Cabins
Knobs are finding their way back to the front of the cabin
After a run of cars that hid temperature and wipers in a screen, the desks we sat in this month were less uniform.
Lena Voss, Editor · 1 June 2026
For several years the fashionable cabin put almost everything on glass. Volume, temperature, and sometimes the wipers lived in a menu. The hazard light stayed a real button, because it has to be found in a hurry. Everything else was allowed to become a tap.
That pattern is no longer the only one we are seeing.
Three cabins, one week
In the past week the desk sat in three recent cabins, none of them named here because the point is the control, not a model score. Two still asked for a menu before the temperature would move. One had put a knob back within reach of the driver, with a row of switches under the screen for demist and the heated rear window. The knob was not nostalgia. It was a control you could find without looking down into a list.
The screen in that third car was still large. The change was what had been allowed to leave it. Basic climate and a handful of driving functions were hardware again. The rest, navigation and the deeper settings, stayed on glass, which is a reasonable split. A map benefits from a screen. A demist button does not.
Why the menu lost the argument
A driver who already knows the car can learn a menu. A driver in a borrowed car, a rental, or a car at night in rain cannot. European safety ratings have been moving toward a plain question: can you start the demister, the wipers, and the hazards without hunting. Cabins that fail that question in ordinary weather start to feel dated even when the display is sharp and the software is quick.
We are not arguing for a dashboard from 1998. We are arguing for a hand to land on the thing that matters while the eyes stay on the road. A knob with a clear detent does that. A slider drawn on glass, in gloves, in sun, often does not.
What we will keep noting
When a cabin puts a basic function back in hardware, we will say so, and we will say whether it is in reach or merely present. When a cabin hides that function three taps down, we will say that too. The trend is not universal. It is visible, and it is the first cabin story in a while that is about a hand rather than a pixel.
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