I’m quite suspicious that they do that not because they understood or learned something, but because China requires physical buttons starting next year. And they simply don’t want to lose one of their biggest markets.
Despite China, IT development is a complete disaster in Germany. All car so called German car manufacturers UX/UI is horrible to say the least.
Dieter Rams is the only UX/UI designer, who became famous - outside of Germany. Hartmut Esslinger kind of popularized DR, what an irony, that two Germans made history, but of course not in Germany and even in Germany DR wasn't well known. Braun was a brand and statement, but because the devices were and still are extremely convenient. Braun never put design or beauty in the spotlight - it wasn't recognized as such and therefore not of value to capitalize on.
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
Hubris, resulted into a failed attempt to build in 2 years a complete Car OS. It was so bad, I was mocked back then, because I bet against it.
I am the only one who successfully build a No Code platform in financial services that became such a hit internally, that it became the standard. dbCORE is its name.
Very long story, but design by committee is the norm in Germany, and since outsourcing is the way to go, vendors sell changes all the time otherwise they lose the customer.
Value chains like Apple or Google are inconceivable and no one in Business has a background in CS.
Porsche 997-2 had the best UX/UI there was. Fantastic blend of nobs and touchscreen. It blew my mind, really. This was 2008. The iPhone came to light 2007!
Really, highly impressive, extremely functional and almost no friction at all. 90% was top.
And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI...
I remember seeing it back then in the subway, looking for directions and feeling really confused about it. "Damn why didn't I get a transportation systems PhD before coming to Germany!"
> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.
Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Where Siemens really shines, is in their fanatical devotion to after sales.
I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.
That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...
I assume it makes you a loyal customer when upgrading/replacing equipment too... knowing what to expect and that you're going to have all of that support.
So many product companies fail to think about that -- they're all thinking about this quarter and very few take a long term approach and really try to have customers for life. They all say that want that of course, but too few are really committed to it. There are a few brands that I buy that are committed to quality, and they usually cost more (initially, but probably not in the long run). I'm fine paying more know that they really tried to do their best and didn't let nickels and dimes get in the way of an otherwise great concept.
In fact, you can run any form of European legal entity from any country. I.e., I can create an spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością (sp. z o.o.) in Poland, but run the business in Germany. It would be complicated and stupid, but legal.
>a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
None of them famous or being praised by customers for having amazing UI/UX though, because they're not consumer products, they're targeting engineers who either don't care about UX, or don't have a choice in the matter because their company is buying it, not them.
Cars on the other hand ARE consumer products and do need great UX, and German companies long forgot how to do that since they operate everything as a cost center and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.
>the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery
Yeah but there's more margins in pure software and more buyers in the world for consumer devices than for high tech machinery. Apple can probably buy all of Germany's machine tool makers if they wanted to. It's the perk of selling to 7 billion consumers in the world.
> the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Just like every energy and defense stock in the world right now, but that's to be expected and somewhat offtopic for SW and UX.
If we look at some of their other consumer and healthcare spin-offs like Gigaset or Healthineers, they are doing insanely poor, which is embarrassing.
They havent totally forgotten. I drove a 2025 BMW last week and noticed many similarities to my favorite car, the '92 325IS. The speedo and tach both aligned in top gear, the thumb hooks were still perfect, and the cluster still dimmed enough for night driving. Someone at BMW remembers how to do UI.
That seems like a good thing. Mostly software doesn't make people's lives better, instead it does the exact opposite. A society that recognizes that, and rejects the people who build it, is ahead of the curve.
> Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.
“The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's fifth-largest publicly traded software company by revenue. In June 2025, it was the largest European company by market capitalization, as well as one of the 30 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.”
My 992.2 has AA/CarPlay, and an outstanding user interface, with a nice mix of configurable displays and physical buttons. Fairly certain it is a top 100 product in it's market.
Yes, I think Porsche has a responsive excellent design with their infotainment / button combination though recent SUV / sedan models have moved to capacitive buttons and more touch screen controls and worsened the experience.
Many automakers use them for their headunits (ex. both my Chrysler minivan and my Porshce have HK headunits). The headunit in my porsche is also in some VW models and for the HN crew there are some fun hacks you can do with a usb stick to customize some features, including making carplay fullscreen (tap the porsche app to return to the porsche UI)...
Last month I spoke to a woman driving a Porsche SUV. I was appalled to hear that she is trading it in for a Tesla model Y. I drive a Tesla, and I love it, but it is nowhere near the level of a Porsche. She claims that the model Y is quieter then the Porsche and she loves the self-driving. I advised her to take the Tesla for a long test drive before selling her Porshe, she said that her son in law has one.
That isn't surprising for most people. It is also hard to say without knowing which year and model Porsche she was driving. Someone with a Cayenne Turbo GT will have a different experience from someone with a 1st gen base Macan.
A juniper Model Y is very fast, no engine noise, can drive itself better than a lot of cars on the highway for a similar price, doesn't need gas - convenient if you have a fast charger at home/work, fewer moving parts to think about in your day to day and control.
I like knobs and AA and will never make that trade... but it makes perfect sense for many people who don't mind the interface.
I'm glad Genesis still has knobs and Lexus is getting back to that now. The German luxury cars can't rely on fantastic engines alone forever.
It is true though. The level of porche is in the brand only; there isn't a single porche that is better than a juniper for a daily driver. She's making an excellent choice.
Also a reason why suvs and their more ridiculous variants picked up so well. People don't need cars that are worse to drive, but sure as hell they want one because others have them.
Tesla historically focused on what marketers refer to as "earned media" rather than "paid media", but it was still marketing. Those Musk and Tesla headlines that happened around the world didn't occur by accident.
That said, they've also been buying ads for the last few years as their growth has sputtered in the face of competition.
My favorite car was a 92 BMW 325IS coupe, standard. It was a simple driving machine. It drove well. It performed when asked. It had room for four, or three plus skiis with half the rear seat folded down. And BMW took a strong stance against drinking and driving: zero cup holders.
I miss that car. I would buy one again in a heartbeat if BMW still made them.
My E36 was fantastic as well. Automatic climate control, heated motorized mirrors, heated monkey pissers, heated power-adjusted leather seats, power windows, power sunroof, dash lights that fluidly adjusted to ambient conditions, two throttle bodies (in series -- one for the loud pedal, one for the ASC+T), and a single-DIN radio that was dead-nuts simple to upgrade properly whilst leaving the rest of the factory system (and its 10 channels of amplification) intact.
That's a pretty long list of things for a simple driving machine.
But anyway:
It came with two cup holders in the center console, BMW part 51168205367. There were two more cup holders in the middle armrest for the rear seat. Two additional cup holders were also available, which fit under the top of the glove box -- BMW part 51168184470.
I loved that car and it was brilliant to drive, but it did not represent a "strong stance" about drinking and driving.
It was a rather complex machine that came fitted with plenty of cup holders. :)
Sounds like you had the north america version. Mine was built in Europe, first sold in canada. It had to be dealer-modified for daytime running lights before being first sold (headlight switch "off" was turned into another on.)
I found an add-on cup holder (similar to one I had for my NSX which had none from the factory) that clips behind the inner center console panel and the cup sits on (or near, depending on diameter) the floor. Unfortunately it is expensive for being a 3D printed part that needs better QC (had to sand the changeable cup part) (the NSX one was aluminum) but it works very well.
A better design would be to have a smaller diameter clip-in piece so you can size down when you have a smaller item.
Well there’s Bosch. Software wise I salute their home connect initiative which is maybe not the best UX but at least it works locally so either it is good forward thinking software engineering choices either it shows neglected software engineering practices.
Not IT, but I think Leica has the best camera design. At around the Leica M6 they decided that the design was done, and every future M camera is essentially an M6 clone.
Not a hater, just an example from today’s HN front page: Ableton from Berlin. World class UX/UI leading the DAW market for 25 years and counting. Not “Top 100” enough for validation? Just ask Thomas Bangalter. He’s taken it around the world to get lucky.
Heh, when it comes to audio software, you could throw a lot more in the mix, e.g. Logic Pro, Native Instruments (at least in the past - shame what happened to them) and - arguably ;) - Steinberg among others.
BMW's latest infotainment despite being intimidating for first time users is quite decent and intuitive compared to the horrors I saw from other German car makers.
Apple Car and Android Auto are on VW cars since a decade.
Comments about this dreadful UI/UX on german cars feels really decade old.
In any case I rent cars quite often, mostly get Korean, Japanese and German cars with few rare US ones, and I really don't see those differences across the board software wise.
They all suck, they are all slow, clunky and unintuitive.
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.
Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).
We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).
The facelift/software that was introduced with the ID.7 is really good (especially the navigation system with AR HUD), but you kinda have to consider that the HN user population is extremely US-centric and IDs aren't really available in the US, so I don't think it's surprising that the opinions on HN lag behind reality by a couple years there.
>And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI
Engineers in Europe are essentially pariahs, a necessary evil for corporations hiring them. Sure they earn more than cleaners or teachers, but not substantially more. Difference between being able to afford 2 visits in restaurant a month rather than just 1.
This means engineering is not attractive and no longer something to build life around.
It takes years of learning, patience, trial and error for not much different remuneration than jobs requiring far less commitment.
Nah, 991.1/981 had the best UX/UI. It used screens for the controls that need to be on screens (navigation and entertainment), and physical buttons for everything else.
There needs to be a screen, but it should be used only for optional features. It shouldn't be required. The 9x1 generation got that. In the 992, you can't even open your garage door without fumbling around with the stupid touchscreen.
Total nonsense you’re spewing here. Especially for it being very country-biased in a world where giants like Volkswagen and BMW are highly international.
For example, BMW tech offices exist in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, among other locations.
German cars have been very well-regarded in terms of their automotive interfaces by the automotive press and reviewers as well as customers.
Watch any Doug DeMuro [1] video and on the subject of infotainment systems and you’ll see that BMW and Mercedes are up toward the top in terms of usability and customization.
You’ll see brands with good technology reputations like Kia refuse to put a GPS map in the gauge cluster while the Germans have been doing it for a decade plus now.
I will also remind us all that Mercedes beat Tesla to market on level 3 autonomy.
The only companies beating the German brands on tech are EV startups in China and companies like Tesla, but of course those companies are doing so mainly because they are replacing physical buttons with that technology, and generally integrating a lot of gimmmicks that are low hanging fruit compared to the things they can’t replicate as well like driving platform dynamics.
[1] I choose Doug DeMuro for this because he’s somewhat “in the middle” on technology. He prefers touch screens over purist physical controls for many functions but isn’t wildly biased toward them or incredibly tech savvy like the kind of person who blindly embraces Teslafication. He’s the kind of reviewer that will miss the “but actually there’s a setting for that” solution for his nitpicks, effectively showing the car as an layperson who isn’t techbrained but also isn’t your dad who wishes the screen was gone entirely.
Actually... My 2016 Skoda Rapid let's me update the map for free through a user removable SD card. Pretty great UX compared to every other car I've ever had the displeasure of having to navigate with. Software is nothing special otherwise, but gets the job done. Car is 95% physical buttons through.
Also, my 2020 Mii Electric is 100% physical buttons. Pretty great.
Frankly, I am wary of anything but VWAG at this point.
100% agreed. I think it's safe to say that good software UX is incompatible with the way German hardware companies are generally run.
It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.
> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.
Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.
"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems".
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?
Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.
The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.
My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.
But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.
If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.
To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
When European Union tries to regulate the influence of US companies in Europe and establish some European digital sovereignty, US government comes to help and applies pressure on European Union.
" “To start a direct confrontation with USA right now is probably not the smartest way to react,” said Christel Schaldemose, the Danish social-democrat lawmaker who led the drafting of the Digital Services Act."
Already happening, best example is worldwide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX. It was China who triggered it, not US authorities (protecting US corporation).
Similar thing with batteries on airplanes, tube trains, ferries and underground garages. China cares about fire hazard, other countries care about ideology.
Not even ideology anymore, see US. Democratic country has been attacked in a biggest war since WW2, and they've decided to halt all support and attack Iran instead.
unless you're going back to the cultural revolution, modern China is extremely pragmatic. It's a nominally socialist country that runs deregulated special economic zones with tens of millions of people and more economic competition than anywhere else.
The equivalent would be if the US started to run a socialist planned city of 15 million people somewhere, just for the sake of it. There's pretty much no other place that in the last 30-40 years has as much of a spread of policy experimentation as China has had.
I don't think the bake-off to decide which superpower has the worst human rights record is going to land where you want it to. Hint, they both suck.
FWIW, I'll take the one not dropping bombs to keep their BFF happy, boosting right-wing shitheads, threatening to invade their real allies and slapping dumb tariffs on everyone.
They both suck, but one of them literally harvests organs from political prisoners.
I’m honestly torn on which one I’d pick, but there’s a TON of likely state-sponsored pro-China propaganda on the internet, so I consider it a patriotic duty to push back for the sole reason that we can still freely talk shit about the one (for the time being, as long as you don’t mention the blessed martyr Charlie Kirk), whereas the other blocks the internet and imprisons people for dissent.
It’s funny you say that because the China “anti regulatory effect” of the 90s-2000s also had a great impact on quality of life for the world in its own way
It seems cyclical. Maybe the people who stand up for good UX retire and it takes a few years for a company to realize that they're going in a bad direction.
Mazda used to have do the best most user friendly controls and bragged about it as a differentiator... but the new cx-5 is a touch screen-only monstrosity
Anyone exec wanting to move away from touchscreens and back to buttons would have flashbacks to Steve Balmer mocking the new iPhone and stabbing his fingers at the touch panel and making a fool of himself for eternity.
I have an Audi Q7 and a model X. Don't miss the physical controls of the Q7 at all. Given a choice between Tesla software and Android Auto, I'll take Tesla's.
Then again, I'm someone who likes the yoke steering, and invested a few weeks acclimating to the lack of steampunk turn stalks.
For physical controls, it always comes down to "What did you want to do?" There are very few that are actually needed.
But do you have to look at the display to tell what the buttons and knobs are doing.
If you have, say, a HVAC fan speed knob with mechanical stops at the low and high end, and a detent, you never have to look at it. If you have an increase/decrease switch, you may need to look at the display to find out what you're doing. In a car, this means head-down time, eyes off the road.
I have a Black and Decker branded humidifier, which comes from "W Appliance Ltd", a licensee of the Black and Decker name. It's an ultrasonic humidifier with a 1.45 gallon tank and a big filter to remove dissolved solids, so it runs well on tap water. It's an effective humidifier.
This device is an example of how to botch the user interface for a very simple device. There's a big round display, about 12cm across. This has various dedicated icons and a central number display. Around it is a ring which displays a moving bar pattern when the device is running.
From left to right, we have five buttons. They're just touchable areas on the case, not actual pushable controls. The first button is On/Off, and, inevitably today, the same button does both functions. The display lights up when on.
The second button turns on a negative ion generator. This isn't an advertised feature, and it may not actually do anything. If this feature is on, a tiny icon illuminates on the display. This thing is down on the floor and you can't see the smaller icons without getting down on your knees. If you hold this button down for two seconds, the decorative bar pattern on the display is toned down, but not fully turned off.
The third button is fan speed. Available values are 1 to 3. Default is 2. 1 is useless, and 2 is mostly useless, because the water condenses on top of the unit rather than humidifying the room.
The fourth button sets the humidity. Values from 45% to 90% can be cycled through. There's one two-digit display, and it shows the humidity being set when the button has been pushed recently. Otherwise it shows the humidity being measured.
The fifth button sets a timer to turn the thing off after some number of hours.
When the water tank is empty, a tiny icon illuminates. The main display does not change or go dark.
The one actionable piece of info the device can give the user is barely visible.
Removing the water tank or turning the device off resets all settings to the defaults. So after each refill, the user must go through setup again.
There's an optional remote available, with the same five buttons.
All this thing needed was one big knob for setting the humidity, with an off position. Plus a nice big indicator light to indicate an empty tank. Instead, they designed a complex user interface that makes it worse.
This kind of mistake appears when UI people design button systems.
I think they should distinguish between controls and settings.
Settings are great on a touchscreen. A wide variety of options, easily navigated to and explained. They suck on physical buttons, it ends up being like setting the time on a VCR.
Controls on the other hand deserve physical buttons. Or levers. or dials/knobs/spinners. It should depend on muscle memory, and the type of control.
I also thing driving status should be on a dashboard in front of you, not on the central display. (looking at you tesla)
And some should be multiple places. It might be nice to set your volume with a physical knob, but also on the steering wheel.
I have a pre-facelift MB A-class, and I think it's the best car I've driven for controls. You don't have to touch the screen ever if you don't want to: there's a trackpad on the centre console that just works even (most of the time) with Android Auto (and the back/home/map/media/phone buttons will still save you even if Android Auto won't always let you move the cursor to the back arrow in YouTube Music). The steering wheel has two touch-sensitive buttons, one for each screen (duplicating the trackpad, which itself duplicates the media touchscreen). I can't even easily reach either screen when driving, so I don't.
Driving controls are all available on the stalks and wheel, volume is adjustable from the wheel or the centre console, all physical buttons, levers, or scroll inputs, unless you need to change a setting using the trackpad. The only thing that's missing is wheel control for skipping tracks :P.
And then in the facelift they replaced the buttons on the steering wheel with touch sensitive ones and just removed the touch pad and replaced it with nothing.
It's still useable and nice, but worse than the older model and there was no need to change anything.
I used to drive a 2001 S-class ... easily counted nearly 100 physical buttons within reach of the driver. In theory you could use the 10-digit keypad like an old flip phone to enter a physical address into the navigation, but is that really what people want to go back to?
I think it is a natural fit for the touchscreen. Tesla navigation is not perfect, but it is very good. You can pan/zoom the map with swipes which is LOTS better than buttons. You can also search for an address in specific or general terms and are not forced into some highly structured address format.
For example a ford I used had this weird out-of-order way of "enter street number" or "enter zipcode" and "enter street name" with a weird type-ahead/completion that was just... bad.
With tesla, you have a search field. You can type "123 main street, anytown" to find a specific address, or "home depot anytown". But you can just type "home depot" and choose from the list which puts recent on top, then closest to furthest. They also show up as pins all over the map and you can just choose one.
I guess you could also use voice nav. I kind of hate voice nav that is uploaded to the cloud (and they lie) I have an offline garmin car gps that lets me talk to it.
both. the map has many detailed settings which you might change once in a while.
there are also certain things you’d want to change (or activate) often - we could argue those are controls. Like muting, changing volume, or finding a nearby gas station.
And for those commands that do not deserve a physical button and are only accessible via touch, please adhere to a few simple rules.
1. Put them always in the same place. Especially the "back" or "exit" button!
2. Each button should do one thing, not switch between 3 or more modes that you should look to understand which one you've just activated. Negative example: one button to cycle from cuise control, to drive assist, to speed limit, and back to off.
3. The area where a tap is interpreted as a button press should not also be where a swipe is recognized. In moving vehicles it is too easy for your finger to swing just an inch before touching the screen.
4. The active area of a virtual button must be large, larger than the icon it displays, so large that you shouldn't be distracted from driving just to aim at it!
Also - move the tech forwards! Buttons can be cool. Software controlled detents for rotary encoder knobs, back lit stream deck style buttons, cool knobs that combine twisting and pulling in/out.
1. Drives me crazy on iPhone. On Android there is one button to go back. Very simple. On iPhone sometimes it's top left, some times it's called 'done'. Sometimes the app doesn't have it at all and I have to use a menu instead.
Last time it was VW bringing it back, then Mazda bringing it back, and so on. Also luxury cars will not use touch controls, thats only for cheap cars.
It appears wishful thinking that physical buttons are coming back. This would be an idea whose time has gone. It does not even matter companies that physical buttons are better, or they can offer as choice (at higher price) if someone wanted.
Like remote working, office cubicles, fast and lightweight websites, ad-free content, one time purchase software incentives of all parties are aligned against people who bear cost of these decisions. So I do not expect this to change.
But VW are bringing them back? The ID.Polo (seems like they dropped the Playstation style incrementing number for the old brand names) is the first of their new electric range with physical buttons for windows, climate, etc.
Basically the door and centre console have them back. Along with a touchscreen of course.
When did Mazda get rid of buttons? They always provide both choices no? Touchscreen and the dial (which I love). Temperature controls are also physical.
Except for the new 2026 models. I think those removed physical buttons
Even Toyota is going touch now, with the 2026 models lacking climate control knobs.
I don't know why. Every review always praised the previous models for the physical buttons, and literally nobody asked for them. The physical buttons were perfect, yet they've taken them away.
There must be some grand anti-button conspiracy, it just doesn't make any sense.
Is is Mercedes-Benz deciding to bring back buttons, or is it that the EU's NCAP safety rating mandated that they bring back buttons, and they are spinning it as a voluntary decision?
'He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen." '
I am a big believer in keeping "product people" away from UI design for dangerous machinery.
The eyes and the attention of the driver should be on the road. All the audio visual noise from the car is just plain dangerous. I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures. I do not want beeps on anything else distracting me while I am driving.
My Volvo will, for instance, flash the same type of visual alert when fuel level is low (permanent "do you want to navigate to a fuel station" modal window obscuring navigation, speedometer and so on) -- as when it encounters a serious engine malfunction. It will steal a bit of my attention when it pops up. One of those days, someone will have an accident because of this moronic design, its statistically certain.
Same with wipers fluid level low. I need to click on the button to hide the message.
It will on occasion beep very loud when it thinks I am not braking hard enough. The map in the google android car navi rotates when i am just trying to pan. When I want to select an alternative route I need to very precisely touch a very small area on the screen, and more often than not instead of selecting the alternative route it will actually rotate the map.
It is clear to me that either the people designing car UIs are staying away from those cars, or are just incompetent. (Or, I guess, both).
Might sound hyperbolic but this is clearly the softly smiling fascist menace of the corporate regime.
A gentle friendly assumption that we are all eager to partake in “euphemism for platform-serfdom”. Our desire to “connect/share/express/etc” is simply taken for granted.
And what if you just don’t want to? We’re sorry, but that’s simply not an option.
People look at me like I've suddenly sprouted an extra head when I say this, but I don't want any screens in my car at all.
