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Comment by zoomablemind | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how much the UI is indeed at play here, rather than the User's state. The keyword here is 'rental'. This seems to just amplify grumpiness.

Picking a rented car, I normally don't spend much effort trying to figure out all features. Just basics - adjust the seat, the mirrors, reset the trip, rarely link up the phone. Touch-n-go.

It always gets irritating later, as I would try to figure some needed feature while already on the go. Climate, radio, what's that beeping, which side is the fuel port (while already pulling to the pump), the curiously long-lasting parfum on the seat-belt from the previous renter at times triggering unexpected memories...

I guess, it's just a mild form of self-inflicted road rage. RTFM would be an easy answer, but we all know how that works out.

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That reinforces the article's point. Having a car as a rental allows you to see its UI foibles without the blinders that inevitably come down when people are forced to adapt to some problem over a long period of time. And like the OP says, the UI of most modern cars is horrendously bad. For example, my personal car is a 2019 Subaru Legacy. I rather like it. But there's no way to make it start with the stereo off. If the car is on, the stereo is on. The only way to turn the audio off is to twist the volume knob all the way down to zero before you turn off the car.

When I first had the car, I found this to be totally ridiculous. Whoever heard of a car that automatically turns on the radio when it starts? But, after having had the car for a month, the problem is already fading, as I've developed a habit of turning the volume down before I turn off the car. At this rate, six months from now, like you, I'll be defending this anti-feature. (Hey, you're going to turn the radio on anyway when you drive, so why not have the car do it for you on startup?)

I agree that the key word is rental, but my conclusion is exactly the opposite of yours. The fact that this is an unfamiliar rental is what is allowing the OP to see the issues with the car's UX clearly. If the car were his daily driver, he'd have adapted to it, and he wouldn't notice himself getting distracted.

[1]: https://www.subaruxvforum.com/forum/interior-audio-hvac/1460...

I must say, I'm a little confused re the radio- hasn't that been the default UX for car audio for as long as cars have had radios? Even old AM only radios would come on when the ignition was turned on, and would retain the volume & station from the last time the car was used. I don't think I have ever driven a vehicle that defaulted the radio off when starting, they all retain the setting that was last used.

If the radio was on, then it would come on the next time the car was started. If the radio was off, it would remain off until you turned it on. In the Subaru, the radio comes on regardless of its state when the car was shut off.

In every other car I've owned, if I press the volume knob to turn off the radio, the radio stays off. The next time I start the car, I have to press the volume knob again to turn the radio back on. In the Subaru, the radio turns on and starts playing when I start the car, even if I specifically pressed the volume knob to turn it off before turning off the car last time.

I encourage you to go try this in your (presumably non-Subaru) car. Start the car. Turn on the radio. Turn off the radio. Shut off the car. Start the car again. Is the radio playing audio or not?

Oh wow, so it is always on... what would possess someone to think that was in any way a useful feature? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the volume defaults to 50%, which if the FM station is playing an advert with the gain maxed would be loud enough to be painful.

This might be a safety feature that needs to be turned off.

Oh, I feel for you, radio behavior is such a long standing feature that has been ingrained in minds of more than one generation of drivers. Strange choice from Subaru. I looked it up, it seems that the problem was also present on Outbacks, fixed in update for 2018 model.

As for the freshness of a renter's UX observations, personally, I'd find it less reliable due to different objective vs. a future owner. I would dismiss a lot of seeming inefficiencies of design just due to my unfamiliarity with vendor 'concept' and would kludge it for the short duration of the rental.

On the other hand, if shopping for a new car, test-driving one, my mindset would be a lot more critical.

I remember, at one time having to pull over the highway just to figure out, where was the headlights switch on the fine Dodge Charger. Used to Japanese cars, I would not expect it to be off the steering wheel stalks, but as a knob near the door. Turns out, it's another 'concept'.

Another example is the hand-brake pedal (!). Makes sense in a way. That one entered my memory bank via a nice Toyota Prius, at 4 in the morning, starting my the way to the airport from the darkness of parking lot. Previous share driver left it engaged, manifested itself with a dash warning and very squeeeeky and slow drive.... Luckily, there was a user manual in the car.

