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Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

drive.com.au

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Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#351

Post by throwawayk7h »

m463 wrote: post #275

I think they should distinguish between controls and settings. Settings are great on a touchscreen. A wide variety of options, easily navigated to and explained. They suck on physical buttons, it ends up being like setting the time on a VCR. Controls on the other hand deserve physical buttons. Or levers. or dials/knobs/spinners. It should depend on muscle memory, and the type of control. I also thing driving status s…

this is an incomplete picture though. Would Google Maps be considered a control or setting?

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#352

Post by CrimsonRain »

fooker wrote: post #333
CrimsonRain wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What needs to be changed during driving that needs 2-3 layers deep stuff? Examples.

Wiper speed, fog lights

Press the wiper button on Steering wheel to wipe, use left scroll button on steering wheel to make it fast/slow/off. No touch screen needed. Can also use voice command.

Press headlight button on s.wheel, tap the fog light icon on screen.

There's one thing I actually dislike. You can use voice to control all these stuff except foglight. It even understands foglight command, but doesn't do anything. Most likely a bug. I don't know how to report it.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#353

Post by CrimsonRain »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #348
CrimsonRain wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true though. The level of porche is in the brand only; there isn't a single porche that is better than a juniper for a daily driver. She's making an excellent choice.

what's a juniper?

the 2025/2026 Model Y.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#354

Post by CrimsonRain »

grassfedgeek wrote: post #330
CrimsonRain wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have enough physical buttons. Removing indicator stalks without steer by wire was a mistake. They fixed that by bringing back the stalks. Touch screen for great shifting works better than you think. It actually works better than traditional gear shifters especially when you enable auto shift. It changes gears as needed. It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the…

> It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future. Did you read the article about how Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical controls? So in your opinion are they dragging their customers back to the past? Or are they correcting a mistake?

They are doing neither. All German car companies are idiots. Years of lead compared to all other car manufacturers, threw away all of it with sheer incompetence and bureaucracy.

They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure instead of thinking of designing a better UX. Result is, laggy/buggy/buttonless bad ux that customers hated. So they are going back with a bad excuse. The mistake is thinking software+UX as second class in a modern car. But now they are correcting "touch screen bad" mistake. lmao.

I mean, it is no surprise. Germans in general don't know how to develop good software because to them everything is a design by committee (see CARAID).

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#355

Post by vachina »

jval43 wrote: post #287
geodel wrote: post #258

Last time it was VW bringing it back, then Mazda bringing it back, and so on. Also luxury cars will not use touch controls, thats only for cheap cars . It appears wishful thinking that physical buttons are coming back. This would be an idea whose time has gone. It does not even matter companies that physical buttons are better, or they can offer as choice (at higher price) if someone wanted. Like remote working, offi…

Even Toyota is going touch now, with the 2026 models lacking climate control knobs. I don't know why. Every review always praised the previous models for the physical buttons, and literally nobody asked for them. The physical buttons were perfect, yet they've taken them away. There must be some grand anti-button conspiracy, it just doesn't make any sense.

There’s less need for a physical button for those things now that climate control algo has become so good it has been on Auto the entire time for me.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#356

Post by foxglacier »

hephaes7us wrote: post #114
georgeecollins wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but at the same time cars are requiring less of our attention. Forget autonomous driving for a moment and consider lane change alerts for cars in your blind side, automatic braking if you come up too fast on the car ahead, active lane keeping, smart cruise control. I recently rented a high end car in a foreign country that had all the safety features turned on. Before I arrived I was worried about driving in…

When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers. All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent. Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that w…

It's hard to believe a car exists that ignores steering input. I suspect you just didn't try hard enough. Perhaps because it was a last-minute decision, you weren't very confident it was safe to change lanes and chose to give up some decision making to the car?

> the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.

Youtube will tell you that bumping into someone sideways at highway speed can leave either car spinning and flipping off the road.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#357

Post by fakedang »

Silhouette wrote: post #324
satvikpendem wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no…

"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems". One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companie…

Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?

Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#358

Post by binkHN »

ahartmetz wrote: post #35
shcheklein wrote: post #12

If they have custromer feedback and focus groups like they mention how did it happen in the first place? Some overoptimistic head-of-something? Really curious. I own previous -2021 mb and had to drive the upgrade (touch buttons) once as a replacement car. UX is terrible. Period. I even checked then in the dealership what they did to S-class and mybachs - and yes, same crappy wheel, etc. Anyways, I was mostly surprise…

I guess it is possible that customers - the ones that they asked anyway - were also caught up in the touchscreen hype. There was a lot of hype in the first few years of iPhone and iPad.

It's not hype; touch screens won for mobile devices and that's why they all work this way.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#359

Post by lurking_swe »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #351
m463 wrote: post #275

I think they should distinguish between controls and settings. Settings are great on a touchscreen. A wide variety of options, easily navigated to and explained. They suck on physical buttons, it ends up being like setting the time on a VCR. Controls on the other hand deserve physical buttons. Or levers. or dials/knobs/spinners. It should depend on muscle memory, and the type of control. I also thing driving status s…

this is an incomplete picture though. Would Google Maps be considered a control or setting?

both. the map has many detailed settings which you might change once in a while.

there are also certain things you’d want to change (or activate) often - we could argue those are controls. Like muting, changing volume, or finding a nearby gas station.

Re: Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

#360

Post by mjcarden »

philjohn wrote: post #298

This was one of the reasons why, when looking for an EV, I went with the Kia EV6. All of the buttons on the steering wheel are physical buttons, the heated seats, steering wheel heater etc. all physical buttons. The only blip is the capacitive buttons that are dual use for climate control or media control (you press a button to switch between the two modes) but even that's preferable to having to hunt in a touchscree…

I think that the EV6 User Interface is pretty spot on, including things like side mirrors complemented by cameras that activate when you indicate, a nice HUD and real buttons for most things. If ONLY I didn't have to manually deactivate lane keep warning alerts EVERY time I start the car, it'd be nudging perfect.
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