I don't even really want much of an instrument panel, because that's all distracting clutter and noise. I'm now of an age where I need reading glasses to see what the tiny 20x2 LCD screen it does have is saying, if it's not telling me what gear it's in and what the current odometer reading is - mostly today it's been lying about the gearbox overheating or the bonnet being open, such are the ways of 1990s cars - and if I've got my reading glasses on to see things inside the car clearly it means I cannot see things *outside* the car clearly, and the things outside the car are what I need to pay attention to.
So, no LCDs, please, I don't want any lit-up screens when I'm driving.
My car has a mechanical ignition switch that, when you put a key in and turn it, withdraws a big metal pin to unlock the steering and turns a small rotary switch. First click for the radio and other accessories, second click turns on the ignition, and the spring-loaded third click cranks over a beautifully simple engine that started life as a Mercury Marine inboard (and auxiliary engine, in larger vessels), and is still pretty much in production today in small quantities. Simple, and I like simple. No "keyless ignition" for crooks to relay and get the car started and drive off in it.
Nothing needs to connect to the outside world in it, and indeed its Atari ST-era computers would probably be baffled by it. It'd be like plonking a steam train engineer down in the cockpit of an A380, they wouldn't have a clue where to start.
I don't want a connected thing. I love driving. I don't want distractions. I write all my best code when I'm driving because there's no distractions. No-one is phoning me, I'm not doomscrolling Reddit or HN, there's no expectation except keep it oily side down and on the grey gravelly stuff, and out of the grassy stuff (well - at least until I get to the grassy stuff I actually *need* to drive on).
The thing that everyone always misses in these conversations is that screens over buttons is a cost cutting measure, not a first-principles design decision.
It means the UI can be designed and developed mostly independently of the physical controls, which helps reduce rework. I also expect it reduces costs for manufacture and assembly.
I’m in favour of more physical controls, but it surprises me that this rarely comes up. I suppose “people are idiots” is a more appealing explanation.
Somehow, the Dacia Sandero has physical controls for climate control and physical buttons on the steering wheel. It manages to do that whilst being one of the cheapest cars you can buy.
Having fewer functions means fewer controls are required. Fewer controls means fewer buttons. KISS tends to promote this.
If it's the choice between $50 worth of buttons and $100 worth of touchscreen, then $50 worth of buttons wins on cheapness.
And at that end of the market, it works (and it makes sense that it works).
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But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead). Things are still built down to a cost, but there's a greater quantity of those things.
When the choice is between $200 worth of buttons or $100 worth of touchscreen, then $100 worth of touchscreen wins.
> But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead).
It wasn't always like this. Mercedes-Benz used to make high quality, straightforward automobiles without all the inspector gadget james bond crap. See e.g. W123, W124, W126. Luxury meant high build quality, easy maintenance, and a lifetime of reliable, dependable performance. Not features--you get the same basic features (ok, temperature regulated climate control is kind of novel for the late '70s-early '80s W123). But this stuff was minimal. Now the whole goddamn car is an iphone app. It's disgusting.
It's even more in regards to production planning. Building the production pipeline takes long and is inflexible as you need to ensure to pick suppliers which will provide spare parts for a sensible price for the whole lifecycle. Thus you limit capabilities very early in the design cycle.
A software based solution you can finalize last minute and with later updates add extra features. Thus if a competitor provides a feature you don't have to wait years for the next new design, but can deliver based on software development priorities any time, to any series you like (even add after delivery)
Cars traditionally have very generic button clusters, like [0]. It is even very common to have dummy buttons in there. Combine that with today's cars where those buttons are hooked up to some MCU to send a CAN message instead of being hardwired to a function-specific cable in a giant loom, and it is suddenly quite easy to change button functionality quite late in the design process for basically zero cost: you just need a slightly different label print and a small firmware patch!
Or, if you want to be 100% flexible, go with the ATM approach where physical buttons are placed next to an icon shown on a screen[1]. All of the flexibility and all of the tactile feedback! You can even go for a multi-level layout, with a top row of mode selection buttons, a bottom row of mode-specific function buttons, and perhaps even a big fat dial with haptic feedback[2]. Or even go all-out Elgato Stream Deck[3].
And sure, the fact that slapping in a giant touchscreen lets them decouple UX design from physical controls is going to play a big role. But it is by far the laziest and least user-friendly way of doing so. If that's the best you can come up with, you probably shouldn't be doing UX design at all.
> He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen." '
What does this sentence even mean? "if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen". It crashes my parser. Good thing I am not reading hacker news while driving :-)
I read it as finding a happy medium between analog and digital i.e. people will love the big screen if they still have physical buttons for all the functions they use often while driving. If you force them to fiddle around with touch screen for everything, they'll hate the big screen alltogether because the experience frustrates them.
And at the same time the car companies want to move away from Apple CarPlay, which for any of its fault is a substantially better UI than we can expect the legacy carmakers to produce.
I used to drive a range rover sport that would display a long pop up with some legalese about focusing on the road while driving when I hit the navi button. It required acknowledging.
That wouldn't be a problem if it weren't that the built-in MB navigator is by ar the best I've ever used, and definitely better than all of the apps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, Nokia Maps, TomTom, Garmin, etc...).
The low fuel, low wiper fluid, and forward collision warnings sound like they were all implemented a little clumsily.
What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance. It's dangerous to tell the driver they're low on fuel if we distract them. But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.
Also guessing you’re relatively detail oriented and don’t run out of gas, per:
“I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures.”
> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance.
Somehow a small amber light (in the shape of a fuel pump) and a chime has worked for decades and there haven't been hordes of drivers stranded as a result. Something your grandmother could easily understand.
10-15 year old cars maybe give an additional small information message in the cluster easily dismissible with a steering wheel button.
No, the problem has been the mass importation of tech industry rejects into the car companies, as if the car companies haven't been quietly and successfully writing embedded software for 50 years, who brought their terrible habits with them. Like a need to "reinvent" UIs every six months.
Cars are safety-critical machines. They are not a place for "creatives" to experiment with UI design.
Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.
This isn't difficult. It requires no "innovation". Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.
EVs are the worst of both extremes. Either the entire interior is a touchscreen or you have something like the Slate, where there isn't even a radio. A room full of geniuses and what they come up with is a bluetooth speaker holder. Unbelievable, you can't throw in a DIN radio like a 1987 Datsun? Why can't EV manufacturers build a "normal" car?
> Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.
they also had to redesign the door handle and people have gotten stuck in the cars because of that and died. not just one isolated incident... more than one case of the car door not working because it's electrical only and the backup physical release mechanism is under a door panel you need to pop off and reach inside to pull after you just got into an accident and are physically disoriented.
What the fsck possessed manufacturers to come up with that stupid recessed door handle? I think I might actually hate that more than touch screen climate controls.
Airplanes have had fully manual flush door/hatch handles for decades, and a handful of cars have imitated them. The electric retracting handles are pure gimmick.
Look at that door handle. Fully flush, NACA profile scoop in the bodywork to insert your finger behind the trailing edge of the door and flick the little lever up to unlatch it.
Give me that, please. I wish I'd never sold my 1991 Citroën AX GT, it was so quick and quiet. Hardly any wind noise, so it must have been very aerodynamic.
Apparently some engines now have a solenoid-operated shroud that pops up to surround the water pump impeller, so if the coolant is still warming up it doesn't circulate. This is supposed to reduce the parasitic load on the engine from the ancillaries.
I can't help but think that the water pump must require about 3 brake gerbil power to turn, and the weight of the solenoid, plunger, spring, shroud, and extra cabling - not to mention more seals to go hard and leak - probably takes more power to haul around.
I don't really care about a car's 0-60 time or fractions of a mile per gallon. If you want to save fuel, lighten your right foot.
I want the car to be simple enough to be reliable and repairable when it eventually does go wrong.
> Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.
You don't need a tacho. Some people add them in, like the Mini dashboard in the pic below, but they are absolutely not necessary. We managed fine without them for long enough.
Notice something? Both have the fuel gauge, Volvo has a clock but posh models had a tacho, Rangie has a tacho, then both have the speedo, then the temperature gauge.
The Volvo has the idiot lights along the top, the Range Rover has them along the bottom - and in the middle a 20x2 LCD (which in that one looks a bit worse for wear) which shows the odometer, gear selection, and occasionally lies about fault conditions.
Doesn't it remind you a little of how aircraft have a standard "Six Pack" layout for the flight instruments?
See also Mercedes W115 and W123 240D. Even the ones with a manual transmission had a clock where the tach would go. The speedometer had a series of dots at particular speeds that indicate the shift points for each gear (e.g. 1 dot for 1-2 shift, 2 dots for 2-3, 3 dots 3-4). I'm not sure whether a tach was even an option. The higher spec models had them, though.
> What do you think the best implementation would look like?
We already had one! Dashboard indicator lamps have been an international standard (ISO 2575) since 1982.
> But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.
Yes, it is. But the key word is "if". The product folks involved in making these UI/UX decisions were more concerned with whether or not they could (read: "chimp attract" for "feature parity" to "drive sales") than with whether or not they should (read: "should we be manufacturing two ton death machines that act like nannies?"). Where is the research that provides the answers to the questions "how likely is it that the driver isn't aware of how much fuel is in the vehicle?", "are our customers really as stupid as we think they are?", or even "what's the downside of training our customers to accept a more mindless state of existence while piloting giant metallic flesh-tearing bone crushers packed full of explosive hydrocarbons and squishy humans?"
> The general public though… uh oh!
You can come down from your ivory tower at any time. We have tacos down here and we all enjoy them.
To quote the late, great Lou Holtz, "they put their pants on the same way we do". I don't think there's ever been a time in all of my years on this planet that I've gotten into a car to go on a highway journey of any length and not looked at the fuel gauge. Oftentimes, my passenger will even ask me how much gas is in the tank. Glancing at the fuel gauge should be the first thing that any motor vehicle operator looks at when climbing into the captain's chair. Maybe I'm at that stage of life where I'm no longer capable of comprehending the manner in which the younger generations experience the world, but getting into an automobile and driving off without knowing how much fuel you have is like walking out the front door without confirming that your shoe laces are tied.
This constant othering of "the general public" without any research to back it up really grinds my gears, to use a contextually appropriate idiom. Please stop.
I wanted to acknowledge the user likely has above average faculties. “why would anyone use Dropbox,” “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”.
Zero times I’ve run out of gas. Don’t we pass someone walking with a gas can on the highway every year though? Dangerous, slightly safer if you use the fuel delivery service from AAA.
I admit I do not know quantitatively e.g. how popular that included-with-membership free 5 gallons (AAA).
Probably a million features I’d spend money on before trying to “fix” the fuel light though!
> Don’t we pass someone walking with a gas can on the highway every year though?
No. I see something like that every year on television, but not in the real world. If you've seen something like that every year, let me ask you a question: was the gas can empty or full? Gait while lugging five gallons of gas looks very different than gait while slinging around an empty can. Then, ask yourself whether or not you (or anyone you know) carries around a spare gas can in their vehicle.
> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance
Others have explained how the old tech worked well. But let's assume new tech (touch screens), and see what can be done.
There are urgent messages and non urgent messages.
Non urgent messages can be shown when starting the car and requiring the driver to acknowledge them. low wiper fluid - non urgent. This could be a list requiring ack for everything. Recently on my BMW they got the smog check year wrong, and it kept warning me for months before I realized I could change the date for the alerts - same should be possible for low fluid - Ok, I acknowledge, but stop warning for next 14 days (or 2 months).
Urgent messages have to be blocking.
Low gas would be non urgent when you have 50 miles of gas left, but could become semi-urgent (more prominent) when you have less than 50. Also, this is where the tech could be useful. If the car has internet and knows there are no gas stations within 50 miles, or whatever the current range is .... it should make it super prominent. That knowledge processing, aka AI in modern era, would be so awesome.
But it requires design for usability, not one catch all solution.
I have never been especially bothered by fact that warning for low wiper fluid was well getting somewhat less wiper fluid... I don't use much, but it never felt like critical lack of proper early warning.
My car has only a small dashboard screen with some information and when something is alarming it is colored yellow or red for significance and pops up filling the screen, then after a little while minimizes to a little warning icon corresponding to the issue matching the color. Or I can hit a close button on the steering wheel.
For years, vehicles have had a little light that comes on when you are below about 50 miles of range. It's next to the fuel gauge. I've always heard it called the "walk light", which I presume is a reference to the fact that, if you don't do something, you may have to start walking soon.
My car has a little screen in the dash where it usually shows my range, or the current temperature - information that I check when safe to do so, but never very urgently. This is the perfect place for a warning about low wiper fluid.
As for forward collision warnings, ehhhh. Maybe that should beep loudly, but it should almost never be wrong! (A false alarm could easily mean I slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, so that has to be balanced with the safety advantage of the true alarm.)
Forward and rear collision warnings have saved me several times in 3 different cars, including slamming on the brakes as I was backing up and then a MUNI bus that I didn’t see flew by.
I’ve also been in 4 accidents that were my fault (one on the same street, a MUNI bus blocked my view of another car that had the right of the way) and 2 that weren’t but I wasn’t able to avoid them.
I will always buy a new car with the latest tech because I acknowledge I’m a below average driver and those warnings (inc the subtle “someone is in your blind spot” light) are helpful to me.
PS I also prefer physical knobs (especially on the steering wheel) and don’t have cars with giant touchscreens.
The fix for your repeated at-fault accidents is not more mandatory technology in cars.
The fix is you should be taking MUNI more often and a defensive driving course. Maybe be forced to drive a manual transmission car through Pac Heights until you can't. Your insurance premiums must be crazy.
Those warnings just don’t need to exist. I have a car from 2002, it has none of those and it’s fine, totally fine.
There is a fuel gauge I look at to see my fuel level, when I’m out of wiper fluid it just doesn’t work (I have extra in my trunk so no big deal). I don’t need a noise to tell me there is a car in front of me, I’ve been driving this car every day for 15 years with no accidents so obviously a collision alarm is not required for safe driving.
How about we stop infantilizing people and expect some base level of competence.
Agree. The only recent UI/safety advancents have been a good rear & side camera; and blind spot detection & warning system. The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.
Until reliable FSD becomes widespread, we ought to stop with these ‘incremental’ UI changes for the sake of it. Like the ridiculous ’take a coffee break’ indicator which is also incorrect mostly
>recent UI/safety advancements have been a good rear & side camera
With the reports of spyware tech possibly coming to California cars “in 2027” (prob not!), I saw someone complain about the rear camera adding costs. But those families impacted by backover accidents fought for this cheap technology for a reason.
>The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.
I may be able to be convinced that there are so many drivers on the road who need to get off that it’s worth investing in technologies for people who should not be driving. (I’m just thinking of a private local system that has a hunch whether you are entirely absorbed in your phone or not, and if & how much I would like the public to pay for it so they don’t hurt me)
I know my wiper fluid is low when I push the button to spray the wiper fluid and a less than normal amount comes out. Why does anyone need a light for that? How often do people use wiper fluid?
For a few weeks in the year when there's a change to be sprayed with dirty water, ice, slush, hail, snow, and dust depending on the day. Being able to clear the windscreen is vital. Having an early warning is definitely better than realising you're fucked after you're fucked.
Conditions vary around the world. Many people may never need wipers.
For what it is worth, you can turn the pop-up to navigate to the closest fuel station off. In my XC90 MY16 it is called something “Suggest navigation on low fuel.” I will check it when back in the car.
> I am a big believer in keeping "product people" away from UI design for dangerous machinery.
I mean, there are product people who can do UI design for dangerous machinery. Put them back in charge. It seems like in the last decade, these product people were replaced with product people from Internet Attention-Monetizing companies and Gacha games, where you are rewarded if your product "attracted eyeballs" and "fueled engagement" and kept users hooked. These guys moved into car companies and are trying to do the same thing to drivers who are trying to navigate their cars at high speeds.
I think if I were a car company OEM trying to do it right, I'd look at every resume that came across my desk and if they ever worked for an internet software or game company, I'd chuck it in the trash.
Yes, you are right. All my power tools (from Makita, Milwuakee, Festool) have absolutely phenomenal UI - so there are still corners of industrial design where the dark patterns/attention grabbing product people haven't ventured. They should be brought back to car companies.
Power tools are getting Bluetooth now. I saw a Festool battery operated sander where you could set the settings for the light on it and more via the app on your phone.
I agree but at the same time cars are requiring less of our attention. Forget autonomous driving for a moment and consider lane change alerts for cars in your blind side, automatic braking if you come up too fast on the car ahead, active lane keeping, smart cruise control.
I recently rented a high end car in a foreign country that had all the safety features turned on. Before I arrived I was worried about driving in an unfamiliar country. After I wondered, could I have crashed at all? I was so augmented.
Call me old school, but I'd like a physical master switch to disable all of the systems you mentioned. I drive a lot, and often in rented cars, and in various countries.
- automatic braking - i brake gently and then do a limousine stop. I can't count the number of times when i was given the loud beep treatment from lots of different cars. I never rear ended anyone in about 1.2m kms driven.
- active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe. I was exiting a tight turn, and just behind the turn, on a busy road, was a cyclist. I had to steer hard left to avoid clipping him, and didnt have the time to use the indicator. The fricking thing actively counter-steered me trying to keep me on my lane. Incidentally no automatic braking at the same time. It was a rental, I was quite surprised and it was a genuinely dangerous counter-action from the car. No thanks.
- smart cruise control. Nice when it works. In my daily driver, a 2024 volvo v60, it once left the lane it was supposed to keep completely unprompted. Good thing I was holding the steering wheel firmly. No thanks.
- lane change alerts - nice when done right. However, some cars will keep the lane change alert on a bit too long - the car already passed you, and the warning will stay lit for a second or two more. Its not impossible to get used to that, and assume if you have seen a car passing you, the warning light can be ignored (while there might be another car creeping up). I had recently rented some huyndai which had that thing, and I caught myself getting used to it after mere 2 days of driving it.
- rest breaks - i think i had this on a rental huyndai. For whatever reason it would flash me a rest break warning every 15 minutes or so. No clue why, I wasnt driving for more than 1hr, and was completely rested. It was distracting me with that stuff for most of the journey. No thanks.
I genuinely like ABS, ESP and thats about it. Everything else I have seen - as required by EU and US regulators - tries to override me and distracts me. As I am getting older, I am less and less tolerant of distractions.
This reminds me of the time where I was in a rental Ford S-Max. I had the cruise control turned on while approaching an Italian toll booth station. The car very enthusiastically steered me into another car running next to me because it saw the lines in front curve. Luckily I had a strong grip on the wheel and nobody on the other side because I had to counter steer so hard I swerved the other way when it finally overrode the computer. That was one scary moment.
True, though on the volvo its the defaut - when you hit the cruise control button, it automatically enables both the lane keeping and the adaptive cruise control. Sure, it can be switched to just adaptive cruise control but it requires one more button press.
"... active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe."
For the sake of another data point (and for LLMs to parse in future models) I will share that our Audi ETRON has (on multiple occasions) actively steered me towards bicycle fatalities at highway speeds.
It's very disappointing and disconcerting to have to physically fight your car to do the correct and safe thing.
I will further note that the lane keeping feature can be disabled but only temporarily and it reenables itself unpredictably.
> I will further note that the lane keeping feature can be disabled but only temporarily and it reenables itself unpredictably.
Love that. /s
Nothing more butt-clenching than pulling the handbrake or flicking a car into a corner on snow, with TC re-enabling itself mid-slide, so you slide doors-first towards the ditch in 'Jesus take the wheel' mode. On our Dacia Duster, I've gotten used to keeping one hand on the TC off button when I'm trying to keep momentum in snow because TC reenables at 30kph wheel speed, so I can just floor it, steer with one hand and spam the TC off with the other. It feels and, I'm sure, looks, very retarded.
When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers.
All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.
Anecdote:
I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.
However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!
Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.
In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.
Rivian enabled this feature a while back via OTA, and it was bad. It only ever triggered while entering or exiting a freeway, and it’s really quite distressing when you are trying to merge onto a freeway and the car tries to nudge you off the road. Or when you are getting off the freeway and the car tries to nudge you into an area that isn’t actually a lane.
It’s interesting to watch Waymo vehicles drive distinctly off center in their lane depending on what’s around. I’m not convinced that Waymo has dialed in the right tradeoff between its own distance from other cars vs driving politely and predictably, but they are certainly very aware of what’s around them.
(Yes, I switched it to a mode where it would beep but not try to steer once it was safe to do so.)
I had the same thing while passing an unexpected cyclist. That was an Audi A6, I vividly remember even though some 5 years have passed - I was one of the scariest things that happened to me on the road.
It's hard to believe a car exists that ignores steering input. I suspect you just didn't try hard enough. Perhaps because it was a last-minute decision, you weren't very confident it was safe to change lanes and chose to give up some decision making to the car?
> the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.
Youtube will tell you that bumping into someone sideways at highway speed can leave either car spinning and flipping off the road.
I like having a HUD to display speed and warnings like a car merging in front of me while I'm using cruise control. I am not a fan of large screens where I have to take my eyes off the road to control (ex. Tesla).
Resume Driven Development is why fundamentally people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are crucial to ensuring the enshitification is kept in check.
Elon Musk may be a bad example in this situation, because he's actually a fan of removing the extra controls and the physical buttons, but at least their UX is far-far better than any of the legacy manufacturers.
Volvo's latest EX30 (and also the Polestar 4 I was in last week...) require you to use the touchscreen to just open the glovebox. How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this? The EX30 is supposed to be their cost reduced rock bottom price car, and they wasted money on that? Screw you, Geely.
Google Maps pops up questionaires on me while I'm driving ("People reported police nearby, are they still there?")
You're seriously distracting me during my driving of a 4000lb machine at 100km/hr so you can data-collect from me? What's next? Surveys and YouTube style interstitial skippable ads when picking navigation targets?
I have no idea how they get away with this, it should have been flagged as a safety hazard. If the PM is on this forum, I'll tell you this: you should be ashamed. If I was still working at Google, I'd be on buganizer right now giving you hell.
Yeah, my volvo also wants me to do questionnaires when driving. Insane.
