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Most of my rental cars now use touch screen interface. Elsewhere in this page, a developer complained that we "just don't take the time to learn what we need to."

No.

Just ... no.

A critical control system should be simple, able to be used without taking one's eyes off the wheel/road.

Any control system (atmosphere, lights, defroster, wipers, ...) that requires you to remove your attention from the road in order to operate a touch screen interface with a generally terrible UI/UX is BROKEN. And dangerous to boot.

This is what I find now in many (not all, but the majority) of my rentals.

Want to turn on defroster (which is usually a snap decision as the rear window is getting foggy/frosty)? You have to navigate a screen. Not push a single button.

Want to turn down the radio? Now you have to navigate MULTIPLE screens to find the O(&^*&^$^$&^& control pane for the radio, and shut it off.

And so on.

This is not progress.

This is risk.

Pardon my pun, but someone is asleep at the wheel here. These control and interface systems are inherently broken, by not being as simple as possible.

I agree somewhat here. My car has volume controls and station changer on the backside of the wheel, along with knobs for the volume. I have knobs and or an up/down arrow for temperature adjustment.(Depending on the car I'm driving.) Ironically Navigation is completely touch screen, which is dangerous. I tend to use my phone if I need directions, because the car system is cumbersom.

In general I'm frustrated by the loss of consistency in operating cars. A couple years ago I volunteered to help valet cars at a charity dinner for a university. Someone asked me because they knew that I drove manual so I'd be able to "drive anything." It was quite comical to discover how untrue this was, particularly since the event tended to attract people with luxury cars...

A lot of luxury cars no longer have a conventional key but some kind of electronic system. Sometimes it is proximity based, so you simply have to have the key and push a button on the steering column or dashboard or maybe center console. Other cars have a key that has some kind of electrical connector and must be inserted into the side of the steering column and then you push a button, and still another one I drove seemed to have a proximity key but you had to stick it into the side of the steering column and turn to start the engine.

Then you have to figure out the parking brake... Used to be that it was a ratchet pedal, or a handle in the center console, or one of those pull-and-twist deals in some 4x4s. This was already a little annoying, but now there's a huge diversity of buttons and toggles in non-obvious places. At least the electrical ones usually disengage if you hit the gas.

Now for the automatic gear selector...

One guy somewhat sheepishly apologizes that his car was hard to drive... but it was an old stick-shift 4runner with a strange feeling clutch. That one I was actually able to work out!

> If I ever"upgrade" my car audio, I'm going back to an old-school style unit, with an aux plugin.

Last week at lunch, we were lamenting the disappearance of headphone jacks from phones. We speculated that a Bluetooth-to-jack adapter would be a popular accessory, letting people keep their old headphones for use with their latest media players. I'd wager there's a whole class of products that might fit here, for example a set of old-fashioned analog knobs backed by Bluetooth or some other interface to the players, as an alternative for those who feel more comfortable - or safer - with the old gear.

https://flic.io/ and the classic https://griffintechnology.com/us/powermate-bluetooth

Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, has an article about that (not touchscreens, but mouse-like device that sounds even worse): http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/interaction_design_f.html

It's the same in smartphones but it's less critical. New tech teams forgot the 50 years of stupid tactile interfaces and how much people enjoy and get efficient with touch.

> In my current run of the mill, screen based, "infotainment" system, doing this without endanger myself and others, requires stopping the vehicle, and undertaking a series of awkward and unresponsive controls, none of which are accessed on the same screen!

Toyota, the automaker under discussion here, offers steering wheel controls that are pretty decent. The main weakness of such systems is that the interface between stereo and phone has such little functionality, and that is where many people will be playing their music. Eventually you're going to be poking at a phone and a badly-designed app unless you're happy to simply play everything from a long playlist.

I own GM products and an Audi. My GM vehicles have Apple Carplay integrated, the only catch is I need to plug my iPhone in via the USB on the car and that menu shows up. Even with just Bluetooth, I have decent control, via stearing wheel and touch screen.

