Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

Your comment reminds me of the hostile, to say the least, Munich U-Bahn map:

https://drmory.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TARIFPLAN_Inne...

I remember seeing it back then in the subway, looking for directions and feeling really confused about it. "Damn why didn't I get a transportation systems PhD before coming to Germany!"

> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally.

Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.

What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.

> Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.

“The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's fifth-largest publicly traded software company by revenue. In June 2025, it was the largest European company by market capitalization, as well as one of the 30 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.”

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

Not a hater, just an example from today’s HN front page: Ableton from Berlin. World class UX/UI leading the DAW market for 25 years and counting. Not “Top 100” enough for validation? Just ask Thomas Bangalter. He’s taken it around the world to get lucky.

Software in Germany is simply not highly regarded, on the contrary. It is seen as necessary evil at best.

Ageing population that finds itself overwhelmed is my guess. There are exceptions, but they are far and few between.

My 992.2 has AA/CarPlay, and an outstanding user interface, with a nice mix of configurable displays and physical buttons. Fairly certain it is a top 100 product in it's market.

In the defense of VW, their EVs launched with absolutely horrible software, but apparently its pretty good now, and its still the same indigenous platform.

And to join in the bashing - I once went to a tradeshow where a software company building infotainment for high end Mercedes cars told me the cars are running k8s clusters with multiple computers.

Not sure if that's the red flag I make it out to be, but it sure doesn't inspire confidence.

> VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"

VW was supporting CarPlay from launch and the VW MEB dash was on all pro material of Apple for ages.

Already happening, best example is worldwide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX. It was China who triggered it, not US authorities (protecting US corporation).

Similar thing with batteries on airplanes, tube trains, ferries and underground garages. China cares about fire hazard, other countries care about ideology.

It’s funny you say that because the China “anti regulatory effect” of the 90s-2000s also had a great impact on quality of life for the world in its own way

It seems cyclical. Maybe the people who stand up for good UX retire and it takes a few years for a company to realize that they're going in a bad direction.

Mazda used to have do the best most user friendly controls and bragged about it as a differentiator... but the new cx-5 is a touch screen-only monstrosity

Anyone exec wanting to move away from touchscreens and back to buttons would have flashbacks to Steve Balmer mocking the new iPhone and stabbing his fingers at the touch panel and making a fool of himself for eternity.

I have an Audi Q7 and a model X. Don't miss the physical controls of the Q7 at all. Given a choice between Tesla software and Android Auto, I'll take Tesla's.

Then again, I'm someone who likes the yoke steering, and invested a few weeks acclimating to the lack of steampunk turn stalks.

For physical controls, it always comes down to "What did you want to do?" There are very few that are actually needed.

safety, probably. Why do we require cars have functional brakes?

I missed navigation.

I think it is a natural fit for the touchscreen. Tesla navigation is not perfect, but it is very good. You can pan/zoom the map with swipes which is LOTS better than buttons. You can also search for an address in specific or general terms and are not forced into some highly structured address format.

For example a ford I used had this weird out-of-order way of "enter street number" or "enter zipcode" and "enter street name" with a weird type-ahead/completion that was just... bad.

With tesla, you have a search field. You can type "123 main street, anytown" to find a specific address, or "home depot anytown". But you can just type "home depot" and choose from the list which puts recent on top, then closest to furthest. They also show up as pins all over the map and you can just choose one.

I guess you could also use voice nav. I kind of hate voice nav that is uploaded to the cloud (and they lie) I have an offline garmin car gps that lets me talk to it.

Some people just want a faster horse :)

And then in the facelift they replaced the buttons on the steering wheel with touch sensitive ones and just removed the touch pad and replaced it with nothing. It's still useable and nice, but worse than the older model and there was no need to change anything.

You probably don't want to be setting up Maps on either a touch screen or a with keys while driving. But navigation and media selection are the two functions I'm generally happy to interact with via voice.

both. the map has many detailed settings which you might change once in a while.

there are also certain things you’d want to change (or activate) often - we could argue those are controls. Like muting, changing volume, or finding a nearby gas station.

Twist it! Bop it!

The VW ID.4 also seems like a gaming console. The steering wheel is full of capacitive buttons, you never know what you might accidentally activate or adjust.

If you just want to drive it's a really nice car, but the overuse of capacitive buttons on the steering wheel and key fob really lets the rest of the car down. The key fob is easily worse than that of a 2012 Renault.

Assuming that VW is returning to buttons, I can assure you that it was not for the 2025 models.

I think you answered your own question. 2026. My 2025 CX-90 has amazing controls.

You answered your own question...

Chasing trends and it's now cheaper to have a single touchscreen with software controls than to design and manufacture physical controls.

There’s less need for a physical button for those things now that climate control algo has become so good it has been on Auto the entire time for me.

A screen costs 75, a button is 1 each. You get a lot more that 100 buttons on a screen.

Not to mention the physical space a button takes.

Somehow, the Dacia Sandero has physical controls for climate control and physical buttons on the steering wheel. It manages to do that whilst being one of the cheapest cars you can buy.

