Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls | Hacker News Reader

Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

1,922 pointstrenning743 comments

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to replace the hardware. Here's the catch: for safety critical interfaces, YOU DO NOT want the interface to change. The point is moot.

Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems, because safety and stability matters to airline manufacturers, current ongoing scandals notwithstanding. I only wish automobile manufacturers took their job equally seriously.

Electronic Flight Bag is one of the biggest screens, right? And that's used for navigation, which is largely strategic, not tactical.

I'd love for someone who's in the industry or an actual pilot to comment on this because I'm frankly not sure about what common scope AFBs have on commercial airliners, and what the backup procedures are if they fail. For private pilots, I know bringing an iPad up is common these days, but I think (and sure hope) commercial flight is a lot more risk averse and slow to adopt these things without thorough procedure.

80 to 90% of airlines worldwide use EFBs, based on iPad or Microsoft Surface.

I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.

What exact type of input is being grabbed by these screens? "Critical pilot systems"? Touchscreens already exist in airliners, for systems used by crew and passengers, but that's beside the point.

Critical driver systems (i.e. steering, signaling, acceleration and brakes) aren't controlled by touchscreen in any car I know of either, so if non-critical systems are beside the point, what is the criticism here? Or are you thinking of some particularly extreme cars that are even more reliant on touchscreen than the Model 3?

I was just trying to make an illustrative example of why I think static interfaces are safer and therefore better, at the end of the day it comes down to subjectivity for the part of a positive user experience, but when it comes to safety the trend is, to me, worrying.

I also imagine that there are other reasons for both airliners and cars to replace buttons with touchscreens, namely that of cost instead of prioritizing safety and stability, and in general I am not a fan of that trade-off. But I'm also not claiming to be representative of the automobile market in general.

If you believe that aviation not having touch screens means that cars should not either, then evidence to the opposite should change your mind. The A350 and 777X both have touch screens now.

It's not just Boeing, who you accused of being backwards who are doing this, Airbus is too, along with every other manufacturer. Garmin and BendixKing now offer touch screens and it's clearly the future of GA as well not just commercial aviation.

Everyone believes that this will increase safety. That showing only the relevant information in a tunable and interactive way will decrease distractions and help focus on what matters.

The idea that this is to save money is totally absurd! A 777X is $350 million dollars. Any accident would cost an astronomical amount compared to the cost of switches. Even leaving that aside. The touchscreens are actually far more expensive than the old instruments.

This is just a way for Honda to cover up the fact that they can't write software, can't design a reasonable UX, don't want to spend money on it, and want to live as if it's 1999 forever.

I'd pay extra for a 1999-style car. That year was near the peak for car design quality. Fancy cars hit the peak around 1995, and cheap ones hit the peak around 2010 or 2015.

Who is this everyone that believes touchscreens will increase safety? I could not find any reputable sources for this claim.

Furthermore, tactile feedback is safety. The fact that each switch has a feel, a size, a position - that let's your brain know what you are doing without having to take eyes off the road.

I have seen side mirrors controlled by touch screen, as well as some headlight functions. Which is are critical safety systems, though rarely an issue.

Still, if you’re borrowing your wife’s car it’s easy to realize you don’t have great blindspot visibility at which point looking at a touch screen is very distracting.

I fly recreationally and all the higher end gear has touch screens. Some of them are redundant with paths using hardware controls or not. But that's definitely the minority. There are a slew of critical operations that I simply cannot complete without interacting with a touch screen.

Not saying it's right or wrong but your original post is 100% incorrect.

My iphone touch screen won't work if my fingers aren't clean and dry.

They are not capacitive

Are these things certified?

Many recreational pilots fly with uncertified gear (GPS in particular), and even regular smartphone/tablet apps. They also have the required paper documentation and certified instrument but that's just to cover themselves, and as a backup.

Garmin has quite a few certified touchscreens these days, some intended for panel upgrades (e.g. https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/67886) and even some in new light jets (e.g. https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/66916).

Also, some airlines now have officially certified iPads as EFBs, meaning pilots no longer need to carry paper backups.

Yes this has all been in Pipers and Cessnas.

No offense intended, but the sector as a whole has been doing all sorts of dumb sh*t recently when it comes on-board electronics (787 batteries, 737max MCAS, A380 wiring, F35 ... everything). This doesn't exactly refute OP's point, is all I'm saying. Maybe airspace firms shouldn't be taking their design cues from Cupertino.

OP was making an appeal to authority, that avionics manufacturers know what they're doing and decided against touchscreens. So IMO it does strongly refute OP's argument.

(That's not to say that OP is wrong, of course, just that their argument isn't really a valid one. My belief is that touch screens would suck for flying a plane, but I'm not a pilot.)

What I was trying to say was more that avionics are by nature risk averse, so if they're doing something it's probably worth understanding why. So it's not so much "it's safe because it's in an airplane", I was more going for "consider why this very safety-focused environment looks different". So sure, I might be in the wrong if what I said was interpreted as a simple appeal to authority, but I was trying to get a point across that people spent a lot of time trying to make and keep these systems secure, so let's try to learn from that instead of invalidate it as being simply old or outdated (which Boeing themselves ironically seem to be guilty of).

