[insane_dreamer]

My favorite car control system is the BMW iDrive rotary dial.

Touch screens are fine for given much more fine-grained access to controls. But they should be limited to controls that you _don't need to set while driving_. It's absurd that it takes 3 taps on a screen -- diverting my attention to the screen -- on my Tesla to turn on defogging (a common event here!) while I can do it with a one touch (now muscle-memorized) on my Subaru.

[ggreer]

That's odd. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually turn on defogging. Often my Model 3 will say, "auto defogging". Maybe your humidity sensor is faulty?

I agree that physical controls for these things would be ideal, but nowadays the only one that annoys me is lack of the wiper controls. I think even that issue would go away if Tesla used rain sensors instead of cameras to trigger the wipers.

[insane_dreamer]

They’ve improved the wiper controls in the Tesla in a recent update.

I haven’t found the “auto defogging” - will check for it.

[ggreer]

The wipers are certainly better than when I got the car 5 years ago, but they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions. I don't have much to compare them against, as my previous cars have all been from the early 1990s or cheap rentals.

I don't remember a setting for auto defogging. My car just does it sometimes.

[insane_dreamer]

> they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions

yeah, same here. Our Subaru does better in this regard.

[kdmtctl]

Did you ever tried to use the rotary dial for text input? I gave up immediately. The car has a regular screen regular, no touch. Something is good only when balanced.

[hadlock]

Only twice in seven years did voice control not work for me. I can't recall the last time bmw didn't have touchscreen in a car but it predates 2014

[kdmtctl]

I haven't had many, so I do have a touch screen. But I've tried the rotary input on a rental 2 series that had a dial but no touch screen, and I had to use the GPS.

[piperswe]

They have touchscreens now, so you can input text with an on-screen keyboard but do everything else with the controller.

[kdmtctl]

Sure. That what I meant balanced.

[insane_dreamer]

Yeah, agreed on a rotary dial being terrible for text input. That's where a touch screen shines. But you shouldn't need to do anything requiring text input while driving.

[kdmtctl]

I barely used the dial while driving, except for track selection. There are lot of different knobs in old models)