they already did a study that touchscreens are too distracting and dangerous, buttons are more intuitive and quicker to use, without looking at the menu.
But screens are cheaper and cars are getting more expensive.
Thanks, Europe!
good
i kinda wonder if this is motivated as a non tariff trade barrier to chinese cars designed for the china market which loves apps, touch screens and karaoke in your car 🤔
My experience with country level regulation suggests yes. Usually this sort of thing is targeted at protecting domestic firms from other EU firms. There is always some good sounding reason to do it.
In this case I don’t mind at all.
Maybe but probably not. It’s just basic common sense that all car manufacturers need to get on board with. Maybe there’s just a coincidence that touchscreens and no physical buttons are cheaper to produce and the Chinese brands that you’re referencing are also targeting cheaper production at the cost of road safety.
Europe is being awesome once again!
I would also ban touch sensitive fixed controls. My father’s Avalon has dedicated controls for the HVAC but they’re touch sensitive, so you set the climate controls to 80C and full fan if you just wipe dust off the panel while the car’s on.
You should be able to train your hand on the control, get a good grip on it, and then move it in such a way that a control input is realized. It shouldn’t have to beep at you to tell you it’s done a thing.
I can turn the air conditioner in my pickup on and off by feel alone, same with the basic radio controls.
VW id3, maybe the whole id series, has this bullshit. I test drove the id3 a couple of months ago. Buttons in the wheel are touch, but you can push them as well which feels clunky. rant warning! Giant freaking screen that got mad at me for trying to adjust the ac while driving (supposedly I tap it too fast, and got a time-out). Stupid LEDs under the windshield that tries to communicate stuff by lightning up in either side or move across and shit, that was really confusing. It even had mood lighting. Wtf, in a car?!? Putting the car in sports mode, to get an idea of how it can drain the battery on the motorway, changed the mood from blue to red.
Stupidest fucking car I’ve ever driven. Went with a fully optioned zoe instead. 5k€ less for the same year, and actual buttons for stuff. Although I’d like to meet the engineer, who thought sticking buttons behind the wheel where they’re hidden, was a good idea.
And temperature up/down and fan power should both be dials/rotary encoders, none of this “one push per degree/power level” BS.
I have a 15 year old car with a touchscreen. It’s not a capacitive screen, it’s resistive. That means I need to actually push a little bit to register a touch. It works great!
Controlling everything in a car through screens is a safety hazard. It’s insane that’s even allowed.
It’s insane that as of now it’s up to manufacturers to self-regulate.
I just bought a newish car and would not even consider any without physical buttons for climate. It really helped narrow the options, haha.
Mazda?
I don’t know how they are now but a couple of years back Mazda was on the other extreme for me. I don’t want to fiddle with a dial when all I would need is one tap. I don’t want to squit at a tiny screen to descipher the map. I don’t want to jiggle the knob for half an hour to write in 3 words in a search bar.
Having both a decent infotainment and also physical buttons for the most important functions is possible and there have been others that have done it better.
There are very few core controls and they should absolutely be physical.
I hate screens as much as anyone but I honestly don’t think there’s much that can’t be put behind one.
Climate controls need to be physical, though.
They are safety critical when your windscreen fogs over.
Radio, too. For emergency broadcasts.
And obviously any driving controls, like lights, indicators, cruise control, wipers, …Basically, anything that was present in a car 30 years ago needs to have physical buttons.
Disagree about radio (if it’s really that urgent to receive an emergency broadcast you can pull over for a moment), but yeah the rest seem like it’s best to have physical controls for everything else.
The volume down is important.
That’s usually on the steering wheel for a while now. I do agree with more physical buttons though.
just because it is doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be regulated to be
Also, it tends to be easier to find the volume knob or dedicated volume keys than trying to see if the label on the steering wheel is for volume, skip tracks or cruise control. Not as important on your car, but it comes into play for rentals and/or borrowed cars.
That’s theoretically correct, however, when picking safety standards you should go by how most people would be expected to act, not by ideal scenarios. Is someone commuting to work going to pull over to change the media source or radio station? Probably not. So the controls should minimize how long the driver will look at the console and have their hand off the steering wheel. Media buttons on the steering wheel can seem superfluous, but it helps keep people less distracted.
Climate controls need to be physical, though.
I had an 02 Peugot with automated climate controls. Shits not new. it’s one of the few cases where I will not go back to the caveman way. automated headlights are another.
a case can be made for demister buttons but I haven’t owned a car made this century that would fog up so that’s a pull over and figure this shit out for the first time affair not a take your eyes off the road and dick around with controls physical or otherwise affair.
