Yeah I really hope other car makers follow because I fucking hate touch controls in cars with a burning passion. It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Same goes for kitchens. Give me real buttons and knobs and not these abhorrent touch panels that refuse to work every third time. A good quality kitchen appliance is identified by high quality knobs that last for decades.
I pumped gas at a brand new Shell station over the weekend. The controls for the pump was one GIANT touchscreen (I'm talking probably 12 inches wide by 36 inches tall). It was fucking PAINFUL to use. Every touch took 2-3 seconds for the action to happen. Da fuck is wrong with a regular pump and regular buttons that just work!?
Because then they don't have a display the size of a living room TV to shove ads in your face
And to sell to the station owner when their proprietary hardware breaks. Oh what am i saying, they're all service contacts these days. So more expensive service conrtacts and the ability to shut them down for non-payment
Were the old ones not the same...?
Were the old ones not the same…?
The contracts? Pumps? Im kinda talking out my ass here but currently there's no ability to shut down the pumps themselves as far as i understand it (in l understanding coming from being a cashier at one once. The touchscreens outside just process the customers payments. Without those they can still be run from the other system inside. The pumps are not connected to Wi-Fi.
My hypothetical assumes more and more control left to the touchscreen outside i guess, and i ran with it. If it doesn't make much sense then just reread my first sentence ;)
The conversation was about locking in the owners to their expensive proprietary pumps as a reason for switching to this new style, and I was asking if lock-in was actually a new thing or not. Otherwise the comment doesn't really make a lot of sense in context.
Reminder to try and press any of the buttons on the side of the screen to mute if possible. 2nd right or bottom right works on all the pumps around me but I dread the day we get touch only
This is the reason.
It should be illegal to connect a touch screen to a computer that runs like a potato. Even computers in the 80s could respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks in real time.
If it keeps getting broken they might reconsider.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn't as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
This sucks because I don't get better hardware just to make up for worse software (not that it even does; a lot of browser-based apps are painfully slow), and some of these devs end up working on weaker platforms that don't make up for their shitty programming. They might not ever touch the platform it is actually supposed to run on and instead work on a dev machine that is powerful enough to make it look good. It's possible that neither them nor anyone hiring/managing them realizes that they aren't the kind of programmer they want.
Though it's also possible that the programmers are fine and have told their managers that the CPUs just aren't powerful enough for what they want them to do but some assholes are only looking at the bottom line and have low standards for these kind of things in their own life (my TV is slow, so it's no big deal that our car interface is slow).
Worst thing is it's probably less than a $50 difference in cost to switch to something that could handle it fine, assuming it's not programmed in JavaScript and HTML or slow because it's backend is on the cloud or some shit like that, which also wouldn't surprise me.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn't as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
How's this for irony: I was hired at my current job as part of a team whose whole mission is to address performance problems in a large desktop app...that's written entirely in Typescript!
It's kinda funny how some are willing to develop a skill to great depth (you'd have to know JavaScript/TypeScript very well to write a full deal desktop application in it, and it probably involved a LOT of frustrating debug if performance is the main issue with it) but don't spend any time on breadth to understand that some depths aren't worth it.
We used to have a rule in computer system design that if an event would take more than 4 seconds we had to show a "waiting" icon like the hourglass.
Now though, people are sensitive to half a second between tap/click and something happening. Incidentally there's no reason for a fuel pump control to be slow, even running on a potato. The engineer who designed it wasn't given time to make it efficient
In Canada it really sucks having to take your gloves off half the year. I hope this gets taken into account when touchscreens on gas pumps are considered.
Try wearing very thin neoprene under your bigger gloves. It's been a game changer for me. I have a horrible habit of taking my gloves off from years of snowboarding and those have been awesome.
Your experience remembers me those old touch screen we had at the library in the 90s. The screen was monochrome, but touch sensitive. It took several seconds for react.
Also it probably was crustier than a toddler's iPad. 🤢
What do you need a touchscreen for? You just take an appropriate pump (E95, Diesel), fill the fuel and pay at the register.
Because it's way faster to pay at the pump and not have to go inside. I've only been inside a gas station like 4-5 times in the last decade.
It was slow because all of the memory was allocated for the ads they show you.
Biggest problem is that they cheap out on the tech parts. Nobody complains that an iPad has a touch screen, cause it works. But an appliance tends to have a crappy UI, running on a crappy touch screen, powered by a crappy CPU.
If they just used quality parts, it'd probably be fine, and the only issue would be expensive replacement for an entire assembly, instead of small, cheap parts that can be fixed.
A smartphone or tablet screen has the function to have multiple buttons and responsive functions on one and the same place.
A kitchen appliance doesn't have or need that. Absolutely no need for digital or so-called "smart" gimmicks.
Yeah! Instead of having a knob my idiot stove has “touch areas” - good luck cooking if you’re blind.
At my old place, if I wanted to set the bottom left plate to the hottest setting, I’d put my hand on the leftmost knob and turn counter-clockwise until it snapped once.
On this thing I usually have to start with turning off the child lock. We never turn it on, but every time we wipe off the stove there’s a like 95% chance the child lock activates due to the lingering moisture.
After turning the child lock off you have to hold the power “zone.” Then you have to select which burner by holding its zone - if you don’t you’ll start changing the timer when you hold down the - button to cycle from 0 to keep warm, to 9, and then press + to turn it from 9 to boost.
I'm legit not joking. Mind you this example is when the piece of shit behaves. I’ve an absentmindedly placed lids on the off “button” before and had the piece of junk refuse to turn back on for half an hour.
What does the touch controls add to my experience other than frustration? A knob doesn’t activate from water splashes. A knob doesn’t turn from residual moisture from a slightly damp cloth. A knob is tactile and pleasing to hold, and can be used by anyone of appropriate age, even if they’re blind.
Four knobs could pull the weight that these NINE touch “buttons” fucking struggle with.
WHO CAME UP WITH THAT?! Holy shit that is a fucking crime against humanity.
I can't believe I wasted five minutes of my life on that hell. Whoever constructed that is an evil genius.
JUST FIVE?! Holy shit dude, how much of bad UI/UX have you been through?
Holy shit, I could not imagine someone who cooks a lot to put up with that. If you have a few things you need to start and stop at specific times and change heat levels and stuff while cooking several things at once.. it takes me .5 seconds to operate my dials when doing this. I would be livid using your stove.
Yeah it drives me bonkers every time I have to use it.
It’s worse than that too because I grew up with gas and electric hot plates. I’ve 20 years of ingrained habit causing me to move pots and pans off the plate to quickly adjust temperature. I’ve legit lost count of the amount of times I’ve absent-mindedly pulled a hot pan over the controls causing the stove to become unusable for a while.
These are the most sensitive touch controls I’ve ever experienced. They’re triggered by moisture and even putting pans or groceries on them.
Oh ffs what a fucked up convoluted mess.
We need to find the engineer that designed this, and their managers who pushed it, and shame them People of Walmart style.
How is it people can willingly violate fundamental UI/UX rules?
As mentioned, how do these things pass Accessibility regs?
In general high quality things tend to have physical buttons and knobs as opposed to touch screen devices.
Instead of turning into e-waste after 5 years or less they can last for the next 30 to 50 years.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
I just tore apart a working thermostat that almost 80 years old now (to understand how it works) and in perfectly working condition. It uses the physical properties of the materials inside to measure temperature (a coil of metal expands and contracts causing a pendulum to move clockwise or counterclockwise). Suspended at the top of this pendulum is a small vial of mercury containing two electrodes. When the pendulum is far enough counterclockwise the Mercury slides in the vial and bridges the electrodes, turning the furnace on, when the pendulum is far enough clockwise the mercury slides to the right and no longer bridges the electrodes.
When you set the temperature on the thermostat you are changing the default position of this pendulum. Meaning that it has to move more or less distance for the bead of mercury to bridge the circuit.
It's brilliantly simple and will continue to work essentially forever. The physical characteristics of the materials involved won't change.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
Same goes for pretty much every IoT device that people seem to be filling their homes with.
This is why, going forward, smart home products I buy have to be zigbee or zwave so I can integrate it with home assistant.
I thought this comment was trolling then I realized that zigbee and zwave are real brand names. You can’t make this shit up.
lol from the outside I can see how you’d think that.
Haha yeah they're IoT protocols for smarthome stuff.
But an open source software called Home Assistant can talk to it, so you can self-host your home automation without your home being subject to the whims of some fragile tech startup and by extension, their investors.
Oh I see, that’s helpful and makes sense. I’m one of those newbs who took 15 hours to set up my own Jellyfin. Self hosting Home automation is a ways off in the distance for me haha.
Hey, same! Glad it was helpful.
And hey it sounds like after 15 hours you DID get it set up, so congrats! The skills learned will keep transferring to your next projects. If you're having fun, you're winning. :)
Home Assistant has a pretty rad community and guides on which devices it can use and stuff. They're trying really hard to be accessible to the curious. So hey, never know!
