In the 1990s a friend flung open the door on a contemporary Aston Martin for the first time and couldn’t help but notice out loud how many Ford switches were sunk into the wood ‘n’ leather dash. The Aston PR man, standing next to him at the time, quietly cleared his throat. ‘What you have to understand, old chap,’ he said slowly, ‘is that most of our customers have never been in a Ford.’
I think about this story whenever I’m in a car and I spot some interior bit lifted from another model. Which, since I’m rather strange, is quite often. Of course, there’s good reason for interior parts sharing, and switches in particular. They’re complicated little things for many reasons, not least because they have to pass brutal durability tests and conform to precise homologation rules to ensure they don’t stab you in the eye or dagger through your hand in an accident.
For this latter reason the early generation BMW Minis had semi-circles of metal either side of their groovy, but also rather pointy, 1960s-style toggles. On top of this, you’ve got the complex engineering niceties of how a switch looks and feels. It’s this matter that caused a lone Mercedes engineer in the early 2000s to spend an entire year scouring the world for the best minor control action on any device anywhere, from which he concluded that the most satisfying button travel depth was precisely 1.4mm. From then on all Benz buttons had to be designed to this spec, the company issuing suppliers with detailed requirements including a finger pressure graph to ensure that everything from heated rear window controls to electric seat memory selectors in every Mercedes felt exactly the same.
