January 9, 2009 5:27 PM PST
Visteon's disappearing dashboard - photos
With touch-panel technology, Visteon is doing away with buttons and knobs in car dashboards. These new dashboards, on display at CES 2009, look like opaque, blank panels, but when you put your hand near the surface, a proximity sensor lights up button areas. Visteon has mapped standard car controls onto its touch panel, such as climate control and audio. The panels use haptic technology so you can feel it click. The company had a few other innovations on display, including a 3D navigation display and a driver alertness monitor.
See what dashboards in future cars will look like with our photos.
Buttons and knobs, big enough to use with gloved hands, work really well. Perhaps the auto electronics industry can work on re-discovering them. Multilevel menus and multifunction panels in cars are a really "Why?" tech.