[734129837261]

Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively to images of flashy touch screens and shiny lights.

Driving a car with touch screens (new BMW or Mercedes) has left me very unimpressed. My 2016 VW Golf has actual buttons, switches, and knobs to twist and turn and press and flip.

Car reviewers, too, often say it's a shame that car manufacturers are switching to touch screen nonsense. It's such a shameful trend if you think about it. The BMW series of pre-2022 had buttons in the dashboard, but the upcoming new series will do away with those entirely.

Touch screens even find their way onto steering wheels and doors.

Of course, it's easy to understand why:

1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want.

Honestly, I hope European legislation makes it illegal at some point. For the sake of safety. With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch.

What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance!

So, now you need to do everything with an outstretched arm in a moving vehicle to operate tiny buttons on a flat touch screen.

Oh, and the touch screen can only barely hit 60 frames per second and often feels much slower. They're even saving costs on GPU power in their fancy luxury cars.

[greyhair]

My brother works in automotive engineering, it isn't 60+ driving this trend. It is the design team, which skews young, and the marketing team, which also skews young.

Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago.

So on you four bullets above:

1) True 2) I don't know, perhaps? 3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing? 4) Completely false.

The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons.

1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there.

2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it.

One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.

[thesuitonym]

>but are they doing usability testing?

You know they're not. If they were, nobody would ever replace a knob with a touchscreen.

[paganel]

> One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night,

Another of the many reasons to decry the death os Saab as a car company.

Later edit: Added link to YT video demonstrating Saab's night mode [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E

[734129837261]

Thanks for clarifying that. I stand corrected.

It all makes sense from just the financial point of view. So that means it isn't going away any time soon, unless there's a huge backlash from consumers.

Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is 1 car manufacturer deciding: "Buttons first, touch screen(s) second."

Let consumers decide with their wallets. Though, I wouldn't be surprised that many consumers go for an inferior product just because it looks cool. Because that, unfortunately, is how humans work.

[BurningFrog]

> Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints

This makes a ton of sense for displaying state.

For manipulating state I need tactile physical controls.

This is how computers work, and for good reason. I have a big screen to show state, and keyboard + mouse to manipulate it.

[sli]

> Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using.

Doesn't stop Toyota for wanting a solid $1000 to replace the display in my 2014 Corolla. Someone's pocketing a lot of money.

[HPsquared]

Night driving is especially annoying if there is a lot of backlight bleed through the display. Perhaps OLED displays would make this better, but of course... more expensive.

[mrtksn]

The cars with a lot of buttons simply look outdated and people feel bad on choosing a car with a small screen.

The whole marketing is built on it, you get a small screen and lots of buttons if you get the basic version of the car and you get giant touchscreen if you buy the premium package.

If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy(at the time of purchase, most people don't have real world experience with touch screens on cars and touch screens are in these cutting edge electronics that are expensive, so they must be good). If your new car has a small screen you need to explain why this was the logical choice and how much you saved.

It's even the same with the iPhone 13 mini. That device is amazing, you can use it with one hand and fits in every pocket and the screen is actually larger than the first large screen iPhone(the iPhone 6) but people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone?

It's very strange, the word on the street is that the larger the screen the better. If your $30K product instantly becomes much easier to sell when you replace buttons with touchscreens without increasing the costs wouldn't you do that? I guess you need to have a niche, snobby traditionalist brand to be able to reject that demand from the consumers.

[badpun]

> people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone?

I mean, fsck them. If I had people in my life who though like that (I don't), I'd get rid of them. If they're family and cannot be simply cut off, I'd minimise the contact.

[duncan-donuts]

Heh funny you mentioned the iPhone 13 mini. I just got a new phone and picked the iPhone mini. It’s by far my favorite phone since the iPhone 5. It’s also one of the cheapest new iPhones you can get. Like buttons on a dashboard the iPhone 13 mini is far and away a better product (for me).

