I am writing this with a perfectly clear windscreen. I would like that on the record, because for six years I could not say it with any confidence, and now I can, and I am quietly weeping into a Greggs napkin.

Let me take you back to a damp November morning in Rotherham. I got into my car, which was fogged up like a Victorian bathroom, and I did what any reasonable adult would do. I prodded the screen. The screen offered me Settings. Settings offered me Vehicle. Vehicle offered me Comfort, which was a lie, and Comfort offered me a tab called Cabin Wellness, which I would describe as an overreach. By the time I had located the demister I was late, damp and spiritually altered.

The Forum Post

I did not find it myself, you understand. I was guided. A user called BrumDave_77 posted in 2021 that the demister could be summoned by holding a small fan icon for three seconds, then swiping left, then “not thinking about it too hard”. He has no other posts. I like to imagine he ascended.

I have since printed his words and laminated them. They live in the glovebox, next to the manual I have never opened because it is 900 pages long and also, I now realise, a screen.

A Click Heard Round the Showroom

Then came the news that Euro NCAP’s 2026 ratings will reward cars that keep physical buttons for the basics: indicators, hazard lights, wipers, horn and emergency call. Reader, I had to sit down. I was already sitting down, so I sat down further.

Last Saturday I went to a showroom, purely to look. I opened a door, and there it was. A red triangle. A real one, on a real button, that you could press with your actual finger. I pressed it. It went clunk. The hazard lights came on, and the dashboard ticked in time with them, and I understood that this is what being loved feels like.

“It was a tactile miracle. It had weight. It had a point of resistance. I have been in relationships with less feedback.”

My wife, Janice, a retired school secretary and a woman who has seen a lot, said I knelt. I say I crouched to inspect the footwell. We agree that I was on the floor.

The Volume Knob Incident

It was the volume knob that finished me. I turned it clockwise and the music got louder. I turned it back and the music got quieter. No slider, no swipe, no accidentally skipping to a podcast about sourdough. Just a knob doing the single job a knob was born to do. A salesman named Callum offered me a tissue and a brochure, in that order, which I think shows good instincts.

“I’ve had people bring cars in saying the heater’s broken,” says Declan Hargreaves, service manager at a garage in Doncaster. “It isn’t broken. It’s three menus down, under a tab called something like Atmosphere. Last week a man cried when I showed him where it was. I didn’t know where to look. I looked at his tyres.”

I know that man. I am that man. If that man is reading this, I would like to say we are not alone, and also that I hope he has since found his tyres to be in good condition.

What Have We Learned

I do not want to be unfair to touchscreens. They are very good at maps, and at showing me a reversing camera, and at making me feel like I am piloting something more expensive than I am. But somewhere along the line we decided that every function needed to be a pane of glass, and nobody asked the person doing 70 on the M1 with a steamed-up windscreen and a sandwich in one hand.

I am not saying I will buy a new car. I am saying I have been to the showroom three times, and Callum now waves. I am saying that when I got home I sat on the driveway, looked at my old dashboard, and reached for the fan icon. I held it for three seconds. I swiped left. I tried not to think about it too hard.

It worked, as it always does, and I felt nothing.