6 ms·

Volkswagen Brings Back Physical Buttons

391 points by stephc_int13 9mo ago

circlemaze 9mo ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486646
- tomhow 9mo ago
  Comments moved thither. Thanks!
  - nathansherburn 9mo ago
    I learnt a new word today. Thanks!
    - anadem 9mo ago
      'Thence' is another nice word
foxglacier 9mo ago
Be careful what you wish for everyone. My Toyota Wish (no pun intended) has an absolute cluster of a button cluster (pun intended) for air controls. To change where the air comes out, you have to repeatedly push the same button and watch the LCD to see what you get. There's a button for windscreen defogging but it ramps up the fan slowly over about 10s or so so you end up trying to set it manually instead which means the same repeat pressing and watching the LCD. If the fan is off but warm air is wafting in the vents, you have to press "auto", turn the temperature knob down to minimum, then press "off". Nearly every action requires looking for visual feedback on the stupid LCD screen.
- joeevans1000 9mo ago
  We wish for hardware intefaces. Not screen/hardware interfaces.
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  IMO the real sin there is the defogging, because that can arise when the driver needs immediate results and is already distracted by difficulty seeing or bad weather conditions. I'd prefer it be part of a row of "panic buttons" along with the hazard-lights and "all wipers to max." In contrast, stuff like "airflow toward torso" versus "airflow towards feed" or "both" is stuff where you can either wait to feel it or else glance at the settings during a safer moment. This assumes, of course, they don't do something stupid like have the "current setting" vanish from the screen on a short timer...
  - foxglacier 9mo ago
    Agree. In my more traditional car, defogging is "all 3 knobs to the far right and all 3 buttons turned on" It's a lot of actions but simple to remember, I can do it without looking, and it responds instantly.
- ssl-3 9mo ago
  My 2012 Honda (which is quite old by some measures) is somewhat similar. It's got buttons. Lots of buttons. It has no touch screen(s). Some of the buttons include: Multi-tap button to change HVAC vent configuration manually. Dedicated, separate buttons for front and rear defrost (with an LED on the button for each). And the PWM control for the fan loves slow ramping, apparently as a design intent, which is dumb: It could provide immediate audible feedback to input but instead tends to just loaf around in response to user inputs. But! It has an automatic mode that really does work pretty well almost always, maintaining comfort for different zones based on a temperature setting for each. So usually, I don't mess with it at all. When that doesn't work optimally (too hot? too cold?), the temperature is adjusted by knobs. And it also accepts voice commands. Which sounds silly, and perhaps is silly, and I certainly do feel silly using that. But when the front window starts fogging a bit on the inside on a cold night, I can tap the voice command button on the steering wheel (which is easy to find by feel) and say a command like "Climate control defrost and floor" and it switches to that mode. I very seldom look at the stupid LCD screen, with its small and nearly-inscrutable blue-backlit hieroglyphs. I change modes with my voice, and I give the temperature knob a twist using muscle memory (though I could use voice commands for that, instead). It's still perhaps not ideal (and I do have ideas for hacking on the CAN-B network for some hands-off automations to make it work better with even less user input), but it's pretty good. And if Honda could use voice commands starting ~15 years ago, then any automaker should be able to do so today. The physical parts (the microphone, the CPU grunt, the CAN controls) are broadly already in-place; the rest is just software that can be copied infinitely as new cars roll off the line.
jrgaston 9mo ago
Requiring a driver to navigate a touchscreen while driving is a needless distraction. Bring back buttons and knobs, things you can feel without looking, things that don’t move with every app refresh. Now if only VW would resume bringing small cars to North America. I’ve owned a few VWs, I liked them, but I don’t want a big car, much less an ugh truck, but that seems all they offer any more. I suppose the market has spoken.
