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
Thank the lord.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Dedicated fingerprint unlock like the Pixel 5 would be nice to see again.
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?
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’d settle for reasonable ports
I like the full screen size. Slide out keyboards are GOAT.
I dare say that that part of the reason behind this decision is that they are also required to meet safety standards.
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!
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
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?
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!
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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.
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.
Tesla already backtracked on some touch-screen controls.
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!?! 🤦♂️
Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
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.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.
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.