VW Is Putting Buttons Back in Cars Because People Complained Enough
Customers and critics alike have raked VW over the coals for its "frustrating" interiors.
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Yeah I really hope other car makers follow because I fucking hate touch controls in cars with a burning passion. It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Same goes for kitchens. Give me real buttons and knobs and not these abhorrent touch panels that refuse to work every third time. A good quality kitchen appliance is identified by high quality knobs that last for decades.
I pumped gas at a brand new Shell station over the weekend. The controls for the pump was one GIANT touchscreen (I'm talking probably 12 inches wide by 36 inches tall). It was fucking PAINFUL to use. Every touch took 2-3 seconds for the action to happen. Da fuck is wrong with a regular pump and regular buttons that just work!?
Because then they don't have a display the size of a living room TV to shove ads in your face
And to sell to the station owner when their proprietary hardware breaks. Oh what am i saying, they're all service contacts these days. So more expensive service conrtacts and the ability to shut them down for non-payment
Were the old ones not the same...?
Were the old ones not the same…?
The contracts? Pumps? Im kinda talking out my ass here but currently there's no ability to shut down the pumps themselves as far as i understand it (in l understanding coming from being a cashier at one once. The touchscreens outside just process the customers payments. Without those they can still be run from the other system inside. The pumps are not connected to Wi-Fi.
My hypothetical assumes more and more control left to the touchscreen outside i guess, and i ran with it. If it doesn't make much sense then just reread my first sentence ;)
The conversation was about locking in the owners to their expensive proprietary pumps as a reason for switching to this new style, and I was asking if lock-in was actually a new thing or not. Otherwise the comment doesn't really make a lot of sense in context.
Reminder to try and press any of the buttons on the side of the screen to mute if possible. 2nd right or bottom right works on all the pumps around me but I dread the day we get touch only
This is the reason.
It should be illegal to connect a touch screen to a computer that runs like a potato. Even computers in the 80s could respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks in real time.
If it keeps getting broken they might reconsider.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn't as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
This sucks because I don't get better hardware just to make up for worse software (not that it even does; a lot of browser-based apps are painfully slow), and some of these devs end up working on weaker platforms that don't make up for their shitty programming. They might not ever touch the platform it is actually supposed to run on and instead work on a dev machine that is powerful enough to make it look good. It's possible that neither them nor anyone hiring/managing them realizes that they aren't the kind of programmer they want.
Though it's also possible that the programmers are fine and have told their managers that the CPUs just aren't powerful enough for what they want them to do but some assholes are only looking at the bottom line and have low standards for these kind of things in their own life (my TV is slow, so it's no big deal that our car interface is slow).
Worst thing is it's probably less than a $50 difference in cost to switch to something that could handle it fine, assuming it's not programmed in JavaScript and HTML or slow because it's backend is on the cloud or some shit like that, which also wouldn't surprise me.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn't as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
How's this for irony: I was hired at my current job as part of a team whose whole mission is to address performance problems in a large desktop app...that's written entirely in Typescript!
It's kinda funny how some are willing to develop a skill to great depth (you'd have to know JavaScript/TypeScript very well to write a full deal desktop application in it, and it probably involved a LOT of frustrating debug if performance is the main issue with it) but don't spend any time on breadth to understand that some depths aren't worth it.
We used to have a rule in computer system design that if an event would take more than 4 seconds we had to show a "waiting" icon like the hourglass.
Now though, people are sensitive to half a second between tap/click and something happening. Incidentally there's no reason for a fuel pump control to be slow, even running on a potato. The engineer who designed it wasn't given time to make it efficient
In Canada it really sucks having to take your gloves off half the year. I hope this gets taken into account when touchscreens on gas pumps are considered.
Try wearing very thin neoprene under your bigger gloves. It's been a game changer for me. I have a horrible habit of taking my gloves off from years of snowboarding and those have been awesome.
Your experience remembers me those old touch screen we had at the library in the 90s. The screen was monochrome, but touch sensitive. It took several seconds for react.
Also it probably was crustier than a toddler's iPad. 🤢
What do you need a touchscreen for? You just take an appropriate pump (E95, Diesel), fill the fuel and pay at the register.
Because it's way faster to pay at the pump and not have to go inside. I've only been inside a gas station like 4-5 times in the last decade.
It was slow because all of the memory was allocated for the ads they show you.
Biggest problem is that they cheap out on the tech parts. Nobody complains that an iPad has a touch screen, cause it works. But an appliance tends to have a crappy UI, running on a crappy touch screen, powered by a crappy CPU.
If they just used quality parts, it'd probably be fine, and the only issue would be expensive replacement for an entire assembly, instead of small, cheap parts that can be fixed.
A smartphone or tablet screen has the function to have multiple buttons and responsive functions on one and the same place.
A kitchen appliance doesn't have or need that. Absolutely no need for digital or so-called "smart" gimmicks.
Yeah! Instead of having a knob my idiot stove has “touch areas” - good luck cooking if you’re blind.
