VW Brings Back Physical Buttons (caranddriver.com) 57
sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Volkswagen is making a drastic change to its interiors, or at least the interiors of its electric vehicles. The automaker recently unveiled a new cockpit generation with the refreshed ID. Polo -- the diminutive electric hatchback that the brand sells in Europe -- that now comes with physical buttons. [...] The steering wheel gets new clusters of buttons for cruise control and interacting with music playback, while switches for the temperature and fan speed now live in a row along the dashboard.
The move back to buttons doesn't come out of nowhere. Volkswagen already started the shift with the new versions of the Golf and Tiguan models in the United States. Unfortunately, some climate controls, such as those for the rear defrost and the heated seats, are still accessed through the touchscreen. Thankfully, they look to retain their dedicated spot at the bottom of the display. Volkswagen hasn't announced which models will receive the new cockpit design. The redesigned interior also may be limited to the brand's electric vehicles, which would limit it to the upcoming refresh for the ID.4 SUV (and potentially the ID.Buzz), as the only VW EV models currently sold in America. "Unfortunately, the glued-on-dash tablet look is still there," adds sinij.
The move back to buttons doesn't come out of nowhere. Volkswagen already started the shift with the new versions of the Golf and Tiguan models in the United States. Unfortunately, some climate controls, such as those for the rear defrost and the heated seats, are still accessed through the touchscreen. Thankfully, they look to retain their dedicated spot at the bottom of the display. Volkswagen hasn't announced which models will receive the new cockpit design. The redesigned interior also may be limited to the brand's electric vehicles, which would limit it to the upcoming refresh for the ID.4 SUV (and potentially the ID.Buzz), as the only VW EV models currently sold in America. "Unfortunately, the glued-on-dash tablet look is still there," adds sinij.
Yay.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I literally bought a 2011 BMW because it has real dials (not LCD) and actual buttons.
I also have a tesla, and other than the performance, everything else about the car sucks. It's objectively just poorly designed. Even the touch screen ignoring the non-physical button aspect, the design is atrocious. There are UI elements that are 5mm wide that you have to touch while traveling 70mph.
Don't even start on the absolutely POINTLESS and waste of space the 3d picture of the car is.
Why can't my passenger adjust radio without covering my sat nav ? Why is the text so small ?
Anyway good for VW. Hope more manufacturers follow.
Re:Yay.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am happy that a brand this large is reconsidering... but it's still VW...
I wouldn't touch a German car with a ten foot pole. Right now my dream car is a 2016 Toyota Sienna... used prices are just nuts at the moment...
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I just bought a used 2021 Hyundai Kona EV, low mileage, for a great price (US$22K). The major factor in the choice was it has nearly all physical buttons and rotary controls.
Very happy so far, range in the city is about 500km (300Miles) and long term average consumption is 11.8kwh/100km (6miles per kwh). Battery at 50,00km has no detectable deterioration.
Being retired, nearly all of my trips are no more than 4-5 miles, a use case modern ICE engines do not like at all.
Still got a turbo MX5 for fun drives!
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My sister has an EV6 and nothing but good to say about it.
I know a muscle car nut who has hardly driven his prized Grand National since buying EV6 GT in 2023 and it's been his FB backdrop photo since
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He's given his weekend car a very long vacation & bought the GT specifically for the performance
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Some people have dreams of the vehicle being reliable. No German car has fit that description since the nineties.
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Exactly. A car is a tool. And since I don't want to own more than one of those, I ned a very versatile piece of kit.
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Your statement is false. I've been driving the same 2011 VW GTI every day that I bought used with 30k miles on it in 2012. I beat on it and don't drive it lightly. It is still a joy to drive today. I still get regular compliments on it from random people at gas stations. We also have a 2013 Jetta which runs great and is another reliable car. You may not like VW but you don't need make stuff up either.
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I don't even blame Tesla too much for going for minimalism in its initial design/quote? Are you talking the sports car or the Model S? The latter wasn't minimalistic, it was a complete ripoff of a Mazda design.
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I don't even blame Tesla too much for going for minimalism in its initial design/quote?
Are you talking the original sports car or the Model S? The latter wasn't minimalistic, it was a complete ripoff of a Mazda design.
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It's still not a proper win (Score:5, Informative)
So many of the OEMs who are bringing back physical controls are doing really shitty implementations. This includes VW with its new Golf.
