Is the Viagraization of car displays the inevitable result of drivers requiring more informationĀ or is the cheapness of screens manufacturing its own false necessity? How much better is the experience of driving a car with a gigantic screen compared with a smaller one?
Before I get too far: this isn’t an anti-screen rant. As much as I love the pure driving experience of my old BMW and its little orange pixelated single line of text, the reality is that half the time I drive it there’s an iPhone magnetically attached to the dashboard. Everyone is driving around with a screen these days and it’s just a matter of how much screen is enough screen.
I’ve now driven the same car with two different screen sizes and I’ve come to the conclusion that a small screen is totally fine… up to a point. The boat can certainly be so small that the motion of the ocean becomes meaningless, though I think the size people think they want is much smaller than the size they actually need.
Honda On Honda
One of the perks of this job is that I semi-regularly borrow cars from automakers to review. This gives me a chance to see the latest and greatest in-car technology. I’ve been able to witness the evolution from a single-DIN head unit with a display not even large enough to show all of a song’s name (“Mr. Brights…”) to cars like the Mercedes EQS with its 56-inch curved display ‘Hyperscreen.’
When I bought my new Honda CR-V Hybrid earlier this year one of my big internal debates was over which trim level to get. The car I reviewed was a top-of-the-line CR-V Touring, which comes with a nine-inch screen in the dash. It seemed like an entirely usable screen and on par with what I’m used to in the class.
I’m the kind of person who tends to set a car to CarPlay and leave it there for most of a trip, though Honda did have a cool “Power Flow” graphic that I got a little obsessed with looking at while trying to hypermile. If there was any downside to the large screen it’s that the bigger the screen the more automakers want to put on those screens and, increasingly, that means replacing buttons.
Hell, the Cybertruck has the damn shifter on its screen, as David pointed out in his review:
The shifter works, and it isnāt confusing like some shifters can be, but I still struggle to find a worse transmission shifter in the automotive industry. Thereās a reason why the Ford F-150 has stayed with its T-handle PRNDL shifter despite the fact that it takes up a bunch of space and doesnāt actually mechanically connect to the transmission: Thatās what Fordās customers want. They want a physical, substantial shifter. Ram went to a rotary dial, and that received a bunch of criticism, though I think most folks are used to that now. But this āshifterā in the Cybertruck? One with minimal feedback to tell you whatās going on and one that you cannot use without looking ā it may work, but that doesnāt mean itās not the worst of the bunch.
The CR-V thankfully doesn’t have a transmission in the screen, though it lacks tactile buttons for simple things like accessing the phone or radio if you get the larger screen.
After a week with the CR-V Sport Touring, I decided the extra $3k or so to go up to the Sport-L trim level to get a bigger screen wasn’t worth it. Was I just cheaping out in a way that would haunt me later?
Regrets, I Have A Few
I was quite pleased to receive my Honda CR-V after almost a year of searching for the perfect replacement for my imperfect Subaru. The car looked great and I was immediately happy that I went for the cloth seats, which felt more comfortable around my flat white tuchus. Was it a bad idea to skip the automatic powered liftgate? Nah. I’m not Dwayne ‘The Rock” Johnson, but I can close a hatch on a CR-V.
Unfortunately, my first instinct was that the screen was too small. I liked that it had real buttons, including ones to immediately switch to phone mode, which is the one I think most people probably need the most. It was also nice to be able to quickly switch to the radio (shoutout WFUV). I didn’t like the small size.
The difference between seven inches and nine inches never felt greater. Whenever I’d load up the CarPlay screen all the logos suddenly felt very small. I generally don’t like turn-by-turn audio and prefer to actually look at the map and the map felt tiny.
This feeling faded after a couple of weeks. The map itself is way larger than the one on my phone and I can see where I’m going while also easily clicking through the various screens if necessary. It started to dawn on me that the desire to have a larger screen is a desire we’ve created.
We all walk around with screens in our pockets and those are, for many of us, the screens we interact with most. No rational person complains about the size of their giant iPhone 16 Pro. It’s been three months with the car and I no longer mind or even notice the size of the screen. If I had a Tesla andĀ everything was routed through the screen this would be annoying, but I thankfully do not have to do everything through a screen because Honda was nice enough to provide buttons and toggles.
The integration of the screen into the dash, where it pops out like an iPad, isn’t ideal, but it’s fine. I think the space looks better with the nine-inch screen and, if it was only an extra few hundred bucks I’d have probably gone for it. For more than $1,000? Not worth it.