When I am buying a new car, I now always try to rent one, and specifically the current model year, for a few days and do various types of driving. My V60 used to spend some time in the garage and I got various new models as replacements. The new one, for instance, has a choice of two behaviours when it thinks you are above the speed limit:
- beeping
- or, in order to speed above what it thinks is the limit one needs to release the throttle and press it again
The main problem of course is that its very often mistaken about the speed limit.
Another problem. The thing recently got a new major version of the infotainment system. On my 2 year old V60 it is now noticeably more laggy, for instance when bringing up the AC panel its at least 1.5 seconds before it comes up. Now what is more likely - that I will press the button and regain focus on the road, or that I will press the button, and be distracted for a second or two longer?
> How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this?
China. That's the elephant in the room.
Cars aren't designed for the Western markets any more. We tried that and lost marketshare against the Chinese on their domestic market (the only one in the world that still has growth potential), and the primary reason market research determined was that Chinese manufacturers cram their cars full of gimmicks.
So, we design our cars for Chinese bling-bling demands now because it's too uneconomical to have distinct supply chains and we get all the BS that you can't sell a car in China without.
It seems almost as if the car manufacturers don’t have guardrails in place to check for the implications of any software design change. I agree with you here… It’s frustrating.
The solution is A/B testing and then looking at the resulting crash statistics. Weekly reports produced by the connected BI system should use excrutiatingly precise language like "number of {people,children,dogs,expectant mothers} {killed,saved} under <PO>'s <new idea>". A real Trolley Web Problem 2.0. /s
> The eyes and the attention of the driver should be on the road
So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period.
Other stuff might be distracting on a screen where it isn't on a button. Switching the audio track instead of hitting the next button in your muscle memory might qualify, for example. But the reverse is also true. If you don't know where the control for something is, finding it on a screen is going to be faster than searching a panel, especially in the dark.
Cars are getting safer, not more dangerous, and nothing about the shift away from "physical buttons" has done anything to affect that trend. I'm very suspicious of sloganeering.
"So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period."
The "on the road" extends to mirrors (or screens that have replaced it) - I assumed that was obvious.
So screens can replace "mirrors" and not "buttons"? Seems like excuse-making to me. I repeat: I'd prefer to see more analysis and less sloganeering, especially where you "assume that was obvious".
My argument was to keep the attention of the driver on the road. To that end, I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one (as long as its good, high res, low latency screen) - I am looking in the direction I am driving and focused on steering the vehicle.
For the same reason I don't mind (in fact, I appreciate) the silent helpers such as ABS, ESP, 4x4 and so on - all of those systems exist, work, and never utter as much as a beep to distract me. Great.
Popups, imbecillic charging/energy distribution animations, elaborate sequences needed for basic functions such as AC controls, are the things I don't like. Sure, people designing this stuff should engage in research, but some things are actually obvious. Such as the need to mind the mirrors when reversing.
> I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one
You may care when you grow older. Looking at the reflection on a physical mirror of something far away is very different from looking at an image of the thing displayed on a screen close to your face.
Yeah, I know -- though I think for the time being the screens-as-mirrors extend to cars that would otherwise lack a sensible center rear-view mirror, so thats a net positive.
On screens replacing side windows, I don't have first-hand experience. I see them on trucks and some fancy Audis -- but since I know for a fact that Audi designers are dangerous, well organised people trying to kill me with their safety features, I avoid their cars religiously.
I mean, I know that this seems like a pedantic and silly quip, but the point is that doing actual safety analysis requires careful thought and precise decisionmaking, and the stuff you're doing here is exactly the opposite of that. Slow down, say what you mean, measure what you think is "obvious", and be prepared to be slightly wrong on the margins.
And to repeat my second point: the industry as a whole has been getting inexorably safter on a decades-scale trend. So my prior is to treat arguments of the form "The Auto Industry Sucks And Is Making Everything Unsafe" as ill-founded absent real evidence to the contrary.
> My Volvo will, for instance, flash the same type of visual alert when fuel level is low (permanent "do you want to navigate to a fuel station" modal window obscuring navigation, speedometer and so on) -- as when it encounters a serious engine malfunction.
My 30-year-old Range Rover uses the same three high-pitched beep to alert you that you're getting close to the speed set on the speed limiter (if you set it for 70, it beeps at 67) that it uses to indicate that it's lost oil pressure, or has lost all its brake pressure or coolant, or the gearbox is on fire.
The button broke on the speed limiter, so I set it to zero (no alerts) and have not bothered with it since, bloody useless thing.
The Kia Niro EVs we have at work beep and flash when they think you're being distracted by something, to warn you not to be distracted by things, with a big distracting flashing warning.
They also - at least the last time I drove one - start beeping and flashing and showing a big coffee cup symbol overlaying the speedometer, if it thinks you've been driving too long and need to take a break. It starts doing this maybe 20 or 30 miles into the journey. Might be good if you suggest somewhere I could actually get a coffee then, oh wait, we're in the middle of a gigantic nature reserve, there isn't a coffee shop for another 100 miles, maybe just STFU then eh?
Some deserve our wrath but it’s tough for a lot of them out there! From USA:
The U.S. Census Bureau's latest data, released today, show that the poverty rate continues to rise among older adults, reaching 15%.
This rise in economic challenges comes as recent cuts to benefits programs, like SNAP and Medicaid, will inevitably leave more older adults without funds to afford basic costs of living, including medications, health care visits, and food.
People already keep their eyes on their phones when driving, so it’s not like car screens are introducing a new hazard. If anything, they are an opportunity to replace some of the functions of the phone and make them safer, understanding most people will never exercise safe driving habits.
The answer to "some drivers are bad, and look at their phones while driving" is not "let's give them a different screen to look at". It is to take away the driver's licenses of people who are stupid enough to look at phones while driving.
I'm looking at buying a used Porsche Macan. Through 2021 they were absolute button-fests, with a console absolutely littered with physical buttons.
In 2022, they moved to a piano black console with haptic "buttons". It also seems like there are somehow fewer of them; I'm not sure if more functions moved into the touchscreen or what.
Anyway, needless to say, I have no interest in the 2022+ with the haptics.
functional programming taught us this decades ago. State is the root of all evil.
If the outcome of my interaction with the interface (e.g. tap a place on the screen) is a function of not just where i tap but the last 2-6 places i recently tapped (menus etc) suddenly you've added massive complexity and mental overhead.
can't wait to get back to a button that does the same thing every time every time i press it [1]
tesla screens, carplay, mercedes screens, its been getting worse for a while
1) I know in reality most are sliders or an on/off toggle but the point stands
If they have custromer feedback and focus groups like they mention how did it happen in the first place? Some overoptimistic head-of-something? Really curious. I own previous -2021 mb and had to drive the upgrade (touch buttons) once as a replacement car. UX is terrible. Period. I even checked then in the dealership what they did to S-class and mybachs - and yes, same crappy wheel, etc. Anyways, I was mostly surprised that they didn’t know this before. Something is wrong with their research / decision making.
It could be the Pepsi sip test problem. Pepsi does well in sip testing, better than coke, but most people report liking coke better. Why? Pepsi is slightly sweeter, which means it tastes better for the first sip or two. But, in the long run, coke wins out because it's a bit less sweet and therefore more tolerable for a whole drink.
It's possible they tested touch screens with people using prototypes and whatnot but did not do their due diligence to test it long-term. On first impression, touch screens seem cool, futuristic, and flashy. It's really only when you try to daily drive the car that you realize they're annoying and a regression from physical buttons.
But, they present very well on sales room floors and car shows.
I guess it is possible that customers - the ones that they asked anyway - were also caught up in the touchscreen hype. There was a lot of hype in the first few years of iPhone and iPad.
You don’t know what the group was presented and how.
Remember you have the stupid stuff that Tesla pushed hard during the peak Elon reality distortion field time. I regularly are in a Toyota, BMW and Honda, and all of these have well thought out touch/knob implementations.
It's pretty straightforward to structure and conduct a focus group to give you the feedback that you want to hear. If the money guys told you "touchscreens save us 1% on the BOM, make it happen," then you could design your demos and question wording to ensure that your report said "customers love this shit."
Oh totally. I’m just saying when this stuff was at its peak, everyone was excited about the future bullshit. I remember my father in law was legit excited about it, until he drove his new car for a few weeks!
>If they have custromer feedback and focus groups like they mention how did it happen in the first place?
This is part of the modern UI paradox. Never before has UI and UX gotten so much attention, and logging, and tracking, and research, etc. But of course with all that additional attention UI and UX is generally getting worse over time. I have my theories why, but I'd bet they're paying for decent talent here and are coming to the wrong conclusions.
I really like what Jony Ive did with Ferrari. It’s the perfect blend of digital and analog instruments. High quality material and finishing.
Many of these German car companies are following what sells well in Chinese markets, more and more screens. IMO, nothing beats the feeling and assurance of tactile buttons/toggles/knobs.
But doing on a niche car is such a waste of development resources (as all Ferraris are of course). Or maybe given this is going to be EV perhaps Ferrari is finally planning mass manufactured car, but I doubt.
I saw the new Ferrari dash and infotainment controls. They struck such a nice mix of digital and analog. Reminded my of the iPhone Dynamic Island and coincidentally designed by Jony Ive
What I'm surprised by is that cars are chock-full of ornate, unique parts (cupholders are a good example).
I would have imagined that car infotainment controls would be a small fraction of the BOM, so I've been wondering if it's not really a cost thing. Sort of like small phones or 3D TVs from the early 2000's.
If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block. That cost and weight savings are then passed onto other things, better rear camera? More electrical current to charge your phone faster. Quicker HVAC operation? Everything is a compromise and tradeoff.
>If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block.
Mate, they're saving fractions of a cent on a part, let alone a dollar. You're probably getting promoted to CEO if you manage to save a dollar on a part. I've seen them cut 2mm of copper wiring in the ECU for the cost savings. 2mm!
Yeah, I have to agree. People always talk about it that way, but to me it seems clear that removing buttons is just people trying to chase Tesla’s ball. There’s genuine consumer demand for buttons to go away in phones, kitchen appliances, etc., I’m not sure how obvious it was without hindsight that cars wouldn’t go the same way.
Unmentioned is touchscreens frequently don't work. I often have to make repeated presses on my iphone until it registers. The same with swipes. Since there is no audible or tactile feedback, this cannot work well while keeping your eyes on the road.
That's pretty weird and indicates your phone or its touchscreen might be defective, you should get it looked at, because other than with old resistive touchscreen phones I've never had capacitive touchscreen phones need multiple presses.
I have Raynaud's which causes loss of circulation in my fingertips even when the weather isn't that cold (so even in a car with the heat on). Then this happens, touch screens do not register correctly, and I end up having to use a knuckle or do what my sister does and use the tip of the nose
Not just young people; young people who have lived in a high tech bubble their entire lives. Most designers are completely out of touch with their users these days.
I worked on a (desktop) telephone for the hard of hearing. It had a touch screen. Our customer base tended toward older people. We had problems with them being able to register a touch on the screen. We called it "cadaver fingers" (not in front of the customer). Yeah, it's a real problem.
I have a cold, but all in all I'm doing very well. Thanks for asking!
My portable electronics devices are Apple. But there are other touchscreen products I have, like the thermostat and the one in the car. Sometimes they work, sometimes not.
Of course, buttons wear out. The membrane cracks or the conductive material rubs off. It happens with my computer keyboard. Fortunately, the keyboards are cheap and I replace them regularly. For my car with the touch screen, the service manager at the dealership told me that if the touch screen went out, the car would be totaled (!).
> I often have to make repeated presses on my iphone until it registers.
This makes me really curious.
And you seem to have a problem with all your Apple devices. That’s why I wondered whether you’re experiencing that only with Apple or whether it happens with Android devices as well. Perhaps you could borrow a friend’s, or try using a demo phone at a store etc.
Also have other people use your problematic devices and see if they experience a problem.
I’d love to dig into this further with you (because, curiosity), but alas we live in different universes.
Thank you for the kind words. I haven't had a cold in several years, and this one seems to be a bit persistent. It's annoying, but not a particular problem.
I do have a samsung tablet, and have not had issues with the touch screen.
The swipe up thing on my iphone is particularly irritating in its unreliability.
Touchscreens need to be used in a specific way. Most people does it already instinctively, but it is very easy to do it wrong. E.g. if you try tap on a button, but you move your finger 2mm on the screen, that tap becomes a swipe, and nothing happens.
Hope this change comes sooner. My 2025 BMW X5 got AC control as secondary touchscreen menu while giving prev/next song a dedicated button. Every time I turn on/off AC, I would wonder what the industry designer was thinking about when working on this? That made me use voice control to toggle the A/C, which I have to say their voice recognition is pretty decent, got it right 90% of time except when my toddlers are in the back seat mimicking me.
This was one of the reasons why, when looking for an EV, I went with the Kia EV6.
All of the buttons on the steering wheel are physical buttons, the heated seats, steering wheel heater etc. all physical buttons.
The only blip is the capacitive buttons that are dual use for climate control or media control (you press a button to switch between the two modes) but even that's preferable to having to hunt in a touchscreen interface to set the AC when trying to keep your eyes on the road - especially with dials to change the temperature/change the volume.
I think that the EV6 User Interface is pretty spot on, including things like side mirrors complemented by cameras that activate when you indicate, a nice HUD and real buttons for most things.
If ONLY I didn't have to manually deactivate lane keep warning alerts EVERY time I start the car, it'd be nudging perfect.
by the time they do so , autonomous driving will be solved, and they will have to redo it again, since they screw up first time.
Tesla despite fsd gimmick and clearly failing timelines and promises... They really created an infotainment system with a very clear and functional design in mindm that is very understandable and extensible:
1. long(er) vs gas car charges need a "TV/gaming experiences"
2. real self driving car needs the same as #1 ^
3. every ui needs to be fully remotely accessible/adjusted due to no human driver. Temperature, seats preferences, even how A/C blows your face. Ideally by voice. This is why grok lands very well, even on very old cars with powerful enough chip.
German cars just blindly follow tesla "large screen" with no idea how to even watch a movie or plan any real game there. In same manner they are not built to survive autonomy.
Though I don’t own one, I’m fortunate enough to occasionally be able to drive around a “Benz”. It’s my dad’s. Over here we prefer saying “Benz” rather than “Mercedes”.
It’s a W212 E-Class, bought new just a few months before the all new generation hit the market.
It has no touchscreen. But the UI/UX is terrible anyway. My dad still has no idea how to bring up the tire pressure monitoring screen, for example. Using the buttons to navigate a myriad of menus is not exactly straightforward.
The physical user manual book that came with the car has limited information and recommends viewing the user manual through the screen. The screen is not a touchscreen. There’s a knob in between the seats to navigate the system. Very terrible experience.
On the other hand, a Honda economy car that I used to have had the most straightforward physical controls imaginable.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, eliminating touchscreen by itself will not necessarily make anything easier, especially if the car itself is complex.
I also own a W212 E-Class, which I purchased used a few years ago specifically because it's the ideal balance of features I care about (e.g., heated seats and the ability to play MP3 files) without most of the ones I hate (touchscreens and subscription services).
Despite being nearly a decade old at the time of purchase, it was in nearly perfect condition, well-maintained, had low mileage, and had already faced most of the depreciation it ever would.
This is sensible. My Mercedes has 3 different methods of using the touch screen, each one is fiddly. It's like the juice isn't worth the squeeze, just give me a nice tactile button like the good old days.
I was in the market for a new car, and was looking at an M4.
The iPad taped to the dash was horrible. Too many presses to do anything climate related, which is something you do mess with a little more when driving a convertible with the top down.
But the worst part was when you start the car and it starts to heat / cool. While it is working to reaching your desired temperature, it shows an indeterminate progress bar in the button to adjust the temperature.
REALLY distracting.
Ended up getting an M8, the pinnacle of BMW before hybridization and full touch screens. If only it had an analogue cluster...
Never understood any appeal of a screen inside a car:
1. Reflections make you tilt, just to make some pesky highlights go away. Even if they are angled properly, there's always something (like a sun reflected by a watche's face) what causes nuissance at any angle
2. Car can go from a tunnel to a sunny valley in few seconds. That's 5 to 8 stops of dynamic range difference, that a human eye is easily designed to handle. Auto adjusting screen brigtness is never as bright as necessary in sunny conditions. Even if it were, it would be a significant battery drain and an element, that heats the cars interior already unnecessarily.
3. You don't have pure blacks in many of them, so that annoying halo at the corner of the eye is often present. You can solve it with an OLED, but those are even worse in bright daylight
4. All of the usually mentioned tactile feedback facts - you can reach with your hand to a AC knob, feel it's current set by finding the bulge with a finger and gently turn exactly how you want them. Zero lag, no eye contact necessary at all (keep that on the road!), instant feedback. Nothing that any screen can ever give.
5. Biggest gripe of all - modality. I think that there were some high ranking studies done early in design exactly against this type of input for high risk applications. Modality is the biggest enemy of discoverability and throws extra delays into otherwise instant input.
6. If you use a LCD variant, they interact with sunglasses polarity filter and, at some orientations, can be blocked altogeter. As you often use sunglasses exactly, because you want to see the road the best, it's contrary to the main objective of the control again.
7. Refocusing. If you can use a tactile control, with a good feedback, you're freeing your eyes from the need to adjust it's lens to focus from far to near to far again. Not many people are aware, that this is even happening, and can lead to overestimating your ability to keep engaged attention on the road.
I'd pay extra for a zero screen variant in a jiffy. Had I ever need to use a screen, I would've put my phone in a holder instead.
This is the main reason I haven’t bought a new car since 2005. I refuse to get anything with “smart features” or “infotainment” so I’m pretty much stuck until my current car dies. Then I’ll be forced to get something new, hopefully someone will manufacture a car with a sane UI with minimal features by then.
Yes it’s a first world proven that I have to take gloves off to turn on my heated seats but buttons made sure stupid problems like this never happened in the first place
What car do you have? Usually lower end cars have resistive touchscreens which yours sounds like an example of, but higher end ones have capacitive touchscreens and those don't generally work with gloves, but of course gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens exist and have for many years now.
My screen goes into dark mode as soon as I hit a tunnel so in practice it isn’t an issue. I mostly don’t notice anymore, but I had my eyeglasses prescription redone and I can’t see the screen very well anymore while driving. Will need progressive driving glasses I guess.
Note if you give up a screen they aren’t going to replace it with analog controls. It’s just too expensive, instead you’ll get something that turns to control your AC, but it’s really converted to a digital signal immediately and it’s physical rotation won’t be synchronized with the state of your AC like they were in the old days. I also really hate capacitive buttons which are worse than unsynced dials and screens, it’s like a touch screen with a fixed function.
Yes, my goes either-or quite abruptly and, while that's not really annoying, I notice it doing way too often, than I'd like to. It shouldn't be done in a binary fashion as well.
I really don’t notice because it happens with the light change of entering a tunnel anyways. Since I’m in Seattle, it happens often, so maybe I just got used to it.
touch screens in cars are mainly a cost saving measure, just like plastic that is supposed to look like wood (cheaper than real wood), or economy class tires instead of higher end tires, or steel rather than aluminum.
The questions are not "are touchscreens performant" or "are touchscreens dangerous" ... we already knew the answers to those questions and there was no reason to run this multiple model generations experiment.
The question is: who was in charge of these design decisions and what kind of respect and esteem did these people command as leaders at these large companies ?
A followup question: what professional consequences accompany terrible design decisions in an arena where such decisions are life threatening ?
5 years ago I didn’t want to buy a new car, because of the lack of buttons (general lack of reasonable interfaces); today I can’t afford to buy a new car with the luxury of plastic buttons
maybe i'm old school but i hate the ipad like interfaces in cars... especially if i'm trying to change settings while driving. i suppose we're very close to all of that just being voice activated but still this is a win in my book...
also while i'm ranting can we teach people about regenerative braking? every uber or lyft driver that has an EV actually uses the brakes and i'm getting whiplash every time we have to stop.
I gave up on "people should read things". Especially with AI now telling you how to think and what your final design should look like, I would be at least happy if they did some test of their own design and criticize it constructively.
Just put a "designer" in one of these cars and let them drive in real life situations like:
- a wasp entering your car, while you're approaching the entrance to the highway
- a child suddenly appears on the street from behind an SUV so big you could barely see the sidewalk
- a traffic light, green for you, but red for the car coming straight for your door.
We're past the "happy path". Try real life shit in your tests and maybe we'll install less screens and more sensors to actually help you drive, instead of distracting you.
Saving someone's life should be more important than a dumb undeserved promotion because you digitalized the whole car.
Is it manufacturing? Tesla and Mercedes have factories in china including partnerships with chinese manufactures. Or is it the design of the car? Chinese companies shelled huge sums of money to hire the best car designers from Europe.
Don't let your competition hire away your top talent.
The same way they've fought cheaper ICE brands: delivering higher quality materials, a fancy badge and a great driving experience. Currently the Chinese EVs are cheap, but far from Merc levels of refinement.
I really don't know about that. Mercedes used to mean high, tactile, audible mechanical quality. You'd hear it while closing the doors, you'd see it when looking at perfectly assembled dash, you'd hear it while driving and you'd be happy with it when clocking 500k miles with just regular maintenance. I remember those cars - I think the quality started tanking around late 1990s.
Right now its just ok. My friends S class has visibly mis-aligned buttons (a 200k car). My other friends electric S-class bean-thingy has squeaking doors (a 2 year old, 120k-when-new car) and feels surprisingly cheap to touch and drive. Sure, small sample and all of that but I don't think those are exceptions.
I only drove one Chinese car, and it was just a normal experience - what I'd expect from a volvo, bmw, or audi. Good UI on the infotainment, was below average annoying. No big difference vs. a merc. For sure not a qualitative difference in levels of refinement.
While I am also a fan of having knobs and switches with that nice mechanical quality, I think we're not really part of a majority. YoY sales dropped "only" 9% for Mercedes passenger cars, so people are not that bothered by the lack of knobs.
I'd love to have some of these cars in my local market, but at 3:15 this guy explicitly makes the comparison and says they're not up to Mercedes-Benz level.
If you watch the entire video you see that this remark is just a minor nitpick on one of the dozens of cars in that video. They could very easily replace that piece of plastic wood by real wood to fix it.