The main benefit of physical controls compared to touchscreen only, is that users can operate them without looking. But the new Polo, and my Mercedes EQA, have a strip of identical physical buttons, all little up/down levers with small icons. So you can try to use muscle memory to hit the correct button, but it's hard to press the correct one without looking. The contrast with my previous car, a Renault Zoe, could not be more striking. That car had three rotary controls for the AC, one to direct airflow where you wanted it to go, another to control the temperature, and another one for the fan speed. They were physically separated and after a couple of weeks, there was no chance that you'd use the fan control by mistake instead of the temperature control, for example. On top of that, rotary buttons are a much more intuitive and quick way to set a temperature or a fan speed than a little lever you have to click repeatedly.
The designers are absolutely prioritising form over function, all these years after Jobs's famous quote that design is how something works.
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Three Dial air control is peak usability althought I'll also go with three levers. Drove many pre-80s cars with the three levers.
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Yes and no. The buttons that are relegated to the singular line in VW cars are buttons that you don't normally need to interact with. Things like climate control (it's 2025 guys, if your car can't maintain a perfect temperature in all weather conditions automatically then you bought a shit car, I haven't touched a climate control in my car in 2 years now, summer or winter, fogged windscreen or not).
VW got exceptional flack for their design because their steering wheel "buttons" were capacitive touch sensors
So the time every device wants to... (Score:1)
Alternate reality (Score:2)
The screen-only parts are for detailed things like oil temperature, individual tire pressure, lane monitoring, predicted miles between oil changes, and other things, which if I insisted on 100 percent manual would make the system as complicated as a B-29 cockpit. As well as make the thing cost over 150K
Even then, those are mostly steering wheel pushbutton controlled.
T
Losers (Score:5, Funny)
I want a fully AI car where the feature can never be turned off, the hood can't be opened, the screws all have one-way heads, and of course always-on 360 degree LED lights that outshine a galactic nucleus.
So I can leave it parked in my densified urban condo's underground storage while I work from home.
Masochist! (Score:3)
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You're in luck, Apple is reportedly looking at entering the auto market.
Now Microsoft et al should fix their #$% buttons (Score:2)
UI text entry fields used to be sunk, so you could see quickly and easily what UI elements you could type in.
Then UI artistes at Microsoft ( et al ), in an attempt to follow fashion, fucked it all up and made buttons you could click on into patches of color, which are indistinguishable from the patches of color which are not buttons and which you cannot click on.
And they gave up on indenting text entry fiel
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Unironically get a toyota. They had the same wheel and AC control layout for a while, and it's hilariously intuitive with circles for D-pad on both sides of the wheel with "ok" button in the middle.
Let side controls the UI if the car, right side controls driving features (cruise control, LTA, etc).
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100%.
Flat Design SUCKS because it turns every signal into noise where you can no longer easily tell what is:
a) interactable vs
b) static.
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Path of Exile 2 IMHO is a boring, tedious Ruthless Souls-lite grindfest.
Toyota be like (Score:3)
"You had a phase with no buttons? No wonder your resale values are shit".
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Yeah funny story, but VW's resale values are no different to Toyota's. The 5-year resale value for both vehicles sits in the 50-60%. Toyota gets to edge out due to a peculiarity in that they have fuck all EVs. ICE cars between brands have virtually identical resale values. EVs are still lagging, so the car company which infamously ignored EVs of course has a win there.
That said Toytoa Mirai may have the worst resale value of any car in history, even worse than Swasticars Model 3 now given people are activel
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Toyota hybrids are basically everywhere now. In many places in the world, you can't even get a non-hybrid toyota any more.
Notably, they hold value better than any other hybrid or EV, and better than most ICE cars.
Mirai was never a mass market car. It was a test bench that barely sold any cars. The fact that you have to scrape barrel this hard to find a toyota with poor resale value matches the "nazi musk" shit. Your boy NYC mayor just did the same gesture, and your silence on him being a nazi is deafening.
Couldn't save pennies any more too many dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember the Tesla semis? (Score:3)
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and not being able to figure out how to turn the heat on in the winter.
If you need to turn on the heat in winter or the AC in the summer then your car fucking sucks. Climate control is ludicrously easy to get right and trivially cheap to implement. I haven't adjusted that setting in my car in years, not parked, not while driving.
Is it just me (Score:4, Interesting)
Or are there too many buttons in that image. I do support the physical controls but that steering wheel by my count has 19 buttons and that's without seeing if there are more on the backside of the wheel. There's gotta be a reasonable middle ground between no button Tesla and 1980's button madness.
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There's gotta be a reasonable middle ground between no button Tesla and 1980's button madness.
