Why touchscreen hazard lights are a design disaster

You’re cruising down the expressway, music humming, dashboard clean. Then: brake lights flare ahead. Cars swerve. You slam the brakes, barely stopping in time. Instinctively, you reach for your hazard lights. Except there’s no red triangle. Just… a frozen screen. You jab at it. Nothing happens. Another driver leans on their horn behind you.

It’s only later, once your hands stop shaking, that you realize: the hazard lights were three menus deep in your car’s touchscreen. And the touchscreen? It crashed. This is where design ambition collides with human panic. And the losers are all of us.

The push toward touchscreen-only interfaces in cars isn’t new. Tesla led the aesthetic shift in the 2010s: one massive screen, zero clutter, minimalist as a tech cathedral. No buttons. No knobs. No distractions. Other automakers followed suit, wanting to look modern, sleek, Apple-adjacent. Physical controls were deemed “legacy.” Touchscreens became the standard—even for critical functions like windscreen wipers, defoggers, seatbelts, and yes, hazard lights.

But what was framed as innovation was really just a vibe shift. The assumption? That people wanted their cars to feel like their phones. And that’s the first mistake. Phones aren’t built for panic. Cars are.

Designers love frictionless experiences. Tap, swipe, smooth. But in high-stress situations—emergency braking, icy roads, child in the backseat—your brain doesn’t want fluid UX. It wants habit. Repetition. Muscle memory. This is cognitive science 101: under stress, fine motor skills and problem-solving capacity tank. You’re not calmly navigating a menu. You’re trying not to die.

That’s why hazard lights were always a physical button. A universally recognized symbol. A triangle. Red. Clicky. Findable without looking. Pressed by instinct, not intellect. Touchscreen hazard lights break that instinct—and that’s not an interface bug. That’s a human factors disaster.

You don’t notice good design when you’re calm. You notice it when you’re not. In a review of user feedback on newer vehicle models, the most common complaints weren’t about horsepower or tire grip. They were about the UI. Specifically, lag. Layers. Location. And failure.

One VW Golf owner posted a viral video showing how it took six steps to activate the defroster. A Ford driver reported they had to use voice control to toggle lights—except voice control glitched when their child was crying in the back. A Tesla driver admitted they missed a turn because they couldn’t adjust the AC while navigating.

These aren’t luxury problems. They’re human ones. When a safety function depends on perfect software conditions, you're one frozen screen away from helplessness.

Let’s talk access. Older adults may struggle to read tiny on-screen icons while driving. Drivers with hand tremors or arthritis can’t always tap precise spots. Low-income drivers in secondhand cars might get outdated software that never updates. And good luck using a touchscreen in gloves, in sunlight glare, or with a cracked screen.

In the name of elegance, we’ve erased the tactile memory of safety. And for anyone outside the bubble of tech-savvy, able-bodied design assumptions, the tradeoff isn’t cosmetic—it’s existential. This is the aestheticization of risk.

In the US, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) still require hazard lights to be “accessible and operable.” But that wording was written in the era of physical buttons. What does “accessible” mean when menus are nested? What does “operable” mean when the system freezes?

Euro NCAP and other testing bodies have begun criticizing over-reliance on touchscreens, especially for safety-critical systems. Some German lawmakers have proposed mandating tactile controls for basic functions like indicators, climate control, and hazards. But car companies are moving faster than regulators. And in the meantime, consumers are test subjects in a design experiment they didn’t sign up for.

Because clean sells. Marketing departments love minimalism. Screens look expensive. Buttons don’t. And automakers save money with consolidated controls—no need to manufacture individual switches when you can ship a single screen interface across models. Add to that the app-ification of the driving experience—Spotify integration, map overlays, voice commands—and suddenly the car is no longer a tool. It’s a platform. But safety isn’t a platform. It’s a baseline. And while we’re busy optimizing for aesthetics, we’ve de-optimized for urgency.

Here’s the good news: some carmakers are walking it back.

Volkswagen has reintroduced physical buttons on newer ID models after a flood of customer complaints. Hyundai’s design chief recently declared: “Touchscreens are great for media controls, but not for every function.” Even Tesla—yes, Tesla—reinstated some haptic buttons on the steering yoke after backlash. Why? Because when drivers miss a turn or fail to signal, it’s not just bad UX. It’s liability. Designers are realizing something humanists already knew: smooth isn’t always smart. And not all feedback is haptic.

Think about the last time you panicked while driving. Maybe it was hydroplaning on wet roads. Or slamming the brakes when a motorcyclist cut in. You don’t remember tapping the brakes. You just did it. That’s what rituals of safety look like. Muscle memory. Embodied action. Design should reinforce those rituals, not erase them. A screen that asks you to think in a moment of fear isn’t innovative. It’s hostile.

Ironically, cars already contain redundancy systems for critical features—dual airbags, backup cameras, mechanical override systems. But when it comes to the human interface, we’ve bet everything on the touchscreen. That’s a fragile bet.

The safest approach is hybrid: tactile buttons for time-sensitive actions, touchscreen for non-essential ones. That’s not backward. That’s balanced. Because a defroster isn’t a style choice. Neither is being able to signal distress while stuck in a tunnel.

This isn’t just about vehicles. It’s about the kind of tech culture we’re building.

Are we designing for moments of flow—or for moments of failure?

Are we trusting software to replace centuries of embodied knowledge without offering a backup plan?

Are we being honest about who gets left out when elegance replaces reliability?

These are not hypothetical questions. They are design principles. And in a world increasingly shaped by software, they are safety rules—whether we admit it or not.

We’re not asking for cars to look like 1997 sedans. We’re asking for designers to remember that driving is a physical act. That risk isn’t just theoretical. That real humans, in real fear, don’t have time to swipe. Hazard lights don’t need to glow. They need to work.

In an age where cars park themselves and suggest songs, we shouldn’t have to fight a screen to say, “Help.”

And that red triangle? It belongs in the real world. Right where your hand knows to find it.