I know most of us here aren’t exactly fans of touchscreens and how they’ve so vigorously and brutally taken over the dashboards of every modern car, but I think we all have to respect the touchscreen. We should at least admit that for those of us still beholden to knobs and switches and buttons, the touchscreen has proven to be a most worthy adversary, and there’s no denying its popularity. But where did it start? I think it may have started with a clever little concept hybrid city car called the Microdot.
The first production car to feature touchscreen controls was the 1986 Buick Riviera which used a green phosphor cathode ray tube (CRT) display, as fitting for the era, and this was a pretty comprehensive implementation of what we understand touchscreen controls to be: a sceen with changing displays and on-screen buttons and controls.
GM called it the Graphic Control Center, and just look at it:
It ended up in cars other than the Riviera, too, like in this Buick Reatta, which you can see in action here:
Incredibly, this doesn’t seem to be the very first implementation of an automotive touchscreen, though, at least in some form. A solid decade earlier, though, there was a concept car, one that was hoped to make production, one that was designed by the man behind some of the most famous Aston Martins, a hybrid city car, and, yes, what I believe to be the first automotive implementation of a digital touch screen.
The car is Willam Towns’ Microdot, and yes it’s that William Towns, the man behind the Aston Martin DBS, the Aston Martin Lagonda, and the Aston Martin Bulldog. Towns was a pioneer and master of a flat-plane, straight-edge style, and you can definitely see that in the design of the Microdot.
The Microdot was first shown at the 1976 British International Motor Show and was a true hybrid, with an eight horsepower electric motor – giving it a top speed of about 40 mph – powered by lead-acid batteries stored under the three-abreast seats, and recharged by a 400cc engine driving a 3.5 kW generator. The design was pretty radical and quite appealing: lots of glass (nice and flat, to keep things cheap) for great visibility, along with a sleek, wedgy design and fantastic green-plaid-1970s-Lutheran-church-rec-room-couch upholstery, all in an interior designed by the same people who designed the spaceship interiors for Star Wars, which was released the very next year.
Around back, the license plate housing revealed a removable little cart that could be used like the trunk of the car, except it was a trunk you could take with you on its own little wheels. It’s pretty damn clever, and I was able to get Jonee Eisen, Associate Curator over at the Petersen Automotive Museum, where the car is now on display, to show me just how that works, live on a video call:
You can see it in use in this film from the era, which shows the Microdot in action and explains the hybrid drivetrain:
That’s pretty great. Actually, Jonee made a whole video with this car that you really should watch, too:
It’s all fascinating, and it’s a shame it never made it into production, even though there were certainly plans; Towns worked with Mallalieu Engineering in 1978 to develop a production-ready prototype of the Microdot in 1978, based on a cut-down Mini chassis and using a Reliant engine instead of the hybrid drivetrain, but for a variety of reasons and lack of funding the project fizzled out.
But! We have to talk about this touchscreen, because whether or not anyone realized it at the time, that may be this car’s real legacy. The touch screen didn’t have a full matrix display like modern touch screens or even the 1980s CRT-based Buicks; it was a panel with what I believe were red LEDs behind it, and silkscreened text and icons on the face of it to indicate what the buttons did. There may have been a numeric seven-segment type of display on there, too, but honestly I haven’t seen enough of it in action to know. All I know is that Jonee told me there are red lights that illuminate in the panel when you touch the controls, and I think this meets the minimum requirements of a “display.”
Now, the real question I have here is how did this work? Back in 1976, what sort of touch-based technology was around? Looking at the display, we don’t have that many clues; there is a bit of a rougher texture on the surface where you actually touch things, and when touched, the whole display recesses into the housing, giving a sort of early haptic feedback.
My best guess about how this could work comes from looking at a roughly-contemporary touch-sensitive device, the old Apple Graphics Tablet from 1979:
This was a pretty amazing device for 1979, and used graphics software created by, surprisingly, musician Tod Rundgren. I believe the tablet worked by using that grid of wires you see there inside the pad, and when there was pressure on the pad, a horizontal and vertical wire would make electrical contact, telling the computer the X,Y location of the contact. There must have been some sort of compressible layer above the wires and possibly below, and the wires must have been under enough tension to not make contact until pressed upon.
Could the Microdot’s touchscreen worked in a similar manner, with the wire grid behind an outer skin and the (presumably) LED lights below? I’m not really sure, but I think we should all speculate, wildly, in the comments. The Microdot’s controls do currently still work, incredibly, so I don’t think anyone is eager to pull it apart to see, so our speculating seems to be the best option, as actual documentation does not seem to exist.
Whatever you think about touchscreen controls, don’t be mad at the Microdot. It was just a little car full of many good ideas ahead of their time. You can’t blame it for how absurd touch screen interfaces have gotten, with glove boxes and vent controls being doomed to be on screens.
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