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!
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
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.
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 don’t want a touchscreen in my fucking car. That is all.
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 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.
I’m very glad, the lack of buttons are a safety hazard… Looking at these stupid TESLA cars especially… You can’t even adjust the AC without messing with the touchscreen, which means your eyes are not on the road…
Still not going to own a car, but at least it will be slightly safer by bringing back physical buttons, so hurray for small victories.
I own two cars. The newest is a 2013 because it’s before touchscreens became standard equipment. I’m gonna limp those bitches along until either I die or that trend reverses.
Actually, I am wondering if these dumb things can be replaced with aftermarket stuff. I kinda have my doubts. I miss when you could just pull the stereo out yourself and slide a new one into the bay like a disc drive on a PC.
limp those bitches along
I hope you don’t have to limp them along. My newest vehicle is from 2007, and my oldest from '84. They aren’t limping, they run and drive quite well.
Well one runs like a top. The other I need to replace the suspension on but the engine is sound.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about idea where flexible display can be combined with some sort of mechanism where a button on the display can be shown and underneath display in same place it would raise the display slightly. Just enough to be tactile and easy to find without looking. We might see these at some point as stars seem to be aligning that way.
They’ve been working on that for a while now. It looks like those stars are not aligning anytime soon.
https://www.howtogeek.com/894140/when-will-we-get-tactile-touch-screens/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/feedback-tactile-heptic-touch-fujitsu,26244.html
Cool. I mean it’s obvious that’s going to happen at some point.
I said the same to a Tesla owner who informed me buttons on the steering wheel provide all these functionalities. But upvoters don’t own a Tesla.
Not all functionalities. You can’t even adjust the direction/power of the AC or open the glovebox without multiple presses on the touchscreen.
There’s no physical button to open the glovebox? Better not keep anything critical in there in case of a software failure.
Either software or hardware failure of the big infotainment system can suck really badly, and TESLA is also an anti-repair company too…
You have buttons on the wheel and voice commands. But it must be nice to stay in your little ignorant bubble so I will leave you be now.
What?!? Pictures Under Glass turns out not to be the most desired solution for controling your car? Who could have guessed? /s
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.
A great reminder that your voice does matter. Apply it other things as well, and things can actually improve…
Finally people are starting to see that touch screens or any other touch surfaces don’t belong into cars.
And I’ll continue complaining about stuff, nothing will stop me, not even getting what I want!
The squeaky wheel gets the greese!
as my dad would say, “you’d complain if you’s hung with a new rope”
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 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 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?
and to add insult to injury, I couldn’t turn the heater on countless times because the climate portion of the OS was unresponsive. Other times, it would simply say that the function couldn’t be performed at the time. Why? No idea.
This is the main problem, not something about the UI being wonky. That my AC can freeze not because of the radiator but because of a shitty UI system? That’s insane.
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.
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.
