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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

If the two 2023 VW models I've driven are any indication, it's an abject failure.

It might be partially because I haven't seen what a "new" car looks like in a while, but I found everything horrible. Both the actual touch menu navigation as well as the applications - possibly the worlds most useless distance sensing / park assistance technology who's only mode of operation is to been insanely at you when you're near anything. I've also had it just crash and had to look up how to reset by holding the power button for a long time.

I think this stuff may be par for the course on new cars now, but VW in particular is shit.

I would add that I don't know what the design goals of the OS are. It appears that in-car OSs generally are for the utility of the car company, whether stealing personal information or upselling, nagging, or preventing you from doing things you'd like with your car. So maybe it's going great on those fronts.

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Honestly, I have multiple friends who were Volkswagen fanatics for life, normal folk who would only consider a VW product for their next car, all of them said they will look elsewhere after test driving the latest generation of cars. The touch interface is actually insane. It's honestly designed by someone whose goal is "try to see what's the worst interface you can create and still sell a car". The capacitive window controls deserve some kind of award on their own. It's awful awful awful 1000x. A friend of mine is literally in the process of selling his nearly new Golf Mk8 over this shit - he said he thought he would get used to it, but it leads to misclicks and accidental activations of functions literally every day. He has the entire system crashing at least once a week usually when driving. And multiple times the entire system just switched from miles to km on its own without any input. He reported it to VW who of course said they can't reproduce the issue. It's unusable. I wish reviewers would use extremely harsh words about it - it doesn't matter how well the car drives or how much space it has if the interfaces inside it are literally unusable.

Great time to be a second hand GTI mk 7 seller.

I’m a big fan of Mazda’s interface, especially with their recent commitment to maintain tactile controls.

Indeed, you’d think Mazdas take is so logical and natural in the context of car safety that all manufacturers would follow, but here we are, with new models moving away from any tactile control.

> capacitive window controls

And the winner for “make me not buy this car in 3 words” goes to…

I honestly recommend seeing how it's done as it begs to ask how this left the design stage without the head designer being fired and barred from the automotive industry forever. If the buttons to control all windows were all capacitive, that would be bad enough on its own, but perhaps manageable. But they decided to go with two buttons for left/right window, then a separate capacitive button that switches those other two between controlling front or rear windows. And no of course it offers no tactile feedback, so if you want to open the rear window you have to swipe on this button you can't even feel and that you can't see the state of without looking down, then you need to find the capacitive button for windows control to roll the window down. It's 100% insane. The only way to make it worse would have been to remove the buttons entirely and make it all voice controlled only.

"ok Volkswsgen, windows 50%"

"sorry, 50% up or down?"

"it doesn't matter if it's up or down"

"Ok, windows down"

"No, lower windows 50%!"

"Windows already lowered 100%"

"Raise windows 50%"

"Please park and verify window frames are clear before using this command."

"Navigate to nearest dealer"

"Diving to IMAX theater"

"Air conditioning functions can not be operated by voice control"

Porsche is part of the VW group, and while you could expect something better for the price paid, the UI is even worse in their EV Taycan. With poor touch screen feel and frequent crashes too.

Luckily they integrate, when it works, with CarPlay and Android Auto that provides a 2023 like interface.

The last year drama firing the CEO for many reasons, one being poor software results, doesn't bring hope for a fresh update any time soon.

> I wish reviewers would use extremely harsh words about it

Some are. Drive Tribe on YouTube has been very critical of Ferrari’s move to use touchscreens entirely and while praising the cars themselves, they outright claim the UX is is simply unusable and they just couldn’t recommend them just because of it.

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