VW is putting buttons back in cars
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
> This is reassuring for the simple fact that actual buttons just work. The touch sliders and whatnot in the Mk8 Golf and ID.4 are finicky, only operating like they should some of the time. They also aren't backlit, making them difficult to find and use in the dark.
I'd frame it differently. It's not that, under certain circumstances, buttons work better than touchscreens. It's that there are particular situations when touchscreens are superior to physical buttons (nav is one of them), and for every other use case, buttons provide a more intuitive, consistent, discoverable, pleasurable experience for users. Because I can do GPS nav on my phone anyway, if I have to choose one, I'd say it's reasonable to conclude that physical controls are superior in general as UI for cars.
The other problem with touchscreen interfaces is that, paradoxically, they can result in worse design. You'd think that an all-software interface would give designers more options. What it seems to do—and many designers will recognize this antipattern from the real world—is make it so that you don't get as much time to think about the right design, and you don't have to make the difficult decisions that result in a simple, opinionated design. Instead, the UI ends up being an afterthought because it's just software, and every VP with a dumb idea gets to have it crammed into the design. That's why touchscreen controls for cars still suck, 10 years into them being ubiquitous, while a dashboard from the 1970s can be controlled by a child.
Thank you, sweetheart!!!
I really was baffled by this decision. Not believing this headline until I see it.
That’s not quite right. At scale the buttons and knobs are cheap. Having designed many control panels for a wide range of applications, I can tell you that good design is an excruciatingly long and painfully expensive undertaking.
You cannot recompile your way out of a poorly working physical control panel or bad design. You can’t just throw something together for testing and finish it while other teams complete the design of the rest of the car, machine, etc.
As a real example, you might have to evaluate hundreds of button designs for tactile, audible and visible feel. Once sub-selected, you might evaluate over a dozen full scale control panel mock-ups before design lock. Etc.
Touch screens allow you to eliminate a huge portion of what goes into creating a user interphase.
I’m not buying a Tesla precisely for that reason. Physical touch is powerful.
You don’t need to look, the fingers just do what the Brian thinks.
... ok, I'll just toss that into my typos collection as a Monty Python artefact.
I'll trade in half of a string-loaded door.
One of my favorite feature on Mazdas... never seen anything like it before
> Car enthusiasts were not smitten with iDrive; many found that the system had the opposite of its intended effect, requiring more, not less, visual attention. Automobile Week wrote that iDrive ''turned the 'experience' of driving the car into a computerized affair.'' And even experts who sympathize with the impulse behind iDrive note its shortcomings. ''I spent an hour experimenting in a simulator, and I got lost in the menus,'' says Don Norman, the author of ''The Design of Everyday Things.'' BMW countered by including a cheat sheet that can be affixed to the steering wheel for befuddled parking valets. Eventually, some initially skeptical reviewers have conceded that once accustomed to it, they find the iDrive indispensable; however, that acclimation has taken as long as three months.
Norman wrote more about it at https://jnd.org/design-as-communication/ .
> By logic, the iDrive was a superior device. Alas, people function through stories, not logic. Moreover, people are spatial, we remember where things are in space, whereas the iDrive destroyed spatiality. And finally, the stories we remember and the conceptual models we prefer have to do with how a particular device functions: heating and cooling the automobile, changing the station of the radio, checking what distance remains for our trip. Each activity requires a separate story, separate control, and a separate location for operation. Alas, the iDrive collapsed everything into one location.
However I doubt Google has done the work in the interim to keep the UX in Android Auto working well with dial controls. Esp if only Mazda is doing this.
Unfortunately BMW moved to eliminating a lot of hardware buttons in the latest version of the iDrive with a giant curved screen. They still have dial and buttons on the center console, plus few additional buttons under the main screen. But they have removed one of another great features - eight programmable buttons in the center. These are great and you can assign any function from the touch screen to them.
I've rented several other cars in the last couple of years that have been touchscreen only (or, at the very least, very heavily biased towards touchscreens), and the amount of extra time needed to orient where you're pressing is honestly kind of terrifying when you need to, say, demist a windscreen quickly.
I just wish the Mazda software was similarly well-designed. They have so many on-screen popups, for everything from "Warning, screens can be distracting! Select okay to acknowledge." to "Your XM radio has lost connection" when I'm not listening to the XM radio. And they display their own popups over CarPlay while CarPlay is active, which I basically never want to see.
