Buttons are surprisingly expensive; not just the button itself but the wiring and the labor. Let's WAG at $20 per button. $20 * a few dozen buttons is real money.
Yes, I understand that it's a cost-savings measure by the automakers, but that's not relevant to me as a car owner.
If the added expense is so onerous to the automaker, then they can raise the price of the car to make up for it. I'd buy that, where I won't buy a car that has inferior controls. Why would I, when there is still a plethora of older cars available that better meet my needs?
Maybe, maybe not. If you posed it to customers in that way, many would object. If you didn't, then a $1000 price increase wouldn't really be noticed.
But it doesn't matter how many are willing. All I'm saying is that this is a thing that matters a great deal to me. It's pretty close to a dealbreaker. Even if I'm the only one that feels that way, it's still how I feel.
The auto industry appears to not want to make cars that I'd actually want to buy. Fair enough.
But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
> But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
heck, finding a sub-6" cellphone is next to impossible, outright impossible if you want high end features. and phones are way easier to create in different configurations than cars are.
The populations in developed nations are generally getting older, and people are living longer. Older people have bad eyesight for close-up things, so large-screen smartphones make a lot of sense.
If there was a model with buttons that was $1000 more than a model using a touchscreen to turn the wipers on and adjust the AC, I would absolutely pay the $1000.
I drive a twenty year old Volvo, and I went to a dealer to buy a new one a few months ago. I didn't buy anything because basic functions are all behind crappy screen UIs instead of good old buttons.
I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.
Would you pay the extra $10k or $20k for the custom built interface, though? It’s only $1000 if the majority of buyers are willing to pay that (which they are not).
No, buttons are not that expensive, that's silly. Cars have had buttons for ages, and they certainly weren't more expensive decades ago.
The big reason touchscreens are so favored is because they don't require that you finalize your user-interface design decisions so early in the design cycle. With physical buttons, you have to design molds etc. to have the parts ready for final assembly. What if you want to make a change? Whereas with a touchscreen UI, you can worry about UI details any time and just make changes in software, even after the car has been sold if necessary. So for the early design process, you just specify the size screen you want, and design the molds for the bezels etc.
I assume you mistyped, and meant "wiring". I don't think so: usually, the buttons will be on assemblies with many buttons together (such as the A/C control panel on my 2015 car), with a PCB inside and probably a small microcontroller to talk on the CAN bus, so in the factory, the worker only needs to plug in one electrical connector. That's really no different than a touchscreen system, which also would presumably have a single connector for the whole assembly.
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