> 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.

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.

> 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.

Not IT, but I think Leica has the best camera design. At around the Leica M6 they decided that the design was done, and every future M camera is essentially an M6 clone.

>And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI

Games count I suppose?

BMW's latest infotainment despite being intimidating for first time users is quite decent and intuitive compared to the horrors I saw from other German car makers.

Engineers in Europe are essentially pariahs, a necessary evil for corporations hiring them. Sure they earn more than cleaners or teachers, but not substantially more. Difference between being able to afford 2 visits in restaurant a month rather than just 1.

This means engineering is not attractive and no longer something to build life around.

It takes years of learning, patience, trial and error for not much different remuneration than jobs requiring far less commitment.

Apple Car and Android Auto are on VW cars since a decade.

Comments about this dreadful UI/UX on german cars feels really decade old.

In any case I rent cars quite often, mostly get Korean, Japanese and German cars with few rare US ones, and I really don't see those differences across the board software wise.

They all suck, they are all slow, clunky and unintuitive.

Nah, 991.1/981 had the best UX/UI. It used screens for the controls that need to be on screens (navigation and entertainment), and physical buttons for everything else.

There needs to be a screen, but it should be used only for optional features. It shouldn't be required. The 9x1 generation got that. In the 992, you can't even open your garage door without fumbling around with the stupid touchscreen.

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"

I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.

Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).

We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).

Total nonsense you’re spewing here. Especially for it being very country-biased in a world where giants like Volkswagen and BMW are highly international.

https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/innovation/innovation-network/te...

For example, BMW tech offices exist in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, among other locations.

German cars have been very well-regarded in terms of their automotive interfaces by the automotive press and reviewers as well as customers.

Watch any Doug DeMuro [1] video and on the subject of infotainment systems and you’ll see that BMW and Mercedes are up toward the top in terms of usability and customization.

You’ll see brands with good technology reputations like Kia refuse to put a GPS map in the gauge cluster while the Germans have been doing it for a decade plus now.

I will also remind us all that Mercedes beat Tesla to market on level 3 autonomy.

The only companies beating the German brands on tech are EV startups in China and companies like Tesla, but of course those companies are doing so mainly because they are replacing physical buttons with that technology, and generally integrating a lot of gimmmicks that are low hanging fruit compared to the things they can’t replicate as well like driving platform dynamics.

[1] I choose Doug DeMuro for this because he’s somewhat “in the middle” on technology. He prefers touch screens over purist physical controls for many functions but isn’t wildly biased toward them or incredibly tech savvy like the kind of person who blindly embraces Teslafication. He’s the kind of reviewer that will miss the “but actually there’s a setting for that” solution for his nitpicks, effectively showing the car as an layperson who isn’t techbrained but also isn’t your dad who wishes the screen was gone entirely.

Actually... My 2016 Skoda Rapid let's me update the map for free through a user removable SD card. Pretty great UX compared to every other car I've ever had the displeasure of having to navigate with. Software is nothing special otherwise, but gets the job done. Car is 95% physical buttons through.

Also, my 2020 Mii Electric is 100% physical buttons. Pretty great.

Frankly, I am wary of anything but VWAG at this point.

100% agreed. I think it's safe to say that good software UX is incompatible with the way German hardware companies are generally run.

It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.

> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom.

Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

> 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.

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.)

Distinguish between what used to be red and amber lights.

Glad I asked, y’all are great, thanks

Those warnings just don’t need to exist. I have a car from 2002, it has none of those and it’s fine, totally fine.

There is a fuel gauge I look at to see my fuel level, when I’m out of wiper fluid it just doesn’t work (I have extra in my trunk so no big deal). I don’t need a noise to tell me there is a car in front of me, I’ve been driving this car every day for 15 years with no accidents so obviously a collision alarm is not required for safe driving.

How about we stop infantilizing people and expect some base level of competence.

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.

Call me old school, but I'd like a physical master switch to disable all of the systems you mentioned. I drive a lot, and often in rented cars, and in various countries.

- automatic braking - i brake gently and then do a limousine stop. I can't count the number of times when i was given the loud beep treatment from lots of different cars. I never rear ended anyone in about 1.2m kms driven.

