OP here: I always disliked touchscreens in cars, so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in. I always assumed I was weird in some way, and that most consumers preferred touchscreens or something (Reddit seems to argue this in circles all the time). I planned to keep buying Mazdas, with their lovely buttons and stuff.
But when Mazda unveiled their button-lite 2026 CX-5 about a year ago, I started investigating.
I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
> I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
I thought this is a pretty well-known thing already? For almost decade.
OP: Perhaps it is, but this article honestly took me 12 months to research & write. I really struggled to find trustworthy sources. Do you know of any others I should look at?
> Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious
I thought about this before posting my reply, that should I. But if you really spent time for researching this blog, you would know that your conclusion is not rare nor the first one. It is widely discussed and appears in HN regularly. But regardless, the tone in the post or here in comments felt to me that you try to somehow own this idea. Thought, you even cited the Ferrari CEO who said exactly the same.
I think that nowadays people value "technological features", and how better to show "technological advancement" like a giant ass touchscreen and not some "old" XX century knobs.
I hope that changes and people start valuing simplicity and robustness over electric gimmicks (I know many people already do, but we need critical mass).
How much is that needed? There was very little text on those buttons to begin with. Are there significant cultural differences in the iconography associated with them?
I think they've got that. Short of budget stuff or the Slate truck, most new cars have some big dumb screen in them at all times.
But advertising poses a new problem for both advertisers and mfgs not unlike the mid-90s ad sale issue. There was no consolidated ad server, so everyone was trying to build their own agency and advertisers had to navigate that.
Which probably means some sort of Google or Google-like player in the space.
(a) cars have forward-facing cameras/computer vision for lane tracking
(b) infotainment systems have always-on cellular internet connections
(c) billboard impression counts can be tied to the vehicle
IIRC infotainment systems are already showing ads in some form. And location + driving performance is being captured + monetized and shared with insurance companies.
Unless this results in an EV car that I can rent for less than $100/mo, this really needs to be stopped.
> I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
It amuses me that back in the 90's LCD color screens were magical fairy dust that cost about the same as what magical fairy dust would cost. Laptops with color LCD screens were like $6000 in the 90's, I think $3k over a greyscale. That's like $13k today.
Whereas the little plastic buttons and knobs were cheaper to pump out of an injection molding machine and assembled. Now screens are cheaper to make than little plastic baubles.
Yeah it's sorta of fascinating. Likewise now cells phones are faster than supercomputers from two decades ago and everyone can afford one. Meanwhile hardwood furniture is much more expensive now that it's usually in the "rich peoples" category.
From what I've read, the little plastic baubles part of buttons are cheap, it's the electrical wiring harnesses and assembly that are expensive part of physical controls.
Injection molding is still quite cheap. I think it's the tooling and labor and wiring and parts management et cetera that makes the cost add up for fiddly little bits.
I love the click-wheel on my Mazda3 and I love that it allows the screen to sit out of arms length up on the dashboard. Its a very nice interior. What I don't love is how Android Auto is slowly breaking since it assumes more and more that you have a touchscreen.
It used to be that it would focus buttons in notifications, making it easy to interact with. Now the focus doesn't seem to change at all (or only sometimes) making it a nightmare to do simple things. I dare not use the new Gemini assistant since the last time I was completely unable to navigate to the buttons in its panel at all.
I really hope they don't phase out the wheel just because Google sucks at supporting it. I know they have both touch and the wheel in newer models now.
I think there is a real market for modding news cars to have physical buttons again. Whenever this discussion pops up on the internet, there's plenty if people who prefer them (they're called "old folks" ;-)) so why not mod your dashboard to feature a - wait for it - volume button for your music!
I wonder how much can be controlled over some kind of bus. Would be cool to have all sorts of physical buttons and a micro controller to control radio, AC, heated seats etc etc so I can keep looking at the road while changing things.
> I think there is a real market for modding news cars to have physical buttons again.