Yeah that's how things are now.
I was looking for kitchen scale and not a single recognisable brand was there on Amazon. No Phillips, Bosch, Siemens, Panasonic etc.
Don't know if these companies even make things like that anymore.
Yeah Amazon has opened the door to the lowest quality hardware out of China to put most name brands out of business for lower priced goods.
But it can't run DOOM.
You should read Exhalation by Ted Chaing if you haven't already. It's a quick read
Touch screens especially don't make sense in the cooking context, where your hands are likely to be wet / damp.
Touch controls for burners are very dangerous in my opinion. What if i spill oil on the stove and touch screen? Now the oil might stop me from turning off the heat and the situation could quickly turn into a fire.
That's a thing? Holy shit... And here I thought the worst offender was Tesla's yolk steering wheel with a capacitive touch horn "button".
I’ve had similar situations happen before. Moved into this apartment in September. This stove will be the death of me.
That's why they have spill detection. Try pouring water over the touch controls. It should beep, then turn off.
It's not a good solution or better than a knob, but better than nothing.
Except your spill doesn't flow over the controls. Then good luck.
Omg I feel that. The oven in my apartment has touch controls. When I'm baking stuff with lots of moisture inside, water evaporates and is expelled though a vent JUST BELOW the touch controls. The condensation makes them completely unresponsive. Smh
You have to wonder if the engineer who designed that was a complete dumbass because it seems remarkably obvious that you'd want to keep moisture away from electronics.
I was boiling pasta earlier and my fucking stove turned itself off and engaged the child lock because water splashed onto those controls. THREE TIMES!
I’ve had this piece of shit literally ruin dinner before. It’s amazing how it can be both really nice and really fucking useless at the same time.
Agreed, it's true for most devices. They're often finicky, don't offer anything in terms of feedback (Except maybe for a beep that is identical for all button presses) and they don't last.
I'm really on the fence when it comes to kitchens because a) you actually have time to look at what you're doing -- if you need to lower temperature suddenly the better option is to take your pan off the stove, anyway and b) touch controls are trivial to clean.
What I can't stand though is scales manufactures being so cheap as to not even have capacitive buttons but re-use the front left/right feet as sensors for the interface. On the upside the thing was dirt cheap and actually comes with an USB-C port to charge its LIR2450 cell.
Nah I just got new ovens and a hob and they are sleek and easy clean and work like a charm.
I like touch panels but don't mind physical buttons.
It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Not to mention completely useless in places where you need to wear gloves when driving.
Volvo car touchscreens work with gloves on.
wear gloves when driving
For example?
If it's so cold that you wear gloves, then get your AC fixed because it should've been running by the time you drive off.
My car takes 15 minutes to warm up enough for the heat to work at all let alone get the interior to a comfortable temperature.
Good. Touchscreens are the most unsafe feature added to vehicles in decades. It's honestly mind boggling how it was allowed in the first place.
Easy, because regulations don’t mean anything anymore.
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night, road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car, all around limo tints on literally every car, people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
And that doesn’t even begin to mention the drivers themselves, so fucking self absorbed, tailgating, cutting you off for fun to get to the same light.
I’ve literally had a stream of cars going around me on street roads and so many dumbasses just follow the stream that I literally cannot safety accelerate because they’re all cutting me off bumper to bumper.
You should start carrying a gun if not already. The conservatives have successfully rotted western society.
While you have some good points, it seems you may be missing one in that if you are constantly getting passed in that manner, you are causing a problem, regardless of what is posted. Most western law systems have a provision against impeding the flow of traffic.
Problem is when you get passed because other people aren't driving legally. Even if it's the flow of traffic, you're still technically not allowed to break the law.
Even if the people overtaking you on the Autobahn break the speed limit (yes those exist), you still have to keep to the right as much as possible. Hogging the left lane at exactly the speed limit is vigilantism.
I'm confused, did I miss someone mentioning staying in the left lane on the highway?
You mentioned getting passed which should only ever happen, in civilised countries with sane traffic laws, on the left. (modulo countries which drive on the left where it's the right).
Like, breaking the speed limit gets you a ticket over here. Overtaking on the right can easily mean losing your license and having to undergo a psych exam as they take such things as an opportunity to accuse you of racing on public roads.
They're in the right lane and getting passed by cars on the left. I'm really confused by what you're trying to say. What makes you think they're blocking traffic?
This:
Problem is when you get passed because other people aren’t driving legally.
Is what made me assume that they at least desire to block traffic by driving on the left at the speed limit. People breaking the speed limit might be a problem, but it isn't your problem.
Yes, exactly. So try to realize that not keeping out of the lane to pass is still an infraction on your part and let traffic enforcement do their job. It's actually easier for them to witness you impeding multiple vehicles and pull you over than to track down everyone passing you, so don't get yourself into a completely avoidable situation. Nobody passes you and later on reflects on the point you were trying to make.
Did anyone mention driving in the wrong lane?
Can you differentiate staying out of the lane to pass from staying out of the passing lane? Don't try to bring your petulant road anger to me, silly goose. You have even less power and impression here than on the road. Allow me to demonstrate with my next reply.
What? What are you talking about? I'm confused, are you having an episode?
Had me until the politics, but I agree. These fucking headlights nowadays are incredibly dangerous, especially on these lifted garage queens.
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night,
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night, road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car, all around limo tints on literally every car, people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
pretty sure all of those are illegal around here, with exception of the giant compensators.
It sounds like you too, might live in a heavily populated metropolitan area of Nevada, USA. Lol
people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
That might be people with daytime running lights not turning on the lights. My car will turn on the headlights as soon as I take the parking break off (MT, an auto would likely do it when put in drive), but the dash and rear lights don't turn on unless I turn the dial.
They are a lot safer now that we have LKAS and ACC and FCW systems. But that’s moreso in spite of the touchscreens.
Replacing the buttons with a tablet has always been a cost saving measure on Tesla's part that was marketed as "futuristic", physical switches and dials made of plastic and metal as well as the underlying components will never be as cheap or as easy to wire as a simple touchscreen control. Other car companies followed suit, because Tesla made a method of reducing their own manufacturing costs hip, so many of them jumped on it.
But, Tesla tablets were designed with the belief that this cost saving is possible because of the delusion that full autonomous self driving is possible with existing hardware through software updates. When self driving didn't happen after a decade of trying, people realized how inconvenient and dangerous it is that the only way to adjust the AC, stereo volume, and sideview mirrors while driving is through a tablet with no tactile feedback. So now, we are finally seeing that trend reversing.
Especially when the buttons move around in the GUI after an update so you accidentally press the wrong ones, or end up having to search the menus while driving.
Perhaps this could change when we have mainstream tactile displays, but until then buttons will always be better.
I think using a car tablet is equally as dangerous as texting and driving. Voice control would actually be better for adjustments while driving.
Realtime non-cloud voice control is still unreliable. Gonna be a while before that can replace physical buttons.
I don't want to have to talk to my car. Just have buttons and knobs. This shit was figured out 30 years ago.
This shit was figured out 30 years ago
More like 100 years ago.
Horseshit. My Pentium 133 could do it in 1997.
The send-to-the-cloud thing just exists because tech companies have a pathological fetish for recording, analyzing, and storing every single little thing you say and do and then trying to sell it to advertisers. Or train AI's with it these days, or whatever the fuck else. The only marginal benefit you might get is that they can update their algorithms server side and not have to update your car or other device. But the technology has been mature for literal decades, so I don't think that's terribly important.
That said, I still don't want my car to have voice control. It's just as stupid as a concept as making everything touchscreen.
Speech to text is one thing. Actually understanding all the intricate details and variations of language is incredibly difficult. It’s good enough for some stuff, but I’ve yet to see a system a system that’s reliable enough for day to day use, especially in a car.
Scenarios like this happens way too often:
“Set alarm for fifteen minutes”
“Ok, setting alarm fifty minutes from now”
“No! FIFTEEN minutes”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean”
“Remove old alarm and set it to fifteen minutes instead”
“Playing song on Spotify…”
Indeed and it seems attainable now, if it weren't for the expensive hardware and massive energy required for general pre-trained transformers. Don't want my car to call home just to run a neural network on Azure, it needs to run locally.
There's Gemini nano which will run on phones locally, so I think we can have that soon enough
I don't think autonomous driving had anything to do with the initial choice. It might be a reason now, but I don't think it was the initial driving factor.
You left off it being marketed as clean and minimalistic. I think that's different enough from futuristic. Some people love that aspect, some outright hate it. (Edit and I mean this in a looks fashion, not a functionality one)
Also, Tesla's button replacements actually do work more or less reliably. The other manufacturers decided to save money by adding a potato instead of a potent CPU that powers the screen in the middle of the console.
"Finally a use for all these leftover 1st gen Kindle Fire CPUs!"
In practice though Tesla has buttons for the controls you need while driving.
