Dieter Rams is the only UX/UI designer, who became famous - outside of Germany. Hartmut Esslinger kind of popularized DR, what an irony, that two Germans made history, but of course not in Germany and even in Germany DR wasn't well known. Braun was a brand and statement, but because the devices were and still are extremely convenient. Braun never put design or beauty in the spotlight - it wasn't recognized as such and therefore not of value to capitalize on.
VW? "No one needs Apple Car or Android. We are the world wide Nr. 1 in car business, what does a computer company know about cars? hahaha"
Hubris, resulted into a failed attempt to build in 2 years a complete Car OS. It was so bad, I was mocked back then, because I bet against it.
I am the only one who successfully build a No Code platform in financial services that became such a hit internally, that it became the standard. dbCORE is its name.
Very long story, but design by committee is the norm in Germany, and since outsourcing is the way to go, vendors sell changes all the time otherwise they lose the customer.
Value chains like Apple or Google are inconceivable and no one in Business has a background in CS.
Porsche 997-2 had the best UX/UI there was. Fantastic blend of nobs and touchscreen. It blew my mind, really. This was 2008. The iPhone came to light 2007!
Really, highly impressive, extremely functional and almost no friction at all. 90% was top.
And to the haters: Show me any company or product from Germany in IT that is Top 100 globally. Only SAP is or has been featured somewhere below the bottom. And I gurantee you, no one fell in love with its UX/UI...
“The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's fifth-largest publicly traded software company by revenue. In June 2025, it was the largest European company by market capitalization, as well as one of the 30 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.”
Also I wouldn’t want to disagree with you outright, there are still a few important German companies in the IT sector (or related): Siemens, Infineon, Deutsche Telekom, Bechtle, TeamViewer come to my mind.
What Siemens exemplifies is that the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery. While Siemens and most of its spin-offs are doing somewhat okay, the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
I rely on Siemens automation products at work. They give me end-of-life warnings a couple of years ahead - and maintain a spares inventory for a decade and change after EoL.
That basically ensures I am never caught out, and makes me more than happy to (grudgingly) accept all their ideosyncracies...
None of them famous or being praised by customers for having amazing UI/UX though, because they're not consumer products, they're targeting engineers who either don't care about UX, or don't have a choice in the matter because their company is buying it, not them.
Cars on the other hand ARE consumer products and do need great UX, and German companies long forgot how to do that since they operate everything as a cost center and outsource everything they perceive ads no value.
>the strength of German industry is not pure software, but high-tech machinery
Yeah but there's more margins in pure software and more buyers in the world for consumer devices than for high tech machinery. Apple can probably buy all of Germany's machine tool makers if they wanted to. It's the perk of selling to 7 billion consumers in the world.
> the stocks of its spin-off Siemens Energy have risen by ~700 % in the last 3 years.
Just like every energy and defense stock in the world right now, but that's to be expected and somewhat offtopic for SW and UX.
If we look at some of their other consumer and healthcare spin-offs like Gigaset or Healthineers, they are doing insanely poor, which is embarrassing.
Ageing population that finds itself overwhelmed is my guess. There are exceptions, but they are far and few between.
To be fair, it is outsourced to Harmon/Kardon.
VW was supporting CarPlay from launch and the VW MEB dash was on all pro material of Apple for ages.
6000 people to develop a software stack for VW.
Go figure. The fact VW supported CarPlay early is footnote in this comedy.
Much as people seem to dislike when I say this, but, Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems, which, while sometimes something good does come out of it like the DMA, it does not help long term when there are no good home grown big tech (or indeed, any sector in the top 100) companies of their own.
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
Comments about this dreadful UI/UX on german cars feels really decade old.
In any case I rent cars quite often, mostly get Korean, Japanese and German cars with few rare US ones, and I really don't see those differences across the board software wise.
They all suck, they are all slow, clunky and unintuitive.
I have never used the native UI of my Samsung Frame. I haven't used any car's own navigation or music app in at least a decade.
What?
My BMW i4 has iDrive 8.5 and it's excellent, and i've had Mercedes and Audi and VW and Honda and SAAB.
the BMW and the 40 years ago SAAB (i bought it very used) both were easy to operate without looking away from the road.