After seeing your comment, I dug into my Subaru Legacy's menus and found the option to force-check for a software update. Alas, there was none to be had. I think the next step is to e-mail the dealership and get them to lobby Subaru of America to port the fix to my model.

Same "feature" with the radio in my Peugeot. How can anyone design something like that?

> But there's no way to make it start with the stereo off. If the car is on, the stereo is on. The only way to turn the audio off is to twist the volume knob all the way down to zero before you turn off the car.

I have a 2016 Hyundai Tucson with a similar, but slightly different feature.

Turning the volume all the way down before switching off the engine does not effect the startup volume. When the engine starts, the radio comes back on at a preset, but reasonable, volume.

However, if I turn the entire screen off, by pushing the volume knob in until it clicks, before stopping the engine, then on start-up the radio will be off, but so will the entire screen, which also controls navigation, bluetooth connectivity and the reversing camera.

My first action after starting my car is 90% of the time to turn the volume down on the radio.

However, I must say that's really the only niggle I have with the Tucson. Everything else I'm pretty pleased with. While it does have a touch screen, I hardly use it, as everything can be controlled with tactile knobs and buttons. The touchscreen is used most when stationary and inputting a new destination address for navigation.

My Subaru has the same behavior, minus the backup camera remaining off. In reverse, the screen turns on and displays the image from the backup camera. It turns off again once you switch into drive. It's certainly a solution to the problem I described, but it's obviously not ideal for all the reasons you've enumerated. Turning off Bluetooth, navigation, and (in my case) Android Auto is certainly a drastic way of dealing with this radio behavior.

By outsourcing to the lowest bidder and then putting the thumbscrews on to push the price down even more. Everything in these cheap mass market cars is made as cheaply (and thus half-assedly) as humanly possible.

I mean, the real issue is that it starts at some preset volume that's almost invariably too high. if turned on at something more reasonable I'd get less annoyed by it

Does the Subaru have any beeping misfeatures other than the radio thing? Our Civic FK/FH is quite considerate about beeping, it only beeps twice like a bell if you don't have your seatbelt on and then shows a red pictogram on the dashboard, unlike Toyotas and Peugeot which are very annoying, or VW which beeps like a bomb is about to go off for virtually any dashboard notification deemed important by the manufacturer, like when your windscreen wiping fluid is low.

The Subaru beeps insistently if you don't have your seatbelt on. Other than that, it only beeps if you have the adaptive cruise control system enabled and you start to drift out of your lane.

You're really ignoring the main point that the tech in these machines makes them more difficult to use and less intuitive.

I'm wondering how many cars you drove that did not have any screens. Having grown up during a time when the most sophisticated display was the LCD for the radio station, I can assure you car interfaces are getting worse.

Japanese cars used to be my favorite because they had consistent manual interfaces across models. Perhaps Renault and Peugeot have always had bad design but the digitization of the interfaces and the software that's now controlling some aspects of the actual driving makes them more dangerous.

And I wonder if the car manufacturers are even listening (to us).

In some ways the current state of car interior design reminds the 1990s and 2000s of computers and mobile phones. Everything was so ugly and unusable that when proper industrial design finally came into the industry, the guy responsible for it got knighthood and worldwide recognition of a genius.

(To be fair a few companies did try to make their devices look well-designed and luxury, such as Sony, but then Sony never understood software. Industrial design without software is nothing.)

Whereas all it takes for any electronics or car manufacturer is to have someone C-level with a good taste to approve or disapprove designs. Which got me thinking, maybe at this point the humanity needs to come up with some measure of good taste similar to IQ...

The real problem is… who are "us" in this sentence?

For a fairly intuitive UI, check out the Tesla, particularly in its latest incarnations. In my estimation it is at least as usable as most tablets, and very discoverable.

However, look online and you will discover a litany of people who decry the lack of physical buttons to control everything.

