Some automakers’ design choices are never mimicked, while others become so trendy every other brand rushes to follow suit.
What is the most ‘new’ thing that we have ever seen before, whether it be massive touchscreens, capacitive ‘switchgear– or designs which came straight out of I, Robot’?
Here are some of the automotive trends the childcareman.xyz team would like to leave in 2025.
Alborz Fallah: Stop putting the Tesla-like car display in the instrument cluster
I want to see car companies stop putting the Tesla-esque assistance display in the instrument cluster.
My eyes are on cars, I don’t need a computer to tell me what cars are around me. If you have to show the damn speed in that central location, please use that because in Australia it is a crime against humanity when you exceed the speed limit by 5km/h.
Paul Maric: Piano black trim
I think I say this each year – but piano black.
It needs to die inside cars, but it also needs to die outside cars (I can’t believe I’m saying that).
This material is now being fitted to the outside of cars – it truly beggars belief that this inside a cabin which scratches easily and gets covered in marks without touching it.
James Wong: Touchscreen-based car controls
It’s not good to say a dislike for change last year I was sick of it.’ This year, one of the latest industry trends is needed to be right in the you-know-what that has been trending out there.
Banishing controls that were once physical buttons on the steering wheel or dashboard needs to stop, yesterday.
One of the most vivid memories from this year was rushing to pick up a Jaecoo J7 and take an entire 20-minute trip back to office in order to realise you have to dive through multiple menus for finding the mirror adjustment controls – WHY?!
It should be no longer visible to the public, or at least not from the distance setting for the adaptive cruise control (cough bmw) that quick access controls such as heated/cooled seat features and air recirculation are required.
It’s just needlessly distracting and annoying – and those are just a handful of examples. Please stop.
William Stopford: Switchgear minimalism
I’m not calling for car interiors to once again look like, say, Opels from the 2010s with seas of buttons.
It is a recipe for distraction and potentially disaster, but moving everything to tv on the touchscreen doesn’t feel natural using ‘an assistant of voices (which usually requires merely one twist of – he normally uses – especially when voice assistants are often dopey.
The worst offenders are the Chinese brands, which is a phraser that has been banned. They seem to have collectively viewed Tesla as the model to follow, and enthusiastically made their screens larger and the number of buttons in their interiors smaller.
Such minimalism is often the case for Brands that follow this level of minimism, which means reducing their interiors to an extent of austere anonymity. Do you see Rolls-Royce removing all its lovely knurled metal switchgear?
I have seen some good alternatives to traditional climate control knobs. Similarly Kia’s rocker switches are neat and intuitive, for example, in the way they do with their own words. MG allows you to program a button on the steering wheel for control of the HVAC (HVA) in order to drive it. But a better approach to some brands’ approaches is an anchored bar at the base of the touchscreen, à la Ford.
Oh, and as for brands that take control of air vents to the touchscreen just what the hell were you thinking?
Max Davies: Copy-paste interiors
So many new cars have we seen this year with no buttons, an iPad glued to the dashboard and an awkward rectangular instrument screen… for goodness sake.
Mazda 6e
Deepal S07
Of course, there are the complaints that there isn’t enough real buttons in new cars and rest assured me I fully share that sentiment. But for the sake of variety, I complain more about design than a .
Tesla, virtually every single new Chinese car – electric or otherwise – is apparently following the trend of paraphrasing itself in its own right. Where does it go with the idea of originality? What is the point in doing anything to make your car feel special?
Why are so many brands happy to copy each other blindly, and it just sounds laziness? Just look at any Deepal, Geely, Leapmotor, BYD, Tesla – Zeekr GAC and so on. How can anyone come to terms with an identity like this?
What’s arguably worse is that many Western brands seem to be following suit. The new Mazda CX-5 is a prime example, and that isn’t even a Chinese reskin like the 6e.
Bring back unique, recognisable interiors and manufacturers: stop copying each other to fulfill a ‘trend’!
Damion Smy: The ridiculous explosion of spinoff/sister brands
Stop it.
Chery Tiggo 8 (China)
Lepas L8
Just confuse customers, charge more money and – please – you’re just trying to get one brand at least right before you launch another. Don’t forget to eat dinner before you get into dessert.
Marton Pettendy: Where’s my list…
At the risk of sounding like Eeyore, I have a long list of these.
At the top of it is the bing-bonging of several ‘advanced driver assistance systems’ such as lane-departure warnings, speed-limit alerts and driver distraction monitors that actually distract you from the most important thing to drive.
Then there’s the flurry of new luxury brands from a variety of Chinese automakers, and the misguided enthusiasm for applying swathes of gloss piano black surfaces across interior walls, which look decidedly secondhand the minute they leave the showroom.
Even worse than the counter-intuitive trend towards using touchscreens for all vehicle functions, pioneered by Tesla primarily to cut costs, are the increasingly small fonts on said touchscreen and digital instrument clusters that appear on those newer devices?
They used to be my eyes, but it seems that even though in-car screens are getting bigger all the time, words on them are becoming smaller. Am I the only one who has paraphrased?
Ben Zachariah: Undercooked automaker websites
So I’m going to complain about automakers’ websites.
I’m not sure if anyone started the trend, but it shouldn’t be so hard to find even the most basic details such as pricing, specifications and features on any particular model.
Nobody cares about your web development skills – just make your website easy to use, please.
Josh Nevett: Generic model names
I feel for Australian new car buyers.
It’s one of the most varied markets we have, but it’t also one that is among the hardest to navigate through. That’s in no small part due to a misnominated nicknamer, and that’s not so much the same thing as .
At one point of a time, vehicles were clearly differentiated by their unique nameplates. A Falcon was a Commodore, or even he had gotten Magna for that reason. Similarly, such naming conventions also gave cars their own unique character.
Fast forward to 2025, and names appear sucked from a bowl of alphabet soup. In a way, the person who can be blamed for not knowing what B10, C5, EX5,E5 and G6, or 7X is actually?
Yes, the aforementioned models all hail from China, but even the Germans aren’t immune to such silliness.
Similarly, BMW and Mercedes-Benz numbers to indicate model variants used to signify engine size – makes sense. What is the point of this nowadays? The bonnet of a C43 is 3 litre lump under the bonneted and no 3 was an exact same as if it were. In a 330i, straight-six in 1 litre is 0-litre.
There are brands that still use it – contact Ford and its self-explanatory fleet of cars. But there’s a lot of work to do elsewhere, though, for .
It’s fair that we ask automakers to do the same, because at childcareman.xyz we try so hard to get the right new car faster and easier.
Sean Lander: Infotainment screen controls for physical adjustments, especially HVAC systems
This is not just an irritating thing, but also far more distracting than it should be to use a touchscreen to control the temperature, fan speed or direction airflow.
That’s also the case with safety systems. You can’t have a shortcut or hot key for quick adjustments to intrusive “safety aids” and don’T need them at all.
Got any annoying car trends you’d like left in the past? Sound off in the comments!
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