Volkswagen will restore physical buttons to the dashboard in its latest compact car, part of a wider move away from touchscreens.
In a particularly retro touch, the new ID Polo will even have a volume dial.
For a decade or so, automakers rushed to replace knobs and switches with screens, Autoblog noted in October, but users largely disliked them: Controlling the air conditioning, for example, required delving through submenus while driving, which was both difficult and dangerous. Research found that using touchscreens took longer and distracted drivers.
Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and VW have all announced plans to return to more tactile controls, and US and EU regulators announced last year that cars with touchscreen controls could get worse safety ratings.
If they’re undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they’ll get rid of automatic stop-start too?
That was a federal regulation that Trump undid. Won’t get rid of it on your car, but it will for future cars.
Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.
How does this automatic start stop work that you don’t like? And what brand of car is your experience with?
I have a VW ID.4 and I have no idea what you mean? If I use adaptive cruise control it will stop if the traffic stops, and it will start again automatically when traffic moves again. Working exactly as it is supposed to.
However if I don’t want that, I can touch the break at any time, which obviously disables cruise control, and release the break to roll slowly forwards like a traditional automatic in drive gear position.
Or if I hold the break for a short while, it will engage auto hold, and only go forwards again if I use the speeder.
Auto hold can be disabled if I don’t want it. But I like the feature, as I’m used to drive a manual.
Everything works perfectly and intuitively, I’ve only had the car for a month, and it’s so nice to operate compared to an older car.
If I don’t want the adaptive cruise control, that too can be disabled, and it will work like a traditional dumb cruise control.
Edit: The post I responded to is apparently about start stop of the engine, which was in no clear, especially since automatic start stop of the car is a common feature of modern cars, just saying start stop in no way indicate the engine more than the air condition.
I’m used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend’s 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There’s no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you’re driving even after you’ve pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it’s simply not OK for a car to do something after I’ve pressed the button telling it not to do that.)
Well IDK if VW is better in that regard, what I do know is that it’s to save fuel, and ICE cars are on their way out anyway. So it’s kind of a moot point to talk about improving on them now IMO.
No, this is a feature that cuts the engine off when you’re at a stop. Then the engine re-starts when you try to accelerate again. Or if the AC needs to kick on. Or if the car needs literally anything. It’s jarring, and it’s little more than a gimmick that manufacturers used to improve gas mileage in testing.
I’ve yet to find any testing that would indicate it doesn’t work, only few where the effect has been quite small.
But even the tiniest effects become massive when multiplied by the amount of vehicles on the road. Like how turning your headlights off and using LED DRLs reduces fuel consumption by roughly 1-3%, which is quite a lot less pollution once you multiply that by the 250 million cars zooming around the EU and so on.
Stop-and-start systems usually result in a reduction of emissions somewhere between 3-10% in city traffic. That’s huge.
But because most people find it a tiny bit irritating, you are required the massive effort of pressing a button to turn it off every time. Most quickly realize it’s not all that irritating, because having to press a button to turn it off is actually more irritating, and so it stays enabled for a few hundred million cars reducing emissions.
I disagree. I like a car that does what I tell it to do. On older cars, when I press the accelerator they accelerate. On cars with stop-start (and mine does), when I press the accelerator it starts the engine, then accelerates.
And it’s not like it reliably turns the engine off anyway. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. If i so much as touch the sterring wheel it restarts the engine. If a pigeon sneezes nearby the same…
And lastly, it will wear out your battery slightly quicker according to the guy who replaced the battery that died on my car.
And you know, reduce unnecessary emissions
OK that’s very different from start/stopping the car, which is an actual function of modern cars. He should have specified he was talking about the engine.
That’s not the feature they’re talking about.
Which I suspected, so I started out asking what the “feature” actually is!
Turns out it is NOT automatic start stop of the car, but of the engine. Very poorly formulated post IMO.
Complaining about making less pollution. And demand improvements on ICE cars that are going obsolete.
Wake up FFS! This is not the 90’s.