VW Is Putting Buttons Back in Cars Because People Complained Enough

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.
- I think using a car tablet is equally as dangerous as texting and driving. Voice control would actually be better for adjustments while driving.
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)
Also, Tesla's button replacements actually do work more or less reliably. The other manufacturers decided to save money by adding a potato instead of a potent CPU that powers the screen in the middle of the console.
- "Finally a use for all these leftover 1st gen Kindle Fire CPUs!"
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?
I had huge reservations towards Tesla's control system, but in reality, I got used to it in a week. And I'm loving how clean and sleek the dashboard is otherwise. What I don't understand is the car makers who include a huge tablet AND a dozen gadgets around the dashboard. That's worst of both worlds.

Can we complain more about subscription paywalled car functions then?

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
- is it the biggest success if it's a luxury RV?
- While you're slowly drowning in payments but no one can know and you're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire!
  Lol you nailed it. I know it goes against some of the ethos of Lemmy but I do wish there was some kind of particular "THIS PERSON RIGHT HERE GETS IT" award to give you haha.
They absolutely did!

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?
- Lane assist on the golf tried to murderise me recently even though I was driving on a road without lane markings
- 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 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
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
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.

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

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.

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".

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.

They obviously knew it sucked because all of their luxury cars still have buttons. It was just a cost saving measure and they tried to spin it as “fancy” in their low to mid range cars.

That's not true though. This happened in their EVs regardless of price range. Even the Porsche Taycan which requires using a screen to adjust HVAC vents. Other than some steering wheel buttons the Taycan is all screens.
The Audi E-Tron GT (same chassis as the Taycan) oddly enough has more buttons. But that's because VAG makes sure Porsche and Audi interiors are slightly different for different market segments.
It's more about VAG thinking (like many automakers) copying the Tesla trend was what people wanted. The mistake made was not considering Tesla early adopters often being techy people who might not match broader market opinion.
- They also didn't do it as well as Tesla which gave even more reason to dislike it.

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.

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!

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.
- I hate the fact that you’re probably right about that reason.
Oh they KNEW what they were doing and just didn't give a fuck.
We need a People of Walmart equivalent for this bullshit. Start finding the designer/engineer/manager responsible for this garbage and shame them publicly.
How does this stuff pass any kind of Accessibility regs?

i like buttons

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.
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
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.
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.

I might be the one of the weirdos that want buttons back on phones as well lol. 💀 I loved keyboards.

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone's name.
- My biggest annoyance with Gboard is that my muscle memory is so tuned with it and it has GIF search built in...but it keeps wanting to correct random words to whichever is closer: celebrity name or a brand name or something. -_-
Here you go: https://www.unihertz.com/
EDIT: Typo
- Wait, an actually unique smartphone manufacturer and they're not impossibly expensive and aren't locked in to Europe?
  How did this happen without me noticing? Cool!! Nice share! Now I want them to put daily drivable Linux on it and I'm insta-sold!
  (So far I merely put up with the duopoly of mobile OSs. I don't enjoy them lol)
I was also a Blackberry baby. But I can type faster now with Swype + autocorrect compared to buttons. I do, however, want my camera shutter button back.
- Idk about other phones, but at least on my pixel the volume down button is also a shutter button. And double pressing the lock screen button opens the camera

Judging from reviews, people are avoiding VW now because of really shitty infotainment systems...

It's a thing Chinese manufacturers are focussing on to distract from the rest of their engineering.
For me it was this and their build quality, I got the impression they aren't cars you keep for 10+ years
- Have you tried observing the service intervals.

A great reminder that your voice does matter. Apply it other things as well, and things can actually improve...

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”

Imagine paying the same price for a car that lacks the technology of:

Smart screen
- With heat resistant materials that are designed to resist high temperatures and still function properly (i.e in summer times)
- With GPS features, and media access
But the screen still sucks because you can literally buy a magnet and stick your phone there, and still be able to do literally everything a smart screen car do.

