Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn five-star safety rating in Europe
Euro NCAP will release new testing guidelines in 2026.
Controlling everything in a car through screens is a safety hazard. It's insane that's even allowed.
I just bought a newish car and would not even consider any without physical buttons for climate. It really helped narrow the options, haha.
I don't disagree, but what's up with climate? Of all the things I change during a drive, climate is probably the least used one. IMO, if the car has a decent HVAC system, it should be set and forget (less the defroster and A/C max in summer).
It might be that manufacturers see in their data that most people use it set and forget nowadays anyways, which made the cost cutting decision easier.
There are very few core controls and they should absolutely be physical.
I hate screens as much as anyone but I honestly don't think there's much that can't be put behind one.
Climate controls need to be physical, though.
They are safety critical when your windscreen fogs over.
Radio, too. For emergency broadcasts.
And obviously any driving controls, like lights, indicators, cruise control, wipers, ...
Basically, anything that was present in a car 30 years ago needs to have physical buttons.
It's insane that as of now it's up to manufacturers to self-regulate.
Good.
My exact comment.
I would also ban touch sensitive fixed controls. My father's Avalon has dedicated controls for the HVAC but they're touch sensitive, so you set the climate controls to 80C and full fan if you just wipe dust off the panel while the car's on.
You should be able to train your hand on the control, get a good grip on it, and then move it in such a way that a control input is realized. It shouldn't have to beep at you to tell you it's done a thing.
I can turn the air conditioner in my pickup on and off by feel alone, same with the basic radio controls.
VW id3, maybe the whole id series, has this bullshit. I test drove the id3 a couple of months ago. Buttons in the wheel are touch, but you can push them as well which feels clunky. rant warning! Giant freaking screen that got mad at me for trying to adjust the ac while driving (supposedly I tap it too fast, and got a time-out). Stupid LEDs under the windshield that tries to communicate stuff by lightning up in either side or move across and shit, that was really confusing. It even had mood lighting. Wtf, in a car?!? Putting the car in sports mode, to get an idea of how it can drain the battery on the motorway, changed the mood from blue to red.
Stupidest fucking car I've ever driven. Went with a fully optioned zoe instead. 5k€ less for the same year, and actual buttons for stuff. Although I'd like to meet the engineer, who thought sticking buttons behind the wheel where they're hidden, was a good idea.
The Id3 and more specifically the Cupra Born are off my list because of the stupid steering wheel buttons, they are soo fucking bad.
I will probably go with a used electric Niro, saw a video complaining about how it has 73 buttons, I am like, awesome.
And temperature up/down and fan power should both be dials/rotary encoders, none of this "one push per degree/power level" BS.
I have a 15 year old car with a touchscreen. It's not a capacitive screen, it's resistive. That means I need to actually push a little bit to register a touch. It works great!
They even work with gloves! Of course, one could say "just turn up the heat", but it takes a while to warm up the car. And heated steering wheel is still not a standard feature.
I want to be able to replace my infotainment system without hassle or loss of functionality
The good old days when the first thing you did when buying that old beater was change the radio to one with CDs or even MP3s... Of course if you didn't have the budget for that you could always get one of these cassettes with a jack cable to plug into your disc man, the only issue is it would skip when you hit a pothole.
Unless you had a fancy discman with anti-skip. Reminds me of driving my dad's 1963 VW Beetle in high school before we restored it.
Also... Good old days? I did that with my minivan barely three years ago with an Alpine ILX-407... But that one doesn't have a CD player because I don't use CDs anymore. I haven't used CDs in a car since high school, now that I think about it... I just kept my iPod connected to that car, hidden from view.
they already did a study that touchscreens are too distracting and dangerous, buttons are more intuitive and quicker to use, without looking at the menu.
2015 Honda - perfect. Buttons when I wanted buttons. Touch when I wanted touch, and I never had to use it when driving.
2023 Ford - Yeah, it's bad and dangerous.
But screens are cheaper and cars are getting more expensive.
Screens make cars look cheap. Why would anyone pay $60k for a vehicle when they cheaped out on the controls. Ipads are no longer new and exciting technology and yet companies want to put them literally everywhere.
