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.”
Glad they return to the old proven ways. It’s so much safer to have proper buttons and dials.
Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
Nah you should make the steering wheel also a touchscreen, that would be smart. 🙃
Step 1: put in touchscreens Step 2: touchscreens good because = smart Step 3: … Step 4: Profit?
Swipe left to go left. Swipe right to go right. Pinch to accelerate. Say in a clear voice “Please begin braking” to decelerate.
Display ads in the meantime.
Say Yaah to accelerate, and Whoa to slow down.
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…
Seriously? The blinkers are on the touchscreen!?! 🤦♂️
Capacitive button on the wheel
Dumb
Yeah, imagine trying to hit that while you’re turning the wheel
Touch buttons on the steering “wheel”
Tesla already backtracked on some touch-screen controls.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Billionaires, both of them, I think.
But why can we not have button phones as well? I miss tactile feedback.
The world is healing
Postal service PostNL uses them, so I happen too see them from time to time.
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 🥹
!cassettefuturism@lemm.ee brace for the flood!
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.
Hyundai and now VW? Who’s next?
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.
It is not only safety - stupid screen is eating the battery for no reason.
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
The screen consumes orders of magnitude less energy than what it takes to move the car. It’s not even worth taking into account.
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.
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
