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.”
[email protected] brace for the flood!
This is incredible news because that means my future GTI will have buttons.
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
This way the new VW tanks will be easier to handle.
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.
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.
About fucking time some damn sense around here.
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
It is not only safety - stupid screen is eating the battery for no reason.
The screen consumes orders of magnitude less energy than what it takes to move the car. It’s not even worth taking into account.
The power consumption of a tablet is next to nothing compared to the power it takes to move an EV.
Yeah.
iPad battery capacity: 25-41 Wh
EV battery capacity: 30,000 - 200,000 Wh
There used to be a concern of lights draining a car battery preventing it from starting the ignition, but nowadays all the lights are LED so it’s many times more efficient.
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.
Glad they return to the old proven ways. It’s so much safer to have proper buttons and dials.
And fix the spring steering thingy maybe. Feels like you’re driving a boat, which is dangerous, because you underestimate speed.
honestly, I’m all for buttons on phones too, I miss my sideout keyboard.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
Tesla already backtracked on some touch-screen controls.
