I’ve Come To Believe That Seven Inches Is Totally Enough (Screen)

Is the Viagraization of car displays the inevitable result of drivers requiring more information 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 isn’t confusing like some shifters can be, but I still struggle to find a worse transmission shifter in the automotive industry. There’s 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 doesn’t actually mechanically connect to the transmission: That’s what Ford’s 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 “shifter” in the Cybertruck? One with minimal feedback to tell you what’s going on and one that you cannot use without looking — it may work, but that doesn’t mean it’s 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 and 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 your Podcast and 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.