Auto China Report Part 2: Hypocrisy, switch theft & Chinglish
Make no bones about it, giant, glitzy, and glamorous high-definition screens dominate every Chinese car dashboard. Backed by crisp 3D cameras and wireless CarPlay, Android Auto, or some absurd generic Shanghai app, they dazzle punters in the showroom. Salespeople call this buttonless slab of monitor ‘minimalist luxury.’ Engineers admit it’s penny-pinching.
Mainland bean-counters deleted every physical button, rotary dial, and switch simply to save a buck per car by minimising buttons and the wiring looms to support them across the vast majority of Chinese cars. See, it saves money to route every cabin function into a few lines of software code deep in some ECU to reflect on a cheap LCD tablet. Western carmakers may have started the disease, but the Chinese have made an epidemic out of it. But to what end?
Swiping a 3D graphic on your SUV centre screen to crack the sunroof, pop the glovebox, align the wing mirror, speed up the blower, improve cabin ambience or turn up the audio volume may seem smart parked in the showroom. But try to stab a tiny virtual icon on a screen with nowhere to locate or brace your bouncing finger at 120 km/h on a bumpy, potholed South African backroad in the rain. Now that’s a recipe for a disaster. And it’s endemic to just about every Omoda, Jaecoo, Jetour, Chery, Leapmotor and most of the other new Chinese brands descending locust-like on the local market.
Control & Infotainment Comparison
Metric Chinese Offenders Traditional Offenders
Models Haval, Chery, Omoda Volvo, VW Golf 8,
Jetour & Jaecoo. Merc & BMW.
Controls HVAC, Mirrors Buried VW Unlit Sliders,
& Screen 3-5 Taps Deep; Volvo Single Tablet
Many Button Free Volvo Button Free
Mirror/Glovebox Mirror/Glovebox Buttons
Controls Deep in Menu Deep in Menu
Climate CarPlay/Auto Locks Strip at Base of Screen
Out AC Bar; Forces Volvo on Screen
Blind Driving
Metric Chinese Exceptions Traditional Champions
Models GWM Tank 300 & 500, Toyota, Mazda, Isuzu
BYD Shark 6 & GAC. Suzuki, Renault & Kia.
Controls Chunky Knobs/Dials Big Rotary Dials or
& Screen for AC, Volume & 4x4 Piano Keys.
Climate Dedicated Real Buttons Seamless Real Knobs
Bypass Screen Lockout Independent of Screen
Hidden Controls, Lockouts and Driving Blind
Just in case all that’s not enough, Chinese car auto-climate systems have zero finesse. Many of them blow Arctic ice at 21 degrees and desert heat at 22. So you’re constantly fiddling with deep cyber aircon ‘controls’ just to stay comfy in the car. But when you CarPlay your iPhone, your Chinese car’s native aircon bar all of a sudden completely disappears off the screen. So to drop fan speed by a notch, you must now swipe down from the top bezel, exit Google Maps, wait for the 3D vents graphic to load, locate and drag a tiny slider, and tap back into your navigation. Which usually takes three efforts before you give up. Because you fingered the wrong function somewhere along the line.
If that had been a real fan knob, your hand subconsciously would know exactly where it was, like it does your shower tap at home, and it would take two seconds to twist it without ever having to, as Jim Morrison once said, take your eyes off the road. But how long were your eyes off the road to slow the fan in your Chinese car at 120 km/h? Enough to drive a good 200 metres completely blind. Think about that for a second. That’s worse than driving with a cell phone. Which is banned and carries a hefty fine.
Want to adjust your wing mirrors or headlight height in a Jetour Dashing, Omoda, or Jaecoo J7? There’s no switch on the door card or in the corner of the dash. No sir. You must dig four or six layers deep into touchscreen hell to find that, tap Rearview Mirror, and then try to strike unlabelled steering-wheel buttons to shift the glass. And every time you restart the ignition, that hyper-active Lane-Keep Assist defaults back on, so it’s another four screen taps before every trip just to stop the steering wheel perpetually grabbing itself out of your hands.
Menus & Warnings Comparison
Metric Chinese Offenders Traditional Offenders
Models Haval, Chery, Omoda Volvo, VW Golf 8,
Jetour & Jaecoo Merc & BMW
Menus & Senseless Mashed Clean English Grammar;
Warnings Mandarin Translation, Annoying Steering Touch
Infuriating Bongs, Pads, Minor Translation
Chimes& Warnings Quirks
Metric Chinese Exceptions Traditional Champions
Models GWM Tank 300 & 500, Toyota, Mazda, Isuzu
BYD Shark 6 & GAC. Suzuki, Renault & Kia.
