They could go one step further and add braille support directly, it’s just nudges. Tactile feeling is the only reason they are back.
Yes, I’m aware there are no blind drivers. The point is not having to look at your controls and doing so with something that already exists.
Braille isn’t very good for quick discernment. It’s much easier to put differently-shaped buttons together or put buttons into different places.
Why not both? And blind people don’t seem to think so. Either way, better than what’s in the picture.
Out of curiosity, have you actually spoken to blind people about how useful they find Braille?
Feeling for a 2cm x 1.5cm button is way different than trying to read braille.
Now try selecting between each of the buttons 2cm x 1.5cm for a particular button without having to feel the rest or having to glance at it.
Literally just bumps that are even easier to make than the text on the buttons because they are just part of the plastic mold instead of additional paint jobs. Some people are just hostile to any basic improvement.
We’re talking about something most people’s minds are not used to interpreting, so I fear that this would just add a layer of mental load for most drivers that would be actually less safe.
… Feel free to speak for yourself …
You think most people are reading things with their fingertips?
You do realize that human touch can differentiate between .01mm? It’s why braille works so easily.
Imagine trying to both make the argument that braille is too hard to distinguish and that 0.01mm is easy to differentiate in the same thread.
No.
Out the way, boomers.
Are you able to drive? Do you understand the difference between tactile controls and touch screens?
Morgan Freeman: “They did not.”
I just want a coffee table book with pictures of these stupid executive’s faces who approved the original all touchscreen versions that were becoming ubiquitous.
woody_harrelson_wiping_tears_with_cash.jpg
Touch screens are cheaper, that’s why they did it.
You could make money from that. Trace the execs, get nice shiny photos to the tech, write some good copy, and publish “The Encyclopaedia of garbage tech” so that people in the future can ridicule and possibly learn from their stupidity.
Trace the execs
Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.
I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.
Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there’s many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.
The book cover would be a photo of Musk 😆
Plenty of responsibility for elmo, but don’t remove shared blame from the many layers of individual greedy cowards beyond that who used this as convenient cover to approve changes in their own org’s designs. Anything to make their extra pennies and not pass any of those savings on to the consumer (also so much easier to enable subscription car features, can’t make a physical button disappear over the air)
Having worked with people in that industry they don’t care. They always just want to shake things up then move to next thing to say they did something at their old job. Then forget all about it once they did the next thing.
Thank Tesla.
I just hope they don’t go overboard one way or another. All touchscreen was too much but all buttons would be excessive too
The touch screen should be used for entertainment.
Touch screen should have maintenance/status display and diagnostics and settings for things you’d take care of while the vehicle isn’t moving. Like seat/mirror positioning presets, ride height, towing mode, etc.
I disagree because you probably use the entertainment buttons more than anything. For instance, my wife’s car has the volume control on the touchscreen, which is super annoying because it’s something I like to manually adjust a lot.
I honestly can’t think of what I would prefer be touch screen…really it should just display on a touch screen so I can use it if I want, but everything should be controllable through physical buttons too.
Touchscreen should just be for guidance. Maps, cameras, overlays, caller info, etc.
There shouldn’t be any “entertainment” in it other than the radio info.
Hard disagree. Touch screens are more intuitive, can be updated to be made better, have the option for more controls, and don’t take any more time with your eyes off the road.
Well with a touch screen you have to look at what you’re doing.
With physical buttons, you don’t have to since they have a shape.
Are you looking at your keyboard while typing on your computer? Now try not looking while typing on your phone 🤓
I have to look when adjusting physical buttons in my car, same as I have to look when adjusting things on the touch screen in my car. And I don’t have to look at my phone keyboard while typing.
Do you have problems with object permanence in everyday life? or just in your car?
Interesting that you would say someone like that when the options on a screen are in the same place, too.
Why even type this out?
Do you just like arguing stupid points for fun even when you know yourself that you are wrong?
Have you never seen an automotive touchscreen before?
Even within one model/brand there are a ton of panes, and layouts. And even when you choose one layout, which apps are open changes the location and size of the buttons. Now add into that multiple brands, models, layout, and years… And your comment gets more worthless at every step.
Beyond that. The screen doesn’t use haptic feedback to tell you where your fingers are so that the parts of your brain that evolved to handle that kind of context can use it without your fucking eyes. ‘Oh I touched the round thing, I know there are 4 rectangles next to this’ is a built-in feedback loop that a touchscreen does not provide at this time.
When you’re fumbling to find the right switch/knob by feel your focus is still not on driving. It is at best very marginally better, and probably worse because you now think you’re still paying attention to driving even though you really aren’t. It’s still illegal to text while driving, even on an old phone with a physical keyboard, specifically for this reason.
You can’t compare turning the volume control knob in your car to writing an SMS on an old keyboard phone
Volume control is also accessible from the steering wheel on pretty much any car produced within the last 15 years, and certainly any with a touch screen. I’m not comparing to steering wheel controls.
I’m comparing it to fiddling with AC settings on a centre console like everyone seems to me mentioning in this post.
One, the volume knob is far quicker to respond than the usual ‘up/down’ slow volume adjustment on the wheel. The turn down the overly loud sound from the last driver immediately is nicer with a volume knob.
But with my car with hard A/C controls, I just reach down to the little ‘up/down’ toggle and tug it down a bit if I feel a little warm or bump it up a little if I feel too cold, or hit the big old button if I need to toggle it off to talk on speaker.
