That's in fact one of the pros of carplay/android auto as opposed to just putting your phone in one of those windscreen attached holders; you get to use the volume buttons on the steering wheel. Annoyingly my car doesn't have play/pause buttons on there, but if it had, they would work.
The wheel in an Enyaq before the facelift is the same haptic one-button shitshow. They have some buttons that act like shortcuts below the infotainment. But it the screen is still essentialistisk for managing crucial functions.
My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every time I turn the car on.
Lots of modern cars cater for this. It’s actually a marketing point with manufacturers like the VW group publicising how they’re bringing back tactile interfaces. And some ranges of cars never took that away (for example Jaguar).
They did away with a lot of physical buttons in the past. Now they are in the process of bringing them back. There are some models still sold with the old design while all new models have physical again.
Also some of their brands had physical buttons all along. I think Skoda never removed them in the Elroq or Enyak.
I use CarPlay all the time and I almost never use the touchscreen - as you shouldn't while driving. The car has buttons and knobs, on the dash and on the wheel, to call up all sorts of options in the UI. The only time I need to touch the screen is if I want a full screen map (instead of the three-panel usual view).
I'm unconvinced. Navigating the UI via knobs seems much more distracting to me. I have to reach farther in my vehicle, but more importantly, I have to watch the screen anyway to make sure the knob ends up on the right control.
It really depends on what you are doing, but yes - if you need to look at the screen to do anything, you still fail safety. A knob is nicer than a touchscreen because you don't have to adjust to a moving vehicle to hit the right spot of the screen (for this same reason recent airplanes have buttons in addition to touchscreens).
Still, if you are very used to the UI, you can say the music app is one item down from the map, and the phone is two, so you can count presses. I was able to SMS people with a Nokia phone with a hand on the steering wheel and one on the phone (back when it was not forbidden).
Even physical controls can be a downgrade if poorly implemented.
R.I.P. Anton Yelchin, who brought us joy with his portrayal of Chekov in the Star Trek films, before losing his life at only 27, from a switch poorly masquerading as a brake lever.
At this point, I feel like automakers should be criminally liable for redesigning the automatic shifter UX. It's probably the 3rd/4th most dangerous control in the vehicle; why do we want people to have to relearn it every time they're in an unfamiliar car?
(I stick with a manual for my vehicles, so fortunately I'm mostly immunized against the madness.)
In my Hyundai pressing the mute button while on Bluetooth/Android Auto pauses playback and mutes. Pressing again resumes playback and volume to previous level.
Well, either I'm very dumb and didn't think to press play on the car I own to solve the problem I've had for years, or you're missing the fact that there is no play button on BYD cars.
Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
All the effort put in to stopping drivers distracting themselves with phones while driving, then we get big distracting touchscreens with apps front+centre in many new cars, and apparently that's OK.
I think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection.
Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.
Some still have knobs. My mom's caddy has knobs in front of the armrest that control everything, so the touchscreen is optional but works just as well for those that want it.
The things that CarPlay does are not the things that are controlled with buttons. Navigation, music, audiobooks, notifications work best with a screen. The driving and vehicle features like heat, blinkers, etc are where you want dedicated physical buttons.
It will also depreciate by 50% or more in 5 years, so there’s that. Honda and Toyota mostly use knobs and buttons for important controls and retain their value much better than Stellantis trash.