But now cars won't look like what Blade Runner drove! /s
The first time I heard that many car manufacturers are getting rid of traditional buttons and odometers in favour of touchscreens, I already thought that it is dangerous.
As always, corporations don't give af.
I don't see an issue to have digital odometer because you don't interact with it
For real, instrument cluster I'm okay having digital. It's not something I need to touch, usually there's steering wheel buttons to interact with it.
Having your whole radio/climate/etc all on one screen with menus and shit is stupid. You can't just reach over and change a setting without looking. I miss when everything was "analog". My first car was a 91 mazda rx7, and I knew exactly where every control was, didn't have to look at anything to operate it.
Thanks, Europe!
For real, so many good things happen here (us) because Europe makes it a thing, and it's too expensive to have separate manufacturing. Unfortunately for those that use iPhones, their requirement of third party app stores doesn't work here, because that's a software setting, and costs them nothing to have different. (Android user btw, don't come at me)
IKR? The EU legislation to require a common charging system is already making big improvements. Seeing so many things, not just phones, that are now chargable via USB C. So many electronic gadgets, like my shaver, screwdriver and others no longer coming with a wallwart adapter each to live in my drawers and jam them up. Benefits for everyone, apart from the occasional company (Apple) that locks in to a specialised charger for profit reasons.
Europe is being awesome once again!
My car is pretty old and doesn't have any screens. I was using a rental car last week for a few days and I was definitely missing my physical buttons. I had to ask the guy in the passenger seat to change things for me because whenever I tried to without taking my eyes off the road I'd almost never hit the right buttons. Especially when I was going over bumps on the road.
Ford, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make the touchscreen pressure-sensitive, but the flat physical buttons capacitive. Which means that it's super easy to accidentally turn on the driver's seat heater if you dare use the volume knob, impossible to use any of the physical buttons if you have normal gloves on, and very inaccurate to use the touchscreen with those same gloves on.
They know it, too, because when I had a 2013 Fusion, the overhead console with the dome light buttons was the same capacitive bullshit, and my 2015 Fusion has a regular button. (Apart from these design flaws, I love the car, which is why I replaced one with the other.)
At least you had a volume knob. Last week I drove a new Renault Clio via local carsharing, and it had a touchscreen, where you had to click a button on the screen to pop up a slider next to it, where you could change the volume. It had like 5 buttons on the steering wheel, some of them even looked like they could be used for controlling the volume, but no, they were for cruise control or whatever, the only way to change the volume was via the touchscreen with two taps.
I'm renting a Mazda and it seems really tame on that front. Buttons for everything.... There's one screen that can do Android Auto/Carplay but it's NOT touchscreen. You have a big knob down with the gear selector that you can rotate and push in/up/down/left/right to use it. But no car controls except radio tuning on it. There's a separate knob for volume (and on-wheel controls).
Bring back physical keys!
I don't even mind the option of being controlled in the screen, so long as there are also physical buttons. Radio and climate control should be easily accessible by physical buttons. Also, I really hate the newer aesthetic of looking like someone just jammed a tablet into the consol. There no contouring or anything.
I hate key fobs, I have two cars both with massive fobs. I can't keep both on my keyring if I'm planning to put my keys in my pants pocket. I also hate these stupid things are $200-300 to replace - even more at a dealer.
They don't even make the car more secure or harder to steal. Get rid of them.
Blackberry
Europe wins again.
Fuck I hope this gets brought to North America.
Spoiler: it won’t. Tariffs are gonna make it cost prohibitive to buy anything abroad so Americans will have American cars, Europeans will have European cars. Expect quite a bit of divergence.
I don't know. They tend to standardize pieces across countries to reduce costs. And we might just end up with European cars up here in Canada in the end. Who knows. 🤞
up side: divergence isn’t so bad… divergence leads to problems being solved differently rather then homogeneously because it’s cheaper to copy than to solve
But if there’s less screens then where will manufacturers put the advertising???
More buttons and more screens
Cars have had a multitude of controllers (which means software) for over 30 years now. It's the cellular connection you don't want or need.
The only way I would ever have a connected car is if the software was under my control and could be self-hosted. Nothing crazy, just stuff like weather, traffic, and maybe remote diagnostics. But that's just my nerdy side coming out.