Who? Virtually all makes are moving to all-touch infotainment systems, even VW here. The VW change is that they were using weird touch-sensitive 'buttons' for volume and steering wheel control and you literally couldn't rest your fingers on the steering wheel. The only reason touch suckls on Mazda is that the display is placed too far away to be reached on purpose.
Well, that certainly makes it worse on Mazdas, but those touch screens are terrible on everything.
I prefer using the knob to touching the screen. It's much faster, primarily. You have some touch feedback so you don't really need to be looking at the screen for very long. You don't need to move your torso, so you can manipulate the wheel while you're driving normally with your left hand.
I can see it depending on what you're doing with the system. Personally I'm either using Spotify or Google Maps, both of which work quite nicely with the scroll wheel.
... because there's a dial, obviating the need for touch. Beyond that, without needing to use touch, the screen can be placed further up and forward - meaning there's less "travel" for your eyes between looking at the road and glancing at the centre display.
What year/model is this? I've never had a popup on top of CarPlay, except for the volume bar that appears along the bottom of the screen.
I got a Carlinkit wireless adapter so I don't even see the Mazda UI except for a couple of seconds while the adapter boots up, or if I want to put it on the clock screen because there's nothing on CarPlay that I need.
There’s the usual “screens are distracting” notice when the car turns on but after that it uses the speedometer screen to say things like “Service due” or “Safety and Driver Support Systems Temporarily Disabled. Front Radar Obscured. Drive Safely”
Honestly the head unit is one of the worst I've ever used, though the interface is at least moderately well designed. They clearly had at least one intern try using it while driving. It's just the rest of the entire operating system that's garbage
Instead I went with a Mazda and stayed with them since. Just great all around cars: safe, reliable, low maintenance, freaking fun to drive, and always good tech (Love the heads up display!), upscale fit and finish. Not super expensive but expensive enough that you’re getting a good car.
I would easily choose my CX-30 over an A4 any day.
Every few years since then there has been an article like this that another brand "discovered" the same thing.
^ Check it, dead last in the industry according to people who bought the car.
The system is coated in buttons...but most units do not allow you to use Carplay with touch. That's right. You need to navigate the UI as if you were using a keyboard to use windows. 'spin spin spin, highlighted?, select, spin spin spin highlighted?, select' The outcome is considerably more time spent looking at the screen no matter how proud they are about killing touch. Carplay and Android Auto are both noted by customers as the number 1 technology priority in new cars.
The system is virtually unchanged in UX since 2012 with only a UI refresh in 2019. They claim it as if it is an intentional design when they really are just selling 12 year old tech on $60K CX-90s.
This is no rebuttal to you, if you love it, that is great! But here and reddit both seem to think that Mazda's UX is amazing when customers truly hate it.
Seems like my 2016 CX-5 ignores touch inputs if the car is moving, and CarPlay can't override this.
Quite the opposite. The wheel has discrete clicks while rotating so muscle memory becomes a thing. I've got half a dozen "workflows" memorized so I don't even need to look at the screen to do things like love a song, add it to my favorites, switch between apps, report an accident, etc.
I had a BMW with a wheel and it was insanely annoying. But that was 10 years ago!
I find the newer Mazda red to be far sexier than Ferrari red. (Ferrari red is still best choice for Ferraris though)
It's a shame, because I can see the usefulness of the input controls.
I only use the back-up camera. It's super cool that Mazda actually managed to retrofit this in all the other old models though. I don't think many car manufacturers would bother with that.
It'd be a bit expensive to replace the head unit with an Android-based aftermarket one, so I'm not sure it's worth doing. Depends on how long I'll keep the car.
I also think that the whole interface is quite sluggish in general.
- Microwave ovens should have a knob-button combo that I can work in 0.5 seconds without looking or reading the manual
- Ovens and stoves should have knobs I can turn with wet or oven-mitted hands
- Cars should have volume buttons I can twist or smack into silence without thinking about it for more than a moment
- Same with seat heaters, wipers, and anything I might do while the car is moving
Ooh, yeah this is a big one for me now. A few years ago I got a new range and the controls are all capacitive touch. Mitts are a minor inconvenience, but also sometimes cooking is messy and liquid gets spilled here or there. Now imagine how your phone works when you get some rain on the screen... yeah, it's not great. I've learned enough tricks to live with it since it's honestly the only thing I don't like about that range, but next time I'll probably shell out a little more for knobs if I have to.