I mean id still buy it because I prefer cars that are not so impractical, but it's a shame that it still costs practically the same.

Conceptually, a smart screen sounds like a good idea, but the implementation is bad.

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 telematics on EV VWs was designed by someone who lost a bet.

I'd rather have a "non-touch" screen with buttons in a car. Just to show info. And be it right in front of me.

Cool I like buttons

Edit: Why is this post yellow?

yellow? give us a screenshot of what you see.
Don't eat it.

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!?
- 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.

there should never be a fucking touch screen menu in a car for any reason

Maps? Android Auto / CarPlay? Gotta have the screen anyway for the mandatory backup camera.
We can have both! Physical buttons for everything that doesn't actually benefit from having a display, (like music or heat/ac), touch screen for the rest.
- Just like my 2019 Hyundai Ioniq. Buttons for the car stuff and a touchscreen for media, calls, navigation, backup camera, etc. If the touchscreen were to shit the bed I'd still have a fully functional car minus the backup camera.

Infiniti not updating their interior since 2014 is starting to feel like a good thing as other brands abandon buttons.

Nice to know VW is returning to sanity

Everyone else is going to start putting analog clocks in the dash again.
- God I fucking need that. One of my cars didn't use a big enough variable to hold the GPS time adjustment. So it's off by an hour randomly about 9 months out of the year. My other car is just old enough that they don't have an update for the radio to fix the time since the last time they moved daylight savings around.
- God I miss the analog clock in my Q. The G feels so much fancier

Thank god. End this shitty touchscreen fad. I have problems reading things too close, so the buttons/knobs in my 10+ year old car are a lifesaver.

VW has made a lot of bad decisions

Good news

Now only if I could complain enough that my recall on my Atlas gets the passanger air bag fixed. Got told in April that nobody can ride in the passenger seat because the air bag might not deploy. Still no ETA on when a fix will be available. What a BS company.

I gotna letter from Toyota that says I will get another letter later because the car might be dangerous for my health and safety without saying what it is and now I have to drive my car not knowing what could happen.
It's been more than a month and I still don't have any other letter with information and/or resolution.
Thanks Toyota, I already am a very anxious person and now I have to rrive everyday with the knowledge my car has something dangerous to it but don't know what.

Progression is regression in this issue, thanks people!

Reason why I love my Subaru is that it still has buttons for almost everything, yet still has Android Auto.

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.
- While you have some good points, it seems you may be missing one in that if you are constantly getting passed in that manner, you are causing a problem, regardless of what is posted. Most western law systems have a provision against impeding the flow of traffic.

Tom Paris was right.

A big part of why I chose my Mazda is so I didn't have touchscreen everything.

Main reason I canceled my ID4 reservation

Now if they'd just sell the baseline Golf or wagen Golf in Canada, I'd consider buying another VW!

I wonder if they can also make a vehicle not near the bottom of the reliability rankings next?

Lol, careful, you'll waken the VW mob. They don't like to hear what garbage VWs are.
Can't give me one.
- It appears there has been a few that caught this. I was surprised they were so far down the Consumer's Report list for reliability as it was but honestly I don't really think of the brand that much as it's something my parents owned when I was a little kid then they moved onto Toyota and domestics.
  It's not to say others are better. I've was surprised by Ford's decent down the list but not by Jeep's continued place down there and I've owned many Jeeps.

Why have you said that VW is Putin?

That's a bad joke
- Your mom is a bad joke

Unpopular opinion: Unresponsive buttons are just as bad as unresponsive touchscreens. And touchscreens are not bad if you don't have 5 keys presses to get what you want, if you can customise your layout and if the system is not underpowered as they always seem to be.

Don't know what buttons or touch screens you have in your care but in my car it's way easier to hit the button than the exact location on the touch screen. You can 'feel' your way to a button on a dashboard, you can't do it on a touch screen.
haptics of a button means that you can keep your focus on the street while pressing a button.