Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.

Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.

We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.

“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone.”

  • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Touch screens in cars has always been a fuckin’ stupid idea, and I say that with the sincerest hope that nobody died because they had to look at the touchscreen to know where to tap to change the radio station because commercials came on

    • SaraTonin@lemm.ee
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      Someone has died due to a touchscreen. A woman had a Tesla which you put in park forwards or reverse with a touchscreen. She’d always had trouble with it and got it wrong and reversed into a pond. That meant the power went out so she couldn’t open that door. To get to the emergency escape handle you have to remove the speakers in the doors. So she drowned.

      The kicker? Her husband was a millionaire and he immediately put out a statement absolving Tesla and musk from any wrongdoing.

  • meep_launcher@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Finally saw a VW Buzz on the streets- I fell in love instantly. Not sure of the specs but I think she’s mighty pretty and it makes me want to load up my band and do a cross country trip with a fun montage sequence.

  • nuko147@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Nah you should make the steering wheel also a touchscreen, that would be smart. 🙃

    • fubarx@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.

      The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.

      None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

      • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

        This is why I don’t have a new car. I’m hoping I get one where I have access to my own data (in eg. Home Assistant), and the manufacturer doesn’t.

          • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Yep, that’s basically what I have.

            I’m ready to buy a factory new car, when I find one where the data is mine.

            • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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              It’s too bad LocalMotors never really worked out. It could have been an open source car company, but instead it was a weird designed by committee expensive car.

              Factory cars these days are so locked down that in order to replace some sensors or controllers you have to log into a paid (like sometime $30+ an day) online portal to enable the new part. It’s super fucked.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      The thing the vast majority doesn’t care about and that doesn’t prevent them from buying cars and that you’ll have to live with unless you just keep driving your old car forever?

      • regrub@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I’ll eventually have to buy a new car, yes. But I’ll also be looking into replacing the car’s cellular antenna with a dummy load if possible. A good car shouldn’t depend on cellular networks to be able to function.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.

      Sometimes things can just be good.

      • myplacedk@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yes, but this is not one of those times.

        Imagine someone poops on your doorstep, and then removes half of it.

        You can say it’s good that they removed some of it, but that’s probably not the point you would want to make.

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Trust is earned, and automakers have done nothing but the opposite for an entire lifetime. There’s a reason everyone was so desperate for Tesla to be the little guy rebel. It didn’t work out though :(

        • Billiam@lemmy.world
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          Yes, but a corporation complying with the law is sadly what passes for good news in the US these days.

        • regrub@lemmy.world
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          Consumers don’t like subscriptions to operate heated seats that are already integrated into the car, for example.

  • meliante@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Nothing to do with the euroNCAP guidance that came out earlier in the year, of course.

  • PeteZa@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    This is incredible news because that means my future GTI will have buttons.

    • prudx@lemm.ee
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      21 hours ago

      I just hope they’re smart enough not to put a 1200kg battery in it 🥹

    • latenightnoir@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Would be hilarious if they recalled them and superglued buttons over the touchscreen interface.

      • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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        2 days ago

        Isn’t that basically how the knob on the touchscreen of the Ford Mach-E works? I think it’s just glued on and simulates a touch like a stylus.

    • jaschen@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I have an 2021 Toyota and replaced the display with a Android head unit. Then added Bluetooth + USB buttons on my dash.

      Some features don’t work anymore like, but I can live with that.

    • octoblade@lemmynsfw.com
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      I am too young and missed this era of phones, but personally I don’t like the idea of slide out keyboards. They seem like they would be very prone to dirt clogging it up. Would it even be possible to get an IP68 rating with a slide out keyboard?

      The one phone feature I miss most is the alert slider from the OnePlus 5T I had. The 3 position switch is so intuitive when it comes to putting the phone on vibrate or mute. It sucks that no other phones have it, as I vowed never to buy a OnePlus phone again due to them never selling phones officially in my country. That, the increase in price, the trend towards more mainstream conformity, and the software deficiencies really soured my opinions of OnePlus.

      • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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        1 day ago

        the keyboards back in the day were generally dustproof, yes, with only the gap between the keyboard and the rest of the phone being an issue. the keys weren’t like the keys on a laptop, generally, they were more like buttons under a solid plastic sheet, that’s how they kept it from gettng dirty!

        • octoblade@lemmynsfw.com
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          Yeah it was the sliding mechanism I was thinking of as a potential issue, not the actual keys themselves. Phones with keyboards that don’t slide seem ok, but I personally wouldn’t want one.

          • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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            the sliding stuff generally wasn’t a problem unless you buried your phone in sand or something, that would probably make the slide a bit gritty, but it was fine otherwise

          • fossilesque@mander.xyz
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            Now it probably makes me sound old, but I think a lot of you youths would be changing your tune after trying one. I was so much faster at typing and navigating on one of thase than a touch screen, even with gestures.

        • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          More like a formed plastic sheet with contact pads glued on the underside. The whole keyboard was just a PCB, plastic casing, and a button sheet.

      • Warehouse@lemmy.ca
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        Would it even be possible to get an IP68 rating with a slide out keyboard?

        Maybe, but the competition at the time wouldn’t have IP68 anyway.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      Even on “near 100% screen” devices, there’s still real estate on the side, for some function buttons, like bixby, back, home, etc. My Windows Phone Nokia had a dedicated camera button that could have alternative functions in some applications.

      • phar@lemmy.ml
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        If you double click your power button it should bring up your camera

    • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      Especially for gaming. My old Nokia N81 kicked this rectangular piece of glass’s ass when it comes to gaming because I could actually comfortably play games that weren’t turn based and didn’t need to slap an overlay onto the screen.

        • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          Damn, that definitely looks very cool. Probably expensive too lol. But exactly what these touchscreen phones need.

          • Petter1@lemm.ee
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            19 hours ago

            Well it is a nice young youtuber starting a startup using kickstarter. I think an investment is worth it 😇

            Edit: 😯 way more expensive than I thought

        • stopforgettingit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          You can get the same feeling with a Xbox controller and a phone mount for the controller. its not quite as cool looking but for $10 is the same experience. I have this one that I got like 2 years ago, it works great. Good money saver if you already have a controller that supports bluetooth. They have them for PS controllers too.

    • rigatti@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      My favorite phone was my LG enV2 with the physical qwerty keyboard. Thing would keep its charge for weeks, and I could just chuck it across a room with no consequences. Not a smartphone obviously, but it was great for its time.

  • realitista@lemm.ee
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    This will be another nice side effect of Tesla shitting the bed. They were the ones that started this trend and now that they are out of fashion, it will become unfashionable again.

  • Stormy1701@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Good. My air con controls are actual buttons and I can use them without looking at them. But literally everything else in the car is controlled by a touch screen that you have to look at to see what you’re doing.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Now wait a second! Hold on! Let’s get one thing straight here…

    …buttons should also return to phones.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        Not sure your age, but that used to be a thing. A little slide out keyboard as a way to transition the gap between fully onscreen controls, and the old flip phones. This would have been 2003-2009 roughly.

        I’ve never understood the cell phone market thinking. If you have 1 flip phone, it’s suddenly ALL flip phones for the next 2 years. Then its a candybar style for the next 3 years. Then one phone gets wider, they all get wider. Then one gets credit card slim, they all get credit card slim. Now for the past decade it’s all been black rectangles with no personality besides 1 logo on the back. Just a touchscreen, and a fuck you.

        The market is filled with different customers. One wants a keyboard. One doesn’t. Why can’t they both find what they want in different products on the market?

        • kusivittula@sopuli.xyz
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          i remember my mom having some nokia phone like 10 - 15 years ago, had oled display and the screen would slide to the side and reveal a horizontal physical qwerty keyboard