China is bringing buttons back to cars, ending trend led by Tesla

China will require automakers to include physical buttons for safety-related functions, pushing back on the proliferation of using screens for everything in modern cars.

In recent years, it has become common for automakers to migrate vehicle functions onto touchscreens instead of physical buttons.

This offers several advantages – a single touchscreen is easier to keep in the parts bin than many physical buttons, it can help enable cleaner designs, and it enables over-the-air updates to the car’s interface.

But it also offers downsides. Touchscreens can be laggy, or can make it hard to find functions, especially without taking your eyes off the road.

Tesla has been one of the major drivers towards the use of touchscreens in car interfaces. Ever since the initial screen-centric Model S prototype, Tesla has focused its cars around a large screen in the center. Over time, it migrated other features onto that screen – including the gear shifter and windshield wiper controls.

The rest of the industry has been migrating more features onto touchscreens as well, and this has become particularly common with Chinese EV startups.

It seems like things have gone a bit too far, and there’s been a pushback against proliferation of screens in cars. In recent years we’ve seen a few manufacturers rolling back changes and re-adding physical buttons or stalks, as customers have expressed annoyance.

But soon, that’s not going to be up to customers or the industry itself, as the Chinese government is cracking down and requiring buttons for certain safety features.

The changes were announced in a draft regulation in February, but were finalized this week. The regulation calls out 19 vehicle functions which must have physical controls inside the vehicle, with additional requirements about size and usability of the buttons.

Those functions include:

Turn signals
Hazard lights
Horn
PRND gear shifter
Driver assist function, if present
Windshield wipers
Windshield defroster
Power windows
Emergency call system
Power off switch for EVs
The common thread among these features is that they are safety-related. It doesn’t matter so much if your volume or climate control freeze up when the screen crashes, but it certainly would matter if that makes you unable to see out of the window.

The regulation goes into place on July 1, 2027 – just a year from now. No long implementation timelines here, China wants to fix this problem quickly.