At my old place, if I wanted to set the bottom left plate to the hottest setting, I’d put my hand on the leftmost knob and turn counter-clockwise until it snapped once.
On this thing I usually have to start with turning off the child lock. We never turn it on, but every time we wipe off the stove there’s a like 95% chance the child lock activates due to the lingering moisture.
After turning the child lock off you have to hold the power “zone.” Then you have to select which burner by holding its zone - if you don’t you’ll start changing the timer when you hold down the - button to cycle from 0 to keep warm, to 9, and then press + to turn it from 9 to boost.
I'm legit not joking. Mind you this example is when the piece of shit behaves. I’ve an absentmindedly placed lids on the off “button” before and had the piece of junk refuse to turn back on for half an hour.
What does the touch controls add to my experience other than frustration? A knob doesn’t activate from water splashes. A knob doesn’t turn from residual moisture from a slightly damp cloth. A knob is tactile and pleasing to hold, and can be used by anyone of appropriate age, even if they’re blind.
Four knobs could pull the weight that these NINE touch “buttons” fucking struggle with.
WHO CAME UP WITH THAT?! Holy shit that is a fucking crime against humanity.
Holy shit, it's like User Inyerface, but for stoves!
I can't believe I wasted five minutes of my life on that hell. Whoever constructed that is an evil genius.
JUST FIVE?! Holy shit dude, how much of bad UI/UX have you been through?
Holy shit, I could not imagine someone who cooks a lot to put up with that. If you have a few things you need to start and stop at specific times and change heat levels and stuff while cooking several things at once.. it takes me .5 seconds to operate my dials when doing this. I would be livid using your stove.
Yeah it drives me bonkers every time I have to use it.
It’s worse than that too because I grew up with gas and electric hot plates. I’ve 20 years of ingrained habit causing me to move pots and pans off the plate to quickly adjust temperature. I’ve legit lost count of the amount of times I’ve absent-mindedly pulled a hot pan over the controls causing the stove to become unusable for a while.
These are the most sensitive touch controls I’ve ever experienced. They’re triggered by moisture and even putting pans or groceries on them.
Oh ffs what a fucked up convoluted mess.
We need to find the engineer that designed this, and their managers who pushed it, and shame them People of Walmart style.
How is it people can willingly violate fundamental UI/UX rules?
As mentioned, how do these things pass Accessibility regs?
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In general high quality things tend to have physical buttons and knobs as opposed to touch screen devices.
Instead of turning into e-waste after 5 years or less they can last for the next 30 to 50 years.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
I just tore apart a working thermostat that almost 80 years old now (to understand how it works) and in perfectly working condition. It uses the physical properties of the materials inside to measure temperature (a coil of metal expands and contracts causing a pendulum to move clockwise or counterclockwise). Suspended at the top of this pendulum is a small vial of mercury containing two electrodes. When the pendulum is far enough counterclockwise the Mercury slides in the vial and bridges the electrodes, turning the furnace on, when the pendulum is far enough clockwise the mercury slides to the right and no longer bridges the electrodes.
When you set the temperature on the thermostat you are changing the default position of this pendulum. Meaning that it has to move more or less distance for the bead of mercury to bridge the circuit.
It's brilliantly simple and will continue to work essentially forever. The physical characteristics of the materials involved won't change.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
Same goes for pretty much every IoT device that people seem to be filling their homes with.
This is why, going forward, smart home products I buy have to be zigbee or zwave so I can integrate it with home assistant.
I thought this comment was trolling then I realized that zigbee and zwave are real brand names. You can’t make this shit up.
lol from the outside I can see how you’d think that.
Haha yeah they're IoT protocols for smarthome stuff. But an open source software called Home Assistant can talk to it, so you can self-host your home automation without your home being subject to the whims of some fragile tech startup and by extension, their investors.
Oh I see, that’s helpful and makes sense. I’m one of those newbs who took 15 hours to set up my own Jellyfin. Self hosting Home automation is a ways off in the distance for me haha.
Hey, same! Glad it was helpful.
And hey it sounds like after 15 hours you DID get it set up, so congrats! The skills learned will keep transferring to your next projects. If you're having fun, you're winning. :)
Home Assistant has a pretty rad community and guides on which devices it can use and stuff. They're trying really hard to be accessible to the curious. So hey, never know!
Yeah that's how things are now.
I was looking for kitchen scale and not a single recognisable brand was there on Amazon. No Phillips, Bosch, Siemens, Panasonic etc.
Don't know if these companies even make things like that anymore.
Yeah Amazon has opened the door to the lowest quality hardware out of China to put most name brands out of business for lower priced goods.
But it can't run DOOM.
You should read Exhalation by Ted Chaing if you haven't already. It's a quick read
Touch screens especially don't make sense in the cooking context, where your hands are likely to be wet / damp.
Touch controls for burners are very dangerous in my opinion. What if i spill oil on the stove and touch screen? Now the oil might stop me from turning off the heat and the situation could quickly turn into a fire.
That's a thing? Holy shit... And here I thought the worst offender was Tesla's yolk steering wheel with a capacitive touch horn "button".