Games count I suppose?
This means engineering is not attractive and no longer something to build life around.
It takes years of learning, patience, trial and error for not much different remuneration than jobs requiring far less commitment.
There needs to be a screen, but it should be used only for optional features. It shouldn't be required. The 9x1 generation got that. In the 992, you can't even open your garage door without fumbling around with the stupid touchscreen.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I think all recent VW cars (since 2018) support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. CarPlay works great with our VW ID.3.
Also, since a refresh a few years ago, the in-car system has had great UX/UI. We are perfectly happy with it and this is after almost two decades of iOS + having tried the systems of various different cars (including NIO).
We do not have anything to complain about, except more physical buttons would be nice, but the latest generation is bringing them back (e.g. the new ID.3 NEO). We are considering upgrading to the ID.3 NEO soon (or maybe Hyundai).
https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/innovation/innovation-network/te...
For example, BMW tech offices exist in Silicon Valley and Shanghai, among other locations.
German cars have been very well-regarded in terms of their automotive interfaces by the automotive press and reviewers as well as customers.
Watch any Doug DeMuro [1] video and on the subject of infotainment systems and you’ll see that BMW and Mercedes are up toward the top in terms of usability and customization.
You’ll see brands with good technology reputations like Kia refuse to put a GPS map in the gauge cluster while the Germans have been doing it for a decade plus now.
I will also remind us all that Mercedes beat Tesla to market on level 3 autonomy.
The only companies beating the German brands on tech are EV startups in China and companies like Tesla, but of course those companies are doing so mainly because they are replacing physical buttons with that technology, and generally integrating a lot of gimmmicks that are low hanging fruit compared to the things they can’t replicate as well like driving platform dynamics.
[1] I choose Doug DeMuro for this because he’s somewhat “in the middle” on technology. He prefers touch screens over purist physical controls for many functions but isn’t wildly biased toward them or incredibly tech savvy like the kind of person who blindly embraces Teslafication. He’s the kind of reviewer that will miss the “but actually there’s a setting for that” solution for his nitpicks, effectively showing the car as an layperson who isn’t techbrained but also isn’t your dad who wishes the screen was gone entirely.
All the provide is a squeeze money scheme by making everything paid upgrade, laggy software, buggy software, bad range and much more.
There's nothing good about most German cars anymore. Bmw neu klasse is finally a decent answer but it took how many years?
Also, my 2020 Mii Electric is 100% physical buttons. Pretty great.
Frankly, I am wary of anything but VWAG at this point.
It's the same old story about how hardware companies can't do software UX, except extra amplified because of the strong emphasis on hierarchy, formal degrees and their, errm, heavy processes.
Perhaps we will have a "Beijing regulatory effect" positively impacting the world like the Bruxelles and California ones.
Similar thing with batteries on airplanes, tube trains, ferries and underground garages. China cares about fire hazard, other countries care about ideology.
Not even ideology anymore, see US. Democratic country has been attacked in a biggest war since WW2, and they've decided to halt all support and attack Iran instead.
Mazda used to have do the best most user friendly controls and bragged about it as a differentiator... but the new cx-5 is a touch screen-only monstrosity
Then again, I'm someone who likes the yoke steering, and invested a few weeks acclimating to the lack of steampunk turn stalks.
For physical controls, it always comes down to "What did you want to do?" There are very few that are actually needed.
https://sim-lab.us/cdn/shop/files/mercedes-product-image.png...
If you have, say, a HVAC fan speed knob with mechanical stops at the low and high end, and a detent, you never have to look at it. If you have an increase/decrease switch, you may need to look at the display to find out what you're doing. In a car, this means head-down time, eyes off the road.
I have a Black and Decker branded humidifier, which comes from "W Appliance Ltd", a licensee of the Black and Decker name. It's an ultrasonic humidifier with a 1.45 gallon tank and a big filter to remove dissolved solids, so it runs well on tap water. It's an effective humidifier.
This device is an example of how to botch the user interface for a very simple device. There's a big round display, about 12cm across. This has various dedicated icons and a central number display. Around it is a ring which displays a moving bar pattern when the device is running.
