I like how you can get a ticket for using your phone while driving, so automakers decided to replace your tactile radio, where you don’t need to look at it to operate, with what is basically a giant touchscreen phone in your car where you need to look at it to see what you’re doing instead of feeling what you’re doing.
And it’s legal!
Yep it should just be illegal plain and simple. Maybe some screens that are mainly intended for passive display that you can still use with touch, but all main functions one would need to use while operating the vehicle should be buttons and dials.
Many states have laws prohibiting the use of anything that isn’t hands free, including integrated media controls. Won’t stop anyone, but just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean people won’t do it. Same as speeding, or eating/drinking while driving in many states.
This is actually very good news for car manufacturers.
Touch crap was cheaper but sold a new tech so => price increase
Buttons are old tech so no new investments or tech development but they are more complicated => price increase
Thank you! I’ve been making this argument a LOT with recent discussions on kids not understanding keyboards and controllers because their lives are full of touchscreens.
Touch isn’t “the future”. It just absolutely flooded the market.
You think they don’t just charge more because they can, like every other industry lately?
They 100% do! But the marketing departments always likes to have “solid” arguments at hand.
How else can they organise fairs and conferences where they can lament about how poor the automakers are and how pressure from are pulling prices down so automakers cannot compete… how they have to fire people and move production in poorer countries where people can be treated more like slaves… how profits are so low that they have to use the same jets with the same bitches twice!
Carmakers did this to copy Tesla, not realising that Tesla did it to save themselves a few bucks and to hell with the person who suffer a degraded or unsafe driving experience as a result. Witness how Tesla even removed indicator stalks, making it all but impossible for people to safely and legally navigate a roundabout. Who cares if someone crashes, because it’s all about the bottom line.
not realising that Tesla did it to save themselves a few bucks
I guarantee you they realized that and likely did it for the same reason.
I don’t want a touchscreen in my fucking car. That is all.
I’d go as far as mounting a full size qwerty keyboard on the steering wheel. Although we’d somehow have to deal with the shrapnel grenade situation as soon as the airbag hits it.
But if I’m gonna go out, having WASD forever embedded in my forehead is kinda metal.
What?!? Pictures Under Glass turns out not to be the most desired solution for controling your car? Who could have guessed? /s
They’re fine for certain things on an evolving menu etc, but not anything where a tactile sense might be needed to avoid distraction. A lack of volume knob is the thing that pisses me off the most in many vehicles, including my own.
Also, power should be a physical cutoff and NOT a soft button for head units. The one of my car is a software toggle and when the system started glitching, froze and also put out high volume noise with no way to kill it except to shut off the vehicle when I could safely do so
Yep a good rule of thumb is probably “If you aren’t comfortable with having it disabled when the car is moving, don’t make it a picture under glass”. Managing playlists is a thing you can expect people to do when stationary, touchscreen is fine, skipping a song is done while driving, make it a button.
This was a wonderful read, thanks
I’m hoping by the time I need a new car, this insanity will have passed, allowing me to skip it. It’s like everyone skipped Windows Vista.
By that time they will start selling monthly subscriptions to use the buttons or they will revert to a regular touchscreen
i like buttons
I might be the one of the weirdos that want buttons back on phones as well lol. 💀 I loved keyboards.
Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.
My biggest annoyance with Gboard is that my muscle memory is so tuned with it and it has GIF search built in…but it keeps wanting to correct random words to whichever is closer: celebrity name or a brand name or something. -_-
Here you go: https://www.unihertz.com/
EDIT: Typo
Wait, an actually unique smartphone manufacturer and they’re not impossibly expensive and aren’t locked in to Europe?
How did this happen without me noticing? Cool!! Nice share! Now I want them to put daily drivable Linux on it and I’m insta-sold!
(So far I merely put up with the duopoly of mobile OSs. I don’t enjoy them lol)
I was also a Blackberry baby. But I can type faster now with Swype + autocorrect compared to buttons. I do, however, want my camera shutter button back.
Idk about other phones, but at least on my pixel the volume down button is also a shutter button. And double pressing the lock screen button opens the camera
I really miss the 1/2 click to focus. I think Sony is the only phone that has this. :(
I test drove one, and the touch buttons were ass, but nobody mentions the lag. There’s ZERO feedback, do you press the button again and watch the screen show you turn the thing on and then back off.
