Super-Size My Screen! In-Car Infotainment Systems Are Making Big Leaps

Depending on how you view the proliferation of in-car screens, you can either blame or credit Buick for pushing the digital envelope. The 1986 Buick Riviera is widely recognized as being the first production passenger vehicle to include a touchscreen in the dashboard. Called the Graphic Control Center (GCC), it featured an antique by today’s standards 3-by-4-inch CRT display with an equally as archaic green-and-black graphic user interface that controlled the car’s radio, climate control, and other functions.

When Popular Mechanics reviewed a 1986 Riviera T Type equipped with the GCC, it declared that the new interface “violates the First Commandment of ergonomics—you must take your eyes off the road to make any adjustments.” Buick abandoned the setup by 1990, but as anyone who has been in a vehicle made in the past 15 years knows, digital infotainment screens have not only taken over car dashboards but have also grown ever more plentiful and increasingly larger in the process.

Big Screen Wars

Tesla fired something of an opening salvo in the big-screen arms race more than a decade ago with the introduction of its then-unprecedented 17-inch touchscreen for the Model S and later its single landscape panel that serves as Tesla’s primary vehicle operations control center. It’s taken some time, but the rest of the automaking world has been responding in an ever-larger way ever since, rolling out all manner of curved, dash-width panels and other generously sized portrait and landscape real estate.

The German luxury brands were among the last to get on board but have since warmly embraced the super-sized digital dashboard and are now among the leaders in the space. Mercedes-Benz in particular hasupped the stakes in the present day with the introduction of its Hyperscreen setup, first seen in the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS sedan.

The slightly curved Hyperscreen stretches almost the entire width between the car’s A-pillars and consists of two 12.3-inch touchscreens—one in front of the driver and another ahead of the front-seat passenger—bridged by a 17.7-inch center-dash touchscreen, with all of it co-located behind a single glass panel. In 2022 BMW countered with a 31-inch panoramic screen in the i7 EV that folds down from the headliner to create a cinema for rear passengers, with the right rear seat featuring a reclining function that helps create a luxurious drive-in movie experience.

On the domestic front, MotorTrend’s 2025 SUV of the Year–winning Lincoln Nautilus has an available curved 48-inch 4K panoramic display that also spans the width of the cabin and is made up of two 24-inch screens near-seamlessly joined together. Lincoln’s long, slim display (a winner of one of our inaugural Best Tech awards) is recessed above the dashboard but isn’t touch-enabled and displays info in segments: instrument panel in front of the driver, infotainment in the middle, and weather, a clock, and other data on the passenger side. The displays are configurable and use large graphics and fonts that are easy to read at a glance even in bright sunlight, and Lincoln says it takes the place of a head-up display (HUD). Lincoln’s American luxury SUV competitor Cadillac has an available curved OLED display for the Cadillac Escalade that’s 38 inches wide and consists of a 14.2-inch instrument cluster display, a 7.2-inch driver control touchscreen, and a 16.9-inch infotainment touchscreen.

Trickle-Down Effect and Change in Dashboard Design

As is typical with automotive tech, larger screens are now trickling down from the luxury segment to lower-priced vehicles. In 2024, the average size of a vehicle dashboard display was 9.6 inches, according to S&P Global Mobility, and the analyst firm predicts that by 2030 the average size will grow to 10.6 inches. The driving force behind this forecast is how fast larger screens have “democratized downstream across a number of nameplates,” said Brian Rhodes, director of connected car and vehicle experience at S&P Global Mobility.

Other reasons include me-too rivalry, changes in dashboard designs, and vehicles being crammed with more tech features than ever before. “There’s a prestige with larger screens,” said Kevin Mixer, senior director analyst at Gartner who specializes in automotive and transportation. “There’s a competition of who has the largest screens and who gets to the market faster with a larger screen.”

Larger screens also grew out of a symbiotic relationship with an evolution in dashboard design. “You’ve started to see screens take over more of the dash, and suddenly dead zones become areas with screens,” Mixer said. Newer curved dashboard designs also freed vehicle designers from the conventional segmented cockpit layout with more compartmentalized instrument clusters and center stack displays.

“Displays continue to grow in prominence in the automotive interior, especially as we break the traditional flat-rectangle mold and unlock more dashboard real estate with curved displays and cover glass,” Rhodes said. “In addition to more size, there are simply more display applications.”

Bigger Screens but More Distraction

Bigger screens also allow for less cluttered interfaces and more prominent touch icons. “Larger screens make it easy for people to take advantage of new technologies and services without scrolling through three different menus,” Mixer said. He added that they also better support advanced features such as high-definition navigation maps and graphics needed for semi-autonomous highway driving systems.

But the increase in the size and number of screens also led to a decrease in physical controls—and more distraction—because drivers must glance at a screen to adjust settings such as audio volume that with physical controls could potentially be done by feel without taking eyes off the road. In recent years some automakers have even brought buttons back after consumer complaints. “There are more than a few examples of nameplate refreshes bringing limited hard buttons back in response to consumer feedback,” Rhodes said. “A display in a driver’s view is always going to be a distraction risk, but generally speaking more screen space unlocks more content flexibility rather than more unnecessary content.”

Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), agreed that larger screens allow designers to lay out displays in ways that aren’t cluttered and better direct driver’s attention to only the necessary information. But he added that visual distraction causes “a lion’s share” of distracted-driving crashes.

“We’ve done enough research to prefer voice systems over visual systems, but there are limits to how much you can do with voice,” Reagan said. “There’s always going to be these trade-offs, and there’s no substitute for an alert driver, but with all the technology the potential for distraction is there.” He added that one possible solution is the addition of driver-monitoring systems (DMS) that are becoming more prevalent (they are currently mandated in Europe) that study a driver for distraction and can issues warnings or even not allow access to certain features in a dangerous situation.

“Incorporating context is more possible now than ever with in-vehicle cameras and DMS technologies sensing what’s going on inside and outside of the vehicle,” Reagan said. “That’s where I see real potential for advancing vehicle design in ways that strikes the balance between limiting driver distraction and letting drivers do various things when there’s very low risk to them and other people around.”

Screen Technology is Looking Up in Vehicles

The recent CES trade show in Las Vegas is always a good gauge of where in-car technology is heading, and vehicle screen technology is literally looking up in the form of more advanced HUDs. BMW unveiled its latest iDrive infotainment interface at CES 2025; it’s scheduled to make its debut at the end of 2025 in the brand’s first Neue Klasse generation of electric-powered SUVs and is called Panoramic iDrive. It includes the Panoramic Vision system BMW unveiled two years ago, which features a specially printed dash-width black surface at the base of the windshield onto which graphics are displayed for the driver and passenger.

The Panoramic Vision display can be populated with up to six widgets that show information such as turn-by-turn directions and driver assist notifications in the driver’s line of sight just above the steering wheel, while a traditional HUD projects more info onto the windshield. Secondary widgets such as weather and infotainment info can be set to appear on the central and passenger side of the display. The other parts of the new iDrive system are a 17.9-inch center-dash touchscreen and a radically redesigned steering wheel with illuminated and haptic-feedback buttons—it looks more like a video game controller than a traditional vehicle tiller.

Korean automotive supplier Hyundai Mobis and German optical company Zeiss teamed up to develop a HUD that uses holographic displays. Hyundai Mobis showed a prototype at CES 2025 in a Kia EV9 that projected information across width of the windshield using a holographic optical element (HOE) that diffracts light toward the driver within a specified field of view compared to current technologies that simply reflects light projected at the windshield back toward the driver. More compact packaging is another advantage of holographic HUDs compared to existing reflected designs. Hyundai Mobis said the technology will be “launching as early as 2027.”

HUDs are one of the fastest-growing automotive display segments, Rhodes said. S&P Global Mobility found that in 2024 about 14.5 million cars globally had HUDs, and by 2030 it predicts the figure will grow to 21.3 million. “Whereas previously the focus was more on new nameplates offering a HUD for the first time, the biggest driver of growth going forward is increased take rates across vehicle lineups that already offer HUD,” Rhodes added.

Private Front Passenger Screens

More automakers are also adding dedicated passenger-side screens that work while the car is in motion but can’t be viewed by the driver thanks to a polarized coating, along the lines of the type that keep nosy people from peeping at your laptop screen on a plane. Most allow front passengers to select music sources, operate a navigation system, and watch video.

Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis kicked off the passenger-side screen trend: Mercedes with the 12.3-inch display that’s part of the Hyperscreen and Stellantis with a 10.3-inch passenger screen rolled out in the 2022 Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Porsche Cayenne and Taycan are also available with a 10.9-inch passenger display that mimics the center-dash infotainment screen, as does the recently released Audi Q6.

Even the exotics are getting in on the passenger-side view. The folks in Maranello, for example, added a vertically mounted 8.4-inch touchscreen to the Ferrari Roma that “gives passengers the opportunity to share the joys of driving with the driver,” according to the Italian supercar maker. This means displaying engine and vehicle speed, the selected gear, manettino traction control settings, and navigation information. Unlike other passenger-side screens, the one in the Roma doesn’t allow those riding shotgun to watch video while the car is in motion. The Hyperscreen allows front passengers to stream online video, but they have to listen to audio through headphones. The Porsche and Audi right-side screens have a YouTube app that can only be used by passengers when the car is in motion, while the system in the Jeep Grand Cherokee has an HDMI input so passengers can bring along a gaming console to pass the miles.

Roger Lanctot, president of the Mobile Satellite Users Association and a longtime car technology analyst, calls this trend “the fourth screen to add to the smartphone, mobile computer, and television” and predicts live TV, online gaming, conference calls, and more could be piped into passenger-side displays. Lanctot said automakers such as GM are building in prepaid data access dedicated to content streaming for front passengers.“With the move to EVs with downtime while charging and the parallel advance toward semi-automated driving, the possibilities are limitless,” he added. And so are the opportunities for automakers to add more and larger screens to cars.