VW Design Boss Confirms Buttons Coming Back: 'It's A Car, Not A Phone'
VW Design Boss Confirms Buttons Coming Back: 'It's A Car, Not A Phone'
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.”
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Great. Do away with the unnecessary telemetry next.
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lol
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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.
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nymea.io was one of the few who were full private, but I think they got bought out or something
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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?
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It's so weird how not a single person here can just say "cool, this is good".
Sometimes things can just be good.
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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.
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Nothing to do with the euroNCAP guidance that came out earlier in the year, of course.
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Nah I'm sure that carmakers being forced to do this only factored in a little bit.
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Only because buttons are cheaper than fines of course.
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I’ve been assured that tHe MaRkEt will solve everything, though!
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Just keep hoping for that invisible handjob.
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Great, now unfuck the car I already have
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I have an 2021 Toyota and replaced the display with a Android head unit. Then added Bluetooth + USB buttons on my dash.
Some features don't work anymore like, but I can live with that.
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Why did you buy it then
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Because there are multiple criteria that people look for in a car? Or because fuck you.
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Step 1: Make insanely stupid design decision to save $2
Step 2: Sell reversal as an upgrade
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Glad they return to the old proven ways. It’s so much safer to have proper buttons and dials.
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Now wait a second! Hold on! Let's get one thing straight here......
.......buttons should also return to phones.
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I'd settle for reasonable ports
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Bring back the Blackberry.
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As long as I don't have to buy it, sounds good to me. Options are good.
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And maybe introduce the blueberry!
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i would be willing to pay so much money to have a physical horizontal keyboard in my phone
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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?
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Dedicated fingerprint unlock like the Pixel 5 would be nice to see again.
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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.
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honestly, I'm all for buttons on phones too, I miss my sideout keyboard.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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I’m thinking about getting one of those
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Whoever thought touchscreens were a good idea for a console needs to be shot
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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.
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Nah you should make the steering wheel also a touchscreen, that would be smart. 🙃
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Swipe left to go left. Swipe right to go right. Pinch to accelerate. Say in a clear voice "Please begin braking" to decelerate.
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Display ads in the meantime.
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Say Yaah to accelerate, and Whoa to slow down.
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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
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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.
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Billionaires, both of them, I think.
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The world is healing
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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.
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I dare say that that part of the reason behind this decision is that they are also required to meet safety standards.
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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
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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)
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Regulations work!
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But why can we not have button phones as well? I miss tactile feedback.
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Hyundai and now VW? Who's next?
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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Wouldn't it have been better for them to wait until cars were fully self-driving? I suspect they were just trend-chasing.
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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.
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Finally!
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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.
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This is incredible news because that means my future GTI will have buttons.
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I just hope they're smart enough not to put a 1200kg battery in it 🥹
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!cassettefuturism@lemm.ee brace for the flood!
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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.
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VW is not Stellantis. VW is VW AG (often humourously called VAG).
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This is VW, they aren't Stellantis, they are actually bigger than Stellantis, aren't they?
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Indeed.
The VW group trades places with the Toyota group for largest in the world.
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Thank the lord.
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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?
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They are probably going to do the bare minimum required by the new laws. So not even necessarily buttons under the touchscreen, the required controls are warning lights, indicators, wipers, the horn and the SOS button.
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It is not only safety - stupid screen is eating the battery for no reason.
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The power consumption of a tablet is next to nothing compared to the power it takes to move an EV.
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Yeah.
iPad battery capacity: 25-41 Wh
EV battery capacity: 30,000 - 200,000 Wh
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The screen consumes orders of magnitude less energy than what it takes to move the car. It's not even worth taking into account.
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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.
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About fucking time some damn sense around here.
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They cant just be buttons. They have to be well thought out buttons. My old toyota had 3 big round knobs for the heater controls. Could adjust it without even looking. My new Toyota has heater control buttons but they’re tiny and arrayed in a row like a tiny piano. There is no space between each button and they all have the identical tactile feel. Have to take my eyes off the road for a few seconds just to find what I need.
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Thank fucking god.
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I'm pretty sure VW made a declaration similar to that a few years ago.
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This way the new VW tanks will be easier to handle.
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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.
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they do
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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
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And fix the spring steering thingy maybe. Feels like you're driving a boat, which is dangerous, because you underestimate speed.
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Good. Now make the touchscreens in cars illegal.
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Nah man. There are uses for touchscreens in cars. Just don’t put everything there, and especially don’t put anything you’d need to use while actively driving in there.
But being able to have dynamic user interfaces is very useful for plenty of non-directly-driving-related features.
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