The fact that it'd be easy to replace strengthens the negative signal. If they're cutting corners in a highly visible portion of the car which would have required no additional engineering to do right, they're probably cutting more corners in ways that are harder or impossible to see. No review video will reveal, for example, whether they used a poor quality adhesive or the button labels show visible wear within months.
If you review 10 cars and 1 turns out to make a questionable choice for some minor aspect, then suddenly the car is bad, and not only that, all of them are bad? Sorry but if the German car industry thinks like this it is just grasping at straws.
Glad that Mercedes-Benz is doing this change. The management team has been misguided for a couple years. The "only luxury" strategy has not been working out as anticipated, partly due to quality not living up to the level to be truly luxury. The EVs, including the top line EQS, have also not been received to great success.
More prevalent in luxury cars, although Japanese had their share of bad experiments as well. My 10yo Honda has all climate control buttons, but no volume knob, which is mitigated a bit by having volume button on the steering wheel.
IMO luxury manufacturers like MB and BMW tried to squeeze larger screens, more of them and there was not enough space to put those screens, buttins and vents. Some luxuty brands make vents supper slim.
I dunno how intentional but my 2020 Forester seems to have been designed with the rule that you should be able to do absolutely everything without touching a screen.
It feels great. The touch screen is there for finer control when I’m stopped or for the passenger. But I can do everything in memorable ways using the knobs and buttons.
My 2024 Sequoia has the heads up display and I really like it. Shows the mph, integrated turn directions with Apple CarPlay, and shows what song is playing without me having to take my eyes off the road. The only problem is since it’s a projector my wife and I have to use vastly different settings in order to see the HUD while driving. She didn’t realize it existed for nearly a year since we’re about a foot height difference and I’d set it up when we got the car.
This! The LCDs are a big eyestrain for me driving at night. I've dialed down the brightness but it's still nowhere near as pleasant as the old red-illuminated physical gauges.
For 4x4 pickup trucks, bring back physical transfer case shifters and get rid of the idiotic menus for that. Also bring back transfer case Neutral mode so that flat towing again becomes commonplace. A Jeep Gladiator pickup is a great vehicle but doesn't replace larger pickup trucks that have lost those great transfer case features.
Argh. I just rented a car on a trip. It had a big central dial on the dash, which was not the speedometer. It was the fuel economy gauge. The speedometer was a digital readout in the center of that.
Given the history of car user interfaces and what they have taught users to expect, it was a terrible design.
The argument of buttons vs no buttons is missing the forest for the trees.
Teslas have a mere two buttons and are generally a joy to use. Why? Because the UI/UX was taken seriously, and the cpu hardware wasn't sourced from the dolllar store. This combination resulted in a screen-only experience that is responsive and easy to use (if you disagree with this, I will point you to Tesla's consumer satisfaction ratings, which say otherwise).
Every other car manufacturer followed suit, but made a critical mistake in that they only saw the cost savings in not needing to manufacture and build a bunch of switches. They forgot to do the necessary UI/UX work, and fitted their vehicles with a cpu out of a TI-83.
The reason why consumers are complaining about every other car manufacturer isn't because they have no buttons; it's because the screen-only experience isn't intuitive. Make it intuitive and the complaints go away.
That report speaks nothing about the infotainment system. It's also a pay-to-play service. I'm talking about actual customers. For example, look at the Tesla subreddit as a closer proxy than CR. It is a source of frustration where Tesla is frustrating; the lack of buttons is rarely complained about.
Tesla software is in no way a joy to use. I had rented one and it was infuriatingly bad. I'm sure people can get used to it, but people can get used to literally anything.
The map looks like it really wants to be in Star Trek more than than it is meant to be usable software.
Doing simple things takes getting into menus 2-3 layers deep, often while driving.
Press the wiper button on Steering wheel to wipe, use left scroll button on steering wheel to make it fast/slow/off. No touch screen needed. Can also use voice command.
Press headlight button on s.wheel, tap the fog light icon on screen.
There's one thing I actually dislike. You can use voice to control all these stuff except foglight. It even understands foglight command, but doesn't do anything. Most likely a bug. I don't know how to report it.
I’ve been driving a Model Y for a year now. Used to have a Volvo with android automotive and before that a Mercedes Benz with the.. I’m not sure whatever that OS is called.
Tesla sw is miles better than the previous two. It is responsive and laid out well. When you get used to it, it is intuitive. Android was not that bad but the visual design was much worse and it was laggy.
The MB software can die in hell. It is the worst piece of shit ever been built by humans. And it is running on hopes and dreams instead of a capable processor. Note that this was an E class so not an entry model. (Even then, there is no excuse)
Tesla removed as many physical buttons and controls as possible to reduce cost and called it revolutionary. Their faithful parroted it because they loved Tesla.
Other manufacturers tried to copy it, and when any normal person had to interact with touch everything - the real opinions of how absolute garbage it was came out.
Having a big screen to display navigation and audio is awesome. Removing things like physical vents, volume control, gear selection, turn signal stalk - those are all idiotic decisions made to maximize margin on every car sold and COMPLETELY user hostile.
I'm just pleasantly surprised the germans listened to their customers.
The problem is like much of copying they put in the screen and took out the buttons without realizing how important the UI becomes when you do that. Tesla optimizes and improves constantly and while they’ve made mistakes, other manufacturers just leave the terrible UI in place for five or ten years and leaves everyone who purchased stuck with cheap, unresponsive screens and UI.
It is ridiculous that an Android potato can be more responsive than many cars screens and UI.
Common argument on the internets, but meh, I think most of it is totally fine and I prefer it to my other car with buttons galore.
I do enjoy physical controls for things that are constantly being used while driving for safety purposes and all of that exists for my model. Dropping stalks was too far imo, but for a car maker that wants to remove the driver it's not surprising. Mine has two stalks and I think that's the Goldilocks version. The auto shifter is surprisingly good though.
Everything else in the Tesla is completely fine where it is. Even if I do need to reach for something there's always voice. Saying I'm hot/cold or take me to X or play my playlist or whatever works completely fine. If it's not, just adjust it when you stop like you should be doing anyway.
Plenty of things to dislike about my car but this isn't one of them. The only button, or a thing a button replaced, that is missing on my car is the manual door release in the back which is a pretty egregious omission that does make me a tad angry. I'm going to have to drill a hole in my door for that one.
This is sort of like Microsoft saying they're making Windows better. It's just undoing a change that should never have been made in the first place, because it made things worse.
I hope Elon Musk can take a lesson from Mercedes. Tesla went in the other direction: there are barely any physical buttons to remove, so they removed the stalks for signaling and even for changing gear! You have to use the touch screen to shift gears!
Removing indicator stalks without steer by wire was a mistake. They fixed that by bringing back the stalks.
Touch screen for great shifting works better than you think. It actually works better than traditional gear shifters especially when you enable auto shift. It changes gears as needed. It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
> It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
Did you read the article about how Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical controls? So in your opinion are they dragging their customers back to the past? Or are they correcting a mistake?
They are doing neither. All German car companies are idiots. Years of lead compared to all other car manufacturers, threw away all of it with sheer incompetence and bureaucracy.
They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure instead of thinking of designing a better UX. Result is, laggy/buggy/buttonless bad ux that customers hated. So they are going back with a bad excuse. The mistake is thinking software+UX as second class in a modern car. But now they are correcting "touch screen bad" mistake. lmao.
I mean, it is no surprise. Germans in general don't know how to develop good software because to them everything is a design by committee (see CARAID).
Or maybe they understand from experience that physical buttons are better? When you can't take your eyes off the road, buttons you can feel with your fingers are better. That's easy to understand, is it not?
> They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure
Tesla is doing it as a cost cutting measure too. Elon Musk's philosophy is "the best part is no part".
Tesla does a great job not having buttons. I think the real issue is that other car companies have bad interfaces that make physical buttons necessary. Tesla just has a great UI that does not need physical buttons.
Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.
I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.
Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.
Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.
You are absolutely right. See my other post before where I saw essentially the same thing. It is absurd how bad the German companies are; the only thing they know how to do great is the engine.
I never understand these people with their ac knobs... What are they doing that they need to change AC all the time during driving?
I set it to 21.5 with auto, and it is perfect for the whole car. Why do people need to constantly change ac?!!
Why do you need to change climate control at all let alone when driving? Is it because the car can't maintain proper temperature? Response time is lagging? Or what?
Also, you can just use voice control. Works better than physical buttons.
Let me expound: They've said for years they are no longer a car company, and they are acting like it. Their last UX experiments were several years ago and apart from the on-screen PRND, they had to walk them back (yoke steering wheel, blinker buttons).
Autopilot regressed in that you can't even turn autosteer on/off without stopping the car.
Model 3 and Y refreshes were lackluster, S and X are gone, Cybertruck which actually had some catching-up stuff (800 V, V2L) is a write-off and Roadster is what, 7 years delayed and nowhere to be seen and there's nothing else announced on the horizon.
Not a car company. All ready and ripe to merge with SpaceX.
I for one am quite happy that Mercedes is committed to a physical button for hazard lights, parking assist overrides, and the other controls that are used so very...rarely. Perhaps they'll do something about the less commonly used buttons like climate control for the next model redesigns in five to seven years.
I really struggle to understand what's so damned difficult about this. They've admitted touchscreens annoy the hell out of drivers and capacitive touch buttons are even worse. Is it really going to take yet another lifecycle before they actually do something about it?
And many stupid decisions have no direct impact on the driver, but instead on those around the car. Like red beltline lights that don’t function as brake lights, instead using red lamps near the road that are easy to be obscured/ignored because the giant red lights above them look like brake lights.
Or dashes that are fully lit at night even if the headlights aren’t on, so the driver doesn’t have an obvious visual indicator that their tail lights aren’t lit.
So many rules I’d enforce were I king of the automakers.
Remember how Volkswagen exec promised exact same thing many years ago and just blatantly lied? I do. I will judge only by the actual actions and not by the empty arrogant lies.
They have more usability problems than that. Driving Mercedes Benz hire cars a couple of times recently in UK and Ireland was a shock - they have the automatic gearbox PRND selector on the right-hand stalk, and indicators on the left hand one. I could maybe excuse that on a LHD car, but on an RHD car, it is infuriating. Using the windscreen wipers instead of indicating is a trivial low-consequence mistake, bumping into neutral is not.
Most cars I have driven in the UK have the indicators on the left stalk? I think that is the norm here.
Gear selector for automatics tends to vary but usually center-console, but my id3 has it on an extra stalk on the right of the steering wheel (coming off of the dashboard - it's weird). I've never seen it on a normal steering wheel stalk like lights or indicators or wipers.
What people really want on their dash are giant screens. So they can watch movies and automate having to manually have car crashes. I think the manufactures understand human drivers just fine.
Some years ago I owned a Mercedes CLA which had Android auto controlled using the rotating joystick with push down to select. The experience was perfect. It was fast, could be handled without any distraction, never misbehaved and never detoriated over time. Now I drive a car with touchscreen ... it's bullshit but I guess it looks fancier.
The touchscreen also enables different engineering divisions to work in parallel, without waiting on one another. This drastically reduces development time. It is also cheaper to manufacture, more reliable as there are less moving parts, and reduces parts inventories at dealerships.
Whenever you add a touchscreen to something it makes the UI/UX a software issue instead of a hardware issue. You can ship updates. You can cheap out on UI/UX designing because you can ship it later. So you find commonly used features buried 4 menus deep. You also find that the positions of things in menus will randomly change by OTA updates.
Touch screens are (IMHO) terrible for cars because there's no tactile feedback that allows you to use them without looking at the screen. Dials, buttons and switches can be felt and used. It goes beyond being lazy. It's unsafe.
The only reason we got trouch screens in cars at all is cost-cutting.
Too little too late. I was a long time advocate of German cars, owned a bunch of them but after this fuckery with touch screens everywhere I moved to other brands and I’m staying there for the foreseeable future. BMW, Mercedes and VW have really dropped the ball when it comes to usability. At least BMW has a decent OS that kinda makes the whole experience less dreadful than that of the other two.
it wont matter how many physical buttons you apparently have, if its not physical all the way through, that "button function" can be redefined, or taken away at any time.
no, its the problem that will be created by solving the touch screen problem, with a physical user interface, that is still just an input to a digital device.
> He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen."
This statement is logically on a level with something like "yesterday is colder than outside." ... he believes in screens - because if you want to connect - you have to make the magic work behind it? I mean what? This is Olympic level marketing bullshit. It's frightening that somebody blurting gibberish like that is heading a department. But then again this car company is anyway merely a pale shadow of its former self and about to get eaten by the Chinese and very deservedly so.
That’s another good step. I wrote about this last week < https://www.maxvanijsselmuiden.nl/blog/touch-screens-everywh...>. Touch screens are an unsuitable form of interaction because of the implicit requirement to ‘watch what you are doing’, inherently slower and more dangerous to use in a car.
I’m seeing some brands say they have physical buttons but they aren’t the same. They’re more like touch based buttons that are not in a screen. And I feel they’re just as bad. I want to be able to use the button without looking. Like one car had a touch based slider for operating the air vents. Ridiculous
There is another thing that reduces the safety of car - it is sunroof.
In India, all top trims come with sunroof.
I believe, sunroof can not provide the safety that of one without sunroof.
More ever, it can absorb significantly more heat compared one without sunroof.
Physical buttons are another reason I absolutely love my 24 4Runner, absolutely huge and clear labeled knobs and buttons all over the place, I feel like being in a cockpit when I drive it.
Whatever is happening in car industry, it is so unexciting, over-engineered, and too glossy. I'm so happy I don't have to work for people who prefer new car toy over paying me a decent salary.
I’m quite suspicious that they do that not because they understood or learned something, but because China requires physical buttons starting next year. And they simply don’t want to lose one of their biggest markets.
Despite China, IT development is a complete disaster in Germany. All car so called German car manufacturers UX/UI is horrible to say the least.
Dieter Rams is the only UX/UI designer, who became famous - outside of Germany. Hartmut Esslinger kind of popularized DR, what an irony, that two Germans made history, but of course not in Germany and even in Germany DR wasn't well known. Braun was a brand and statement, but because the devices were and still are extremely convenient. Braun never put design or beauty in the spotlight - it wasn't recognized as such and therefore not of value to capitalize on.
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
Hubris, resulted into a failed attempt to build in 2 years a complete Car OS. It was so bad, I was mocked back then, because I bet against it.
I am the only one who successfully build a No Code platform in financial services that became such a hit internally, that it became the standard. dbCORE is its name.
Very long story, but design by committee is the norm in Germany, and since outsourcing is the way to go, vendors sell changes all the time otherwise they lose the customer.
Value chains like Apple or Google are inconceivable and no one in Business has a background in CS.
Porsche 997-2 had the best UX/UI there was. Fantastic blend of nobs and touchscreen. It blew my mind, really. This was 2008. The iPhone came to light 2007!
Really, highly impressive, extremely functional and almost no friction at all. 90% was top.
And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI...
Your comment reminds me of the hostile, to say the least, Munich U-Bahn map:
https://drmory.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TARIFPLAN_Inne...
I remember seeing it back then in the subway, looking for directions and feeling really confused about it. "Damn why didn't I get a transportation systems PhD before coming to Germany!"
> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.
Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Where Siemens really shines, is in their fanatical devotion to after sales.
I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.
That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...
I assume it makes you a loyal customer when upgrading/replacing equipment too... knowing what to expect and that you're going to have all of that support.
So many product companies fail to think about that -- they're all thinking about this quarter and very few take a long term approach and really try to have customers for life. They all say that want that of course, but too few are really committed to it. There are a few brands that I buy that are committed to quality, and they usually cost more (initially, but probably not in the long run). I'm fine paying more know that they really tried to do their best and didn't let nickels and dimes get in the way of an otherwise great concept.
Technically SAP is a Société Européenne but still somehow the biggest German software developer.
What matters is where the headquarters and key employees are. SE can be based anywhere in EU and even then legal entity stuff isn't what matters.
Origin: German, HQ: German, Accounting regime: German, Main stock listing: German, Executive board: 5/6 German
In fact, you can run any form of European legal entity from any country. I.e., I can create an spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością (sp. z o.o.) in Poland, but run the business in Germany. It would be complicated and stupid, but legal.
>a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
None of them famous or being praised by customers for having amazing UI/UX though, because they're not consumer products, they're targeting engineers who either don't care about UX, or don't have a choice in the matter because their company is buying it, not them.
Cars on the other hand ARE consumer products and do need great UX, and German companies long forgot how to do that since they operate everything as a cost center and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.
>the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery
Yeah but there's more margins in pure software and more buyers in the world for consumer devices than for high tech machinery. Apple can probably buy all of Germany's machine tool makers if they wanted to. It's the perk of selling to 7 billion consumers in the world.
> the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Just like every energy and defense stock in the world right now, but that's to be expected and somewhat offtopic for SW and UX.
If we look at some of their other consumer and healthcare spin-offs like Gigaset or Healthineers, they are doing insanely poor, which is embarrassing.
They havent totally forgotten. I drove a 2025 BMW last week and noticed many similarities to my favorite car, the '92 325IS. The speedo and tach both aligned in top gear, the thumb hooks were still perfect, and the cluster still dimmed enough for night driving. Someone at BMW remembers how to do UI.
Software in Germany is simply not highly regarded, on the contrary. It is seen as necessary evil at best.
Ageing population that finds itself overwhelmed is my guess. There are exceptions, but they are far and few between.
That seems like a good thing. Mostly software doesn't make people's lives better, instead it does the exact opposite. A society that recognizes that, and rejects the people who build it, is ahead of the curve.
> Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.
“The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's fifth-largest publicly traded software company by revenue. In June 2025, it was the largest European company by market capitalization, as well as one of the 30 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.”
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP
High market cap but universally hated by its end-users is probably not a great yardstick to measure consumer software against.
No, but it seems to be par for the course for enterprise software.
My 992.2 has AA/CarPlay, and an outstanding user interface, with a nice mix of configurable displays and physical buttons. Fairly certain it is a top 100 product in it's market.
Yes, I think Porsche has a responsive excellent design with their infotainment / button combination though recent SUV / sedan models have moved to capacitive buttons and more touch screen controls and worsened the experience.
To be fair, it is outsourced to Harmon/Kardon.
> it is outsourced to Harmon/Kardon
Many automakers use them for their headunits (ex. both my Chrysler minivan and my Porshce have HK headunits). The headunit in my porsche is also in some VW models and for the HN crew there are some fun hacks you can do with a usb stick to customize some features, including making carplay fullscreen (tap the porsche app to return to the porsche UI)...
https://github.com/LawPaul/MH2p_SD_ModKit
Last month I spoke to a woman driving a Porsche SUV. I was appalled to hear that she is trading it in for a Tesla model Y. I drive a Tesla, and I love it, but it is nowhere near the level of a Porsche. She claims that the model Y is quieter then the Porsche and she loves the self-driving. I advised her to take the Tesla for a long test drive before selling her Porshe, she said that her son in law has one.
That isn't surprising for most people. It is also hard to say without knowing which year and model Porsche she was driving. Someone with a Cayenne Turbo GT will have a different experience from someone with a 1st gen base Macan.
A juniper Model Y is very fast, no engine noise, can drive itself better than a lot of cars on the highway for a similar price, doesn't need gas - convenient if you have a fast charger at home/work, fewer moving parts to think about in your day to day and control.
I like knobs and AA and will never make that trade... but it makes perfect sense for many people who don't mind the interface.
I'm glad Genesis still has knobs and Lexus is getting back to that now. The German luxury cars can't rely on fantastic engines alone forever.
IME the juniper model Y has crazy road and wind noise, it’s certainly louder in the cabin than my S63 which has a V8.
Fast? Sure.
Little she knows that if she uses the “self driving” from Tesla she may get into a death trap.
It’s way safer than most human drivers. I use it all of the time.
It is true though. The level of porche is in the brand only; there isn't a single porche that is better than a juniper for a daily driver. She's making an excellent choice.
Did you somehow get a juniper which doesn’t suffer from significant road and wind noise?
what's a juniper?
the 2025/2026 Model Y.
Marketing beats quality, also a valid approach.
Also a reason why suvs and their more ridiculous variants picked up so well. People don't need cars that are worse to drive, but sure as hell they want one because others have them.
Does Tesla do marketing? They don't advertise in my country.
Tesla historically focused on what marketers refer to as "earned media" rather than "paid media", but it was still marketing. Those Musk and Tesla headlines that happened around the world didn't occur by accident.
That said, they've also been buying ads for the last few years as their growth has sputtered in the face of competition.
So you want me to put my big luggage, 3 carry ons and a big stroller in a sedan trunk?
That has nothing to do with the conversion. However I've actually fit all that and more in my Model 3 Tesla. The trunks are huge.
The cup holder situation, on the other hand… (992.1 owner)
My favorite car was a 92 BMW 325IS coupe, standard. It was a simple driving machine. It drove well. It performed when asked. It had room for four, or three plus skiis with half the rear seat folded down. And BMW took a strong stance against drinking and driving: zero cup holders.
I miss that car. I would buy one again in a heartbeat if BMW still made them.
My E36 was fantastic as well. Automatic climate control, heated motorized mirrors, heated monkey pissers, heated power-adjusted leather seats, power windows, power sunroof, dash lights that fluidly adjusted to ambient conditions, two throttle bodies (in series -- one for the loud pedal, one for the ASC+T), and a single-DIN radio that was dead-nuts simple to upgrade properly whilst leaving the rest of the factory system (and its 10 channels of amplification) intact.
That's a pretty long list of things for a simple driving machine.
But anyway:
It came with two cup holders in the center console, BMW part 51168205367. There were two more cup holders in the middle armrest for the rear seat. Two additional cup holders were also available, which fit under the top of the glove box -- BMW part 51168184470.
I loved that car and it was brilliant to drive, but it did not represent a "strong stance" about drinking and driving.
It was a rather complex machine that came fitted with plenty of cup holders. :)
Sounds like you had the north america version. Mine was built in Europe, first sold in canada. It had to be dealer-modified for daytime running lights before being first sold (headlight switch "off" was turned into another on.)
I've had to give up drinking trenta-sized Starbucks entirely.
I found an add-on cup holder (similar to one I had for my NSX which had none from the factory) that clips behind the inner center console panel and the cup sits on (or near, depending on diameter) the floor. Unfortunately it is expensive for being a 3D printed part that needs better QC (had to sand the changeable cup part) (the NSX one was aluminum) but it works very well.
