Volkswagen Is Done With Touchscreens for Vital Functions

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Our own King Wordsmith Steve Hanley wrote a story yesterday about how upcoming changes to the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) will require physical controls, not touchscreen controls, for 5 key functions of a car — using the horn, operating the windshield wipers, activating turn signals, engaging the emergency flashers, and activating SOS features. We also just got news that Volkswagen is moving back to providing physical controls for vital car functions, after getting a bit too caught up in the touchscreen craze.

Is Euro NCAP influencing Volkswagen and causing this? Did Volkswagen bring the issue and idea to Euro NCAP? Or is it all just a serendipitous coincidence? I’ll leave that conjecture for you, but in the case of Volkswagen, chief of design Andreas Mindt has now said:

“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. They will be in every car that we make from now on. […] We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone: it’s a car.”

That echoes what I’ve seen many readers saying and asking for since Tesla first brought touchscreen management into the auto world.

You may have noticed something else in that quote. Interestingly, Mindt did not list the same 5 vital functions as Euro NCAP. Whereas Euro NCAP focused on functions that are needed in emergency situations, Volkswagen focused on very commonly used features — the volume, the heating, and the fans. Clearly, Volkswagen is intent on owners not taking their eyes of the road while managing common functions in the car. The one shared feature mentioned was the hazard lights, or emergency flashers. That said, one would presume that Volkswagen is intent on keeping the horn, windshield wipers, and turn signals as physical controls.

Volkswagen’s new focus on the proper balance between touchscreen controls and physical controls is starting with the Volkswagen ID. 2all. (Maybe they could also set a policy soon of using normal, proper names for its models again. That would be appreciated, especially for those of us writing about these vehicles and trying to not confuse readers with out-of-place punctuation.)

Of course, there’s still a key role for touchscreens. Aside from being preferable for certain capabilities, the backup camera feed is now an expected feature in all cars, and is even becoming required by law in more and more places, like the US. “There are a lot of functions you have to deliver in certain areas, so the screen will be big and you will find a lot of HMI [human-machine interface] contents in the depths of the system,” Mindt added. “But the five main things will always be on the first physical layer. That’s very important.” It all sounds sensible to me, and I’m sure to many of you.