Cruise control/lane keeping/cancel is a lever
Indicators, flash high beams is a lever
Park is a button
Windscreen wiper single wipe is a button, same button is window wash
Set speed is a scroll wheel, volume is a scroll wheel (and a touch control on the passenger side)
Navigation is on screen keyboard, but you should stop to change navigation, or have a passenger do it
Climate control heats or cools towards your target temperature, heated seats and steering wheel are automatic or touch screen, but you know you need them before you get in the car
The fact that they needed to receive a lot of complaints to reconsider makes me wonder - do they even do any kind of usability testing for their products? Anyone who even sat in a car with only touchscreen can tell you the experience is not comfortable.
And I don't think it's just about the price of physical buttons. Buttons are a selling point right now, they could charge a small premium (not in the thousands but ~$200 certainly.
Or follow the BMW plan and put buttons in the cars but make them subscription only.
Never read from a book that summons demons, even as a joke.
Never read from a book that summons demons
I know they said "What you do in High School will affect your entire life" but I didn't think it would be this bad! It was only once! I swear!
It’s probably a cost issue. Running one wire harness to a touch screen is a lot cheaper than running a wire to every button in a car.
It's also a "We can charge $900 for this $80 touchscreen when it fails in 5 years because your car is a brick without it" issue.
I hate the fact that you’re probably right about that reason.
I wonder if it's a planning issue. Buttons you have to actually plan out. Touchscreen? Plop it in.
You have the software design costs, which are high but one-off, so they're amortised over the entire production - and it's either the same or nearly the same across each brand's entire range
Oh they KNEW what they were doing and just didn't give a fuck.
We need a People of Walmart equivalent for this bullshit. Start finding the designer/engineer/manager responsible for this garbage and shame them publicly.
How does this stuff pass any kind of Accessibility regs?
Besides cost, we should probably at least entertain the idea that we are a vocal minority. I'd be completely unsurprised to find out that the majority of people hardly ever touch the controls that got moved to touchscreens and, if they do, they don't really care - they can set them before they set off, or do it while driving and wobble all over the road, but hey everyone does it so what does it matter?
Now take away subscriptions.
I'm looking at you, everyone.
SAAS is the greatest scam of the 21st century.
I say there are some fair applications of SaaS. If you use a product that requires servers to be running, paying a recurring cost for however long you need the software is fair.
That being said, mandatory SaaS on a physical product with upfront cost is decidedly shitty. Especially when it’s a 50k car.
Server costs are different from SAAS. The fact that they are often blended is just a piss poor attempt to conceal the grift.
Software as a Service for those ignorant like I was and had to Google what SaaS meant
Also known as Shit as a Service
SaaS is great for business-to-business products. Sucks ass for everything else.
Companies love subscriptions, customers hate subscriptions. Subscriptions it is.
I'd love to get a fitness band, but fuck all the subscriptions to access all their features.
It's impossible, just like it's impossible to tell game companies to stop doing microtransaction.
Can we complain more about subscription paywalled car functions then?
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.
My '16 Prius has a pretty good balance between touchscreen and buttons. The only thing I don't care for is having to use the touchscreen to change radio presets, but I usually stay on the same station anyway.
This was a wonderful read, thanks
Thank god. This is literally the worst thing about my car (apart from the lane assist trying to kill me).
I found that a homicidal lane assist, have a really good effect on my alertness. Before lane assist I could relax and almost doze of, but with lane assist I don't dare to relax for a second since I know it will try to murder me the first chance it gets. So, I guess that is why people say lane assist prevents accidents.
So they’re targeting gay people now?
Corrected my typo, so contextually challenged persons can avoid being confused. You are welcome.
Your spelling is homogeneous now.
Wait, you don't mean dozing off while driving, right?
Lane assist on the golf tried to murderise me recently even though I was driving on a road without lane markings
Lane assist on the golf tried to murderise me recently even though I was driving on a road without lane markings but I keep it on because it stops me from killing myself on this one bridge I have to drive over
My car lets you turn off lane assist, it's the collision avoidance that I can't turn off that is trying to kill me. Randomly I'll be driving along when an alarm sounds and it tries to swerve off the road. It's fucking infuriating and dangerous and despite many of us complaining to the manufacturer you can't turn it off.
The capacitive touch buttons under the screen on my ID4 don't light up, so they're literally invisible at night and completely useless.
You sure you don’t have the fader wheel turned all the way down? It’s usually to the left of the steering wheel.
There isn't a fader wheel on the ID.3 at least, so I'd assume the same in the ID.4
Do you have more unlit buttons than the volume and climate strip that I have in the Multivan?
I believe we share that same strip and it's ironic that the power button on there is actually lit! However as it only does two things and there's feedback on the screen when you touch it, I haven't had any of the issues people have complained about. Plus those functions can be accessed elsewhere.
For the driver, you can access it elsewhere. But to deal with the climate, you then have to go into the touchscreen menu and mess around rather than just turning a dial. The volume is less of an issue as the driver, the volume is on the steering wheel. But the passenger can't turn down the volume, etc. I love the id4, planning on driving it into the ground, but buttons for functions like that would be better.
I don’t want a touchscreen in my fucking car. That is all.
I don’t mind a touchscreen. Apple CarPlay/Android Auto are really nice.
I just also want physical controls for everything the car needs to do to be a car, like climate control or wipers or shifting. And also physical controls for play/pause, skip, volume, and tuning.
Touchscreens can do a lot to enhance the car experience, but they cannot replace physical buttons.
If it's the kind of thing that it's not reasonable to expect that people will stop by the side of the road to do, it should be buttons. The rest can be touch.
So for example setting a destination on your navigation interface is fine to do via touch screen, but starting/stopping swipers or changing audio volume is not.
Very well put.
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.
Seems the novelty VW engineers had to be reminded of the first item in the Unix philosophy:
Make each program do one thing, and do it well.
Buttons already had this. Each single button did one and only one thing: Turn a feature on or off, or in the case of the radio, switch stations.
We didn't need complicated menus to navigate. Press the appropriate button, and voilá. It was simple. It worked.
Who the fuck came up with the idea of having to use touch menus? I have no idea, but I really hope they got fired.
the more important thing here is that you can find and press a button without looking at it
I get what you're saying, up to a point. But you really don't want the dashboard to look like the average TV remote either.
would take TV remote over touch display any day, those things are horrible in so many ways, lack of tactile feedback and having to confirm it registered the input is literally a lethal hazard because it's another reason people aren't looking on the road while driving
Have you ever seen an airplane cockpit? Those things are crowded and confusing.
A car, on the other hand, is simple enough that the average person gets used to all of the button, knobs, switches and dials in a few days.
Why? It's not an art peice hanging above your desk. You're putting from over function.
I mean, I get a bit jealous when I see the cockpit of an F1 car. So many knobs, buttons, and switches and they don't even have climate control or entertainment systems.
That level isn't necessary with daily drivers, but I'd rather have physical buttons for any action I'll want to do while moving and zero latency for any action that physically positions something like my seat or mirrors.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!
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.
Safer to use.
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'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"
That would be funny, but it's more likely because they are about to go under if they don't change something up. Doing one of the most requested this seems like a good start in that direction.
Where with "going under" you presumably mean "doesn't overtake Toyota and stays the 2nd biggest car company world-wide". That's by number of cars, by revenue VW is in first place.
I'd say it's more a case of "yeah we should've guessed that how Tesla does things is just hype".
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
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.
Finally.
Real buttons in a car are good because you don't have to fucking look at them to know what you're doing, unlike a god damn touch screen, so your eyes can remain on the road.
Sanity prevails at last!
i like buttons
Thank god.
Touchscreens in a car never made any sense.
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.
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.
Actually, I am wondering if these dumb things can be replaced with aftermarket stuff. I kinda have my doubts. I miss when you could just pull the stereo out yourself and slide a new one into the bay like a disc drive on a PC.
limp those bitches along
I hope you don't have to limp them along. My newest vehicle is from 2007, and my oldest from '84. They aren't limping, they run and drive quite well.
Well one runs like a top. The other I need to replace the suspension on but the engine is sound.
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.
Cool. I mean it's obvious that's going to happen at some point.
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...
You have buttons on the wheel and voice commands. But it must be nice to stay in your little ignorant bubble so I will leave you be now.
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. -_-
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. :(
Judging from reviews, people are avoiding VW now because of really shitty infotainment systems...
For me it was this and their build quality, I got the impression they aren't cars you keep for 10+ years
Have you tried observing the service intervals.
I drive a Honda it just keeps going
Yes. Different engineering approach. Performance, efficiency, no mandatory service intervals, choose two.
It's a thing Chinese manufacturers are focussing on to distract from the rest of their engineering.
I've always wondered how these things happen. Clearly a massive car manufacturer should have some kind of a feedback group about what will potentially go into new vehicles, right? I can't imagine anyone enjoying getting distracted from the road, to navigate between piano black plastic, and laggy nested touchscreen buttons
Car manufacturers are the epitome of slow ass waterfall product development. They commit to a dashboard / infotainment solution that will last for 4-5 years. VW basically started following Tesla in 2019-2020, and realized it sucked, and they’re now going back. Changing course in 3-4 years is actually pretty “quick” for a vehicle manufacturer.