How sophisticated are the things you can do to control the stereo and song selection without taking your eyes off the road? I have to admit that for me, that's pretty much the whole ballgame. I can see how something like Siri might aid that, potentially.

Worse, I believe some cars are now doing this with almost all of the controls, not just the entertainment system controls.

Controls I want to operate without looking at them: fan, temperature, air routing, defrost, windshield wipers, high beams, turn signals.

The fan and AC on a touch screen is an immense failure. Here in Norway there are many tunnels on the motorway and in some conditions this leads to the windscreen steaming up a few seconds after entering the tunnel. Imagine not being able to see out of the car until you fiddle with a touch screen at 120 km/h. Hire cars, where you aren't familiar with the layout are going to be a lot of 'fun'.

I was surprised with a friend's Jeep where the seat warmers were in the touch screen interface. Really? On my old 2003 wagon, they were just dials.

To be fair, on a Jeep the screen is probably easier to seal against dust/dirt intrusion. But otherwise, I agree and much prefer buttons/knobs. Also - heated seats? On a Jeep? Being uncomfortable is part of what you're paying for...

You mean there are cars where windshield wipers, high beams, turn signals are operated by touchscreen?

"If I ever"upgrade" my car audio, I'm going back to an old-school style unit, with an aux plugin."

I ended up splitting the difference, going for a modern Bluetooth equipped radio with old-school physical buttons and a knob. I play music through my phone over Bluetooth and control playback with the phone's voice control. My eyes never leave the road, and my right hand never leaves the steering wheel except to change volume, which is easy with the huge knob and muscle memory.

Totally agree. My car radio still has 10 station preset buttons that are very easy to access along with next/prev buttons on the steering wheel. My wife care has a touch screen where only 4 stations are shown at a time and you need to push/touch extra to scroll through the list. None of it has dedicated buttons, so it's a lot of looking and poking around. Not appropriate at all for a driver.

Exceedingly poor UI design.

The worst I've seen for presets is in GM's implementation. You first have to touch a tiny "up" arrow in the bottom right of the screen, and then you have five touch presets along the bottom. Madness!

For some reason most people like bad user interfaces by default. They randomly decide on a layout and are immediately too proud to consider anything else.

I disagree somewhat, the issue isn't that the infotainment system is a touch screen based series of menus, the problem is they are almost universally shit. They often use resistive screens which have been utter shit since the day they were invented, and only support single touch, making them useless for gestures. The software is slow, the refresh rate of the screen/GPU is brutally slow and primitive, etc.

I don't know if capacitive screens and proper GPUs are just somehow incompatible with cars, or what the engineering problem is to get solid framerates with solid responsive time in a good looking screen, but no car manufacturer other than Tesla seems to have been able to solve this problem.

Now that doesn't address everything you're pointing out here, which several of these are legit points. I'm just saying if my car's touch screen felt more like an iPad and less like an Android tablet from 2006, it would be a metric fuckton easier for me to use.

A neighbor lab did some works about haptic feedback design for automotive touchscreens [1]. They worked on user comfort using fuzzy models. This could be implemented right now but it seems it's not automotive makers (thus casual customers) first priority. Why would we need good UI when driving is all autonomous.. [1]https//www.researchgate.net/publication/280047157_A_Fuzzy_Expert_Model_of_Haptic_Perception_for_Automobile_Touch-Screen_Displays

More or less one could have a couple (programmable) bluetooth rotary knobs and buttons assembled in a old-style radio dashboard panel.

Of course provided that the stupid proprietary toouchscreen infotainment system can actually be interfaced with them.

I don't think such a product exists (or that current infotainment systems would allow such a connection), but it could be a nice thingy.

The steering wheel controls in my Volvo (from 2006!) are excellent. I have an aftermarket Bluetooth device from Grom Audio which allows me to control playback on my phone from the controls on my steering wheel. It really is the best of both worlds.

Yes, older cars are so much better in this way. These interfaces are garbage, the hardware is laggy and the whole thing is ugly and filled with latency, but it hardly matters because physical controls will always be better.