Is there an ideal size for a screen? I think anything in the 9- to 12-inch range is about perfect. This is the size of the second screen in the Lincoln Nautilus and that works perfectly well for me. Can you go too small? Absolutely.
The Ferrari F8 Tributo has this little screen integrated into the gauge cluster and it’s, what, maybe four inches wide? That’s hilarious. It’s fine for yourĀ Podcast andĀ Messaggi, but I can’t imagine that it’s so great for your Mappe. I’m not even sure this was worth the effort.
In conclusion: Don’t complain about 10 inches because seven inches is probably fine, though 50 inches is too much, and four inches likely isn’t enough unless you’ve got really good tactile controls to go with it or very small hands.
Sooo, itās not really about the size, but how you use itā¦ At least when you stay in the normal range. Carplay in MIB 2.5 doesnāt always scale up well (or could show way more detail, or longer lists etc.), but who is to blame? Software wizards at VAG or Apple? I think Apple, as various euro-rental-trash seem to have the same problem.
If the stuff on the screen stays the same, just bigger, when the screen size goes up, what is the point?
My current daily has an 8.4″ screen, up from a 6.8″ screen so the change was quite noticeable. As long as I’m not missing out on physical HVAC and volume/seek controls and the bezel around the screen is not like 2″ wide, I’m fine.
I’ve also found that most bigger screens like the 15″ from Ford is far from ideal as most of the time you’ll never been able to fit a single app into that, so you’re effectively not getting bigger fonts nor anything, the only advantage of that being a split screen feature that even my current vehicle can do.
And most of the vertical screens actually reserve the bottom part of it for HVAC controls which wouldn’t have been needed in the 1st place if they had just let them alone where they have always been.
Just bought a ’24 Terrain for my wife and one of my favorite features is its solitary 7″ screen integrated in the dash. It’s small as far as screens go these days, and I’m happy for that. It displays my maps and Spotify just fine, everything else is buttons and switches. I’m not sure if this in an indictment on GMC or not, but the interior reminds me a lot of my ’02 Yukon, which I like!
Good take. We need less screen.
I’m 100% for 0% screens in any vehicle I own. My wife’s 2022 Civic has a __?__ inch screen, and I could care less. I can drive about a country mile before it syncs to my phone in my pocket to play music. I don’t need maps on a screen since I know every road in the Northeast or can figure it out as needed. Screens only ruin my night vision, don’t ever seem to have a dedicated OFF button and generally suck to operate since the UI is laggy.
Screens: Get off my lawn.
The best part of my Hyundai Elantra GT’s stereo is that it has a dedicated screen off button. Game changer when you’re on a dark road at night.
My Mazda doesn’t have an off button for the screen, but it’s small with a black background and grey lettering, like they took night vision into account when they made it. It’s also only something like 3×8 and NOT a touchscreen. I don’t really notice it exists unless I’m looking for.
I think something more important than the diagonal size of the screen (how they’re normally measured) is the vertical size. My Volt’s 8″ works great. But a modern Hyundai’s 12.3″ ultrawide screen is… basically the same vertical height. And I like it just the same – in fact, I kind of like having just a bit more width for my map in Android Auto while keeping my music playing.
A taller screen than these takes up a lot more visual space, and tempts the automaker to lock HVAC, transmission, and other such front panel items on the screen where they don’t need to be.
It’s not the size of the screen but how it’s used…
I have two aftermarket radios with varying screen sizes in my two older vehicles. One is a 7″ double-DIN and the other is a 9″ custom-fit. Both are fine for Android Auto and Carplay, and neither has made me desperate for something larger.
In that vein, nearly every rental car I get with around an 8″ screen has felt about right, and the ones with the 12″ screens always had me wishing for an 8″ screen and more physical buttons for functions embedded in that dumb, giant screen.
I prescreen all of my cars, meaning I only buy cars that existed before cars had screens. If I wanted to look at a screen while in the car, Iād go to a drive-in movie. Oh, wait ā¦ Iām old.
it’s not the screen size but the bezel of the 7″ screen. All that black useless space above the volume dial would drive me crazy. make the entire display smaller to match.
Well, Conspicuously absent is Mrs. Hardigree’s opinion on her size preference! š
I wonder if Matt wears button fly jeans?
I’m not sure what the implications are is he does wear button fly jeans. ā(Ā“ā¢_ā¢`)ā
While alluding to other things in his discussion of screen size, Matt concluded that a combination of buttons and modest size were acceptably adequate; you wondered whether his wife agreed. My question was both an extension of his allusion and your question.
You win today’s reading comprehension award. And the obscure reference award.
