Barely Anyone Actually Uses The Feature We All Knew No One Would Use: Study

Today’s cars come loaded down with more gimmicks than a circus. Some of them, like ambient lighting and headrest speakers, range from harmless fun to pretty awesome. Others, like having an entire giant screen just for the passenger, seem to be added technology for no apparent reason. A new study from JD Power seems to suggest what you’ve already known all along. Seemingly few drivers care about having a screen for a front passenger, and even if your car has a passenger screen, your passenger probably isn’t using it.

There was once a time when having any screen at all in your car was weird and novel. The Buick Reatta and its phosphor monochrome cathode-ray tube seemed ripped from the pages of science fiction. Then there was a whole rash of cars in the 1980s and 1990s that had futuristic digital instrument clusters or proto-infotainment systems. Even everyday Chrysler products like its minivans had the option for a radical green instrument cluster that continues to capture the awe of drivers today.

Screens aren’t new anymore. Since at least 2018, when the federal government’s mandate on backup cameras went live, even the cheapest, most base model cars have at least one screen. Nowadays, it’s common to see regular cars with a screen for both infotainment and instruments, even if the instrument cluster screen doesn’t actually add much to the experience.

Automakers have become rather obsessed with screens. On one end, you have the likes of Tesla, which chooses to route most of its cars’ functions through a single, monolithic touchscreen. On the other end, you have legacy luxury marques whose visions of opulence mean screens that take up nearly 100 percent of dashboard real estate. An increasing number of automakers even give screens to front-seat passengers, which seems rather redundant as it’s almost certain that the person sitting in that seat is going to have a personal computer in their pocket or purse already.

The screens are just one techy feature that’s out there today. You can buy cars filled to the brim with tech like SAE Level 2 driver assistance, cars with biometrics, cars with electric door handles, cars with a million automated safety features, cars that claim to be able to drive themselves, and even cars with AI-driven climate control. Of course, the big question is whether people actually use this stuff.

According to the JD Power 2026 U.S. Tech Experience Index (TXI) Study, which was recently released, there’s one standout piece of tech that car buyers and their passengers don’t actually care about, and it’s one that isn’t surprising at all.

Car Owners Like When Tech Works In The Background

According to JD Power, it surveyed the owners of 2026 model-year vehicles about their experience after 90 days of ownership. This survey period ran from June 2025 through May 2026, based on vehicles registered from March 2025 through February 2026, capturing responses from 68,084 vehicle owners. JD Power says this about the study:

The U.S. Tech Experience Index (TXI) complements the annual JD Power U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS) and the JD Power U.S. Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) Study by measuring how effectively each automotive brand brings new technologies to market. TXI combines the level of adoption of new technologies in each brand with excellence in execution. The execution measurement examines how much owners like the new technologies and how many problems they experience while using them. The TXI dataset allows automakers to immediately identify the specific technologies their customers consider to be must-have, nice to have or not necessary at all.

While this methodology potentially has some imperfections, it is a window into how people feel about their vehicle purchases. Three months is long enough for many people to figure out what features they like and what features they don’t care about.

One of the study’s key points was pretty obvious in that car buyers like when their car’s tech works in the background rather than being in their face. An example of this, per JD Power, is a smart ignition system. Buyers generally enjoy how frictionless today’s car ignition technology is – just don’t leave the fob on your hood – and also like cars that allow them to use their phone as a key. Buyers further like automatic climate control systems and cars that can easily remember and recall driver personalization settings like seat position, mirror position, and infotainment settings.

Cars receiving high marks in the study include the Cadillac Escalade and Toyota Tundra for their camera rearview mirrors, the BMW X6 and Hyundai Palisade for smartphone-based keys, the BMW iX for one-pedal driving, and the Hyundai Ioniq 9 for its EV charging scheduler. Cadillac and Genesis earned top marks in tech innovation with 641 points and 559 points, respectively, based on a 1,000-point scale. Hyundai led the pack of mass-market brands with 524 points.

Technically, responses would have ranked Tesla with 924 points and Rivian with 781 points, but JD Power says that those two brands, along with a few others, did not meet study criteria.