I sure hope so. I can avoid this whole touchscreen madness by only buying older cars, but there's a chance that I'll outlive the availability of cars that are old enough.
As an engineer in R&D, I've always known if I needed a cheap but amazing part, to look at automotive replacements from third parties for parts to build an MVP with.
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
The $6,000 profit per car referenced in the article is gross profit, not net profit. Net profit is considerably lower, around 5% for the mass manufacturers. So a $100 cost savings is very significant against a ~$3,000 net profit on a Bolt.
The $6,000 number is a lot harder to calculate. The lower number is just vehicle profit from their investor reports divided by number of cars sold. The lower number is a lot more variable -- some years car companies lose money from their vehicle production side...
For touchscreens, I think there is an opportunity to make larger touch targets. For example, when you want to adjust HVAC controls, the UI should take over the ENTIRE screen with ridiculously huge targets. Something in the range of 1-4 square inches in size for a core button should allow your for reduced cognitive overhead. This is critical for safe driving.
There was a study from a few years ago that associated almost all increase in traffic deaths in the past decade or so with in car displays. Almost all deaths were pedestrians being struck at or after twilight. The thinking is that infotainment systems are making drivers take their eyes off the road to adjust anything in their vehicles, and also ruining their nightvision. Not sure how they were able to separate this from smartphones.
Adjusting radios was the biggest cause of traffic incidents for a long time. IMO the super bright LED headlights from other vehicles is the worst thing for night vision.
There has been more pushback on car screens over the past couple of years, and the optimist in me hopes this leads to change. With enough pushback, manufacturers will have to listen to the market, cost savings be damned.
A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_CO, but if enough people do this, it does get back to the them and will make a difference.
That works as long as you actually stick to your guns and keep them as deal-breakers. If you accept them with some grumbling, that's still a sale and that provides no backpressure to the manufacturer.
I agree. It also works if you mention it as a dealbreaker, leave without buying, and then buy at another shop. Yes, I realize this can be more work and may not be feasible for everyone.
I could not imagine having to go back to buttons for anything I actually want to control. Once you get used to a well-designed touchscreen, buttons are just so clunky and unintuitive for most functions. Dials are probably my most favorite physical control, but other than volume there's not much it's useful for in a well-designed, modern car anymore. It was great for radio stations, but is terrible for Spotify.
Setting temperature manually by dial doesn't make sense anymore either- most cars have too many things to change and an expanding menu is great. There's hot cold, faster fan lower fan, feet vs head-height (we're already looking at more than three separate controls). Now there's seat heating and cooling (with varying power), steering wheel, defrost, controls of vent direction, etc.
I'll admit the touchscreen might be daunting if it's a rental but it takes like one week to get everything mapped out mentally (and going back to physical controls on rentals sucks).
A touchscreen is just a collection of buttons that might not have a predictable location...
If you like touchscreens, how would buttons be worse for anything you need to do in a car?
And remember, back-up cameras / screens are going to happen no matter what. If you have a billion settings you need access to when you are NOT driving you can use a touchscreen for those things.
Expanding menus are the worst possible control mechanism in a car that you're driving.
Not exactly, I got my first iPad in college. It's not so much that it's a challenge as it's totally unnecessary effort. I'm sure when the controls came out they were great, then they turned into some weird sprawl that was just designed to look complicated so the car looked like it had lots of features. Now, minimalism reigns king in tech and the one screen is the newest, (imo best) form factor, along with the steering wheel controls, etc.
More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.
> car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself
They're dangerous for controls the driver would reasonably need to operate while driving the car. They're fine for more-complex at-rest configuration, or stuff a passener would care about.
Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons.
The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.
You cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth. Fiddling with radio controls is the most cited reason for accidents before cell phones.
You're right- it was a generalization. I think the amount of actual dashboard-button-pressing without looking away is extremely low, probably 1 button. The rest might be usable a quick glance, but so is a touchscreen.
