The media controls on my car. Previous and Next are Up and Down. Volume Up and Down are Right and Left.

This layout makes sense if you have used an old school mp3 player or similar.

Volume is left and right because it’s an analog of the volume bar on the screen.

Up and down is previous and next because play was controlled by a list UI so you were moving a cursor up and down between songs.

It’s not how I personally would prefer it, but it’s not as outlandish as it seems.

Hey, at least it's not a touch screen :)

My wife just reminded me that she was asked to take a survey about this car after she bought it.

She complained about these buttons being oriented stupidly, and the survey taker mentioned that this has been a common complaint for years. Nevertheless, BMW / Mini has stayed the course. Users be damned.

The speak-button looks like a farting stick-figure.

Ampersands on Lemmy, mildly infuriating

I want to know why do many cars don't have a play/pause button on the wheel, but do have a source button.

I change my source from my phone exactly never. I want to pause the audio all the time.

Drove a Kia once and it was the same. Up went back a track, down went forwards. Opposite of my intuition.

Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.

It's almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.

Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.

Wouldn't it be nice if an engineer had decision making power?

The designer of this layout look at the display, saw that the volume slider was going left/right and placed the buttons accordingly (probably what happened).

Same in my 2017 Toyota. Bought it new and trained my brain to use it. Someone finally released a replacement that's set up correctly, and now I'm relearning the control.

Preach! When did you ever hear someone say "please turn the volume right" or "can you play the up track"? It drives (NPI) me crazy in my Toyotas!

Think of it like this. Up arrow is forward and the down arrow is back. The volume then increases from left to right like most linear scales (that aren’t up and down). Yes the buttons should be the other way but there was probably some (poor) reasoning to why they are this way.

My VW is this way and it’s infuriating. It drives me nuts that Down is Next, it’s so backwards.

Volume should be up/down, and track left/right.

I’m curious if the left/right would be language dependent? English is left to right, so Right would be Next. Would Hebrew and Arabic be the opposite since they’re right to left languages?

I drove this make of car for a while; there's an optional head up display where the up and down buttons here let you cycle through contacts/the song queue/radio stations. I'd imagine it's the same interface without it, just displayed somewhere in the car where you're not looking while driving.

Having it so that up/down moves you up/down through the list when there's a visual display is way more intuitive than up/down being volume - frankly the volume bar on Windows, Mac, many TVs etc. goes from left (quiet) to right (loud) anyway

Made by people that use a volume slider and swipe for next... Such a horrible design in cars.

This is a Mini Cooper steering wheel.

Clearly you're meant to have the car on its side before playing any media

The up and down are used to go up and down in menus lists. It matches the animations as well. It would be infuriating if those buttons were on the horizontal.

So my question is, which is next: up or down?

My pet peeve has always been when media controls (like volume) are on the right side of the steering wheel rather than the left.

To me it makes a lot less sense to put them on the right when my right hand is already 10 inches away from another set of media controls (left-hand drive vehicle).

My 2004 Mazda, 2018 Mazda, and 2011 Kia all had it figured out and pretty much used the same layout for media controls and accessories like cruise control. My Ford, however, seems like no thought was put into it.

Return the car, it's obviously built by morons.

This is actually exactly how my telly remote works. Left and right are volume down and up respectively, up and down are next channel and previous channel respectively.

Name and shame. What make and model?

If you're turning left, they'll be correct

Is it a Japanese car?

My folks had a Volvo where the radio had 2 knobs and two buttons with arrows. One knob was volume, makes sense. The other knob and arrow buttons controlled the radio tuner and the thing to switch inputs from radio to cd to usb or whatever.

So on one hand you've got radio channels with about a hundred different options (90.1, 90.3, 90.5, etc), and on the other hand you've got maybe 5 different inputs. Guess which thing the knob controlled.

Rotate the controls the whole car 90 degrees CCW.

At least you have those ridges dividing the directions. My car has similar but oriented correctly and no ridges. All too often I skip to next when trying to increase volume. It’s really annoying

Makes perfect sense while you are holding a stick drift!

I would risk life and limb to crack that open and find a way to right this wrong.

I confirm that on a MINI Cooper the controls are also this way and the same as infuriating.

Same as my Toyota. It's a crazy indicator of how we expect things to be, but it's absolutely not a deal breaker.

Fucking Christ that is stupid. That would drive me insane.

I'm lucky that my Subaru has it right. Left right are back forward and up down is volume. My only complaint is that the button in the middle is mute, rather than pause. I can pause CDs, bluetooth audio, and even live radio. Why in hell would I ever choose mute over pause?

What about turning the switch 90 degrees? 🤔

Cars should come with ✖️⭕🟪🔺

My VW is like this as well. I don't like it either.

People actually use the steering wheel controls??? I use the cruise buttons but that's it