Volkswagen Brings Back Physical Buttons

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486646

Requiring a driver to navigate a touchscreen while driving is a needless distraction. Bring back buttons and knobs, things you can feel without looking, things that don’t move with every app refresh.

Now if only VW would resume bringing small cars to North America. I’ve owned a few VWs, I liked them, but I don’t want a big car, much less an ugh truck, but that seems all they offer any more. I suppose the market has spoken.

The aviation industry has spent decades researching cockpit design, running simulator studies, and learning from accidents. They still use physical buttons for critical controls. If touchscreen-everything was safer or better, they’d have adopted it by now. The main reasons cars are removing buttons are cost savings and aesthetics—not driver safety.

Could still advance on physical buttons though. Have a huge touchscreen- and the buttons just drive on it via magnets- having little displays on them. That way, a set can be fixed function- and others can migrate with the purpose.

This is excellent. I hope the market rewards them. Do manual transmissions next.

This is also a minor thing, but I also long for galvometer-based speedometers and tachometers. They're charming. You can keep the screens in the cluster, but just give me a mechanical dial and show me the engine RPM at all times even if it's a PHEV.

I’m all for bringing buttons back, but do we really need that many buttons on a steering wheel?

Tesla should take inspiration from this and at least bring back the physical gear shifter and the turn signal stalks.

Be careful what you wish for everyone. My Toyota Wish (no pun intended) has an absolute cluster of a button cluster (pun intended) for air controls. To change where the air comes out, you have to repeatedly push the same button and watch the LCD to see what you get. There's a button for windscreen defogging but it ramps up the fan slowly over about 10s or so so you end up trying to set it manually instead which means the same repeat pressing and watching the LCD. If the fan is off but warm air is wafting in the vents, you have to press "auto", turn the temperature knob down to minimum, then press "off". Nearly every action requires looking for visual feedback on the stupid LCD screen.

Too many vehicle manufacturers removed buttons to copy Tesla without thinking about why Tesla did it in the first place. Tesla removed those buttons because they were aiming for a low-cost driverless future with full self driving and automatic updates that change the feel of the car. If you put those features in a VW that doesn't regularly update and doesn't have consumer self driving program (at least yet) it doesn't really make sense.

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Good, smart, and so needed. That said, I'm not forgiving them for the diesel emissions scandal.