In 1996 that was changed to require new dryer circuits to be 4 wire. Two hots wires, one neutral, and one ground. Existing 3 wire dryer circuits were allowed to remain in use.
Particularly if you operate rentals, the legal liability is perhaps almost as much as NOT retrofitting GFCIs into baths/kitchens.
SRC: not your electrician
it's an absolute failure of product design in my eyes
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WHXlXwYWETA/UbHwdsgx5dI/AAAAAAAAA_...
You know what's funny? The 2024 Dacia Duster, still a cheap but functional car, has 4 physical switches to control the windows, unlike the mess that's the VW ID.4 which went full cost cutting mode to the extreme.
How did VW fall so low? If a budget Franco-Romanian brand can school them on UX, then the Chinese will eat them alive.
I really like the climate controls on my slightly older Jetta, with three knobs: temp, fan, and position. The left- and right-most knobs have a button in the center that controls the heated seats. VW had a perfect system and I hope more automakers rediscover knobs and buttons soon.
It also shows the power of a good vendor. My uncle had a dealer he knew well and trusted, so bought them sight unseen when his old ones broke. Probably paid extra for the commercial line rather than the consumer line, but I assume they will last way longer too.
Knob 1: A rotary timer. Twist it so the little arrow points at the time to cook (+/- 30 seconds)
Knob 2: Nobody knows. This was some sort of a "mode" selector that wasn't touched in eight years as far as I remember.
Button: More similar to a space bar on a mechanical keyboard - push to start cooking.
The door was just a simple "pull to open", there was no "eject" button to open the door.
When it was done cooking, there was a single "ding".
Stoves with touchscreen buttons that become completely unusable as soon as more that 4 water molecules get within a 2 metre radius are infuriating beyond belief.
I sometimes had to disable the fuses to turn off the indiction stove. I kid you not. It would beep incessantly if something spilled near the controls (it was all one flat surface, so easy thing to do when e.g. boiling anything) and I just couldn't turn the fucking thing off.
I genuinely wonder if the people who designed this have ever tried using it themselves in any real-world conditions. It's just broken.
The benefits in ease of cleaning outweigh the negatives in my opinion. And I use that stove a lot.
Saying that, I suspect there's a whole load of manufacturers who put different levels of thought into their capacitive controls. I only gave my example because I'm really happy with it - and so in my opinion it's not a universal problem with touch controls on stoves. Every time I stay in an AirBnB I'm surprised by just how bad a lot of cooking appliances are though - really unintuitive timers, poor quality knobs, very primitive technology (precisely controlling temperature really isn't that hard!)
One of the difficulties of these sort of things is that it's really hard to know if something is any good unless you've actually used it in real-world conditions a few times.
When I was car shopping a couple years ago I immediately disqualified at least half of the ones I looked at because of garbage features. Now I'm looking for a new fridge and that market hasn't gotten as bad yet, but it's already bad. I have no interest in a fridge that has a camera and a wifi connection, or needs an app to change the temperature.
Alas, a knob is no guarantee of a decent user interface. I have a higher-end GE microwave with a knob that is completely inert until you know what you're supposed to press first. Granted, "cook time" is not an entirely unintuitive prerequisite, but why the designers didn't at least consider that this would be the 95% use case and simply default the knob to that function is beyond me.
Breville has, in my experience, nailed the interaction between physical knobs and digital input.
I’m minutes away from replacing my instapot purely because I feel like it’s ui will cause an explosion one day and the Breville won’t.
We have a microwave with a knob to set the duration and another to set the clock, with two small buttons (one is 12/24 hours, the other I can't remember).
Every guest we had who tried to use the microwaive failed it, because it was so not intuitive to just turn to set the duration ... and then wait a couple seconds before heating starts automatically.
I wish there was a physical start button.
> Then there's the ID.4, which only has two window switches on the driver's door, with a separate button that shifts their controls between the front and rear windows.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/vw-ceo-admits-frustrating-golf...
