82% of vehicles sold this year came with a touch screen

It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1122803944206544897

--- The two axioms that explain your experience with devices that contain software (except Teslas):

I. It takes extraordinary effort to make software that's not horribly difficult to use.

II. Companies whose main focus isn't software don't expend extraordinary effort on it.

Arguably the reason Tesla is an exception is that it is actually a software company. ---

I remember buying aftermarket “din 1” size radios for my dad’s car in Europe.

It is insane to me that we are coming up with these impractical user interfaces with implausible limited use cases, when... we had interface that works! I'm refusing to let go of my aging Subaru, because any rental I've tried is impossible to drive without taking your eyes off the road or a myriad other safety and practicality compromises

"Playing weezer"

It might be good if voice control was perfect but it'a long way from that and still offers little benefit over buttons and knobs.

Plus, given that most voice recognition is done in the cloud these days, if something has voice control then I am immediately very suspicious of it.

The parts used in cars need to handle a lot of vibration and heat and last 10+ years.

The tech lags behind consumer electronics because consumer electronics don’t need to work in these difficult environments.

examples would be: touches to raise air suspension or adjust climate temperature without accidentally turning on seat heater.

Model 3.. no dashboard. a tragedy. Not only are critical displays to the side, the controls are even further to the side.

Touchscreens on the other hand lure the eyes into guiding the hand through the selection process, particularly when you lack a haptic reference point because the screen isn't handheld. And then the eyes are already focused on the screen when the next menu page shows up, so it's tempting to continue right there. I guess there must even be some threshold in UI slowness beyond which touchscreens are not quite as bad for safety as faster ones because one would quickly learn that there is plenty of time to focus on the road while the glacial computer's cogs are turning.

Even physical per-function controls are worse once the number of functions gets too high. Volume up/down is easy, but how do you {insert any of the hundreds of functions that you can make safely discoverable, in time, with a slow menu}? Interrupting the process of scanning a wall of buttons with tiny symbols on them for a context switch back to traffic and then continuing the scan without generous re-scanning on resume is a skill that few people would ever develop without explicit teaching, so most would simply take their chances, keeping their mind in the scan. Throughput might still be higher than a deep menu, but the effective pauses are way too long (a quick glance up just to stifle the worst fears while the mind is still on the screen/scan does not count). I would not even be surprised of the annoying inclusion of some frequently used functions in the menu wasn't just penny-pinching or a misguided interior designer striving for cleaner lines, but a deliberate decision to train users in the interface system.

Land Rover is so far ahead in UX it's unbelievable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6YYun90S8g&feature=youtu.be...

I think designers get into a mindset, and then keep going (too far)

First, I don't want to yell at my stove. I don't want it to misunderstand me. I don't want to forget it is on (dials are pretty easy to notice out of place; yes you can add a LED but now you're compensating for a flaw that doesn't need to exist).

I don't want to compete with my Google Home or my Alexa. I don't want my Kitchen to end up a constant stream of barked commands as I cook.

I don't want to stop conversation or music just to turn my stove on and off.

I don't want to take the time to speak "Stove, please turn on the bottom right burner to setting of five" when it takes me one fifth the time to actually change the knob.

It's a UI that works. It works great. Everybody STOP messing with UI that works great, pretty please :P

If you were primarily only putting your own life in danger, sure.

But with driving the way it is now, I do not think it's a leap to make the claim that distracted driving is a danger to not just yourself but to others on the road. It's exactly the kind of thing that the government should be regulating.

Not when you are endangering others on the road.

> Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here?

I think that's very self-centered to imply cars aren't worth talking about just because you don't have one.

Also i don't recall my comment to have any kind of imperative tone: i'm stating what works for me, and for a lot of people i see, explicitly requesting comments about whether or not this applies to others. Some made up numbers from what i feel about my surroundings: young adults (<30yo), i'd say maybe 1 in 3-4 have a car around here. Families from friends that live in or near a city center (inside the subway zone), i'd say 1 out of 3-4 have no car, that's already significant: they rely on their children, friends or rental when they need one. Parking lots aren't cheap. Of course there are some difficulties, when you need to move some couch through the city you grab a couple friends, a skateboard and start pushing. Every couple weeks when you do some large food shopping you have to carry heavy bags. Maybe you get a trolley of your own like the grandmas at the saturday market, it's actually convenient.

In the country side where i grew up, i'd say half the people have only 1 car per household. There's a train station 30min from there, a small line but is used quite a lot, with a train every 1h or so. Almost all of my friends had a driver's license by the time they turned 18 etc. Yet i slipped through, always making my way using quite a lot of cycling, making my schedule around the one of the buses, sometimes hitchhiking when the time was bad. Most people i know use either some carpooling app or train when they travel across the country and don't transport anything they can't carry in a couple bags. People do have cars there, but it's because of necessity, not choice. And you see far less new cars, lots of people buy them refurbished, cars switch hands in the family, some are real utility vehicles which are adopting interface bloat at a slower pace, etc.

So i ask again: don't we have to change our ideas about (1) car ownership and (2) car manufacturing/reparation/life-cycle? From what i can see, things are already far from the "every adult owns a car which they change every ~5 years" model from post-war until the oil shocks. My point is the usual dependency vs convenience thing [#]: the more a particular infrastructure becomes widespread or reliable (may be cars, electricity, network), the more you start depending on it; yet giving up some of it may not make your life worse, it just implies different life constraints and capabilities to work around it.

[#] I'm getting out of topic here, but to read this argument developed in the field of energy, see: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...

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That was for the places i know well; now you implied i didn't travel or talk. I do. There are lots of other environments where car can and are avoided.

Would you consider the whole north/west european cities (in nl, dk, de, ch, ..) to be just a big "hipster neighborhood"? Believe it or not, but not everyone on a bike or in the bus has a beard, fancy sticker on their macbook air or is some kind of alter-globalism&ecology activist. There, and to some extend in a lot of other places, personal cars are neither a big necessity nor very practical in most slightly urbanized areas. People there own and use less cars. Of course it doesn't come out of nowhere: there is less specialization of urban areas for living, shopping, eating/drinking, working. More smaller and distributed structures, roads organized differently giving a lot of space for pedestrians, bikes, some green spaces, playgrounds etc. I'm not saying it can be done everywhere and now, i'm saying it's being done in various places and probably could be expanded.