One In Three Owners Got A Passenger Screen And Never Once Turned It On

Simple car technology makes owners happier than flashier features, study shows.
Fashionable passenger screens score poorly, 35% of owners never using them.
Cadillac tops premium innovation while Hyundai wins the mass market category.

Automakers keep stuffing cars with bigger screens and smarter electronics, but owners say they’re not asking for a rolling Best Buy. JD Power’s latest tech study suggests drivers are happiest with features they barely notice, while some headline-grabbing gadgets are proving much less lovable and end up unused.

JD’s 2026 US Tech Experience Index surveyed 68,084 owners of new 2026 model-year vehicles after 90 days of ownership. It examined 40 technologies covering comfort and convenience, connectivity, driver assistance, EVs and smart vehicle features.

And simple stuff did rather well. Smart ignition, which automatically starts and stops the vehicle without you rummaging through your bag to find a key, delivered the highest overall satisfaction and just 2.4 problems per 100 vehicles. Smart climate control also scored strongly while generating relatively few complaints.

“The technology customers value most is often the technology they barely notice because it simply works,” said JD Power’s Doron Hikry. That’s probably not something automakers spending fortunes developing enormous dashboard-wide infotainment displays wanted to hear.

Passing On Passenger Screens

One In Three Owners Got A Passenger Screen And Never Once Turned It On

Because those fancy (but almost always optional) passenger screens we keep seeing at new-car debuts fared particularly badly. They recorded 21.3 problems per 100 vehicles, while 35 percent of owners with one said they’d never even tried using it. Just 6 percent reported using the passenger display every time they drove.

More sophisticated driver assistance didn’t automatically mean happier owners, either. Conventional Level 2 systems requiring hands on the wheel beat more advanced Level 2+ hands-free systems for execution and overall experience, despite the latter actually recording slightly fewer reported problems.

Cadillac Tops Tech Table

There were winners, though, despite the grumbling. Cadillac topped the premium innovation rankings with 641 points from a possible 1,000, ahead of Genesis at 559 and BMW at 524. Hyundai scored 524 to win the mass-market category for an impressive seventh consecutive year, with GMC and Kia tied behind it at 470.

The individual awards reinforce the theme. Camera mirrors won for the Cadillac Escalade and Toyota Tundra, while blind-spot cameras, digital keys, one-pedal driving and an EV charging scheduler also collected trophies.

None sounds especially sci-fi, and perhaps that’s precisely the point. Drivers seemingly don’t hate technology. They just prefer the kind that quietly makes life easier instead of demanding applause every time they start the car. Which makes life hard for automaker product planners and their marketing teams, because how are they going to convince us to upgrade if we’re not interested in their newest gadgets?