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324 comments
Previous, related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686967 17 hours ago, 211 comments (thedrive.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678853 1 day ago, 52 comments (afronomist.com)

Touchpads are a horrible interface for almost any device - especially ones that can easily kill when there is an operator mistake.

God I hate touchpad or touch based controls or whatever the correct term is, even on mobile phones they are almost always terrible to use.

I'm not big on touchscreens on phones, though it doesn't drive me mad personally. Real estate is a practical limitation and so forces trade-offs.

The big difference with a phone/tablet is that you're looking at the screen when using it. That's fundamental to the interaction experience. Cars are _completely_ different: a driver should be looking at *the road*.

Touchscreens as the main control interface for cars were a stupifying dumb idea right from the start. It's as if the alphageeks burst through the design studio doors, shunted the ergnonomicists aside, and proclaimed anything physical was neanderthal and out of date. Behold, the emperor has new clothes! "We can do all this in SOFTWARE, and it's adaptable, we can use clever colours, and look if you just tap this menu three times and slide along here, YOU CAN BOOST THE BASS IN THE RIGHT REAR SPEAKER! Show me how you do THAT with your Victorian buttons!".

Fair play to Mazda for leading the resistance movement here - and good to see VW actually listening and doing something about it. With any luck, touch screen car control will suffer the ignominious death it deserves.

Touchpad controls are so bad I've literally never played a game on my phone.
My biggest gripe is touch interfaces on stoves. You constantly spill water or other things.
Have you tried to use train ticket machine without touch screen? It is a nightmare, but popular in France.

Few buttons and a wheel - all you have to go through the journey to type your start and destination points, amount of people, age, discounts, etc.

when you think about it, touch is good for complex things and it's universal, the UI can shift to anything

for specialized repetitive control, doesn't seem to make much sense to me - certain functions in car, will be super repetitive, AC control, speaker volume, etc.

even for phones this logic applies, volume buttons are still physical

this means that something like navigation is better of with voice/touch (coz who would want physical letter keyboard there) ... but to pull down a window? yeah, hell nah with touch

And many argued that cars could be "improved" further with voice recognition....! Disaster waiting to happen.
Wish car manufacturers simply design a place for an ipad and Apple integrates Carplay with it. That’d be my ideal setup. I rather not pay $5,000 (implied) for some infotainment system that will be outdated in two years.
> outdated in two years.

More like already out of date. There’s no chance that any system that doesn’t play Spotify is a match with my phone. Or any navigation that isn’t based off Google Maps. And so on.

If I have to connect my phone, they already lost.

Some airlines went to free WiFi (limited to streaming local content) and bring-your-own-tablet instead of screens in seatbacks. I’m not sure how that’s worked out, but my sense is it didn’t solve everything.

What if car dashboards were BYOD? A standardized API and connector, and you could have a choice of aftermarket UI -- screens, buttons, knobs, whatever. You could get used to it and bring it with you for rentals or to your new car.

The design in the pic looks reasonable. Big screen for nav, setup, rarely used functions. Then a set buttons with a knob for volume (or other rotary control when in setup mode on the screen) and buttons around it to provide just the minimum functions you need while driving such as defrosters and climate control.

You really don't need a lot of physical buttons for a car UX to be safe. And each button shouldn't need a separate cable. That button pad can be the exact sam N buttons for every model, every trim, and regardless of which side the steering wheel is on. The design with "flying" screens in front of the dashboard feels modern but it's of course a cost saving, which can be copied for the button pads. And use a single cable to the button console. I can't see how it's a massive production headache or cost if it's built that way.

It's not 1989 you don't need 2 wires per button and 9 buttons for favorite radio stations.

Ah, the sweet spot between a cockpit and a calculator. You're spot on; we're not trying to relaunch Apollo 13 here. Sure, give us a touchscreen for the tech savvy, but let's not forget the tactile satisfaction of a good ol' button. And yeah, a universal button pad is like the Swiss Army knife of car controls – versatile, yet uncomplicated. Let's keep the touchscreens for Candy Crush and leave driving to the buttons.
Funny enough, the Taos and Jetta, which are their cheapest models, have physical buttons for volume and climate control and there isn't this level of friction using the car. I have a Taos, so I paid less for a better experience than a GTI or ID4 driver.
The dashboard test: Arrive from a long flight at night at the airport, get a car rental, attempt to operate the buttons to enter the gps address of the hotel and turn on the headlights on before exiting the parking lot. The last time, my 2020 Lexus SUV insisted that I needed to download the Lexus App to my phone before I could access navigation tools in the dashboard. This was a luxury car for chris sake. Cars today are victims of the Nokia feature curse. A bunch of features (calendar, reminders ) that nobody used during the flip-phone era. But you had to have the darn feature in order to compete weather people use it or not.
I absolute prefer proper physical interfaces for the most commonly used things. Like steering, acceleration, breaking, blinking, volume control, door handles, wipers, that sort of things. These are things I would use almost every drive.

