4 ms·

A lot of people seem to be thinking of this as a touch screen vs physical button issue, but in the case of VW it was actually much worse: they put capacitive bu

A lot of people seem to be thinking of this as a touch screen vs physical button issue, but in the case of VW it was actually much worse: they put capacitive buttons instead of physical ones everywhere. The worst of both worlds: a lack of tactile feedback and the inability to have a flexible interface. I own an ID.4, the "car" part of the car is fine, but the controls inside are by far the most unpleasant I've ever used. 60% of the time I want to turn the fog lights on, it registers as "Defrost Max" that is right next to it. The worst offender by far though are the windows controls. Instead of four buttons like most sane cars, you have 2 buttons as well as a capacitive "Rear" toggle. That toggle is both incredibly easy to activate by accident and impossible to use with glove. I can't fathom how someone designed these things and though, yep, this is a good experience. At least the car has wireless CarPlay so I can ignore the terrible VW software.

mnicky 10mo ago
Does it also have motion sensors to turn on the interior lamp? That's what I've found the most frustrating on some of their models. You want to turn on the lamp? Try some waving gestures... Also, I don't know whether this is a feature, a bug, or just a lack of skill on my side but I couldn't get the lamp to turn on with the engine turned off. VERY impractical.
- strongpigeon 10mo ago
  You have to touch the light itself, which is more or less fine, but sometime doesn’t work if you’re wearing gloves…
mattlondon 10mo ago
Same with my id.3 The windows' "rear" button thing is especially infuriating. That and the climate controls being behind a mandatory privacy click-through warning every damn time you turn the car on. Gah. I have heard rumours that they were penny-pinching to get the price under various countries' cut-offs to be eligible for EV grants. But yeah the interior controls are terrible for an otherwise pretty nice car.
- alistairSH 10mo ago
  Why would you even buy a car with such infuriating UX defects? It would be a hard no for me, I think.
  - mattlondon 10mo ago
    Cheap when second hand. Plus a lot of the annoyance only becomes clear after using it for a while or in different seasons from when you did a test drive. Many cars are like this right now, although EuroNCAP is obviously forcing a change for the better here (because it is so widespread)... but I needed a car then and couldn't wait for the new rules to arrive in X years so... It's fine - it's just a car and it is fine as a car, just some irritating bits.
pc86 10mo ago
> At least the car has wireless CarPlay In 2026 this is roughly equivalent to saying "at least the car has wheels."
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, that is not true. Many manufacturers are very resistant to using Carplay.
- wmeredith 10mo ago
  Don't tell General Motors–the largest carmaker in the United States and a huge player in the global market. They are phasing out CarPlay in all their brands.
  - xnyan 10mo ago
    It’s not going to work for them. Car companies have already tried this, people will literally get a suction cup and stick their phone over the crappy car UI if needed.
- pseudosavant 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, many EV brands (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, etc) and the biggest EV player from the legacy automakers (GM) all don't support CarPlay. They see you as a captive user that they can monetize through their UI instead of Apple/Google. The Rivian is really testing my resolve to never buy another vehicle without CarPlay. If I don't buy one, that will probably the #1 reason.
  - ishtanbul 10mo ago
    Their ceo just did an interview on stratechery where he defends this choice. Something about their software being better and wanting to control the whole experience. Doesn’t mean much if you lose customers before they enter your showroom.
    - pseudosavant 10mo ago
rsync 10mo ago
Why didn’t you vote with your dollars? The interface of the id4 was known to you prior to purchase and the Chevy bolt existed… We needed a third electric car and instead of buying a second audi etron we bought a second Chevy bolt for 1/4 the price solely based on the interface and controls.
- strongpigeon 10mo ago
  It was a weird period in 2022 (ish?) when the US electric car tax credit was changing. The Mach-E was our first choice, but the delivery would have been too late to receive the credit (IIRC). We didn't love the interface, but it wasn't a deal breaker, especially for the tax credit difference.
- thinkingtoilet 10mo ago
  Because we live in a complex world with minimal choices and we can't vote with our wallet on every single issue for every single purchase.
  - sedawk 10mo ago
    So true, voting with your wallet (for myriad of practical reasons) isn't always possible. And sometimes you/spouse/friend/whoever will often say "how bad can it be"! And often we ourselves wonder "Ah! I can get used to it".
    - cindyllm 10mo ago
      [dead]
  - immibis 10mo ago
    You can when buying a car though? Like, if this car sucks, buy a different car.
    - thinkingtoilet 10mo ago
      There are a thousand things to consider when buying a car and maybe the interface sucks but you are more concerned about MPGs. I feel like that was a pretty easy thing to consider.
micw 10mo ago
> 60% of the time I want to turn the fog lights on, it registers as "Defrost Max" that is right next to it Ever tried to open a window on an ID.7? There are 4 windows, 2 buttons and a touch sensor that toggles between front and rear windows. Step 1: Try to open to driver's window. You touch the sensor and open the rear window. Step 2: Try to close the rear window now. Of course you touch the sensor again. The buttons now controls the front windows which are not open. I'm getting used to greet my neighbors through the rear window and close it later when I stopped the car and can look at the controls.
- OptionOfT 10mo ago
  BMW did this too. Instead of multiple separate buttons it's now 1 button bar and it's capacitive. Really annoying.
epolanski 10mo ago
I've driven an ID.4 multiple times (my employer gives it to me when I go in office) and I got used to all of this in few minutes. I'm not saying that it's a good experience, but I don't think it's a tragedy either.
mk89 10mo ago
> I can't fathom how someone designed these things and though, yep, this is a good experience. My 2 cents: it's the typical "lab" test. It overall looks cool if you think about it, on paper. In reality, they should test with children inside (potentially screaming, because that's what they do!), while pedestrians/bikes are outside near the street so you need to pay particular attention, the traffic light is turning red, and at the same time you need to open the windows to let that f** wasp out, that somehow was inside the car. I wanna see how cool that is. If there are UX standards for accessibility, why aren't there patterns about such things? Oh, right, maybe there are, and someone wants to "innovate" :) This is the kind of distractions that really can lead to accidents, because you need to actually "watch" whether something got activated or not. EDIT: my comment was for the other comment that mentioned the buttons for the windows :) somehow I clicked on the wrong "reply". It still applies, though!
immibis 10mo ago
We seem to be living in some kind of general competence crisis. Do we have any theories to why this is?
- majorchord 10mo ago
  The meta-irony of this statement is impressive.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Are you saying the statement of a competency crisis is, itself, somehow incompetent?
vga42 10mo ago
Yeah, I was also utterly disappointed at Volkswagen early last year. After Musk's nazi moment, we started looking for a replacement, and after months of reading about how Tesla is the worst car that has ever existed, I thought this would be an easy trade. But nope, turns out that Tesla's UX is actually top of the line and everybody else, even the best chinese models, are fumbling about, trying to catch Tesla's quality and failing. ID.7 was absolutely the worst. As you say, the cars are good as cars, and indeed climbing into the car felt good. That shattered utterly in 10 seconds -- we talked loud with the family how neat the car felt, and turns out that the car was listening to us and started blabbing "sorry, I didn't get that" in loud volume over our conversation. Trying to find out how to permanently turned that feature off revealed how dismal the UX of the media system is. Perhaps a testament to the Android system it's built on. It might be fastest I've ever experienced a mildly positive feeling dropping to absolute zero point. VW needs to fire 80% of the interface designers they have, starting from the top and perhaps hiring somebody from Tesla to help them restart from scratch. They had the moment of a lifetime 2 years ago and they totally blew it.
- whynotmaybe 9mo ago
  How wrong am I to think that car UX was a solved issue and this is just the proof. Trying to improve something "done" often leads to worse. I recently used a kia Rio 2019 and everything is nicely placed, zero ambiguity and, except the touchscreen, everything cam be used with gloves
- subscribed 9mo ago
  Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions or hiding emergency door opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6.
  - vga42 9mo ago
    > hiding emergency door That's a horrible mistake from their part, but has nothing to do with UX. >Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions ... opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6. By having good taste, I guess?