- Hikikomori 9mo ago
  Vw were still using buttons, but capacitive.
- rkhassen9 9mo ago
  Agreed on all points.
- yencabulator 9mo ago
  I owned a Polo way back when. As far as I know, they've never been sold in the US, the smallest US-sold VW is one size up, Golf. So while I agree with the desire, that's not really a resumption. US has only seen compact VWs, not small ones.
- jolt42 9mo ago
  Renting a car is more of a pain these days. I find I actually have to learn how that car "likes its buttons". I don't remember having to look at a physical gear shifter to know it's in drive/reverse, etc. Now I have to see if some light is on. It must have been obvious to Human Factors folks from the outset that this was all a waste of time.
  - AngryData 9mo ago
    Yeah but if they didn't change anything substantial and merely followed customer preferences and established norms, how would they justify the massive administrative and managerial bloat with inflated salaries in established auto companies? How will you keep the investor class satisfied without promises of massive returns within the next few years or so to keep that stock juiced with new gimmicks to sell? How do you keep the MBA holding c-suite relatives employed if they are simply making the same or similar bulk consumer cars for decades at a time? Think about that year or so window when only OEM parts are available to repair new vehicles before generic parts are modeled and built and the new and completely unnecessary tools that can be sold to mechanics and dealers that they can gouge people on.
guywithahat 9mo ago
Too many vehicle manufacturers removed buttons to copy Tesla without thinking about why Tesla did it in the first place. Tesla removed those buttons because they were aiming for a low-cost driverless future with full self driving and automatic updates that change the feel of the car. If you put those features in a VW that doesn't regularly update and doesn't have consumer self driving program (at least yet) it doesn't really make sense.
- AlotOfReading 9mo ago
  Tesla's lack of buttons long pre-dates any sort of ADAS feature development. Here's the interior from their 2009 Model S prototype: https://i.redd.it/ahxh0bmh7ka11.jpg https://i.redd.it/ahxh0bmh7ka11.jpg The first version of autopilot that did anything that could charitably be called navigation wasn't introduced for another 8 years after this car and actual self-driving remains a distant goal 17 years later.
  - thejazzman 9mo ago
    I think the constant OTA updates was an intentional marketing point though (gotta spin the fact you’re selling it before it’s done) And that Tesla has gear shifter, turn signals, etc. Tesla only went full FU about 2y ago
  - guywithahat 9mo ago
    As far as I remember, Tesla has been talking about full self driving and auto-updates since before 2009, and although cameras weren't placed on the car until years later I would argue these early models were low enough production they were selling the idea more than the product (like how a sports car might be stylized after a jet, even though it doesn't contain a jet engine, but just to capture the feeling of something that's fast). It's also worth noting that car had a lot more buttons, including PRNDL, stock, and I believe AC/heater. Also my Tesla drives me to work every day just fine without intervention. I don't think you need unsupervised full self driving for the screen to make sense, and while I didn't have a Tesla 11 years ago I think the vision was clear and a screen with minimal/no buttons was still useful. My point is just that if you're trying to make a so-called driver's car, without regular updates or meaningful self driving capabilities, it makes sense to add buttons so people know where things are while driving. The screen was a logical derivation from the other features tesla was building and incorporating, starting with the screen because it's easy is a mistake by companies like VW/benz/etc in my opinion.
bloudermilk 9mo ago
I’m all for bringing buttons back, but do we really need that many buttons on a steering wheel?
- formerly_proven 9mo ago
  This is the same number of buttons/functions that they have had for about ten years on the wheel.
acd 9mo ago