Drivers Aren’t Yet Fully Into Hands-Free Driving

One surprise came from how drivers are currently accepting SAE Level 2 driver assistance systems. According to JD Power, more driving automation doesn’t automatically translate to a more pleasurable experience. From JD Power, which quotes Doron Hikry, director of customer success at JD Power:

In the United States, SAE Level 2 (L2) driver assistance systems, which require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, outperform more technologically advanced SAE Level 2+ (L2+) hands-free systems on execution and overall experience scores, despite L2+ systems offering more functionality. While L2+ systems have a slightly lower problem count than L2 systems (13.8 vs. 14.3 PP100, respectively), they do not deliver a better overall experience, suggesting that simply adding hands-free capability does not necessarily translate into greater customer satisfaction. “The results indicate that owners may currently be more comfortable with systems that clearly assist the driver rather than those that introduce a greater degree of automation,” said Hikry.

I get this one to a degree. To date, GM’s Super Cruise is my favorite driver assist system. I’m still wowed by how a truck with Super Cruise can effectively and safely tow a huge travel trailer. However, it still requires a pretty decent degree of babysitting, and it’s frustrating when it does make errors. It seems that, at least for the drivers that JD Power surveyed, they’d rather have a system that helps them drive than a system that drives for them, but still needs as much supervision as a car that’s under full manual control.

Passenger Screens Are Being Ignored

Now, we get to the meat and potatoes, and it’s that, like you, other car owners don’t really care about passenger screens:

Passenger screens offer little appeal to owners: Passenger screens are more common and actively used in premium vehicles, yet they rank among the most problematic technologies in the index (21.3 PP100). More than one-third (35%) of owners industrywide who have a passenger screen say they have never tried to use it, while just 6% say they use it every time they drive. Some vehicles equipped with passenger screens also had higher rates of infotainment system problems in the JD Power 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS).

This isn’t surprising at all to me. Back in early 2025, I tested Ram’s updated heavy-duty pickup truck line. At a casual dinner during that press trip, Doug Killian, Chief Vehicle Synthesis Engineer, admitted that Ram found out that its customers don’t actually use the front passenger screen that comes in higher trim models. Ram thought that, like rear seat passengers, the front seat passenger would appreciate having a screen with all sorts of media on it. In reality, most of the front passengers just use the phone they already have and would rather have more dashboard storage than yet another screen. The difference? Rear seat passengers are often children who don’t walk around with a smartphone. As Killian put it, Ram might have accidentally done “technology for the sake of technology.”

As a few other journalists at that event further noted, there are a lot of people who get carsick when trying to focus on a screen while they’re a passenger in a moving car. I’m one of those people. I have to be very careful looking at any screen while I’m a passenger in a car because there’s a good risk I’ll get violently ill.

Then there’s the fact that, as I have personally witnessed when testing new cars, these screens don’t do anything that your phone doesn’t. Sure, the dash screen might be larger, doesn’t need to be hooked up to a charger, and doesn’t need to be held, but your phone already has all of your favorite apps, movies, and music right there. Chances are, like me, you’ll be holding your phone in your hand as you use the dashboard screen.

So, between the people who get sick and the people who will just whip out the smartphone that’s already on them, there might not be a large population of people who actually care about having extra screens.

It doesn’t help that, as JD Power points out, passenger screens have given their owners problems. The screens apparently proved problematic in JD Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Study, which tracks owner-reported problems in the first 90 days. In that study, passenger screens were responsible for 21.3 problems per 100 vehicles. That doesn’t give a whole lot of confidence in how well these screens are going to work after warranties have expired.

JD Power’s study isn’t exactly a huge revelation, either. The reliance on screens has been controversial in the automotive world. Last year, researchers at the University of Washington and Toyota Research Institute put 16 people into a driving simulator, making them use a built-in touchscreen while on the move. Unsurprisingly, the results showed that, when forced to use a screen and drive at the same time, drivers became sloppier at the wheel while also being worse at hitting the screen. Earlier this year, Forbes reported on how even designers think that automakers went too far with screens. Of course, there’s far less at stake with a passenger using a screen than a driver, but it’s still a part of this trend of slathering dashboards in screens.

Hikry says that, given the JD Power study, automakers have an opportunity “to prioritize technology that makes driving simpler, not more complicated. The features that solve real problems without adding effort or stress for the driver are the ones resonating most with customers.” Does this mean that this is the end of the road for the passenger screen? Who knows. But if you’re the person who has been yelling at clouds about how many screens that new cars have, it seems you aren’t alone.

But maybe this is the beginning of something different. We’ve already seen some automakers commit to bringing buttons back. If automakers know that buyers aren’t interested in passenger screens and other gimmicks, maybe we’re headed to a future with fewer screens and perhaps fewer distractions. I can get behind that.

Top graphic image: Porsche