I would NEVER buy a car with touch controls based on this experience. It was horrible.
I wonder if that’s a lingering effect from the auto chip shortage from 2020 (limited choice lead to using processors less powerful than they’d like), or just the general shitty quality common when companies try to add features outside of what they are familiar with? Maybe combined with hiring shitty developers that want to run a full browser stack when they need to be doing embedded real-time programming instead?
I swore I would never buy a car with a touchscreen, but I ended up with a Toyota with no noticable touch lag and physical controls for everything important. The steering wheel buttons also replicate all phone- and radio-related functions that are on the touchscreen.
The wife’s Honda (a few years older) has too many physical controls. For example, I’m fairly certain you could turn on heat for the driver and rear passenger-side, and air conditioning for the passenger and rear driver-side, if you really wanted to.
Oh yeah, honestly, I don’t mind the controls on a touchscreen as you get immediate feedback on most, if not all cars, but for some reason on that GTI, the touch buttons on the dashboard and wheel didn’t work for me at all.
They obviously knew it sucked because all of their luxury cars still have buttons. It was just a cost saving measure and they tried to spin it as “fancy” in their low to mid range cars.
That’s not true though. This happened in their EVs regardless of price range. Even the Porsche Taycan which requires using a screen to adjust HVAC vents. Other than some steering wheel buttons the Taycan is all screens.
The Audi E-Tron GT (same chassis as the Taycan) oddly enough has more buttons. But that’s because VAG makes sure Porsche and Audi interiors are slightly different for different market segments.
It’s more about VAG thinking (like many automakers) copying the Tesla trend was what people wanted. The mistake made was not considering Tesla early adopters often being techy people who might not match broader market opinion.
They also didn’t do it as well as Tesla which gave even more reason to dislike it.
Finally people are starting to see that touch screens or any other touch surfaces don’t belong into cars.
As I’ve said elsewhere, touchscreens are fine in cars for functionality that isn’t something cars already had.
I don’t need a dedicated button for the Now Playing screen on my podcast app. Or for Points of Interest in my Maps app. But I would still like to use those things in my car the way I have become accustomed to.
But I do want physical buttons for everything I’ve always had physical buttons for.
My current car (a 2022 Ford Escape PHEV) has actual buttons and dials for climate control, media controls, etc. Everything you want to be able to do without looking. But it also has a nice touchscreen to support Apple Car Play/Android Auto.
This is the proper balance, I think. Let the car continue to function as a car without the touchscreen, but the touchscreen should be available for the luxury elements a car can provide.
You want buttons back because they’re easier to use
I want them back because I think car interiors look bland without them
We are not the same…alright I also want them back for the first reason aswell.
I’m very glad, the lack of buttons are a safety hazard… Looking at these stupid TESLA cars especially… You can’t even adjust the AC without messing with the touchscreen, which means your eyes are not on the road…
Still not going to own a car, but at least it will be slightly safer by bringing back physical buttons, so hurray for small victories.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about idea where flexible display can be combined with some sort of mechanism where a button on the display can be shown and underneath display in same place it would raise the display slightly. Just enough to be tactile and easy to find without looking. We might see these at some point as stars seem to be aligning that way.
They’ve been working on that for a while now. It looks like those stars are not aligning anytime soon.
https://www.howtogeek.com/894140/when-will-we-get-tactile-touch-screens/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/feedback-tactile-heptic-touch-fujitsu,26244.html
I own two cars. The newest is a 2013 because it’s before touchscreens became standard equipment. I’m gonna limp those bitches along until either I die or that trend reverses.
I said the same to a Tesla owner who informed me buttons on the steering wheel provide all these functionalities. But upvoters don’t own a Tesla.
Not all functionalities. You can’t even adjust the direction/power of the AC or open the glovebox without multiple presses on the touchscreen.
There’s no physical button to open the glovebox? Better not keep anything critical in there in case of a software failure.
Either software or hardware failure of the big infotainment system can suck really badly, and TESLA is also an anti-repair company too…
I’m reading this as “VW is putting buttons back in cars because they reckon the EU is going to slap them for making dangerous cars”
A great reminder that your voice does matter. Apply it other things as well, and things can actually improve…