- active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe. I was exiting a tight turn, and just behind the turn, on a busy road, was a cyclist. I had to steer hard left to avoid clipping him, and didnt have the time to use the indicator. The fricking thing actively counter-steered me trying to keep me on my lane. Incidentally no automatic braking at the same time. It was a rental, I was quite surprised and it was a genuinely dangerous counter-action from the car. No thanks.

- smart cruise control. Nice when it works. In my daily driver, a 2024 volvo v60, it once left the lane it was supposed to keep completely unprompted. Good thing I was holding the steering wheel firmly. No thanks.

- lane change alerts - nice when done right. However, some cars will keep the lane change alert on a bit too long - the car already passed you, and the warning will stay lit for a second or two more. Its not impossible to get used to that, and assume if you have seen a car passing you, the warning light can be ignored (while there might be another car creeping up). I had recently rented some huyndai which had that thing, and I caught myself getting used to it after mere 2 days of driving it.

- rest breaks - i think i had this on a rental huyndai. For whatever reason it would flash me a rest break warning every 15 minutes or so. No clue why, I wasnt driving for more than 1hr, and was completely rested. It was distracting me with that stuff for most of the journey. No thanks.

I genuinely like ABS, ESP and thats about it. Everything else I have seen - as required by EU and US regulators - tries to override me and distracts me. As I am getting older, I am less and less tolerant of distractions.

When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers.

All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.

Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.

However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!

Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.

In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.

Resume Driven Development is why fundamentally people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are crucial to ensuring the enshitification is kept in check.

Elon Musk may be a bad example in this situation, because he's actually a fan of removing the extra controls and the physical buttons, but at least their UX is far-far better than any of the legacy manufacturers.

The solution is A/B testing and then looking at the resulting crash statistics. Weekly reports produced by the connected BI system should use excrutiatingly precise language like "number of {people,children,dogs,expectant mothers} {killed,saved} under <PO>'s <new idea>". A real Trolley Web Problem 2.0. /s

Yeah, my volvo also wants me to do questionnaires when driving. Insane.

When I am buying a new car, I now always try to rent one, and specifically the current model year, for a few days and do various types of driving. My V60 used to spend some time in the garage and I got various new models as replacements. The new one, for instance, has a choice of two behaviours when it thinks you are above the speed limit:

- beeping - or, in order to speed above what it thinks is the limit one needs to release the throttle and press it again

The main problem of course is that its very often mistaken about the speed limit.

Another problem. The thing recently got a new major version of the infotainment system. On my 2 year old V60 it is now noticeably more laggy, for instance when bringing up the AC panel its at least 1.5 seconds before it comes up. Now what is more likely - that I will press the button and regain focus on the road, or that I will press the button, and be distracted for a second or two longer?

> How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this?

China. That's the elephant in the room.

Cars aren't designed for the Western markets any more. We tried that and lost marketshare against the Chinese on their domestic market (the only one in the world that still has growth potential), and the primary reason market research determined was that Chinese manufacturers cram their cars full of gimmicks.

So, we design our cars for Chinese bling-bling demands now because it's too uneconomical to have distinct supply chains and we get all the BS that you can't sell a car in China without.

"So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period."

The "on the road" extends to mirrors (or screens that have replaced it) - I assumed that was obvious.

> you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.

the_homer.jpg

> Engineers should be delegated to the worker-bee level and you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.

This, but unironically.

Have you tried that, or is it just a random thought?

The answer to "some drivers are bad, and look at their phones while driving" is not "let's give them a different screen to look at". It is to take away the driver's licenses of people who are stupid enough to look at phones while driving.

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?

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.

>If you can save a dollar on a part, and that part goes into millions of cars per year… then it will be on the chopping block.

Mate, they're saving fractions of a cent on a part, let alone a dollar. You're probably getting promoted to CEO if you manage to save a dollar on a part. I've seen them cut 2mm of copper wiring in the ECU for the cost savings. 2mm!

Also worked for an OEM.

>better rear camera? More electrical current to charge your phone faster. Quicker HVAC operation?

Modern vehicle luxury is disgusting and decadent.

I have Raynaud's which causes loss of circulation in my fingertips even when the weather isn't that cold (so even in a car with the heat on). Then this happens, touch screens do not register correctly, and I end up having to use a knuckle or do what my sister does and use the tip of the nose

I've had multiple Apple touchscreen products. The same on all of them. Sometimes I have to lick my fingertip to get it to register.

