Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons In New Cars | Down with touch screen controls.::Volkswagen says that it has heard the feedback from its customers. It plans to bring back physical buttons and controls in future models.
VW really marketed their way into every feed on every site by making a big deal about… putting buttons in their cars. All hail our corporate overlords, who give us our buttons and dominate our feeds.
There’s so many fewer points of failure when you use physical buttons as opposed to touch screens. I hope everyone follows suit.
Physical buttons have wiring harness failure, mechanical failure, and software failure…pretty much exactly the same amount as the touchscreen solution.
What boggles my mind is that cheap, snappy, easy-to-use touchscreen interfaces have been a solved issue for well over a decade with the proliferation of smartphones…why the hell do car manufacturers suck so much at implementing it!? They’re all slow bug-ridden shitshows.
It’s because car manufacturers are loath to change microcontrollers in their vehicles because they’ve got decades of processes, tooling, and debugging with the (Atmel) chips they’ve been using since forever. When they decide to make a new car they basically just look at the latest Atmega(whatever) “automotive” chip (using really old chip tech) and choose that.
Atmel has “automotive” chips for everything! From regular MCUs to beefy ones with boatloads of pins and (slow ass) LCD controllers. They’ve made it so that car manufacturers don’t even have to think! The engineers probably get an automatic OK to use whatever Atmel “automotive” chip they want but anything else requires a lengthy and expensive certification process.
Some cars are using STM32 chips made for automotive but they’re not as common as you’d think!
Basically, the car manufacturers are extremely risk-averse because of low margins and something like an ECU recall can totally ruin the profitability of a new car. They’re also lazy and don’t want to try new things! There, I said it 😁
The physical buttons aren’t attached to anything though. It’s still software. My ford buttons glitch out when the soft buttons and steering wheel buttons do.
It’s because they cheaped out and used (cheap) electromechanical switches for the buttons and electromechanical rotary encoders for the knobs.
If they used magnetic hall effect switches they’d never glitch (unless the microcontroller itself is glitching). Hall effect switches are forever.
(And no: Even cars in Arizona don’t get hot enough to wreck rare earth magnets… They’ll lose strength slightly above 80°C but not enough to matter since the car knows its internal temp and can compensate if they didn’t get the better sensors that auto-compensate).
For reference, hall effect switches and encoders aren’t really that much more expensive for something like a car where you’re going to be using/making millions of them. It probably saves pennies per car to use the cheap switches.
What I don’t get is this constant cheating where they don’t have to.
Even where making a real thing with its advantages is cheaper or same, they’ll still make it dependent on something that breaks.
Well, it would be advantageous where no competition will do the real thing. But we have competition, right? Free markets, right? No cronyism, right? LOL
The last thing I want to do is navigate a tablet when I’m operating a vehicle. I don’t know how it ever made sense in the first place.
