Bringing real buttons back to car consoles and dashboards

The current trend of placing many if not all functions of a vehicle within a touchscreen display may soon be a thing of the past.

Australia’s independent vehicle safety testing body, ANCAP, now stipulates the return of physical buttons for important driver controls.

Some screens are slow or stubborn to react to fingertip inputs, while others require the driver to scroll through multiple menus and submenus.

As a result, drivers are taking their eyes off the road more often as they attempt to fumble with fiddly touchscreens, dramatically increasing the chances of a collision.

The confusion and frustration can also lead to driver fatigue, reducing their abilities to operate a vehicle safely.

The increasing number of vehicle functions being added to touch screens has come to the fore over the past few years with the dramatic uptake in Chinese vehicles, with most of them featuring touchscreen controls over buttons.

This is to save their manufacturers time and money in development costs, which in turn has led to cheaper – but at-times compromised – vehicles.