However, I would prefer to plan my navigation, browse settings, configure the car, and peruse statistics on a nice snappy capacitive display UI. Please do keep/build that.

It's kinda funny that this piece is written with nothing about all the issues and changes at Cariad, VW's software group having all sorts of issues for years and is been undergoing a reorganization.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38131504 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35851369

Feels more like PR to encourage improvements are coming.

They’ve replaced it since, but I’ve really come to appreciate the control scheme of my 2016 Acura RDX.

Two screens, one positioned and angled for touch, one for driver visibility. Physical controls for climate, volume, and accessing touchscreen functions & menus.

This doesn’t seem like an incredibly hard problem, but rather that designers (or the marketing folks) have been convinced customers are impressed by extremes. In the ‘90s, dozens of buttons on the steering wheel. Today, nothing but massive screens.

There are two cars in my life that I liked more than any other car. The first was my 1965 Corvair and the second was my 1998 Kia Sephia.

Today’s car drive you, you don’t drive the car. I sat in a Tesla and felt I was in a future that I didn’t want to be in. Everything physical abstracted away into a smooth curve or a flat screen. we have let middlemen come between us in reality and we’re going to pay for it whether it’s in more expensive repairs or dislocation from nature.

I've recently been having to drive a higher end Audi from maybe... 2008? And the physical button situation is a complete fucking mess and I hate it. While driving I was trying to find the way to turn off the AC entirely because I was fed up with it being too hard to control and it took me literally 15 seconds to find it (mostly due to also driving at the same time). The UI (if you can call it that) of physical buttons is complete garbage in most cars. My daily, when I'm home, is a Yaris with three huge physical knobs - temperature, fan speed, and vent choice. It's perfect, I get exactly what I want, I don't physically have to look at it at all, I don't have to deal with automatic climate control which sucks in every single car. I'm just venting and have no real point here I guess other than physical controls suck unless it's super basic and simple.
The members of the business committee who decided that to operate the 4 windows 2 buttons are enough should be sentenced to driving a Trabant in their remaining lives. What were they thinking?... Of course, it was a desperate cost saving measure. No engineer could have come up with that stupid an idea.
Reminds on Rich Hickey ranting about touch screens in cars [1] in Design in Practice:

> We do not have feature X" is never a valid problem statement. If you need proof of this you only need to look at a modern car which has a touch screen where no one said, "I need to slide my finger on some random piece of glass to a precise point to set my blower in my car while I am driving." No one has ever said that, right? But somebody did say, "We need touch screens because young people will never buy our cars." This is what happens when you are not talking about the problem.

[1]: https://youtu.be/c5QF2HjHLSE?si=M6apr6fG_YaIDOpj&t=1826

A touch UI is actually always trying to simulate physical controls, it’s only better because you can have many controls in a small area but you need a lot more focus/brain to use the UI. Physical buttons are ideal still and as proven for cars
It might be relevant to know though, that the way VW did their on-screen and on-steering wheel buttons where not state of the art. Glitches, missing feedback, latency etc.

Tesla also added more on-wheel capacitive buttons in their Model S refresh and got negative feedback, but they worked on it for the new Model 3 refresh and I only heard a much improved, basically physical button experience. Not to mention their non-existent UI lag on their screen.

So if customers only know laggy screens, and weird feeling buttons, maybe it is not always the right way forward to go backward.

Thank god. I hate cars with touchscreen controls for core functions. I shouldn't have to look away from the screen for more than a minisecond to turn the temperature up a bit or turn up the volume.
Endlich.

Four years after Mazda. But the video still shows big touchscreens, useless themes and distractions of the driver. Why they mount office monitors on the cockpit instead of building them into the cockpit?

