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.”

  • @ripcord
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    28 hours ago

    It’s so weird how not a single person here can just say “cool, this is good”.

    Sometimes things can just be good.

    • @myplacedk
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      11 hour ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      107 hours ago

      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 :(

      • Billiam
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        66 hours ago

        Yes, but a corporation complying with the law is sadly what passes for good news in the US these days.

      • @regrub
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        47 hours ago

        Consumers don’t like subscriptions to operate heated seats that are already integrated into the car, for example.