Volkswagen Brings Back Physical Buttons | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen Brings Back Physical Buttons

caranddriver.com

391 pointsstephc_int1351 comments

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46486646

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

I learnt a new word today. Thanks!

'Thence' is another nice word

Requiring a driver to navigate a touchscreen while driving is a needless distraction. Bring back buttons and knobs, things you can feel without looking, things that don’t move with every app refresh.

Now if only VW would resume bringing small cars to North America. I’ve owned a few VWs, I liked them, but I don’t want a big car, much less an ugh truck, but that seems all they offer any more. I suppose the market has spoken.

Agreed on all points.

I owned a Polo way back when. As far as I know, they've never been sold in the US, the smallest US-sold VW is one size up, Golf. So while I agree with the desire, that's not really a resumption. US has only seen compact VWs, not small ones.

Vw were still using buttons, but capacitive.

Renting a car is more of a pain these days. I find I actually have to learn how that car "likes its buttons". I don't remember having to look at a physical gear shifter to know it's in drive/reverse, etc. Now I have to see if some light is on. It must have been obvious to Human Factors folks from the outset that this was all a waste of time.

Yeah but if they didn't change anything substantial and merely followed customer preferences and established norms, how would they justify the massive administrative and managerial bloat with inflated salaries in established auto companies? How will you keep the investor class satisfied without promises of massive returns within the next few years or so to keep that stock juiced with new gimmicks to sell? How do you keep the MBA holding c-suite relatives employed if they are simply making the same or similar bulk consumer cars for decades at a time? Think about that year or so window when only OEM parts are available to repair new vehicles before generic parts are modeled and built and the new and completely unnecessary tools that can be sold to mechanics and dealers that they can gouge people on.

not to mention it has all the phone pairing of the last dozen people to use that car. I wish rental fleet cars had some super easy to access setting to reset them for the next person.

> I wish rental fleet cars had some super easy to access setting to reset them for the next person.

Just factory reset the radio, that's what I had to do with my truck that has no apparent way to remove a phone once it's been added.

> bring back buttons and knobs, things you can feel without looking

“Things you can feel without looking …”

Sadly, this refresh seems to miss this point. The photos look like a grid based keyboard on everything, instead of the tactile experience that means your eyes don't leave the road.

The buttons are likely to work better than the touchscreens, and when you look at what you press you'll actuate your intent every time, but you'll still have to look.

I still drive a VW from 12 years ago because it was the last with "old school" buttons and knobs. VW has been pre-marketing this change for several years now, but looks like they'll need a few more before going back to your point.

Sad.

> Now if only VW would resume bringing small cars to North America.

The VW EOS was one of the last hard top convertibles, while also being a small car and practical. The concept needs to exist, yet doesn't seem to any more — another reason for prolonging the useful life of one if you have it!

// EOS retrospective: https://youtu.be/qkU-UP-iTag

I would never drive a small car in US. The amount of distracted/drunk/high drivers is way too high.

And so the arms race continues!

Id happily give up my truck if there was legislation that prevented people from drinking and driving. Doesn't have to be invasive either like mandatory breathalyzer to start car, it can be something like a mandatory key check in places requiring a breathalyzer to get your key back

The aviation industry has spent decades researching cockpit design, running simulator studies, and learning from accidents. They still use physical buttons for critical controls. If touchscreen-everything was safer or better, they’d have adopted it by now. The main reasons cars are removing buttons are cost savings and aesthetics—not driver safety.

While aviation is the origin of UX design, I'm uncertain whether modern cockpit design is born out of UX or out of a resistance to change. For example, for fuel-efficient takeoffs, you need to go in and override the ambient temperature and air pressure sensors and calculate what an efficient fuel mix would be yourself.

It seems unlike commercial aviation to leave efficiency on the table. Maybe the default somehow errs on the side of safety?

Whatever the reason may be, the fact that pilots regularly engage in rather complicated and obstruse workarounds shows that cockpit design shouldn't be taken as the holy grail of UX.

