The move to electric vehicles has been linked to the decline of many things—AM radio, manual transmissions, tinkering with cars as a hobby—but perhaps one of the most immediate and obvious losses is that of physical dash buttons.
As automakers push to add more screens in the car, and to equip those screens with software that continuously updates, fixed buttons that perform one function are being replaced by expansive menus full of apps and adjustable settings for each passenger in the car.
But Hyundai is resisting the move to all touch screens in the name of safety, Carsguide reports. Navigating a digital screen requires multiple steps, and eventually forces drivers to take their eyes off the road to know where to press, according to Hyundai head of design Sang Yup Lee.
“We have used the physical buttons quite significantly the last few years,” Lee said when speaking at a recent launch event for the next-generation Hyundai Kona EV. “For me, the safety-related buttons have to be a hard key [that] is easy to sense and feel.”
Lee added that the company will continue to use physical dials, especially for functions like adjusting the air conditioning and volume, in conjunction with touch screens—until the advent of autonomous driving makes fully touch-based displays safer to adopt.
Once cars are cleared for Level 4 autonomous driving, touch screens throughout the vehicle will make sense, but until then, "when it comes to driving, it’s safest to have your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel,” Lee said.
While it might be easy to classify the preference for buttons as a relic of an older generation, many people seem to share Hyundai's concerns over safety and ease of use.
Last summer, Swedish magazine Vi Bilägare timed drivers performing a set of tasks on the interfaces of 11 different cars, Jalopnik reports. They found the 17-year-old Volvo was easier to operate than a screen-filled, modern vehicle like the Tesla Model 3 or BMW iX.
PCMag experienced this during our Best Mobile Networks drive-test in a Model 3 and when trying out a Tesla for a month in Chicago this winter. When the windows steamed up while driving, it took multiple taps on the touch screen to find the defogger as the road became increasingly hard to see. A physical, one-touch defog button would have been much easier.