And what’s funny is that a lot of the agile methodology in software development comes from Toyotas factories
The first focus group to try out a touch screen in a car was like "ooh, novel!", then they didn't have a second focus group ever after. The end.
Touchscreens in Cars, a short story.
They just copied everything Tesla did when they decided to start making electric cars, including the really idiotic stuff. As to why Tesla did that, Musk probably fired anyone that dared question his ideas.
Touch screens in cars were everywhere well before Tesla.
Tom Paris was right.
A great reminder that your voice does matter. Apply it other things as well, and things can actually improve...
Imagine paying the same price for a car that lacks the technology of:
Smart screen
With heat resistant materials that are designed to resist high temperatures and still function properly (i.e in summer times)
With GPS features, and media access
But the screen still sucks because you can literally buy a magnet and stick your phone there, and still be able to do literally everything a smart screen car do.
I mean id still buy it because I prefer cars that are not so impractical, but it's a shame that it still costs practically the same.
Conceptually, a smart screen sounds like a good idea, but the implementation is bad.
Reason why I love my Subaru is that it still has buttons for almost everything, yet still has Android Auto.
This is why I chose Mazda. No touch screen at all, just a display for Android auto.
my 1st gen yaris has a space for a 1din radio, but there's a 3rd party frame that lets you get rid of the casette player (you read that right) and allows for a 2din radio.
buy one of those pioneer radios, throw some blaupunkt widebands in there, and i have a top of the line entertainment system.
i want to drive that car forever...
Not the new ones. They're all touch screen and it's soooo slow to start up and do anything, including HVAC and heated seats. My friend's new Outback has it and it's not good.
I have a '22 Crosstrek and most options are buttons with a large screen I use with Android Auto. I would hate HVAC and heated seats integrates into the screen because I love mine being buttons, switches, and dials. Plus, I can control most of the screen features from my steering wheel.
I wonder if people who took the decision to put the touchscreens even drive.
and to add insult to injury, I couldn't turn the heater on countless times because the climate portion of the OS was unresponsive. Other times, it would simply say that the function couldn't be performed at the time. Why? No idea.
This is the main problem, not something about the UI being wonky. That my AC can freeze not because of the radiator but because of a shitty UI system? That's insane.
Main reason I canceled my ID4 reservation
Thank god. End this shitty touchscreen fad. I have problems reading things too close, so the buttons/knobs in my 10+ year old car are a lifesaver.
The telematics on EV VWs was designed by someone who lost a bet.
I'd rather have a "non-touch" screen with buttons in a car. Just to show info. And be it right in front of me.
Wait, they care about what we want? That doesn't sound right.
VW really actually does care a lot. It's just early market data on EVs (because Tesla cheaped out) pointed to people liking the screens. Now that ordinary people are going EV there is a lot more feedback available on this being a bad idea.
Cool I like buttons
Edit: Why is this post yellow?
yellow? give us a screenshot of what you see.
Don't eat it.
Infiniti not updating their interior since 2014 is starting to feel like a good thing as other brands abandon buttons.
Nice to know VW is returning to sanity
Everyone else is going to start putting analog clocks in the dash again.
God I fucking need that. One of my cars didn't use a big enough variable to hold the GPS time adjustment. So it's off by an hour randomly about 9 months out of the year. My other car is just old enough that they don't have an update for the radio to fix the time since the last time they moved daylight savings around.
The analog clock is really nice, not gonna lie
God I miss the analog clock in my Q. The G feels so much fancier
there should never be a fucking touch screen menu in a car for any reason
Maps? Android Auto / CarPlay? Gotta have the screen anyway for the mandatory backup camera.
We can have both! Physical buttons for everything that doesn't actually benefit from having a display, (like music or heat/ac), touch screen for the rest.
Just like my 2019 Hyundai Ioniq. Buttons for the car stuff and a touchscreen for media, calls, navigation, backup camera, etc.
If the touchscreen were to shit the bed I'd still have a fully functional car minus the backup camera.
*because they sell really bad, even in germany
VW has made a lot of bad decisions
Now if they'd just sell the baseline Golf or wagen Golf in Canada, I'd consider buying another VW!
Good news
I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?
Lol, careful, you'll waken the VW mob. They don't like to hear what garbage VWs are.
Can't give me one.
It appears there has been a few that caught this. I was surprised they were so far down the Consumer's Report list for reliability as it was but honestly I don't really think of the brand that much as it's something my parents owned when I was a little kid then they moved onto Toyota and domestics.
It's not to say others are better. I've was surprised by Ford's decent down the list but not by Jeep's continued place down there and I've owned many Jeeps.
Now only if I could complain enough that my recall on my Atlas gets the passanger air bag fixed. Got told in April that nobody can ride in the passenger seat because the air bag might not deploy. Still no ETA on when a fix will be available. What a BS company.
They're too busy fixing the frag grenade air bags right now. That took almost a year and a half to get the parts in to fix.
I gotna letter from Toyota that says I will get another letter later because the car might be dangerous for my health and safety without saying what it is and now I have to drive my car not knowing what could happen.
It's been more than a month and I still don't have any other letter with information and/or resolution.
Thanks Toyota, I already am a very anxious person and now I have to rrive everyday with the knowledge my car has something dangerous to it but don't know what.
When I bought my Tiguan the dealer was pushing really hard for me to get a 2022 which has just come in. It was the first year to have capacitive steering wheel buttons. I told them to find a 2021 or I'm looking at something else. I think the car market was still a little slow at that time so they made it happen to get a sale.
Progression is regression in this issue, thanks people!
Not all of the buttons. Please be reasonable. Just some of the buttons.
I don't need memory buttons.
I don't want to push the button half a dozen times, just to miss the menu I wanted by 1 click, and have to go around again.
I don't need separate am fm and cd buttons.
I really don't mind a touch screen for climate control, or audio interface. Just keep the business from moving around the screen at all and I'm pretty happy.
I was with you up until the climate controls.
Any control you can find in a 1997 Hyundai Accent should be physical.
Anything else can be hidden behind a touchscreen because I'm not going to use it while driving anyway.
My big request would be to drop the USB cable. I don't know why I need to connect both USB and Bluetooth. I'd love to just leave my cell in my bag where it belongs instead of advertising yet another reason why someone should smash my windows in!
Yeah climate control is where he lost me. My wife’s Honda odyssey has that.
I’m okay with the soft-buttons for memory, or to toggle input, since they are always in fixed locations. In fact soft-buttons are slightly better because they are labeled with the station….though my 2013 Passat has the better compromise of a physical button with the station printed above it.
But HVAC is where I draw the line. I guess the trade off would be that a thermostatically controlled digital systems are probably more simplistic, in their operation and maintenance, than the vacuum-and-linkage systems of yore, and this gives way to multi-zone climate systems in mass market cars. But I still hate that I have to utilize the touchscreen to change which blowers are on or to change the temperature in the rear zone, which blocks GPS if you’re using CarPlay/Android Auto/Nav (I’d assume, I don’t have nav).
Really the only thing on my Tesla I ever need to access on the touchscreen while driving is the climate controls (assuming I don't want to use voice, which is a pain as it hears you wrong)
The other used to be fog lights, but I just keep those on now for extra visibility, like another day time running light.
Everything else including wipers I can do from the wheel now without having to touch the screen.
I only use voice to choose a new song/artist, I'm not trying to navigate spotify by hand while driving.
What in hearing is ... Dials are good too?
Just wait 'til you try this knob!
Love a good knob...
Unpopular opinion: Unresponsive buttons are just as bad as unresponsive touchscreens. And touchscreens are not bad if you don't have 5 keys presses to get what you want, if you can customise your layout and if the system is not underpowered as they always seem to be.
haptics of a button means that you can keep your focus on the street while pressing a button.
Well she's at least as clever as that, so suppose you guys got a little in common.
Yet the model Y is the world’s most sold car. Maybe it’s not the touch screen that is the problem.
Not sure where you get that data but according to Statista the top selling car is a Toyota corolla. Tesla model y is on the list but at #4.
Touchscreens probably aren't the deciding factor in a purchase but that doesn't mean that they aren't a problem for users. People just have to decide what features they are willing to compromise on (assuming they have a choice, and touchscreens increasingly are unavoidable).
As a Model 3 owner of 5 years, it's really a non issue, in my opinion. All the basic controls you need while in motion are on the steering wheel. The touchscreen is responsive and intuitive.
Yeah I really hope other car makers follow because I fucking hate touch controls in cars with a burning passion. It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Same goes for kitchens. Give me real buttons and knobs and not these abhorrent touch panels that refuse to work every third time. A good quality kitchen appliance is identified by high quality knobs that last for decades.
