Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.

Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.

We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.

“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone.”

  • pfr@lemmy.sdf.org
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    12 hours ago

    I dare say that that part of the reason behind this decision is that they are also required to meet safety standards.

    • Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      No it’s the only reason they are coming back, if they cared they wouldn’t have got ridden of the buttons in the first place

    • bluGill@fedia.io
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      11 hours ago

      They have been publicly moving in this direction for a few years. They cynical play is they pushed the new safety standards because they are ready and want to cause their competition problems as they are forced to rush buttons back (who knows, but it wouldn’t surprise me)