Apparently people don’t really want to page through 5 levels of the touchscreen menu to tune the radio.
https://slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touch-screens-vw-porsche-nissan-hyundai.html
intercst
11 Likes
My current car is a 2010 Ford Focus I bought in 2013. Previous to that I was driving a 1993 Dodge Shadow. When I got in the car and looked at the dash I felt like Rip van Winkle. Ree-(explitive delted)- diculous! What if I just want to listen to the radio?
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I’m a tech person but I also like to keep things simple and not make things more complicated than needed. My wife’s SUV does have a shifter like all cars I’ve driven to put it into reverse or drive, instead it just has a push button which is strange to me.
Probably a decade ago I got a new washing machine at the house I owned at that time and one day while waiting for the cycle to finish I realized the machine had 6 different “tones” to signal when the clothes are done. Now why 1 wasn’t enough beats me but it seemed like a waste of money to program this into the machine.
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Actually, that isn’t new, there were cars (or maybe just one) that had push buttons for selecting gears back in the 60’s/70’s - In about 20 minutes I will remember the make and model, but I’ll forget I posted this, and wonder why I remembered that.
JimA
2 Likes
Push button selectors for automatic transmissions: Chrysler Corp and Rambler: late 50s into early 60s. Packard: 1956. Edsel: 1958.
Steve
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Yup. My '64 Plymouth Belvedere, for one. I drove it cross country from Calif. and for about a decade in Michigan. After about 100K miles, reverse gear disappeared, so I’d park it in places where I wouldn’t need to back up. If I did get penned in, I’d get out and push the car backwards, then hop in, turn the wheel, and pull forward. This was esp. fun when I had a broken ankle and a cast throughout an entire snowy winter. Fun times. 
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Ah, yes! T’was good to be young.
Gaudeamus igitur,
Juvenes dum sumus;
Post icundum iuventutem,
Post molestam senectutem
Nos habebit humus.
3 Likes
Yep. And then afterward, a few decades of steering column stalk transmission gear selectors. Ironically, the newer Tesla models use a stalk on the steering column to select “gear” (Drive, Reverse, Neutral).
IIRC, Saab was one of them. A friend had an old “sob” story for a car in the late 70s
Mike
1 Like
Featuritis is a feature, not a bug!
The Captain
1 Like