I pumped gas at a brand new Shell station over the weekend. The controls for the pump was one GIANT touchscreen (I'm talking probably 12 inches wide by 36 inches tall). It was fucking PAINFUL to use. Every touch took 2-3 seconds for the action to happen. Da fuck is wrong with a regular pump and regular buttons that just work!?
Because then they don't have a display the size of a living room TV to shove ads in your face
And to sell to the station owner when their proprietary hardware breaks. Oh what am i saying, they're all service contacts these days. So more expensive service conrtacts and the ability to shut them down for non-payment
Were the old ones not the same...?
The contracts? Pumps? Im kinda talking out my ass here but currently there's no ability to shut down the pumps themselves as far as i understand it (in l understanding coming from being a cashier at one once. The touchscreens outside just process the customers payments. Without those they can still be run from the other system inside. The pumps are not connected to Wi-Fi.
My hypothetical assumes more and more control left to the touchscreen outside i guess, and i ran with it. If it doesn't make much sense then just reread my first sentence ;)
The conversation was about locking in the owners to their expensive proprietary pumps as a reason for switching to this new style, and I was asking if lock-in was actually a new thing or not. Otherwise the comment doesn't really make a lot of sense in context.
Reminder to try and press any of the buttons on the side of the screen to mute if possible. 2nd right or bottom right works on all the pumps around me but I dread the day we get touch only
This is the reason.
It should be illegal to connect a touch screen to a computer that runs like a potato. Even computers in the 80s could respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks in real time.
If it keeps getting broken they might reconsider.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn't as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
This sucks because I don't get better hardware just to make up for worse software (not that it even does; a lot of browser-based apps are painfully slow), and some of these devs end up working on weaker platforms that don't make up for their shitty programming. They might not ever touch the platform it is actually supposed to run on and instead work on a dev machine that is powerful enough to make it look good. It's possible that neither them nor anyone hiring/managing them realizes that they aren't the kind of programmer they want.
Though it's also possible that the programmers are fine and have told their managers that the CPUs just aren't powerful enough for what they want them to do but some assholes are only looking at the bottom line and have low standards for these kind of things in their own life (my TV is slow, so it's no big deal that our car interface is slow).
Worst thing is it's probably less than a $50 difference in cost to switch to something that could handle it fine, assuming it's not programmed in JavaScript and HTML or slow because it's backend is on the cloud or some shit like that, which also wouldn't surprise me.
How's this for irony: I was hired at my current job as part of a team whose whole mission is to address performance problems in a large desktop app...that's written entirely in Typescript!
It's kinda funny how some are willing to develop a skill to great depth (you'd have to know JavaScript/TypeScript very well to write a full deal desktop application in it, and it probably involved a LOT of frustrating debug if performance is the main issue with it) but don't spend any time on breadth to understand that some depths aren't worth it.
We used to have a rule in computer system design that if an event would take more than 4 seconds we had to show a "waiting" icon like the hourglass.
Now though, people are sensitive to half a second between tap/click and something happening. Incidentally there's no reason for a fuel pump control to be slow, even running on a potato. The engineer who designed it wasn't given time to make it efficient
In Canada it really sucks having to take your gloves off half the year. I hope this gets taken into account when touchscreens on gas pumps are considered.
Try wearing very thin neoprene under your bigger gloves. It's been a game changer for me. I have a horrible habit of taking my gloves off from years of snowboarding and those have been awesome.
Your experience remembers me those old touch screen we had at the library in the 90s. The screen was monochrome, but touch sensitive. It took several seconds for react.
Also it probably was crustier than a toddler's iPad. 🤢
What do you need a touchscreen for? You just take an appropriate pump (E95, Diesel), fill the fuel and pay at the register.
Because it's way faster to pay at the pump and not have to go inside. I've only been inside a gas station like 4-5 times in the last decade.
It was slow because all of the memory was allocated for the ads they show you.
Biggest problem is that they cheap out on the tech parts. Nobody complains that an iPad has a touch screen, cause it works. But an appliance tends to have a crappy UI, running on a crappy touch screen, powered by a crappy CPU.
If they just used quality parts, it'd probably be fine, and the only issue would be expensive replacement for an entire assembly, instead of small, cheap parts that can be fixed.
A smartphone or tablet screen has the function to have multiple buttons and responsive functions on one and the same place.
A kitchen appliance doesn't have or need that. Absolutely no need for digital or so-called "smart" gimmicks.
Yeah! Instead of having a knob my idiot stove has “touch areas” - good luck cooking if you’re blind.
At my old place, if I wanted to set the bottom left plate to the hottest setting, I’d put my hand on the leftmost knob and turn counter-clockwise until it snapped once.
On this thing I usually have to start with turning off the child lock. We never turn it on, but every time we wipe off the stove there’s a like 95% chance the child lock activates due to the lingering moisture.
After turning the child lock off you have to hold the power “zone.” Then you have to select which burner by holding its zone - if you don’t you’ll start changing the timer when you hold down the - button to cycle from 0 to keep warm, to 9, and then press + to turn it from 9 to boost.
I'm legit not joking. Mind you this example is when the piece of shit behaves. I’ve an absentmindedly placed lids on the off “button” before and had the piece of junk refuse to turn back on for half an hour.
What does the touch controls add to my experience other than frustration? A knob doesn’t activate from water splashes. A knob doesn’t turn from residual moisture from a slightly damp cloth. A knob is tactile and pleasing to hold, and can be used by anyone of appropriate age, even if they’re blind.
Four knobs could pull the weight that these NINE touch “buttons” fucking struggle with.
WHO CAME UP WITH THAT?! Holy shit that is a fucking crime against humanity.
Holy shit, it's like User Inyerface, but for stoves!
I can't believe I wasted five minutes of my life on that hell. Whoever constructed that is an evil genius.
JUST FIVE?! Holy shit dude, how much of bad UI/UX have you been through?
Holy shit, I could not imagine someone who cooks a lot to put up with that. If you have a few things you need to start and stop at specific times and change heat levels and stuff while cooking several things at once.. it takes me .5 seconds to operate my dials when doing this. I would be livid using your stove.
Yeah it drives me bonkers every time I have to use it.
It’s worse than that too because I grew up with gas and electric hot plates. I’ve 20 years of ingrained habit causing me to move pots and pans off the plate to quickly adjust temperature. I’ve legit lost count of the amount of times I’ve absent-mindedly pulled a hot pan over the controls causing the stove to become unusable for a while.
These are the most sensitive touch controls I’ve ever experienced. They’re triggered by moisture and even putting pans or groceries on them.
Oh ffs what a fucked up convoluted mess.
We need to find the engineer that designed this, and their managers who pushed it, and shame them People of Walmart style.
How is it people can willingly violate fundamental UI/UX rules?
As mentioned, how do these things pass Accessibility regs?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I'm legit not joking.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In general high quality things tend to have physical buttons and knobs as opposed to touch screen devices.
Instead of turning into e-waste after 5 years or less they can last for the next 30 to 50 years.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
I just tore apart a working thermostat that almost 80 years old now (to understand how it works) and in perfectly working condition. It uses the physical properties of the materials inside to measure temperature (a coil of metal expands and contracts causing a pendulum to move clockwise or counterclockwise). Suspended at the top of this pendulum is a small vial of mercury containing two electrodes. When the pendulum is far enough counterclockwise the Mercury slides in the vial and bridges the electrodes, turning the furnace on, when the pendulum is far enough clockwise the mercury slides to the right and no longer bridges the electrodes.
When you set the temperature on the thermostat you are changing the default position of this pendulum. Meaning that it has to move more or less distance for the bead of mercury to bridge the circuit.
It's brilliantly simple and will continue to work essentially forever. The physical characteristics of the materials involved won't change.
Same goes for pretty much every IoT device that people seem to be filling their homes with.
This is why, going forward, smart home products I buy have to be zigbee or zwave so I can integrate it with home assistant.
I thought this comment was trolling then I realized that zigbee and zwave are real brand names. You can’t make this shit up.
lol from the outside I can see how you’d think that.
Haha yeah they're IoT protocols for smarthome stuff. But an open source software called Home Assistant can talk to it, so you can self-host your home automation without your home being subject to the whims of some fragile tech startup and by extension, their investors.
Oh I see, that’s helpful and makes sense. I’m one of those newbs who took 15 hours to set up my own Jellyfin. Self hosting Home automation is a ways off in the distance for me haha.
Hey, same! Glad it was helpful.
And hey it sounds like after 15 hours you DID get it set up, so congrats! The skills learned will keep transferring to your next projects. If you're having fun, you're winning. :)
Home Assistant has a pretty rad community and guides on which devices it can use and stuff. They're trying really hard to be accessible to the curious. So hey, never know!
Yeah that's how things are now.
I was looking for kitchen scale and not a single recognisable brand was there on Amazon. No Phillips, Bosch, Siemens, Panasonic etc.
Don't know if these companies even make things like that anymore.