I count 9 buttons. No distinct knobs for volume or temperature. Again One button, one function. Not two functions, no long pressing, half pressing or whatever bad user interface ideas somebody can have. Donald A. Norman explained that well in The design of everyday things. And group that stuff logically.

Good. Can the regular roadworthiness tests be updated to fail cars that don't have physical buttons or dials for essential controls? These cars need taking off the road.
I thought for the longest time that touch controls were a misguided attempt by manufacturers to do something "cool" because buttons are considered "boring". But I've come to realise they are doing it simply because it's cheaper. I'm sad that most electronics I've bought in the past few years have touch buttons. In all cases I wish they were real buttons. There are very few actual advantages, apart from it being cheaper.
(buying a brand new Volkswagen in future) What's in the trunk in a plastic bag? your physical buttons, sir! You can stick them with double-sided tape wherever you want!
> The automaker has since reverted its since on the steering wheel buttons and is looking to now claw back its reputation for something that its current CEO, Thomas Schäfer, says "did a lot of damage" to the brand.

They aren’t even the first car manufacturer to reverse on this. Do these companies not test market these things? Like, I’ve never heard of anyone actually _liking_ these all-touch controls; it’s transparently making things worse to save a few cents.

AWESOME!! Physical buttons are great.

A while back I was considering buying a Tesla, but I rented a Model X for a long trip and overall found it pretty enjoyable. However, I found their heavy reliance on touch interface pretty annoying, and did a much deeper dive into other EVs as a result.

The turning point will be ads displayed in these ridiculous screens. Or not. On top of existing product placement e.g. preinstalled apps, upselling certain subscriptions, premium POIs, etc. If this continues, in 10 years the driver will have only huge screen in front of them and the car will self drive straight away to Shell then to Lidl and the range of the car will be just enough to come back home.
I didn't notice this in the article, but I wonder if this is only Volkswagen, or if this decision will extend to the rest of VAG.

I'm quite disappointed that the new Porsche models have a load of touch screens. I'm a fan of the Cayenne from 2012 which has an interior full of physical buttons and feels a bit like an airplane cockpit.

I know this irks a lot of people, but I've had a Skoda Enyaq iV for a year or so now and the fact that most of the buttons are on a screen make no difference to me at all.

There's physical buttons for the windscreen blowers, and hazard lights and few other critical things. Otherwise, it's just not been an issue for me at all.

The automotive industry as a whole created one of the biggest UX blunders ever with their IVI systems.

If your new smartphone has a different UI, learning that won't put anyone at risk.

Not so with the IVI system in a new car.

This is so obvious, you can only shake your head in disbelief the current state of affairs ever was allowed to be.

I love my VW GTI and I won’t replace it with an electric car until someone releases something equally good in a similar form factor (hot hatch or close). The physical button UI is a huge part or why I love the car. The mockup here is better than no buttons but not as good as my 2018 car.
I think the ultimate solution will combine touch screens with physical buttons and dials that adapt to different contexts. Ford already has what is effectively a stylus dial and products like the Elgato Stream Deck have basically solved how it could work with regular buttons.
Rented a Toyota Vios lately with that horrific tablet-as-HU. Just having to visibly hit the exact volume down 'button (spot) when in need, instead of VERY quickly turning a physical knob down, made me curse them every time.
Didn't the CEO and other decision makers try these interfaces before betting the company on them? Are they from a completely different world than the sample here who can see how obviously better physical affordances are?
I hope it's not too late to see a new manual car with buttons and knobs. I think it might be. The latest golf R coulda been a true great if not for the dumb haptics.
I hope it will be proper buttons then, not whatever they're using in the ID.3. I think all ID owners have opened the rear windows when they mean to open the ones in the front.
BMW had this solved in 2003 with their central wheel interface

But they are not a hot California startup speaking at TEDx about how they will change the world so they must be in the wrong.

Good! I miss the clicky knobs in my car. I don't mind touch controls when they're always on the same place and don't require navigating submenus.
“Dangerous cost-cutting measure not universally loved"
I bought a 2011 4runner last year and one thing I really like about it is the lack of a big infotainment touch screen. Lots of physical buttons.
This reminds me of the Navy issue years back that caused them to rip out all the touchscreen interfaces.

Critical path controls should not be touchscreen.

Not sure they should be over by the pad. Again, I have to reach for them, which means I have to take my eyes off the road to find them.