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by CoryAlexMartin 597 days ago
I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are.

I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.

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Toyota has also swung back into the button direction. Only the CarPlay and a few of the backup camera controls use the touch interface (and the button I use most for the camera is a physical button). I’m sitting in my car right now waiting, and so just counted all the buttons I can reach while driving from the drivers seat and got to 95 including things like left toggle right toggle for the mirrors adjustment being two buttons, so being as liberal as possible in my definitions of a button or knob. There’s then a touch screen a little bigger than an iPad in the center console that has the Toyota infotainment stuff (which I disabled and opted out of the master data agreement so it does nothing) and CarPlay.

The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.