Volkswagen Reveals That It Has Brought Back Physical Buttons

New interior photos of an upcoming Volkswagen EV reveal the company’s previously announced scheme to bring back certain physical buttons will soon be a reality. What’s being revealed is a small, budget EV called the ID. Polo that may never see a U.S. release, but the company has made it clear that this is the new button plan for its cars generally.

As previously noted by Gizmodo, there have been rumblings for some time of consumer exhaustion around car interiors that resemble an array of tablet computers. VW is not, to be clear, issuing a full-throated rebuke of infotainment screens by adding what looks like a handful of new physical buttons to this model—and this update also addresses a totally separate problem unique to the controls on Volkswagen steering wheels—but it’s at least a fresh data point showing a greater number of physical buttons inside a car rather than fewer.

Aspects of the company’s earlier pivot away from certain physical buttons were deemed a failure by VW itself, with design chief Andreas Mindt speaking about the issue with extraordinary candor to British car magazine Autocar. “We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone: it’s a car,” Mindt said.

VW fans were annoyed at Mindt and his colleagues perhaps most of all because of confusing, non-clicky buttons that require the driver to squint down at the steering wheel to perform basic functions like changing their music volume.

Several essential buttons that had been removed, Mindt said, “will be in every car that we make from now on. We understood this,” he told Autocar, adding, “From the ID. 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions—the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light—below the screen.” According to the naming scheme laid out by Volkswagen, what Mindt confusingly referred to in this case as the “ID. 2all” pretty clearly refers to the ID. Polo.

Kai Grünitz, whose title at the company is “board member for technical development,” said in a new press release that what’s being unveiled now is the company’s “new interior architecture, starting with the all-new ID. Polo,” and that includes “an intuitive operating environment with physical buttons and newly structured screens.”

Elsewhere, the release notes “Separate buttons for climate functions and the hazard warning lights are integrated into a strip below the infotainment screen.”

Uh, but: the photos also show one of those increasingly trendy non-circular steering wheels. Volkswagen has been subtly tiptoeing toward less round steering wheels for a while now, and this is another step in that dubious direction. This one’s not quite shaped like the Tesla yoke, which has been accused of being a safety risk, and it’s also certainly not the abomination shown off almost a decade ago when VW first teased the ID. Buzz. But the freshly unveiled steering wheel shape for the ID. Polo is not a circle—more like a 2-D version of the shape a volleyball takes when you step on it.

As far as I know, consumers made it abundantly clear many years ago that they just want the steering wheel to be good (and to not fly off while they’re driving). But if you’re the one driver in the entire world who hates circular steering wheels in particular, congrats on another win!