[RHSeeger]

> you need to explain why

You really don't, and the fact that people consider it a given that you do says some very bad things about society. You should be buying the things that work the best for _you_, not the ones that will impress your friends.

[jbverschoor]

Sure, my laptop looks outdated with a keyboard. But compared to touch screen I'm more productive, faster, make less mistake, can wear gloves, don't have to look, can use it in sunlight, and it was never unresponsive.

[Silhouette]

If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy

Does this ever happen? I've never heard anyone express jealousy regarding not having a big enough touchscreen in their car. I've heard several owners of modern cars with touchscreens bemoan how complicated and slow to use they are. In my experience literally no-one who actually buys and drives cars thinks they are a good idea and many people - including myself - are deterred from buying a new model specifically because of the technology.

[ryanbrunner]

I wonder if there's a way to make physical controls feel more premium via materials / design. In other consumer goods, there's definitely a market for physical design that feels more well-engineered with things like using metal and thoughtful trim. It's not surprising that people find black plastic buttons not particularly premium looking.

[croes]

So instead of the whiteness and type of your business card it's now the size of your touchscreen.

[workingon]

maybe stop hanging out with narcissistic rich people, no one i talk to would ever make comments like that

[croes]

If you need to showboat you are not rich

[wikfwikf]

I think the trend towards touchscreens has to do with the halo effect of the iphone. The fully touchscreen phone was much more modern-feeling, and also better and easier to use than previous phones with buttons.

The irony is of course that the decision to have very few buttons (not one, not zero, but very few) with almost all input via the screen was made very carefully by Apple with very specific justification based on understanding of how phones were used and could be used. This is clear from Jobs' iphone keynote.

If Steve Jobs, Jony Ives etc were redesigning car interfaces it's far from obvious that they would have made similar decisions.

[hulitu]

Physical buttons: 1. Are expensive 2. Need space on the PCB 3. Need ICT 4. Need special soldering sometimes 5. need a dedicated interrupt interface on the microcontroller ( that's why are more responsive) 6. Need software both at "kernel" (BSW) level and at userspace (application) level. A touchscreen "button" needs only a callback to a routine and a lot of patience from the user.

[kottapar]

> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance!

Mazda also has this beautiful dial-joystick which we can operate in a rested position. It is so intuitive that I stopped using the touchscreen console itself. On the other hand even when we operate using a dial and buttons we take our eyes for an instant to look at the screen to check the changes. Now imagine looking away at a touchscreen just to see what operation to perform etc. This is a major distraction.

[ModernMech]

Mazda has actually been going in the opposite direction by removing their touchscreens; 2016 Mazdas came with touchscreens, but the newest models go without. Personally, owning a 2016 Mazda I never actually used the touch screen once, due to as you note, the great dial interface.

[spcebar]

BMW at one point had (and may still have) a dial joystick, but I found it really unintuitive. Maybe it was poor software design, but it was never clear to me when I needed to turn the dial vs move the stick to navigate menus. Did you find it easier to use the control in the Mazda? Was the UX better?

[konschubert]

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively to images of flashy touch screens and shiny lights.

It's mostly a cost saving measure.

Physical buttons are expensive. I you eliminate them, the car gets cheaper to make.

That's all.

It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.

[Joker_vD]

Surely the buttons don't cost that much compared to, y'know, the rest of the vehicle?

[vladvasiliu]

> It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.

I'm not so hopeful. The same can be said about household appliances. Yet more and more random things figure they should have touchscreens, or at the very least touch buttons. And this trend has lasted for far more than 10 years.

[m000]

> It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.

Consumers is the key word here. Manufacturers already know that buttons have the "disadvantage" that they break independently. They are also easier to fix with a generic replacement part. Which means that you won't have to scrap your car because it suddenly became unusable.

Force manufacturers to provide replacement parts for 25 years after original purchase, and see them flocking back to the basics. But that prob. won't happen in EU (because it's against the interests of Germany) or USA (because "communism"). So I guess we're depending on the common sense of Japanese and Korean manufacturers?