Unreal. Note that explanations like "they want to make everything software" don't work, because it was still physical buttons. At best you are reducing the number of physical buttons by two, but then also increasing the number of haptic buttons by one.
Here is a video by VW that tries to explain it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDj4sSyNl_Y
Just absolute lunacy.
It‘s cheaper. That’s all there is to it.
Automotive design is heavily influenced by bill—of-materials cost, there are committees upon committees deliberating and ultimately deciding on saving cents per unit.
I could manage every setting of that vehicle without even looking.
It was standardised across most Hondas, so I could do the same in any other vehicle of the same model era range.
https://static0.topspeedimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...
- Connect my phone via CarPlay (as only user).
- Adjust AC depending on outside temperature and passengers.
- Plug car in at home to charge after midnight (cheaper rates).
In all three cases, the car forgets previous settings, requires multiple taps (up to 5-6 at a time), or makes it hard to find the screen to make the adjustment.
My last car ran fine for 20+ years. This is the third VW I've ever driven; the first two were a long time ago. I intentionally leased this one since I figured EV technology would evolve, so best to hold off before purchasing outright.
Unless they figure out how to make those features be 0-touch (or even 1-touch) operations, this will be the last VW for me. The EV part works fine, but I grit my teeth every time I get in or out of the car.
I got a Renault Megane e-Tech this summer, and it does the things you mention right. Not only does it remember AC settings, CarPlay/Android Auto and such per profile (my SO uses Android Auto, I don't), but it has physical buttons for adjusting temperature, fan speed, max AC, rear window heater and air recycling.
While they have physical buttons they can also be adjusted via the voice interface of course.
Having physical buttons for those key operations is one of the reasons we got it. Not having it was a hard pass.
Compared to our previous BMW i3, I also really enjoy having easy access to the regen settings via paddles on the steering wheel. I live in the suburbs, so drive a lot on both fast and slow roads, and actively switching between regen settings depending on speed limit and traffic makes it more enjoyable to drive.
Other bad UX:
I also only have one user profile setup and I have to hit "okay" every time I start my car.
The self parking feature works maybe 40% of the time.
You cannot disable child locks independently, it's either on or off.
The alert that my phone is charging everytime I put it into the wireless charging spot.
Cannot disable assists without disabling acc.
I blame Netflix, fairly or not, for this UI pattern.
The idea of "choosing a profile" on startup is a UX that I don't think was common before Netflix made it the de facto in streaming.
Now every video streaming service, regardless of how many profile _actually_ exist (for me, only one), asks you to pick a profile on startup. Absolutely annoying.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd love an old Defender 90; those are cool)
Hiding the wipers or lights or temperature controls deep in menus is a flippin' disaster.
Hyundai has about the right balance from what I have seen.
Yet the car comes with a device I also need to take my eyes off the road and poke around at.
It's illegal to use your cellphone while driving in many areas --- so they built a cellphone UI into the car --- which is every bit as distracting and dangerous to use while driving.
Owner of a '23 Ioniq 5 here. Hyundai has struck a balance, but not quite the right balance. There are physical buttons, but they don't control the climate or seat warmers. In fact, one of my few annoyances with this car is when I use the physical volume button, my finger often brushes up against the capacitive "climate" button area, hence flipping on the heat when I just wanted to turn the podcast down.
Now, there are the usual physical controls like wiper and turn signals, but that's not because Hyundai are paragons of control design, but rather because they're not idiots. And the complaints above are not that big a deal, as the "buttons" are right at hand. But with just a minor tweak or two, they could have done much better. And, as other commenters point out, it could be much, much worse.
But it certainly could be better.
Most Hyundai's I've seen have a physical button for the seat warmers and a nice 1 knob control for automated climate. Just turn to the temperature you want and the car handles whatever is needed to get you there. It don't get any simpler.
The issues are similar to tying the seat warmers into that single control.
Absolutely. I shall henceforth refer to this as the Kmoser UX Test: Can the clock be set intuitively?
My dad (65yo) just bought a new car with a mediocre central display. It makes me super uneasy to see him drive. The man used to slap me over my wrist for looking at my phone while driving. Now it takes him 1+ seconds JUST TO adjust his eye sight to be able to while switching from the road to the display and back! Then he has to navigate the touch menus...
I am really worried he is going to hurt himself or someone in 10 years time he will likely own this car.
