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.”
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
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.
Now wait a second! Hold on! Let’s get one thing straight here…
…buttons should also return to phones.
Bring back the Blackberry.
And maybe introduce the blueberry!
As long as I don’t have to buy it, sounds good to me. Options are good.
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
Dedicated fingerprint unlock like the Pixel 5 would be nice to see again.
I’d settle for reasonable ports
I like the full screen size. Slide out keyboards are GOAT.
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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’m pretty sure VW made a declaration similar to that a few years ago.
Great, now unfuck the car I already have
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!
Why did you buy it then
Because there are multiple criteria that people look for in a car? Or because fuck you.
Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
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.
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
[email protected] brace for the flood!
This way the new VW tanks will be easier to handle.
Great. Do away with the unnecessary telemetry next.
It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.
Sometimes things can just be good.
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.
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.
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
lol
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.
But then how will you know where the nearest Arby’s is on your commute
My favorite place to buy and use drugs!
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?
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.
Say Yaah to accelerate, and Whoa to slow down.
Display ads in the meantime.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
