Mercedes is bringing some buttons back to its mostly touchscreen cabins. Volkswagen and Audi are, too. But BMW? Nope. BMW is steadfast in its mission to make you control your car’s interior with everything except buttons, and it’s blaming that on young people. BMW Group Australia CEO Vikram Pawah recently told CarExpert that young people “want things done quickly and they’re multitasking. And we have to keep that in mind. That’s how customers are evolving. They are multitasking.”
The youths (it’s a struggle as a New Jerseyan to not hear “youts” in Joe Pesci’s voice) Pawah is referring to are people under the age of 45. Since that firmly keeps me categorized as youthful for almost another decade, I’ll accept his terms. However, Pawah says that cars are a reflection of what’s happening in society and that people 45 and under want touch and voice controls over physical buttons.
“We can see that voice and touch are becoming more and more common. Maybe it’s a generational thing as well. You would see that a lot of the younger generation, maybe 45 or below, they’re tapped into these technologies at a faster pace, using voice, using touch.”
I’m sure it’s done countless focus groups and tons of research, collecting mountains of data about what customers want. But I’m not sure I agree with Pawah’s logic, here. His examples for the speed of its voice controls are asking the BMW iX3’s to take you to the coffee shop you went to last week, or move the airflow away from your face. Admittedly, that is convenient but I disagree with his logic. For voice controls to work, I have to ask a computer to do what I want, which puts a middleman in between me and the command. With a button, I just press it and it’s done. I don’t have to ask a computer something, hope it understands me, and then wait for it to carry out the request. I just do it. Done.
Pawah equates the shift toward buttonless cabins to the original iDrive. “People always feel uncomfortable with radical change. Do you remember when we introduced the iDrive back in 2001? And you remember what the world’s reaction was to the iDrive, and now look there’s hardly a car you get into where there’s not an iDrive,” he told the Australian outlet. And that’s true, BMW’s iDrive was revolutionary. Problem is that BMW’s rivals are seeing the touchscreen trend reverse. Both are claiming that the market is guiding them, so someone is wrong. It’ll be interesting to see who it is in the coming years.
