Volkswagen will restore physical buttons to the dashboard in its latest compact car, part of a wider move away from touchscreens.
In a particularly retro touch, the new ID Polo will even have a volume dial.
For a decade or so, automakers rushed to replace knobs and switches with screens, Autoblog noted in October, but users largely disliked them: Controlling the air conditioning, for example, required delving through submenus while driving, which was both difficult and dangerous. Research found that using touchscreens took longer and distracted drivers.
Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and VW have all announced plans to return to more tactile controls, and US and EU regulators announced last year that cars with touchscreen controls could get worse safety ratings.
Prediction and pattern recognition is not general AI. This is just what LLMs and image generators do. They find plausible continuations starting from a noise to better fit the disired outcome. They don’t have real contextual knowledge about a domain. To them everything is just numbers that can be manipulated until they fit better. They don’t just instantly know the correct or incorrect answer because of a deeper understanding on the matter.