Yep, my favorite car controls were our ‘66 Bonneville. Pull the mechanical light switch out to turn on headlights. Turn the switch to turn on the overhead light. Tap the floor switch for brights. Five punch keys on the radio. A radio volume and tuning knob. A slider for air temperature. Another slider for air on the face or floor. A knob for fan speed. That was it. That was the entirety of controls on a luxe car.
Oh, there were two pull knobs by your knees to open huge air doors by your feet to blown in enormous amounts of air on the freeway.
Simple, hardly any memorization required, and could be operated by feel in dead of night.
I’ve been driving my wife’s GLK Mercedes SUV for nine years and still cannot remember where everything is or what it does. Changing the fan speed is almost impossible - the buttons are the size of pinheads, located very low where you cannot see them, it’s nearly impossible to put your finger on them while driving, and they printed faint, tiny icons on black buttons set way down in the darkest part of the dashboard.
Today’s controls designers are absolutely idiots. There was a huge push for “human factors” to be implemented in nuclear power plants after Three Mile Island because the controls were confusing. The auto makers need to hire a lot of “human factors” people to really understand how people react to all the BS larded onto today’s cars.
Amen to that. When I travel to Mass to visit family and rent a car at the airport, it takes forever to figure out the controls so I can operate it reasonably safely. And, of course, Avis never puts an owners manual or instruction sheet in the vehicles, you're on your own.
Just your mentioning of that brought an old memory to mind. The way to set the “presets” was to manually turn the tuning knob to your selection and then to fully depress the “punch key” of choice, all the way in once. From then on, just a slight depression of that key would return you to that preset. How many remember doing that?!