Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola K\u00e4llenius says touchscreens in cars could continue to grow in the future – but he believes the industry might have reached peak “low button”.<\/p>\n
As with many of its rivals, the Stuttgart firm’s cars have focused on introducing large touchscreens in recent years at the expense of physical buttons.<\/p>\n
The tri-screen MBUX Hyperscreen can measure up to 1410mm wide in some cars, making it the largest such display in any production car.<\/p>\n
There have been complaints about the increasing number of controls moved from physical switches to the screen.<\/p>\n
However, while K\u00e4llenius acknowledged such concerns, he said: “We spend countless hours on UI [user interface]. I spend hours every year discussing this with our engineers and we joke it needs to be so easy that either a five-year-old kid or a Mercedes board member can use it. That is the hurdle, and once you familiarise yourself with it, it becomes second nature.”<\/p>\n
K\u00e4llenius also cited efforts to improve voice control systems but conceded “the industry as a whole might have gone a little bit too far” towards digital controls.<\/p>\n
He noted Mercedes has now introduced physical controls on the steering wheels in its cars and said: “Sometimes you get a bit ahead of yourself and do technology for the sake of technology and maybe forget a little bit about the customer. So from now on, you will see us reintroduce the most sensible buttons.”<\/p>\n
Asked if that meant the car industry had reached ‘peak screen’, K\u00e4llenius said: “I don’t know if we’re at peak screen, but we’re at low button.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola K\u00e4llenius says touchscreens in cars could continue to grow in the future – but he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20951],"tags":[3622],"class_list":["post-66632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mercedes-benz","tag-mercedes-benz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}