> You cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth
You can't possibly make this argument in good faith. Obviously it is trivial to interact with physical buttons while blind, so it can always be done without taking eyes off the road.
Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience.
BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
> It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
The article directly links to a study that shows this is also true of physical buttons. Regardless of the fact that buttons are tactile, people don't go feeling up their radio without looking, even if they can. Furthermore, the vast majority of infotainment input today is into phone mirroring systems like carplay.
This whole thing is compounded by the fact that Mazda's knob solution was actually worse while being marketed as better. While a touchscreen needs to be looked at to find a button, a cursor controlled by a knob needs to be watched in whole to navigate to the button. Your fine motor skills as a human allows you to directly press a button, physical or not, without looking at your arm to get near it.
You're right in that with a physical control you still probably glance at it as you're reaching for it, but you don't have to keep your eyes on it the whole time unlike a touch screen. With a touch-screen there's no feedback that your finger is on the button and that you have actually pressed it. With a physical control, button, knob, or slider once you have your hand on it you can manipulate it without looking. They demand momentary glances, not seconds of constant focus.
Well, it depends on button and function. Rarely used functions will require looking, common ones (assuming button placement is sensible) will not, but even ones that require looking are still better because you skip going thru the menu to find it.
Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.
With the knob, you have a few issues:
1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.
2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.
3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.
Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.
With a knob, you always could stop what you are doing and look back at the road and then continue. With a touch screen, you need to find a button and touch it without looking at the road, or you need to do it from the start again.
I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor.
I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want.
Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.
Yes, you still need to look at the screen but could pause this in any position of the selected item and continue after looking back at the road.
I was driving an F150 with just a touch screen and it was much worse when I needed to find an item on the screen and try to touch it on a far-located screen in a shaking car.
In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Just selecting the icon want from the screen is instantaneous.
But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.
> That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.
Absolutely! Twiddling with a phone while driving is illegal, for a good reason.
For the same good reason, having to interact with a touch screen while driving should be illegal (from that, it follows that it should be illegal to sell a car which requires using a touch screen).
They're getting better though. The first gen touchscreens were tiny and unreliable. The one in my 2024 Ioniq 5 is pretty decent. I am really glad I still have physical AC controls though, even if they're capacitive.
Touchscreens are modal. If I want to control the climate, I first have to press the Climate capacitive button or scroll through the screen to find climate. That takes my hands off the wheel and my eyes off the road for longer than just tapping the fan-up button.
As for the cost, I will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior. Heck, I chose to step up an entire trim model to the top of the line trim just for the fancy LCD screen mirror. I'd happily pay extra for better buttons.
IMO touch screens are great for rarely used features, but anything that gets clicked on most drives should be a dedicated touch point (capacitive button, physical button, steering wheel control, whatever).
Give me multifunction displays from aviation. Touch screen in the middle, rows of modal buttons along the bottom and left side. You can use muscle memory to find the button.
> I will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior
I'm guessing the cost difference is far greater than this. Which means the end-user price difference would be thousands of dollars. Would be interesting to see if customers would pay $5 to 10k extra for a tactile interior.
I'm somewhat skeptical that the cost difference would really be that high, but honestly...yeah I probably would. If what I was getting was fully physical (not capacitive) media and AC controls, including pause/play, skip/tune, volume control, temp control, fan speed control, zone selection, etc? I interact with those systems multiple times every single time I get into a vehicle, which is essentially multiple times every day, for years. Improving the quality of those interactions even a little bit (and in my opinion the difference between good physical buttons and even a very good touchscreen, let alone a shitty one, is massive), is worth thousands of dollars.
While I was not presented with the option on a given model to go with buttons or touchscreens, when I was shopping for cars, I did eliminate models based on their interface options. The models I was willing to consider were probably cut in half because I wouldn't get anything that was entirely touch screen or capacitive for both AC and media.
