CarGurus’ motoring expert and commentator Vicky Parrott has her say on the burning issues in the automotive world. This week, Vicky weighs up the benefits of touchscreens vs tapes.
Touchscreens: Scourge of the devil. A dangerous distraction. Let’s all go and buy a W124 Mercedes and live happily ever after in the faint glow of its analogue dials, with the lovely click of its well-damped buttons, the nostalgically crackly speakers and our own whimsical smugness to keep us company. Lovely.
Except, we’re being unrealistic, aren’t we? I started driving in the early 2000s, and I considered a car that was under 10 years old to be nearly new. My first car was a Renault 5, which I bought for £50. It had an aftermarket cassette player (Google it, if you’re not sure what that is) held in with duct-tape.
The Mk1 Nissan Micra that succeeded my Renault 5 cost me a sky-high £700, and was very quickly fitted with an aftermarket CD player and ‘6x9’ speakers. I was, after all, a child of the Fast and Furious era. My off-white, brown upholstered, four-speed Micra was far from the GT-R, Supra, Impreza or Evo that I dreamed of in my turbocharged, JDM-fuelled fantasies. But it was still my own personal kingdom of independence, and I made up for its disappointingly tedious appearance and performance with offensively loud music. We were all young once.
With age, a job and a bit more money, my car history evolved through a Peugeot 205 1.6 GTI 1.6, a Toyota Celica GT-Four, a Mercedes 190E, an E34 BMW 5 Series, a Saab 900 (the Vauxhall one, sadly), a Mk3 Toyota MR2, a Nissan X-Trail and a few others too fleeting to mention.
Anyway, I was thinking about my cars of yore, in context of the modern cars I spend most of my time in today. And while I do not particularly care for the changeable digital dials and endless sub-menus often found in many of today’s driver readouts, I generally think that modern infotainment systems – and modern cars generally - are marvels of convenience.
I mean, if you were driving in the 1990s or 2000s, I bet you had a glovebox full of cassettes, and then eventually a CD case in your car. With lots of CDs in it. Unless you were lucky enough to be able to afford the heady delights of a CD changer, the case-of-CDs-under-the-passenger-seat was very much the norm among my peers. And sometimes those CDs would need to be changed mid-journey, which is not a distraction-free task.
How about nav? For those long journeys, were you printing out route suggestions from the internet on A4 paper, stapling it together and then glancing at it for guidance while you drove?
Let’s not even think about the prevalence of texting and mobile phone use while driving, in those years between mobile phones becoming commonplace, and the use of handheld phones in cars becoming outlawed (rightly so, I think we can all agree).
But, maybe if we take the rose-tinted glasses off and remember the reality of what daily life in older cars was like, we’ll be more inclined to view modern infotainment systems – maybe even modern cars generally - with a touch more appreciation.
I can slide into the vast majority of new cars, and have all of my music, my podcasts, my nav guidance and my phone contacts on the screen in moments. I don’t even need a cable, or a postcode for the nav, and it reliably responds to traffic changes. Thousands of hours of music or chat, to ease through the miles while the car figures out the best route. Peachy. Yes, infotainment systems can be a distraction, but they can also be a doddle to set it up with hours of entertainment and a nav route, before you set off, and then you never need to touch it again for the duration of your trip.
What might this same journey have involved, were it undertaken in the era before the dreaded distraction that is the modern touchscreen? It may have involved multiple CD or cassette changes (hope that the ribbon doesn’t get unravelled on your favourite homemade mix-tape), not to mention the checking of an actual paper map and/or printed route instructions.
And think about the convenience of modern vehicle’s air-con and heating systems! Back then, it was entirely normal to have a fan that offered the choice of boiling or freezing air. And whichever of those two temperature options you chose, it was blown directly at your eyeballs. If it was winter, you’d also have to chamois the windscreen while driving along to keep it free of mist (although the chamois did also double up to mop your brow or to be worn as a scarf, depending on what mood the heater was in). The best way to avoid chamois-ing the windows every few minutes was to drive with the window down and risk hypothermia. Or hold your breath for a few hours.
This morning, a frosty day in 2025, I set my Tesla Model 3 to a toasty 21 degrees via my phone, so that I could walk my daughter to school and the car was de-iced, mist-free and delightfully warm when I got in. My music played automatically, and I was away. But yes, new cars are terribly distracting…
I love old cars. I truly do. I revel in the character, the smell, the noise, the way they make me feel when I drive them, the communities surrounding them, the festivals, the road trips, the excitement, the sense of occasion… I love it all.
You can even watch the videos where I’ve detailed the highs and lows of owning my old 1992 Merc SL, which I doubt I will ever part with. But d’you know the best thing I ever did with the Merc? It was to fit a head unit that’s got Bluetooth and a USB input, and a decent phone holder so that I can use my phone for nav.
Because we don’t live in the 20th century, any more. And it got to a point where I wasn’t enjoying the SL as much, because the only CD I still owned when I bought the Mercedes in 2017 was Graceland by Paul Simon. A masterpiece, no doubt, but after about five years of listening to it, even You Can Call Me Al gets a bit tired. And before you ask, the radio didn’t work because the aerial’s motor had broken. How about that for a bit of old-school ‘character’?
Yes, I know; many touchscreens can be infuriating. I’ve made a living out of criticising them. I had one in a Skoda Enyaq recently that froze every time I tried to link my phone via Bluetooth. It made me hate an otherwise really rather excellent car. And yes, I still like a physical shortcut and/or home button, and appreciate the really good touchscreens over the really bad ones.
But the vast majority of the time, especially with the advent of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, modern infotainment systems – and modern cars, in general - are things of wondrous convenience. And if you really stop and think about all the stuff that was distracting us while driving in the pre-touchscreen age, the latest systems might suddenly seem like less of a scourge and more of a saviour.
