5 Modern Car Tropes That Won’t Age Well

Anybody who has scrolled far enough down their own Facebook feed knows what retroactive embarrassment feels like.

Whether it’s a haircut you had, a joke you made, or an opinion you held, things once considered normal — or fun, or virtuous, even — simply have not aged well. This era we’re currently in isn’t immune, and neither are the cars we drive. In fact, I’d argue that the car-related features, tropes, and decisions made over the last decade have already turned sour.

Every car is some shade of grey, every car has about two more drive modes than it needs, merely putting it into drive can be a puzzle in itself, and what the actual heck was up with those “coupe” SUVs? And there’s no way poking at a massive touchscreen while doing 110 km/h beside a minivan won’t become the automotive equivalent of smoking indoors.

Here are five modern car tropes that we’ll soon want to delete from our collective search histories.

Screens Everywhere for Everything

Step into a new car in 2026, and chances are, there will be a minimum of two large screens. I’m hardly the first (nor will I be the last) car journalist or research study to harp about this, but there’s almost no way the modern car’s obsession with distracting touchscreens will age gracefully. Unlike buttons and knobs, you cannot use a touchscreen without taking your eyes off the road and looking at it. And, as it turns out, safety regulators agree. Starting this year, the European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP) will require physical controls for certain key functions for a car to qualify for its top safety rating.

Here in Canada, the fact that it is staunchly illegal in all provinces to use a handheld cellphone while driving, yet the iPad-sized touchscreens that come in most new cars are somehow A-OK simply because they aren’t sitting in your hand is borderline farcical.

According to Transport Canada, distracted driving contributed to around a quarter of both fatal collisions and serious injury collisions in 2021. The organization also explicitly calls out “using the entertainment or navigation system” in your car as potentially distracted driving, and that “The risk of a collision goes up when a driver’s eyes are taken off the road even for a second.” Translation: just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.

The specific mechanics and ethics of multitasking behind the wheel can be debated all day. But in my mind, the fact that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a serious industry voice advocating for more screens that isn’t professionally incentivized to do so says everything you need to know.

To their credit, automakers have heard the cries and are slowly pivoting back to more physical controls. Volkswagen is bringing them back after a detour into touch-sensitive everything. Key personnel from brands like Hyundai, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz have come out voicing varying flavours of screen disdain, and a J.D. Power study found that more than half of the top 10 problems in new cars had something to do with smartphone integration.

What we have, then, is one of those rare instances where regulators, average consumers, the media, and the companies responsible (tacitly, at least) all pretty much agree that, yes, this was a mistake. And I’d be willing to bet future generations will see it that way, too.

Experimental Gear Shifters

If there’s one thing that shouldn’t require a YouTube tutorial, it’s how to put your car into drive or reverse. Yet designers have seemingly made it a contest to come up with the most unnecessarily creative replacement to the trusty PRNDL. And, surprise, surprise, people hate it. There are knobs that look like they control the volume, there are button modules that look like radio presets, there are crystal balls that spin in place and definitely, totally won’t malfunction once the warranty is up.

The prevailing automaker rebuttals are that these condensed controllers free up space in the cabin and that owners will learn how their car shifts the first time they drive it and quickly get used to it. That first part is fair, but the second part is only airtight if the primary owner is indeed the only person who ever drives the car. What happens when it’s handed over to a valet? What happens when you lend it to a friend? What happens when your unlicensed teenager decides to be a teenager and sneak out for a joyride? (Like it or not, it happens.)

It only takes one confused operator for things to get out of hand, and when we’re talking about the control that decides which direction your two-ton hunk of metal will travel, things can go and have gone south fast.

Back in 2016, Jeep made headlines after actor Anton Yelchin died after his Grand Cherokee rolled backward down his driveway, fatally pinning him against a pillar and a fence. Prior to the incident, Jeep had already issued a recall for that vehicle after numerous rollaway cases caused by a decidedly sleek shifter design that made it hard to tell whether the car was in park or in gear.

Innovation and creativity are important, but so is safety. And when a creative decision triggers confusion at the exact moment clarity is the difference between life and death, creativity stops being clever. 

Drive Mode Overload

If your car was made after, say, 2013, there will likely be selectable drive modes of some kind. Maybe it’s a simple sport mode button. Maybe it’s a rotary knob that lets you select between eco, normal, sport, sport plus, and snow. Perhaps it’s an entire Excel spreadsheet within the infotainment touchscreen that lets you alter stuff like damper stiffness independently from throttle sensitivity.

In any case, the ability to digitally alter how your car drives is no longer exclusive to performance or specialty vehicles, but I have a hunch that, given enough hindsight, we’ll eventually realize that they should have been.

I will concede that drive modes can be welcome as long as they satisfy three conditions: The differences between modes must be meaningfully distinguishable, the modes on offer must be spiritually appropriate for the vehicle, and the way in which you swap between modes must be simple. The reality, however, is that most drive mode systems in new cars today fail at least one of these.