Do you not have muscle memory for screens too? I find my brain has an easier time visualizing all the touchscreen controls I use semi-often over buttons. Perhaps it's a generational thing.
Touch screens don't have to be modal, that's a UI choice. The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times, even when CarPlay is open. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of buttons it has, including both a volume knob and a temperature knob.
That being said, the touchscreen software is abysmal and laggy. CarPlay works great, but any time I have to navigate the car's built-in software is a headache.
car touchescreens are in the same category of most laptop webcams/cams: just make it good enough, and make it fit (and they both suck, most of the time)
I gotta say, the one redeeming feature of Ferrari Luce, for me at least, was the interior. I don't dislike screens, I just hate the tesla-esque obsession (where, for them with FSD - for all the hate they get about it up here - it might actually make sense since u are gonna have a FSD+Grok car) with no buttons. I know buttons add cost, but going back to the Luce example again: you have a healthy sized screen (so u don't go to the pre-tesla days), but you also have wonderful buttons across the board.
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
Tesla arguably has better, more useful, and more obvious physical buttons than most cars. Most car manufacturers spray confusing physical buttons everywhere with esoteric icons and insane UX. Everything you'd want to do as a driver in a Tesla has a physical button or a set it and forget it "auto" mode.
Uhm, I like Teslas a lot. The design and the philosophy of just minimizing the amount of components. But where I would draw the line is AC via touch screen (again, if Grok can now do it reliably, fine, otherwise, buttons please). Also, depending on the model, I know some models had turn signals in some weird places (above the head? or am I hallucinating?). Also to make your point: if it hadnt been for carplay and its android equivalent, legacy auto would have been cooked long ago. I never use my VW native apps.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
I have heard (but have no insider knowledge) that it's not just the cost of parts, but what parts do to the development lifecycle.
With physical parts, the development process is highly sequential. Pick the look, design how it fits, engineer what parts are used, manufacture tooling etc etc in a waterfall. If a revision needs to be made, the whole process needs to be re-started adding a huge amount of delays.
With a touchscreen, the physical touchscreen and the software that runs on it are parallel threads. You can make most UI changes without impacting the manufacturing/design pipeline at all. You don't even need to have planned what the interface looks like before you finalize the parts needed.
I feel like you could solve that with some constraints defined early in the process—the controls must fit in dimensions XxYxZ, and have K-input wires, and draw at most 5V of power, or whatever. Then the control designer can go off and design whatever they want within those constraints, and the car designer can go off and design the interior of the car knowing what the head unit will require.
That's what the term "parts bin parts" refers to in the industry. If you get familiar with any car brand you can normally tell what brand of car a particular switch came from because they all use the same parts. Corvettes will share a LOT of parts with Suburbans, eg.
You still have the issue of having to build the panels that the switches get installed into, so if you can replace a bunch of switches with a touchscreen interface, you can get on with designing the interior before you even know how may switches need to be installed.
I suspect that another thing that's expensive, besides analog controls, is creating and testing a new, better interface for driving ICE cars using digital controls. So the only thing old our old-tech car companies do is add ad-hoc extensions of the usual car controls. And it is economical to package all these in a touch screen along with all the standard controls they can get away with.
It's a good argument except the basic controls needed for a car haven't changed in decades: We all need the same climate controls, media controls, etc.
For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
Automakers are constantly doing functionality-neutral tweaks. There's fashion in how cars looks, and they want every year's model to feel new. Climate control is constant, but one generation has a knob, the next has a slider, the next adds an extra zone, the next changes fan speed from two buttons to a single "up-down" button and so on.
Maybe people should stop buying cars with crappy touch screens then? The touchscreens in my Model 3 has been amazing. Ever since I took delivery of it in 2019. Manufactures need to do better.
