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.”
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lol
I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.
The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.
None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.
None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.
This is why I don’t have a new car. I’m hoping I get one where I have access to my own data (in eg. Home Assistant), and the manufacturer doesn’t.
3rd party stereos in classic cars seems to be the only way to get that.
Yep, that’s basically what I have.
I’m ready to buy a factory new car, when I find one where the data is mine.
It’s too bad LocalMotors never really worked out. It could have been an open source car company, but instead it was a weird designed by committee expensive car.
Factory cars these days are so locked down that in order to replace some sensors or controllers you have to log into a paid (like sometime $30+ an day) online portal to enable the new part. It’s super fucked.
nymea.io was one of the few who were full private, but I think they got bought out or something
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?
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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
My favorite place to buy and use drugs!
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.
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Yes, but this is not one of those times.
Imagine someone poops on your doorstep, and then removes half of it.
You can say it’s good that they removed some of it, but that’s probably not the point you would want to make.
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.
Only because buttons are cheaper than fines of course.
I’ve been assured that tHe MaRkEt will solve everything, though!
Just keep hoping for that invisible handjob.
Great, now unfuck the car I already have
Would be hilarious if they recalled them and superglued buttons over the touchscreen interface.
I have an 2021 Toyota and replaced the display with a Android head unit. Then added Bluetooth + USB buttons on my dash.
Some features don’t work anymore like, but I can live with that.
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.
Whoever thought touch button for blinking signs is a good idea 😆
So many Teslas blinking wrong on the streets now…
Seriously? The blinkers are on the touchscreen!?! 🤦♂️
Touch buttons on the steering “wheel”
Tesla already backtracked on some touch-screen controls.
honestly, I’m all for buttons on phones too, I miss my sideout keyboard.
Even on “near 100% screen” devices, there’s still real estate on the side, for some function buttons, like
bixby, back, home, etc. My Windows Phone Nokia had a dedicated camera button that could have alternative functions in some applications.If you double click your power button it should bring up your camera
My favorite phone was my LG enV2 with the physical qwerty keyboard. Thing would keep its charge for weeks, and I could just chuck it across a room with no consequences. Not a smartphone obviously, but it was great for its time.
Now wait a second! Hold on! Let’s get one thing straight here…
…buttons should also return to phones.
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!
i would be willing to pay so much money to have a physical horizontal keyboard in my phone
Not sure your age, but that used to be a thing. A little slide out keyboard as a way to transition the gap between fully onscreen controls, and the old flip phones. This would have been 2003-2009 roughly.
I’ve never understood the cell phone market thinking. If you have 1 flip phone, it’s suddenly ALL flip phones for the next 2 years. Then its a candybar style for the next 3 years. Then one phone gets wider, they all get wider. Then one gets credit card slim, they all get credit card slim. Now for the past decade it’s all been black rectangles with no personality besides 1 logo on the back. Just a touchscreen, and a fuck you.
The market is filled with different customers. One wants a keyboard. One doesn’t. Why can’t they both find what they want in different products on the market?
i remember my mom having some nokia phone like 10 - 15 years ago, had oled display and the screen would slide to the side and reveal a horizontal physical qwerty keyboard
I like the full screen size. Slide out keyboards are GOAT.
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Dedicated fingerprint unlock like the Pixel 5 would be nice to see again.
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.
Nah you should make the steering wheel also a touchscreen, that would be smart. 🙃
Swipe left to go left. Swipe right to go right. Pinch to accelerate. Say in a clear voice “Please begin braking” to decelerate.
Display ads in the meantime.
Say Yaah to accelerate, and Whoa to slow down.
Step 1: put in touchscreens Step 2: touchscreens good because = smart Step 3: … Step 4: Profit?
The world is healing
Touch screens in cars has always been a fuckin’ stupid idea, and I say that with the sincerest hope that nobody died because they had to look at the touchscreen to know where to tap to change the radio station because commercials came on
Someone has died due to a touchscreen. A woman had a Tesla which you put in park forwards or reverse with a touchscreen. She’d always had trouble with it and got it wrong and reversed into a pond. That meant the power went out so she couldn’t open that door. To get to the emergency escape handle you have to remove the speakers in the doors. So she drowned.
The kicker? Her husband was a millionaire and he immediately put out a statement absolving Tesla and musk from any wrongdoing.
Billionaires, both of them, I think.
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.
“They” is the car manufacturers. And yes, they were promised by Apartheid Willy Wonka.
And they fell for it. Partly because this happened back in like, 2010, when tech still felt promising and fun and partly (mostly?) because they wanted to.
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.
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.
VW is not Stellantis. VW is VW AG (often humourously called VAG).
This is VW, they aren’t Stellantis, they are actually bigger than Stellantis, aren’t they?
Indeed.
The VW group trades places with the Toyota group for largest in the world.
