VW Design Boss Confirms Buttons Coming Back: 'It's A Car, Not A Phone'

VW cut most of the physical controls out of its early EVs and learned a long, painful lesson.

Volkswagen ID.Every1

Photo by: Volkswagen

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Mar 7, 2025 at 1:30pm ET

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Volkswagen will bring back key controls in physical form, starting with the ID.2.
All future models will have key controls in button form and will ditch touch panes on the steering wheel.
Mercedes is another automaker that acknowledged screens in cars are not ideal.

Manufacturers are slowly starting to listen to what car journalists and owners have been complaining about for almost a decade: Cramming all the car’s functions into a touchscreen is an inferior solution to having dedicated physical controls for key tasks.

Among the manufacturers known to be switching back to buttons is Volkswagen, whose latest vehicles have gone touch-control-crazy with functions either buried inside a touchscreen menu or relocated to an annoying haptic feedback panel.

We’ve known for a while that Volkswagen was considering putting back some buttons in its cars, but the manufacturer never officially acknowledged this. Now VW’s design boss, Andreas Mindt, has admitted to Autocar that this approach was a mistake and that the automaker is backtracking on this trend.

“From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen,” Mindt told Autocar. He added, “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We will never, ever make this mistake anymore. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing anymore. There's feedback, it's real, and people love this. Honestly, it's a car. It's not a phone.”

2024 Volkswagen ID.4 Pro S. Review

Volkswagen ID.Every1

The five functions that will have dedicated controls are in addition to requirements from Euro NCAP, which will include them in its safety ratings starting in 2026. If a car doesn’t have physical controls for the horn, windshield wipers, turn signals, hazard lights and SOS functions, it won’t be able to achieve the maximum five-star rating.

So it’s not just us journalists that consider moving toward touch-only interfaces a bad idea. "What we now see is we have more and more... crashes where people are having collisions because they're being distracted,” Matthew Avery, NCAP's director of strategic development, told Politico.

You’ll know why that is not surprising if you’ve been in a modern Volkswagen, like an ID.4, which forces you to use non-backlit haptic slides below the screen to adjust the cabin temperature or media volume (the 2024 refresh at least made these controls backlit on all but the base model). And if you want to fine-tune your climate settings, you must do it through the touchscreen, which is harder than it has to be even when VW’s infotainment software works.