Menus & Physical Switches Physical Switches
Warnings Logical English Menus Clean English Grammar
Single Button Kills Single Button Kills
Lane Assist Lane Assist
Hypocrite Cars & Chinglish Lost in Mandarin
Best of all, by the time you’ve finally shut the window, opened the glove box or upped the volume, your neurotic Chinese driver-monitor starts striking its gong like a mating rabbit while at the same time obscuring the whole dash as it screams at you, often audibly too, that you’re not paying due attention to the road. So the car tells you to pay attention when it’s consuming it in the first place. Hypocrisy at its very finest. It doesn’t end there. The very first time we ever tested a new wave China car ten years back, we were amused by the Chinglish infotainment prompts and commands.
We said back then that it was all part of the development. But nothing’s happened to improve China car Chinglish in over a decade. The systems still say Open or Close ESP instead of ESP On or ESP Off. Or Open the Air Condition. And does ESP Close mean that the traction control is off? Or that’s where you should press to switch it off? Good luck guessing! See, Chinese software labs code cockpit interfaces in Mandarin and run English export strings via word-for-word translation tables. Because Mandarin uses the characters Kaiqi and Guanbi for Open and Close, the menus say Open or Close instead of On or Off. So why not have an English motoring writer, or teacher edit those outputs? The mind boggles. And the Chinese car owner struggles.
Similarly, the Mandarin word for Front Windshield shares a character with Gear. So machine-translated menus call it Front Gear Heating instead of Windscreen Demister. And then long English words get chopped in half to make wholly illogical sentences like Intell. Curv. Decel. Because full English words don't fit into boxes made for two square Mandarin characters. And don’t mention the speakers barking Do Not Drive Tired! every time your sunglasses confuse the infrared face camera. It’d still be fun if all this was still novel. But here again, nothing has changed ten years later in spite of our constant criticism. Read the Auto China Report chapter on engineering to figure out why.
Headlamp Comparison
Metric Chinese Offenders Traditional Offenders
Models Haval, Chery, Omoda Volvo, VW Golf 8,
Jetour & Jaecoo Merc & BMW
Headlamp Glitzy Showroom LEDs Benchmark Matrix/LED
Performance Poor 40m Throw on Long-Range Throw
Dirt Roads. & Auto-Masking
Metric Chinese Exceptions Traditional Champions
Models GWM Tank 300 & 500, Toyota, Mazda, Isuzu
BYD Shark 6 & GAC. Suzuki, Renault & Kia.
Headlamp Solid Projector Industry Benchmark Long-
Performance Beam LEDs Range Pencil-Beams
The NCAP Hammer and Why it Will Change
Western driving authorities are well aware of the perils of buttonless driving. Euro NCAP will for instance now enforce star penalties on touchscreen-only car cabins. To score full Safe Driving points toward a 5-star rating from 2026, cars must provide physical controls for primary functions and stop burying day-to-day switchgear in distracting sub-menus. In October 2026, Euro NCAP publicly hammered the Chinese XPeng X9 for stuffing every control into a touchscreen. But praised Audi and Kia for bringing back physical buttons. Which is a dilemma for Chinese carmakers desperately clinging on to otherwise well-earned 5-star NCAP ratings as among the few true positives in their cars.
Look, the legacy brands also got the cyber button and knob thing horribly wrong. The previous Volkswagen Golf 8, Tiguan, Mercedes, and BMWs all ditched physical climate buttons for awful unlit capacitive sliders. Lest we forget Geely's ergonomic nightmare button-free Volvo EX30 cockpit. Which doesn't even have a driver's speedo cluster or four window switches. So much for that Volvo 5-star safety halo. To a model, however, those sales tanked. It’s a cockup VW's boss admitted damaged the brand, forcing Wolfsburg to bring back proper knobs and buttons.
Thankfully, some Chinese models still respect the driver. The GWM Tank, BYD Shark 6 bakkie, JMC and GAC models and some others deploy chunky physical knobs and toggles for aircon, volume, and 4x4 locks. They join traditional champions like Toyota, Isuzu, Suzuki, Mazda, which bans using touchscreens on the move, and Renault. But if you want to stay sane behind the wheel, make sure the car you are considering at least packs an actual physical fan switch, volume knob, mirror adjustment and that each window has its own button to control it. Otherwise take a leaf from the NCAP book and walk away.
Auto China Car Report 2026 Navigation