I realize the article is pro buttons. I think a huge thing missing from the button discussion (well, maybe lightly touched on in the article) is that physical buttons and controls help guide without looking. Other buttons give feedback that your hand is in the right place. Sure, at first contact that (very bad) reference radio is worse than the touch screen but within a few days of using that I would not need to look to make sure I was hitting the button I wanted because I could feel the face of it with my hand and know I was hitting the right button. So basically, even though the paper picked essentially the worst radio on the planet, it would likely be better than a well designed touch screen after just a few days of use. First day though? That thing is a nightmare.
Totally agree; I had to cut a few sentences about that :). (I also tried to steel-man the paper as much as possible).
Oddly enough, it seems like, although the value of "blind operation" is well-understood, it's not super well researched. As one of the papers I cite puts it:
> Little research deals with the optimal design of haptic features and how haptic feedback can support the user in searching for control elements.
A while ago I was driving a loaner car - a brand new top tier Accura rdx and the infotainment system was truly the worst and most dangerously designed I had ever witnessed. It was essentially a lenovo thinkpad type touchpad by the cup holder, and the screen was far away. The first time I tried to use it, it was so distracting that I would of crashed the car if it weren't for the safety features.
My car is a 2018 with car play and physical scroll knobs and buttons, while awkward, I can operate it with my eyes on the road (realistically I can do everything I need from the steering wheel). This weird middle ground carplay was somehow the worst combo of buttons and touchscreen.
I test rode an electric pedal assist bicycle yesterday that has a little operating system by the throttle, basically just a speedometer + toggle the level of power assist from eco to turbo. Even it has a "avoid distracted driving" popup that I had to fiddle with to dismiss while riding this bike for the first time.
I think that most people have the usability of buttons without sight as a main argument for.
Things like sliders and knobs can also have limits and detents that provide two way feedback that a screen cannot.
If you have to set the fan level on a touch screen, I have to use my eyes to coordinate my hand movements. On my old 2000 econobox, I just had to find the fan control slider (normally without even looking, and certainly faster than finding it on a screen, and getting my hand to the right spot), and I knew if I was already at max, or how much I had adjusted it based on the number of clicks. Same thing with the old red/blue temperature adjuster slider/knob.
Sure, touchscreens are cheap, but high-quality touchscreen software is most def NOT CHEAP!
Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.
Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.
I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.
Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.
I want to cheer (again) for my 2020 Ford Escape. Its infotainment design was a significant differentiator that led to my selection after testing a dozen different models across all US manufacturers.
It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have a single (sometimes dual) static purpose, they don't change purpose depending on whatever mode something is.
It is, in my mind, an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible features, meaning those buttons had no static purpose.
I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.
Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.
My biggest issue with touchscreen controls is that they are not ergonomic.
1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be
2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons
Resulting in two problems:
1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks
2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related
I think its easier to develop muscle memory to certain buttons. For instance I had a similar 1DIN head unit to the one pictured in the article. I never needed to look at it to operate it.
On my last button car, I could control volume and turning on/off the radio without looking, but that was it. With the touchscreen, I do have to glance away but am way faster to get back looking at the road. Most things I just don't need to fiddle with anymore, before I'd need to redirect 3 fans, change a dial to put AC mode on/off, another two sliders to make driver and passenger the same (desired) temp (more or less- would have to change later), etc. Now I just adjust one smart "auto mode" a couple degree depending on what I feel like, then can get more granular in controls if I want in two taps.
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
Not sure why the command knob in Mazda scares new users: it’s an option and you still could use the touch screen, it’s just a nice alternative for it…
Absolutely love the command knob, so much better than using the touch screen
You cannot touch the touch screen on a Mazda with the commander nob unless you're in Carplay/Android Auto and only if you've found the buried setting to enable it.
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadBut when Mazda unveiled their button-lite 2026 CX-5 about a year ago, I started investigating.
I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
I thought this is a pretty well-known thing already? For almost decade.
Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/blogging-stating-the-obvio.... Hopefully my argument is helpful to someone!