From left to right, we have five buttons. They're just touchable areas on the case, not actual pushable controls. The first button is On/Off, and, inevitably today, the same button does both functions. The display lights up when on.
The second button turns on a negative ion generator. This isn't an advertised feature, and it may not actually do anything. If this feature is on, a tiny icon illuminates on the display. This thing is down on the floor and you can't see the smaller icons without getting down on your knees. If you hold this button down for two seconds, the decorative bar pattern on the display is toned down, but not fully turned off.
The third button is fan speed. Available values are 1 to 3. Default is 2. 1 is useless, and 2 is mostly useless, because the water condenses on top of the unit rather than humidifying the room.
The fourth button sets the humidity. Values from 45% to 90% can be cycled through. There's one two-digit display, and it shows the humidity being set when the button has been pushed recently. Otherwise it shows the humidity being measured.
The fifth button sets a timer to turn the thing off after some number of hours.
When the water tank is empty, a tiny icon illuminates. The main display does not change or go dark. The one actionable piece of info the device can give the user is barely visible.
Removing the water tank or turning the device off resets all settings to the defaults. So after each refill, the user must go through setup again.
There's an optional remote available, with the same five buttons.
All this thing needed was one big knob for setting the humidity, with an off position. Plus a nice big indicator light to indicate an empty tank. Instead, they designed a complex user interface that makes it worse.
This kind of mistake appears when UI people design button systems.
Settings are great on a touchscreen. A wide variety of options, easily navigated to and explained. They suck on physical buttons, it ends up being like setting the time on a VCR.
Controls on the other hand deserve physical buttons. Or levers. or dials/knobs/spinners. It should depend on muscle memory, and the type of control.
I also thing driving status should be on a dashboard in front of you, not on the central display. (looking at you tesla)
And some should be multiple places. It might be nice to set your volume with a physical knob, but also on the steering wheel.
1. Put them always in the same place. Especially the "back" or "exit" button!
2. Each button should do one thing, not switch between 3 or more modes that you should look to understand which one you've just activated. Negative example: one button to cycle from cuise control, to drive assist, to speed limit, and back to off.
3. The area where a tap is interpreted as a button press should not also be where a swipe is recognized. In moving vehicles it is too easy for your finger to swing just an inch before touching the screen.
4. The active area of a virtual button must be large, larger than the icon it displays, so large that you shouldn't be distracted from driving just to aim at it!
It appears wishful thinking that physical buttons are coming back. This would be an idea whose time has gone. It does not even matter companies that physical buttons are better, or they can offer as choice (at higher price) if someone wanted.
Like remote working, office cubicles, fast and lightweight websites, ad-free content, one time purchase software incentives of all parties are aligned against people who bear cost of these decisions. So I do not expect this to change.
I am a big believer in keeping "product people" away from UI design for dangerous machinery.
The eyes and the attention of the driver should be on the road. All the audio visual noise from the car is just plain dangerous. I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures. I do not want beeps on anything else distracting me while I am driving.
My Volvo will, for instance, flash the same type of visual alert when fuel level is low (permanent "do you want to navigate to a fuel station" modal window obscuring navigation, speedometer and so on) -- as when it encounters a serious engine malfunction. It will steal a bit of my attention when it pops up. One of those days, someone will have an accident because of this moronic design, its statistically certain.
Same with wipers fluid level low. I need to click on the button to hide the message.
It will on occasion beep very loud when it thinks I am not braking hard enough. The map in the google android car navi rotates when i am just trying to pan. When I want to select an alternative route I need to very precisely touch a very small area on the screen, and more often than not instead of selecting the alternative route it will actually rotate the map.
It is clear to me that either the people designing car UIs are staying away from those cars, or are just incompetent. (Or, I guess, both).
What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance. It's dangerous to tell the driver they're low on fuel if we distract them. But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.
Also guessing you’re relatively detail oriented and don’t run out of gas, per:
“I don't want my car to draw my attention to itself for anything less than a critical engine/tyre pressure failures.”
The general public though… uh oh!
