Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.
Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.
We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.
“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone.”
Great. Do away with the unnecessary telemetry next.
The thing the vast majority doesn’t care about and that doesn’t prevent them from buying cars and that you’ll have to live with unless you just keep driving your old car forever?
I’ll eventually have to buy a new car, yes. But I’ll also be looking into replacing the car’s cellular antenna with a dummy load if possible. A good car shouldn’t depend on cellular networks to be able to function.
Unfortunately, a lot of them are bad https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
I’m looking for reading on cars that don’t break when you disable the cellular antenna, but haven’t found much so far.
Even if you disable the antenna, who is to say it doesn’t cache telemetry locally that isn’t just sucked up by the dealer the next time you bring your car in?
But then how will you know where the nearest Arby’s is on your commute
It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.
Sometimes things can just be good.
Trust is earned, and automakers have done nothing but the opposite for an entire lifetime. There’s a reason everyone was so desperate for Tesla to be the little guy rebel. It didn’t work out though :(
Yes, but a corporation complying with the law is sadly what passes for good news in the US these days.
Consumers don’t like subscriptions to operate heated seats that are already integrated into the car, for example.
Nothing to do with the euroNCAP guidance that came out earlier in the year, of course.
Nah I’m sure that carmakers being forced to do this only factored in a little bit.
I’ve been assured that tHe MaRkEt will solve everything, though!
Great, now unfuck the car I already have
Would be hilarious if they recalled them and superglued buttons over the touchscreen interface.
Isn’t that basically how the knob on the touchscreen of the Ford Mach-E works? I think it’s just glued on and simulates a touch like a stylus.
Why did you buy it then
Whoever thought touchscreens were a good idea for a console needs to be shot
They are grat for things that benwfit from havibg flexible touch anywhere interaction like maps.
They suck for anything you want to touch without looking away from the road, like temp controls.
Honda still including buttons and knobs for climate controls was a huge factor for my last purchase. A few brands were instantly rejected because they had climate controls in the touch screen and I had already hated that experience from rentals and my in law’s cars.
Now wait a second! Hold on! Let’s get one thing straight here…
…buttons should also return to phones.
I like the full screen size. Slide out keyboards are GOAT.
I’d settle for reasonable ports
Bring back the Blackberry.
As long as I don’t have to buy it, sounds good to me. Options are good.
And maybe introduce the blueberry!
It’s incredible it took them this long, considering how obvious it is. But good - it’s nice to see at least one thing getting less and not more shitty for once, however tiny.
I dare say that that part of the reason behind this decision is that they are also required to meet safety standards.
No it’s the only reason they are coming back, if they cared they wouldn’t have got ridden of the buttons in the first place
They have been publicly moving in this direction for a few years. They cynical play is they pushed the new safety standards because they are ready and want to cause their competition problems as they are forced to rush buttons back (who knows, but it wouldn’t surprise me)
Regulations work!
Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
This will be another nice side effect of Tesla shitting the bed. They were the ones that started this trend and now that they are out of fashion, it will become unfashionable again.
Finally!
They decided it already couple years ago. However refresh cycles are such, that only now it starts to arrive to times where changes physically manifest. Another thing which they already said back then and kinda apologised for alas sorry, changes have to wait until next refresh or next generation of the vehicle depending on timing.
Like I guess this is official official now, but design team lead or someone like that said ages ago they would be going back to more physical buttons.
The world is healing
Thank you!
(Though, to be fair, I’m not sure how much they deserve to be thanked for undoing a change that should never have been made in the first place.)
Ehh, they were promised that full self driving was only a few years away. If that had been the case, touchscreens would be perfectly fine. But a decade of “only two more years, we swear” later, it’s time for the manufacturers to get back to work on AM instead of FM.
Wouldn’t it have been better for them to wait until cars were fully self-driving? I suspect they were just trend-chasing.
Touch screens still were not perfectly fine. At least not as they are implemented today. I have a medical condition that is eased by heated seats, I notice how long it take to get them on when I first sit down.
Who is “they”? Nobody made that bullshit promise except the Nazi in Chief.
That’s Stellantis. It’s the same company that’s building cards that are now showing ads when the car stops at a red light.
Does this mean VW’s won’t 15" touchscreen monitors plastered to the dashboard anymore? Or are they keeping that and just putting buttons under it?
Thank the lord.