Any car will fog up when you get in with 4 people in wet clothes while it rains.
again that’s not something you should be dealing with doing 110 on the freeway while steering with your knees and eating cup ramen.
I think my “peak American” was that time many years ago when I went driving down the I35 interstate in rural Kansas…eating a plate of chicken fettuccine alfredo.
It’s OK. The statute of limitations has long passed.
Although, now that I think of it, this might be my peak Italian moment, though I’m not of Italian ancestry…
Anyway, it was
deliciousFazoli’s.Absolutely not. Italians may drive like madmen, but they drive well and are focussed.
Also why the hell would you add chicken to butter and parmigiano.
We have a 2015 Toyota Highlander with automatic climate controls. Except when it’s 72° outside and 110° inside the car when I get in, I don’t want it lazily whispering 72° air at me (which it does sometimes), I want it to blow ice-fucking-cold air for several minutes so I don’t sweat my balls off waiting for the interior temp to come down. Having physical controls is quite nice for that. I can set it back to 72 or 69nice or whatever after the fact.
Both of my cars have automatic headlights, so 95% of the time we don’t really touch those controls. Every once in a while I’ll turn them on during a storm, when the light level isn’t quite low enough to trigger the headlights.
Do you live somewhere not humid? My 2016 fiesta fogs up pretty badly.
it varies, but I’ve had 90s cars at the same place look like someone painted the windows white the second I open the door so I just assumed they figured it out. might just have gotten lucky with the model of car or window treatments or something.
Good.
My exact comment.
I want to be able to replace my infotainment system without hassle or loss of functionality
The good old days when the first thing you did when buying that old beater was change the radio to one with CDs or even MP3s… Of course if you didn’t have the budget for that you could always get one of these cassettes with a jack cable to plug into your disc man, the only issue is it would skip when you hit a pothole.
Unless you had a fancy discman with anti-skip. Reminds me of driving my dad’s 1963 VW Beetle in high school before we restored it.
Also… Good old days? I did that with my minivan barely three years ago with an Alpine ILX-407… But that one doesn’t have a CD player because I don’t use CDs anymore. I haven’t used CDs in a car since high school, now that I think about it… I just kept my iPod connected to that car, hidden from view.
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No no no, cars need the least amount of software, no touch and all buttons. And 0 OTA. Zero, Nada. And the only software that should be there is that very minimal radio and some dash functions controllers, that’s it. I’m so sick of having a phone on wheels. It’s a car, and can be called “death on wheels” and drivers need the most attention they can.
Cars have had a multitude of controllers (which means software) for over 30 years now. It’s the cellular connection you don’t want or need.
The only way I would ever have a connected car is if the software was under my control and could be self-hosted. Nothing crazy, just stuff like weather, traffic, and maybe remote diagnostics. But that’s just my nerdy side coming out.
Both of my cars are fairly modern (2008, 2015), but neither have any sort of connection to the outside world, and despite both having touchscreen interfaces, all critical functions are button-operated.
That’s what I meant. I know that there has to be some software. That’s why I mentioned zero OTA. So the modem. We don’t need that. No one asked for it. They use it to syphon our personal data and sell it to the insurance companies.
My car is pretty old and doesn’t have any screens. I was using a rental car last week for a few days and I was definitely missing my physical buttons. I had to ask the guy in the passenger seat to change things for me because whenever I tried to without taking my eyes off the road I’d almost never hit the right buttons. Especially when I was going over bumps on the road.
Ford, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make the touchscreen pressure-sensitive, but the flat physical buttons capacitive. Which means that it’s super easy to accidentally turn on the driver’s seat heater if you dare use the volume knob, impossible to use any of the physical buttons if you have normal gloves on, and very inaccurate to use the touchscreen with those same gloves on.
They know it, too, because when I had a 2013 Fusion, the overhead console with the dome light buttons was the same capacitive bullshit, and my 2015 Fusion has a regular button. (Apart from these design flaws, I love the car, which is why I replaced one with the other.)
At least you had a volume knob. Last week I drove a new Renault Clio via local carsharing, and it had a touchscreen, where you had to click a button on the screen to pop up a slider next to it, where you could change the volume. It had like 5 buttons on the steering wheel, some of them even looked like they could be used for controlling the volume, but no, they were for cruise control or whatever, the only way to change the volume was via the touchscreen with two taps.
We had a Civic with that kind of weird slidy up/down volume control, total garbage.
A knob for volume control has been the standard for car audio since there was car audio. If you’re going to change that, why not put the clutch pedal all the way on the right?
