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.”

    • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Most of them, probably. It’s a new requirement in EU to get 5/5 stars safety rating.

      That’s also why it’s specifically 5 features - that’s the bare minimum.

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That’s what I do 99% of the time with my car. The scroll wheels and voice commands work well.

    • fubarx@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.

      Sometimes things can just be good.

      • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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 :(

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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?

  • realitista@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • whyalone@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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

    • octoblade@lemmynsfw.com
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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        2 months ago

        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!

        • octoblade@lemmynsfw.com
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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            2 months ago

            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

          • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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            2 months ago

            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.

        • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • Secret Music@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • rigatti@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • variaatio@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.)

    • meeeeetch@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Wouldn’t it have been better for them to wait until cars were fully self-driving? I suspect they were just trend-chasing.

      • bluGill@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    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

    • SaraTonin@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • nuko147@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Nah you should make the steering wheel also a touchscreen, that would be smart. 🙃

    • snooggums@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.