My 9-year-old Subaru has physical buttons. The car still ignores them when it's busy "thinking", like leaving the sound blasting at whatever volume setting it was on previously, but now with a different song, and there is nothing I can do to shut it the hell up for like a minute or two while it finishes booting up the OS.
Pro-Tip: "Physical buttons" don't have to mean a damn thing.:-(
Edit: I do like the tactile feel of them though.:-)
That’s one of my 3 complaints about my wife’s 2018 Subaru:
It takes over a full second to shift into drive.
The clock shows you the date but not the time when you start the car. You know, the one time I literally always look for the clock to see if I left on time? Yeah. No clock. (Seriously, what the what? Why?)
You can’t turn off the radio when the car is starting. (For a while I thought it was while reversing, but I think that’s just because it’s the first thing I do every time I turn in the car after my radio-listening wife has parked.)
Other than those three problems, it’s a great car.
It has physical buttons in the steering wheel for most functions, so this article isn’t very relevant. Sure, you can’t adjust your front-back speaker volume while driving, but you shouldn’t be doing anything that involved while driving anyway.
Absolutely. Overall the Subarus are the best designed car I've seen - I would change those few things, but it's a small list and they are very minor.:-)
Whoop-dee-fucking-doo! Are we supposed to cheer for what looks like 9 lousy buttons and 2 tablets glued to a couch-back? If this is peak automotive interior design; you guys can keep it…
Also; the “joystick-thingie” just makes the problem worse! Now you have to navigate a cursor on a screen instead of “just touching the thing”. That takes your eyes off the road for longer yet!
Bro, clearly you’ve never used the rotating joystick because it’s WAY WAY better than a touchscreen.
You take your eyes off the road far less because it’s quick, tactile, and right near where one of your hands rests anyway. Mazda has been doing them for years and the system is far and away the best mechanism for interacting with car infotainment.
A touchscreen is incredibly difficult to use while driving. I can fly through menus so fast with the rotating joystick that would take ages tapping a touchscreen.
Bro, clearly you’ve never used the rotating joystick because it’s WAY WAY better than a touchscreen.
Sure, in the same way that merely having the shit beaten out of you and being left with life-long debilitating injuries is “WAY WAY better” than being murdered. It’s damning with the faintest of praise.
You know what’s an actually-good interface? Having buttons that do only one thing each so that you don’t have to look at them at all!
I can fly through menus so fast
The speed at which you can navigate a menu is entirely beside the point. Having menus exist in the first place is the kind of shit that belongs on one of those “they have played us for absolute fools” memes, except unironically. User interfaces designed to be used while driving simply shouldn’t be modal!
Car UIs peaked in the '90s and have been getting more and more unsafe ever since.
Mazda does it right. Not only are there plenty of physical buttons for everything you would commonly use, the infotainment screen is not a touch screen. There is a knob in the center console which acts as a sort of "mouse" to operate the screen options.
You mean the knob and buttons that is right in front of the the cupholder in some models. A little turning knob to control stuff that any drink you have is going to interfere with access and potentially spill on. The salesman was trying to point it out as a feature. I laughed and left the dealership when I saw that little bit of stupidity.
Seriously, a touch screen isn’t a big deal as long as you have physical buttons for the most frequent actions in an easier location.
I’ve got a 2016 Honda, and although the infotainment system is noticeably showing it’s age, you can do any of the functions using either the touchscreen, or the buttons around the edge. My only complaint is that you can only do things like typing in a destination or connecting a phone if the vehicle is stopped. It would be nice if that feature was disabled when a passenger was in the front seat, since they can safely operate the controls independently from the driver.
Also, only the Audio and navigation are in the infotainment system, still have physical controls for climate. It’s in the Goldilocks zone of automotive infotainment technology.
I ended up purchasing a '22 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport for my teenager for those reasons. The infotainment center was “dated” according to the reviews. Lots of buttons for most things and a basic touchscreen that ran auto/carplay.
Yeah, probably the worst design possible. Having both options is a maybe. Having no touch screen makes everything a multi step process you need to watch the screen for to know is working.
Yes, they actually save a significant sum with touch screens. Not only are the components cheaper (1 ~$150 touchscreen is cheaper than 15x $2 buttons w/ associated hardware + 10x $10 dials w/ associated hardware), but the wiring and electronics get significantly reduced.
Plus, people liked the idea of touchscreens before they found about the actual downsides of touchscreens. So they were both meeting demand and doing cost savings at the same time.
The new interior has a row of physical (and backlit) buttons for the climate and a rotary controller on the centre tunnel to control the screen on the dashboard above, much like with BMW’s iDrive.
Reading the article you are replying to tends to be helpful
Exactly and in the modern world today, you can't just expect them to put a fm radio and an anolog driver cluster. Although the center infotainment tablet could be a little bit smaller. They could have also designed the cockpit better around the screens rather than just sticking the tablets.
Yeah, it doesn't address the awful and lazy design that is "hardwired tablet in middle of console", but at the very least it provides a way to interact with car functionality without taking your eyes off the road.
How is turning a dial to find the right option on the screen reduce eye time off road? You still have to seek around and look at the screen to find your option you want.
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