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.”
Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
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.
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.
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.
Good. Now make the touchscreens in cars illegal.
Nah man. There are uses for touchscreens in cars. Just don’t put everything there, and especially don’t put anything you’d need to use while actively driving in there.
But being able to have dynamic user interfaces is very useful for plenty of non-directly-driving-related features.
Alright. Just make it illegal to operate any touchscreens while driving.
And make it the responsibility of the car manufacturers if the touchscreen is used, because they clearly induced the accident, that would quickly make them stop making touch screens be needed for things you should not look away while driving
About fucking time some damn sense around here.
They cant just be buttons. They have to be well thought out buttons. My old toyota had 3 big round knobs for the heater controls. Could adjust it without even looking. My new Toyota has heater control buttons but they’re tiny and arrayed in a row like a tiny piano. There is no space between each button and they all have the identical tactile feel. Have to take my eyes off the road for a few seconds just to find what I need.
This is incredible news because that means my future GTI will have buttons.
I just hope they’re smart enough not to put a 1200kg battery in it 🥹
Good. My air con controls are actual buttons and I can use them without looking at them. But literally everything else in the car is controlled by a touch screen that you have to look at to see what you’re doing.
Great, now unfuck the car I already have
Why did you buy it then
Because there are multiple criteria that people look for in a car? Or because fuck you.
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.
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.
I had no idea, yet I was correct: this IS hilarious!
Now that I think about it, cars could totally add a slot for SIM cards and be a phone and roaming wifi if they wanted to.
they do
Mine has an embedded one and I cannot change the provider, I am basically stuck. Luckily i can make hotspots from the phone and car can access the internet through my phone
And fix the spring steering thingy maybe. Feels like you’re driving a boat, which is dangerous, because you underestimate speed.
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.
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.
VW is not Stellantis. VW is VW AG (often humourously called VAG).
The world is healing
Thank the lord.
Glad they return to the old proven ways. It’s so much safer to have proper buttons and dials.
This is going to be unpopular but I quite like the buttonless UI in my car (6 year old swasticar). I recently bought a van and it’s so distracting.
Buttons are all over the place and I have two screens to monitor. Honestly, I spend more time looking at the controls in the van ghsn the car.
I’m getting rid of it soon and I’m not looking forward to that part.
Once you start remembering where the buttons are you get to the advantageous part which is using the controls without ever having to take your eyes off the road.
That’s what I do 99% of the time with my car. The scroll wheels and voice commands work well.
honestly, I’m all for buttons on phones too, I miss my sideout keyboard.
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.
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
Especially for gaming. My old Nokia N81 kicked this rectangular piece of glass’s ass when it comes to gaming because I could actually comfortably play games that weren’t turn based and didn’t need to slap an overlay onto the screen.
I’m thinking about getting one of those
Damn, that definitely looks very cool. Probably expensive too lol. But exactly what these touchscreen phones need.
Well it is a nice young youtuber starting a startup using kickstarter. I think an investment is worth it 😇
Edit: 😯 way more expensive than I thought
You can get the same feeling with a Xbox controller and a phone mount for the controller. its not quite as cool looking but for $10 is the same experience. I have this one that I got like 2 years ago, it works great. Good money saver if you already have a controller that supports bluetooth. They have them for PS controllers too.
I am too young and missed this era of phones, but personally I don’t like the idea of slide out keyboards. They seem like they would be very prone to dirt clogging it up. Would it even be possible to get an IP68 rating with a slide out keyboard?
The one phone feature I miss most is the alert slider from the OnePlus 5T I had. The 3 position switch is so intuitive when it comes to putting the phone on vibrate or mute. It sucks that no other phones have it, as I vowed never to buy a OnePlus phone again due to them never selling phones officially in my country. That, the increase in price, the trend towards more mainstream conformity, and the software deficiencies really soured my opinions of OnePlus.
the keyboards back in the day were generally dustproof, yes, with only the gap between the keyboard and the rest of the phone being an issue. the keys weren’t like the keys on a laptop, generally, they were more like buttons under a solid plastic sheet, that’s how they kept it from gettng dirty!
More like a formed plastic sheet with contact pads glued on the underside. The whole keyboard was just a PCB, plastic casing, and a button sheet.
thanks, i wasn’t aware of the specifics :3
Yeah it was the sliding mechanism I was thinking of as a potential issue, not the actual keys themselves. Phones with keyboards that don’t slide seem ok, but I personally wouldn’t want one.
the sliding stuff generally wasn’t a problem unless you buried your phone in sand or something, that would probably make the slide a bit gritty, but it was fine otherwise
Now it probably makes me sound old, but I think a lot of you youths would be changing your tune after trying one. I was so much faster at typing and navigating on one of thase than a touch screen, even with gestures.
Would it even be possible to get an IP68 rating with a slide out keyboard?
Maybe, but the competition at the time wouldn’t have IP68 anyway.
My friend, you are in luck. I happen to have not one but two Motorola droids with slide out keyboards. The keyboard is a full plastic sheet that has raised buttons for the keys, so no dirt can get under the keys, but as you can see here although dirt can accumulate on the keyboard itself, this doesn’t effect the sliding. https://streamable.com/9g509h
