The touchscreen-versus-buttons debate has been going on in car design for years. BMW’s head of design Adrian van Hooydonk thinks it might finally be settling — and he’s got Ferrari’s help making the case. In a recent interview with Top Gear, he gave his take on the Ferrari Luce interior, the cabin put together by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Diplomatic, but clear: what he saw there looked a lot like validation for something BMW has been arguing for a while.
When Ferrari said Ive and Newson were doing the Luce interior, expectations were high. Ive spent decades at Apple reshaping how people expect technology to look and feel. Newson has done similar work across furniture, watches, aircraft. Putting them together on a Ferrari cabin was going to generate commentary regardless of what they produced.
BMW’s design boss gave what sounded like a genuine assessment: the interior is roughly what he’d expect from two of the best designers in the world approaching a car the way they’d approach an Apple product. He didn’t say that as a knock. The Apple-car parallel is interesting on its own terms, and the execution — from what’s been shown — keeps physical controls in the mix alongside the screens.
Physical buttons aren’t going anywhere
BMW has kept a few hard controls all along. Toggle switches in the MINI, buttons in the center console of BMW cars. The reasoning is practical: some inputs work better when you can find them without looking and feel them click without wondering if the screen actually caught it.
The problem is that “a few” isn’t enough for a lot of BMW owners. Spend five minutes in any BMW forum or comment section and the complaint comes up constantly — newer models have pushed too far toward voice controls and touches, and the controls that remain don’t always make up for what’s been lost. Climate, volume, basic navigation through menus: things that used to be a quick button press now live somewhere in a touchscreen hierarchy. It’s a real irritation for people who bought into BMW partly because the ergonomics used to be so good.
Van Hooydonk says BMW has always believed in holding some hard controls back. Customers are effectively saying: hold more of them back. After years of brands going full glass, there’s been steady pushback from people who miss knowing, by feel, that something actually happened.
Ferrari getting to the same place — and bringing Ive along for the ride — is the kind of validation that doesn’t need much explaining. Van Hooydonk’s point was simple: the industry watches Ferrari. It watches Ive. Both of them arriving at a hybrid interior is a harder thing to argue with than BMW saying it alone.
But the real question is this: will regulations push automakers to bring back more buttons? Or will the future be simply voice and touches? We will find that answer likely after 2030.
[Source: Top Gear]
First published by https://www.bmwblog.com