Yeah Amazon has opened the door to the lowest quality hardware out of China to put most name brands out of business for lower priced goods.
But it can't run DOOM.
You should read Exhalation by Ted Chaing if you haven't already. It's a quick read
Touch screens especially don't make sense in the cooking context, where your hands are likely to be wet / damp.
Touch controls for burners are very dangerous in my opinion. What if i spill oil on the stove and touch screen? Now the oil might stop me from turning off the heat and the situation could quickly turn into a fire.
That's a thing? Holy shit... And here I thought the worst offender was Tesla's yolk steering wheel with a capacitive touch horn "button".
I’ve had similar situations happen before. Moved into this apartment in September. This stove will be the death of me.
That's why they have spill detection. Try pouring water over the touch controls. It should beep, then turn off. It's not a good solution or better than a knob, but better than nothing. Except your spill doesn't flow over the controls. Then good luck.
Omg I feel that. The oven in my apartment has touch controls. When I'm baking stuff with lots of moisture inside, water evaporates and is expelled though a vent JUST BELOW the touch controls. The condensation makes them completely unresponsive. Smh
You have to wonder if the engineer who designed that was a complete dumbass because it seems remarkably obvious that you'd want to keep moisture away from electronics.
I was boiling pasta earlier and my fucking stove turned itself off and engaged the child lock because water splashed onto those controls. THREE TIMES!
I’ve had this piece of shit literally ruin dinner before. It’s amazing how it can be both really nice and really fucking useless at the same time.
Agreed, it's true for most devices. They're often finicky, don't offer anything in terms of feedback (Except maybe for a beep that is identical for all button presses) and they don't last.
I'm really on the fence when it comes to kitchens because a) you actually have time to look at what you're doing -- if you need to lower temperature suddenly the better option is to take your pan off the stove, anyway and b) touch controls are trivial to clean.
What I can't stand though is scales manufactures being so cheap as to not even have capacitive buttons but re-use the front left/right feet as sensors for the interface. On the upside the thing was dirt cheap and actually comes with an USB-C port to charge its LIR2450 cell.
Nah I just got new ovens and a hob and they are sleek and easy clean and work like a charm.
I like touch panels but don't mind physical buttons.
Not to mention completely useless in places where you need to wear gloves when driving.
Volvo car touchscreens work with gloves on.
For example?
If it's so cold that you wear gloves, then get your AC fixed because it should've been running by the time you drive off.
My car takes 15 minutes to warm up enough for the heat to work at all let alone get the interior to a comfortable temperature.
I got a new car two years ago, and physical buttons were one of the determining factors.
How about others leading?
From march 20
https://www.thedrive.com/news/hyundai-promises-to-keep-buttons-in-cars-because-touchscreen-controls-are-dangerous
Good. Touchscreens are the most unsafe feature added to vehicles in decades. It's honestly mind boggling how it was allowed in the first place.
Easy, because regulations don’t mean anything anymore.
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night, road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car, all around limo tints on literally every car, people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
And that doesn’t even begin to mention the drivers themselves, so fucking self absorbed, tailgating, cutting you off for fun to get to the same light.
I’ve literally had a stream of cars going around me on street roads and so many dumbasses just follow the stream that I literally cannot safety accelerate because they’re all cutting me off bumper to bumper.
You should start carrying a gun if not already. The conservatives have successfully rotted western society.
While you have some good points, it seems you may be missing one in that if you are constantly getting passed in that manner, you are causing a problem, regardless of what is posted. Most western law systems have a provision against impeding the flow of traffic.
Problem is when you get passed because other people aren't driving legally. Even if it's the flow of traffic, you're still technically not allowed to break the law.
Even if the people overtaking you on the Autobahn break the speed limit (yes those exist), you still have to keep to the right as much as possible. Hogging the left lane at exactly the speed limit is vigilantism.
I'm confused, did I miss someone mentioning staying in the left lane on the highway?
You mentioned getting passed which should only ever happen, in civilised countries with sane traffic laws, on the left. (modulo countries which drive on the left where it's the right).
Like, breaking the speed limit gets you a ticket over here. Overtaking on the right can easily mean losing your license and having to undergo a psych exam as they take such things as an opportunity to accuse you of racing on public roads.
They're in the right lane and getting passed by cars on the left. I'm really confused by what you're trying to say. What makes you think they're blocking traffic?
This:
Is what made me assume that they at least desire to block traffic by driving on the left at the speed limit. People breaking the speed limit might be a problem, but it isn't your problem.
Yes, exactly. So try to realize that not keeping out of the lane to pass is still an infraction on your part and let traffic enforcement do their job. It's actually easier for them to witness you impeding multiple vehicles and pull you over than to track down everyone passing you, so don't get yourself into a completely avoidable situation. Nobody passes you and later on reflects on the point you were trying to make.
Did anyone mention driving in the wrong lane?
Can you differentiate staying out of the lane to pass from staying out of the passing lane? Don't try to bring your petulant road anger to me, silly goose. You have even less power and impression here than on the road. Allow me to demonstrate with my next reply.
What? What are you talking about? I'm confused, are you having an episode?
Had me until the politics, but I agree. These fucking headlights nowadays are incredibly dangerous, especially on these lifted garage queens.
Illegal in the EU, Xenon and later LEDs always needed automatic height adjustment (it doesn't suffice to do it once because cars change angles continuously). Lots has changed in the last 20+ years, though, speaking of VW: How about high beams all the time unless there's something that could be blinded, then switch them off locally but keep the rest bright.
Like this?
Illegal.
Illegal.
See the thing is that if you build your infrastructure in a way that requires people to drive cars you can't just take licenses away from asshats.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
How about high beams all the time unless there's something that could be blinded, then switch them off locally but keep the rest bright
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
pretty sure all of those are illegal around here, with exception of the giant compensators.
It sounds like you too, might live in a heavily populated metropolitan area of Nevada, USA. Lol
That might be people with daytime running lights not turning on the lights. My car will turn on the headlights as soon as I take the parking break off (MT, an auto would likely do it when put in drive), but the dash and rear lights don't turn on unless I turn the dial.
They are a lot safer now that we have LKAS and ACC and FCW systems. But that’s moreso in spite of the touchscreens.
Replacing the buttons with a tablet has always been a cost saving measure on Tesla's part that was marketed as "futuristic", physical switches and dials made of plastic and metal as well as the underlying components will never be as cheap or as easy to wire as a simple touchscreen control. Other car companies followed suit, because Tesla made a method of reducing their own manufacturing costs hip, so many of them jumped on it.
But, Tesla tablets were designed with the belief that this cost saving is possible because of the delusion that full autonomous self driving is possible with existing hardware through software updates. When self driving didn't happen after a decade of trying, people realized how inconvenient and dangerous it is that the only way to adjust the AC, stereo volume, and sideview mirrors while driving is through a tablet with no tactile feedback. So now, we are finally seeing that trend reversing.
Especially when the buttons move around in the GUI after an update so you accidentally press the wrong ones, or end up having to search the menus while driving.
Perhaps this could change when we have mainstream tactile displays, but until then buttons will always be better.
I think using a car tablet is equally as dangerous as texting and driving. Voice control would actually be better for adjustments while driving.
Realtime non-cloud voice control is still unreliable. Gonna be a while before that can replace physical buttons.
I don't want to have to talk to my car. Just have buttons and knobs. This shit was figured out 30 years ago.
More like 100 years ago.
Horseshit. My Pentium 133 could do it in 1997.
The send-to-the-cloud thing just exists because tech companies have a pathological fetish for recording, analyzing, and storing every single little thing you say and do and then trying to sell it to advertisers. Or train AI's with it these days, or whatever the fuck else. The only marginal benefit you might get is that they can update their algorithms server side and not have to update your car or other device. But the technology has been mature for literal decades, so I don't think that's terribly important.
That said, I still don't want my car to have voice control. It's just as stupid as a concept as making everything touchscreen.
Speech to text is one thing. Actually understanding all the intricate details and variations of language is incredibly difficult. It’s good enough for some stuff, but I’ve yet to see a system a system that’s reliable enough for day to day use, especially in a car.
Scenarios like this happens way too often:
“Set alarm for fifteen minutes”
“Ok, setting alarm fifty minutes from now”
“No! FIFTEEN minutes”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean”
“Remove old alarm and set it to fifteen minutes instead”
“Playing song on Spotify…”
Indeed and it seems attainable now, if it weren't for the expensive hardware and massive energy required for general pre-trained transformers. Don't want my car to call home just to run a neural network on Azure, it needs to run locally.
There's Gemini nano which will run on phones locally, so I think we can have that soon enough
I don't think autonomous driving had anything to do with the initial choice. It might be a reason now, but I don't think it was the initial driving factor.
You left off it being marketed as clean and minimalistic. I think that's different enough from futuristic. Some people love that aspect, some outright hate it. (Edit and I mean this in a looks fashion, not a functionality one)
Also, Tesla's button replacements actually do work more or less reliably. The other manufacturers decided to save money by adding a potato instead of a potent CPU that powers the screen in the middle of the console.
