There are too many screens, time to go back to gauges

There are people who are unable to speak but are perfectly able to drive. Replacing controls instead of them being an additional form of control of the existing controls can have the effect of removing people’s ability to drive simply because of an infliction they are unable to control.

Heck what happens the day you get a bad throat, lose your voice and you are unable to drive yourself to the local pharmacy because your unable to control your windscreen wipers.

Right now the EV market I think is open to electric cars for people like us: physical gauges, just the bare minimum for driving (I'd include ABS for safety and cruise control for some minimal comfort), slick interior with a subtle vintage touch maybe. No autopilot, no Netflix for you. Oh and physical keys.

I'm constatnly thinking about this, but unfortunately starting a car company seems to be almost as difficult as going to Mars. But who knows, maybe some day.

I don't want to preclude someone doing this. But it is a luxury. And not worth it for most of us.

And I say this as someone that likes my chain geared bike. Subjectively, I love the thing. Objectively, an ebike is almost certainly better in every way.

What you are complaining about is being restrained from being a danger to the public.

Great read for the letters to the editor page of a car enthusiast magazine that specialises in draping hot chicks over shiny bonnets and pretending that road hypnosis is as desirable a state as zen flow. But back here in the real world where driving happens on crowded roads with other people shuttling themselves and their families to work and school, not such a great read. Your attention should be on the road ahead and the cars around you, not where the gear shift needs to be for a clean gear change, or how much throttle you can apply before fish-tailing into the soccer team in the next lane.

Bring on the cars where I don’t even need to touch any controls, mostly because that means the hoons and idiots won’t be touching any controls either.

In suggesting that driving is no more than a boring, productivity-sapping waste of time, the Valley guys are mistaking a personal bias for a universal truth. And they’re blinding themselves to the social and cultural challenges they’re going to face as they try to convince people to be passengers rather than drivers. Even if all the technical hurdles to achieving perfect vehicular automation are overcome — and despite rosy predictions, that remains a sizable if — the developers and promoters of autonomous cars are going to discover that the psychology of driving is far more complicated than they assume and far different from the psychology of being a passenger. Back in the 1970s, the public rebelled, en masse, when the federal government, for seemingly solid safety and fuel-economy reasons, imposed a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. The limit was repealed. If you think that everyone’s going to happily hand the steering wheel over to a robot, you’re probably delusional.

There’s something bigger going on here, and I confess that I’m still a little fuzzy about it. Silicon Valley seems to have a good deal of trouble appreciating, or even understanding, what I’ll term informal experience. It’s only when driving is formalized — removed from everyday life, transferred to a specialized facility, performed under a strict set of rules, and understood as a self-contained recreational event — that it can be conceived of as being pleasurable. When it’s not a recreational routine, when it’s performed out in the world, as part of everyday life, then driving, in the Valley view, can only be understood within the context of another formalized realm of experience: that of productive busyness. Every experience has to be cleanly defined, has to be categorized. There’s a place and a time for recreation, and there’s a place and a time for productivity.

This discomfort with the informal, with experience that is psychologically unbounded, that flits between and beyond categories, can be felt in a lot of the Valley’s consumer goods and services. Many personal apps and gadgets have the effect, or at least the intended effect, of formalizing informal activities. Once you strap on a Fitbit, you transform what might have been a pleasant walk in the park into a program of physical therapy. A passing observation that once might have earned a few fleeting smiles or shrugs before disappearing into the ether is now, thanks to the distribution systems of Facebook and Twitter, encapsulated as a product and subjected to formal measurement; every remark gets its own Nielsen rating.

What’s the source of this crabbed view of experience? I’m not sure. It may be an expression of a certain personality type. It may be a sign of the market’s continuing colonization of the quotidian. I’d guess it also has something to do with the rigorously formal qualities of programming itself. The universality of the digital computer ends — comes to a crashing halt, in fact — where informality begins.

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5813

I drive a Mazda and didn't even realize the screen was touchable because there is absolutely no reason to not use the puck.

(If you've never seen it, the puck is an all-in-one scroll wheel, button, and directional joystick - on the center console exactly where your arm naturally rests, no reaching necessary.)

The Tesla Model 3 is already like this, including the Netflix part.

> So if updates and digital screens are on the way for all cars

Tesla has been doing over the air software updates and had digital screens for years.

Bingo. The screen becomes less readable (and if a touch screen, difficult and/or dangerous to use) the longer it ages, the more chance it gets physical damage. Then there's the batteries which go bad, yet the devices are glued. And then there's the backlight. My Kobo reader does not use/need much backlight, it doesn't use/need much battery (esp w/o networking), and the screen can endure a lot. So perhaps e-readers are partly exempt from this. Airpods, for example, are not because of the battery alone. Smartwatches: screen (often touch as well)/battery/backlight. Monitors: backlight/screen. On top of that, some of these devices also require software updates. These devices are sold to be replaced in a few years; not to last. If they were part of a service contract (like a boiler) they wouldn't happen.

> After a few years, it was normal to see trains with broken head signs, broken car numbers, and broken reservation systems.

True, seen this ample amount of time when I traveled with ICE Amsterdam - Berlin. I do have to admit I like it when I see the TeamViewer error in the EBS busses. All these otherwise show is useless, distracting commercials anyway.

> The result (at least in the towns I use public transportation) are regularly broken displays that even when they work, offer no advantage over LCD or LED or even mechanical display from a passenger perspective. They just look more modern.

Indeed, never mind the backlight dying, or the broken (stuck, dead, ...) pixels, or physical damage on the screen (due to vandals, accidents, ...).

Britain's railways have mostly orange LED platform signage. The LEDs have good lifetime and each sign has enough local intelligence that a failure in one doesn't knock them all out, but they also don't run Windows, because that's neither necessary nor sufficient.

You can even buy replicas (either desktop sized or full size if you're really train crazy) which pull data from the national railway system over the Internet unlike a real one but function the same. So e.g. configure one to show you platform 2 from your local railway station and you'll know at a glance if the train home is running normally before leaving work.

Early full colour displays suffer bad burn-in, but the orange LEDs don't have a burn in problem and many have been in service for decades.

Yes it is technically possible for one LED or even the entire sign to fail, and at the smallest stations there may not be any other signs for the affected trains but that's not different than any alternative, the fault will be reported and a fitter will be out to fix or replace the sign.

I simply don't believe that previously all the signage which exists today was duplicated but mechanically or with hand-written signs. Instead my guess is that mostly you just didn't know. On a London bus for example, before they had screens telling you where you are, which bus this is and what the next stop is, there was nothing. This is fine if it's "your" bus and you know the route, but it made buses very intimidating for visitors. Today iBus has screens and spoken announcements, "2 to Marylebone" says your bus, and the display spells out Marylebone in case you don't understand the pronunciation. Later on another bus "Lavington Street for Tate Modern" says the screen. You have no idea where "Lavington Street" is but the bus knows this is where to get off for the Tate Modern art gallery, and now you know too.

This backlash cannot come soon enough.

Overall the new systems which can tell people which bus is coming and how long it’s likely to be are great, because they help remove the worry about whether the bus I am about to catch is the bus I actually want.

Google Transit beats any paper maps and signs system hands down and requires far less capital investment.

With my old phone, I could pretty safely check an incoming call or text without taking my eyes off the road for more than a second or so.

With me new phone, I can't even manage to unlock my phone without feeling like I'm going to kill someone.

I guess it makes sense that the rise of all the anti-cellphone laws coincided with the rise of smartphones. They are absolutely hostile to anything but undivided attention.