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.