The screen is now the single worst thing about a new car, testers found

New-vehicle quality keeps improving almost everywhere except the dashboard screen. J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Multimedia Quality and Satisfaction Study, released September 9, found that infotainment is the only major vehicle category to get worse year over year, even as automakers wring problems out of engines, seats, climate systems and nearly everything else a new owner might notice. Multimedia issues now make up a quarter of every complaint filed by new owners, and the five most frequently cited defects across the whole industry all trace back to the screen.

The study is one of J.D. Power’s Component Quality Reports, a dataset built on the same 90-day owner surveys that feed the company’s flagship Initial Quality Study. Those surveys point to a consistent pattern: as mechanical failures become rarer across the rest of the vehicle, the touchscreen and the software behind it have become the industry’s most stubborn liability.

Multimedia Problems Hold at 42.4 Per 100 Vehicles

Owners reported 42.4 multimedia-related problems per 100 vehicles (PP100) in the 2026 study, essentially unchanged from the year before. A flat score sounds harmless until it is measured against everything around it. As other components improved, multimedia’s share of total reported problems climbed to 25%, according to the J.D. Power press release announcing the study. In other words, infotainment is not simply having a bad year; it is one of the only systems in the modern car that has stopped getting better at all.

Screens Now Drive a Quarter of All Reported Defects

The study’s most pointed statistic is that the five most frequently cited problems from new-vehicle owners nationwide are all infotainment-related. No other component category comes close to producing that concentration of complaints. Touchscreen freezes, phone-pairing failures and misheard voice commands are no longer scattered irritations buried among dozens of other gripes; they are, by a wide margin, the thing owners are most likely to complain about in the first 90 days of ownership.

Hardware Gives Way to Software Complexity

Lisa Boor, director of customer success for OEM solutions at J.D. Power, said the nature of the complaints has shifted along with the technology. “The industry continues to make progress improving overall vehicle quality, but multimedia remains a persistent challenge,” Boor said. “As vehicles become increasingly software-defined, quality issues are leaning less toward hardware failures and more toward system complexity, software performance and connectivity.” She added that brands able to simplify the experience while still delivering reliable execution are best positioned to improve quality and satisfaction going forward.

That framing lines up with J.D. Power’s separate Initial Quality Study earlier in the year, which found fewer owner-reported problems across nine of the ten vehicle categories it tracks. Infotainment was the lone exception, with connectivity issues continuing to strain the ownership experience even as nearly every other system got measurably better.

Navigation Is the Exception, Climbing 17 Points to 933

Not every part of the multimedia system is sliding backward. Navigation, long one of the weaker links in the infotainment stack, showed real improvement in 2026. Fewer complaints about usability and accuracy helped push overall navigation satisfaction up 17 points on J.D. Power’s 1,000-point scale, to 933. Satisfaction with general multimedia systems and with in-car speakers also improved, evidence that automakers can move the needle when they focus engineering resources on a specific, well-defined function rather than the sprawling touchscreen environment as a whole.

A Third Straight Year of the Same Plateau

The 2026 numbers extend a pattern that has been building for several years. J.D. Power’s 2025 edition of the same study recorded multimedia problems declining to 42.3 PP100, down from 44.1 the year before, a gain that reporting on the study’s results at the time attributed partly to fewer hardware breakdowns. But that same 2025 report also flagged rising complaints about touchscreens and digital displays, a trend that coverage of the newest data now describes as an early warning sign for the plateau showing up in this year’s results. A single year of improvement, in other words, was followed by a stall in the exact area executives keep calling the frontier of vehicle differentiation.

How J.D. Power Measures 90 Days of Ownership

The 2026 study is based on responses from 78,514 purchasers and lessees of new 2026 model-year vehicles, surveyed after 90 days of ownership, with fielding running from June 2025 through May 2026. It draws on the same respondent pool as J.D. Power’s flagship Initial Quality Study and U.S. Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout Study, giving automakers and suppliers a detailed view of which specific components are generating complaints rather than just an aggregate quality score. That level of detail is what allows the study to isolate infotainment as the one category moving in the wrong direction while nearly everything else trends up.

The broader tension the study captures is a familiar one in the software-defined car: drivers who have spent years using smartphones that update quietly overnight and rarely crash bring those same expectations into a new vehicle. A frozen touchscreen or a voice assistant that mishears a command does not register as a minor annoyance the way a squeaky door hinge might; it reads as a flaw in the core experience of owning the car. As automakers pack more functions into a single display, that gap between expectation and execution is what keeps showing up in the data.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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