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Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.
Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.
We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.
“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone.”
Great. Do away with the unnecessary telemetry next.
I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.
The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.
None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.
nymea.io was one of the few who were full private, but I think they got bought out or something
This is why I don’t have a new car. I’m hoping I get one where I have access to my own data (in eg. Home Assistant), and the manufacturer doesn’t.
The thing the vast majority doesn’t care about and that doesn’t prevent them from buying cars and that you’ll have to live with unless you just keep driving your old car forever?
I’ll eventually have to buy a new car, yes. But I’ll also be looking into replacing the car’s cellular antenna with a dummy load if possible. A good car shouldn’t depend on cellular networks to be able to function.
Unfortunately, a lot of them are bad https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
I’m looking for reading on cars that don’t break when you disable the cellular antenna, but haven’t found much so far.
Even if you disable the antenna, who is to say it doesn’t cache telemetry locally that isn’t just sucked up by the dealer the next time you bring your car in?
But then how will you know where the nearest Arby’s is on your commute
My favorite place to buy and use drugs!
lol
It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.
Sometimes things can just be good.
Yes, but this is not one of those times.
Imagine someone poops on your doorstep, and then removes half of it.
You can say it’s good that they removed some of it, but that’s probably not the point you would want to make.
Trust is earned, and automakers have done nothing but the opposite for an entire lifetime. There’s a reason everyone was so desperate for Tesla to be the little guy rebel. It didn’t work out though :(
Yes, but a corporation complying with the law is sadly what passes for good news in the US these days.
Consumers don’t like subscriptions to operate heated seats that are already integrated into the car, for example.