A better design would be to have a smaller diameter clip-in piece so you can size down when you have a smaller item.
a good idea anyway
see my comment about shopping for a used Macan, and avoiding 2022+ with the haptic BS.
> VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
VW was supporting CarPlay from launch and the VW MEB dash was on all pro material of Apple for ages.
Ever heard of CARIAD, the biggest trainwreck, er carwreck, of a software company south of the north pole?
6000 people to develop a software stack for VW.
Go figure. The fact VW supported CarPlay early is footnote in this comedy.
Not sure how CARIAD is relevant here. That company was started years after carplay landed in VAG.
Nowadays those 6000 people don't even develop anything, they do outsourcing.
Well there’s Bosch. Software wise I salute their home connect initiative which is maybe not the best UX but at least it works locally so either it is good forward thinking software engineering choices either it shows neglected software engineering practices.
No disagreeing with your points. I can see the passion in your reply :)
But Hetzner Cloud UX/UI is wonderful, compared to the rivals, Digital Ocean, Google, AWS (yea those are bigger and offer more, but still)
Not IT, but I think Leica has the best camera design. At around the Leica M6 they decided that the design was done, and every future M camera is essentially an M6 clone.
Not a hater, just an example from today’s HN front page: Ableton from Berlin. World class UX/UI leading the DAW market for 25 years and counting. Not “Top 100” enough for validation? Just ask Thomas Bangalter. He’s taken it around the world to get lucky.
Heh, when it comes to audio software, you could throw a lot more in the mix, e.g. Logic Pro, Native Instruments (at least in the past - shame what happened to them) and - arguably ;) - Steinberg among others.
Live is not world class UI. It’s great software but that’s despite the interface, not because of it.
Same thing with Premiere, or the Pioneer CDJ. It’s not the standard because it’s a joy to use, it’s a standard because it’s functional.
BMW's latest infotainment despite being intimidating for first time users is quite decent and intuitive compared to the horrors I saw from other German car makers.
Apple Car and Android Auto are on VW cars since a decade.
Comments about this dreadful UI/UX on german cars feels really decade old.
In any case I rent cars quite often, mostly get Korean, Japanese and German cars with few rare US ones, and I really don't see those differences across the board software wise.
They all suck, they are all slow, clunky and unintuitive.
They are all like TVs. The native interface sucks, you plug Apple in and it's suddenly good.
I have never used the native UI of my Samsung Frame. I haven't used any car's own navigation or music app in at least a decade.
Yep, except on my TV I don't have to leave Apple TV to adjust my climate control every time.
(Mk8 GTI)
I drove such a VW. Once. I still get annoyed when I'm reminded of it!
I couldn't help myself and just watched a video demo of it https://www.evshift.com/242850/how-to-adjust-the-heating-and...
The actual rage it induces LOL!
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.
Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).
We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).
The facelift/software that was introduced with the ID.7 is really good (especially the navigation system with AR HUD), but you kinda have to consider that the HN user population is extremely US-centric and IDs aren't really available in the US, so I don't think it's surprising that the opinions on HN lag behind reality by a couple years there.
> All car so called German car manufacturers UX/UI is horrible to say the least.
What?
My BMW i4 has iDrive 8.5 and it's excellent, and i've had Mercedes and Audi and VW and Honda and SAAB.
the BMW and the 40 years ago SAAB (i bought it very used) both were easy to operate without looking away from the road.
>And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI
Games count I suppose?
Engineers in Europe are essentially pariahs, a necessary evil for corporations hiring them. Sure they earn more than cleaners or teachers, but not substantially more. Difference between being able to afford 2 visits in restaurant a month rather than just 1.
This means engineering is not attractive and no longer something to build life around.
It takes years of learning, patience, trial and error for not much different remuneration than jobs requiring far less commitment.
Nah, 991.1/981 had the best UX/UI. It used screens for the controls that need to be on screens (navigation and entertainment), and physical buttons for everything else.
There needs to be a screen, but it should be used only for optional features. It shouldn't be required. The 9x1 generation got that. In the 992, you can't even open your garage door without fumbling around with the stupid touchscreen.
Total nonsense you’re spewing here. Especially for it being very country-biased in a world where giants like Volkswagen and BMW are highly international.
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/innovation/innovation-network/te...
For example, BMW tech offices exist in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, among other locations.
German cars have been very well-regarded in terms of their automotive interfaces by the automotive press and reviewers as well as customers.
Watch any Doug DeMuro [1] video and on the subject of infotainment systems and you’ll see that BMW and Mercedes are up toward the top in terms of usability and customization.
You’ll see brands with good technology reputations like Kia refuse to put a GPS map in the gauge cluster while the Germans have been doing it for a decade plus now.
I will also remind us all that Mercedes beat Tesla to market on level 3 autonomy.
The only companies beating the German brands on tech are EV startups in China and companies like Tesla, but of course those companies are doing so mainly because they are replacing physical buttons with that technology, and generally integrating a lot of gimmmicks that are low hanging fruit compared to the things they can’t replicate as well like driving platform dynamics.
[1] I choose Doug DeMuro for this because he’s somewhat “in the middle” on technology. He prefers touch screens over purist physical controls for many functions but isn’t wildly biased toward them or incredibly tech savvy like the kind of person who blindly embraces Teslafication. He’s the kind of reviewer that will miss the “but actually there’s a setting for that” solution for his nitpicks, effectively showing the car as an layperson who isn’t techbrained but also isn’t your dad who wishes the screen was gone entirely.
Where driving platform dynamics are they offering that helps normal people (not talking about car junkies here)??
All the provide is a squeeze money scheme by making everything paid upgrade, laggy software, buggy software, bad range and much more.
There's nothing good about most German cars anymore. Bmw neu klasse is finally a decent answer but it took how many years?
Actually... My 2016 Skoda Rapid let's me update the map for free through a user removable SD card. Pretty great UX compared to every other car I've ever had the displeasure of having to navigate with. Software is nothing special otherwise, but gets the job done. Car is 95% physical buttons through.
Also, my 2020 Mii Electric is 100% physical buttons. Pretty great.
Frankly, I am wary of anything but VWAG at this point.
100% agreed. I think it's safe to say that good software UX is incompatible with the way German hardware companies are generally run.
It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.
> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.
Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.
"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems".
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?
Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.
The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.
My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.
But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.
If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.
To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
When European Union tries to regulate the influence of US companies in Europe and establish some European digital sovereignty, US government comes to help and applies pressure on European Union.
" “To start a direct confrontation with USA right now is probably not the smartest way to react,” said Christel Schaldemose, the Danish social-democrat lawmaker who led the drafting of the Digital Services Act."
https://www.politico.eu/article/jd-vance-waging-war-eu-tech-...
I hadn't heard of this china regulation.
Perhaps we will have a "Beijing regulatory effect" positively impacting the world like the Bruxelles and California ones.
Already happening, best example is worldwide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX. It was China who triggered it, not US authorities (protecting US corporation).
Similar thing with batteries on airplanes, tube trains, ferries and underground garages. China cares about fire hazard, other countries care about ideology.
> other countries care about ideology
Not even ideology anymore, see US. Democratic country has been attacked in a biggest war since WW2, and they've decided to halt all support and attack Iran instead.
China, famous for never putting ideology over policy.
unless you're going back to the cultural revolution, modern China is extremely pragmatic. It's a nominally socialist country that runs deregulated special economic zones with tens of millions of people and more economic competition than anywhere else.
The equivalent would be if the US started to run a socialist planned city of 15 million people somewhere, just for the sake of it. There's pretty much no other place that in the last 30-40 years has as much of a spread of policy experimentation as China has had.
Too bad they don't care so much about factory worker safety or slave labor
I don't think the bake-off to decide which superpower has the worst human rights record is going to land where you want it to. Hint, they both suck.
FWIW, I'll take the one not dropping bombs to keep their BFF happy, boosting right-wing shitheads, threatening to invade their real allies and slapping dumb tariffs on everyone.
They both suck, but one of them literally harvests organs from political prisoners.
I’m honestly torn on which one I’d pick, but there’s a TON of likely state-sponsored pro-China propaganda on the internet, so I consider it a patriotic duty to push back for the sole reason that we can still freely talk shit about the one (for the time being, as long as you don’t mention the blessed martyr Charlie Kirk), whereas the other blocks the internet and imprisons people for dissent.
China glazing on HN, wow what a suprise!
Wow, that's amazing. What fire hazard are they preventing in their support for Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine?
It’s funny you say that because the China “anti regulatory effect” of the 90s-2000s also had a great impact on quality of life for the world in its own way
Euro NCAP will also only give the highest safety rating to cars with physical buttons for common functions.
Dunno, people hate the all-touch trend so much (I've never come across someone who likes it), it surprised me it took them so long to reverse course.
It seems cyclical. Maybe the people who stand up for good UX retire and it takes a few years for a company to realize that they're going in a bad direction.
Mazda used to have do the best most user friendly controls and bragged about it as a differentiator... but the new cx-5 is a touch screen-only monstrosity
Anyone exec wanting to move away from touchscreens and back to buttons would have flashbacks to Steve Balmer mocking the new iPhone and stabbing his fingers at the touch panel and making a fool of himself for eternity.
I have an Audi Q7 and a model X. Don't miss the physical controls of the Q7 at all. Given a choice between Tesla software and Android Auto, I'll take Tesla's.
Then again, I'm someone who likes the yoke steering, and invested a few weeks acclimating to the lack of steampunk turn stalks.
For physical controls, it always comes down to "What did you want to do?" There are very few that are actually needed.
well their F1 yoke uses lots of buttons, and makers often roll insights from F1 into production cars
https://sim-lab.us/cdn/shop/files/mercedes-product-image.png...
So what’s the next link in this chain why is china ‘really’ requiring it?
But do you have to look at the display to tell what the buttons and knobs are doing.
If you have, say, a HVAC fan speed knob with mechanical stops at the low and high end, and a detent, you never have to look at it. If you have an increase/decrease switch, you may need to look at the display to find out what you're doing. In a car, this means head-down time, eyes off the road.
I have a Black and Decker branded humidifier, which comes from "W Appliance Ltd", a licensee of the Black and Decker name. It's an ultrasonic humidifier with a 1.45 gallon tank and a big filter to remove dissolved solids, so it runs well on tap water. It's an effective humidifier.
This device is an example of how to botch the user interface for a very simple device. There's a big round display, about 12cm across. This has various dedicated icons and a central number display. Around it is a ring which displays a moving bar pattern when the device is running.
From left to right, we have five buttons. They're just touchable areas on the case, not actual pushable controls. The first button is On/Off, and, inevitably today, the same button does both functions. The display lights up when on.
The second button turns on a negative ion generator. This isn't an advertised feature, and it may not actually do anything. If this feature is on, a tiny icon illuminates on the display. This thing is down on the floor and you can't see the smaller icons without getting down on your knees. If you hold this button down for two seconds, the decorative bar pattern on the display is toned down, but not fully turned off.
The third button is fan speed. Available values are 1 to 3. Default is 2. 1 is useless, and 2 is mostly useless, because the water condenses on top of the unit rather than humidifying the room.
The fourth button sets the humidity. Values from 45% to 90% can be cycled through. There's one two-digit display, and it shows the humidity being set when the button has been pushed recently. Otherwise it shows the humidity being measured.
The fifth button sets a timer to turn the thing off after some number of hours.
When the water tank is empty, a tiny icon illuminates. The main display does not change or go dark. The one actionable piece of info the device can give the user is barely visible.
Removing the water tank or turning the device off resets all settings to the defaults. So after each refill, the user must go through setup again.
There's an optional remote available, with the same five buttons.
All this thing needed was one big knob for setting the humidity, with an off position. Plus a nice big indicator light to indicate an empty tank. Instead, they designed a complex user interface that makes it worse.
This kind of mistake appears when UI people design button systems.
I think they should distinguish between controls and settings.
Settings are great on a touchscreen. A wide variety of options, easily navigated to and explained. They suck on physical buttons, it ends up being like setting the time on a VCR.
Controls on the other hand deserve physical buttons. Or levers. or dials/knobs/spinners. It should depend on muscle memory, and the type of control.
I also thing driving status should be on a dashboard in front of you, not on the central display. (looking at you tesla)
And some should be multiple places. It might be nice to set your volume with a physical knob, but also on the steering wheel.
I have a pre-facelift MB A-class, and I think it's the best car I've driven for controls. You don't have to touch the screen ever if you don't want to: there's a trackpad on the centre console that just works even (most of the time) with Android Auto (and the back/home/map/media/phone buttons will still save you even if Android Auto won't always let you move the cursor to the back arrow in YouTube Music). The steering wheel has two touch-sensitive buttons, one for each screen (duplicating the trackpad, which itself duplicates the media touchscreen). I can't even easily reach either screen when driving, so I don't.
Driving controls are all available on the stalks and wheel, volume is adjustable from the wheel or the centre console, all physical buttons, levers, or scroll inputs, unless you need to change a setting using the trackpad. The only thing that's missing is wheel control for skipping tracks :P.
And then in the facelift they replaced the buttons on the steering wheel with touch sensitive ones and just removed the touch pad and replaced it with nothing. It's still useable and nice, but worse than the older model and there was no need to change anything.
I used to drive a 2001 S-class ... easily counted nearly 100 physical buttons within reach of the driver. In theory you could use the 10-digit keypad like an old flip phone to enter a physical address into the navigation, but is that really what people want to go back to?
I missed navigation.
I think it is a natural fit for the touchscreen. Tesla navigation is not perfect, but it is very good. You can pan/zoom the map with swipes which is LOTS better than buttons. You can also search for an address in specific or general terms and are not forced into some highly structured address format.
For example a ford I used had this weird out-of-order way of "enter street number" or "enter zipcode" and "enter street name" with a weird type-ahead/completion that was just... bad.
With tesla, you have a search field. You can type "123 main street, anytown" to find a specific address, or "home depot anytown". But you can just type "home depot" and choose from the list which puts recent on top, then closest to furthest. They also show up as pins all over the map and you can just choose one.
I guess you could also use voice nav. I kind of hate voice nav that is uploaded to the cloud (and they lie) I have an offline garmin car gps that lets me talk to it.
Some people just want a faster horse :)
this is an incomplete picture though. Would Google Maps be considered a control or setting?
both. the map has many detailed settings which you might change once in a while.
there are also certain things you’d want to change (or activate) often - we could argue those are controls. Like muting, changing volume, or finding a nearby gas station.
love that distinction.
And for those commands that do not deserve a physical button and are only accessible via touch, please adhere to a few simple rules.
1. Put them always in the same place. Especially the "back" or "exit" button!
2. Each button should do one thing, not switch between 3 or more modes that you should look to understand which one you've just activated. Negative example: one button to cycle from cuise control, to drive assist, to speed limit, and back to off.
3. The area where a tap is interpreted as a button press should not also be where a swipe is recognized. In moving vehicles it is too easy for your finger to swing just an inch before touching the screen.
4. The active area of a virtual button must be large, larger than the icon it displays, so large that you shouldn't be distracted from driving just to aim at it!
Also - move the tech forwards! Buttons can be cool. Software controlled detents for rotary encoder knobs, back lit stream deck style buttons, cool knobs that combine twisting and pulling in/out.
1. Drives me crazy on iPhone. On Android there is one button to go back. Very simple. On iPhone sometimes it's top left, some times it's called 'done'. Sometimes the app doesn't have it at all and I have to use a menu instead.
Last time it was VW bringing it back, then Mazda bringing it back, and so on. Also luxury cars will not use touch controls, thats only for cheap cars.
It appears wishful thinking that physical buttons are coming back. This would be an idea whose time has gone. It does not even matter companies that physical buttons are better, or they can offer as choice (at higher price) if someone wanted.
Like remote working, office cubicles, fast and lightweight websites, ad-free content, one time purchase software incentives of all parties are aligned against people who bear cost of these decisions. So I do not expect this to change.
But VW are bringing them back? The ID.Polo (seems like they dropped the Playstation style incrementing number for the old brand names) is the first of their new electric range with physical buttons for windows, climate, etc.
Basically the door and centre console have them back. Along with a touchscreen of course.
When did Mazda get rid of buttons? They always provide both choices no? Touchscreen and the dial (which I love). Temperature controls are also physical.
Except for the new 2026 models. I think those removed physical buttons
I think you answered your own question. 2026. My 2025 CX-90 has amazing controls.
You answered your own question...
Even Toyota is going touch now, with the 2026 models lacking climate control knobs.
I don't know why. Every review always praised the previous models for the physical buttons, and literally nobody asked for them. The physical buttons were perfect, yet they've taken them away.
There must be some grand anti-button conspiracy, it just doesn't make any sense.
Chasing trends and it's now cheaper to have a single touchscreen with software controls than to design and manufacture physical controls.
There’s less need for a physical button for those things now that climate control algo has become so good it has been on Auto the entire time for me.
A screen costs 75, a button is 1 each. You get a lot more that 100 buttons on a screen.
Not to mention the physical space a button takes.
It’s nice. But unless they commit to bring back reliable and comfortable cars - who cares?
Is is Mercedes-Benz deciding to bring back buttons, or is it that the EU's NCAP safety rating mandated that they bring back buttons, and they are spinning it as a voluntary decision?
My money is on the latter. I’ll take it, but being bullshitted by these big corporations is the norm.
Auto makers have been aware for years of consumer sentiment around the physical dials is my guess based on the complete consistency I’ve seen.
'He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen." '
I am a big believer in keeping "product people" away from UI design for dangerous machinery.
The eyes and the attention of the driver should be on the road. All the audio visual noise from the car is just plain dangerous. I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures. I do not want beeps on anything else distracting me while I am driving.
My Volvo will, for instance, flash the same type of visual alert when fuel level is low (permanent "do you want to navigate to a fuel station" modal window obscuring navigation, speedometer and so on) -- as when it encounters a serious engine malfunction. It will steal a bit of my attention when it pops up. One of those days, someone will have an accident because of this moronic design, its statistically certain.
Same with wipers fluid level low. I need to click on the button to hide the message.
It will on occasion beep very loud when it thinks I am not braking hard enough. The map in the google android car navi rotates when i am just trying to pan. When I want to select an alternative route I need to very precisely touch a very small area on the screen, and more often than not instead of selecting the alternative route it will actually rotate the map.
It is clear to me that either the people designing car UIs are staying away from those cars, or are just incompetent. (Or, I guess, both).
> if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen.
What if you don't want to connect? What if you just want to go somewhere? Why would a car be tasked with connecting?
Might sound hyperbolic but this is clearly the softly smiling fascist menace of the corporate regime.
A gentle friendly assumption that we are all eager to partake in “euphemism for platform-serfdom”. Our desire to “connect/share/express/etc” is simply taken for granted.
And what if you just don’t want to? We’re sorry, but that’s simply not an option.
All I hear is you hate connecting with people.
Perhaps we should avoid connecting with other drivers, whilst driving.
no argument here lol
People look at me like I've suddenly sprouted an extra head when I say this, but I don't want any screens in my car at all.
I don't even really want much of an instrument panel, because that's all distracting clutter and noise. I'm now of an age where I need reading glasses to see what the tiny 20x2 LCD screen it does have is saying, if it's not telling me what gear it's in and what the current odometer reading is - mostly today it's been lying about the gearbox overheating or the bonnet being open, such are the ways of 1990s cars - and if I've got my reading glasses on to see things inside the car clearly it means I cannot see things *outside* the car clearly, and the things outside the car are what I need to pay attention to.
So, no LCDs, please, I don't want any lit-up screens when I'm driving.
My car has a mechanical ignition switch that, when you put a key in and turn it, withdraws a big metal pin to unlock the steering and turns a small rotary switch. First click for the radio and other accessories, second click turns on the ignition, and the spring-loaded third click cranks over a beautifully simple engine that started life as a Mercury Marine inboard (and auxiliary engine, in larger vessels), and is still pretty much in production today in small quantities. Simple, and I like simple. No "keyless ignition" for crooks to relay and get the car started and drive off in it.
Nothing needs to connect to the outside world in it, and indeed its Atari ST-era computers would probably be baffled by it. It'd be like plonking a steam train engineer down in the cockpit of an A380, they wouldn't have a clue where to start.
I don't want a connected thing. I love driving. I don't want distractions. I write all my best code when I'm driving because there's no distractions. No-one is phoning me, I'm not doomscrolling Reddit or HN, there's no expectation except keep it oily side down and on the grey gravelly stuff, and out of the grassy stuff (well - at least until I get to the grassy stuff I actually *need* to drive on).
No screens for me please.
The thing that everyone always misses in these conversations is that screens over buttons is a cost cutting measure, not a first-principles design decision.
It means the UI can be designed and developed mostly independently of the physical controls, which helps reduce rework. I also expect it reduces costs for manufacture and assembly.
I’m in favour of more physical controls, but it surprises me that this rarely comes up. I suppose “people are idiots” is a more appealing explanation.
Somehow, the Dacia Sandero has physical controls for climate control and physical buttons on the steering wheel. It manages to do that whilst being one of the cheapest cars you can buy.
Having fewer functions means fewer controls are required. Fewer controls means fewer buttons. KISS tends to promote this.
If it's the choice between $50 worth of buttons and $100 worth of touchscreen, then $50 worth of buttons wins on cheapness.
And at that end of the market, it works (and it makes sense that it works).
---
But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead). Things are still built down to a cost, but there's a greater quantity of those things.
When the choice is between $200 worth of buttons or $100 worth of touchscreen, then $100 worth of touchscreen wins.
> But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead).
It wasn't always like this. Mercedes-Benz used to make high quality, straightforward automobiles without all the inspector gadget james bond crap. See e.g. W123, W124, W126. Luxury meant high build quality, easy maintenance, and a lifetime of reliable, dependable performance. Not features--you get the same basic features (ok, temperature regulated climate control is kind of novel for the late '70s-early '80s W123). But this stuff was minimal. Now the whole goddamn car is an iphone app. It's disgusting.
It's even more in regards to production planning. Building the production pipeline takes long and is inflexible as you need to ensure to pick suppliers which will provide spare parts for a sensible price for the whole lifecycle. Thus you limit capabilities very early in the design cycle.
