There are many worrying trends in new cars. One of the most frustrating is the gradual exorcism of buttons. It’s a lot cheaper to get rid of physical controls and instead integrate their functions into the screen(s). This most often presents itself as climate controls within the infotainment system, which just about everyone complains about endlessly. But there’s another missing knob that’s getting on my nerves lately—an interior lighting dimmer.
We’ve known for a long time that bright light makes it very difficult to see at night. But obviously, we need a bit of interior illumination for the gauges and other controls. The best compromise is to have dim lighting, enough that everything is legible, but not so much as to cause excess eye strain.
Personally, I like to be able to brighten or dim the interior lighting when I want. I live in a city, so a lot of my night driving isn’t in extreme darkness, so it makes sense to raise the backlighting. But out in the country, where streetlights are sparse, I want to be able to dim the lighting a lot. In my car, a 2017 Volkswagen GTI, there’s thankfully a little knob to the right of the headlight switch that makes it easy to adjust the lighting without needing to take my eyes off the road.
That’s especially important now in a world where there is simply more interior illumination from ever-larger screens. And as a car reviewer, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been infuriated to find no easy way to dim the many lights in whatever I’m testing. That's made worse by the fact that you typically discover this when you’re on the move at night.
It is a car critic’s pitfall to bemoan controls that actual customers will get used to over their long car ownership. Or a convoluted control for a setting people may only change once. But, putting a brightness control in a touch screen, or in a gauge-cluster menu is supremely annoying if downright dangerous for those of us who like to make more frequent adjustments. Some cars have auto-dimming to address this problem, but in most cases, it’s still too bright.
Adding to the irritation is that some cars have separate settings for different lit elements. So you can set, say, the gauge cluster and other lights to a dimmer level, but keep the center screen brighter. Why? The center screen is enough of an eyesore—literally—as it is. Why should that have a separate brightness control?
We’ve even seen cars where there’s a physical knob to dim the interior lights, but one that doesn’t control the infotainment screen brightness. So you’re still left sifting through menus. And inevitably, people aren’t going to pull over to dig for the right menu.
Then add in ambient lighting, which in so many of today’s cars is completely over the top (ahem, Mercedes). Even in my beloved Golf, which has subtle thin red ambient light strips in the door panels, the brightness control is in the infotainment screen, separate from the rotary knob on the dash.
Maybe it’s a small thing, maybe I’m just blowing this all out of proportion, but we have seen so many automakers realize the error of their ways and reintroduce actual buttons to appease annoyed customers. The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP), equivalent to our IIHS, will soon start dinging cars for eschewing easy physical controls.
A lot of automakers used to put a lot of effort into reducing eye strain for night driving. There was Saab’s famous Night Panel button, which blacked out all but the most important information for night driving; and BMW’s soft red-orange lighting, a hue thought to reduce eye strain compared with blue or green lights.
Some thankfully still do. GM, for example, always has a dimmer for interior lighting, even as it’s moved exterior lighting controls to the touchscreen, and if you set it to its lowest setting, the backlighting is very minimal.
These days, night driving is already enough of a fight, with too bright headlights stunning everyone. Why make it worse with interior lighting that’s too bright and/or too hard to control? And for what, so a car company can save a few bucks by not having one extra knob?
