“It’s not a phone, it’s a car” reiterates Volkswagen design chief on its decision to bring back buttons.
It looks like after years of general dissatisfaction from pretty much every new car buyer, automakers are finally coming to their senses and bringing back some physical buttons to their cars. And it just so happens that the latest to do so incidentally comes from one of the worst offenders of this trend — Volkswagen, with its design chief Andreas Mindt recently telling Autocar that all of its future models will once again feature physical controls for the most important functions.
Starting with the production version of the ID 2all concept that will arrive next year, Mindt has stated that Volkswagen will bring back physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, heating on each side of the car, fan speed control, and hazard light – below the central screen. “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We understood this,” assured Mindt.
“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.”
Mindt nevertheless added that VW will continue to offer cars with touchscreens, in part due to new legal requirements in certain parts of the world that require all cars to feature a reversing camera. “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,” he added. “But the five main things will always be on the first physical layer. That’s very important.”
The German automaker had been roundly criticised over the past few years for moving many of the vital controls in its cars from physical buttons and dials to the infotainment touchscreen, with most of that ire directed towards the unlit haptic sliders below the touchscreen for the heating and volume.
A good amount of unhappiness was previously also channeled towards the company’s decision to use haptic panels instead of physical buttons for its steering wheel controls too, and it got to the point that Volkswagen made the decision to install base-spec steering wheels (which still had buttons) as an interim stopgap measure.
Incidentally, the five functions that VW is bringing back buttons for will be in addition to dedicated safety-critical controls that Euro NCAP has mandated to have tactile controls for a good score in its safety test come 2026. If a car doesn’t have physical controls for the horn, windshield wipers, turn signals, hazard lights, and SOS functions, for instance, it will not be able to achieve the coveted maximum five-star rating.