If VW produced a 90s style interior today, would anyone buy it? Yes it would be more usable and safer , but it wouldn’t sell.
Cars suffer from a few issues. The biggest one is regulatory . It’s prohibitive for any manufacturer to break from the trend. A 1990s-style vehicle would be illegal today because of DOT & EPA mandates. And auto makers try to employ re-usable components that are DOT certified.
https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/Akg2QO/s1/2025-volvo-ex30-...
All I wanted was an electric version of the V90 wagon. Instead, Volvo wants to sell us space-cars ... Tron-mobiles ... eInitiative iCars.
Since a model generation is something like five years long, it's going to be a while.
The dealer was absolutely disconnected from his product offerings, and ultimately I left frustrated. The "Inflation Reduction" Act revoked their rebate, which had me balk at Volvo's pricing. Thankfully, I did not purchase a Recharge Hybrid Volvo (they changed mid-year, as did their infotainment provider).
Ultimately, I walked out of WallyWorld with their $24.00 entry-level unit — because it has physical knob controls. Not a digital circuit in sight, and when I need tendies crisped [chef's kiss] PERFECTO. It even has a real bell which [dings].
Brilliantly thought out car imo.
Display in the middle physicall buttons and knobs to control the interface.
Note, this is not an excuse or justification for touchscreen-only interfaces, but my personal feelings towards the matter.
I have two Teslas and I have never found the touchscreen to be a problem when the "automatic" setting is GOOD. For example, I almost never touch the AC. I set it to the temperature I like and it keeps me comfortable during the entire ride.
However, when things like the automatic windshield wipers are bad (and they constantly fluctuate between disastrous and good enough between software updates), I get really frustrated because I have to tinker with the bullshit screen too much.
Personally, I think the end game is minimalist physical buttons (some multipurpose) + software that is actually good enough to not interact with the touchscreen very often. Most companies that aren't Tesla really struggle on the latter portion.4
After having these 2 cars for a couple of years, I find most cars extremely cluttered and almost claustrophobic. I really like how clean and simple the Tesla interior is. I hope we don't overcorrect back into the 2010s and even 80s style of "put a button right in front for EVERYTHING." But I do think there's a ton of room for healthy middle ground.
When I am driving 85mph obviously I don't want to have to look over at a screen to adjust windshield wiper settings.
One day, ideally most of this stuff is handled automatically or through a simple interface like voice. Stuff like window controls should always exist, but things like windshield wipers or speed should ideally be automated one day.
What does this mean?
Progress means making it better, degradation means making it worse. It can't be both.
Too many industries seem to confuse "new" with "better".
New just means it is a recent change, it might be better or much worse.
New does not make something better. Better is better. Sometimes what is better is how it used to be.
For example, I am a PC gamer. I think mouse / keyboard is the best way to play many types of games.
But it impractical to have a M/KB on a phone.
So when I play a mobile game I wish I had a M/KB, but I am OK with sacrificing it because I have a portable form factor that was previously not possible.
The new Volvo CX30, for example, put a lot of very simple buttons in the center so they wouldn't need to manufacture a left side driver and right side driver model with completely different layouts. It's likely not as intuitive, but the reduction in manufacturing costs allows them to deliver EVs for cheaper.
This is the kind of idea I was trying to convey, but I admit it was confusing.
I would love to disable few things in UI (i.e. some minimalistic mode with speedo only) but it's fine.
What I do hate with climate is the stupid vents. I know many people hate when wind blows to their face, but I love it and it's impossible to get it right in mine. Even if you dial it down to be barely acceptable it seems to reset after each drive.
Controls are centralized, I have everything in one place which I greatly prefer. There are far less physical buttons that can break or wear out. Manufacturing is much simpler. Visually it's far less cluttered.
And no cars are going "touchscreen only." Even Tesla with its aggressive move towards less parts still has controls for windows, hazards, lights, etc.
Is it really progress if it's a degradation? And what's so awesome about minimalism that it's worth a worse UI? Just trying to understand the cost/benefit analysis here.
For vent control on a Tesla, you have to pull up a visualization and "drag" the airflow to where you want it to go. Kinda silly compared to just moving your vent like in the old days.
But when I use it on that screen, I can adjust airflow for ALL of my passengers from one spot. I can change the airflow for multiple areas of the car, I can change heated/cooled seats, I can split the air, I can turn on biohazard mode, etc.
