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
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.
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.
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.
It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Not to mention completely useless in places where you need to wear gloves when driving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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"
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 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.
Finally people are starting to see that touch screens or any other touch surfaces don't belong into cars.
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