There are a fairly well known set of very common controls that will never be better and need an update. Coarse A/C adjustments, vent direction volume, and next-track are all no-brainers (unless you are Tesla…)
For example, here’s a layout that obviously has room and depends on touch for a lot of features, but preserves a reasonably sane set of audio and climate controls (and four miscellaneous functions)
With that you don’t look, you know pretty much immediately for the functions you would use.
There’s still plenty of room for touch/voice controls for those more nuanced/complicated things that don’t fit into button land well. Entering a navigation destination, managing any software updates, setting parameters like "should the car adjust cruise control based on speed limit signs, and if so, what adjustment to the limit should be applied?’
and don’t take any more time with your eyes off the road.
Physical controls generally don’t have to be looked at at all to reach common controls.
and don’t take any more time with your eyes off the road.
Uh, yes, yes they do. Which is why buttons are superior there. It’s all about usecase. Keep your touchscreen for things like the navi settings.
Touch screens are shit tor buttons. They can be hacked. They can be unresponsive.
There’s a load of other reasons, but either or both are enough to realise that a physical button is much safer. Perfect example of safety being lost in technology. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
While you’re at it bring back the Amber, its such a perfect color for the dash
It looks nice but I’m sure they lean towards cool colors because they’re better at keeping you awake.
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.
I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.
SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN
Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?
IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE SUN
Never had an issue with them but then I live in Europe, where auto-adjusting/adaptive lights aren’t just legal it’s a requirement if you want to make the headlights permanent high-beams.
I wish adaptive lights were legal in the USA. Manufacturers like BMW have to disable the feature at the factory because their implementation isn’t approved for usage in the USA.
I saw this, but apparently the European ones don’t meet the US guidelines, and the Euro manufacturers aren’t yet redesigning and recertifying their headlights to meet the US guidelines. The two brands I was looking at (BMW and Porsche) both still have this feature disabled on their 2025 US models.
Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.
And for some reason my state still doesn’t have properly reflecting paint, so everyone drives with their high-beams on because otherwise you can’t see the lanes. The net result is that nobody can see anything because they’re constantly being blinded by oncoming traffic.
It sucks all the way down…
my issue isn’t really with the brightness, it’s the height. Don’t get me wrong bright headlights are annoying as fuck, but a huge ass truck behind me with their headlights literally higher than my back window is insane.
My point exactly. The brightness is great, when it works in your favor. But when a modern car sits at such a height, where the low-beams shine directly over the top of my car, it’s obnoxious
That, and people don’t know how to adjust them, or are unwilling to. My parents’ cars have a dial to adjust the headlight angle for when carrying weight in the back of the car, or when towing, but they never touch the setting.
I miss that in my old car. When I’m drivng around in the city and don’t rally need much headlighting I’d angle them all the way down. When I’m in a dark area where there’s enough people that I can’t use my brights I’d just angle them up. My current car has stupid self leveling headlights so I don’t get any of that fun :(
Especially when people fuck with the ride height on their trucks. They almost always end up with the front higher than the back, relative to it’s stock setting. Then don’t bother to adjust the head light angle to compensate.
Then, on I need a massive light bar on the top of my truck. Never mind that I never take this thing off road or do any work with it. It looks cool and it’s bright and shiny.
Fuck off. Can we just tax these things properly and not v give them a lower tax rate since their classed as commercial vehicles. No one buying these massive boats uses them for more than going to home Depot once a year to buy some leaf bags.
/Rant
I don’t know the white point on some of the LED headlights is extremely taxing to look at at night.
My car has adjustable headlight height and I love it. I put em all the way down because they’re stupid bright.
I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.
This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.
The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.
From personal experience in Europe, I can tell you that it sounds great in theory, but it’s horrible in practise. I get routinely blinded by headlights here and I feel like it has only gotten worse with the advent of LED headlights.
Not all manufacturers use adaptive headlights, and on some cars it’s only available as an upgrade whereas there’s a lot of people driving base models.
Interesting, I have those on my car and I actively avoid using them.
It can’t cope with anything more than a simple scenario (dim around car in front, deal with on coming car in other lane). If you also have pedestrians and vehicles on side junctions, then you burn their eyes.
So, I’d assumed it was a US feature (straight, wide roads) brought over here
You know what I would really hate? Automatic diagnostics on my dashboard. Nah. Please make those as LED blinks where the mechanic has to supply his own LED, Jerry rigged to the obd connector. And make it so that only one guy in Minnesota has the manual. Every mechanic has to contact that guy. Then the mechanic has to interpret the LED Morse code manually. Oh yes this would be so useful. And to add a 3Ghz motherboard with only access to Apple music. Totally awesome. Make the display show a video of “all I want for Christmas is you” I’ll certainly be making use of that.
Should be illegal to have touchscreen controls in a car, it requires you to look at it to effectively control it, which means the car forces you to ignore the road to do anything.
I prefer the tactile controls over the touchscreen. While you’re at it, bring back manual transmissions too!
Honestly at this point just make a mobile app to control it.
But we’ve still got a good 10 years of avoiding used cars. This era is literally landfill.
Never mind that even 3-5 years down the line, some of these systems will fail to connect/ pair with the latest gadget in your pocket.
10 years and counting
There’s so much bullshit in new cars that’s it’s infuriating, especially considering the cars call home with all kinds of privacy violating bullshit.
I didn’t have a car for a few years and the one I had was 2003 (with a slight stint from a similarly-aged car during a couple-month time I had to drive). I now have a car again and I HATE that my heat/air and such are all flat against the panel (not a touch screen, though). I literally can’t adjust anything without looking in my current car. Thankfully, I avoid driving it whenever possible.
Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.
I like that being a leading expert on buttons is a profession that exists in this world. You go Rachel Plotnick.
