Apparently car buyers don’t like passenger screens

Recently, there has been a trend towards more luxurious vehicles: Screens for passengerswhere the person riding shotgun gets their own display. What should that screen actually be show or do? It doesn’t matter! More screens, better, right?

Well, as it turns out: no. Buyers don’t like ithowever the companies insist on putting them in more and more cars anyway. More screens is with emphasis not better, which raises an obvious question: what’s the point of passenger screens?

The center screen of a car is, by definition, FOCUSED — at fairly equal range of driver and passenger. Many of them are angled toward the driver, often more angled than you realize until you’re riding shotgun in your own car, but few are so far from the right side of the car as to be completely unusable by it.

In many iterations of the passenger screen, it simply displays what’s happening on the main screen just a few inches to the left. Different apps in the foreground, maybe – maybe someone’s doing music and another browsing – but they’re all tied to the same computer. Nothing accessible on the right screen is inaccessible on the left. Your passenger isn’t watching a YouTube video while you’re driving.

Which, of course, would not be better. We’re all sufficiently insulated from technology, there’s no reason to build that insulation further into the literal design of your car. Getting caught up with your passenger is a chance to hang out and connect, but the passenger screen means you have one less thing to share.

Is the purpose of a passenger screen to isolate the front seats of a car, to ensure that the two have nothing in common? Is it to avoid those occasional accidental moments where both occupants of a car reach the same screen at the same time? Or is it just saying in the press release that there’s another screen there as a way to add “value” that might not add much at all?

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.