To contrast this, on my previous car, the physical "heated seats" button was in a different place for every single seat. So if my wife or kid left theirs on, it stayed on unless I reach across the car to turn it off or get out and go into the backseat.
I get that this is an extremely minor example, but I do think a combination of good centralized physical buttons and a well made UI can be a good combo.
Another small simple example I'm thinking of off the top of my head is sound balance. On my previous car to change fade/balance to avoid waking small children on a road trip, it was a physical button click and scrolling through menus to scroll an arbitrary number for left/right, then backing out, then doing the same for an arbitrary number for back/front. In a Tesla, I just pull up the visualization and click one time in one spot for exactly where I want the sound to be centered.
These little things add up and I think eventually someone will nail it.
Too bad the Arteon will be phased out and the ID7, which looks like a great car, will have the same buttons. At least the new Passat seems to get the haptic buttons again.
Many people are familiar with shifting knob but now companies are introducing switches (Tesla takes it up notch in their latest cyber truck, they are putting drive switches below rear view mirror) I would prefer for critical activities like wiper, heater where I can rely on muscle memory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbPHp6QfkQ
I had a mk7 and it is the best interior + UX I've seen in a car. Everything is as simple and ergonomic as possible. The volume adjustment is a knob, with soft rubber knurling and indents for feedback. It's not some awful feeling smooth afterthought that you see on certain Toyotas or Hondas. It's not a push button (beep beep beep beep) you find on old Pioneer stereos from the '90s. It's exactly what you want to adjust the volume. The AC is similar. Heated seats are a button with 3 LEDs indicating high/med/low. Everything just makes sense.
And then VW got cheap and greedy. The mk8 is almost the complete opposite of what the mk7 was.
Real buttons for window control, very easy to use and multi purpose knobs on steering wheels, very functional steering stalks, combined with great software, with great user interface, and good hardware to support it.
But for some reason German car makers that were inspired by it ended up with horrible haptic buttons everywhere.
Glad to see this trend is going in reverse.
I also use the siri shortcut to start climate control a few minutes before I leave the house.
I also didn't say I wanted a button for every function. But this is getting off into the weeds.
My aim was to say that "minimalism" can be applied in different ways. For example, minimalism in the number of features, or in the complexity of the overall system, or in the ease of operating it.
Well now you can’t have skip/back, because those _have_ to be left/right. Meanwhile everyone’s phone vol-/+ is vertically oriented, up/down, so I’d argue that’s a folk default.
Here’s the thing: I don’t use the up/down buttons for everyday use. I’m guessing they work a menu. They are clearly an over-prioritized affordance. And I’m stuck with it until the lease is up.
I’ve done 40k miles in a model 3. The cabin temps are automatic to the temp I like. I never change it. It’s easy to pick the last few things I listened to from the touch screens. I can use Siri for other things (Bluetooth, no CarPlay)… buttons are overrated.
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678853
I want dumb TVs that I can control in my house. I want dumb screens that mirror my phones UX in my car. I want dumb pipes delivering my internet. I want control.
That said, I do agree outside of "infotainment" I want knobs and buttons for the actual car processes like A/C, windows, etc.
I'd be fine with that, since I wouldn't be using the "infotainment" stuff to begin with. But everything that I need to adjust while driving needs to be a physical control that I don't have to look at when I use it.
I tend to get confused when cars have too many buttons, console cluster areas and there are cars where, after years as a owner, I just couldn't find the alert button, the rear defogger or some of the other "quick-fire" buttons, such as the "resume" cruise position on the steering wheel right joystick on my wife's Kia. Yes, things buried deep in a menu can also be annoying. To me the best compromise is: give me a steering-wheel "mouse" so that I can at least hit a shortcut somewhere without lifting my hands off the steering wheel.
I recently watched this video: "NEW BYD Seal vs Tesla Model 3 vs VW ID.7" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-f9mLCxgrw
Shocked at how ugly the VW interface was, esp in their next flagship.
I will say this: I used to have the first gen VW CC. Loved that car, especially the physical "Jump" (that's how it was labeled) button that took you to the first radio station preset. So I got used to ordering my music stations by preference, so I could move through the list by the steering wheel arrows but go back directly to #1 whenever I wanted. Can't believe how much I miss that feature.
