The Mk8 VW GTI isn't as good as its predecessor. | Revelations with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 11

Here's a good video from Jason Cammisa about the new (at the time) mk8: ▶ this video I had a mk7 and it is the best interior + UX I've seen in a car. Everything is as simple and ergonomic as possible. The volume adjustment is a knob, with soft rubber knurling and indents for feedback. It's not some awful feeling smooth afterthought that you see on certain Toyotas or Hondas. It's not a push button (beep beep beep beep) you find on old Pioneer stereos from the '90s. It's exactly what you want to adjust the volume. The AC is similar. Heated seats are a button with 3 LEDs indicating high/med/low. Everything just makes sense. And then VW got cheap and greedy. The mk8 is almost the complete opposite of what the mk7 was.

The bizzare thing is that the soft buttons had hardcoded symbols on them! ▶ this video It was objectively worse than physical buttons, without any advantage at all!

Unfortunately I think it's more driven by cost motivations. As noted in the Mk8 VW GTI review [1], the interfaces are often straight up awful, this being a particularly bad design. They're the biggest source of complaints/issues shortly after buying, and three years later. Additionally, distractions are already abundant in a vehicle. A crappy user interface, which most are, is a safety concern. At minimum, lag between screens loading should be extremely minimal. Staring at a screen for an extra second or two while it registers that you pressed a button and updates the screen is incredibly dangerous and has surely lead to some number of deaths. Two years ago Mazda announced they were moving away from touchscreens, which was very well received on HackerNews. [2] And I can't find the thread right now, but 1-3 years ago there was a really good discussion on here about an eye tracking study in a variety of car models. Touchscreen-only interfaces in cars are kind of like electronic-only voting machines. Technical people who know about computers breath funny thinking about it and see issues left and right while large swaths of people really want it. [1] ▶ this video [2] link

> my father-in-law's Mazda... the touch screen doesn't work while driving Sounds like it's an older model, and I can tell you from personal experience Mazda, at least, has learned from their mistakes (regarding touchscreens). I know the 2020 models, and I believe much earlier, have all gone back to physical, tactile buttons. Real buttons, not Volkswagon's stupid, stupid capacitive buttons. Watching Jason Camisa dunk on VW's UX was an exercise in vindication for having avoided that horseshit [0]. They are clicky, settings are remembered, and it does what you tell it to do. Frankly, that's all it took for me to insist our new car be a Mazda. And while I apologize for the rant, finding a new car that doesn't tell you to use a touchsceen at 110km/h is far harder than it should be - and what a sad state of affairs that is. [0] ▶ this video