"Finally a use for all these leftover 1st gen Kindle Fire CPUs!"
In practice though Tesla has buttons for the controls you need while driving.
Cruise control/lane keeping/cancel is a lever
Indicators, flash high beams is a lever
Park is a button
Windscreen wiper single wipe is a button, same button is window wash
Set speed is a scroll wheel, volume is a scroll wheel (and a touch control on the passenger side)
Navigation is on screen keyboard, but you should stop to change navigation, or have a passenger do it
Climate control heats or cools towards your target temperature, heated seats and steering wheel are automatic or touch screen, but you know you need them before you get in the car
What more would you want physical controls for?
The fact that they needed to receive a lot of complaints to reconsider makes me wonder - do they even do any kind of usability testing for their products? Anyone who even sat in a car with only touchscreen can tell you the experience is not comfortable.
And I don't think it's just about the price of physical buttons. Buttons are a selling point right now, they could charge a small premium (not in the thousands but ~$200 certainly.
Or follow the BMW plan and put buttons in the cars but make them subscription only.
Never read from a book that summons demons, even as a joke.
I know they said "What you do in High School will affect your entire life" but I didn't think it would be this bad! It was only once! I swear!
It’s probably a cost issue. Running one wire harness to a touch screen is a lot cheaper than running a wire to every button in a car.
It's also a "We can charge $900 for this $80 touchscreen when it fails in 5 years because your car is a brick without it" issue.
I hate the fact that you’re probably right about that reason.
I wonder if it's a planning issue. Buttons you have to actually plan out. Touchscreen? Plop it in.
You have the software design costs, which are high but one-off, so they're amortised over the entire production - and it's either the same or nearly the same across each brand's entire range
Oh they KNEW what they were doing and just didn't give a fuck.
We need a People of Walmart equivalent for this bullshit. Start finding the designer/engineer/manager responsible for this garbage and shame them publicly.
How does this stuff pass any kind of Accessibility regs?
Besides cost, we should probably at least entertain the idea that we are a vocal minority. I'd be completely unsurprised to find out that the majority of people hardly ever touch the controls that got moved to touchscreens and, if they do, they don't really care - they can set them before they set off, or do it while driving and wobble all over the road, but hey everyone does it so what does it matter?
Now take away subscriptions.
I'm looking at you, everyone.
SAAS is the greatest scam of the 21st century.
I say there are some fair applications of SaaS. If you use a product that requires servers to be running, paying a recurring cost for however long you need the software is fair.
That being said, mandatory SaaS on a physical product with upfront cost is decidedly shitty. Especially when it’s a 50k car.
Server costs are different from SAAS. The fact that they are often blended is just a piss poor attempt to conceal the grift.
Software as a Service for those ignorant like I was and had to Google what SaaS meant
Also known as Shit as a Service
SaaS is great for business-to-business products. Sucks ass for everything else.
Companies love subscriptions, customers hate subscriptions. Subscriptions it is.
I'd love to get a fitness band, but fuck all the subscriptions to access all their features.
It's impossible, just like it's impossible to tell game companies to stop doing microtransaction.
Can we complain more about subscription paywalled car functions then?
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.
My '16 Prius has a pretty good balance between touchscreen and buttons. The only thing I don't care for is having to use the touchscreen to change radio presets, but I usually stay on the same station anyway.
This was a wonderful read, thanks
Thank god. This is literally the worst thing about my car (apart from the lane assist trying to kill me).
I found that a homicidal lane assist, have a really good effect on my alertness. Before lane assist I could relax and almost doze of, but with lane assist I don't dare to relax for a second since I know it will try to murder me the first chance it gets. So, I guess that is why people say lane assist prevents accidents.
So they’re targeting gay people now?
Corrected my typo, so contextually challenged persons can avoid being confused. You are welcome.
Your spelling is homogeneous now.
Wait, you don't mean dozing off while driving, right?
Lane assist on the golf tried to murderise me recently even though I was driving on a road without lane markings
Lane assist on the golf tried to murderise me recently even though I was driving on a road without lane markings but I keep it on because it stops me from killing myself on this one bridge I have to drive over
My car lets you turn off lane assist, it's the collision avoidance that I can't turn off that is trying to kill me. Randomly I'll be driving along when an alarm sounds and it tries to swerve off the road. It's fucking infuriating and dangerous and despite many of us complaining to the manufacturer you can't turn it off.
Subaru?
The capacitive touch buttons under the screen on my ID4 don't light up, so they're literally invisible at night and completely useless.
You sure you don’t have the fader wheel turned all the way down? It’s usually to the left of the steering wheel.
There isn't a fader wheel on the ID.3 at least, so I'd assume the same in the ID.4
Do you have more unlit buttons than the volume and climate strip that I have in the Multivan? I believe we share that same strip and it's ironic that the power button on there is actually lit! However as it only does two things and there's feedback on the screen when you touch it, I haven't had any of the issues people have complained about. Plus those functions can be accessed elsewhere.
For the driver, you can access it elsewhere. But to deal with the climate, you then have to go into the touchscreen menu and mess around rather than just turning a dial. The volume is less of an issue as the driver, the volume is on the steering wheel. But the passenger can't turn down the volume, etc. I love the id4, planning on driving it into the ground, but buttons for functions like that would be better.
I don’t want a touchscreen in my fucking car. That is all.
I don’t mind a touchscreen. Apple CarPlay/Android Auto are really nice.
I just also want physical controls for everything the car needs to do to be a car, like climate control or wipers or shifting. And also physical controls for play/pause, skip, volume, and tuning.
Touchscreens can do a lot to enhance the car experience, but they cannot replace physical buttons.
If it's the kind of thing that it's not reasonable to expect that people will stop by the side of the road to do, it should be buttons. The rest can be touch.
So for example setting a destination on your navigation interface is fine to do via touch screen, but starting/stopping swipers or changing audio volume is not.
Very well put.
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.
Seems the novelty VW engineers had to be reminded of the first item in the Unix philosophy:
Make each program do one thing, and do it well.
Buttons already had this. Each single button did one and only one thing: Turn a feature on or off, or in the case of the radio, switch stations.
We didn't need complicated menus to navigate. Press the appropriate button, and voilá. It was simple. It worked.
Who the fuck came up with the idea of having to use touch menus? I have no idea, but I really hope they got fired.
the more important thing here is that you can find and press a button without looking at it
I get what you're saying, up to a point. But you really don't want the dashboard to look like the average TV remote either.
would take TV remote over touch display any day, those things are horrible in so many ways, lack of tactile feedback and having to confirm it registered the input is literally a lethal hazard because it's another reason people aren't looking on the road while driving
Have you ever seen an airplane cockpit? Those things are crowded and confusing. A car, on the other hand, is simple enough that the average person gets used to all of the button, knobs, switches and dials in a few days.
Why? It's not an art peice hanging above your desk. You're putting from over function.
I mean, I get a bit jealous when I see the cockpit of an F1 car. So many knobs, buttons, and switches and they don't even have climate control or entertainment systems.
That level isn't necessary with daily drivers, but I'd rather have physical buttons for any action I'll want to do while moving and zero latency for any action that physically positions something like my seat or mirrors.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!
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.
Safer to use.
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.
I guarantee you they realized that and likely did it for the same reason.
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"
That would be funny, but it's more likely because they are about to go under if they don't change something up. Doing one of the most requested this seems like a good start in that direction.
Where with "going under" you presumably mean "doesn't overtake Toyota and stays the 2nd biggest car company world-wide". That's by number of cars, by revenue VW is in first place.
I'd say it's more a case of "yeah we should've guessed that how Tesla does things is just hype".
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
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.
Finally.
Real buttons in a car are good because you don't have to fucking look at them to know what you're doing, unlike a god damn touch screen, so your eyes can remain on the road.
Sanity prevails at last!
i like buttons
Thank god.
Touchscreens in a car never made any sense.
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.
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.
Actually, I am wondering if these dumb things can be replaced with aftermarket stuff. I kinda have my doubts. I miss when you could just pull the stereo out yourself and slide a new one into the bay like a disc drive on a PC.
I hope you don't have to limp them along. My newest vehicle is from 2007, and my oldest from '84. They aren't limping, they run and drive quite well.
Well one runs like a top. The other I need to replace the suspension on but the engine is sound.
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
Cool. I mean it's obvious that's going to happen at some point.
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...
You have buttons on the wheel and voice commands. But it must be nice to stay in your little ignorant bubble so I will leave you be now.
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. :(
Oh look they sre following in Hyundais footsteps
https://www.thedrive.com/news/hyundai-promises-to-keep-buttons-in-cars-because-touchscreen-controls-are-dangerous
Judging from reviews, people are avoiding VW now because of really shitty infotainment systems...
For me it was this and their build quality, I got the impression they aren't cars you keep for 10+ years
Have you tried observing the service intervals.