I mean, there are product people who can do UI design for dangerous machinery. Put them back in charge. It seems like in the last decade, these product people were replaced with product people from Internet Attention-Monetizing companies and Gacha games, where you are rewarded if your product "attracted eyeballs" and "fueled engagement" and kept users hooked. These guys moved into car companies and are trying to do the same thing to drivers who are trying to navigate their cars at high speeds.
I think if I were a car company OEM trying to do it right, I'd look at every resume that came across my desk and if they ever worked for an internet software or game company, I'd chuck it in the trash.
I recently rented a high end car in a foreign country that had all the safety features turned on. Before I arrived I was worried about driving in an unfamiliar country. After I wondered, could I have crashed at all? I was so augmented.
Engineers should be delegated to the worker-bee level and you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.
It's possible they tested touch screens with people using prototypes and whatnot but did not do their due diligence to test it long-term. On first impression, touch screens seem cool, futuristic, and flashy. It's really only when you try to daily drive the car that you realize they're annoying and a regression from physical buttons.
But, they present very well on sales room floors and car shows.
Remember you have the stupid stuff that Tesla pushed hard during the peak Elon reality distortion field time. I regularly are in a Toyota, BMW and Honda, and all of these have well thought out touch/knob implementations.
This is part of the modern UI paradox. Never before has UI and UX gotten so much attention, and logging, and tracking, and research, etc. But of course with all that additional attention UI and UX is generally getting worse over time. I have my theories why, but I'd bet they're paying for decent talent here and are coming to the wrong conclusions.
... I cannot believe they actually put them in a base model Sprinter.
Do they hate tradespeople?
If the outcome of my interaction with the interface (e.g. tap a place on the screen) is a function of not just where i tap but the last 2-6 places i recently tapped (menus etc) suddenly you've added massive complexity and mental overhead.
can't wait to get back to a button that does the same thing every time every time i press it [1]
tesla screens, carplay, mercedes screens, its been getting worse for a while
1) I know in reality most are sliders or an on/off toggle but the point stands
Many of these German car companies are following what sells well in Chinese markets, more and more screens. IMO, nothing beats the feeling and assurance of tactile buttons/toggles/knobs.
In 2022, they moved to a piano black console with haptic "buttons". It also seems like there are somehow fewer of them; I'm not sure if more functions moved into the touchscreen or what.
Anyway, needless to say, I have no interest in the 2022+ with the haptics.
I would have imagined that car infotainment controls would be a small fraction of the BOM, so I've been wondering if it's not really a cost thing. Sort of like small phones or 3D TVs from the early 2000's.
Source - I work in an OEM.
Mate, they're saving fractions of a cent on a part, let alone a dollar. You're probably getting promoted to CEO if you manage to save a dollar on a part. I've seen them cut 2mm of copper wiring in the ECU for the cost savings. 2mm!
Also worked for an OEM.
Modern vehicle luxury is disgusting and decadent.
They have struck a really good balance between traditional interfaces and the benefits of screens.
They now resell a Chinese EV with a very Tesla model 3 inspired interior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_6e#/media/File%3AMazda6e...
I didn’t find the original press release but you can find a lot of copies like the following article.
https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-...
All of the buttons on the steering wheel are physical buttons, the heated seats, steering wheel heater etc. all physical buttons.
The only blip is the capacitive buttons that are dual use for climate control or media control (you press a button to switch between the two modes) but even that's preferable to having to hunt in a touchscreen interface to set the AC when trying to keep your eyes on the road - especially with dials to change the temperature/change the volume.
The question is: who was in charge of these design decisions and what kind of respect and esteem did these people command as leaders at these large companies ?
A followup question: what professional consequences accompany terrible design decisions in an arena where such decisions are life threatening ?
Don't let your competition hire away your top talent.
Legislatively
Right now its just ok. My friends S class has visibly mis-aligned buttons (a 200k car). My other friends electric S-class bean-thingy has squeaking doors (a 2 year old, 120k-when-new car) and feels surprisingly cheap to touch and drive. Sure, small sample and all of that but I don't think those are exceptions.
