Seems the novelty VW engineers had to be reminded of the first item in the Unix philosophy:
Make each program do one thing, and do it well.
Buttons already had this. Each single button did one and only one thing: Turn a feature on or off, or in the case of the radio, switch stations.
We didn’t need complicated menus to navigate. Press the appropriate button, and voilá. It was simple. It worked.
Who the fuck came up with the idea of having to use touch menus? I have no idea, but I really hope they got fired.
I get what you’re saying, up to a point. But you really don’t want the dashboard to look like the average TV remote either.
I mean, I get a bit jealous when I see the cockpit of an F1 car. So many knobs, buttons, and switches and they don’t even have climate control or entertainment systems.
That level isn’t necessary with daily drivers, but I’d rather have physical buttons for any action I’ll want to do while moving and zero latency for any action that physically positions something like my seat or mirrors.
I would be down with that, 100%.
My car doesn’t have nearly that many functions, though. Nor do I want it to. Owners of modern cars would shit a brick if they saw the dash on my '99 Silverado and how simple it is. It has a grand total of about 12 buttons on it, and three dials. That’s it.
Somehow it manages to drive down the road just fine, heat or cool the interior, twiddle all the lights, change all the radio stations, play or rewind the tape. (Yes, tape.) Just with those few controls, all of which only do one thing. Except the turn signal stalk, and technically I guess the shifter lever because it has the tow/haul button on the end of it.
The amount of bullshit that’s built into modern cars is astounding. The majority of that crap doesn’t need to be in a car. Which is, you know, a transportation machine. If the passenger wants four touch screens, that’s fine. I don’t need one. I don’t want one.