Incidentally, I also wonder if the many checklists pilots need to go through before the plane does anything are strictly necessary. It seems like automating these steps and removing associated buttons may be beneficial to reduce cognitive load and prevent operator error (such as happened with the Air India crash last year).

Be careful what you wish for everyone. My Toyota Wish (no pun intended) has an absolute cluster of a button cluster (pun intended) for air controls. To change where the air comes out, you have to repeatedly push the same button and watch the LCD to see what you get. There's a button for windscreen defogging but it ramps up the fan slowly over about 10s or so so you end up trying to set it manually instead which means the same repeat pressing and watching the LCD. If the fan is off but warm air is wafting in the vents, you have to press "auto", turn the temperature knob down to minimum, then press "off". Nearly every action requires looking for visual feedback on the stupid LCD screen.

We wish for hardware intefaces. Not screen/hardware interfaces.

IMO the real sin there is the defogging, because that can arise when the driver needs immediate results and is already distracted by difficulty seeing or bad weather conditions. I'd prefer it be part of a row of "panic buttons" along with the hazard-lights and "all wipers to max."

In contrast, stuff like "airflow toward torso" versus "airflow towards feed" or "both" is stuff where you can either wait to feel it or else glance at the settings during a safer moment. This assumes, of course, they don't do something stupid like have the "current setting" vanish from the screen on a short timer...

Agree. In my more traditional car, defogging is "all 3 knobs to the far right and all 3 buttons turned on" It's a lot of actions but simple to remember, I can do it without looking, and it responds instantly.

My 2012 Honda (which is quite old by some measures) is somewhat similar.

It's got buttons. Lots of buttons. It has no touch screen(s).

Some of the buttons include: Multi-tap button to change HVAC vent configuration manually. Dedicated, separate buttons for front and rear defrost (with an LED on the button for each).

And the PWM control for the fan loves slow ramping, apparently as a design intent, which is dumb: It could provide immediate audible feedback to input but instead tends to just loaf around in response to user inputs.

But! It has an automatic mode that really does work pretty well almost always, maintaining comfort for different zones based on a temperature setting for each. So usually, I don't mess with it at all. When that doesn't work optimally (too hot? too cold?), the temperature is adjusted by knobs.

And it also accepts voice commands. Which sounds silly, and perhaps is silly, and I certainly do feel silly using that.

But when the front window starts fogging a bit on the inside on a cold night, I can tap the voice command button on the steering wheel (which is easy to find by feel) and say a command like "Climate control defrost and floor" and it switches to that mode.

I very seldom look at the stupid LCD screen, with its small and nearly-inscrutable blue-backlit hieroglyphs. I change modes with my voice, and I give the temperature knob a twist using muscle memory (though I could use voice commands for that, instead).

It's still perhaps not ideal (and I do have ideas for hacking on the CAN-B network for some hands-off automations to make it work better with even less user input), but it's pretty good.

And if Honda could use voice commands starting ~15 years ago, then any automaker should be able to do so today. The physical parts (the microphone, the CPU grunt, the CAN controls) are broadly already in-place; the rest is just software that can be copied infinitely as new cars roll off the line.

The problem is in remembering the voice commands. I could never do it. Word the command slightly “wrong” and it won’t work at all (at least not in my 2014 VW).

I’m optimistic that the latest progress in AI will fix this when the technology matures in cars. I reckon this is still a decade away though.

Honestly, other than that one single command ("Climate control defrost and floor") I never really use voice for anything else while actively driving. The temperature knob usually does what I want when driving, and I'll be stopped again soon enough if I want to fiddle with something else.

And that one voice command is easy-enough to remember, and the resulting manually-selected mode is easy-enough to cancel with the Auto button (which is the entire middle of the temperature knob -- simple enough).

AI is too easy to get wrong.

