- Volkswagen’s head of quality admits the automaker went too far by replacing conventional controls with touch surfaces and sliders.
- At the time, VW believed EVs represented a new beginning and that their interiors needed equally futuristic controls.
- The company eventually learned that EV buyers wanted electric powertrains, not spaceship-like cabins, prompting a return to physical buttons and knobs.
Volkswagen is in the midst of undoing one of its most controversial interior-design decisions: replacing conventional buttons and knobs with touch-sensitive keys, sliders, and capacitive steering-wheel controls. Early signs are encouraging, with the ID.3 Neo bringing back more traditional buttons while eliminating the hated temperature and volume sliders, which weren’t even backlit in the early days. The ID. Polo and ID. Cross are another step in the right direction, as both have individual switches for all windows, like every car should.
Now, the company has offered a surprisingly candid explanation of why it went down that road in the first place. Asked why Volkswagen, like many other automakers, believed electric cars needed radically different controls, the company essentially admitted that it was trying to predict the future without having enough customer data to know what buyers actually wanted.
The reasoning, according to the company’s Head of Quality Assurance, was understandable at the time. With electric vehicles representing a fundamental change in propulsion, there was a belief that everything around them should feel equally revolutionary. In an interview with Automobilewoche (subscription required), Andreas Krepp explained the thinking process:
Touch Controls Were The Future. Until They Weren’t
‘What seems obvious to you or me today may well be viewed quite differently at a certain point in time. Then someone says, “People won’t want that at all in the future.” And when there’s a lack of reliable customer data, a lot of things are simply tried out.
With electric vehicles—including here at our company—there was this idea: Something new is beginning [electric vehicles], so the controls must also change significantly and be particularly modern. For example, we said, “Let’s install sliders instead of traditional rotary knobs. That’s the future.” Then we learned that customers who buy an electric vehicle are primarily looking for a different type of powertrain. They don’t automatically want to buy a spaceship.
To me, this is a good example of the ability to learn. We listened, took customer feedback seriously, and acted on it. Today, we weigh our options much more carefully: Where does a new user interface concept truly add value—and where is a tried-and-true, intuitive solution simply better?’
2026 Volkswagen ID. Polo GTI with regular steering wheel buttons
Photo by: Volkswagen
EV Buyers Still Want Familiar Controls
The thinking was essentially this: physical controls belong to the past, while touch-sensitive interfaces represent the future. Well, we now know how that worked out. VW eventually discovered that people buying electric cars weren’t necessarily looking for a futuristic spaceship. They wanted an electric drivetrain, but that didn’t mean they wanted to relearn how to operate basic functions such as the climate control or audio system.
With the risk of pointing out the obvious, a volume knob doesn’t suddenly become obsolete because there’s an electric motor underneath the floor. The same applies to physical climate controls and conventional steering-wheel buttons. If anything, having tactile controls can make these functions easier to operate without taking your eyes off the road. Mazda begs to disagree with me on this.
2026 Volkswagen ID. Cross with volume knob
Photo by: Volkswagen
Mea Culpa
VW’s current leadership has repeatedly acknowledged that its previous approach frustrated customers. CEO Thomas Schäfer previously said the touch controls “definitely did a lot of damage,” while the company has gradually moved back toward tactile controls following customer feedback.
The updated ID.4 coming soon is likely to have more conventional switchgear, and hopefully, the new/old approach will expand to combustion-engine cars as well. Core models like the Golf and Passat also suffer from overly simplified interiors and could use a few more analog controls. Not just from a functionality perspective, but also because they make dashboards look more upscale, whereas a screen-heavy design comes across as cheap.
Motor1’s Take: The irony is that the future has now arrived, and it turns out customers weren’t nearly as interested in living inside a spaceship as VW and automakers thought they would be. That said, Wolfsburg deserves credit for admitting that it got this wrong rather than pretending the touch-slider era was part of some grand master plan.
The bigger lesson is that innovation shouldn’t mean changing something simply because you can. Electric cars are already radically different underneath the skin. There’s no need to make basic controls unfamiliar just for the sake of making the cabin look futuristic. Why fix what isn’t broken?
As someone who owns a previous-generation Skoda Octavia, its functional interior borders on perfection. All of which is to say the VW Group needs to go back to the 2010s era of interiors.
Read the full article here