I looked it up as as I typed it sounded too stupid to me. It was a 2024 Clio. It doesn’t have a knob, but it has a separate control rod below the steering wheel on the bottom right side, and that has volume buttons. According to the car sharing app I drove it for 15 minutes, and I remember I was looking for that and couldn’t find it. Is it possible it’s not a standard feature, and they didn’t have it in that car? Or it just placed so badly that you can’t see it from the drivers position?
I’d say it was placed badly. These days when I rent a car I always read the owners manual. At least the sections that explain the infotainment system, steering wheel, and stalks, which always have a huge number of buttons and dials with inscrutable graphic labels that don’t explain what they do. Yet ironically despite all these physical controls plenty of important controls are not accessible physically.
It’s short range car rental, and they have a lot of different models from different manufacturers, so you can’t even know which one you will ride next tine. Open the app, see where is the closest car and what it’s type. Book the car than you have 30 minutes to reach the car and start your trip. That’s not enough time to look up manuals.
Ah here it is (timestamped):
https://youtu.be/V8xarINsqDg?t=245
It is invisible from the driver’s seating position. And it looks like a complete afterthought. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was an option that not all Clios have.
Control rod? Like an extra stalk off the side? Totally possible for that to be invisible from the driver’s position, either from being behind a steering wheel spoke, or by blending in to the rest of the car, while being a thing you would not even be looking for, especially for something like volume controls.
It’s also possible, being a “rental” car, that it had as few options as possible, including not having that control.
Yeah, I don’t know what is the correct English term for that thingies. As it was a rental car maybe the seat was not at the perfect height, I usually just move the the seat back and forth, you don’t start to change it vertically just for a 15 minute ride.
why not put the clutch pedal all the way on the right?
Have you driven a clutch?
whoosh
I’m renting a Mazda and it seems really tame on that front. Buttons for everything… There’s one screen that can do Android Auto/Carplay but it’s NOT touchscreen. You have a big knob down with the gear selector that you can rotate and push in/up/down/left/right to use it. But no car controls except radio tuning on it. There’s a separate knob for volume (and on-wheel controls).
I’d like to buy a European EV
Go ahead. I like the e208 myself, but there’s lots of options
I know people like to harp on Tesla about this, but ALL of the mandatory controls can be done with stalks/buttons/wheels and have been for awhile
Hazard warning lights - button
Indicators - stalks or buttons
Windscreen wipers - button to initiate, wheel to choose intensity (or press button again to increase intensity). Button then wheel to turn off.
SOS calls - N/A
Horn - Press the wheel
The only one that Tesla didn’t always follow was the wipers, but that’s no longer the case, glad they finally listened on that one.
Is there actually any OEM that doesn’t meet these requirements? I agree though, these are good bare minimum requirements.
Edit: I could also see merit to adding a defog one as that could be a critical timing thing.
Those are always button on all cars tho it’s more about secondary operations like tuning AC etc.
The law is about the buttons I listed. Those were in the article.
You’re right, the legislation also needs to mandate a reasonable location for information display. Around me teslas just CONSTANTLY have a blinker on because the stalk has no feedback and the indicator lights are only visible if you’re looking far enough down to lick your own junk.
Not sure why that is, but they do make a noise when they’re like all cars.
Hazard warning lights - button
https://youtu.be/Vk3d-gHdhrE?t=30
It might be a push button, but it’s literally in the worst location I’ve ever seen it in a car.
Your point? It’s a button, it passes the law.
Europe wins again.
Fuck I hope this gets brought to North America.
Spoiler: it won’t. Tariffs are gonna make it cost prohibitive to buy anything abroad so Americans will have American cars, Europeans will have European cars. Expect quite a bit of divergence.
I don’t know. They tend to standardize pieces across countries to reduce costs. And we might just end up with European cars up here in Canada in the end. Who knows. 🤞
up side: divergence isn’t so bad… divergence leads to problems being solved differently rather then homogeneously because it’s cheaper to copy than to solve
Zero is the correct number of touchscreens for a car. This has seemed obvious to me since the first time I saw one and I’ve never understood how anybody could think otherwise.
If you want an in-car navigation system, that seems like a good application for touchscreens.
Rear view camera is nice too have too. Top down is neat too.
Doesn’t need to be touch for that
I remember back in the mid 2000s with my flip phone a T9 texting. Could text and drive without looking away from the road because of muscle memory. Once I got a touch screen I realized that wasn’t the case anymore. So imagine this anecdote with car buttons to touch screens.
