For the past decade, car dashboards have been disappearing. Buttons, dials, switches, all replaced by touchscreens. Tesla started the trend. The rest of the industry followed. Now China is ending it. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has finalised a regulation requiring all cars sold in China from July 2027 to have physical buttons for safety-critical functions. Lights, wipers, hazard warnings, gear shifting, and emergency controls must all be operable by touch, without looking at a screen. The rules are specific. Buttons must be at least 10 by 10 millimetres. They must be clearly visible. And they must be "blind-operable," meaning a driver can use them without taking their eyes off the road. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. But it took a regulatory mandate to say what most drivers have been muttering since the first time they tried to turn on their windscreen wipers through three layers of touchscreen menus at 100 kilometres per hour in the rain. China isn't alone. Euro NCAP announced that from January 2026, cars relying on touchscreens for basic functions like indicators and wipers will be marked down in safety ratings. Volkswagen has already reintroduced physical controls after admitting the touchscreen-only approach made driving harder. The touchscreen era isn't over. But the idea that every button in a car should live inside a screen is. Turns out the original interface worked fine. It was called a button 💛