This commentary is excerpted from the ebook “Discovering the Dashboard 2025.”
The experience of radio is more interactive and delightful than ever.
Radio plays a curious role in the automotive industry. This medium — which has unequaled reach and was the original location-relevant source of content — finds itself fighting to preserve its relevance as automakers seek to accommodate a growing array of competing interactive audio and visual experiences.
For years, the user-experience colleagues at my previous employer documented the fragmentation of in-vehicle content consumption as connected smartphones and streaming apps piled into and onto dashboard screens. With the onset of EV charging, the prospect of streaming video no longer seemed absurd, nor did in-dash gaming, social media and conference calls.
While radio continues to claim the widest reach of all media, it no longer commands the in-dash experience. The word from Quu’s 2025 In-Vehicle Visuals Report is that carmakers are playing hide-and-seek with the car radio.
The report highlights the new reality of in-vehicle content consumption, particularly in regard to radio.
Quu notes two common experiences found in most cars:
Audio-forward — Where the operating system has an audio/media button that generally defaults to the audio source last played; and
Radio-forward — Where the OS opens to a radio screen at startup or has a dedicated radio button that always leads to radio.
While these two modalities suggest some level of clarity, they obscure the reality that those dedicated buttons may be screen icons that are buried two or three levels down, accessible via dropdown menus or screen swipes.
The report states correctly that the default inclination at startup for most cars is to play the last media format the driver was listening to.
Sadly, it also highlights the increasing percentage of new car models with built-in streaming apps (now 37%) and the decline in models with dedicated radio buttons (now 26%).
The percentage of new car models with SiriusXM is up slightly while those with HD Radio technology is down slightly (obscuring the fact that HD Radio is available in 60% of cars sold and more than 10 million cars on the road now are equipped with Xperi’s DTS AutoStage).
Broadcasters are trying to implement metadata assets to raise awareness and visibility in the dash. Most notably, the aforementioned DTS AutoStage has opened the door to a truly revolutionary interactive experience with broadcast radio, including new forms of advertising and listener engagement.
For some reason, automakers appear to be missing the opportunity to restore radio to its traditional focal point in the middle of the dashboard. Radio deserves to be the default as an essential source of locally relevant news, traffic and weather information.
Menus and swipes
My experiences in my own cars, rental cars and for-hire cars are instructive.
The startup default screen in my wife’s Hyundai Ioniq 5 is a picture of the car and its battery, while Toyotas default to an invitation to try out Toyota Connect, and my BMW gives me a dropdown menu.
All typically default to the last radio station I listened to, but not necessarily to a screen that enables the user to turn the radio off or choose another station.
For example, my wife listens to WTOP while I prefer WAMU. When I get in her car I get WTOP and have to swipe left twice to get to the radio icon, select that, and change the station — unless, that is, I use the Soundhound-based voice recognition to instruct the car to tune to WAMU.
In that respect, the implementation of voice commands, natural-language understanding and artificial intelligence in vehicles may be something of a wild card. These solutions may enable searching broadcast sources for particular types of content or even a particular artist.
Until human behavior in cars shifts toward a more voice-centric experience, we will be left touching screens, looking for buttons, swiping left and right, and scrolling through menus to find our favorite radio stations.
This circumstance is magnified by the onset of electrification.
As new electric and hybrid vehicles arrive in the market, they tend to bring with them entirely new user experiences, with carmakers re-thinking and redesigning vehicles from the ground up. The confusion and complexity (sometimes in the guise of simplification, a la Tesla) being introduced into the market extends well beyond the infotainment systems, once dominated by radio, to the HVAC, instrument cluster and even ingress to or egress from the vehicle.
I recently rented a Toyota Crown hybrid at Bradley Field International Airport, picking up the car around midnight. I struggled to get the car in gear — all the while listening to a Christian rock station not of my choosing.
My iPhone died just after noting that my hotel was one mile away. I proceeded to get lost, of course, without in-vehicle navigation. I also fumbled with the clever HVAC settings (no knobs! no buttons!) and then pulled under a Marriott awning and tried to figure out simply how to get the car into park.
In the end, I was able to get back to the airport, change the radio station and find my hotel. But the entire experience was borderline traumatic, especially knowing the entire time that all of the interfaces with which I was struggling were state of the art, developed and deployed at great expense.
All of which is to say: It may be time to get back to basics and put the radio back front and center in the car.
It’s not enough to make radio easy to find. Radio’s natural home is in the car. The experience of radio is more interactive and delightful than ever before. Carmakers would do well to leverage the latest innovations that are enhancing the increasingly interactive radio listening experience and bring it to the fore rather than burying it behind menus and swipes.
