Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

Last year I bought a motorcycle (Honda CB300R) and it was a revelation.

No touch screens. No stereo. No GPS. No Bluetooth. No automatic transmission. No cupholders. Basically no "modern car features". And it's a much, much better road experience than any car I've ever been able to afford to drive.

Get rid of all the distractions at a price point under $30k with an engine that doesn't feel sluggish and maybe I'll consider buying a car again.

(Necessary disclaimer: I live somewhere where it's sunny and warm the majority of the year and where car parking is nigh impossible. Maybe I'd feel differently if I lived in rural Canada.)

Dell Ultrasharp gives you shortcut keys that you can assign to any function. I have one for Displayport and a second for HDMI.

> What if there are legitimate arguments for both

What if you made one?

Let me give you another perspective - I own a Suzuki SX4 S-Cross that comes with a fluid, super responsive and intuitive touchscreen with voice commands in it, which can also be controlled from the steering. You can do stuff like ask to call someone's phone, or read a text message or ask you to give directions.

But the real highlight is the UI + UX. It's super intuitive in that the volume controls, although touch, are always in a fixed location and you just drag over towards the edge of the screen up or down. In addition, you also have steering mounted controls to control the volume. The whole screen is divided into 4 quadrants and clicking anywhere in those quadrants will take you to either of the main screen (Eg. Navigation or FM Radio). It doesn't take long to get used to remembering which quadrant is for which. Also, for safety, you can't use some core features of navigation while driving the car. It will ask you to stop first if you want to say, type for a certain address.

I have never seen such fantastic UX in such mid-tier cars. To me, it seem's Honda's move is backward - perhaps it could be solved by simple UX..which Suzuki and Bosch (the supplier of their infotainment units) have already solved?

I find it super convenient because I don't even need to take my eyes off the road...while enjoying the convenience of a touch screen.

A picture (or video is worth a thousand words): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvERUKfjufg

Excellent move. I totally support this. Touchscreens removes all the accurate tactile feedback of what you are doing to a control and that forces the user to fallback to taking a look, hence deviating the center of the sight from the ideal zone for a really unjustifiable reason.