The aviation industry has spent decades researching cockpit design, running simulator studies, and learning from accidents. They still use physical buttons for critical controls. If touchscreen-everything was safer or better, they’d have adopted it by now. The main reasons cars are removing buttons are cost savings and aesthetics—not driver safety.
- LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
  While aviation is the origin of UX design, I'm uncertain whether modern cockpit design is born out of UX or out of a resistance to change. For example, for fuel-efficient takeoffs, you need to go in and override the ambient temperature and air pressure sensors and calculate what an efficient fuel mix would be yourself.
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    It seems unlike commercial aviation to leave efficiency on the table. Maybe the default somehow errs on the side of safety?
    - LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
      Whatever the reason may be, the fact that pilots regularly engage in rather complicated and obstruse workarounds shows that cockpit design shouldn't be taken as the holy grail of UX. Incidentally, I also wonder if the many checklists pilots need to go through before the plane does anything are strictly necessary. It seems like automating these steps and removing associated buttons may be beneficial to reduce cognitive load and prevent operator error (such as happened with the Air India crash last year).
breadwinner 9mo ago
Tesla should take inspiration from this and at least bring back the physical gear shifter and the turn signal stalks.
- WrongOnInternet 9mo ago
  What would the gear shifter even do though?
  - warmwaffles 9mo ago
    Put it in drive, neutral, park, or reverse. Same as an automatic.
  - breadwinner 9mo ago
    Same as what it did in the original Tesla cars. They only removed the stalks recently.
- sschueller 9mo ago
  Tesla is the one that started this and cost who knows how many lives. They are the ones who thought it would be great to re-invent the wheel and then when the moron execs at the other companies saw the hype they had to copy it.
  - alternatex 9mo ago
    The execs probably got promotions for it considering the money saved. The real morons are the customers buying these cars. Brand loyalists don't buy based on logical reasoning.
- vardump 9mo ago
  Agreed about the signal stalk. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last I've seen the signal stalk is back in Teslas, at least in Model Y, but I believe in newer Model 3s as well. But "gear shifter"? It doesn't really require a stalk. When you start, you select either D or R. Not a big deal. And when you stop, I think most (all?) EVs even automatically go to P and apply parking brakes when you stop. I think that already covers 99% of driving for 99% of people.
dommer 9mo ago
Good, smart, and so needed. That said, I'm not forgiving them for the diesel emissions scandal.
willis936 9mo ago
This is excellent. I hope the market rewards them. Do manual transmissions next. This is also a minor thing, but I also long for galvometer-based speedometers and tachometers. They're charming. You can keep the screens in the cluster, but just give me a mechanical dial and show me the engine RPM at all times even if it's a PHEV.
- alternatex 9mo ago
  As someone looking for an automatic why do you want them to make more manuals? Or was it sarcasm? I'm not a "for the love of the drive" type of fellow, especially after living with an older 6-speed manual for many years, so I'm curious where the enthusiasm for manual comes from.
  - willis936 9mo ago
    It comes from the love of the drive. Driving automatics and CVTs is simply a chore, but driving a manual is an activity. It's fun and engaging. It's an activity that requires coordination and gives control. And, importantly, it's going away. Nearly no vehicles sold in the US are manual because it would be such a small market that it wouldn't be profitable to support it. I don't understand why Corvettes and BMWs don't offer manuals. Are they trying to offer engaging driver's cars or not?
addhochohoc 9mo ago
Could still advance on physical buttons though. Have a huge touchscreen- and the buttons just drive on it via magnets- having little displays on them. That way, a set can be fixed function- and others can migrate with the purpose.
ActorNightly 9mo ago
Why not just have touchscreens, but also put generic controls on each side of steering wheel and let me map the functions.