I assume you're young? Finger capacitance can reduce quite significantly with age.

Touchscreens need to be used in a specific way. Most people does it already instinctively, but it is very easy to do it wrong. E.g. if you try tap on a button, but you move your finger 2mm on the screen, that tap becomes a swipe, and nothing happens.

Try working with you hands for a living. Not all of us has warm, pliable, moist hands constantly.

Most new gloves include touch screen support today.

Ah yes Jobs, just hold the phone right.

Which is the one in the M8, except the temperature aren't dials but up/down buttons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuODGZ30vsc

There are gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens and have existed for 20 years now ever since the iPhone came out.

Counterpoint: the touchscreen in my car DOES work with gloves. Of course the knobs do too.

The screen is some different tech and not quite as responsive as an iPhone screen and does not do multitouch, but otherwise works fine.

Touchscreens can also leave fingerprints and those will catch light at any angle and reduce effective contrast

Yes, my goes either-or quite abruptly and, while that's not really annoying, I notice it doing way too often, than I'd like to. It shouldn't be done in a binary fashion as well.

That report speaks nothing about the infotainment system. It's also a pay-to-play service. I'm talking about actual customers. For example, look at the Tesla subreddit as a closer proxy than CR. It is a source of frustration where Tesla is frustrating; the lack of buttons is rarely complained about.

What needs to be changed during driving that needs 2-3 layers deep stuff? Examples.

I’ve been driving a Model Y for a year now. Used to have a Volvo with android automotive and before that a Mercedes Benz with the.. I’m not sure whatever that OS is called.

Tesla sw is miles better than the previous two. It is responsive and laid out well. When you get used to it, it is intuitive. Android was not that bad but the visual design was much worse and it was laggy.

The MB software can die in hell. It is the worst piece of shit ever been built by humans. And it is running on hopes and dreams instead of a capable processor. Note that this was an E class so not an entry model. (Even then, there is no excuse)

Is it manufacturing? Tesla and Mercedes have factories in china including partnerships with chinese manufactures. Or is it the design of the car? Chinese companies shelled huge sums of money to hire the best car designers from Europe.

Don't let your competition hire away your top talent.

I really don't know about that. Mercedes used to mean high, tactile, audible mechanical quality. You'd hear it while closing the doors, you'd see it when looking at perfectly assembled dash, you'd hear it while driving and you'd be happy with it when clocking 500k miles with just regular maintenance. I remember those cars - I think the quality started tanking around late 1990s.

Right now its just ok. My friends S class has visibly mis-aligned buttons (a 200k car). My other friends electric S-class bean-thingy has squeaking doors (a 2 year old, 120k-when-new car) and feels surprisingly cheap to touch and drive. Sure, small sample and all of that but I don't think those are exceptions.

I only drove one Chinese car, and it was just a normal experience - what I'd expect from a volvo, bmw, or audi. Good UI on the infotainment, was below average annoying. No big difference vs. a merc. For sure not a qualitative difference in levels of refinement.

Are you sure about that last sentence? Plenty of Chinese EVs are as refined as luxury brands, such as seen here: https://youtu.be/xiFmuoBIyjQ

Or automatic transmission shifters that behave differently than every previous car you’ve driven. RIP Anton Yelchin.

> It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.

Did you read the article about how Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical controls? So in your opinion are they dragging their customers back to the past? Or are they correcting a mistake?

Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.

I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.

Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.

Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.

I disagree, taking my eyes off the road to change climate controls is bad UI/UX

“great UI” and “burned to death because the door handle wasn’t” is a bold juxtaposition

Even a great UI requires you to take eyes off the road.

And many stupid decisions have no direct impact on the driver, but instead on those around the car. Like red beltline lights that don’t function as brake lights, instead using red lamps near the road that are easy to be obscured/ignored because the giant red lights above them look like brake lights.

Or dashes that are fully lit at night even if the headlights aren’t on, so the driver doesn’t have an obvious visual indicator that their tail lights aren’t lit.

So many rules I’d enforce were I king of the automakers.

It's not for sale yet

no, its the problem that will be created by solving the touch screen problem, with a physical user interface, that is still just an input to a digital device.