Well done Canopysaurus! āā®(Ā“ąø“āĀ“ąø“āā®)
And are we talking real inches or dating-app inches?
The Lexus we have (ct200h) has an option for folding the monitor down while driving (it will pop up automatically when in reverse). Since they are required for backing up, my next car will need this option of folding down so I can concentrate on driving safely. After the next purchase, I do not ever want to buy a car again. These monitors increase that probability.
99% of the time nothing on that screen is required for me to drive.
As it should be.
I’ll just leave this here…
https://youtube.com/shorts/3dFHa31qxQ8?si=eyIg_Z0FrFnmUjam
Of my 12 current cars, only my 991.2 911 Carrera T has a f-ing TV screen in the console. If I’d specced it new, I would have ordered it without PCM, but the stereo is pretty great, so perhaps worth the trade-off. I generally keep it on the most neutral screen option and pretend it’s not there. The little gauge-cluster screen is awesome though. I love the shift indicator, the customizable info display, and the G-force meter, though it’s just a silly novelty.
Placement matters too. Both of my cars have 8″ screens, but the SUV’s screen rises out of the middle of the dash whereas my car has the “iPad” look, closer to the driver. 8″ is fine there but seems a bit small when it’s far away. There are upgrades for my car that will let you put all different sizes of screen there, but I think 11-12″ would be perfect. The fact is you have to look at it at some point. I can get more info at a glance on a bigger screen, because my vision is hot garbage.
My wife bought a ’24 Kia K5 this past spring. I don’t know what size the screen is but I’d have to guess it’s in the 7-9 range. It’s pretty much perfect and all you need it for is the radio and nav, everything else is buttons (including an actual volume knob). This is the form factor all OEMs should be shooting for.
I really enjoy the screen size, and actual function of the screen as only entertainment (with some car settings menus) on my GR Corolla.
just under 8″ I have physical buttons for HVAC, heated seats and other functions I need to easily adjust without focusing too hard on the screen to poke it in the right place.
my wife has 14″ screen, it incorporates HVAC and any other conceivable button into the screen (thankfully not the gear select), but it is quite annoying, and bigger doesn’t mean better, it just means bigger.
of course, smartly used screen size is really what matters. the new Land Cruiser looks to be a bigger screen, but only the entertainment/carplay/android auto is on it.
Thanks to AssMatt, I can’t unsee it…is Michael Rappaport now kind of introspectively delighted here?
This one’s way different! I was thinking a young Bob Balaban.
Love you Hardigree!
I thought the top shot was a good recovery from yesterday’s “Dick Ritchie” moment.
I think that information density is more definitive than sheer screen size. I have a Double-DIN head unit in my truck, and if I need to use the nav function on that, it pretty much has to be the only thing on there. If I go to the tiled 2/3-1/6-1/6 Android Auto layout, the map gets a bit too small to really be useful at the distance from the driver to the center of the truck.
On the van, which has a 10″ screen, going to the tiled layout means the map is still larger than the whole display of the double-DIN screen in the truck. (It’s also a better, brighter screen, but that’s just because the truck has a cheap-ass head unit that was the best I could find during Covid). That’s a much better size to be able to see the map, and also have sub-displays for whatever I’m listening to and messages.
Also, integration into the dash matters. A lot. The “stick an ipad on the dash” design gets looking weird at large sizes, but a small screen with a big, blank bezel that reminds you that you didn’t spend the money on the better screen also isn’t great.
I see what you did with the headline there.
NOOOOO. 8″ is the minimum is enough, specially when using navigation apps.
My dad’s CR-V has that 7″ inch screen and whenever he drives my Kia Forte or Bronco Sport, both with 8″, he wishes he’s was the same size.
I assume putting in a larger screen isārelativelyāeasy and cheap, and therefore an easy way to draw customers to a higher trim level or differentiate or facelift a model.
Something similar occurred with smartphones a few years ago, when every successive iteration grew larger. In this case, dashboards offer a lot more territory to expand into than pants pockets and purses.
Look, all I’m saying is sometimes you have to get the Whopper Jr because the Whopper makes people’s hands seem tiny.
Double din screens are 7 and thatās perfectly fine imo
This was basically where my brain went. So Matt is saying we should just return to the days of double din standarization, but use the screens.
You do know it’s really all about the ads right? There getting us used to lot’s of screen real estate so they can monetize it. Soon there will be pop up videos akin to what we see on this site.
Not if you’re a member š
Is that another d!ck joke?
Sadly, my BMW turn signal subscription is already stretching the household budget. Come to think of it, I don’t really use that anyway.