Physical buttons replaced with touch buttons in cars are a nightmare. It distracts and causes drivers to lose focus on what’s important when driving – driving and keeping their eyes on the road. Car manufacturers know this, but still insist on removing physical buttons.
One company that promises not to do so (at least for a while) is Hyundai, which says that making all buttons touch-sensitive is dangerous. During the presentation of the new Kona, Sang Yup Lee, head of design at Hyundai, said the following:
We have used the physical buttons quite significantly the last few years. For me, the safety-related buttons have to be a hard key. When you’re driving, it’s hard to control it. This is why when it’s a hard key it’s easy to sense and feel it. When it comes to Level 4 autonomous driving, then we’ll have everything soft key.
As we can see in the picture, there are still many physical buttons in the car, and above all, the volume has a physical knob, and the climate control has no sliders or the like.