mnicky 10mo ago

Does it also have motion sensors to turn on the interior lamp? That's what I've found the most frustrating on some of their models. You want to turn on the lamp? Try some waving gestures... Also, I don't know whether this is a feature, a bug, or just a lack of skill on my side but I couldn't get the lamp to turn on with the engine turned off. VERY impractical.

strongpigeon 10mo ago
You have to touch the light itself, which is more or less fine, but sometime doesn’t work if you’re wearing gloves…

mattlondon 10mo ago

Same with my id.3 The windows' "rear" button thing is especially infuriating. That and the climate controls being behind a mandatory privacy click-through warning every damn time you turn the car on. Gah. I have heard rumours that they were penny-pinching to get the price under various countries' cut-offs to be eligible for EV grants. But yeah the interior controls are terrible for an otherwise pretty nice car.

alistairSH 10mo ago
Why would you even buy a car with such infuriating UX defects? It would be a hard no for me, I think.
- mattlondon 10mo ago
  Cheap when second hand. Plus a lot of the annoyance only becomes clear after using it for a while or in different seasons from when you did a test drive. Many cars are like this right now, although EuroNCAP is obviously forcing a change for the better here (because it is so widespread)... but I needed a car then and couldn't wait for the new rules to arrive in X years so... It's fine - it's just a car and it is fine as a car, just some irritating bits.

pc86 10mo ago

> At least the car has wireless CarPlay In 2026 this is roughly equivalent to saying "at least the car has wheels."