It's even more in regards to production planning. Building the production pipeline takes long and is inflexible as you need to ensure to pick suppliers which will provide spare parts for a sensible price for the whole lifecycle. Thus you limit capabilities very early in the design cycle.

A software based solution you can finalize last minute and with later updates add extra features. Thus if a competitor provides a feature you don't have to wait years for the next new design, but can deliver based on software development priorities any time, to any series you like (even add after delivery)

I'm not convinced it is that easy.

Cars traditionally have very generic button clusters, like [0]. It is even very common to have dummy buttons in there. Combine that with today's cars where those buttons are hooked up to some MCU to send a CAN message instead of being hardwired to a function-specific cable in a giant loom, and it is suddenly quite easy to change button functionality quite late in the design process for basically zero cost: you just need a slightly different label print and a small firmware patch!

Or, if you want to be 100% flexible, go with the ATM approach where physical buttons are placed next to an icon shown on a screen[1]. All of the flexibility and all of the tactile feedback! You can even go for a multi-level layout, with a top row of mode selection buttons, a bottom row of mode-specific function buttons, and perhaps even a big fat dial with haptic feedback[2]. Or even go all-out Elgato Stream Deck[3].

And sure, the fact that slapping in a giant touchscreen lets them decouple UX design from physical controls is going to play a big role. But it is by far the laziest and least user-friendly way of doing so. If that's the best you can come up with, you probably shouldn't be doing UX design at all.

[0]: https://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

[1]: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/672002868/vector/atm-machin...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA

[3]: https://1.img-dpreview.com/files/p/E~TS940x788~articles/8521...

Might sound hyperbolic but this is clearly the softly smiling fascist menace of the corporate regime.

A gentle friendly assumption that we are all eager to partake in “euphemism for platform-serfdom”. Our desire to “connect/share/express/etc” is simply taken for granted.

And what if you just don’t want to? We’re sorry, but that’s simply not an option.

People look at me like I've suddenly sprouted an extra head when I say this, but I don't want any screens in my car at all.

I don't even really want much of an instrument panel, because that's all distracting clutter and noise. I'm now of an age where I need reading glasses to see what the tiny 20x2 LCD screen it does have is saying, if it's not telling me what gear it's in and what the current odometer reading is - mostly today it's been lying about the gearbox overheating or the bonnet being open, such are the ways of 1990s cars - and if I've got my reading glasses on to see things inside the car clearly it means I cannot see things *outside* the car clearly, and the things outside the car are what I need to pay attention to.

So, no LCDs, please, I don't want any lit-up screens when I'm driving.

My car has a mechanical ignition switch that, when you put a key in and turn it, withdraws a big metal pin to unlock the steering and turns a small rotary switch. First click for the radio and other accessories, second click turns on the ignition, and the spring-loaded third click cranks over a beautifully simple engine that started life as a Mercury Marine inboard (and auxiliary engine, in larger vessels), and is still pretty much in production today in small quantities. Simple, and I like simple. No "keyless ignition" for crooks to relay and get the car started and drive off in it.

Nothing needs to connect to the outside world in it, and indeed its Atari ST-era computers would probably be baffled by it. It'd be like plonking a steam train engineer down in the cockpit of an A380, they wouldn't have a clue where to start.

I don't want a connected thing. I love driving. I don't want distractions. I write all my best code when I'm driving because there's no distractions. No-one is phoning me, I'm not doomscrolling Reddit or HN, there's no expectation except keep it oily side down and on the grey gravelly stuff, and out of the grassy stuff (well - at least until I get to the grassy stuff I actually *need* to drive on).

No screens for me please.

Likely.

What does this sentence even mean? "if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen". It crashes my parser. Good thing I am not reading hacker news while driving :-)

That’s all about money… they don’t want Apple to sell services to their customers when they believe it’s “their” territory.

Carmakers want SaaS revenue as well now.

They just want to sell their navi map updates like they used to before CarPlay was a thing.

> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance.

Somehow a small amber light (in the shape of a fuel pump) and a chime has worked for decades and there haven't been hordes of drivers stranded as a result. Something your grandmother could easily understand.

10-15 year old cars maybe give an additional small information message in the cluster easily dismissible with a steering wheel button.

No, the problem has been the mass importation of tech industry rejects into the car companies, as if the car companies haven't been quietly and successfully writing embedded software for 50 years, who brought their terrible habits with them. Like a need to "reinvent" UIs every six months.

Cars are safety-critical machines. They are not a place for "creatives" to experiment with UI design.

Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.

This isn't difficult. It requires no "innovation". Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.

EVs are the worst of both extremes. Either the entire interior is a touchscreen or you have something like the Slate, where there isn't even a radio. A room full of geniuses and what they come up with is a bluetooth speaker holder. Unbelievable, you can't throw in a DIN radio like a 1987 Datsun? Why can't EV manufacturers build a "normal" car?

> a little clumsily

s/a little/very/;

> What do you think the best implementation would look like?

We already had one! Dashboard indicator lamps have been an international standard (ISO 2575) since 1982.

