Drivers climbing into a brand-new car aren’t alone in feeling like they may need a pilot’s licence rather than a driver’s licence.
The modern car has undergone a dramatic transformation in just a few short years.
Buttons have disappeared, touchscreens have grown dramatically, gear selectors have moved, and indicators have changed.
And for some drivers, what was once second nature is becoming a source of confusion, says Ben Zachariah, the road test editor for Car Expert, an Australian site which recently launched in New Zealand.
He’s seen a “massive amount” of change in the industry over the past decade, and the pace of change has been staggering.
“Pretty much every aspect has changed,” he tells The Detail, noting it goes beyond the rise of hybrids and electric vehicles.
“From the driver’s seat, cars look a lot different from what they were back in 2016 and even 2020.”
Screens, he says, were once reserved for relatively simple functions such as radio controls and climate settings. Today, they control almost everything.
“We’re also seeing car makers remove buttons – critical buttons,” Zachariah says. “Things like turning on headlights and controlling automatic wipers. You can actually see them move to the screen.”
For Zachariah, however, one trend stands out above all others.
“I’ve embraced my inner curmudgeon, and I have taken the fight to the car companies. I’m railing against drive selectors that are now being moved to where the indicator would normally be.”
It might sound like a small design tweak. He argues it isn’t.
Increasingly, manufacturers are placing gear selectors on stalks attached to the steering column – often looking remarkably similar to traditional indicator controls.
“It seems like it’s a really dangerous thing,” he says, pointing to drivers waiting at an intersection who could instinctively try to indicate, only to grab the wrong control.
“There’s a danger where you’re sitting at a set of lights, and you think, ‘I should turn on my left indicator,’ and then you hit what you think is the indicator and the car goes into neutral.”
In some vehicles, the same stalk may also control cruise control functions.
“You think you’re turning on your right indicator and suddenly cruise control gets turned on.”
To many motorists, basic driving functions have become an “experiment in innovation”.
But why are manufacturers doing it? The official explanation, according to Zachariah, is that relocating controls frees up valuable space in the centre console. He isn’t entirely convinced.
“What we’re seeing is very few of them are actually doing anything with that space,” he says. “You might get an extra set of cup holders.”
He suspects that economics may be playing a larger role.
“I tend to try and follow the money in anything I can’t explain.”
Modern vehicles, he says, contain kilometres of wiring, and even small savings can become significant when multiplied across a large number of vehicles.
“If they’re cutting a metre of wiring out of the car … and it might save them 15 bucks per car, and we are talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of cars, potentially millions of cars, that’s a lot of money over the long term.”
But his biggest concern isn’t necessarily the people who own these vehicles. It’s everyone else: family members and friends borrowing cars, grandparents collecting children from school, rental car drivers, or workers moving between fleet vehicles.
For decades, many controls remained largely standardised. Drivers could jump into almost any vehicle and know where to find the essentials. But now, “you get in something that is a bit like a spaceship inside.”
That unfamiliarity can create stress before a journey has even begun.
“It’s already stressful when you’re driving somebody else’s car, but then you jump in and have all these things you’re unfamiliar with.”
The issue has sparked calls for greater standardisation, which he says the industry has dealt with before.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, manufacturers experimented with “weird and wonderful” drive selectors, confusing drivers as they moved between vehicles. Eventually, standards emerged.
The familiar PRND sequence – park, reverse, neutral and drive – became the norm.
“They introduced standards to ensure all car companies brought in the PRND system,” he says. “That kind of thinking seems to have gone away now.”
Today’s vehicles use electronic controls rather than direct mechanical linkages, giving designers unprecedented freedom.
“The gear selector doesn’t actually connect up to the gearbox directly in any real way anymore. It’s all digital now.”
The result, he says, is a wave of innovation that has potentially gone too far.
He points to aviation as an example of a safety-critical industry that embraced standardisation.
In aircraft cockpits, controls are carefully designed to be recognisable by touch alone.
“The selector for putting the gear down in a big jetliner feels like tyres,” he says.
“The point is, in a stressful environment … your subconscious knows whether you’re matching the action with the intent.”
By comparison, modern cars are increasingly removing buttons: “everything is on screens now”.
It’s a lesson that takes Zachariah back to his own driving days.
As a teenager, he wanted a flashy new stereo packed with digital controls. His father had other ideas.
“He said, ‘You want a rotary knob. When you’re driving along at 100 kilometres an hour at night, you want to be able to reach down to where the volume knob is and feel for it without taking your eyes off the road.'”
His dad pointed out that you cover a decent distance during a simple glance away.
And that’s the heart of the debate facing the automotive industry.
Are smarter, sleeker and more technologically advanced cars potentially replacing common sense and, maybe even, safety?
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