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.
> 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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
>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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
> 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
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
It’s nice. But unless they commit to bring back reliable and comfortable cars - who cares?
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.
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.
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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.
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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 :-)
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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.
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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?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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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.)
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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.
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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 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.
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Start suing car manufacturers for the deaths caused when the driver's eyeballs were distracted from the road.
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.
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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.
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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 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).
My Citroen does the same if window wiper fluid is low.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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>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
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I assume you're young? Finger capacitance can reduce quite significantly with age.
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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.
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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.
> "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.
Going to better direction. Big tablet screens and everything hidden under UI tabs, not to my liking.
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.
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
It is always better to use tactile inputs especially during diving where eyes need to have undivided attention on the road.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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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)
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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.
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?
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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.
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I disagree, taking my eyes off the road to change climate controls is bad UI/UX
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“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.
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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.
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Cool. But how about they also do something to help prevent the entire EV market going to China.