[neilv]

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!"

Is there evidence it was 60+ year-olds who decided to lean on touchscreens for cars?

If that's just an assumption, isn't an equally likely ageist guess that it was pushed by people who came up through the ranks in the era of "UX"? (Since I'd expect that old-school, pre-UX human factors engineers, who grew up on research coming from aircraft cockpit optimization, safety, and UI in service of the user... would research the heck out of a new technology option like this.)

[TaupeRanger]

The parent comment could not have gotten it more wrong. It was not "60+ year old fossils" that made this decision. It was "30-40 year old disrupter hipsters" that told the older people in charge what looks immediately appealing to the average person (and not just young people, who can't afford to buy new cars).

[stinos]

With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch.

Sort of related, I have the exact same issue with portable music players while walking or cycling. Most of the time the only task I need to do is play/pause or forward/backward track.

For a player with buttons it takes a small amount of attempts and after that you've learned the position of the buttons by heart and can control the device even while it's in your pocket, without needing to see it. Usually aided by some tactile feedback. Fast, convenient, and somewhat safer since we're talking traffic situations.

With a touchscreen-only player that is much harder, sometimes impossible (depending on which screen you're in the controls might not be in the same place or not be there at all).

Sad thing is, this was already the case like a decade ago, leaving me wondering if designers have any pride in their UX, simply don't know they're doing it wrong, willingly just focus on other things apart from usability, etc. In any case: driving a heavy vehicle at high speeds should be the last case where simple things like switching a radio station actually requires you to take your eyes of the road. That's just insane.

[nicbou]

They sell dedicated controls you can clip onto your clothes. You could give that a try.

[rad_gruchalski]

Decent not-so-expensive headphones come with buttons for those functions.

[emiliobumachar]

5. Backup cameras. They're legally required in some jurisdictions (so I heard), and genuinely contribute to safety, but they require a screen. Once the screen is there, there's both less space for buttons and a virtual hook for features.

[rohansingh]

I've seen the backup camera integrated into the rearview mirror in some vehicles. That doesn't have either of those drawbacks.

[kylecordes]

I have been surprised to learn that regulations only require that the backup camera turn on when you go into reverse; not that it stay on while you are in reverse. Some cars let you navigate away from the backup view even while moving backward.

There is so much opportunity for better regulation, without making more numerous regulations.

[benj111]

You can just use the screen for infotainment and satnav though.

I already have a screen showing what radio station is playing, and one on the dash telling me where to go. If a screen is required for a backup camera, just combine it. If I'm reversing I probably don't need the satnav anyway, whereas if I'm reversing or using satnav I probably do need other functions which just means you need an even bigger screen so you can fit everything on.

[ModernMech]

These days the instrument cluster is being displayed with an lcd. It could be used for the backup camera and wouldn’t be practical to be a touchscreen.

[badwolf]

in addition, my Volvo does a "360" view, which is pretty darn useful for parking.

[woliveirajr]

You shouldn't use your smartphone while driving because you might cause an accident while you are looking away from the road and not using both hands to hold the sterring wheel.

But that's ok with touchscreens.

[ryanbrunner]

To be fair, while I agree that touchscreens are far worse for distraction than physical controls, they're far, far better than a smartphone. Phones are designed to hold your attention, have small text sizes and interface elements, require actually holding the phone vs just using the touchscreen, and a lot of distracted driving comes from wildly inappropriate activities like texting vs advancing to the next song on Spotify or something.

[april_22]

I even think the only way to drive new Teslas in reverse is by swiping a button on the touchscreen. That's such a huge security risk.

[throwawaylinux]

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!"

Do you have any evidence for this? Seems pretty outlandish to me.

> 1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want.

What does 4 even mean? If we took 1-3 as fact, then should businesses have disregarded them and instead made something more expensive to produce that looked cheaper and sold for less because people don't respond so positively?

[dogleash]

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils

Please don’t play this game where a bad design decision was finally recognized as bad design and a scapegoat is found rather than admitting the “experts” who did it have no clothes.

