Buttons are back and storage is king when it comes to car interiors

As with interior design for houses, interior design for vehicles is also subject to fashion trends. And like any fashion trend, even the best ideas can become stale and played out with overuse. Some ideas weren't the best, either, like demonstrably worse human-machine interfaces that add to driver distraction; yet, they still proliferated throughout the industry and across the cars offered for sale. But the good news is that the pushback seems to be working.

"When the trend of the Piano Black and the switchless interior was happening, it was during a time when designers and companies and engineers and everybody were thinking that, 'Hey, we can just get rid of all these switches on the interior. We can put it all in the software. It'll save money. It'll save us tooling up all these extra parts for unique cars and all this stuff and make the interior more like a software experience.' And it was done with those intentions," said Hiren Patel, senior design manager at Nissan.

That resulted in cars with minimalist interiors that looked good in the dealership. But people drive their cars on roads; they don't just sit inside them, parked inside a dealership. "So lots of people were complaining about it and saying, 'Hey, it takes my eyes off the road to change the temperature or to adjust my seat or do whatever.' It's not as easy as doing something on your phone where it's just right at your fingertips and intuitive," Patel said.

In part, blame the increasing complexity of modern cars, which have multiple subsystems that need to be controlled. "It's really like I've got to go in all these menus and do stuff, and all the car companies have a different way of doing it, too. So maybe nobody's really figured out a great way of doing it."