A Hyundai Ioniq 5 prototype shows a button-less cockpit despite earlier promises

While most industries adopt touchscreens, and in most cases, that makes sense, in the car business there's a significant push against the omission of physical buttons. And there's a good reason why - burying essential controls like the A/C in menus on the infotainment screen raises safety and usability concerns.

The dislike toward touchscreen controls is almost universal, so many automakers promised to take a step back and bring back physical controls for certain functions in the cockpit. Hyundai is one of those car manufacturers, but the latest spy shots of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 say otherwise.

What appears to be a test Ioniq 5 vehicle was spotted on the street with virtually no exterior changes. The interior, however, is another story. It adopts a big central infotainment screen with no physical buttons in sight.

What's more, the instrument cluster is gone, suggesting drivers would have to rely on a heads-up display or the main screen on the dashboard for information like current speed.

Some may argue that this is just a prototype, so the production-ready unit might adopt hardware buttons, but by the looks of it, it's very much an end-stage prototype. We wonder what Hyundai's explanation is going to be.

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