Car UI is hard, not just because it is hard, but because there are many different groups of "us", and we have all grown used to different forms of car UI, BMW vs Ford for example.

I'm convinced that Tesla UI is only good because they're not afraid to continuously iterate on the design.

The best way to improve a complex human interaction task like a vehicle is with experimentation and incremental improvements—and the touch screen allows the pace of that feedback loop to be an order of magnitude faster than a physical interface.

All they need is a few more buttons for the most common tasks on the steering wheel and the Model 3 design would be greatly improved.

> Tesla UI is only good because they're not afraid to continuously iterate on the design

I'm not sure this is a good thing. Poorly designed physical things will stick for a long time and might damage the reputation of your company. Tesla's reputation is not great precisely for that reason. I remember people were saying that Tesla would be "the Apple for cars" before their first cars left the factory. Nobody says that anymore.

> The best way to improve a complex human interaction task like a vehicle is with experimentation and incremental improvements.

You have to be careful to differentiate between improvements vs. change. You need to know when to stop (or at least slow down the rate of change) otherwise it's just a random walk.

> litany of people who decry the lack of physical buttons to control everything

So how about you as a car manufacturer make these people happy but with an even better design than they expected?

Car usability is not subjective, it can easily be measured. For example, how often do drivers adjust the audio volume while driving? If they are doing it less often it means the volume function is less usable (the driver feels it would be unsafe to try and use the function). And so on.

> Industrial design without software is nothing.

It saved Apple (iMac)

iMac and OS X in a bundle is what saved Apple (along with the iPod of course)

> which side is the fuel port

Note that most cars have a little arrow on the dashboard next to the fuel gauge showing which side the fuel tank is on.

Not most cars I've seen so far, but most filling stations also have hoses long enough to reach around the car, so unless you drive a battleship or a tank, it doesn't really matter.

There's a station near me that just opened. Pay at pump, pumps only on one side. 'Surely' I thought, as I pulled up, 'the hoses will reach the other side'.

They didn't. So I got out to move my hatchback car closer and angled so they would reach. I unhooked the pump and put it in my car.

But first it asked me to pay my bill of £0.

You just didn’t see the indicator (it’s an icon somewhere on the fuel gauge, typically in its center).

I was driving for ten years unaware of this, before somebody told me. It’s easy to miss that the icon telling you “this is fuel gauge” also shows you which side to fill the tank from.

> Not most cars I've seen so far

Do you have an example? Every rental car I have tried in the past decade had this. At least 10–15 different models from a variety of different manufacturers.

I estimate that I've rented 15 different vehicles in the last 24 months, if I cant figure out how to use the infotainment system within five minutes of getting in the car its an instant fail. Similarly, if I cant figure out the wipers, cruise control within 30 seconds of wanting them, or if the car takes evasive action against my wishes, its also an instant fail. I also shouldn't need to look to anywhere but the gas gauge to figure out what side to fuel it, if I do, also a fail.

We've been building cars for 100 years or more - you don't get to make a car that operates in a fundamentally different manner.

If anyone was curious, the best infotainment system was FCA's uConnect, with the Ford and GM systems tying for second, the worst by far was the one on the Volvo I rented, it took me 10 min to figure out the radio, even longer to turn the AC on.

I spent an entire summer bumbling around the UK in a little rented Fiat 500, with the family all crammed in and complaining because we'd rented one that came without AC.

At least, according to the rental company that was the case. On the last day as we were driving it back to drop off, I discovered that you could press the temperature dial inwards to turn on AC.

There was a significant number of choice words from the folks in the back seat. But aside from that the rest of the drive was pleasantly cool.

Reminds me of trying to figure out how to make the power seats go down in a rental car at 3am. Seat was up so far my head was pressed against the headliner. To control the seat there were three switches under the seat on the left. That was easy enough to find though not obvious. But flipping each switch up and down and the seat would move some direction. Except up and down.

Found one page in the back of the owners manual that showed 'one' of the switches in addition to up and down moved right and left.

I drove these various rentals for tens of thousands of kilometers, not just short weekend trips :)

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