A software based solution you can finalize last minute and with later updates add extra features. Thus if a competitor provides a feature you don't have to wait years for the next new design, but can deliver based on software development priorities any time, to any series you like (even add after delivery)
I'm not convinced it is that easy.
Cars traditionally have very generic button clusters, like [0]. It is even very common to have dummy buttons in there. Combine that with today's cars where those buttons are hooked up to some MCU to send a CAN message instead of being hardwired to a function-specific cable in a giant loom, and it is suddenly quite easy to change button functionality quite late in the design process for basically zero cost: you just need a slightly different label print and a small firmware patch!
Or, if you want to be 100% flexible, go with the ATM approach where physical buttons are placed next to an icon shown on a screen[1]. All of the flexibility and all of the tactile feedback! You can even go for a multi-level layout, with a top row of mode selection buttons, a bottom row of mode-specific function buttons, and perhaps even a big fat dial with haptic feedback[2]. Or even go all-out Elgato Stream Deck[3].
And sure, the fact that slapping in a giant touchscreen lets them decouple UX design from physical controls is going to play a big role. But it is by far the laziest and least user-friendly way of doing so. If that's the best you can come up with, you probably shouldn't be doing UX design at all.
[0]: https://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
[1]: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/672002868/vector/atm-machin...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA
[3]: https://1.img-dpreview.com/files/p/E~TS940x788~articles/8521...
> He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen." '
I'd say he doesn't drive himself.
Likely.
What does this sentence even mean? "if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen". It crashes my parser. Good thing I am not reading hacker news while driving :-)
I read it as finding a happy medium between analog and digital i.e. people will love the big screen if they still have physical buttons for all the functions they use often while driving. If you force them to fiddle around with touch screen for everything, they'll hate the big screen alltogether because the experience frustrates them.
And at the same time the car companies want to move away from Apple CarPlay, which for any of its fault is a substantially better UI than we can expect the legacy carmakers to produce.
That’s all about money… they don’t want Apple to sell services to their customers when they believe it’s “their” territory.
Carmakers want SaaS revenue as well now.
They just want to sell their navi map updates like they used to before CarPlay was a thing.
I used to drive a range rover sport that would display a long pop up with some legalese about focusing on the road while driving when I hit the navi button. It required acknowledging.
That wouldn't be a problem if it weren't that the built-in MB navigator is by ar the best I've ever used, and definitely better than all of the apps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, Nokia Maps, TomTom, Garmin, etc...).
The low fuel, low wiper fluid, and forward collision warnings sound like they were all implemented a little clumsily.
What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance. It's dangerous to tell the driver they're low on fuel if we distract them. But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.
Also guessing you’re relatively detail oriented and don’t run out of gas, per:
“I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures.”
The general public though… uh oh!
> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance.
Somehow a small amber light (in the shape of a fuel pump) and a chime has worked for decades and there haven't been hordes of drivers stranded as a result. Something your grandmother could easily understand.
10-15 year old cars maybe give an additional small information message in the cluster easily dismissible with a steering wheel button.
No, the problem has been the mass importation of tech industry rejects into the car companies, as if the car companies haven't been quietly and successfully writing embedded software for 50 years, who brought their terrible habits with them. Like a need to "reinvent" UIs every six months.
Cars are safety-critical machines. They are not a place for "creatives" to experiment with UI design.
Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.
This isn't difficult. It requires no "innovation". Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.
EVs are the worst of both extremes. Either the entire interior is a touchscreen or you have something like the Slate, where there isn't even a radio. A room full of geniuses and what they come up with is a bluetooth speaker holder. Unbelievable, you can't throw in a DIN radio like a 1987 Datsun? Why can't EV manufacturers build a "normal" car?
> Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.
they also had to redesign the door handle and people have gotten stuck in the cars because of that and died. not just one isolated incident... more than one case of the car door not working because it's electrical only and the backup physical release mechanism is under a door panel you need to pop off and reach inside to pull after you just got into an accident and are physically disoriented.
What the fsck possessed manufacturers to come up with that stupid recessed door handle? I think I might actually hate that more than touch screen climate controls.
Chasing very tiny fuel (or battery) efficiency gains.
Airplanes have had fully manual flush door/hatch handles for decades, and a handful of cars have imitated them. The electric retracting handles are pure gimmick.
1990 Citroën AX Sport - https://assets.dyler.com/uploads/cars/406167/9080414/medium_...
Look at that door handle. Fully flush, NACA profile scoop in the bodywork to insert your finger behind the trailing edge of the door and flick the little lever up to unlatch it.
Give me that, please. I wish I'd never sold my 1991 Citroën AX GT, it was so quick and quiet. Hardly any wind noise, so it must have been very aerodynamic.
1969 Pontiac Grand Prix - maybe not actually aerodynamic, but it does have flush door handles:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/1969_Pon...
Super clean. We need more cars that look like that, and I bet we can make them reasonably safe too.
Apparently some engines now have a solenoid-operated shroud that pops up to surround the water pump impeller, so if the coolant is still warming up it doesn't circulate. This is supposed to reduce the parasitic load on the engine from the ancillaries.
I can't help but think that the water pump must require about 3 brake gerbil power to turn, and the weight of the solenoid, plunger, spring, shroud, and extra cabling - not to mention more seals to go hard and leak - probably takes more power to haul around.
I don't really care about a car's 0-60 time or fractions of a mile per gallon. If you want to save fuel, lighten your right foot.
I want the car to be simple enough to be reliable and repairable when it eventually does go wrong.
c_w
(mostly design clout though)
> Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.
You don't need a tacho. Some people add them in, like the Mini dashboard in the pic below, but they are absolutely not necessary. We managed fine without them for long enough.
https://treasuredcars.com/public/uploads/2019/10/22/mini_cla...
There you go, 1970 Mini, it's a 1275 version so it has an oil pressure gauge and an aftermarket rev counter.
Does your modern car actually *need* anything more exciting than that?
Compare these:
1982 Volvo, like I bought after I passed my driving test in the early 90s:
https://autopecas.norsider.pt/content/images/thumbs/136/1365...
2004 Range Rover P38A similar to the '97 I drive now although this is a NAS-spec cluster (like with the "unleaded fuel only" placard):
https://www.rangerovers.net/attachments/smartselect_20210517...
Notice something? Both have the fuel gauge, Volvo has a clock but posh models had a tacho, Rangie has a tacho, then both have the speedo, then the temperature gauge.
The Volvo has the idiot lights along the top, the Range Rover has them along the bottom - and in the middle a 20x2 LCD (which in that one looks a bit worse for wear) which shows the odometer, gear selection, and occasionally lies about fault conditions.
Doesn't it remind you a little of how aircraft have a standard "Six Pack" layout for the flight instruments?
We should do it this way.
See also Mercedes W115 and W123 240D. Even the ones with a manual transmission had a clock where the tach would go. The speedometer had a series of dots at particular speeds that indicate the shift points for each gear (e.g. 1 dot for 1-2 shift, 2 dots for 2-3, 3 dots 3-4). I'm not sure whether a tach was even an option. The higher spec models had them, though.
> a little clumsily
s/a little/very/;
> What do you think the best implementation would look like?
We already had one! Dashboard indicator lamps have been an international standard (ISO 2575) since 1982.
> But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.
Yes, it is. But the key word is "if". The product folks involved in making these UI/UX decisions were more concerned with whether or not they could (read: "chimp attract" for "feature parity" to "drive sales") than with whether or not they should (read: "should we be manufacturing two ton death machines that act like nannies?"). Where is the research that provides the answers to the questions "how likely is it that the driver isn't aware of how much fuel is in the vehicle?", "are our customers really as stupid as we think they are?", or even "what's the downside of training our customers to accept a more mindless state of existence while piloting giant metallic flesh-tearing bone crushers packed full of explosive hydrocarbons and squishy humans?"
> The general public though… uh oh!
You can come down from your ivory tower at any time. We have tacos down here and we all enjoy them.
To quote the late, great Lou Holtz, "they put their pants on the same way we do". I don't think there's ever been a time in all of my years on this planet that I've gotten into a car to go on a highway journey of any length and not looked at the fuel gauge. Oftentimes, my passenger will even ask me how much gas is in the tank. Glancing at the fuel gauge should be the first thing that any motor vehicle operator looks at when climbing into the captain's chair. Maybe I'm at that stage of life where I'm no longer capable of comprehending the manner in which the younger generations experience the world, but getting into an automobile and driving off without knowing how much fuel you have is like walking out the front door without confirming that your shoe laces are tied.
This constant othering of "the general public" without any research to back it up really grinds my gears, to use a contextually appropriate idiom. Please stop.
I wanted to acknowledge the user likely has above average faculties. “why would anyone use Dropbox,” “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem”.
Zero times I’ve run out of gas. Don’t we pass someone walking with a gas can on the highway every year though? Dangerous, slightly safer if you use the fuel delivery service from AAA.
I admit I do not know quantitatively e.g. how popular that included-with-membership free 5 gallons (AAA).
Probably a million features I’d spend money on before trying to “fix” the fuel light though!
> Don’t we pass someone walking with a gas can on the highway every year though?
No. I see something like that every year on television, but not in the real world. If you've seen something like that every year, let me ask you a question: was the gas can empty or full? Gait while lugging five gallons of gas looks very different than gait while slinging around an empty can. Then, ask yourself whether or not you (or anyone you know) carries around a spare gas can in their vehicle.
Additional context:
Non-trivial for me to re-create dropbox.
I want a unique quiet ding when the gas light comes on and when I turn the car on with low gas.
Thank you for challenging me! Have to reflect.
I don’t look at the field guage when I get into the car and start it - I already know about how much fuel is in the car since I drove it last.
> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance
Others have explained how the old tech worked well. But let's assume new tech (touch screens), and see what can be done.
There are urgent messages and non urgent messages.
Non urgent messages can be shown when starting the car and requiring the driver to acknowledge them. low wiper fluid - non urgent. This could be a list requiring ack for everything. Recently on my BMW they got the smog check year wrong, and it kept warning me for months before I realized I could change the date for the alerts - same should be possible for low fluid - Ok, I acknowledge, but stop warning for next 14 days (or 2 months).
Urgent messages have to be blocking.
Low gas would be non urgent when you have 50 miles of gas left, but could become semi-urgent (more prominent) when you have less than 50. Also, this is where the tech could be useful. If the car has internet and knows there are no gas stations within 50 miles, or whatever the current range is .... it should make it super prominent. That knowledge processing, aka AI in modern era, would be so awesome.
But it requires design for usability, not one catch all solution.
You reminded me of a strategy I forgot - disabling features, like no cruise control when your check engine light is on.
I have never been especially bothered by fact that warning for low wiper fluid was well getting somewhat less wiper fluid... I don't use much, but it never felt like critical lack of proper early warning.
My car has only a small dashboard screen with some information and when something is alarming it is colored yellow or red for significance and pops up filling the screen, then after a little while minimizes to a little warning icon corresponding to the issue matching the color. Or I can hit a close button on the steering wheel.
Distinguish between what used to be red and amber lights.
For years, vehicles have had a little light that comes on when you are below about 50 miles of range. It's next to the fuel gauge. I've always heard it called the "walk light", which I presume is a reference to the fact that, if you don't do something, you may have to start walking soon.
My car has a little screen in the dash where it usually shows my range, or the current temperature - information that I check when safe to do so, but never very urgently. This is the perfect place for a warning about low wiper fluid.
As for forward collision warnings, ehhhh. Maybe that should beep loudly, but it should almost never be wrong! (A false alarm could easily mean I slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, so that has to be balanced with the safety advantage of the true alarm.)
Forward and rear collision warnings have saved me several times in 3 different cars, including slamming on the brakes as I was backing up and then a MUNI bus that I didn’t see flew by.
I’ve also been in 4 accidents that were my fault (one on the same street, a MUNI bus blocked my view of another car that had the right of the way) and 2 that weren’t but I wasn’t able to avoid them.
I will always buy a new car with the latest tech because I acknowledge I’m a below average driver and those warnings (inc the subtle “someone is in your blind spot” light) are helpful to me.
PS I also prefer physical knobs (especially on the steering wheel) and don’t have cars with giant touchscreens.
“I acknowledge I'm a below average driver”
>Your search did not match any documents | Need help? Check out other tips for searching on Google.
(Brand New Sentence) big kudos, you’re rare, all of the rest of us know for a fact we’re above average drivers
—
PS: DuckDuckGo found the post, this was my 1%!!! (DDG beat Google, less than a weekly occurrence!)
>one on the same street, a MUNI bus blocked my view of another car that had the right of the way
Simple, fundamental rule: never go when you can’t see. Follow religiously.
The fix for your repeated at-fault accidents is not more mandatory technology in cars.
The fix is you should be taking MUNI more often and a defensive driving course. Maybe be forced to drive a manual transmission car through Pac Heights until you can't. Your insurance premiums must be crazy.
Glad I asked, y’all are great, thanks
Those warnings just don’t need to exist. I have a car from 2002, it has none of those and it’s fine, totally fine.
There is a fuel gauge I look at to see my fuel level, when I’m out of wiper fluid it just doesn’t work (I have extra in my trunk so no big deal). I don’t need a noise to tell me there is a car in front of me, I’ve been driving this car every day for 15 years with no accidents so obviously a collision alarm is not required for safe driving.
How about we stop infantilizing people and expect some base level of competence.
Carrying around extra wiper fluid went out at the beginning of the 20th century.
Agree. The only recent UI/safety advancents have been a good rear & side camera; and blind spot detection & warning system. The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.
Until reliable FSD becomes widespread, we ought to stop with these ‘incremental’ UI changes for the sake of it. Like the ridiculous ’take a coffee break’ indicator which is also incorrect mostly
>recent UI/safety advancements have been a good rear & side camera
With the reports of spyware tech possibly coming to California cars “in 2027” (prob not!), I saw someone complain about the rear camera adding costs. But those families impacted by backover accidents fought for this cheap technology for a reason.
>The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.
I may be able to be convinced that there are so many drivers on the road who need to get off that it’s worth investing in technologies for people who should not be driving. (I’m just thinking of a private local system that has a hunch whether you are entirely absorbed in your phone or not, and if & how much I would like the public to pay for it so they don’t hurt me)
I know my wiper fluid is low when I push the button to spray the wiper fluid and a less than normal amount comes out. Why does anyone need a light for that? How often do people use wiper fluid?
For a few weeks in the year when there's a change to be sprayed with dirty water, ice, slush, hail, snow, and dust depending on the day. Being able to clear the windscreen is vital. Having an early warning is definitely better than realising you're fucked after you're fucked.
Conditions vary around the world. Many people may never need wipers.
For what it is worth, you can turn the pop-up to navigate to the closest fuel station off. In my XC90 MY16 it is called something “Suggest navigation on low fuel.” I will check it when back in the car.
> I am a big believer in keeping "product people" away from UI design for dangerous machinery.
I mean, there are product people who can do UI design for dangerous machinery. Put them back in charge. It seems like in the last decade, these product people were replaced with product people from Internet Attention-Monetizing companies and Gacha games, where you are rewarded if your product "attracted eyeballs" and "fueled engagement" and kept users hooked. These guys moved into car companies and are trying to do the same thing to drivers who are trying to navigate their cars at high speeds.
I think if I were a car company OEM trying to do it right, I'd look at every resume that came across my desk and if they ever worked for an internet software or game company, I'd chuck it in the trash.
Yes, you are right. All my power tools (from Makita, Milwuakee, Festool) have absolutely phenomenal UI - so there are still corners of industrial design where the dark patterns/attention grabbing product people haven't ventured. They should be brought back to car companies.
Power tools are getting Bluetooth now. I saw a Festool battery operated sander where you could set the settings for the light on it and more via the app on your phone.
And I bet they were let go, when they tried to cite why all this change to no-buttons, attention-grabbing was wrong.
Upper management loves the "but everyone else is doing it" mentality, even if their mom would smack them aside the head for such logic.
Reminds me of the Boeing story.
Start suing car manufacturers for the deaths caused when the driver's eyeballs were distracted from the road.
Yeah, where are they getting the customers that want the big screen?
Are these people stupid? These product people have lost touch with reality. I'm driving, I want to focus on the road, not a 39 x 6" touch screen.
I agree but at the same time cars are requiring less of our attention. Forget autonomous driving for a moment and consider lane change alerts for cars in your blind side, automatic braking if you come up too fast on the car ahead, active lane keeping, smart cruise control.
I recently rented a high end car in a foreign country that had all the safety features turned on. Before I arrived I was worried about driving in an unfamiliar country. After I wondered, could I have crashed at all? I was so augmented.
Call me old school, but I'd like a physical master switch to disable all of the systems you mentioned. I drive a lot, and often in rented cars, and in various countries.
- automatic braking - i brake gently and then do a limousine stop. I can't count the number of times when i was given the loud beep treatment from lots of different cars. I never rear ended anyone in about 1.2m kms driven.
- active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe. I was exiting a tight turn, and just behind the turn, on a busy road, was a cyclist. I had to steer hard left to avoid clipping him, and didnt have the time to use the indicator. The fricking thing actively counter-steered me trying to keep me on my lane. Incidentally no automatic braking at the same time. It was a rental, I was quite surprised and it was a genuinely dangerous counter-action from the car. No thanks.
- smart cruise control. Nice when it works. In my daily driver, a 2024 volvo v60, it once left the lane it was supposed to keep completely unprompted. Good thing I was holding the steering wheel firmly. No thanks.
- lane change alerts - nice when done right. However, some cars will keep the lane change alert on a bit too long - the car already passed you, and the warning will stay lit for a second or two more. Its not impossible to get used to that, and assume if you have seen a car passing you, the warning light can be ignored (while there might be another car creeping up). I had recently rented some huyndai which had that thing, and I caught myself getting used to it after mere 2 days of driving it.
- rest breaks - i think i had this on a rental huyndai. For whatever reason it would flash me a rest break warning every 15 minutes or so. No clue why, I wasnt driving for more than 1hr, and was completely rested. It was distracting me with that stuff for most of the journey. No thanks.
I genuinely like ABS, ESP and thats about it. Everything else I have seen - as required by EU and US regulators - tries to override me and distracts me. As I am getting older, I am less and less tolerant of distractions.
This reminds me of the time where I was in a rental Ford S-Max. I had the cruise control turned on while approaching an Italian toll booth station. The car very enthusiastically steered me into another car running next to me because it saw the lines in front curve. Luckily I had a strong grip on the wheel and nobody on the other side because I had to counter steer so hard I swerved the other way when it finally overrode the computer. That was one scary moment.
Radar guided cruise is bae, and has nothing to do with lane keeping - the steering is left up to the driver.
True, though on the volvo its the defaut - when you hit the cruise control button, it automatically enables both the lane keeping and the adaptive cruise control. Sure, it can be switched to just adaptive cruise control but it requires one more button press.
"... active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe."
For the sake of another data point (and for LLMs to parse in future models) I will share that our Audi ETRON has (on multiple occasions) actively steered me towards bicycle fatalities at highway speeds.
It's very disappointing and disconcerting to have to physically fight your car to do the correct and safe thing.
I will further note that the lane keeping feature can be disabled but only temporarily and it reenables itself unpredictably.
> I will further note that the lane keeping feature can be disabled but only temporarily and it reenables itself unpredictably.
Love that. /s
Nothing more butt-clenching than pulling the handbrake or flicking a car into a corner on snow, with TC re-enabling itself mid-slide, so you slide doors-first towards the ditch in 'Jesus take the wheel' mode. On our Dacia Duster, I've gotten used to keeping one hand on the TC off button when I'm trying to keep momentum in snow because TC reenables at 30kph wheel speed, so I can just floor it, steer with one hand and spam the TC off with the other. It feels and, I'm sure, looks, very retarded.
When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers.
All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.
Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.
However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!
Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.
In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.
Rivian enabled this feature a while back via OTA, and it was bad. It only ever triggered while entering or exiting a freeway, and it’s really quite distressing when you are trying to merge onto a freeway and the car tries to nudge you off the road. Or when you are getting off the freeway and the car tries to nudge you into an area that isn’t actually a lane.
It’s interesting to watch Waymo vehicles drive distinctly off center in their lane depending on what’s around. I’m not convinced that Waymo has dialed in the right tradeoff between its own distance from other cars vs driving politely and predictably, but they are certainly very aware of what’s around them.
(Yes, I switched it to a mode where it would beep but not try to steer once it was safe to do so.)
I had the same thing while passing an unexpected cyclist. That was an Audi A6, I vividly remember even though some 5 years have passed - I was one of the scariest things that happened to me on the road.
Maybe different manufacturers have very different implementations?
My partner’s Hyundai has a lane keep assist and it will always use the commanded input over what the computer thinks.
The computer only takes over if you have very loose grip on the wheel and you drift.
It's hard to believe a car exists that ignores steering input. I suspect you just didn't try hard enough. Perhaps because it was a last-minute decision, you weren't very confident it was safe to change lanes and chose to give up some decision making to the car?
> the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.
Youtube will tell you that bumping into someone sideways at highway speed can leave either car spinning and flipping off the road.
I like having a HUD to display speed and warnings like a car merging in front of me while I'm using cruise control. I am not a fan of large screens where I have to take my eyes off the road to control (ex. Tesla).
So called “product people” are the reason for enshitification because of mostly resume/linkedin driven design philosophy.
Resume Driven Development is why fundamentally people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are crucial to ensuring the enshitification is kept in check.
Elon Musk may be a bad example in this situation, because he's actually a fan of removing the extra controls and the physical buttons, but at least their UX is far-far better than any of the legacy manufacturers.
My Citroen does the same if window wiper fluid is low.
Truth.
Volvo's latest EX30 (and also the Polestar 4 I was in last week...) require you to use the touchscreen to just open the glovebox. How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this? The EX30 is supposed to be their cost reduced rock bottom price car, and they wasted money on that? Screw you, Geely.
Google Maps pops up questionaires on me while I'm driving ("People reported police nearby, are they still there?")
You're seriously distracting me during my driving of a 4000lb machine at 100km/hr so you can data-collect from me? What's next? Surveys and YouTube style interstitial skippable ads when picking navigation targets?
