Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions
Brand's design chief commits to "never" repeating the "mistake" of relegating essential controls to touchscreens
I bought a new car last year. When we were researching and narrowing down options, I had a column on my spreadsheet for physical buttons/nobs/etc. It's incredible how many cars now do not have physical implements for things you can easily do while watching the road. So that became a requirement. We needed a minimum amount of physical buttons/etc for vital things like lights, wiper blades, volume, and climate control. But seriously, the amount of cars that don't have those things anymore is quite astounding.
What did you end up buying?
I ended up buying the new Prius. Not perfect, but it has knobs and buttons for everything important you might immediately want to adjust while driving.
You can’t say all of that without mentioning what you actually ended up buying.
I ended up buying the new Prius. Not perfect, but it has knobs and buttons for everything important you might immediately want to adjust while driving.
I did the same thing last year when I was buying my college aged kid a car. I also eliminated any vehicle that has goofy stupid controls that caused you to look away from the screen.
I ended up with the Mitsubishi outlander sport. It's one of the best designed vehicles I have seen in the past 20 years. The ratings on it are of course horrible to say the least.
https://www.caranddriver.com/mitsubishi/outlander-sport
It's a vehicle that's comfortable to drive, easy to see out of with large windows, large mirrors, and all the good basics on the infotainment center. It has physical controls for everything else. The engine and transmission have a long warranties and no issues with reliability. It also has a very tight turning radius that makes it really easy to park and drive around downtown.
What's even better, pop the hood and give it an oil change etc. Its really easy to work on.
Do you mind sharing the spreadsheet or the datapoints you were looking at?
It wasn't too intuitive. If we looked at a car, we would specifically look for how to adjust basic things like climate, volume, etc. then based on what we found we would mark it as "yes" for has all standard knobs/buttons, "no" for does not have them which includes touch buttons or anything else not tactile, or "hybrid" meaning some standards are tactile and some are not. I would list the Prius we got as hybrid, but enough of what I needed were in button form to make me happy.
Great. Now bring back circular steering wheels.
Great; now get rid of the stealerships next.
All Carsalesmen Are Bastards.
now introducing: what everyone had when things were still good