I only drove one Chinese car, and it was just a normal experience - what I'd expect from a volvo, bmw, or audi. Good UI on the infotainment, was below average annoying. No big difference vs. a merc. For sure not a qualitative difference in levels of refinement.
Mercedes-Benz?
It’s a W212 E-Class, bought new just a few months before the all new generation hit the market.
It has no touchscreen. But the UI/UX is terrible anyway. My dad still has no idea how to bring up the tire pressure monitoring screen, for example. Using the buttons to navigate a myriad of menus is not exactly straightforward.
The physical user manual book that came with the car has limited information and recommends viewing the user manual through the screen. The screen is not a touchscreen. There’s a knob in between the seats to navigate the system. Very terrible experience.
On the other hand, a Honda economy car that I used to have had the most straightforward physical controls imaginable.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, eliminating touchscreen by itself will not necessarily make anything easier, especially if the car itself is complex.
Despite being nearly a decade old at the time of purchase, it was in nearly perfect condition, well-maintained, had low mileage, and had already faced most of the depreciation it ever would.
1. Reflections make you tilt, just to make some pesky highlights go away. Even if they are angled properly, there's always something (like a sun reflected by a watche's face) what causes nuissance at any angle
2. Car can go from a tunnel to a sunny valley in few seconds. That's 5 to 8 stops of dynamic range difference, that a human eye is easily designed to handle. Auto adjusting screen brigtness is never as bright as necessary in sunny conditions. Even if it were, it would be a significant battery drain and an element, that heats the cars interior already unnecessarily.
3. You don't have pure blacks in many of them, so that annoying halo at the corner of the eye is often present. You can solve it with an OLED, but those are even worse in bright daylight
4. All of the usually mentioned tactile feedback facts - you can reach with your hand to a AC knob, feel it's current set by finding the bulge with a finger and gently turn exactly how you want them. Zero lag, no eye contact necessary at all (keep that on the road!), instant feedback. Nothing that any screen can ever give.
5. Biggest gripe of all - modality. I think that there were some high ranking studies done early in design exactly against this type of input for high risk applications. Modality is the biggest enemy of discoverability and throws extra delays into otherwise instant input.
6. If you use a LCD variant, they interact with sunglasses polarity filter and, at some orientations, can be blocked altogeter. As you often use sunglasses exactly, because you want to see the road the best, it's contrary to the main objective of the control again.
7. Refocusing. If you can use a tactile control, with a good feedback, you're freeing your eyes from the need to adjust it's lens to focus from far to near to far again. Not many people are aware, that this is even happening, and can lead to overestimating your ability to keep engaged attention on the road.
I'd pay extra for a zero screen variant in a jiffy. Had I ever need to use a screen, I would've put my phone in a holder instead.
WINTER AND GLOVES!
Yes it’s a first world proven that I have to take gloves off to turn on my heated seats but buttons made sure stupid problems like this never happened in the first place
Note if you give up a screen they aren’t going to replace it with analog controls. It’s just too expensive, instead you’ll get something that turns to control your AC, but it’s really converted to a digital signal immediately and it’s physical rotation won’t be synchronized with the state of your AC like they were in the old days. I also really hate capacitive buttons which are worse than unsynced dials and screens, it’s like a touch screen with a fixed function.
The iPad taped to the dash was horrible. Too many presses to do anything climate related, which is something you do mess with a little more when driving a convertible with the top down.
But the worst part was when you start the car and it starts to heat / cool. While it is working to reaching your desired temperature, it shows an indeterminate progress bar in the button to adjust the temperature.
REALLY distracting.
Ended up getting an M8, the pinnacle of BMW before hybridization and full touch screens. If only it had an analogue cluster...
also while i'm ranting can we teach people about regenerative braking? every uber or lyft driver that has an EV actually uses the brakes and i'm getting whiplash every time we have to stop.
I had to choose a smaller entertainment system so I can have knobs..
IMO luxury manufacturers like MB and BMW tried to squeeze larger screens, more of them and there was not enough space to put those screens, buttins and vents. Some luxuty brands make vents supper slim.
