So we leased a 2025 Audi Q5 last year; it’s the first time in a while I’ve driven a brand new car, and I have THOUGHTS.

First of all, the car is an extremely pleasant place to spend time. It’s comfortable, has a great stereo, is roomy (at 6'3" I’m a bit of a Large Lad, so space is important). Plenty of trunk space for what we need, a big sunroof, mostly sensible physical ergonomics. I quite like the HUD, for instance, because it’s purely read-only and gives me GPS directions, speed limits, the time, and like, the radio station or the now playing, without my having to look away from the road – that’s good, responsible design. Right on, Ingolstadt! It’s perfectly fast enough for driving like I do, which is to say, I don’t find myself wishing it had a few extra BHP. And as a winter vehicle, the quattro is pretty great.

What’s taken some getting used to, for me, are the driving position, which is more upright than I’m used to; the size of the car, which is considerable; the engine start/stop. The adaptive cruise works well, when you turn off the lane detection, which doesn’t – adaptive cruise works because it’s not relying on cameras alone (it has radar); lane detection sucks because it does.¹ All of these are now, after a year, pretty much fine.

However, what isn’t fine is twofold, and it’s pretty bad.

First, the climate control system is both overly complex and deeply fussy, and doesn’t have a good, simple abstraction. Say you want to turn on the A/C compressor to reduce the humidity in the cabin and unfog windows; well, in order to do that, you press the “soft” capacitive button (PLENTY MORE ON THIS TO COME) labelled ‘A/C’, and then hold on as the fans go to max and the A/C turns on full blast. Oh, right, I’d set a temperature; so the car thinks that what I want is to reduce the cabin temperature to 11°C as quickly as possible.

OK, so then you turn up the temperature – again with soft buttons – and now it shuts the A/C off. What? Why? All I can figure out is that the car has modelled the climate system with a state machine that is totally alien, cannot easily be derived from first principles, and doesn’t make the important things easy. For instance, I do not care what the cabin temperature is; I just want it “cooler” or “warmer”, and I want a system with three controls, basically – volume of air, temperature of air, and the presence of the A/C compressor. But the car Knows Better, apparently, because it has this dumb, complicated, fussy system that seems predicated on the user knowing and caring about 0.5°C differences in cabin temperature. Maybe this is big in Germany, but we thick-headed North Americans just want a simple system.

So that’s super duper annoying, but what I actually hate are those soft buttons. The car has either delegated functions behind the central panel touchscreen (climate, sound), or assigned them to dedicated but soft buttons. There is no “toggle A/C button” – there’s a tap target on a capacitive touchscreen that is fixed but still soft. Meaning, while driving, you have to look over, which defeats the purpose of having buttons.²

A fixed, physical button provides non-visual affordances for the operator that soft buttons simply cannot, and while I’m driving, I do not want to look away from the road if I can avoid it. Proprioception – our sense of where our own body is and how it is moving³ – is a much better foundation for simple, repetitive tasks in a car than visual memory over a set of images on a screen. Not only do I have to look away from the road, the focus distance is different, and for someone like me, with lousy eyes, that’s a few hundred ms of context switching that’s impossible to avoid.⁴ There’s a volume control, so that part is easy; it requires zero attention from the operator. That’s good! But changing the balance/fader, to send the annoying kids’ music to the back seat? Requires hunting through several layers of visual menus. Boo! That’s bad!

So there are soft buttons, and that’s bad enough, but what’s a real kick in the shorts are the soft buttons that have fixed functions; combining all the downsides of soft buttons with all those of fixed buttons; I will never use the stupid “turn off the stop/start” function, but if I did want to use it, that’s configuration, and sure, fine, bury that in a series of menus on the touch screen, who cares? There are what, a half-dozen dedicated functions on these touch screens, and Audi has decided that turning off traction control (again, why on Earth would I want to do this in a Q5?!?) is important enough to be given pride of place? I imagine that this is a homologation thing, that Audi would have to test the car with fully remappable buttons; but there’s one on the steering wheel! Only, it’s not really remappable, it can be mapped to a fixed set of functions, none of which are useful to me. In other words, the system as designed knows better, and you’d better just lump it.

This more or less has me thinking, well, if software is eating the world,⁵ and this is the result, then software was a mistake. But it’s really more about the complicated economics of cars, I think; these sorts of features only really start to grind one’s gears after one has been driving a car for a while, and basically nobody gets to drive a car for a while before buying one, so there’s very little pressure to improve. I have been led to understand that Euro NCAP is slowly slowly rolling out rating rules around the presence of physical controls;⁶ hopefully, this weird, bad trend of Tesla Envy – which is, itself, a pathetic case of iPhone Envy, of course – has run its course, and people realize that no, a giant touchscreen isn’t good UI in a car.

I’m no Luddite about this – the software that’s invisible, like in the ECU, that’s good! And the high-tech functions, like the adaptive cruise, or even the speed limit detection, or the HUD; they’re good, too. So the issue isn’t that I want a car with carburetors and no synchros on the four-speed; it’s that I want the car to be good at being a car, and I don’t want it to be bad at being a phone. It’s a kind of honesty and humility I want from my industrial designers and engineers in a lot of domains; but it’s also the domain where people can die from the mistakes, so let’s get started on making cars be cars again?