Car Technology Bloat Is Ruining the Basic Job of a Car

I have been reviewing consumer tech for over 15 years, and I never thought the day would come when I would say this: car technology is making cars worse. Not incrementally worse. Fundamentally worse. Modern vehicles have stopped feeling like dependable machines and started feeling like rolling, glitchy smartphones on wheels. Somewhere along the line, automakers decided that physical knobs and switches were not “futuristic” enough, and they replaced them with digital menus, subscription paywalls, and surveillance we never asked for.

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Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. This is not nostalgia. I do not want carburetors and hand-crank windows back. My argument is that unnecessary car technology degrades the foundational purpose of a vehicle: safe, reliable, affordable transportation. When adjusting your air conditioning requires looking away from the road to dig through a three-level touchscreen menu, the technology is no longer solving a problem. It is creating one.

Touchscreens Take Your Eyes Off the Road

Think about the last time you tried to bump the fan speed in an unfamiliar rental car. You squinted at a glossy screen, hunted for the climate tab, tapped the wrong thing, and finally got it right after ten seconds of driving functionally blind. Now imagine doing that at highway speed.

This is not a hypothetical safety problem, it is a measured one. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety commissioned researchers at the University of Utah to test the infotainment systems in 30 new 2017 vehicles, and the results were ugly: programming navigation took drivers an average of 40 seconds to complete, at 25 mph that is four football fields of road, and none of the systems tested rated low enough in demand to be considered safe to use while driving.

The reason is simple. An analog knob gives you physical feedback. Muscle memory lets you adjust temperature or volume without ever looking down. A touchscreen has no texture, no shape, no position your fingers can learn. It demands your eyes, and your eyes belong on the road. Even the safety regulators have had enough: from January 2026, Euro NCAP’s protocols require separate physical controls for key functions for a car to earn a full five-star safety rating. When Europe’s crash testers have to tell automakers to put buttons back in cars, that is not innovation, that is an intervention.

Minor Fender-Benders Now Cost Four Figures

Here is where car technology hits the average driver hardest: the repair bill. A decade ago, a parking-lot bump meant replacing a piece of molded plastic or a bit of sheet metal for a few hundred dollars. Today that same bumper hides ultrasonic sensors, radar units, and a camera, and every one of them needs expensive OEM parts and precise digital recalibration after the repair.

AAA’s own repair research put numbers on it: replacing ADAS components after a minor front collision averaged $1,540.92, on top of an average total repair estimate of $11,708.29. Calibration has become standard practice in collision work, so a scuffed bumper is no longer a scuffed bumper. It is a software event.

There is a longer-term rot here too. Vehicle electronics age in digital years while mechanical parts age in automotive years. A perfectly healthy engine becomes a paperweight if the central display computer fails in year ten and the software that runs it is no longer supported. Cars used to outlive their financing. Now they can be bricked by an abandoned app.

You Are Renting Your Own Car

Automakers looked at the smartphone app economy and had a terrible idea: why sell features once when you can rent them forever? BMW famously charged $18 a month for heated seats, hardware that was already physically installed in the car you bought. The backlash was loud enough that BMW killed the heated-seat subscriptions in 2023, but here is the part that should worry you: the company openly said it is keeping subscriptions for other software-based features. The experiment was not a failure, it was a test run.

Remote start, adaptive cruise, performance boosts, these are all now line items in some brands’ recurring revenue plans. When a manufacturer can flip a switch over a cellular connection and lock out hardware sitting in your own driveway, ownership quietly becomes a perpetual digital lease. You did not buy a car. You bought a license to use one, pending terms and conditions.

Your Car Is Watching You

If the subscriptions annoy you, the surveillance should frighten you. The Mozilla Foundation reviewed 25 major car brands for its Privacy Not Included research and every single one of them failed. Cars became the worst product category Mozilla had ever reviewed for privacy, ranking below smart speakers and every other connected device category they had examined. That is an organization that has reviewed sex toys and mental health apps saying cars are worse.

The details are grim. Nissan’s privacy policy admitted to collecting categories including sexual activity and genetic data. Connected cars continuously harvest location histories, driving habits, and voice inputs, and not a single brand Mozilla reviewed could confirm that data stored locally in the vehicle was even encrypted. Your 2008 Corolla knew nothing about you. Your 2026 crossover is a witness that never stops testifying.

When “Safety” Tech Fights the Driver

The last failure mode is the most unsettling: driver assistance that actively works against the person holding the wheel. NHTSA opened an investigation covering roughly 416,000 Tesla vehicles after drivers reported sudden, unexplained hard braking at highway speed. Tesla was not alone either. Other automakers have faced recalls or federal investigations over phantom braking too. Anyone who has driven a car with aggressive lane-keep assist through a construction zone knows the feeling of the wheel tugging against you while you try to avoid a cone.

Every layer of software adds a new failure point, and every over-the-air update is a new roll of the dice. True automotive quality comes from durable mechanical engineering, not from fragile touch panels and firmware pushed to two-ton machines on a Tuesday night.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, I am not asking for a time machine. I am asking automakers to remember what a car is for. A vehicle’s job is to get you somewhere safely, reliably, and without renting back its own seat heaters or filing a report on your whereabouts when it arrives. Stripping away the car technology bloat returns the focus to what actually makes a car great: tactile ergonomics you can operate blind, mechanical parts that outlast the loan, privacy you never had to think about, and simplicity you can trust. The industry’s own regulators are already demanding buttons back. Drivers should demand the rest.

What do you think of new car technology? Drop a comment on your favorite platform below, and let’s discuss!

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