The tech transformation of the last 30 years has made life better in many ways from having access to apps for all of life's needs to the internet and all of the usefulness and joy that it brings at the tip of our fingertips. In particular within the auto industry it has helped make cars safer and smarter in the process with impact detection, crash avoidance systems, higher mileage per gallon and a plethora of other enhancements that are amazing in their own right. However as we've learned technology is a double-edged sword. Overly relying on tech can get in the way of simple things and become a nuisance or create friction. Cars are the best example of how misuse of tech can hurt the overall driving and ownership experience. 

Automakers are in the business of hitting massive global sales goals and engineering cars for the majority of the population. So enthusiasts that find joy in their car (myself included), the tradeoff when a car has a number of computers that are in charge of different mechanical bits is that finding a “driver’s car” has become increasingly difficult and really I mean really expensive. In addition to hurting the driving experience, automakers have also made the UX of the cabin much worse because of over-reliance on tech. We went from SAAB crafting interiors to feel like jet cockpits in the 90s to glued tablets in the center console for most cars. The reason behind this is simple and like with most things it all comes down to one simple answer, money. Thanks Elon.

The Tesla Effect
For a long time EV's were a joke and never taken seriously by major manufactures, until Elon Musk had a vision to disrupt the industry by making the EV's cool, similar to what Apple did with computers. The innovation and technology that Tesla brought to EV’s made the cars desirable because they represented a future that is more convenient and environmentally friendly (although it's not actually the case but that's a convo for another blog). With all of the good, there also came some questionable choices, most notably with the interior UX that created a bad industry trend.

The concept of having a computer in your car is exciting if you think about the value prop. You can execute a number of actions for your cars performance and you have access to apps and the internet. The same way that tablets were invented to conveniently give us access to computer power within a large-touch screen minus the need for a keyboard and mouse or even a desk. So imagine how powerful that tech hardware is within arms reach in your car. Where this tech goes off the rails is that Tesla decided to stuff all of the cars controls into this touch screen. They’ll claim otherwise, but it all boiled down to their quest to streamline production and reduce the number of parts needed to build a car, an area of their business where they struggled mightily to meet consumer demand. The less buttons and switches in the console meant that they could streamline the factory process and not rely on third part companies for these parts either.

The Death of Mechanical Honesty in Car Performance
Older cars communicated their state clearly. You could feel the road on tight corners, hear the engine and rpms as the gears upshift when you push the car to its mechanical limits. These are just some of reasons why classic cars and many modern day high-performance sports cars have such high resale markets and appeal.They’ve retained the feel and feedback that connects drivers to their cars. When I sit behind the wheel of an 800+ horsepower sports car, I appreciate the lengths that the engineers went to retain the feel of a track car or to capture the essence of the golden age muscle cars of the late 60’s. I’ve never had a boring drive because there’s so much feedback from the exhaust notes to the high-pitched supercharger whine or the screech of the back tires letting loose on a spirited acceleration.

The majority of modern cars have been filtered down with numb steering feel, delayed throttle response that is mapped through layers of computer software. Engine and exhaust sounds are sometimes fake and pumped in through the cars speakers. Vehicle feedback is curated. This isn’t necessarily bad, because the majority of people prefer comfort to rawness, but it creates a gap between action and consequence. The car becomes less of a partner and more of an appliance that occasionally surprises you. When something goes wrong, the system doesn’t tell you, it alerts you with warning lights, chimes and countless notifications. The car speaks in abstractions instead of sensations.

The War on Tactility
Human beings are tactile creatures. We drive our cars with muscle memory, peripheral vision, and subconscious feedback loops. Climate controls or a volume knob can be used without looking. A touchscreen demands attention, confirmation and visual focus, which is not the safest UX for drivers to keep their eyes on the road. Climate controls are buried in menus, seat warmers live behind sliders. Headlights are software toggles. Simple tasks require glances that last just long enough to be dangerous.

The illusion of technical sophistication propelled global car makers to follow this trend favoring touch screens over traditional button-laden center consoles. Sure enough manufacturers glued a large tablet in the center console and turned everything into software controls. They also decoupled function from form which allows the same UI platform to serve ten other vehicle models with minimal hardware variation. Consumers lost frictionless use, while manufacturers gained abstract “flexibility” for mass production. Auto journalists have deemed this trend as the “enshitification”.

Profits Over People
Enshitification is used to describe modern automaker trends, driven by profit and software control that degrade the ownership UX by locking features behind subscriptions (like heated seats), introducing complex, less intuitive software interfaces, tracking our driving habits and making repairs difficult to funnel customers to dealerships, turning a once-reliable product into a bloated, monetized ecosystem. This shift moves cars from being purely functional tools to platforms for recurring revenue, prioritizing shareholder value over driver satisfaction and long-term ownership value.

Cars increasingly feel designed by committees optimizing for checkboxes rather than humans optimizing for use. And because redesigns are expensive, bad decisions persist for years. A bad interior cabin that overly relies on a touchscreen becomes a decade-long mistake. The result is sameness across all brands, where you find identical steering wheel controls, the same tablet bolted to every dashboard and piano black glossy surfaces in an attempt to feel premium.

This feels worse than it is because objectively, cars are incredible, but subjectively, they feel worse because they violate expectations we didn’t know we had. Driving is one of the last activities where humans still expect direct control. When that control is mediated, delayed or hidden, then frustration spikes. We don’t want our cars to feel like operating systems. We want them to feel like machines. The problem isn’t technology. It’s that technology is being used to replace clarity, feedback and feel.

What Good Car Design Still Looks Like
Good car design hasn’t disappeared, it’s just swimming upstream to premium brands. However manufacturers like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Audi and Porsche are listening to customers by bringing back physical controls for frequent actions and using software that supports hardware, not replaces it. Meanwhile, Tesla still makes you open your glovebox through the touch-screen UI.

While some brands will make these meaningful changes most won’t until consumers push back hard enough or just simply won't buy their products. Enshitification doesn’t end when designers run out of ideas. It ends when customers stop tolerating friction disguised as innovation. When that happens, the car won’t need to explain itself with a screen. You’ll just know how to use it.