I thought about this before posting my reply, that should I. But if you really spent time for researching this blog, you would know that your conclusion is not rare nor the first one. It is widely discussed and appears in HN regularly. But regardless, the tone in the post or here in comments felt to me that you try to somehow own this idea. Thought, you even cited the Ferrari CEO who said exactly the same.
I think they've got that. Short of budget stuff or the Slate truck, most new cars have some big dumb screen in them at all times.
But advertising poses a new problem for both advertisers and mfgs not unlike the mid-90s ad sale issue. There was no consolidated ad server, so everyone was trying to build their own agency and advertisers had to navigate that.
Which probably means some sort of Google or Google-like player in the space.
(b) infotainment systems have always-on cellular internet connections
(c) billboard impression counts can be tied to the vehicle
IIRC infotainment systems are already showing ads in some form. And location + driving performance is being captured + monetized and shared with insurance companies.
Unless this results in an EV car that I can rent for less than $100/mo, this really needs to be stopped.
It amuses me that back in the 90's LCD color screens were magical fairy dust that cost about the same as what magical fairy dust would cost. Laptops with color LCD screens were like $6000 in the 90's, I think $3k over a greyscale. That's like $13k today.
Whereas the little plastic buttons and knobs were cheaper to pump out of an injection molding machine and assembled. Now screens are cheaper to make than little plastic baubles.
From what I've read, the little plastic baubles part of buttons are cheap, it's the electrical wiring harnesses and assembly that are expensive part of physical controls.
It used to be that it would focus buttons in notifications, making it easy to interact with. Now the focus doesn't seem to change at all (or only sometimes) making it a nightmare to do simple things. I dare not use the new Gemini assistant since the last time I was completely unable to navigate to the buttons in its panel at all.
I really hope they don't phase out the wheel just because Google sucks at supporting it. I know they have both touch and the wheel in newer models now.
It's one 1 screen, regardless of whether your car has heated seats, ventilated seats, sync, arm-rest warmers, separate blowers or a single blower.
Within 1 production line, say for the BMW 3 series, some people don't select heated seats, some do.
Now they only need to make 1 version of the plastic, and it's just a checkbox in the software to enable the heated seats.
I sure hope so. I can avoid this whole touchscreen madness by only buying older cars, but there's a chance that I'll outlive the availability of cars that are old enough.
same way people just talk to claude code via whisper
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_CO, but if enough people do this, it does get back to the them and will make a difference.
Setting temperature manually by dial doesn't make sense anymore either- most cars have too many things to change and an expanding menu is great. There's hot cold, faster fan lower fan, feet vs head-height (we're already looking at more than three separate controls). Now there's seat heating and cooling (with varying power), steering wheel, defrost, controls of vent direction, etc.
I'll admit the touchscreen might be daunting if it's a rental but it takes like one week to get everything mapped out mentally (and going back to physical controls on rentals sucks).
If you like touchscreens, how would buttons be worse for anything you need to do in a car?
And remember, back-up cameras / screens are going to happen no matter what. If you have a billion settings you need access to when you are NOT driving you can use a touchscreen for those things.
Expanding menus are the worst possible control mechanism in a car that you're driving.
That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.
They're dangerous for controls the driver would reasonably need to operate while driving the car. They're fine for more-complex at-rest configuration, or stuff a passener would care about.
The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.
You can hit buttons without taking your eyes off the road.
You cannot do this with a touchscreen.
There's no way to design or engineer around it, it's simply the wrong tool for the job.
You most certainly can. That doesn't mean people do it 100% of the time.
You can't possibly make this argument in good faith. Obviously it is trivial to interact with physical buttons while blind, so it can always be done without taking eyes off the road.
BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
The article directly links to a study that shows this is also true of physical buttons. Regardless of the fact that buttons are tactile, people don't go feeling up their radio without looking, even if they can. Furthermore, the vast majority of infotainment input today is into phone mirroring systems like carplay.