Both of my cars are fairly modern (2008, 2015), but neither have any sort of connection to the outside world, and despite both having touchscreen interfaces, all critical functions are button-operated.
good
i kinda wonder if this is motivated as a non tariff trade barrier to chinese cars designed for the china market which loves apps, touch screens and karaoke in your car 🤔
Maybe but probably not. It's just basic common sense that all car manufacturers need to get on board with. Maybe there's just a coincidence that touchscreens and no physical buttons are cheaper to produce and the Chinese brands that you're referencing are also targeting cheaper production at the cost of road safety.
My experience with country level regulation suggests yes. Usually this sort of thing is targeted at protecting domestic firms from other EU firms. There is always some good sounding reason to do it.
In this case I don't mind at all.
As this is about NCAP testing standards and not about EU regulations probably not, but I welcome every bit of support to convince my wife to never buy a tesla again.
I will never even get in a Tesla. I've seen far too many stories of it burning its occupants alive because the manual release for the doors is a hidden feature.
Having to have an intact software/computer system AND power just to leave a vehicle is beyond dumb.
Not to mention, F-ELON. Screw that guy, and I hope every asset he owns becomes worthless.
I remember back in the mid 2000s with my flip phone a T9 texting. Could text and drive without looking away from the road because of muscle memory. Once I got a touch screen I realized that wasn't the case anymore. So imagine this anecdote with car buttons to touch screens.
I'd like to buy a European EV
Go ahead. I like the e208 myself, but there's lots of options
Zero is the correct number of touchscreens for a car. This has seemed obvious to me since the first time I saw one and I've never understood how anybody could think otherwise.
I prefer my 2014 car to anything new i have tried. Buttons are just better.
I know people like to harp on Tesla about this, but ALL of the mandatory controls can be done with stalks/buttons/wheels and have been for awhile
Hazard warning lights - button
Indicators - stalks or buttons
Windscreen wipers - button to initiate, wheel to choose intensity (or press button again to increase intensity). Button then wheel to turn off.
SOS calls - N/A
Horn - Press the wheel
The only one that Tesla didn't always follow was the wipers, but that's no longer the case, glad they finally listened on that one.
Is there actually any OEM that doesn't meet these requirements? I agree though, these are good bare minimum requirements.
Edit: I could also see merit to adding a defog one as that could be a critical timing thing.
Those are always button on all cars tho it's more about secondary operations like tuning AC etc.
The law is about the buttons I listed. Those were in the article.
You’re right, the legislation also needs to mandate a reasonable location for information display. Around me teslas just CONSTANTLY have a blinker on because the stalk has no feedback and the indicator lights are only visible if you’re looking far enough down to lick your own junk.
Not sure why that is, but they do make a noise when they're like all cars.
Hazard warning lights - button
https://youtu.be/Vk3d-gHdhrE?t=30
It might be a push button, but it's literally in the worst location I've ever seen it in a car.
Your point? It's a button, it passes the law.
This is genuinely good for safety.
Bout bloody time, I really hate modern cars
Thank fuck. I'm still keeping my 2013 civic forever.
Europe rules!
Common European W.
Customer can choose any car they like as long as it has an ipad on the center console.
The screen should be strictly for the radio, and maybe some android-auto like thing.
Radio and parking camera, maybe sat nav for users that don't do android auto or carplay.
My parents' Duster has volume buttons, but… they randomly regulate different things: navigation voice loudness, media volume, something with microphone icon. If you want to change something else, you need to tap a button on the far top right corner of the display, which is incredibly difficult. And even then, the decision isn't remembered, so if you press the volume button after the popup disappears, it will change not what you want again.
I swear, the cars are not even tested these days
I'm still waiting for someone to try haptic screens.
Is there proof that screens are resulting in more crashes?
Touch screens are basically buttons. Maybe they just need physical buttons to get to the essential parts on the touch screen. My car the buttons are on a touchbar-like screen already. For people that prefer physical buttons, you should ask for a mounted remote.
Screens are not basically buttons. I cannot reach at the screen without looking and find a toggle and know that I pressed it successfully.
