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?
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.
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.
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.
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 like how you can get a ticket for using your phone while driving, so automakers decided to replace your tactile radio, where you don’t need to look at it to operate, with what is basically a giant touchscreen phone in your car where you need to look at it to see what you’re doing instead of feeling what you’re doing.
And it’s legal!
Yep it should just be illegal plain and simple. Maybe some screens that are mainly intended for passive display that you can still use with touch, but all main functions one would need to use while operating the vehicle should be buttons and dials.
Many states have laws prohibiting the use of anything that isn’t hands free, including integrated media controls. Won’t stop anyone, but just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean people won’t do it. Same as speeding, or eating/drinking while driving in many states.
This is actually very good news for car manufacturers.
Touch crap was cheaper but sold a new tech so => price increase
Buttons are old tech so no new investments or tech development but they are more complicated => price increase
Thank you! I’ve been making this argument a LOT with recent discussions on kids not understanding keyboards and controllers because their lives are full of touchscreens.
Touch isn’t “the future”. It just absolutely flooded the market.
You think they don’t just charge more because they can, like every other industry lately?
They 100% do! But the marketing departments always likes to have “solid” arguments at hand.
How else can they organise fairs and conferences where they can lament about how poor the automakers are and how pressure from are pulling prices down so automakers cannot compete… how they have to fire people and move production in poorer countries where people can be treated more like slaves… how profits are so low that they have to use the same jets with the same bitches twice!
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.
Sanity prevails at last!
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.
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.
i like buttons
