Are You Sure You Want a Car With a Giant Touch Screen?

New drivers may never have to learn how to parallel park.

At least not the old-fashioned way.

Many new cars—a Ford Mustang Mach-E, a BMW sedan, a Tesla Cybertruck—will just maneuver into a spot for you with a click of a button.

Even a decade-old Toyota Corolla has a backup camera and pedestrian detection.

Cars that leave you to park all on your own are a dying breed: Any car manufactured after April 30, 2018, for sale in the United States is legally required to have a backup camera and, thus, a screen.

After all, cars are just computers now.

The screen (or really, screens) in today’s vehicles does a lot more than display rearview footage.

It is essentially a tablet wedged into the dashboard that allows you to mirror your phone through Apple CarPlay, make a hands-free call via voice commands, Zoom into a work meeting, or even play a video game (not recommended).

Mercedes-Benz debuted a 56-inch display in several models that it calls the “ hyperscreen .” But the expectation—and in some cases, the requirement—that cars have an ever-growing set of electronic features comes with a cost.

Just like laptops, cars depend on microprocessors and RAM, or random-access memory, to run all of their computations.

“There’s just a baseline level of tech, and thus a baseline level of cost, required of every vehicle,” Karl Brauer, the executive analyst at iSeeCars, an automotive-research platform, told me.

Technology is a major reason the average price of a new car in the U.S. has reached some $50,000, and that was before RAM became one of the most prized commodities in the world.

AI companies are snatching up as much memory as possible for their data centers, causing a RAM shortage that has significantly raised the prices of phones, laptops, and just about any consumer-electronic device.

Cars are next.