New cars got better this year. The screens did not.
J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study is the cleanest scoreboard in the business. Nine of ten problem categories improved. Overall quality posted its biggest year-over-year gain since the 1990s.
Infotainment was the exception. Mass-market vehicles logged 44.4 infotainment problems per 100 cars, up from 42.6 a year earlier. Premium brands sat at 38.3. That is the only box on the sheet that moved the wrong way.
You can hear the industry talking about software-defined vehicles. Owners are talking about a climate slider that takes three taps and a CarPlay handshake that fails in the grocery-store parking lot.
The Number That Should Worry Detroit
Among drivers who said the car itself caused a distraction, 46% pointed at the touchscreen or infotainment system.
That is not a forum anecdote. That is J.D. Power’s own follow-up inside the same study. Frank Hanley, who runs auto benchmarking there, has said owners are complaining that basic functions are buried in menus and that giant tablets force eyes off the road.
A separate 2026 U.K. survey from Scrap Car Comparison put a harder edge on it. Ten percent of drivers said they had been in a serious collision they blamed on touchscreen distraction. Fifty-four percent said screens make simple tasks harder than buttons. Fifty-one percent want physical dials back for key functions. Forty-two percent have avoided buying or leasing a car because the main controls were screen-only.
At 70 mph, the same survey estimated that punching in a navigation destination can eat enough time to cover about four and a half football fields.
Swedish magazine Vi Bilägare reran its old distraction test in 2026. Average distance traveled while finishing basic tasks got worse versus 2022. A 2005 Volvo V70 with actual knobs still smoked the new cars.
Passenger Screens Nobody Asked For
J.D. Power’s 2026 Tech Experience Index added another data point the marketing decks will not print.
Passenger screens ranked among the most problematic features in the index, at 21.3 problems per 100 equipped vehicles. Thirty-five percent of owners who have one say they have never used it. Six percent use it every drive.
Some vehicles with those extra displays also showed higher infotainment problem rates in the Initial Quality Study. More glass. More software. More ways for the system to fail before you leave the driveway.
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity was the largest single contributor to the year-over-year infotainment decline. The phone is supposed to be the escape hatch from a bad native interface. When the escape hatch does not connect, you are stuck in the car’s menus with a 70-mph clock running.
Automakers Already Know
Volkswagen’s CEO has called more physical controls “non-negotiable” after the brand’s haptic-slider era. Mercedes has admitted it went too far deleting buttons, even while it keeps the big displays. Hyundai has used the word “annoying” about touch-only climate controls. Euro NCAP now rewards physical switches for common functions. China finalized rules requiring physical controls for 19 safety-related features on new cars starting July 2027.
The industry is walking it back in press interviews. The 2026 cars already on dealer lots are still the ones owners rated.
A clean dashboard photographs well. It does not help you hit defrost with gloves on, or kill the fan without looking down, or restart CarPlay at a stoplight without missing the green.
Cupholders improved in the same J.D. Power study. Infotainment did not. That sentence should be on a slide in every interior-design meeting this fall.
The screen is not going away. The question is whether volume, temperature, and hazards get a button again — or whether the next quality study just prints 46.0.
Has your screen ever made a simple drive worse — or have you already started shopping for a car that still has knobs?
