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 ;)
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.
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. 🤢
It was slow because all of the memory was allocated for the ads they show you.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
How about others leading?
From march 20
I got a new car two years ago, and physical buttons were one of the determining factors.
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
What more would you want physical controls for?
I had huge reservations towards Tesla’s control system, but in reality, I got used to it in a week. And I’m loving how clean and sleek the dashboard is otherwise.
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.
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
So they’re targeting gay people now?
I have a feeling the people down voting you didn’t see the typo
He fixed the typo. It’s no longer homocidal.
Corrected my typo, so contextually challenged persons can avoid being confused. You are welcome.
Your spelling is homogeneous now.
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.
Is it on an independent fuse? If so just pull the fuse
Man do they still do that with these “smart features” or is it all just linked to an inexplicable welded shut black box now? Lol
Honestly I have no idea. Often they run different features through different control modules, but every car is different.
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.
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?
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.
The car experience
The car experience is driving.
We don’t need 6 different fuel efficiency visualizations and we sure as fuck don’t need games or videos in the car.
Sure. I don’t want games or videos (though I can see how that would be useful while waiting for an EV to charge).
I just want Apple CarPlay/Android Auto. Or, failing that, whatever controls are necessary to facilitate an infotainment system.
How much entertainment do you need while driving? Can’t you just plug your phone in for some music?
Do you really need a maps app built into your car when you already have one on your phone?
I just can’t see a reasonable use for an infotainment system that isn’t already taken care of perfectly by the device I already have.
In my older car, I have a mount for my phone because it does not have GPS. But it does work just fine for Bluetooth.
CarPlay is a lot easier to use. As was Android Auto when I had an Android phone.
These also give me greater flexibility with regard to mapping. I can, for example, simply tell my phone to navigate to my wife’s location. (Obviously not a dealbreaker to not have, but convenient!)
It can also be really nice to have a side-by-side view of the media player and the maps.
I dunno, it’s not like I wouldn’t buy a car that doesn’t have CarPlay, but that car would lose some points in my mind. It’s the kind of thing I didn’t think I’d appreciate as much until I had it.
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.
I just hope they stop treating car interiors like living rooms. It’s like they forgot that people are busy driving in the first place.
They absolutely did!
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?
I test drove one, and the touch buttons were ass, but nobody mentions the lag. There’s ZERO feedback, do you press the button again and watch the screen show you turn the thing on and then back off.
I would NEVER buy a car with touch controls based on this experience. It was horrible.
I wonder if that’s a lingering effect from the auto chip shortage from 2020 (limited choice lead to using processors less powerful than they’d like), or just the general shitty quality common when companies try to add features outside of what they are familiar with? Maybe combined with hiring shitty developers that want to run a full browser stack when they need to be doing embedded real-time programming instead?
I swore I would never buy a car with a touchscreen, but I ended up with a Toyota with no noticable touch lag and physical controls for everything important. The steering wheel buttons also replicate all phone- and radio-related functions that are on the touchscreen.
The wife’s Honda (a few years older) has too many physical controls. For example, I’m fairly certain you could turn on heat for the driver and rear passenger-side, and air conditioning for the passenger and rear driver-side, if you really wanted to.
Oh yeah, honestly, I don’t mind the controls on a touchscreen as you get immediate feedback on most, if not all cars, but for some reason on that GTI, the touch buttons on the dashboard and wheel didn’t work for me at all.
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
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.
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”.
deleted by creator
That’s not true though. This happened in their EVs regardless of price range. Even the Porsche Taycan which requires using a screen to adjust HVAC vents. Other than some steering wheel buttons the Taycan is all screens.
The Audi E-Tron GT (same chassis as the Taycan) oddly enough has more buttons. But that’s because VAG makes sure Porsche and Audi interiors are slightly different for different market segments.
It’s more about VAG thinking (like many automakers) copying the Tesla trend was what people wanted. The mistake made was not considering Tesla early adopters often being techy people who might not match broader market opinion.
They also didn’t do it as well as Tesla which gave even more reason to dislike it.
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
