| So.... what happens when someone decides it's a smart idea to replace all of those commonly used functions that had physical buttons on the steering wheel with more touch buttons? Let's even say, capacitive touch zones? :D I do agree that a good physical button arrangement on the steering wheel is quite useful. On my car, the layout is quite good, IMO. * All of the audio is controlled through a D-pad on the left side. * All phone/voice handled through three physically different buttons on the lower left, accessible without changing how my hand grips the wheel. * All car-computer/cruise-control through a D-pad on the right. * As a result, any "type" of command is specifically associated with one hand, and one area of the steering wheel in particular. As I've learned through a number of long term rental cars, the physical button layout can be bad. * Many have the audio spread across both hands. * Many require one to break grip to even do simple audio adjustments (my car doesn't). * They often overload each area with too many buttons and controls. * The car GUI can also have many slow, confusing layers that one navigates to get commonly used functions, like digital speedometer, estimated range, etc. This isn't even getting to strange things, such as having the older generation UI completely present under the veneer of a newer, slower UI. The car brand I have isn't faultless either - all of their newer cars exhibit the same bad habits. Some bad habits have been slowly walked back a bit in the latest 2022/2023 cars, but the damage is still present. Sort of like bad ideas in Windows. The worst UI elements (IMO) in Win 8 were walked back a bit in 8.1, then successively more rollbacks via a number of Win10 updates. But the baseline is still worse in some ways vs 7 and before (e.g, start menu is less meaningfully customizable than 7, which is still less than XP, IMO). We see tiny hints of that with Win11 updates. I expect 11.1 or 12 to mostly remove the worst offenders. |