391 points by stephc_int13 9mo ago

circlemaze 9mo ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

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

tomhow 9mo ago
Comments moved thither. Thanks!
- nathansherburn 9mo ago
  I learnt a new word today. Thanks!
  - anadem 9mo ago
    'Thence' is another nice word

foxglacier 9mo ago

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

joeevans1000 9mo ago
We wish for hardware intefaces. Not screen/hardware interfaces.
Terr_ 9mo ago
IMO the real sin there is the defogging, because that can arise when the driver needs immediate results and is already distracted by difficulty seeing or bad weather conditions. I'd prefer it be part of a row of "panic buttons" along with the hazard-lights and "all wipers to max." In contrast, stuff like "airflow toward torso" versus "airflow towards feed" or "both" is stuff where you can either wait to feel it or else glance at the settings during a safer moment. This assumes, of course, they don't do something stupid like have the "current setting" vanish from the screen on a short timer...
- foxglacier 9mo ago
  Agree. In my more traditional car, defogging is "all 3 knobs to the far right and all 3 buttons turned on" It's a lot of actions but simple to remember, I can do it without looking, and it responds instantly.
ssl-3 9mo ago
My 2012 Honda (which is quite old by some measures) is somewhat similar. It's got buttons. Lots of buttons. It has no touch screen(s). Some of the buttons include: Multi-tap button to change HVAC vent configuration manually. Dedicated, separate buttons for front and rear defrost (with an LED on the button for each). And the PWM control for the fan loves slow ramping, apparently as a design intent, which is dumb: It could provide immediate audible feedback to input but instead tends to just loaf around in response to user inputs. But! It has an automatic mode that really does work pretty well almost always, maintaining comfort for different zones based on a temperature setting for each. So usually, I don't mess with it at all. When that doesn't work optimally (too hot? too cold?), the temperature is adjusted by knobs. And it also accepts voice commands. Which sounds silly, and perhaps is silly, and I certainly do feel silly using that. But when the front window starts fogging a bit on the inside on a cold night, I can tap the voice command button on the steering wheel (which is easy to find by feel) and say a command like "Climate control defrost and floor" and it switches to that mode. I very seldom look at the stupid LCD screen, with its small and nearly-inscrutable blue-backlit hieroglyphs. I change modes with my voice, and I give the temperature knob a twist using muscle memory (though I could use voice commands for that, instead). It's still perhaps not ideal (and I do have ideas for hacking on the CAN-B network for some hands-off automations to make it work better with even less user input), but it's pretty good. And if Honda could use voice commands starting ~15 years ago, then any automaker should be able to do so today. The physical parts (the microphone, the CPU grunt, the CAN controls) are broadly already in-place; the rest is just software that can be copied infinitely as new cars roll off the line.

jrgaston 9mo ago

Requiring a driver to navigate a touchscreen while driving is a needless distraction. Bring back buttons and knobs, things you can feel without looking, things that don’t move with every app refresh. Now if only VW would resume bringing small cars to North America. I’ve owned a few VWs, I liked them, but I don’t want a big car, much less an ugh truck, but that seems all they offer any more. I suppose the market has spoken.

Hikikomori 9mo ago
Vw were still using buttons, but capacitive.
rkhassen9 9mo ago
Agreed on all points.
yencabulator 9mo ago
I owned a Polo way back when. As far as I know, they've never been sold in the US, the smallest US-sold VW is one size up, Golf. So while I agree with the desire, that's not really a resumption. US has only seen compact VWs, not small ones.
jolt42 9mo ago
Renting a car is more of a pain these days. I find I actually have to learn how that car "likes its buttons". I don't remember having to look at a physical gear shifter to know it's in drive/reverse, etc. Now I have to see if some light is on. It must have been obvious to Human Factors folks from the outset that this was all a waste of time.
- AngryData 9mo ago
  Yeah but if they didn't change anything substantial and merely followed customer preferences and established norms, how would they justify the massive administrative and managerial bloat with inflated salaries in established auto companies? How will you keep the investor class satisfied without promises of massive returns within the next few years or so to keep that stock juiced with new gimmicks to sell? How do you keep the MBA holding c-suite relatives employed if they are simply making the same or similar bulk consumer cars for decades at a time? Think about that year or so window when only OEM parts are available to repair new vehicles before generic parts are modeled and built and the new and completely unnecessary tools that can be sold to mechanics and dealers that they can gouge people on.

