Sage V.K. has spent the last 18 years sitting in the passenger seat of various mid-sized sedans, watching people fail to do the simplest thing in the world: keep their eyes on the road. He is a driving instructor by trade, but a student of human distraction by necessity.

Last Tuesday, he watched a nineteen-year-old student named Leo try to adjust the fan speed on a new electric car. To do this, Leo had to tap a screen, wait for a sub-menu to animate, slide a digital bar, and then tap a “back” button to return to the GPS.

In those 4.2 seconds of digital navigation, the car drifted nearly three feet toward the shoulder of the road. Sage didn’t scream; he simply reached over, corrected the wheel, and muttered that in his old 1994 hatchback, you didn’t need a menu to find the air. You just turned a knob.

The Great Irony of the Modern Interface

The knob was the simplest option. It was also the first thing to be removed when the interior designers decided that “minimalism” meant hiding everything behind a pane of glass.

This is the great