Why does this SUV have six different terrain modes that all feel the same? Why is there a dedicated sport button in this $40,000 midsize family sedan? And what’s taking the field of psychology so long to translate “paradox of choice”into German, because why does every luxury performance car out of that country bury the mode settings in a touchscreen menu so long that you have to scroll to see all of it?

Outside of a car commercial or actual, off-road/closed-course performance driving situations (and even then, it’s debatable), unironic use of drive modes rarely fails to feel ridiculous even when the car in question is shiny and new. Now imagine climbing into a 2006 Toyota Camry today and seeing a sport button on the dash. Silly, right?

Every Car is Grey

According to the latest edition of Axalta’s automotive colour popularity report, the top four most-purchased new car colours globally in 2025 were white, black, grey, and silver, in that order. Collectively, shades accounted for 81 per cent of all new car colours chosen last year. These stats will not be surprising to anybody who has laid eyes on the road any time in the past 20 years, though. Seemingly in revolt against the widespread beiges and teals of the ‘90s, cars have literally been greying for a long time now. But I believe we’re on the cusp of a shift.

Your choice of car colour is, inherently, a fashion choice. And fashion is cyclical. What’s “in” today will eventually become “out” tomorrow, whether you still like it or not, and we’re frankly already seeing it in other aesthetic parallels. Take, for example, the “Millennial grey” home. You know what I’m talking about: grey laminate flooring, grey cabinets, clean, white countertops, straight lines and right angles everywhere. Once catnip for luxury condo buyers of a certain age, it’s quickly earning near-meme status among younger, interior design types and should soon join shag carpets and brown-absolutely-everything on the list of home decor tropes that are no longer cool. Any historian worth their salt will likely tell you that your all-black Audi will eventually reach a similar fate.

With cars, the data is showing the slow beginnings of a shift. Yes, 81 per cent shades is still a lot, but Axalta points out that this is actually lower than it was in previous years. Translation: real colours are slowly becoming more popular, with blue in particular leading the charge. Isolating for North America, blue was actually purchased more often than silver in 2025.

The long-running adage against buying a colourful car was, of course, “Boring colours hold value better,” but, actually, the data disagrees. According to an iSeeCars study, cars painted yellow, orange, and green depreciated the least, whereas black and white cars depreciated harder than the colour-agnostic average. The running theory here is not that secondhand buyers don’t want your white Lexus crossover, but that there are about a million used white Lexus crossovers for sale at any one time, effectively cancelling out any wide-appeal advantage in resale value.

Take all that together, and it’s only a matter of time before a teenager looking for their first ride walks onto a used car lot and asks us all, collectively: Why didn’t any of you bother painting your cars?

“Coupe” SUVs

It all started with the 2008 BMW X6.

Yes, the very idea of the “coupe SUV” as we know it was developed and conceived right before the financial crisis, which feels like a telling detail as to the mindset in which they were made and who they were for — $20 says the sushi-munching CDO manager from The Big Short absolutely had one on order.

For those unfamiliar, a coupe SUV is what the automakers that make them like to call those SUVs that try to look like sports cars from the waist up. Their defining trait is a sloping, less boxy silhouette that trades window area, cargo space, rear headroom, and often entire third rows for vibes.

After the X6, almost every automaker in BMW’s arena came out with its own renditions of the formula. Mercedes-Benz had Coupe versions of the GLE and GLC, Audi came out with the Q5 Sportback and a slantier, two-row Q7 called the Q8, and even Genesis now offers a Coupe version of the GV80.

The supposed upside of these cars (other than letting the companies that make them inexplicably charge more for less utility) is that they look cooler than their non-coupe counterparts, but I’m here to formally pose the question: Do they, though?

Style is ultimately subjective, but observing market movements, the answer to that question increasingly feels like “no” because coupe SUVs are starting to get culled. The BMW X4 (that is, the coupe version of the X3) has been discontinued as of this year. Rumors say Mercedes will soon either cut the GLC and GLE Coupes or consolidate them into a single model (there’s structural precedent here with the CLE replacing both the old C- and E-Class Coupes).

The real taste-based death knell for the coupe SUV, however, is probably the fact that boxy is now fashionable. Everything from the new Lexus GX to the Hyundai Santa Fe not-so-secretly wants to be a G-Wagen. Right angles, knobby tires, painted recovery hooks, and off-road trims are all the rage in 2026 — performative ruggedness, while lampoon-worthy for its own reasons, is what sells now, not performative performance.

Questionable vibes, questionable aesthetics, reduced usefulness, higher prices, and no longer even in vogue, the coupe SUV is arguably on its way to “Why was this ever a thing?” territory. But if you ask anyone paying attention, it frankly never left.