> But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.

Yes, it is. But the key word is "if". The product folks involved in making these UI/UX decisions were more concerned with whether or not they could (read: "chimp attract" for "feature parity" to "drive sales") than with whether or not they should (read: "should we be manufacturing two ton death machines that act like nannies?"). Where is the research that provides the answers to the questions "how likely is it that the driver isn't aware of how much fuel is in the vehicle?", "are our customers really as stupid as we think they are?", or even "what's the downside of training our customers to accept a more mindless state of existence while piloting giant metallic flesh-tearing bone crushers packed full of explosive hydrocarbons and squishy humans?"

> The general public though… uh oh!

You can come down from your ivory tower at any time. We have tacos down here and we all enjoy them.

To quote the late, great Lou Holtz, "they put their pants on the same way we do". I don't think there's ever been a time in all of my years on this planet that I've gotten into a car to go on a highway journey of any length and not looked at the fuel gauge. Oftentimes, my passenger will even ask me how much gas is in the tank. Glancing at the fuel gauge should be the first thing that any motor vehicle operator looks at when climbing into the captain's chair. Maybe I'm at that stage of life where I'm no longer capable of comprehending the manner in which the younger generations experience the world, but getting into an automobile and driving off without knowing how much fuel you have is like walking out the front door without confirming that your shoe laces are tied.

This constant othering of "the general public" without any research to back it up really grinds my gears, to use a contextually appropriate idiom. Please stop.

> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance

Others have explained how the old tech worked well. But let's assume new tech (touch screens), and see what can be done.

There are urgent messages and non urgent messages.

Non urgent messages can be shown when starting the car and requiring the driver to acknowledge them. low wiper fluid - non urgent. This could be a list requiring ack for everything. Recently on my BMW they got the smog check year wrong, and it kept warning me for months before I realized I could change the date for the alerts - same should be possible for low fluid - Ok, I acknowledge, but stop warning for next 14 days (or 2 months).

Urgent messages have to be blocking.

Low gas would be non urgent when you have 50 miles of gas left, but could become semi-urgent (more prominent) when you have less than 50. Also, this is where the tech could be useful. If the car has internet and knows there are no gas stations within 50 miles, or whatever the current range is .... it should make it super prominent. That knowledge processing, aka AI in modern era, would be so awesome.

But it requires design for usability, not one catch all solution.

I have never been especially bothered by fact that warning for low wiper fluid was well getting somewhat less wiper fluid... I don't use much, but it never felt like critical lack of proper early warning.

My car has only a small dashboard screen with some information and when something is alarming it is colored yellow or red for significance and pops up filling the screen, then after a little while minimizes to a little warning icon corresponding to the issue matching the color. Or I can hit a close button on the steering wheel.

Distinguish between what used to be red and amber lights.

For years, vehicles have had a little light that comes on when you are below about 50 miles of range. It's next to the fuel gauge. I've always heard it called the "walk light", which I presume is a reference to the fact that, if you don't do something, you may have to start walking soon.

My car has a little screen in the dash where it usually shows my range, or the current temperature - information that I check when safe to do so, but never very urgently. This is the perfect place for a warning about low wiper fluid.

As for forward collision warnings, ehhhh. Maybe that should beep loudly, but it should almost never be wrong! (A false alarm could easily mean I slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, so that has to be balanced with the safety advantage of the true alarm.)

Glad I asked, y’all are great, thanks

Yes, you are right. All my power tools (from Makita, Milwuakee, Festool) have absolutely phenomenal UI - so there are still corners of industrial design where the dark patterns/attention grabbing product people haven't ventured. They should be brought back to car companies.

Start suing car manufacturers for the deaths caused when the driver's eyeballs were distracted from the road.

They're all copying Tesla. And ironically, only Tesla had a rational reason for their decision -- cost cutting. Not that I think the result is a net positive for the rest of us, it was ideal for Tesla. But just like the rest of their cost cutting choices they successfully spun it as a positive, and now other manufacturers are racing to copy them for all the wrong reasons. Though I suspect those manufacturers do secretly know the real reason and hope to benefit from it.

My guess is simpler. They didn't do much user study before going all screen. Tesla led the way.

Then, a few people inside Mercedes hated the idea and forced a study group to prove their point.

It's not hype; touch screens won for mobile devices and that's why they all work this way.

You don’t know what the group was presented and how.

Remember you have the stupid stuff that Tesla pushed hard during the peak Elon reality distortion field time. I regularly are in a Toyota, BMW and Honda, and all of these have well thought out touch/knob implementations.

They aren't doing all that research to make their product better for you, they're doing it to make their product better for them. Those metrics help them design to keep you on [platform] for as long as possible, consuming as much [product] from [company] as possible. It benefits them to be easy to do the things they want (buy something or view ads) and hard to do things they don't want you to do (leave, change settings, generally take any kind of control)

I'm a bit confused.

Were you aware there is actually a law in China requiring physical buttons?

I think from next year it applies to everyone. Not only Chinese makers.

What were the other physical controls you were thinking of?