UX branding itself “UX” rather than any of the half dozen other names we used to use was a clear statement of “It will be different this time, I promise.” It wasn’t. The design trends we got were different, but bad interaction design is still bad interaction design.

[ptsneves]

I have a 2021 BMW and I really like the alternatives on button and touch screen it offers.

I barely use the touchscreen and when not needed I outright turn it off. This is quite easy because BMW has 8 buttons that can be mapped to any function in the touchscreen including turning off the main screen.

Another thing I enjoy is the gesture detector. It sometimes has false positives when I gesticulate a lot but it works when I actually intend it to. It is very satisfying to mute the radio or change an annoying music with a hand gesture. If they would keep trying to integrate and perfect it I think it would be the right direction for innovation.

Touchscreens are fine when parked or for the passenger. Anything else they are useless and often have too much distracting info, so they are turned off.

[WXLCKNO]

I ordered a new 3 series (2023) which does away with those buttons and a few others. I would have preferred having at least the temperature controls as physical buttons but other than that they do have the navigation knob/joystick which is well positioned to control the system. It feels like a reasonable compromise.

[StevenWaterman]

There is one benefit - you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons. Tesla's first touchscreen [1] now looks slightly dated, but they're able to just update the entire fleet.

No doubt it'll get to the point where you can't update it any more - either due to hardware incompatibility, lack of processing power, or some new technology being added. But it has meant that a 2013 Model S looks more modern today than it would have otherwise.

Equally, tech tends to look dated much faster than physical buttons do. It's too early to really say which has more long-lasting appeal.

[1] https://youtu.be/TZ0HsN-tblo?t=124

[grishka]

Updatability is not a good thing. I want my UIs to never change without a good reason, and there can't be a good reason to change car controls.

[HidyBush]

>you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons

A car is a dependable tool. Changing the UI during a car's lifetime is dangerous and unprofessional. I'd say the same is true for smartphones and computers but I guess the majority of people think of them as simple "cool entertainment devices"

[Silhouette]

There is one benefit - you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons.

This is a bug, not a feature.

If I'm driving then I'm driving. I want any non-driving controls to be as simple, consistent and reliable as possible. I don't want any non-essential controls at all. I don't want anything I might want to use while driving that requires me to take my eyes off the road at all. I couldn't care less what some flashy touchscreen UI looks like because I should never have to look at it.

The physical controls on the dash of every vehicle I drive regularly still work as well and feel as comfortable to use as they ever did. In some cases those vehicles are over a decade old. I'll take that over the modern touchscreen junk any day.

[dncornholio]

I've never been in my car and thought the buttons could use an update.. It's hardly something that you should trade safety for.

[mizzack]

Just waiting for the day some enterprising MBA decides it's a good idea to add ads.

[kylecordes]

It's interesting to see a parade of people object to the updatability.

Sure, on a minute-to-minute timescale, anyone must obviously agree.

But over the long term of owning a car, it is an immensely valuable feature. My 2018 car still feels quite new and fresh - much less reason to replace it than if it were falling behind.

[DrBazza]

> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance!

My MB is a UX disaster.

Have a guess how many controls there are in the car for navigating the (non-touch!) screen?

1? Nope. 2? Nope. 3? Yes 3. A touch surface in the centre console, a spinning wheel in the centre console (which is also a joystick), and finally a little joystick thing on the steering wheel.

Volume controllers? 2.

And don't get me started on how dangerously absurd it is trying to switch between MB's own system and Apple Carplay/Google Auto whilst driving.

[jstummbillig]

You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates. With a touchscreen you are least constraint by your previous assumptions and can change direction any way you like.

[hulitu]

> You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates.

The updates are only for bug fixing.Maybe this will change with SaaS but today i never heard of any Car company which does this. And no, i don't consider Tesla a car company.