guywithahat 9mo ago

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

AlotOfReading 9mo ago
Tesla's lack of buttons long pre-dates any sort of ADAS feature development. Here's the interior from their 2009 Model S prototype: https://i.redd.it/ahxh0bmh7ka11.jpg https://i.redd.it/ahxh0bmh7ka11.jpg The first version of autopilot that did anything that could charitably be called navigation wasn't introduced for another 8 years after this car and actual self-driving remains a distant goal 17 years later.
- thejazzman 9mo ago
  I think the constant OTA updates was an intentional marketing point though (gotta spin the fact you’re selling it before it’s done) And that Tesla has gear shifter, turn signals, etc. Tesla only went full FU about 2y ago
- guywithahat 9mo ago
  As far as I remember, Tesla has been talking about full self driving and auto-updates since before 2009, and although cameras weren't placed on the car until years later I would argue these early models were low enough production they were selling the idea more than the product (like how a sports car might be stylized after a jet, even though it doesn't contain a jet engine, but just to capture the feeling of something that's fast). It's also worth noting that car had a lot more buttons, including PRNDL, stock, and I believe AC/heater. Also my Tesla drives me to work every day just fine without intervention. I don't think you need unsupervised full self driving for the screen to make sense, and while I didn't have a Tesla 11 years ago I think the vision was clear and a screen with minimal/no buttons was still useful. My point is just that if you're trying to make a so-called driver's car, without regular updates or meaningful self driving capabilities, it makes sense to add buttons so people know where things are while driving. The screen was a logical derivation from the other features tesla was building and incorporating, starting with the screen because it's easy is a mistake by companies like VW/benz/etc in my opinion.

bloudermilk 9mo ago

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

formerly_proven 9mo ago
This is the same number of buttons/functions that they have had for about ten years on the wheel.

acd 9mo ago

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

LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
While aviation is the origin of UX design, I'm uncertain whether modern cockpit design is born out of UX or out of a resistance to change. For example, for fuel-efficient takeoffs, you need to go in and override the ambient temperature and air pressure sensors and calculate what an efficient fuel mix would be yourself.
- ahartmetz 9mo ago
  It seems unlike commercial aviation to leave efficiency on the table. Maybe the default somehow errs on the side of safety?
  - LeoWattenberg 9mo ago
    Whatever the reason may be, the fact that pilots regularly engage in rather complicated and obstruse workarounds shows that cockpit design shouldn't be taken as the holy grail of UX. Incidentally, I also wonder if the many checklists pilots need to go through before the plane does anything are strictly necessary. It seems like automating these steps and removing associated buttons may be beneficial to reduce cognitive load and prevent operator error (such as happened with the Air India crash last year).

breadwinner 9mo ago

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

WrongOnInternet 9mo ago
What would the gear shifter even do though?
- warmwaffles 9mo ago
  Put it in drive, neutral, park, or reverse. Same as an automatic.
- breadwinner 9mo ago
  Same as what it did in the original Tesla cars. They only removed the stalks recently.
sschueller 9mo ago
Tesla is the one that started this and cost who knows how many lives. They are the ones who thought it would be great to re-invent the wheel and then when the moron execs at the other companies saw the hype they had to copy it.
- alternatex 9mo ago
  The execs probably got promotions for it considering the money saved. The real morons are the customers buying these cars. Brand loyalists don't buy based on logical reasoning.
vardump 9mo ago
Agreed about the signal stalk. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last I've seen the signal stalk is back in Teslas, at least in Model Y, but I believe in newer Model 3s as well. But "gear shifter"? It doesn't really require a stalk. When you start, you select either D or R. Not a big deal. And when you stop, I think most (all?) EVs even automatically go to P and apply parking brakes when you stop. I think that already covers 99% of driving for 99% of people.

dommer 9mo ago

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

willis936 9mo ago

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

alternatex 9mo ago
As someone looking for an automatic why do you want them to make more manuals? Or was it sarcasm? I'm not a "for the love of the drive" type of fellow, especially after living with an older 6-speed manual for many years, so I'm curious where the enthusiasm for manual comes from.
- willis936 9mo ago
  It comes from the love of the drive. Driving automatics and CVTs is simply a chore, but driving a manual is an activity. It's fun and engaging. It's an activity that requires coordination and gives control. And, importantly, it's going away. Nearly no vehicles sold in the US are manual because it would be such a small market that it wouldn't be profitable to support it. I don't understand why Corvettes and BMWs don't offer manuals. Are they trying to offer engaging driver's cars or not?

addhochohoc 9mo ago

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

ActorNightly 9mo ago

Why not just have touchscreens, but also put generic controls on each side of steering wheel and let me map the functions.