I’ve had similar situations happen before. Moved into this apartment in September. This stove will be the death of me.
That's why they have spill detection. Try pouring water over the touch controls. It should beep, then turn off. It's not a good solution or better than a knob, but better than nothing. Except your spill doesn't flow over the controls. Then good luck.
Omg I feel that. The oven in my apartment has touch controls. When I'm baking stuff with lots of moisture inside, water evaporates and is expelled though a vent JUST BELOW the touch controls. The condensation makes them completely unresponsive. Smh
You have to wonder if the engineer who designed that was a complete dumbass because it seems remarkably obvious that you'd want to keep moisture away from electronics.
I was boiling pasta earlier and my fucking stove turned itself off and engaged the child lock because water splashed onto those controls. THREE TIMES!
I’ve had this piece of shit literally ruin dinner before. It’s amazing how it can be both really nice and really fucking useless at the same time.
Agreed, it's true for most devices. They're often finicky, don't offer anything in terms of feedback (Except maybe for a beep that is identical for all button presses) and they don't last.
I'm really on the fence when it comes to kitchens because a) you actually have time to look at what you're doing -- if you need to lower temperature suddenly the better option is to take your pan off the stove, anyway and b) touch controls are trivial to clean.
What I can't stand though is scales manufactures being so cheap as to not even have capacitive buttons but re-use the front left/right feet as sensors for the interface. On the upside the thing was dirt cheap and actually comes with an USB-C port to charge its LIR2450 cell.
Nah I just got new ovens and a hob and they are sleek and easy clean and work like a charm.
I like touch panels but don't mind physical buttons.
It's idiotic and not safe at all.
Not to mention completely useless in places where you need to wear gloves when driving.
Volvo car touchscreens work with gloves on.
wear gloves when driving
For example?
If it's so cold that you wear gloves, then get your AC fixed because it should've been running by the time you drive off.
Hmm, that’s a strange comment you left. I’m not the person you responded to but:
When I get off work it’s just before dawn (coldest part of the day) and it’s frequently 10 Fahrenheit or lower in the winter (below freezing). I wear gloves in my car in the winter because cars don’t warm up enough for the heat to come on right away. I don’t want to walk through the cold into a cold car and grab a literal freezing steering wheel and hold on to it for 10 mins until the heat kicks on. My drive is about 35 min in good conditions.
I’m assuming you live in a warm place or don’t drive a car, good for you. Wish I had public transportation.
They probably drive a car where they can tell the car to warm or cool the cabin remotely. My problem is opposite yours, even with the windscreen covered the car will heat to 50°C (112°F) and if sunlight was on anything, that thing will be too hot to touch.
So I tell my car to keep the air con on while I'm in the shops, tell it to start cooling when I'm returning to it after I've been away longer than I like to run AC
In your scenario, I would ask the car to be warm an hour before I needed it
it’s frequently 10 Fahrenheit or lower in the winter
Fair enough, we don't hit such temperatures regularly in Warsaw (Poland).
a literal freezing steering wheel
Is it that bad? Wow. Didn't know that. I though the cage would provide at least some thermal insulation.
hold on to it for 10 mins until the heat kicks on
If my colleagues lived in a climate as cold as yours, they'd have mounted parking heaters (e.g. Webasto) by now. Electrics struggle in cold, but they can preheat themselves before the ride, using just the electricity.
I’m assuming you live in a warm place
Warsaw is at the same latitude as Edmonton in Canada, so shouldn't be really that warmer.
or don’t drive a car
Winter 2022/23 was when we still were in our previous office. It was ½ hour long commute with my Xiaomi M365 electric scooter. This winter 2023/24 we moved to an office further away, so I was forced to change my daily vehicle to a motorcycle, maxiscooter SYM MaxSym 600i ABS. At least you have the goddamn cage.
Wish I had public transportation.
I miss having good alternative commute via metro and tram to our old office. Took almost the same time as e-scooter. But our new office? Public transit takes 2x as long as a motorcycle commute, according to Google Maps Timeline, so might as well not exist. So now we're in similar situation. Wish you luck...
Warsaw, same as other European cities, is a lot warmer than North American cities of the same latitude due to warming from the Gulf Stream.
Gloves are not optional in cold climates.
Warsaw is at the same latitude as Edmonton in Canada, so shouldn’t be really that warmer.
Reading a climate chart for Warsaw, it seems like January lows average out to -5C and your coldest days dip under -20C? Feel free to correct that considering you would know better than I.
In Edmonton, January lows average to -15C, and winter temperatures can dip down to -35C (or rarely even worse) along with nasty winds. It's a surprisingly harsh climate.
I live around Ottawa, Canada and our winter experience is basically Edmonton with less wind and more humidity. You scrape the ice off your car and drive with gloves on because otherwise it would take 15 minutes to heat it up enough to be comfortable. Seat warmers are cherished here.
My car takes 15 minutes to warm up enough for the heat to work at all let alone get the interior to a comfortable temperature.
I got a new car two years ago, and physical buttons were one of the determining factors.
How about others leading?
From march 20