If the controls were a touchscreen, OR an physical switch that operated the locks electronically, the locks simply wouldn't work at all. I hate all the latency and ignored commands from physical buttons that work through software almost as much as I hate touchscreens.
The empowerment and psychological difference between a world where I /make/ things happen and a world where I /request/ things that may or may not happen feels like it is often overlooked.
It feels great. The touch screen is there for finer control when I’m stopped or for the passenger. But I can do everything in memorable ways using the knobs and buttons.
Other manufacturers tried to copy it, and when any normal person had to interact with touch everything - the real opinions of how absolute garbage it was came out.
Having a big screen to display navigation and audio is awesome. Removing things like physical vents, volume control, gear selection, turn signal stalk - those are all idiotic decisions made to maximize margin on every car sold and COMPLETELY user hostile.
I'm just pleasantly surprised the germans listened to their customers.
I do enjoy physical controls for things that are constantly being used while driving for safety purposes and all of that exists for my model. Dropping stalks was too far imo, but for a car maker that wants to remove the driver it's not surprising. Mine has two stalks and I think that's the Goldilocks version. The auto shifter is surprisingly good though.
Everything else in the Tesla is completely fine where it is. Even if I do need to reach for something there's always voice. Saying I'm hot/cold or take me to X or play my playlist or whatever works completely fine. If it's not, just adjust it when you stop like you should be doing anyway.
Plenty of things to dislike about my car but this isn't one of them. The only button, or a thing a button replaced, that is missing on my car is the manual door release in the back which is a pretty egregious omission that does make me a tad angry. I'm going to have to drill a hole in my door for that one.
Teslas have a mere two buttons and are generally a joy to use. Why? Because the UI/UX was taken seriously, and the cpu hardware wasn't sourced from the dolllar store. This combination resulted in a screen-only experience that is responsive and easy to use (if you disagree with this, I will point you to Tesla's consumer satisfaction ratings, which say otherwise).
Every other car manufacturer followed suit, but made a critical mistake in that they only saw the cost savings in not needing to manufacture and build a bunch of switches. They forgot to do the necessary UI/UX work, and fitted their vehicles with a cpu out of a TI-83.
The reason why consumers are complaining about every other car manufacturer isn't because they have no buttons; it's because the screen-only experience isn't intuitive. Make it intuitive and the complaints go away.
I really struggle to understand what's so damned difficult about this. They've admitted touchscreens annoy the hell out of drivers and capacitive touch buttons are even worse. Is it really going to take yet another lifecycle before they actually do something about it?
Or dashes that are fully lit at night even if the headlights aren’t on, so the driver doesn’t have an obvious visual indicator that their tail lights aren’t lit.
So many rules I’d enforce were I king of the automakers.
Tesla despite fsd gimmick and clearly failing timelines and promises... They really created an infotainment system with a very clear and functional design in mindm that is very understandable and extensible:
1. long(er) vs gas car charges need a "TV/gaming experiences"
2. real self driving car needs the same as #1 ^
3. every ui needs to be fully remotely accessible/adjusted due to no human driver. Temperature, seats preferences, even how A/C blows your face. Ideally by voice. This is why grok lands very well, even on very old cars with powerful enough chip.
German cars just blindly follow tesla "large screen" with no idea how to even watch a movie or plan any real game there. In same manner they are not built to survive autonomy.
Touch screens are (IMHO) terrible for cars because there's no tactile feedback that allows you to use them without looking at the screen. Dials, buttons and switches can be felt and used. It goes beyond being lazy. It's unsafe.
The only reason we got trouch screens in cars at all is cost-cutting.
Absolute brain rot. The customer already has a phone. They don't need your screen, they already have one.
This statement is logically on a level with something like "yesterday is colder than outside." ... he believes in screens - because if you want to connect - you have to make the magic work behind it? I mean what? This is Olympic level marketing bullshit. It's frightening that somebody blurting gibberish like that is heading a department. But then again this car company is anyway merely a pale shadow of its former self and about to get eaten by the Chinese and very deservedly so.
"Can I pay you the $10 and you make my car not shit?" — "No, I'm sorry, we only make shit now".
Solid, soulless vehicle though.
