The 2022 Kia EV6's touch bar panel is smart (Update)

The 2022 Kia EV6’s climate and radio control panel is a weird one. It’s mostly made up of touch controls, but there are also two knobs. Countering usual logic, those two knobs don’t always control the same thing at the same time. Yeah, that’s where things get weird.

This is a situation where Kia has tried to have its cake and eat it too. Instead of having one set of controls for climate settings and another for radio/navigation, Kia decided it’s best to have a single strip of controls that you can change on the fly. A mode switcher of sorts is indicated by a blower fan and navigational arrow. Tap the touch panel here, and you’ll swap the control mode between displaying climate control settings and radio/navigation control settings. Yes, this means that the touch panel of controls is only displaying one or the other at any moment in time. It’s not only the touch panel that changes, too, but the knobs do different things based on which mode you have activated. When you’re in climate mode, twisting the knob changes the temperature setting. However, when you’re in radio/navigation mode, the driver side knob turns into a volume knob, and the passenger side knob turns into a tuning wheel.

It’s complicated to explain in words, but here’s a video to show it in action.

The idea here is fairly clear. Kia didn’t want to bury all of the vital car controls in the main touchscreen, but it also didn’t want to busy the dash with more buttons than necessary. There’s the tech aspect of it, too, in that such a control interface looks and feels futuristic compared to the company’s other center stacks.

Over the last few weeks with our new long-term tester, I’ve developed a love/irritation relationship with how these controls work in day-to-day life. On the plus side, if you’re looking for a button, it exists, and you don’t need to wade through the infotainment system to find it. You might have to tap the mode switcher to find it, but at least it’s there. I’m an especially big fan of the “Favorite” button indicated by a star that can be mapped to your desired shortcut — I set mine to go directly to Apple CarPlay/Android Auto. More and more new cars are ditching physical controls in favor of dumping everything into the main touchscreen, requiring multiple touches to find the desired effect, but not here.