Screens Are Now a Quarter of Everything Wrong With New Cars
Multimedia complaints held flat at 42.4 per 100 vehicles, but the rest of the car improved so much that infotainment now accounts for one in four reported problems.
The headline on J.D. Power's latest study says infotainment is the only part of a new car that got worse this year. The number underneath says something different: multimedia complaints came in at 42.4 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), essentially flat year over year. What moved is everything else.
The 2026 U.S. Multimedia Quality and Satisfaction Study, published September 9, puts infotainment at 25% of all reported new-vehicle problems. The five most frequently reported problems industry-wide all fall in that category, according to the firm.
The findings are based on 78,514 buyers and lessees of 2026-model-year vehicles, surveyed after 90 days of ownership between June 2025 and May 2026. The study is part of J.D. Power's Component Quality Reports, a data product sold to automakers and suppliers rather than a consumer ranking, which is why the public release names no brands and no specific systems.
Why the share went up while the score stood still
The answer sits in a study J.D. Power published in June. The 2026 Initial Quality Study, drawn from the same 78,514-owner pool, recorded 175 PP100 across the whole vehicle, down from 192 a year earlier. That was the largest year-over-year gain since 1997. Nine of the ten problem categories improved. Infotainment was the one that didn't.
Hold the multimedia line flat while the total shrinks by 17 problems per 100 cars, and its share of the pie grows on its own. Screens haven't become less reliable. Cupholders, driver-assistance alerts, body-panel fit, and road noise have simply stopped generating complaints at the old rate. Cupholders, J.D. Power said in June, were the single biggest contributor to the improvement.
Where infotainment did slip in the June data, the culprit was phone connectivity. Problems with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto added 1.4 PP100, the largest single contributor to the category's year-over-year decline. In the mass-market segment, infotainment logged 44.4 PP100; premium brands did slightly better at 38.3. The same study found that 46% of owners who reported a distracted-driving problem pointed to the infotainment system or touchscreen as the source.
In August, the firm's Tech Experience Index added another data point. Passenger-side screens rated among the most problematic technologies at 21.3 PP100, and 35% of owners who have one said they had never tried to use it.
"Quality issues are leaning less toward hardware failures and more toward system complexity," said Lisa Boor, director of customer success for OEM solutions at J.D. Power. Brands that simplify the experience and execute it reliably, she added, are best placed to improve both quality and satisfaction.
Navigation is the one bright spot in the multimedia report. Complaints about usability and accuracy fell, lifting navigation satisfaction 17 points to 933 on a 1,000-point scale. Satisfaction with speakers also improved.
What J.D. Power hasn't released: which five problems top the list, how individual brands or infotainment systems rank, or how the multimedia numbers split between mass-market and premium buyers. Those details go to subscribing automakers. The next public checkpoint is the 2027 IQS, scheduled for June 24, 2027.