I drive a Honda it just keeps going
Yes. Different engineering approach. Performance, efficiency, no mandatory service intervals, choose two.
It's a thing Chinese manufacturers are focussing on to distract from the rest of their engineering.
I've always wondered how these things happen. Clearly a massive car manufacturer should have some kind of a feedback group about what will potentially go into new vehicles, right? I can't imagine anyone enjoying getting distracted from the road, to navigate between piano black plastic, and laggy nested touchscreen buttons
Car manufacturers are the epitome of slow ass waterfall product development. They commit to a dashboard / infotainment solution that will last for 4-5 years. VW basically started following Tesla in 2019-2020, and realized it sucked, and they’re now going back. Changing course in 3-4 years is actually pretty “quick” for a vehicle manufacturer.
And what’s funny is that a lot of the agile methodology in software development comes from Toyotas factories
The first focus group to try out a touch screen in a car was like "ooh, novel!", then they didn't have a second focus group ever after. The end.
Touchscreens in Cars, a short story.
They just copied everything Tesla did when they decided to start making electric cars, including the really idiotic stuff. As to why Tesla did that, Musk probably fired anyone that dared question his ideas.
Touch screens in cars were everywhere well before Tesla.
Tom Paris was right.
A great reminder that your voice does matter. Apply it other things as well, and things can actually improve...
Imagine paying the same price for a car that lacks the technology of:
Smart screen
But the screen still sucks because you can literally buy a magnet and stick your phone there, and still be able to do literally everything a smart screen car do.
I mean id still buy it because I prefer cars that are not so impractical, but it's a shame that it still costs practically the same.
Conceptually, a smart screen sounds like a good idea, but the implementation is bad.
Reason why I love my Subaru is that it still has buttons for almost everything, yet still has Android Auto.
This is why I chose Mazda. No touch screen at all, just a display for Android auto.
my 1st gen yaris has a space for a 1din radio, but there's a 3rd party frame that lets you get rid of the casette player (you read that right) and allows for a 2din radio.
buy one of those pioneer radios, throw some blaupunkt widebands in there, and i have a top of the line entertainment system.
i want to drive that car forever...
Not the new ones. They're all touch screen and it's soooo slow to start up and do anything, including HVAC and heated seats. My friend's new Outback has it and it's not good.
I have a '22 Crosstrek and most options are buttons with a large screen I use with Android Auto. I would hate HVAC and heated seats integrates into the screen because I love mine being buttons, switches, and dials. Plus, I can control most of the screen features from my steering wheel.
I wonder if people who took the decision to put the touchscreens even drive.
This is the main problem, not something about the UI being wonky. That my AC can freeze not because of the radiator but because of a shitty UI system? That's insane.
Main reason I canceled my ID4 reservation
Thank god. End this shitty touchscreen fad. I have problems reading things too close, so the buttons/knobs in my 10+ year old car are a lifesaver.
The telematics on EV VWs was designed by someone who lost a bet.
I'd rather have a "non-touch" screen with buttons in a car. Just to show info. And be it right in front of me.
Wait, they care about what we want? That doesn't sound right.
VW really actually does care a lot. It's just early market data on EVs (because Tesla cheaped out) pointed to people liking the screens. Now that ordinary people are going EV there is a lot more feedback available on this being a bad idea.
Cool I like buttons
Edit: Why is this post yellow?
yellow? give us a screenshot of what you see.
Don't eat it.
Infiniti not updating their interior since 2014 is starting to feel like a good thing as other brands abandon buttons.
Nice to know VW is returning to sanity
Everyone else is going to start putting analog clocks in the dash again.
God I fucking need that. One of my cars didn't use a big enough variable to hold the GPS time adjustment. So it's off by an hour randomly about 9 months out of the year. My other car is just old enough that they don't have an update for the radio to fix the time since the last time they moved daylight savings around.
The analog clock is really nice, not gonna lie
God I miss the analog clock in my Q. The G feels so much fancier
there should never be a fucking touch screen menu in a car for any reason
Maps? Android Auto / CarPlay? Gotta have the screen anyway for the mandatory backup camera.
We can have both! Physical buttons for everything that doesn't actually benefit from having a display, (like music or heat/ac), touch screen for the rest.
Just like my 2019 Hyundai Ioniq. Buttons for the car stuff and a touchscreen for media, calls, navigation, backup camera, etc. If the touchscreen were to shit the bed I'd still have a fully functional car minus the backup camera.
*because they sell really bad, even in germany
VW has made a lot of bad decisions
Now if they'd just sell the baseline Golf or wagen Golf in Canada, I'd consider buying another VW!
Good news
I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?
Lol, careful, you'll waken the VW mob. They don't like to hear what garbage VWs are.
Can't give me one.
It appears there has been a few that caught this. I was surprised they were so far down the Consumer's Report list for reliability as it was but honestly I don't really think of the brand that much as it's something my parents owned when I was a little kid then they moved onto Toyota and domestics.
It's not to say others are better. I've was surprised by Ford's decent down the list but not by Jeep's continued place down there and I've owned many Jeeps.
Now only if I could complain enough that my recall on my Atlas gets the passanger air bag fixed. Got told in April that nobody can ride in the passenger seat because the air bag might not deploy. Still no ETA on when a fix will be available. What a BS company.
They're too busy fixing the frag grenade air bags right now. That took almost a year and a half to get the parts in to fix.
I gotna letter from Toyota that says I will get another letter later because the car might be dangerous for my health and safety without saying what it is and now I have to drive my car not knowing what could happen.
It's been more than a month and I still don't have any other letter with information and/or resolution.
Thanks Toyota, I already am a very anxious person and now I have to rrive everyday with the knowledge my car has something dangerous to it but don't know what.
When I bought my Tiguan the dealer was pushing really hard for me to get a 2022 which has just come in. It was the first year to have capacitive steering wheel buttons. I told them to find a 2021 or I'm looking at something else. I think the car market was still a little slow at that time so they made it happen to get a sale.
Progression is regression in this issue, thanks people!
Not all of the buttons. Please be reasonable. Just some of the buttons.
I don't need memory buttons.
I don't want to push the button half a dozen times, just to miss the menu I wanted by 1 click, and have to go around again.
I don't need separate am fm and cd buttons.
I really don't mind a touch screen for climate control, or audio interface. Just keep the business from moving around the screen at all and I'm pretty happy.
I was with you up until the climate controls.
Any control you can find in a 1997 Hyundai Accent should be physical.
Anything else can be hidden behind a touchscreen because I'm not going to use it while driving anyway.
My big request would be to drop the USB cable. I don't know why I need to connect both USB and Bluetooth. I'd love to just leave my cell in my bag where it belongs instead of advertising yet another reason why someone should smash my windows in!
Yeah climate control is where he lost me. My wife’s Honda odyssey has that.
I’m okay with the soft-buttons for memory, or to toggle input, since they are always in fixed locations. In fact soft-buttons are slightly better because they are labeled with the station….though my 2013 Passat has the better compromise of a physical button with the station printed above it.
But HVAC is where I draw the line. I guess the trade off would be that a thermostatically controlled digital systems are probably more simplistic, in their operation and maintenance, than the vacuum-and-linkage systems of yore, and this gives way to multi-zone climate systems in mass market cars. But I still hate that I have to utilize the touchscreen to change which blowers are on or to change the temperature in the rear zone, which blocks GPS if you’re using CarPlay/Android Auto/Nav (I’d assume, I don’t have nav).
Really the only thing on my Tesla I ever need to access on the touchscreen while driving is the climate controls (assuming I don't want to use voice, which is a pain as it hears you wrong)
The other used to be fog lights, but I just keep those on now for extra visibility, like another day time running light.
Everything else including wipers I can do from the wheel now without having to touch the screen.
I only use voice to choose a new song/artist, I'm not trying to navigate spotify by hand while driving.
What in hearing is ... Dials are good too?
Just wait 'til you try this knob!
Love a good knob...
Unpopular opinion: Unresponsive buttons are just as bad as unresponsive touchscreens. And touchscreens are not bad if you don't have 5 keys presses to get what you want, if you can customise your layout and if the system is not underpowered as they always seem to be.
haptics of a button means that you can keep your focus on the street while pressing a button.
Why have you said that VW is Putin?
That's a bad joke
Your mom is a bad joke
Well she's at least as clever as that, so suppose you guys got a little in common.
Yet the model Y is the world’s most sold car. Maybe it’s not the touch screen that is the problem.
Not sure where you get that data but according to Statista the top selling car is a Toyota corolla. Tesla model y is on the list but at #4.
Touchscreens probably aren't the deciding factor in a purchase but that doesn't mean that they aren't a problem for users. People just have to decide what features they are willing to compromise on (assuming they have a choice, and touchscreens increasingly are unavoidable).
Current year of course.
https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/
As a Model 3 owner of 5 years, it's really a non issue, in my opinion. All the basic controls you need while in motion are on the steering wheel. The touchscreen is responsive and intuitive.