The manipulation of complex systems with many functions is often realised by inserting many control elements. The easiest way to realize a suitable interface between human being and machine for such systems is to assign an individual control element to each function. However, starting at a certain number of control elements the operation speed decreases, because control elements must be searched to use them. In vehicles - especially in passenger cars - an accumulation of control elements is recognizable particularly for the tertiary tasks which serve the comfort and the entertainment of the vehicle passengers. For this reason more and more car manufacturers replace these control elements with a central control element in combination with an associated display in the form of a LCD-screen. This control element has the form of a rotary knob which can be rotated, pushed, or - in case of BMW - translational moved. The use of adaptive forces and torques can implicate many advantages. For some applications adaptive forces are mandatory. To determine this, the basic circumstances have to be examined. Only when the basic circumstances are entirely transparent, all advantages can be utilized in its entirety. To get transparency subject tests applying fix torque paths should be conducted. In such tests the effects can be examined successively by changing single variables. With adaptive forces it will be possible to increase the importance of the somatosensory perception in the future. Information can be sensed by the use of a control element in a similar way to what has been visually presented to the user so far. The effect of the information transference can be further improved if - in addition to adaptive forces and torques - the form and geometry of a control element is also designed adaptive. Research projects, that deal with the analysis of how an adaptive control element should look like, exist and can be combined with the demonstrated approaches.