For example: At home when my hands are full and I'm headed to/from the basement, I might bark out the command "Alexa! Basement lights!"

This command sometimes results turning the lights on or off. But sometimes, it results in entering a conversation about the basement lights, when all anyone really wants from such simple diction is for the lights to toggle state -- like interacting with a regular light switch just toggles state.

I simply want computers to follow instructions. I am very particularly disinterested in ever having conversation -- a negotiation -- with a computer in my car.

But I can see plenty of merit to adding some context-aware tolerance for ambiguity to the accepted commands. Different people sometimes (quite rightly) use different words to describe the end result they want.

That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.

I reckon that this should have happened 5 years ago. :)

> That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.

I think the most effective way to get this accurate and effective is to give an LLM the user’s voice prompt and current context and ask to convert the user’s request into an API call. The user wouldn’t be chatting with the LLM directly.

The point is that it doesn’t require a static dictionary to already have your exact phrasing and will just work with plain English.

That requires either an online connection to a datacenter somewhere or something that (at present time) is a fairly substantial on-board computing system, and those are things that I think are worth trying to avoid for tasks like adjusting the HVAC in a Honda.

Maybe some day.

Right now, when we do have substantial on-board computing systems, they're trying to drive the car -- not change the temperature. Adding in an additional computational timeslot for LLM voice commands seems both foolhardy and expensive.

Meanwhile: Broader dictionaries and static flows with greater breadth for voice recognition? We can do that right now.

(We can even use LLMs to help generate the static flows, along with people to evaluate and test them. Once implemented, they become cheap to run.

This is in-keeping with a fairly common theme here on HN: Don't use the bot to process the data. Instead, use the bot to write the data processor.)

The Wish more likely suffers from being a car where they shoehorned in a screen to seem more advanced for the time, while keeping the physical controls.

Nowadays screens are being used as a cost cutting measure. It stands to reason that if an automaker reintroduces more costly physical controls it’s going to be to address the issue of cumbersome controls. Hopefully, anyway.

Too many vehicle manufacturers removed buttons to copy Tesla without thinking about why Tesla did it in the first place. Tesla removed those buttons because they were aiming for a low-cost driverless future with full self driving and automatic updates that change the feel of the car. If you put those features in a VW that doesn't regularly update and doesn't have consumer self driving program (at least yet) it doesn't really make sense.

Tesla's lack of buttons long pre-dates any sort of ADAS feature development. Here's the interior from their 2009 Model S prototype:

https://i.redd.it/ahxh0bmh7ka11.jpg

The first version of autopilot that did anything that could charitably be called navigation wasn't introduced for another 8 years after this car and actual self-driving remains a distant goal 17 years later.

I think the constant OTA updates was an intentional marketing point though (gotta spin the fact you’re selling it before it’s done)

And that Tesla has gear shifter, turn signals, etc. Tesla only went full FU about 2y ago

As far as I remember, Tesla has been talking about full self driving and auto-updates since before 2009, and although cameras weren't placed on the car until years later I would argue these early models were low enough production they were selling the idea more than the product (like how a sports car might be stylized after a jet, even though it doesn't contain a jet engine, but just to capture the feeling of something that's fast). It's also worth noting that car had a lot more buttons, including PRNDL, stock, and I believe AC/heater.

Also my Tesla drives me to work every day just fine without intervention. I don't think you need unsupervised full self driving for the screen to make sense, and while I didn't have a Tesla 11 years ago I think the vision was clear and a screen with minimal/no buttons was still useful. My point is just that if you're trying to make a so-called driver's car, without regular updates or meaningful self driving capabilities, it makes sense to add buttons so people know where things are while driving. The screen was a logical derivation from the other features tesla was building and incorporating, starting with the screen because it's easy is a mistake by companies like VW/benz/etc in my opinion.