And bear in mind that this is the end product after VW spent billions on a sister spin-off company, Cariad, that would just focus on creating the best possible in-car software separate from their archaic car business. And this is what they got. Now they're gonna lay off thousands.
There's something with big German companies and consumer facing software that never manages to click no matter how much money they spend. If you have a broken design culture/process with terrible managers, it won't matter how much money you spend or how many people you lay off.
Whoever thought this was a good idea is an imbecile.
All these "software" driven systems seem cast in stone, lack flexibility to let users do the right things for them, and so back back back the pendulum swings until eventually the hype train turns things back around again.
Two points of reference come to mind. The well known-ish one, Steam and the Steam Deck. My gods, the flexibility steam has builtin for wiring up a controller to do whatever is godlike. I don't know how to speak even 1/4 justice to the powers here. It's the most flexible user facing software system on the planet, maybe short of Excel; there's so much capability on tap. I tried playing Jedi Academy recelty, an ancient game, and went & downloaded a bunch of shared profiles. On some of them there's like this gorgeous multimodal popover, press a button then swipe the joystick to pick a force power or weapon, which shows up in game as an overlay with actual graphic pictures someone baked in. The potential for man-machine symbiosis is parsecs afar of where most of the out-of-box(-is-all-you-get) unadjustable cloudware world has left us.
The other data point that keeps resonating for me is an old consumer-oriented iot system, Webinos. There was a bunch of car interest, where exposing all the HVAC and lighting and even realtime radar proximity sensors. The whole system was a user-sovereign API system, where user's had control over where data went & could talk to their cars securely/remotely. The system was a general iot system, but it was neat to see car people leaning in, a decade ago. It never closed the loop though, and layered in programmability to the builtin infotainment system, which feels like what we need now.
Its wild how we have all this software, but the interfaces are still all manufacturer provided. Most people don't, but on Android for example one can change their launcher which radically reshapes the whole experience. I think of that as a breeding ground, a permissive layer to sustain & keep staleness out with. Cars went all in on touchscreens, while caging users into very limited experiences. Ideally users would have hybrid flexibility, would be able to use some manufacturer presets that are touchscreen or physical centric (with both being available to some degree) and then to take the experience further. A static manufacturer defined system has to be simple & reliable first, and the modernization failed too many basic requirements (not remembering settings seems to be a big one in comments. Moved in to a new place recently with Lutron caseta everywhere & the dimmers have a little light showing brightness level... A "nice" affordances that an old old old dimmer switch had!). Not feeling at ends is what technology is failing to give us, and products keep suffering for our e-matter's severe lack of soft tweak ability; we keep taking the problem on in this sector or that & trying to find a balance, but the modern world lacks a software parallel of reconfigurability, is sort of pre-interchangeable-parts. The base of the pyramid to enable products constantly being unadaptable tech-nightmares is basically missing!
Now the tide has finally turned. Sigh.
There have been lots of complaints because there are no physical controls for things such as windshield wiper speed on some Tesla models. They just put out a software update in response to complaints about that, but people don't seem to like the "fix".
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/1305970/finall...
I test drove a Model S but ended up buying a RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid instead. The controls are much better on the RAV4. There are physical buttons for almost everything.
I'm confused by your concept that there are multiple levels -There isn't. There is the car page with 10 tabs, all with only top-level information and the default tab has steering wheel and mirror controls, both are set-it-and-forget-it with driver profiles.
The wipers suck, for sure. I honestly think they could fix that in a software update or at least make more intuitive controls. Currently the wipe speed menu pops up if you hit the wipe button. That said, zero of the settings in the car menu should ever be used while driving. The auto-headlights work well enough and it has a traditional stalk for that anyways.
Ten tabs? This sounds complicated.
On the VW the software is so bad it makes you want to scream in despair, and the buttons they do have are the worst of both worlds: unclear, unresponsive, no feedback, and invisible in the dark.
And the Model 3, etc... which, well... sorry, I won't drive one.
Yes, I know you can program buttons on the stalks and crap, but I'm the kind of person who has used emacs for 30 years with the stock keybindings, so...
My recollection is different. I recall there was always a significant sentiment against eliminating buttons and knobs in favor of a centralized touch screen.