The first time I started a car at the touch of a button, it felt too easy and convenient – as if I had somehow fallen into a tax class I did not belong in. “You tell me,” I thought, “that I can just leave my keys in my pocket and the car will let me in and drive around?”
The push-button ignition is one of those buttons that does not really do that add any new functionality in relation to the thing it replaces (in this case the ignition system where you have to insert and turn a key). It exists solely for the sake of convenience, a job for which it excels. You get in the car, press the brake pedal and a button, and you’re ready to go. It’s hardly harder than unlocking your phone.
It is also, for most of us, at least the most raw force we can generate with just our fingertips. If you turn a switch on a surge protector, you can access almost 2,000 watts. It’s not a small sum, but pressing a button to start a car gives you the power to move yourself, your family, luggage and, oh yes, a machine that weighs thousands of pounds at highway speeds.
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The buttons themselves are relatively standard across the automotive industry, which is surprising considering how different ordinary old keys can be. Everyone I’ve seen has been circular, located somewhere to the right of the steering wheel, and has lighting indicating that your car is on. There are some safety precautions – many cars protect themselves against unintentional starting by requiring a simultaneous press of the brake pedal. Personally, it feels like the perfect mix of convenience and manual process – the foot / hand coordination makes it feel like you are do something, but you do not have the annoyance of fiddling with a key.
When I started writing this, I was under the impression that push button start was a relatively modern feature, but its origins go back more than a century. One of the first cars with a button-based ignition was the 1912 Cadillac Model 30, which made you press a button to activate the electric starter that replaced the engine crank. Of course, these were still pretty early days for “motor cars”, so the convenience factor was somehow diminished by the few other steps (like setting the engine fuel / air conditions and spark timing) you had to perform. Still, it feels reasonable to describe the Model 30 as having a push-button start. It was also keyless, not because it communicated wirelessly with a fob, as modern cars do (of course), but because there just … was not a key at all.
At one point, however, people realized that there probably should be a way to prevent anyone from starting your car. There was a time when cars had keys to unlock the ignition switch, but you did not actually turn on the car with the key. In the 1950s, however, many cars came equipped with the turnkey ignition system that most of us know today, replacing the system with buttons and levers. And it’s mostly like that, it stayed for a while until someone decided it was high time to bring the button back and all the keyless convenience that came with it.
Mercedes-Benz usually gets the credit for popularizing the feature with the KeylessGo system in the 1998 S-Class (I asked the company if it considered itself the inventor of the modern push-to-start system, but did not hear back ). While that car came with a somewhat standard key that you could turn to start the car, you could choose to include a keyless system that would not be out of place in a modern car. As long as you had a special plastic card on you, you could go to the car, get into it and turn it on by pressing a button at the top of the gearshift.
For a while, push to start was a luxury feature. The S-Class started to $ 72,515, which is about $ 130K in today’s money. If you remember a ton of songs in the 2010s from people like 2 Chainz, Rae Sremmurd, Gucci Mane, Lil Baby and Wiz Khalifa that contained lyrics about cars that do not have keys or that started with a button, this is why . (Khalifa refers to his push-button ignition in thaw songs).
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While the feature is not so exotic here in 2022, it’s not exactly ubiquitous yet; looking at the 2022 models of the 10 best-selling cars in the US, only half of them come with the feature as standard. If you buy the lowest model of Toyota RAV4, Camry or Tacoma, a Honda CR-V or a Ford F-150, you get a traditional turntable to start it up with. (The basic F-150’s exclusion of push-to-start is not necessarily a surprise, as the truck does not even come with cruise control – yes, I’m serious.) button.
When I got my first car with push-button start in 2020, I found it quite confusing for the first few months (probably because I had only ever driven decades-old cars at the time). I would press the button a split second before the brake and evoke annoying beeps from my car and the message “Press the brake to START.” However, I have come to love it and now it feels completely archaic to have to take the key out of my pocket and turn it on the ignition every time I drive another car. However, I will admit that for a month or two I definitely tried to get out of the car (a 2016 Ford Fusion Energy) without turning it off completely, which made it scream at me again.
However, this brings up a problem: As with many other conveniences, it’s a cost to start with push buttons. Several dozen people have been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning or uncontrolled driving vehicles after leaving their cars driving, assuming they would turn off after coming out with the key tag in tow. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration even has a page that warns people to be extra vigilant if their car has a keyless ignition system. These deaths show that when a machine becomes easy enough to use without thinking, people will not think about it – and the car manufacturers did not consider the fatal consequences of it. In 2021, several senators proposed laws that would mandate functions to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning and rollaways, but so far the laws have not been enacted.
Many manufacturers have begun to come up with systems to prevent further deaths. But the days of pressing the start button may already be numbered, thanks to companies pushing the convenience envelope even further. Many luxury electric vehicles – especially Teslas – completely forgo a manual start-up process. You step in, choose your driving mode, and the car is ready to drive you away.
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While plenty of electric cars from more traditional automakers like Ford, Hyundai and Toyota have push-button starters, there are signs that the buttonless start-up may already be seeping down; The Volvo XC40 Recharge automatically switches itself on and off, and while the Volkswagen ID 4 has a start / stop button, it is completely optional to use it according to the car’s manual. It is more or less the same technology; the cars authenticate you via a fob, map or even your smartphone, but they just activate or deactivate the engines when you use the gear selector, instead of making it a separate step.
Like I’ve said before, I’m a bit of a jerk for ceremony, so I think it’s a shame if push to start is completely replaced. Fortunately, if it’s the future, it may take a while to arrive, given how slowly buttons have spread since their resurgence. Until then, the button will continue to function as a little luxury, giving those lucky enough to have one thing less to fumble with while getting in the car for their morning commute.
Correction 31 May at 19:02 ET: the original version of this article incorrectly referred to carbon monoxide as CO2. Its actual chemical formula is CO. We apologize for the inconvenience.