I have a personal project organizing who was talking about AVs when, so I would genuinely like a source for Tesla talking about self driving before 2009 if you have one. The earliest Tesla discussion I'm aware of is autopilot, which was announced in 2013 in an off-the-cuff interview comment. Dedicated hiring and talks with mobileye began in late 2013/early 2014. That effort later evolved into "enhanced autopilot" several years later after the two companies fell out, which is where I drew the line for "navigation".

I can't imagine a date significantly earlier than 2009. Musk himself only became CEO in 2008, and 2007 was the second grand challenge.

    Also my Tesla drives me to work every day just fine without intervention.

Strictly and pedantically speaking, you're still driving. There's a whole complicated terminology discussion there. To shortcut that, the definition of driver I recommend is "whoever has ultimate responsibility for avoiding accidents". Hence yet to deliver self-driving.

I understand I'm legally driving but the broad point here is whether a screen is enough or if I should have buttons. The way I interact with the car is screen oriented, and the car is sufficiently autonomous that I don't need to rely on a button which never moves. I enter an address on my phone, get in my car, push the brake, and it drives me somewhere.

Similarly I don't know the exact date Tesla started talking about FSD/Autopilot, but they've certainly been talking about it for as long as I've been aware of the brand.

Obviously the 2009 prototype has buttons and as I've already mentioned it doesn't have cameras, but the point stands. Tesla has oriented the features and experience in a way where just having a screen makes a lot of sense. VW just added a screen and hasn't made moves to back it up with other features or with similarly involved regular updates. I think it makes sense for Tesla to continue building cars with just a screen, whereas if VW won't take advantage of the screen they should add buttons back, at least in my opinion.

This is excellent. I hope the market rewards them. Do manual transmissions next.

This is also a minor thing, but I also long for galvometer-based speedometers and tachometers. They're charming. You can keep the screens in the cluster, but just give me a mechanical dial and show me the engine RPM at all times even if it's a PHEV.

As someone looking for an automatic why do you want them to make more manuals? Or was it sarcasm?

I'm not a "for the love of the drive" type of fellow, especially after living with an older 6-speed manual for many years, so I'm curious where the enthusiasm for manual comes from.

It comes from the love of the drive. Driving automatics and CVTs is simply a chore, but driving a manual is an activity. It's fun and engaging. It's an activity that requires coordination and gives control.

And, importantly, it's going away. Nearly no vehicles sold in the US are manual because it would be such a small market that it wouldn't be profitable to support it. I don't understand why Corvettes and BMWs don't offer manuals. Are they trying to offer engaging driver's cars or not?

I’m all for bringing buttons back, but do we really need that many buttons on a steering wheel?

This is the same number of buttons/functions that they have had for about ten years on the wheel.

Could still advance on physical buttons though. Have a huge touchscreen- and the buttons just drive on it via magnets- having little displays on them. That way, a set can be fixed function- and others can migrate with the purpose.

Why not just have touchscreens, but also put generic controls on each side of steering wheel and let me map the functions.

Tesla should take inspiration from this and at least bring back the physical gear shifter and the turn signal stalks.

What would the gear shifter even do though?

Put it in drive, neutral, park, or reverse. Same as an automatic.

Same as what it did in the original Tesla cars. They only removed the stalks recently.

Tesla is the one that started this and cost who knows how many lives. They are the ones who thought it would be great to re-invent the wheel and then when the moron execs at the other companies saw the hype they had to copy it.

The execs probably got promotions for it considering the money saved. The real morons are the customers buying these cars. Brand loyalists don't buy based on logical reasoning.

Agreed about the signal stalk. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last I've seen the signal stalk is back in Teslas, at least in Model Y, but I believe in newer Model 3s as well.

But "gear shifter"? It doesn't really require a stalk.

When you start, you select either D or R. Not a big deal.

And when you stop, I think most (all?) EVs even automatically go to P and apply parking brakes when you stop.

I think that already covers 99% of driving for 99% of people.

Good, smart, and so needed. That said, I'm not forgiving them for the diesel emissions scandal.

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