Aston Martin's 'Piss-Off Factor' Is Here to Save Us From Touchscreen Hell

Aston Martin wants its interiors to be as simple and easy to use as possible to avoid frustrating its demanding clients. The metric by which it judges its interior controls is called the "piss-off factor," and it's almost self-explanatory. If a button, switch, or touchscreen control pisses designers off, it gets ditched.

So many modern cabins have features baked into touchscreen infotainment systems, which can often lead to simple controls like seat heating being buried under multiple submenus. While Tesla certainly isn't the only touchscreen-heavy brand these days, it is the one that began the trend of routing most controls through the touchscreen, and Aston doesn't want any part of that.

"The big thing for us is to understand how we layer technology into [a cabin], and we were looking at the likes of Tesla who have been pioneers," Miles Nurnberger, Aston Martin's design director, told CarExpert. "We looked at them and very openly, when we first looked at it, said 'that’s not us.'"