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.
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.
How about others leading?
From march 20
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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SaaS is great for business-to-business products. Sucks ass for everything else.
I’d love to get a fitness band, but fuck all the subscriptions to access all their features.
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.
cars aren’t primarily for driving they are for convincing friends and family of your success
Unless you live in places like cities around Los Angeles
Can we complain more about subscription paywalled car functions then?
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?
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.
The capacitive touch buttons under the screen on my ID4 don’t light up, so they’re literally invisible at night and completely useless.
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.
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I would be down with that, 100%.
My car doesn’t have nearly that many functions, though. Nor do I want it to. Owners of modern cars would shit a brick if they saw the dash on my '99 Silverado and how simple it is. It has a grand total of about 12 buttons on it, and three dials. That’s it.
Somehow it manages to drive down the road just fine, heat or cool the interior, twiddle all the lights, change all the radio stations, play or rewind the tape. (Yes, tape.) Just with those few controls, all of which only do one thing. Except the turn signal stalk, and technically I guess the shifter lever because it has the tow/haul button on the end of it.
The amount of bullshit that’s built into modern cars is astounding. The majority of that crap doesn’t need to be in a car. Which is, you know, a transportation machine. If the passenger wants four touch screens, that’s fine. I don’t need one. I don’t want one.
Not that airliners don’t have a lot of things to press (and two people to press them), but the majority of the controls in that image are the navigation, radio, and autopilot controls.
I really just need the “fix” button
Edit: “legs” could also work of adequately sexy
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
Finally.
Sanity prevails at last!