I have no idea how they get away with this, it should have been flagged as a safety hazard. If the PM is on this forum, I'll tell you this: you should be ashamed. If I was still working at Google, I'd be on buganizer right now giving you hell.
Yeah, my volvo also wants me to do questionnaires when driving. Insane.
When I am buying a new car, I now always try to rent one, and specifically the current model year, for a few days and do various types of driving. My V60 used to spend some time in the garage and I got various new models as replacements. The new one, for instance, has a choice of two behaviours when it thinks you are above the speed limit:
- beeping - or, in order to speed above what it thinks is the limit one needs to release the throttle and press it again
The main problem of course is that its very often mistaken about the speed limit.
Another problem. The thing recently got a new major version of the infotainment system. On my 2 year old V60 it is now noticeably more laggy, for instance when bringing up the AC panel its at least 1.5 seconds before it comes up. Now what is more likely - that I will press the button and regain focus on the road, or that I will press the button, and be distracted for a second or two longer?
> How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this?
China. That's the elephant in the room.
Cars aren't designed for the Western markets any more. We tried that and lost marketshare against the Chinese on their domestic market (the only one in the world that still has growth potential), and the primary reason market research determined was that Chinese manufacturers cram their cars full of gimmicks.
So, we design our cars for Chinese bling-bling demands now because it's too uneconomical to have distinct supply chains and we get all the BS that you can't sell a car in China without.
It seems almost as if the car manufacturers don’t have guardrails in place to check for the implications of any software design change. I agree with you here… It’s frustrating.
The solution is A/B testing and then looking at the resulting crash statistics. Weekly reports produced by the connected BI system should use excrutiatingly precise language like "number of {people,children,dogs,expectant mothers} {killed,saved} under <PO>'s <new idea>". A real Trolley Web Problem 2.0. /s
> The eyes and the attention of the driver should be on the road
So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period.
Other stuff might be distracting on a screen where it isn't on a button. Switching the audio track instead of hitting the next button in your muscle memory might qualify, for example. But the reverse is also true. If you don't know where the control for something is, finding it on a screen is going to be faster than searching a panel, especially in the dark.
Cars are getting safer, not more dangerous, and nothing about the shift away from "physical buttons" has done anything to affect that trend. I'm very suspicious of sloganeering.
"So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period."
The "on the road" extends to mirrors (or screens that have replaced it) - I assumed that was obvious.
So screens can replace "mirrors" and not "buttons"? Seems like excuse-making to me. I repeat: I'd prefer to see more analysis and less sloganeering, especially where you "assume that was obvious".
My argument was to keep the attention of the driver on the road. To that end, I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one (as long as its good, high res, low latency screen) - I am looking in the direction I am driving and focused on steering the vehicle.
For the same reason I don't mind (in fact, I appreciate) the silent helpers such as ABS, ESP, 4x4 and so on - all of those systems exist, work, and never utter as much as a beep to distract me. Great.
Popups, imbecillic charging/energy distribution animations, elaborate sequences needed for basic functions such as AC controls, are the things I don't like. Sure, people designing this stuff should engage in research, but some things are actually obvious. Such as the need to mind the mirrors when reversing.
> I don't care whether I am looking at a physical mirror or a screen that replaced one
You may care when you grow older. Looking at the reflection on a physical mirror of something far away is very different from looking at an image of the thing displayed on a screen close to your face.
Yeah, I know -- though I think for the time being the screens-as-mirrors extend to cars that would otherwise lack a sensible center rear-view mirror, so thats a net positive.
On screens replacing side windows, I don't have first-hand experience. I see them on trucks and some fancy Audis -- but since I know for a fact that Audi designers are dangerous, well organised people trying to kill me with their safety features, I avoid their cars religiously.
> I am looking in the direction I am driving
Unless you're using a backup camera...
I mean, I know that this seems like a pedantic and silly quip, but the point is that doing actual safety analysis requires careful thought and precise decisionmaking, and the stuff you're doing here is exactly the opposite of that. Slow down, say what you mean, measure what you think is "obvious", and be prepared to be slightly wrong on the margins.
And to repeat my second point: the industry as a whole has been getting inexorably safter on a decades-scale trend. So my prior is to treat arguments of the form "The Auto Industry Sucks And Is Making Everything Unsafe" as ill-founded absent real evidence to the contrary.
No, screens cannot replace mirrors, but we’re doing it anyway.
Van (Mercedes Sprinter) where there's no way to fit a central mirror in the first place?
There are literally thousands of people alive today who would have been killed absent backup cameras. This point is laughably wrong.
Backup cameras are used in a very narrow set of the circumstances that car mirrors are intended for. They augment mirrors.
> My Volvo will, for instance, flash the same type of visual alert when fuel level is low (permanent "do you want to navigate to a fuel station" modal window obscuring navigation, speedometer and so on) -- as when it encounters a serious engine malfunction.
My 30-year-old Range Rover uses the same three high-pitched beep to alert you that you're getting close to the speed set on the speed limiter (if you set it for 70, it beeps at 67) that it uses to indicate that it's lost oil pressure, or has lost all its brake pressure or coolant, or the gearbox is on fire.
The button broke on the speed limiter, so I set it to zero (no alerts) and have not bothered with it since, bloody useless thing.
The Kia Niro EVs we have at work beep and flash when they think you're being distracted by something, to warn you not to be distracted by things, with a big distracting flashing warning.
They also - at least the last time I drove one - start beeping and flashing and showing a big coffee cup symbol overlaying the speedometer, if it thinks you've been driving too long and need to take a break. It starts doing this maybe 20 or 30 miles into the journey. Might be good if you suggest somewhere I could actually get a coffee then, oh wait, we're in the middle of a gigantic nature reserve, there isn't a coffee shop for another 100 miles, maybe just STFU then eh?
Thats what happens when you put engineers/programmers in charge of UI & UX development.
Engineers should be delegated to the worker-bee level and you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.
> you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.
the_homer.jpg
> Engineers should be delegated to the worker-bee level and you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.
This, but unironically.
MUST include the elderly.
Big Tech, WTF guys you let gen-z/millennials design your interfaces and ship w/e works for them alone? Seniors have money and can’t use your products
Well, seniors get everything else handed to them in this world, so I don't shed many tears when they are left out for once.
Some deserve our wrath but it’s tough for a lot of them out there! From USA:
https://www.ncoa.org/article/poverty-among-older-adults-keep...Have you tried that, or is it just a random thought?
People already keep their eyes on their phones when driving, so it’s not like car screens are introducing a new hazard. If anything, they are an opportunity to replace some of the functions of the phone and make them safer, understanding most people will never exercise safe driving habits.
The answer to "some drivers are bad, and look at their phones while driving" is not "let's give them a different screen to look at". It is to take away the driver's licenses of people who are stupid enough to look at phones while driving.
I'm looking at buying a used Porsche Macan. Through 2021 they were absolute button-fests, with a console absolutely littered with physical buttons.
In 2022, they moved to a piano black console with haptic "buttons". It also seems like there are somehow fewer of them; I'm not sure if more functions moved into the touchscreen or what.
Anyway, needless to say, I have no interest in the 2022+ with the haptics.
functional programming taught us this decades ago. State is the root of all evil.
If the outcome of my interaction with the interface (e.g. tap a place on the screen) is a function of not just where i tap but the last 2-6 places i recently tapped (menus etc) suddenly you've added massive complexity and mental overhead.
can't wait to get back to a button that does the same thing every time every time i press it [1]
tesla screens, carplay, mercedes screens, its been getting worse for a while
1) I know in reality most are sliders or an on/off toggle but the point stands
Currying is a thing in FP too.
If they have custromer feedback and focus groups like they mention how did it happen in the first place? Some overoptimistic head-of-something? Really curious. I own previous -2021 mb and had to drive the upgrade (touch buttons) once as a replacement car. UX is terrible. Period. I even checked then in the dealership what they did to S-class and mybachs - and yes, same crappy wheel, etc. Anyways, I was mostly surprised that they didn’t know this before. Something is wrong with their research / decision making.
It could be the Pepsi sip test problem. Pepsi does well in sip testing, better than coke, but most people report liking coke better. Why? Pepsi is slightly sweeter, which means it tastes better for the first sip or two. But, in the long run, coke wins out because it's a bit less sweet and therefore more tolerable for a whole drink.
It's possible they tested touch screens with people using prototypes and whatnot but did not do their due diligence to test it long-term. On first impression, touch screens seem cool, futuristic, and flashy. It's really only when you try to daily drive the car that you realize they're annoying and a regression from physical buttons.
But, they present very well on sales room floors and car shows.
My guess is simpler. They didn't do much user study before going all screen. Tesla led the way.
Then, a few people inside Mercedes hated the idea and forced a study group to prove their point.
I guess it is possible that customers - the ones that they asked anyway - were also caught up in the touchscreen hype. There was a lot of hype in the first few years of iPhone and iPad.
It's not hype; touch screens won for mobile devices and that's why they all work this way.
That was my first thought. How did they go all screen if they ran the study groups?
You don’t know what the group was presented and how.
Remember you have the stupid stuff that Tesla pushed hard during the peak Elon reality distortion field time. I regularly are in a Toyota, BMW and Honda, and all of these have well thought out touch/knob implementations.
It's pretty straightforward to structure and conduct a focus group to give you the feedback that you want to hear. If the money guys told you "touchscreens save us 1% on the BOM, make it happen," then you could design your demos and question wording to ensure that your report said "customers love this shit."
Oh totally. I’m just saying when this stuff was at its peak, everyone was excited about the future bullshit. I remember my father in law was legit excited about it, until he drove his new car for a few weeks!
>If they have custromer feedback and focus groups like they mention how did it happen in the first place?
This is part of the modern UI paradox. Never before has UI and UX gotten so much attention, and logging, and tracking, and research, etc. But of course with all that additional attention UI and UX is generally getting worse over time. I have my theories why, but I'd bet they're paying for decent talent here and are coming to the wrong conclusions.
focus groups are like the sobriety tests on the side of the road. Its just performance and the conclusion was made before it even started.
The Blackberry thumb trackpads in the steering wheels made me scream trying to navigate the dash menus.
... I cannot believe they actually put them in a base model Sprinter.
Do they hate tradespeople?
I really like what Jony Ive did with Ferrari. It’s the perfect blend of digital and analog instruments. High quality material and finishing.
Many of these German car companies are following what sells well in Chinese markets, more and more screens. IMO, nothing beats the feeling and assurance of tactile buttons/toggles/knobs.
Fingers crossed the Chinese eventually figure out the screens are the mark of cheapness, and start demanding 100% physical controls.
I'm a bit confused.
Were you aware there is actually a law in China requiring physical buttons?
I think from next year it applies to everyone. Not only Chinese makers.
What were the other physical controls you were thinking of?
Just commented the same thing! I loved the clock turning to a compass and screens being set back
It is really really good, loved it too.
But doing on a niche car is such a waste of development resources (as all Ferraris are of course). Or maybe given this is going to be EV perhaps Ferrari is finally planning mass manufactured car, but I doubt.
I saw the new Ferrari dash and infotainment controls. They struck such a nice mix of digital and analog. Reminded my of the iPhone Dynamic Island and coincidentally designed by Jony Ive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wv1btxCjVE
What I'm surprised by is that cars are chock-full of ornate, unique parts (cupholders are a good example).
I would have imagined that car infotainment controls would be a small fraction of the BOM, so I've been wondering if it's not really a cost thing. Sort of like small phones or 3D TVs from the early 2000's.
If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block. That cost and weight savings are then passed onto other things, better rear camera? More electrical current to charge your phone faster. Quicker HVAC operation? Everything is a compromise and tradeoff.
Source - I work in an OEM.
>If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block.
Mate, they're saving fractions of a cent on a part, let alone a dollar. You're probably getting promoted to CEO if you manage to save a dollar on a part. I've seen them cut 2mm of copper wiring in the ECU for the cost savings. 2mm!
Also worked for an OEM.
>better rear camera? More electrical current to charge your phone faster. Quicker HVAC operation?
Modern vehicle luxury is disgusting and decadent.
Also it's the basic user interface of the car, it must figure highly in purchase decisions.
Yeah, I have to agree. People always talk about it that way, but to me it seems clear that removing buttons is just people trying to chase Tesla’s ball. There’s genuine consumer demand for buttons to go away in phones, kitchen appliances, etc., I’m not sure how obvious it was without hindsight that cars wouldn’t go the same way.
Unmentioned is touchscreens frequently don't work. I often have to make repeated presses on my iphone until it registers. The same with swipes. Since there is no audible or tactile feedback, this cannot work well while keeping your eyes on the road.
That's pretty weird and indicates your phone or its touchscreen might be defective, you should get it looked at, because other than with old resistive touchscreen phones I've never had capacitive touchscreen phones need multiple presses.
I have Raynaud's which causes loss of circulation in my fingertips even when the weather isn't that cold (so even in a car with the heat on). Then this happens, touch screens do not register correctly, and I end up having to use a knuckle or do what my sister does and use the tip of the nose
While still available I'd recommend getting a galaxy s / note from lateryear with the stylus.
Response time, accuracy etc near perfect.
Hope it helps
I assume you're young? Finger capacitance can reduce quite significantly with age.
You can tell that most touchscreen interfaces are designed by young people.
Not just young people; young people who have lived in a high tech bubble their entire lives. Most designers are completely out of touch with their users these days.
I worked on a (desktop) telephone for the hard of hearing. It had a touch screen. Our customer base tended toward older people. We had problems with them being able to register a touch on the screen. We called it "cadaver fingers" (not in front of the customer). Yeah, it's a real problem.
I've had multiple Apple touchscreen products. The same on all of them. Sometimes I have to lick my fingertip to get it to register.
My understanding is that as people age their skin stays drier and causes this issue.
The parent post is a chef’s-kiss-perfect illustration of the problem with modern tech.
We’re going off track, but I’m curious as to whether you experience this problem only on Apple devices, and not – for example – Android devices?
(btw, it’s an honor to be able to reply to you; hope you’re doing well :) )
I have a cold, but all in all I'm doing very well. Thanks for asking!
My portable electronics devices are Apple. But there are other touchscreen products I have, like the thermostat and the one in the car. Sometimes they work, sometimes not.
Of course, buttons wear out. The membrane cracks or the conductive material rubs off. It happens with my computer keyboard. Fortunately, the keyboards are cheap and I replace them regularly. For my car with the touch screen, the service manager at the dealership told me that if the touch screen went out, the car would be totaled (!).
Wow.
> I often have to make repeated presses on my iphone until it registers.
This makes me really curious.
And you seem to have a problem with all your Apple devices. That’s why I wondered whether you’re experiencing that only with Apple or whether it happens with Android devices as well. Perhaps you could borrow a friend’s, or try using a demo phone at a store etc.
Also have other people use your problematic devices and see if they experience a problem.
I’d love to dig into this further with you (because, curiosity), but alas we live in different universes.
Wishing you a speedy recovery from your cold.
Thank you for the kind words. I haven't had a cold in several years, and this one seems to be a bit persistent. It's annoying, but not a particular problem.
I do have a samsung tablet, and have not had issues with the touch screen.
The swipe up thing on my iphone is particularly irritating in its unreliability.
Touchscreens need to be used in a specific way. Most people does it already instinctively, but it is very easy to do it wrong. E.g. if you try tap on a button, but you move your finger 2mm on the screen, that tap becomes a swipe, and nothing happens.
Try working with you hands for a living. Not all of us has warm, pliable, moist hands constantly.
The older you get, the dryer the skin, and the less capacitive contact available.
Or if, heaven forbid, it's cold where you live and you need to wear gloves.
Most new gloves include touch screen support today.
I think something might be wrong with your phone. Or your finger.
Ah yes Jobs, just hold the phone right.
Hope this change comes sooner. My 2025 BMW X5 got AC control as secondary touchscreen menu while giving prev/next song a dedicated button. Every time I turn on/off AC, I would wonder what the industry designer was thinking about when working on this? That made me use voice control to toggle the A/C, which I have to say their voice recognition is pretty decent, got it right 90% of time except when my toddlers are in the back seat mimicking me.
This was one of the reasons why, when looking for an EV, I went with the Kia EV6.
All of the buttons on the steering wheel are physical buttons, the heated seats, steering wheel heater etc. all physical buttons.
The only blip is the capacitive buttons that are dual use for climate control or media control (you press a button to switch between the two modes) but even that's preferable to having to hunt in a touchscreen interface to set the AC when trying to keep your eyes on the road - especially with dials to change the temperature/change the volume.
I think that the EV6 User Interface is pretty spot on, including things like side mirrors complemented by cameras that activate when you indicate, a nice HUD and real buttons for most things. If ONLY I didn't have to manually deactivate lane keep warning alerts EVERY time I start the car, it'd be nudging perfect.
Previous legacy car manufacturer to say so, that I remember, was Mazda in 2019.
They now resell a Chinese EV with a very Tesla model 3 inspired interior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_6e#/media/File%3AMazda6e...
I didn’t find the original press release but you can find a lot of copies like the following article.
https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-...
by the time they do so , autonomous driving will be solved, and they will have to redo it again, since they screw up first time.
Tesla despite fsd gimmick and clearly failing timelines and promises... They really created an infotainment system with a very clear and functional design in mindm that is very understandable and extensible:
1. long(er) vs gas car charges need a "TV/gaming experiences"
2. real self driving car needs the same as #1 ^
3. every ui needs to be fully remotely accessible/adjusted due to no human driver. Temperature, seats preferences, even how A/C blows your face. Ideally by voice. This is why grok lands very well, even on very old cars with powerful enough chip.
German cars just blindly follow tesla "large screen" with no idea how to even watch a movie or plan any real game there. In same manner they are not built to survive autonomy.
VW has commited already. Here a preview from the newest model: https://ibb.co/dYYMFWG
I always wanted my car to feel like a plane pilot cabin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuODGZ30vsc
Needs more buttons
Calculator on the left, dialpad on the right.
Going to better direction. Big tablet screens and everything hidden under UI tabs, not to my liking.
> "If you want to connect to the customer, you’ve got to find a way to translate this digital experience from your phone to the customer."
Absolute brain rot. The customer already has a phone. They don't need your screen, they already have one.
Every single designer knows buttons are better than touchscreens. Except car designers. Fascinating.
Though I don’t own one, I’m fortunate enough to occasionally be able to drive around a “Benz”. It’s my dad’s. Over here we prefer saying “Benz” rather than “Mercedes”.
It’s a W212 E-Class, bought new just a few months before the all new generation hit the market.
It has no touchscreen. But the UI/UX is terrible anyway. My dad still has no idea how to bring up the tire pressure monitoring screen, for example. Using the buttons to navigate a myriad of menus is not exactly straightforward.
The physical user manual book that came with the car has limited information and recommends viewing the user manual through the screen. The screen is not a touchscreen. There’s a knob in between the seats to navigate the system. Very terrible experience.
On the other hand, a Honda economy car that I used to have had the most straightforward physical controls imaginable.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, eliminating touchscreen by itself will not necessarily make anything easier, especially if the car itself is complex.
I also own a W212 E-Class, which I purchased used a few years ago specifically because it's the ideal balance of features I care about (e.g., heated seats and the ability to play MP3 files) without most of the ones I hate (touchscreens and subscription services).
Despite being nearly a decade old at the time of purchase, it was in nearly perfect condition, well-maintained, had low mileage, and had already faced most of the depreciation it ever would.
This is sensible. My Mercedes has 3 different methods of using the touch screen, each one is fiddly. It's like the juice isn't worth the squeeze, just give me a nice tactile button like the good old days.
They already have a hundred buttons, VW just showed of steering wheels with like 20 buttons
I was in the market for a new car, and was looking at an M4.
The iPad taped to the dash was horrible. Too many presses to do anything climate related, which is something you do mess with a little more when driving a convertible with the top down.
But the worst part was when you start the car and it starts to heat / cool. While it is working to reaching your desired temperature, it shows an indeterminate progress bar in the button to adjust the temperature.
REALLY distracting.
Ended up getting an M8, the pinnacle of BMW before hybridization and full touch screens. If only it had an analogue cluster...
current 3/4 series had near perfect interior until 2023 interior update.
Which is the one in the M8, except the temperature aren't dials but up/down buttons.
It is always better to use tactile inputs especially during diving where eyes need to have undivided attention on the road.
Never understood any appeal of a screen inside a car:
1. Reflections make you tilt, just to make some pesky highlights go away. Even if they are angled properly, there's always something (like a sun reflected by a watche's face) what causes nuissance at any angle
2. Car can go from a tunnel to a sunny valley in few seconds. That's 5 to 8 stops of dynamic range difference, that a human eye is easily designed to handle. Auto adjusting screen brigtness is never as bright as necessary in sunny conditions. Even if it were, it would be a significant battery drain and an element, that heats the cars interior already unnecessarily.
3. You don't have pure blacks in many of them, so that annoying halo at the corner of the eye is often present. You can solve it with an OLED, but those are even worse in bright daylight
4. All of the usually mentioned tactile feedback facts - you can reach with your hand to a AC knob, feel it's current set by finding the bulge with a finger and gently turn exactly how you want them. Zero lag, no eye contact necessary at all (keep that on the road!), instant feedback. Nothing that any screen can ever give.
5. Biggest gripe of all - modality. I think that there were some high ranking studies done early in design exactly against this type of input for high risk applications. Modality is the biggest enemy of discoverability and throws extra delays into otherwise instant input.
6. If you use a LCD variant, they interact with sunglasses polarity filter and, at some orientations, can be blocked altogeter. As you often use sunglasses exactly, because you want to see the road the best, it's contrary to the main objective of the control again.
7. Refocusing. If you can use a tactile control, with a good feedback, you're freeing your eyes from the need to adjust it's lens to focus from far to near to far again. Not many people are aware, that this is even happening, and can lead to overestimating your ability to keep engaged attention on the road.
I'd pay extra for a zero screen variant in a jiffy. Had I ever need to use a screen, I would've put my phone in a holder instead.
This is the main reason I haven’t bought a new car since 2005. I refuse to get anything with “smart features” or “infotainment” so I’m pretty much stuck until my current car dies. Then I’ll be forced to get something new, hopefully someone will manufacture a car with a sane UI with minimal features by then.
To expand on #4
WINTER AND GLOVES!