[tommyderami]

I think points 1-3 are valid and certainly contribute to the decision, but many manufacturers believe that the future of the interface is a mixture of voice control (environmental, cabin lighting, navigation etc) and manipulation of steering wheel controls with HUD feedback (infotainment and everything else). Failure to embrace voice interfaces and demanding a button for everything is making 'fossils' out of 20-100 year olds. Source: I work at one of the big German car manufacturers and have mostly drank the 'use voice, don't look off the road' koolaid.

[fluidcruft]

I can see voice control being useful and far cheaper (modulo the issue of how to deal with jackass passengers, but that's pretty easily dealt with using a push-to-talk button on the steering wheel).

In a previous discussion someone mentioned that part of this trend toward screens in cars is that new cars are now required to have rear-view camera. So once you are required to have the screen, it's really almost nothing to waltz over to touch screens. Of note: the "winning" car is so old it doesn't have rear-view cameras.

[marvinvz]

It's mainly about cost and a bit about "but Tesla!".

[kgwgk]

The impressive thing about the touchscreens in BMWs is that you don’t need to touch them at all. [I’ve not seen the new models though. I’m sure they are not better than the ones being replaced.]

https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive...

[Sakos]

Why would that be a good thing? That sounds awful

edit: Nevermind.

> The main part of the BMW iDrive system is a control wheel, which can turn clockwise and anticlockwise like a volume dial. It can also be pushed forwards, backwards and to each side as if it were a joystick, and the centre acts as a button that can be pressed to confirm a choice or select an option. As mentioned above, later versions have adopted touchscreen technology, gesture control and voice commands, so there are multiple ways to operate a newer iDrive system in addition to the rotary control.

It's a physical user interface with buttons and a joystick. Which is basically what everybody here wants.

[flakeoil]

Isn't that a drawback. Even easier to press the wrong button. Must be terrible when driving on a bumpy road and your hand is jumping around.

[amelius]

You still have to browse through menus.

[bena]

Maybe I'm weird. I don't use the center console that much. For music, I'm either streaming or shuffling what's on my phone. And then I have the screen showing maps. If I want to put in a destination, it's usually done before I even get out of park.

My steering wheel has volume controls and the environmental controls are still button based.

[moss2]

5. The manufacturer can change functionality and user interface with a simple software update.

If Toyota half-way through shipping their latest car realize it's better to have two knobs on the dashboard, they can very easily add one if the dashboard is just one big touch screen.

[vincnetas]

What this "we can change it later" option creates is designs that are not very well thought out. When you have physical buttons you must be double sure that this is the best layout that you can come up. You need to commit and double (triple) check with multiple people. Allocate resources for manufacturing/tooling. But you are forced to think about it really really hard.

With touch screen and OTA updates, you can skip the hard part and leave it for future you to improve if needed. But as we all know, when it's already sold there is no motivation to spend money to improve. So touch UI stays half baked. And only gets improved with future models.

[ajmurmann]

In some way that's even worse though. Everything should stay put. When driving a car, all this stuff is a secondary activity. I need to be able to develop muscle memory to ideally perform these finds blind while giving my main attention to the road. Buttons help doing this without looking. I might be able to do navigate a touch screen quickly if everything is in the same place all the time. Moving things around is just another opportunity to force more attention to the secondary activity

[chestervonwinch]

I believe you could have made your point without the "fossil" insults.

[fortran77]

I think it's in poor taste that you refer to older people as "fossils"

[slothtrop]

I would have gone for antiques.

[StevePerkins]

I'm not sure how you juggle the cognitive dissonance of cramming "Testing audiences respond positively" and "Fossils decided that this is what people want" into the same explanation.

I do agree with the premise that physical buttons and knobs are generally far superior to touchscreen UI's, at least for the common core basic things.

However, I don't agree that it's about the boomers, or the capitalists, or any other Internet strawman forcing something onto the masses against its wishes. I think it REALLY IS a matter of test audiences and "casuals" having tastes that differ from power users and other people that think deeply about a thing. You see this in many different domains.