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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.)

The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.

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imo Audi/VW has the best dashboard GUI in the auto business bar BMW iDrive. Try using honda or toyota and you will see that it can be much much worse than audi, laggy and badly designed.

They have a nice LCD panel but they decided to not make it touch-enabled. So to enter a street address you're supposed to draw the characters with your finger Palm-Pilot-style on a crappy touchpad. It's absurd. That's on a 2018 model. I think they're fixing that in some of the 2019 models.

It's not the touchpad that annoys me, it's the fact that I generally seem to have to enter the address in the most non-intuitive order for it to find anything, e.g. first postcode, then street name, then street number.

First world problems, I guess.

They don't do this to annoy you but to allow you to keep your eyes on the road more frequently. You are supposed to draw the characters blindly, without looking at the touchpad. They carried out user tests that demonstrated that a real touchscreen captures the driver's attention to a much stronger degree than this system. It might look limiting and obsolete on first glance, but it reduces risks to life and health of all involved parties.

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