- Volkswagen will bring back key controls in physical form, starting with the ID.2.
- All future models will have key controls in button form and will ditch touch panes on the steering wheel.
- Mercedes is another automaker that acknowledged screens in cars are not ideal.
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.”
The five functions that will have dedicated controls are in addition to requirements from Euro NCAP, which will include them in its safety ratings starting in 2026. If a car doesn’t have physical controls for the horn, windshield wipers, turn signals, hazard lights and SOS functions, it won’t be able to achieve the maximum five-star rating.
So it’s not just us journalists that consider moving toward touch-only interfaces a bad idea. "What we now see is we have more and more... crashes where people are having collisions because they're being distracted,” Matthew Avery, NCAP's director of strategic development, told Politico.
You’ll know why that is not surprising if you’ve been in a modern Volkswagen, like an ID.4, which forces you to use non-backlit haptic slides below the screen to adjust the cabin temperature or media volume (the 2024 refresh at least made these controls backlit on all but the base model). And if you want to fine-tune your climate settings, you must do it through the touchscreen, which is harder than it has to be even when VW’s infotainment software works.
VW made the user experience even worse for the driver by placing haptic panels on the steering wheel instead of buttons. These can activate if you accidentally touch them, and don't always respond as expected when you do want to touch them.
Mercedes is another manufacturer that went all-in on screens, and its steering wheel-mounted touch controls are even more annoying than VW’s. Like VW, Mercedes should also go back to buttons and knobs after the company’s Chief Design Officer, Gorden Wagener, admitted that “screens aren’t luxury.” This is coming from a manufacturer that offers a gigantic 56-inch array of three screens in its cars, taking up the entire dashboard.
Cost has been a huge driver of this trend. Manufacturers know they have to put a big screen in a modern car to attract customers, anyway. It's easier and cheaper, then, to put all of the controls in that one screen, rather than sourcing and fitting a variety of physical control switches. That's led to some truly infuriating compromises, like VW and Volvo making their window switches far more annoying for pennies in savings.
Tesla started this trend with the original Model S and its gigantic screen that made everything look old-fashioned. Even though it was a fantastic screen that left legacy automakers to play catch-up, after the wow factor wore off, a lot of people started wondering whether a screen-only experience was really better.
That was exacerbated by later Tesla models. With the Model 3 Highland, Tesla took minimalism to new heights by removing the turn signal, wiper and gear selector stalks. Its cars are the only ones on the market that require you to swipe on a touch screen to go into forward or reverse. At least Tesla realized ditching the indicator stalk was too much, and it will likely bring it back, although in a simplified form without any additional functionality.
Slowly, these companies seem to be learning that tactile controls are a life-saver when you're going 65 mph down the highway. If that costs Volkswagen and Tesla a few more pennies per car, that seems like a worthwhile trade-off.