We had that. it was from roughly 1993-2013, before the first Federally-imposed intrusion of the screen into our cars.
Truly, the last gasp of the car, before it turned into a laptop-driven living room surrounded by Brutalist architecture.
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The inclusion of a screen and backup camera is good, there's been a marked reduction in injuries via backing up, particularly with children. That didn't lead to the touch madness we have now, in fact I would attribute that to a lack of regulation in the US, only now is the EU once again setting the tone by enforcing physical controls again.
No the blame for what you're talking about falls on us and the automakers for being trend chasers. In a better world Tesla is not allowed to ship the Model 3 with its m
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The inclusion of a screen and backup camera is good, there's been a marked reduction in injuries via backing up, particularly with children
Partly disagree. That first screen was the nose under the camel's tent. It was soon co-opted for car config, then nav, then infotainment, and now has grown to a laptop.
The injuries and accidents of people backing into kids are easily solved by a walkaround of the car before you get in. Takes 10 seconds. Any flats? Any oil slicks? Any coolant puddles? Any cats / kids / dogs / trikes / whatnots behidn the car? No? In we go, belt on, engine start, putter away. Do this every time.
A 15 second walk aroun
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"Everybody in the country change your behaviour" is not policy, at least not one that works. If it worked we wouldn't have seen a drop in children dying from backing up cars. You can't enforce 15 second walk around with law and it's already defacto law, doesn't work, won't work
The airplane example makes my point, an airline cockpit is so much more regulated in function by the government than the dash of our cars.
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18 buttons is pretty standard for most cars on a steering wheel these days. And by standard I mean so standard that some buttons don't even do anything. (The top/bottom left button on the left of my steering wheel has no function, and neither does the top right button on the right of mine).
A typical car needs 5 buttons for cruise control. Engage/disengage, faster, slower, bigger gap, smaller gap, lanekeeping engaged/disengaged, speed limit/speed targetting, and resume (though some cars combine resume with t
History will show... (Score:2)
Touch screens are driver abuse. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Car music playback (Score:2)
Seems every car maker these days thinks we all listen to music on fecking spotify via our phones. No, we don't. Some of us listen on the old steam radio (often buried away in sub menus with changing stations a needlessly complicated task) and have large numbers of CDs we'd like to play but apparently thats old hat now with CD drives not even being a purchase option with any manufacturer.
Yeah, maybe I am old and maybe you should get off my lawn, but not everything new is better and easier to use.
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Seems every car maker these days thinks we all listen to music on fecking spotify via our phones. No, we don't. Some of us listen on the old steam radio (often buried away in sub menus with changing stations a needlessly complicated task) and have large numbers of CDs we'd like to play but apparently thats old hat now with CD drives not even being a purchase option with any manufacturer.
Yeah, maybe I am old and maybe you should get off my lawn, but not everything new is better and easier to use.
I losslessly ripped all my CDs to a USB thumb drive and use that in the car. One can still combine old school with elements of modernity. It's way more convenient than dealing with discs.
Re: Car music playback (Score:2)
Tried a thumb drive in my car, didnt recognise that either.
no horses in the barn (Score:2)
Sorry, too late. VW has awful reliability ratings. Any Japanese car is better than a VW, unless maybe you want a Porsche.
Re: no horses in the barn (Score:2)
Yep. My newest car is a Subaru, complete with buttons and a manual transmission and much higher reliability ratings.
Dupe? (Score:2)
VW is publishing dupes now? I thought they announced this news last year. Or is this just a case of them following through on a promise?
I'll buy ID.Polo (and Cupra Raval / Skoda Epiq) (Score:2)
....unless they totally screw something up.
It's basically something I have been waiting for since EVs became a thing and these specifically when they were first announced. They have been delayed by couple of years from the original projected release, but the thing is, nothing better seems to be in the pipeline from any vendor.
The 450 km range and price somewhere between 25k to 30k (euros) - unless they have totally screwed something up, Shut Up and Take My Money. All the others cost more than
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I just read on that car because it's not available in my region. According to Wikipedia, it will have either a 38 or 56 kWh battery. The 38 kWh battery likely won't have that 450 km range. This is most likely with the large battery, and even then, they must be using the very optimistic WLTP test cycle to get those numbers. I expect more like 300 km real-world range in ideal summer conditions.
Eurobureaucrats are annoying, but people (Score:1)
How stupid could they be? (Score:2)
VW has been doing cars for ages. They understand safety engineering. They must have been on drugs when they decided to go without physical buttons. Good to see the drug-haze has worn off and they are coming to their senses again.