Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Anyone with more than only a modicum of experience in human-machine interaction will tell you touchscreens are a terrible idea in cars. It’s high time safety regulators start, well, regulating the use of touchscreens in cars.
File this under “duh”, haha.
While tactile controls are obviously beneficial in cars, IMHO they’re preferable for most other things too. I prefer washers and dryers with physical controls over touch screen ones. Even something like a volume knob with subtle notches has a much higher quality feel than slidding a finger on a piece of glass. Of course touch screens have the benefit of being more portable, which is great for phones, but at the same time the experience is bad enough that I’ll postpone typing until I get to a real keyboard. Brands are replacing tactile controls to be “futuristic”, but honestly most of the time it seems like a downgrade to me. Alas, generic slabs of glass have probably become much cheaper than high quality physical controls, so we’ll probably be seeing fewer and fewer of them going forward.
R.I.P. tactile controls, you will be missed.
Depends on the physical controls IMO. Membrane button systems can be painful to use, half the time it’s not even clear you actually pushed a button unless something reacts (and often that “something” is a cryptic poorly labelled combination of LEDs). A nice big clicky wheel however, lovely.
Honestly tho, fashion plays a part in this too. I’m sure at some point physical controls will come back into vogue as touchscreens become passe
The1stImmortal,
I agree, there are different levels of “tactile” and it’s not all the same, it’s like with keyboards. But if you’re interacting with something for < 1 minute then at least it's not such a huge burden.
Could be, but I’m not so sure. Economics could be the decider. Manufacturers may view touchscreens as an opportunity to permanently do away with physically customized button assemblies for every product in favor of generic interactive slabs of glass that get cheaper.
I feel like a real outlier in this discussion. Not because I like touchscreen controls (I despise them) but rather that I don’t want or need any of the features that touchscreen interfaces has enabled us to have.
So not only having to put up with the awful controls, but having to navigate through menus to find a simple function amongst a sea of tat which I was never interested in having in the first place.
Under-phil,
I agree, I don’t want to navigate menus to control car functions either. Many states ban use of cell phones while driving…these are just as distracting.
I mean the real problem IMHO, is not touch screens themselves, but removing not having physical buttons for the common tasks ( radio volume, temperature controls, heated/cooled seats, etc).
Also then should allow their screens to be configurable. I’d love to have a screen where I could choose quick functions to always be on the first display screen.
This is such a 1st World problem, and with @Alfman and @Under-Phil I completely agree, the utility of the touchscreen in a vehicle is awful, and much to the chagrin of my Java or Scala developing associates I’d rather not have the touchscreen.
@Alfman, my initial response was going to be “der Fred”, but you beat me to it!
There is a real safety concern with touchscreens here – that they divert more attention from the road on average than physical controls, making roads more dangerous. While 1st world countries likely have better overall road safety, distracted drivers killing more people isn’t something to be lightly dismissed.
Big touch screens are cool, because you can get a lot of settings to have – it`s better for me than having 100 physical buttons all around. But it shouldn`t replace basic functions – this is better for physical buttons. With real buttons you can easy change a lot of things without watching on display. It`s much more secure.
You should remember how “old” cars worked : a few buttons for lights, windows, warning, radio and voilà.
Savagegeese on YouTube reviews cars and always mentions the useability of the interface in the interior segment.
Thats good, too many like Doug Demuro and other legacy car review sites will praise any new dumb control like those slide volume controls or heat controls. This is something I’ve been upset about for years.
Without touch screens there is no possibility using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, which would be a showstopper for myself and I suspect many others.
That’s just relaying the problem though – Apple CarPlay and Android Auto could very well be constructed in such a way that they respond to phuysical buttons that each car that uses one of these products should have.
This.
Not true.
My 2021 Mazda 3 has a non-touch infotainment screen that you control with a control wheel in the center console near the shifter, It supports both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. I have not tested it with CarPlay (and I have heard some complaints that it’s not easy to use without touch), but it works just fine with Android Auto.
The car’s physical back/next and volume controls (both on the steering wheel and near the console) work as expected with Android Auto music players. Even the built-in “nav” and “media” buttons (which usually launch the built-in Mazda infotainment options) switch back and forth between Google Maps and your chosen Android media app (Amazon Music in my case) when you’re in Android Auto.
My only complaints about it have nothing to do with the lack of a touchscreen (WHY doesn’t Amazon Music reliably start where you left off when you get in the car?! Very annoying to have to re-pick what I want to listen to 70% of the time I get in the car while it works as expected the other 30%!!!!).
I didn’t like the rest of the vehicle, but the Mazda I had previously used had really nice physical controls for it’s screen. It still worked with touch but 90% of what you needed could be done with the controls.
Mazda CX-5 I had blocked touch control during drive.
My 2021 Mazda 3 doesn’t even have touch – only option is the physical controls, and they work well (with both built-in infotainment and with Android Auto; I’ve heard complaints about it with Apple Carplay but I don’t use that so I can’t vouch for it either way).
Mazda seems to be the only car company pushing back against this “all touchscreens all the time” thing. The previous 3 had a touchscreen, then they got rid of it for the current generation.
Only time I miss the touchscreen is when I’m trying to type an address into the built-in nav (spin to letter 1, press, spin to letter 2, press, ….etc.). But I’ve been using Android Auto more and it’ll let you use the phone keyboard to input an address (when stopped at least)…or voice, which works pretty reliably.
Mazda is great here especially when its your car, but it throws people off who expect touchscreens like a second driver that has a touch screen in the primarily used car.
“regulating the use of touchscreens in cars” – hasn’t Germany done this, to a level that the initial proposal law would outright ban all Teslas for exclusive use of touch screen?
“It’s high time safety regulators start, well, regulating the use of touchscreens in cars.”
It’s pretty obvious that the main controls need to remain physical for commonly used things while driving… but… once you get regulators involved, its just going to make things objectively bad. NTSB typically gets involved and creates new regulations when things become a problem… not when some college grad does a study that is biased towards his outcome of choice but instead when hard data becomes available.
The current standard for these things is there is a limit on the number of button presses away something can be… otherwise the car has to be stopped probably 2 is a practical limit, Once you get to 3 or more… you actually have to look at the screen for extended periods to determine what you are pressing. Also that seems to be a rule regardless of if it is a physical button or a touchscreen button.
ADAC did a similar test last month:
https://www.golem.de/news/adac-tesla-bei-fahrzeugbedienung-auf-dem-letzten-platz-2207-167162.html
Out of the tested cars Teslas Model 3 was the worst.
The top-spots all had physical controls instead of touchscreens.