collinmcnulty 10mo ago
Unfortunately, that is not true. Many manufacturers are very resistant to using Carplay.
wmeredith 10mo ago
Don't tell General Motors–the largest carmaker in the United States and a huge player in the global market. They are phasing out CarPlay in all their brands.
- xnyan 10mo ago
  It’s not going to work for them. Car companies have already tried this, people will literally get a suction cup and stick their phone over the crappy car UI if needed.
pseudosavant 10mo ago
Unfortunately, many EV brands (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, etc) and the biggest EV player from the legacy automakers (GM) all don't support CarPlay. They see you as a captive user that they can monetize through their UI instead of Apple/Google. The Rivian is really testing my resolve to never buy another vehicle without CarPlay. If I don't buy one, that will probably the #1 reason.
- ishtanbul 10mo ago
  Their ceo just did an interview on stratechery where he defends this choice. Something about their software being better and wanting to control the whole experience. Doesn’t mean much if you lose customers before they enter your showroom.
  - pseudosavant 10mo ago

rsync 10mo ago

Why didn’t you vote with your dollars? The interface of the id4 was known to you prior to purchase and the Chevy bolt existed… We needed a third electric car and instead of buying a second audi etron we bought a second Chevy bolt for 1/4 the price solely based on the interface and controls.

strongpigeon 10mo ago
It was a weird period in 2022 (ish?) when the US electric car tax credit was changing. The Mach-E was our first choice, but the delivery would have been too late to receive the credit (IIRC). We didn't love the interface, but it wasn't a deal breaker, especially for the tax credit difference.
thinkingtoilet 10mo ago
Because we live in a complex world with minimal choices and we can't vote with our wallet on every single issue for every single purchase.
- sedawk 10mo ago
  So true, voting with your wallet (for myriad of practical reasons) isn't always possible. And sometimes you/spouse/friend/whoever will often say "how bad can it be"! And often we ourselves wonder "Ah! I can get used to it".
  - cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
- immibis 10mo ago
  You can when buying a car though? Like, if this car sucks, buy a different car.
  - thinkingtoilet 10mo ago
    There are a thousand things to consider when buying a car and maybe the interface sucks but you are more concerned about MPGs. I feel like that was a pretty easy thing to consider.

micw 10mo ago

> 60% of the time I want to turn the fog lights on, it registers as "Defrost Max" that is right next to it Ever tried to open a window on an ID.7? There are 4 windows, 2 buttons and a touch sensor that toggles between front and rear windows. Step 1: Try to open to driver's window. You touch the sensor and open the rear window. Step 2: Try to close the rear window now. Of course you touch the sensor again. The buttons now controls the front windows which are not open. I'm getting used to greet my neighbors through the rear window and close it later when I stopped the car and can look at the controls.

OptionOfT 10mo ago
BMW did this too. Instead of multiple separate buttons it's now 1 button bar and it's capacitive. Really annoying.

epolanski 10mo ago

I've driven an ID.4 multiple times (my employer gives it to me when I go in office) and I got used to all of this in few minutes. I'm not saying that it's a good experience, but I don't think it's a tragedy either.

mk89 10mo ago

> I can't fathom how someone designed these things and though, yep, this is a good experience. My 2 cents: it's the typical "lab" test. It overall looks cool if you think about it, on paper. In reality, they should test with children inside (potentially screaming, because that's what they do!), while pedestrians/bikes are outside near the street so you need to pay particular attention, the traffic light is turning red, and at the same time you need to open the windows to let that f** wasp out, that somehow was inside the car. I wanna see how cool that is. If there are UX standards for accessibility, why aren't there patterns about such things? Oh, right, maybe there are, and someone wants to "innovate" :) This is the kind of distractions that really can lead to accidents, because you need to actually "watch" whether something got activated or not. EDIT: my comment was for the other comment that mentioned the buttons for the windows :) somehow I clicked on the wrong "reply". It still applies, though!

immibis 10mo ago

We seem to be living in some kind of general competence crisis. Do we have any theories to why this is?

majorchord 10mo ago
The meta-irony of this statement is impressive.
- immibis 10mo ago
  Are you saying the statement of a competency crisis is, itself, somehow incompetent?

vga42 10mo ago

Yeah, I was also utterly disappointed at Volkswagen early last year. After Musk's nazi moment, we started looking for a replacement, and after months of reading about how Tesla is the worst car that has ever existed, I thought this would be an easy trade. But nope, turns out that Tesla's UX is actually top of the line and everybody else, even the best chinese models, are fumbling about, trying to catch Tesla's quality and failing. ID.7 was absolutely the worst. As you say, the cars are good as cars, and indeed climbing into the car felt good. That shattered utterly in 10 seconds -- we talked loud with the family how neat the car felt, and turns out that the car was listening to us and started blabbing "sorry, I didn't get that" in loud volume over our conversation. Trying to find out how to permanently turned that feature off revealed how dismal the UX of the media system is. Perhaps a testament to the Android system it's built on. It might be fastest I've ever experienced a mildly positive feeling dropping to absolute zero point. VW needs to fire 80% of the interface designers they have, starting from the top and perhaps hiring somebody from Tesla to help them restart from scratch. They had the moment of a lifetime 2 years ago and they totally blew it.

whynotmaybe 9mo ago
How wrong am I to think that car UX was a solved issue and this is just the proof. Trying to improve something "done" often leads to worse. I recently used a kia Rio 2019 and everything is nicely placed, zero ambiguity and, except the touchscreen, everything cam be used with gloves
subscribed 9mo ago
Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions or hiding emergency door opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6.
- vga42 9mo ago
  > hiding emergency door That's a horrible mistake from their part, but has nothing to do with UX. >Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions ... opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6. By having good taste, I guess?