The fact that they needed to receive a lot of complaints to reconsider makes me wonder - do they even do any kind of usability testing for their products? Anyone who even sat in a car with only touchscreen can tell you the experience is not comfortable.
And I don’t think it’s just about the price of physical buttons. Buttons are a selling point right now, they could charge a small premium (not in the thousands but ~$200 certainly.
Besides cost, we should probably at least entertain the idea that we are a vocal minority. I’d be completely unsurprised to find out that the majority of people hardly ever touch the controls that got moved to touchscreens and, if they do, they don’t really care - they can set them before they set off, or do it while driving and wobble all over the road, but hey everyone does it so what does it matter?
Oh they KNEW what they were doing and just didn’t give a fuck.
We need a People of Walmart equivalent for this bullshit. Start finding the designer/engineer/manager responsible for this garbage and shame them publicly.
How does this stuff pass any kind of Accessibility regs?
I wonder if it’s a planning issue. Buttons you have to actually plan out. Touchscreen? Plop it in.
It’s probably a cost issue. Running one wire harness to a touch screen is a lot cheaper than running a wire to every button in a car.
Or follow the BMW plan and put buttons in the cars but make them subscription only.