This whole thing is compounded by the fact that Mazda's knob solution was actually worse while being marketed as better. While a touchscreen needs to be looked at to find a button, a cursor controlled by a knob needs to be watched in whole to navigate to the button. Your fine motor skills as a human allows you to directly press a button, physical or not, without looking at your arm to get near it.
With the knob, you have a few issues:
1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.
2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.
3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.
Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.
I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want.
Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.
But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.
Absolutely! Twiddling with a phone while driving is illegal, for a good reason.
For the same good reason, having to interact with a touch screen while driving should be illegal (from that, it follows that it should be illegal to sell a car which requires using a touch screen).
Touchscreens are modal. If I want to control the climate, I first have to press the Climate capacitive button or scroll through the screen to find climate. That takes my hands off the wheel and my eyes off the road for longer than just tapping the fan-up button.
As for the cost, I will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior. Heck, I chose to step up an entire trim model to the top of the line trim just for the fancy LCD screen mirror. I'd happily pay extra for better buttons.
IMO touch screens are great for rarely used features, but anything that gets clicked on most drives should be a dedicated touch point (capacitive button, physical button, steering wheel control, whatever).
Give me multifunction displays from aviation. Touch screen in the middle, rows of modal buttons along the bottom and left side. You can use muscle memory to find the button.
I'm guessing the cost difference is far greater than this. Which means the end-user price difference would be thousands of dollars. Would be interesting to see if customers would pay $5 to 10k extra for a tactile interior.
While I was not presented with the option on a given model to go with buttons or touchscreens, when I was shopping for cars, I did eliminate models based on their interface options. The models I was willing to consider were probably cut in half because I wouldn't get anything that was entirely touch screen or capacitive for both AC and media.
No, that's not a thing because there is no physical sensation to it.
That being said, the touchscreen software is abysmal and laggy. CarPlay works great, but any time I have to navigate the car's built-in software is a headache.
At that point though they might as well be physical buttons! It's all the disadvantages of a touch screen and none of the advantages.
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
AC is not an issue IMO. It’s always in the same place on the screen, on auto, and I never touch it really.
With physical parts, the development process is highly sequential. Pick the look, design how it fits, engineer what parts are used, manufacture tooling etc etc in a waterfall. If a revision needs to be made, the whole process needs to be re-started adding a huge amount of delays.
With a touchscreen, the physical touchscreen and the software that runs on it are parallel threads. You can make most UI changes without impacting the manufacturing/design pipeline at all. You don't even need to have planned what the interface looks like before you finalize the parts needed.
You still have the issue of having to build the panels that the switches get installed into, so if you can replace a bunch of switches with a touchscreen interface, you can get on with designing the interior before you even know how may switches need to be installed.
For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
Oddly enough, it seems like, although the value of "blind operation" is well-understood, it's not super well researched. As one of the papers I cite puts it:
> Little research deals with the optimal design of haptic features and how haptic feedback can support the user in searching for control elements.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6676796/
My car is a 2018 with car play and physical scroll knobs and buttons, while awkward, I can operate it with my eyes on the road (realistically I can do everything I need from the steering wheel). This weird middle ground carplay was somehow the worst combo of buttons and touchscreen.
Things like sliders and knobs can also have limits and detents that provide two way feedback that a screen cannot.
If you have to set the fan level on a touch screen, I have to use my eyes to coordinate my hand movements. On my old 2000 econobox, I just had to find the fan control slider (normally without even looking, and certainly faster than finding it on a screen, and getting my hand to the right spot), and I knew if I was already at max, or how much I had adjusted it based on the number of clicks. Same thing with the old red/blue temperature adjuster slider/knob.
Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.
Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.
I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.
Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.
It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have a single (sometimes dual) static purpose, they don't change purpose depending on whatever mode something is.
It is, in my mind, an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible features, meaning those buttons had no static purpose.
I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.
Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.
1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be
2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons
Resulting in two problems:
1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks
2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.