The case for knobs over touch screens.

I have a 2019 Advanced with a large screen that is almost always off. There's a huge button to the left of the screen to control temperature. I adjust it exactly once in summer and once in winter to set it to LO or HI. The fan speed, OTOH, I adjust all the time. I have to turn on the screen, press "climate," and find the tiny "fan up" and "fan down" buttons. It's very distracting so I usually do it while parked or at a stoplight. I wish the temperature button was a fan speed button. There are no steering wheel buttons for climate on the 2019 Advanced.

 

Um, I would quite seriously adumbrate that you should be able to operate all relevant controls while your eyes are absolutely fixated on a forward traffic situation. That was VERY clear in the aviation domain when you are dragging an airplane in on a short final approach watching traffic landing and taxiing on the runway below you and must adjust throttle, flap setting, pitch, roll and yaw controls, and god forbid, use the blasted radio to talk to approach control and/or the tower. God, man, taking your eyes off the quickly-changing situation in front and below you when milliseconds matter to operate ANY of those controls could get you killed. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m not totally sure if the radio on our Prius works, although I assume it does.)

 

Yeah copilot usually works the radio. In the absence of copilot, I might turn it on, and maybe hit AM button, which I know is tuned to CBC Radio2.

 

No steering wheel controls?

 

Never got comfortable with them, not sure why. Again, maybe too small and fiddly? And I can never remember which is which, they're uniform, I'm having to look down and study them, and my copilot starts telling me I'm headed off-road...

 

I've owned several cars with them, so I'm used to using them. The car also has voice command, but I keep forgetting to use it.

 

I think with 2012 they switched the buttons so that increase/decrease (of whatever) corresponded to upper/lower buttons, one heck of a lot more intuitive.

Yeah don't know, just never got the hang of it. I used them once or twice, but I had to spend so much time with eyes off the road reacquainting myself with the buttons, I didn't like it. The Touch-Tracer thing too: cute, but never caught on with me.