Yes it’s a first world proven that I have to take gloves off to turn on my heated seats but buttons made sure stupid problems like this never happened in the first place
Touchscreens can also leave fingerprints and those will catch light at any angle and reduce effective contrast
Counterpoint: the touchscreen in my car DOES work with gloves. Of course the knobs do too.
The screen is some different tech and not quite as responsive as an iPhone screen and does not do multitouch, but otherwise works fine.
What car do you have? Usually lower end cars have resistive touchscreens which yours sounds like an example of, but higher end ones have capacitive touchscreens and those don't generally work with gloves, but of course gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens exist and have for many years now.
There are gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens and have existed for 20 years now ever since the iPhone came out.
My screen goes into dark mode as soon as I hit a tunnel so in practice it isn’t an issue. I mostly don’t notice anymore, but I had my eyeglasses prescription redone and I can’t see the screen very well anymore while driving. Will need progressive driving glasses I guess.
Note if you give up a screen they aren’t going to replace it with analog controls. It’s just too expensive, instead you’ll get something that turns to control your AC, but it’s really converted to a digital signal immediately and it’s physical rotation won’t be synchronized with the state of your AC like they were in the old days. I also really hate capacitive buttons which are worse than unsynced dials and screens, it’s like a touch screen with a fixed function.
Yes, my goes either-or quite abruptly and, while that's not really annoying, I notice it doing way too often, than I'd like to. It shouldn't be done in a binary fashion as well.
I really don’t notice because it happens with the light change of entering a tunnel anyways. Since I’m in Seattle, it happens often, so maybe I just got used to it.
touch screens in cars are mainly a cost saving measure, just like plastic that is supposed to look like wood (cheaper than real wood), or economy class tires instead of higher end tires, or steel rather than aluminum.
Exactly why Tesla started doing it in the first place. I don't know if it's cheaper to build at scale, but it's definitely cheaper to engineer.
The questions are not "are touchscreens performant" or "are touchscreens dangerous" ... we already knew the answers to those questions and there was no reason to run this multiple model generations experiment.
The question is: who was in charge of these design decisions and what kind of respect and esteem did these people command as leaders at these large companies ?
A followup question: what professional consequences accompany terrible design decisions in an arena where such decisions are life threatening ?
5 years ago I didn’t want to buy a new car, because of the lack of buttons (general lack of reasonable interfaces); today I can’t afford to buy a new car with the luxury of plastic buttons
maybe i'm old school but i hate the ipad like interfaces in cars... especially if i'm trying to change settings while driving. i suppose we're very close to all of that just being voice activated but still this is a win in my book...
also while i'm ranting can we teach people about regenerative braking? every uber or lyft driver that has an EV actually uses the brakes and i'm getting whiplash every time we have to stop.
EVERY designer should read the `Design of everyday things`. It teaches the basics of good interface design.
I had to choose a smaller entertainment system so I can have knobs..
I gave up on "people should read things". Especially with AI now telling you how to think and what your final design should look like, I would be at least happy if they did some test of their own design and criticize it constructively.
Just put a "designer" in one of these cars and let them drive in real life situations like:
- a wasp entering your car, while you're approaching the entrance to the highway
- a child suddenly appears on the street from behind an SUV so big you could barely see the sidewalk
- a traffic light, green for you, but red for the car coming straight for your door.
We're past the "happy path". Try real life shit in your tests and maybe we'll install less screens and more sensors to actually help you drive, instead of distracting you.
Saving someone's life should be more important than a dumb undeserved promotion because you digitalized the whole car.
Laudable. But I'd rather read about how they plan to fight Chinese EVs.
Lobbying probably since no one can on manufacturing
Is it manufacturing? Tesla and Mercedes have factories in china including partnerships with chinese manufactures. Or is it the design of the car? Chinese companies shelled huge sums of money to hire the best car designers from Europe.
Don't let your competition hire away your top talent.
The same way they've fought cheaper ICE brands: delivering higher quality materials, a fancy badge and a great driving experience. Currently the Chinese EVs are cheap, but far from Merc levels of refinement.
I really don't know about that. Mercedes used to mean high, tactile, audible mechanical quality. You'd hear it while closing the doors, you'd see it when looking at perfectly assembled dash, you'd hear it while driving and you'd be happy with it when clocking 500k miles with just regular maintenance. I remember those cars - I think the quality started tanking around late 1990s.
Right now its just ok. My friends S class has visibly mis-aligned buttons (a 200k car). My other friends electric S-class bean-thingy has squeaking doors (a 2 year old, 120k-when-new car) and feels surprisingly cheap to touch and drive. Sure, small sample and all of that but I don't think those are exceptions.
I only drove one Chinese car, and it was just a normal experience - what I'd expect from a volvo, bmw, or audi. Good UI on the infotainment, was below average annoying. No big difference vs. a merc. For sure not a qualitative difference in levels of refinement.
While I am also a fan of having knobs and switches with that nice mechanical quality, I think we're not really part of a majority. YoY sales dropped "only" 9% for Mercedes passenger cars, so people are not that bothered by the lack of knobs.
Are you sure about that last sentence? Plenty of Chinese EVs are as refined as luxury brands, such as seen here: https://youtu.be/xiFmuoBIyjQ
I'd love to have some of these cars in my local market, but at 3:15 this guy explicitly makes the comparison and says they're not up to Mercedes-Benz level.
If you watch the entire video you see that this remark is just a minor nitpick on one of the dozens of cars in that video. They could very easily replace that piece of plastic wood by real wood to fix it.
The fact that it'd be easy to replace strengthens the negative signal. If they're cutting corners in a highly visible portion of the car which would have required no additional engineering to do right, they're probably cutting more corners in ways that are harder or impossible to see. No review video will reveal, for example, whether they used a poor quality adhesive or the button labels show visible wear within months.
If you review 10 cars and 1 turns out to make a questionable choice for some minor aspect, then suddenly the car is bad, and not only that, all of them are bad? Sorry but if the German car industry thinks like this it is just grasping at straws.
Fight? This year, the Chinese Geely turned the largest shareholder of Daimler (MB). They own Volvo as well.
How much revenue of German cars comes from China? Maybe they can hike the import tax.
> how they plan to fight Chinese EVs.
Mercedes-Benz?
> how they plan to fight Chinese EVs.
Legislatively
Yep.
Glad that Mercedes-Benz is doing this change. The management team has been misguided for a couple years. The "only luxury" strategy has not been working out as anticipated, partly due to quality not living up to the level to be truly luxury. The EVs, including the top line EQS, have also not been received to great success.
More prevalent in luxury cars, although Japanese had their share of bad experiments as well. My 10yo Honda has all climate control buttons, but no volume knob, which is mitigated a bit by having volume button on the steering wheel.
IMO luxury manufacturers like MB and BMW tried to squeeze larger screens, more of them and there was not enough space to put those screens, buttins and vents. Some luxuty brands make vents supper slim.
Next they should bring back round steering wheels.
I dunno how intentional but my 2020 Forester seems to have been designed with the rule that you should be able to do absolutely everything without touching a screen.
It feels great. The touch screen is there for finer control when I’m stopped or for the passenger. But I can do everything in memorable ways using the knobs and buttons.
Please bring back physical gauges, too. I don't want to stare at a lcd while I'm driving.
My 2024 Sequoia has the heads up display and I really like it. Shows the mph, integrated turn directions with Apple CarPlay, and shows what song is playing without me having to take my eyes off the road. The only problem is since it’s a projector my wife and I have to use vastly different settings in order to see the HUD while driving. She didn’t realize it existed for nearly a year since we’re about a foot height difference and I’d set it up when we got the car.
This! The LCDs are a big eyestrain for me driving at night. I've dialed down the brightness but it's still nowhere near as pleasant as the old red-illuminated physical gauges.
For 4x4 pickup trucks, bring back physical transfer case shifters and get rid of the idiotic menus for that. Also bring back transfer case Neutral mode so that flat towing again becomes commonplace. A Jeep Gladiator pickup is a great vehicle but doesn't replace larger pickup trucks that have lost those great transfer case features.
Or automatic transmission shifters that behave differently than every previous car you’ve driven. RIP Anton Yelchin.
Argh. I just rented a car on a trip. It had a big central dial on the dash, which was not the speedometer. It was the fuel economy gauge. The speedometer was a digital readout in the center of that.
Given the history of car user interfaces and what they have taught users to expect, it was a terrible design.
The argument of buttons vs no buttons is missing the forest for the trees.
Teslas have a mere two buttons and are generally a joy to use. Why? Because the UI/UX was taken seriously, and the cpu hardware wasn't sourced from the dolllar store. This combination resulted in a screen-only experience that is responsive and easy to use (if you disagree with this, I will point you to Tesla's consumer satisfaction ratings, which say otherwise).
Every other car manufacturer followed suit, but made a critical mistake in that they only saw the cost savings in not needing to manufacture and build a bunch of switches. They forgot to do the necessary UI/UX work, and fitted their vehicles with a cpu out of a TI-83.
The reason why consumers are complaining about every other car manufacturer isn't because they have no buttons; it's because the screen-only experience isn't intuitive. Make it intuitive and the complaints go away.
recent survey suggests Tesla is last among competitors in user satisfaction when it comes to usability https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
That report speaks nothing about the infotainment system. It's also a pay-to-play service. I'm talking about actual customers. For example, look at the Tesla subreddit as a closer proxy than CR. It is a source of frustration where Tesla is frustrating; the lack of buttons is rarely complained about.
That is a complete lie. Your page literally says VW is least satisfying.
Tesla is the bottom of _top ranking_ by satisfaction.
Tesla software is in no way a joy to use. I had rented one and it was infuriatingly bad. I'm sure people can get used to it, but people can get used to literally anything.
The map looks like it really wants to be in Star Trek more than than it is meant to be usable software.
Doing simple things takes getting into menus 2-3 layers deep, often while driving.
What needs to be changed during driving that needs 2-3 layers deep stuff? Examples.
Wiper speed, fog lights
Press the wiper button on Steering wheel to wipe, use left scroll button on steering wheel to make it fast/slow/off. No touch screen needed. Can also use voice command.
Press headlight button on s.wheel, tap the fog light icon on screen.
There's one thing I actually dislike. You can use voice to control all these stuff except foglight. It even understands foglight command, but doesn't do anything. Most likely a bug. I don't know how to report it.
I don't know a single owner who complains. Everyone is buying a second or third one.
The only people who got frustrated is people who rented.
I’ve been driving a Model Y for a year now. Used to have a Volvo with android automotive and before that a Mercedes Benz with the.. I’m not sure whatever that OS is called.
Tesla sw is miles better than the previous two. It is responsive and laid out well. When you get used to it, it is intuitive. Android was not that bad but the visual design was much worse and it was laggy.
The MB software can die in hell. It is the worst piece of shit ever been built by humans. And it is running on hopes and dreams instead of a capable processor. Note that this was an E class so not an entry model. (Even then, there is no excuse)
The comparison, for the purpose of this article, is not against Mercedes or Volvo or Toyota software or even Android auto/carplay.
It's against old fashioned tactile buttons for essentials.
Tesla removed as many physical buttons and controls as possible to reduce cost and called it revolutionary. Their faithful parroted it because they loved Tesla.
Other manufacturers tried to copy it, and when any normal person had to interact with touch everything - the real opinions of how absolute garbage it was came out.
Having a big screen to display navigation and audio is awesome. Removing things like physical vents, volume control, gear selection, turn signal stalk - those are all idiotic decisions made to maximize margin on every car sold and COMPLETELY user hostile.
I'm just pleasantly surprised the germans listened to their customers.
The problem is like much of copying they put in the screen and took out the buttons without realizing how important the UI becomes when you do that. Tesla optimizes and improves constantly and while they’ve made mistakes, other manufacturers just leave the terrible UI in place for five or ten years and leaves everyone who purchased stuck with cheap, unresponsive screens and UI.
It is ridiculous that an Android potato can be more responsive than many cars screens and UI.
Common argument on the internets, but meh, I think most of it is totally fine and I prefer it to my other car with buttons galore.
I do enjoy physical controls for things that are constantly being used while driving for safety purposes and all of that exists for my model. Dropping stalks was too far imo, but for a car maker that wants to remove the driver it's not surprising. Mine has two stalks and I think that's the Goldilocks version. The auto shifter is surprisingly good though.
Everything else in the Tesla is completely fine where it is. Even if I do need to reach for something there's always voice. Saying I'm hot/cold or take me to X or play my playlist or whatever works completely fine. If it's not, just adjust it when you stop like you should be doing anyway.
Plenty of things to dislike about my car but this isn't one of them. The only button, or a thing a button replaced, that is missing on my car is the manual door release in the back which is a pretty egregious omission that does make me a tad angry. I'm going to have to drill a hole in my door for that one.
Wow that interior in the article looks awful. I haven't driven a Mercedes since my C230 from 2004.
This is sort of like Microsoft saying they're making Windows better. It's just undoing a change that should never have been made in the first place, because it made things worse.
I hope Elon Musk can take a lesson from Mercedes. Tesla went in the other direction: there are barely any physical buttons to remove, so they removed the stalks for signaling and even for changing gear! You have to use the touch screen to shift gears!
They have enough physical buttons.
Removing indicator stalks without steer by wire was a mistake. They fixed that by bringing back the stalks.
Touch screen for great shifting works better than you think. It actually works better than traditional gear shifters especially when you enable auto shift. It changes gears as needed. It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
> It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
Did you read the article about how Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical controls? So in your opinion are they dragging their customers back to the past? Or are they correcting a mistake?
They are doing neither. All German car companies are idiots. Years of lead compared to all other car manufacturers, threw away all of it with sheer incompetence and bureaucracy.
They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure instead of thinking of designing a better UX. Result is, laggy/buggy/buttonless bad ux that customers hated. So they are going back with a bad excuse. The mistake is thinking software+UX as second class in a modern car. But now they are correcting "touch screen bad" mistake. lmao.
I mean, it is no surprise. Germans in general don't know how to develop good software because to them everything is a design by committee (see CARAID).
> All German car companies are idiots.
Or maybe they understand from experience that physical buttons are better? When you can't take your eyes off the road, buttons you can feel with your fingers are better. That's easy to understand, is it not?
> They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure
Tesla is doing it as a cost cutting measure too. Elon Musk's philosophy is "the best part is no part".
That's why the steering wheel has enough buttons for things you really need during driving.
They are doing it for both, cost cutting WHILE improving UX. Only Rivian and some Chinese companies understand that.
Others did it JUST for cost cutting and result was obvious.
Tesla does a great job not having buttons. I think the real issue is that other car companies have bad interfaces that make physical buttons necessary. Tesla just has a great UI that does not need physical buttons.
Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.
I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.
Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.
Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.
You are absolutely right. See my other post before where I saw essentially the same thing. It is absurd how bad the German companies are; the only thing they know how to do great is the engine.
I never understand these people with their ac knobs... What are they doing that they need to change AC all the time during driving?
I set it to 21.5 with auto, and it is perfect for the whole car. Why do people need to constantly change ac?!!
I disagree, taking my eyes off the road to change climate controls is bad UI/UX
Why do you need to change climate control at all let alone when driving? Is it because the car can't maintain proper temperature? Response time is lagging? Or what?
Also, you can just use voice control. Works better than physical buttons.
“great UI” and “burned to death because the door handle wasn’t” is a bold juxtaposition
Even a great UI requires you to take eyes off the road.
Voice control exists.
No. They don't. They unleashed this touch screen plague upon the entire car industry because they were too cheap to engineer a proper control panel.
Bonkers. How can anyone agree to drive such a distracting car is beyond me.
Tesla sells twice as many cars as Mercedes...
Where'd that figure come from?
Tesla is dead company walking.
Let me expound: They've said for years they are no longer a car company, and they are acting like it. Their last UX experiments were several years ago and apart from the on-screen PRND, they had to walk them back (yoke steering wheel, blinker buttons).
Autopilot regressed in that you can't even turn autosteer on/off without stopping the car.
Model 3 and Y refreshes were lackluster, S and X are gone, Cybertruck which actually had some catching-up stuff (800 V, V2L) is a write-off and Roadster is what, 7 years delayed and nowhere to be seen and there's nothing else announced on the horizon.
Not a car company. All ready and ripe to merge with SpaceX.
No alphabro wants to learn from anyone else, they already know everything
I for one am quite happy that Mercedes is committed to a physical button for hazard lights, parking assist overrides, and the other controls that are used so very...rarely. Perhaps they'll do something about the less commonly used buttons like climate control for the next model redesigns in five to seven years.
I really struggle to understand what's so damned difficult about this. They've admitted touchscreens annoy the hell out of drivers and capacitive touch buttons are even worse. Is it really going to take yet another lifecycle before they actually do something about it?
My guess is that people impulse buy things that look sleek and shiny then suffer through the consequences
And many stupid decisions have no direct impact on the driver, but instead on those around the car. Like red beltline lights that don’t function as brake lights, instead using red lamps near the road that are easy to be obscured/ignored because the giant red lights above them look like brake lights.
Or dashes that are fully lit at night even if the headlights aren’t on, so the driver doesn’t have an obvious visual indicator that their tail lights aren’t lit.
So many rules I’d enforce were I king of the automakers.
Remember how Volkswagen exec promised exact same thing many years ago and just blatantly lied? I do. I will judge only by the actual actions and not by the empty arrogant lies.
Great, but what they haven't told you is that they'll probably create a subscription for the buttons. Gotta recoup those R & D costs!
I don't own an EV yet, but if I ever do, I don't want a single screen. I don't even want electric windows.
You may be interested in Slate truck/SUV
https://www.slate.auto/
It's not for sale yet
Electric seats and windows are always the first thing to go in an old car. And they're so unnecessary.
They have more usability problems than that. Driving Mercedes Benz hire cars a couple of times recently in UK and Ireland was a shock - they have the automatic gearbox PRND selector on the right-hand stalk, and indicators on the left hand one. I could maybe excuse that on a LHD car, but on an RHD car, it is infuriating. Using the windscreen wipers instead of indicating is a trivial low-consequence mistake, bumping into neutral is not.
Most cars I have driven in the UK have the indicators on the left stalk? I think that is the norm here.
Gear selector for automatics tends to vary but usually center-console, but my id3 has it on an extra stalk on the right of the steering wheel (coming off of the dashboard - it's weird). I've never seen it on a normal steering wheel stalk like lights or indicators or wipers.
What people really want on their dash are giant screens. So they can watch movies and automate having to manually have car crashes. I think the manufactures understand human drivers just fine.
Some years ago I owned a Mercedes CLA which had Android auto controlled using the rotating joystick with push down to select. The experience was perfect. It was fast, could be handled without any distraction, never misbehaved and never detoriated over time. Now I drive a car with touchscreen ... it's bullshit but I guess it looks fancier.
The touchscreen also enables different engineering divisions to work in parallel, without waiting on one another. This drastically reduces development time. It is also cheaper to manufacture, more reliable as there are less moving parts, and reduces parts inventories at dealerships.
It doesn’t look fancier, it is just cheaper to manufacture than using the buttons and wheel.
Whenever you add a touchscreen to something it makes the UI/UX a software issue instead of a hardware issue. You can ship updates. You can cheap out on UI/UX designing because you can ship it later. So you find commonly used features buried 4 menus deep. You also find that the positions of things in menus will randomly change by OTA updates.
Touch screens are (IMHO) terrible for cars because there's no tactile feedback that allows you to use them without looking at the screen. Dials, buttons and switches can be felt and used. It goes beyond being lazy. It's unsafe.
The only reason we got trouch screens in cars at all is cost-cutting.
Too little too late. I was a long time advocate of German cars, owned a bunch of them but after this fuckery with touch screens everywhere I moved to other brands and I’m staying there for the foreseeable future. BMW, Mercedes and VW have really dropped the ball when it comes to usability. At least BMW has a decent OS that kinda makes the whole experience less dreadful than that of the other two.
it wont matter how many physical buttons you apparently have, if its not physical all the way through, that "button function" can be redefined, or taken away at any time.
That's not the problem they're trying to solve
no, its the problem that will be created by solving the touch screen problem, with a physical user interface, that is still just an input to a digital device.
Without physical buttons, it always seems risky.
StreamDeck exists for a reason ;-)
Good move. Nothing like mechanical buttons
> He also explained that "I'm a big believer in screens, because I really believe if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen."
This statement is logically on a level with something like "yesterday is colder than outside." ... he believes in screens - because if you want to connect - you have to make the magic work behind it? I mean what? This is Olympic level marketing bullshit. It's frightening that somebody blurting gibberish like that is heading a department. But then again this car company is anyway merely a pale shadow of its former self and about to get eaten by the Chinese and very deservedly so.
Also hate this digital odometers.
As an MB owner this delights me.
That’s another good step. I wrote about this last week < https://www.maxvanijsselmuiden.nl/blog/touch-screens-everywh...>. Touch screens are an unsuitable form of interaction because of the implicit requirement to ‘watch what you are doing’, inherently slower and more dangerous to use in a car.
they're following subaru's lead
I’m seeing some brands say they have physical buttons but they aren’t the same. They’re more like touch based buttons that are not in a screen. And I feel they’re just as bad. I want to be able to use the button without looking. Like one car had a touch based slider for operating the air vents. Ridiculous
There is another thing that reduces the safety of car - it is sunroof. In India, all top trims come with sunroof. I believe, sunroof can not provide the safety that of one without sunroof. More ever, it can absorb significantly more heat compared one without sunroof.
I'm still waiting for Volkswagen to do this after stating the same plan not long ago.
In the future, physical buttons will be considered a luxury.
'So what are we gonna do with those thousands of people, who changed the UI and could be fired? Let's make them roll whole controls idea back'
Physical buttons are another reason I absolutely love my 24 4Runner, absolutely huge and clear labeled knobs and buttons all over the place, I feel like being in a cockpit when I drive it.
Whatever is happening in car industry, it is so unexciting, over-engineered, and too glossy. I'm so happy I don't have to work for people who prefer new car toy over paying me a decent salary.
I imagine the buttons sunk deep into the panel only to come out wheen subscribing to the monthly premium package....
Company/State bends to the mindless whims of boomers yet again.
There's no way you actually like the giant iPad.
Cool. But how about they also do something to help prevent the entire EV market going to China.