It is very clear that the aviation industry is NOT risk averse. They are averse to losing money (via needing to spend money to redesign systems, recertify interfaces, re-train pilots, rebuy new equipment and simulators, all of those reduce risk but are capital intensive). But they are no longer risk averse. They might never have been risk averse at all - the roots of the aviation industry is exceedingly risk seeking in the first place (to fly is itself a risk seeking activity - and that's something understood by all pilots and all aviation and aerospace engineers on day 1 of wanting to fly)

You can say the civilian oversight groups that seek to regulate the industry are risk averse, but the companies that build the planes themselves, if they had their say, we'd be flying mach 3 upside down all day.

> They are averse to losing money (via needing to spend money to redesign systems, recertify interfaces, re-train pilots, rebuy new equipment and simulators, all of those reduce risk but are capital intensive).

Re-designing systems introduces risk and uncertainty. Being able to leverage existing pilot training reduces risk (because crashes have resulted from pilots forgetting they were flying X and applied training for Y). Buying new equipment introduces risk of manufacturing defects that wasn't present in the working one.

Appeal to authority is an informal fallacy of logic. It can/should never be used to prove an argument.

Sure, if everyone is an expert on the subject, or is willing to spend the time to become one, you should never appeal to authority.

That's not most people on most subjects. If someone appeals to authority and says "climate change is real, here's 100 scientists with PhDs who agree" I accept that. I am not willing to become an expert on the subject to be able to spend the time to review the facts for myself. Citing sources in a paper is essentially appealing to authority (I understand I could read those papers and the ones they cite, all the way down, but for most things, I'm not going to do that).

For what it's worth, for a specialist in a field, they'll have already read most of the papers that are cited and will be looking for new or missing ones to find gems or flaws in the argumentation.

That's fair. Most papers are probably written with specialists in mind, so I guess that wouldn't be a good example of appeal to authority.

function (buttons) > form (touch screen)

Usable inputs save lives.

In airplanes touchscreens are less of an issue than in cars. In cars you have to have a hand on the wheel 99% of the time, and your gaze on the road. You can't afford interaction with a complicated non-haptic touch screen menu.

In airplanes it's different. Here, outside of takeoff and landing, it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds while interacting with it with a hand.

Not necessarily. There are many moments during the operation of an aircraft where full attention is paramount. Yes, you see a pilot leaving the cockpit to use the lavatory while the co-pilot is monitoring the autopilot, but the margins are just as small as operating a motor vehicle.

Absolutely not true. In cruise, stabilized, especially with AP - the margins are MUCH MUCH higher. Pilots have fallen asleep (two of them) - overflown airports still landed etc.

I think major difference is commercial airliner vs say fighter jet. As a layman it still seems pretty wrong to make most of the screen highly dynamic. Maybe designated one on the side.

Back to the topic - in car, unless specifically intended for other passengers, driver should never stare on some stupid screen in a place way off the line of sight for driving. Whenever I do that even for a split second in my 15-year old bmw (checking if that knob is really for what I want), there can be an atomic blast in front of me and I wouldn't see it.

Fighter jets are starting to use touchscreens, too.

Because fancy, advanced UIs work so well for Navy ships.

I'm not arguing for touch screens - I don't like them, but to say a commercial pilot in cruise at 30K in controlled airspace with controlled separations and TCAS / ADS-B has margins as low as someone driving 85 MPH with traffic literally 50 feet in front of them is absolutely ridiculous. The spacing distances alone are 100x different (in terms of travel time).

Deaths and injuries per mile traveled supports the idea that flying is MUCH MUCH safer.

I remember when that happened, pretty shocking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(airline)#2008_incident_an...

My partner is a first officer, and frequently describes his job as being a glorified babysitter outside of takeoff and landing.

Worth noting that a significant amount of the information pilots use in the cockpit (at major US carriers, at least), things like flight plans, are on an iPad.

... until something goes wrong. Then a touch screen is the last thing you want. An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right spot of the screen, and avoid touching the wrong spot.

Was team screen til this point.

In critical systems, you want to make sure inputs are easy to use in the worst case scenario.

Even the best of touchscreens can't compare to physical controls in tough times.

I can just as easily make the argument the other way around: An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right knob (of which there are like a hundred), and avoid touching the wrong one.

You'd be wrong. The critical controls are uniquely shaped so that the pilot can put his hands quickly on the correct one and know it's correct.

Part of pilot training (at least in my dad's day in the AF) was blindfolding the pilot and the instructor names a control, and the student must put his hands on it. Or he flunks.

I don't believe this is equivalent though. With hardware controls, most (if not all) of them are immediately accessible at all times. With proper training, body movement and tactile feedback will train your muscle memory which will help you find the right control without much of a hassle.

Kinda like trying to flip just the right toggle switch and avoid flipping the wrong one?

Just because it's on a touchscreen doesn't mean it has to be tiny and hard to touch. A 17" touchscreen could have fewer controls than the same hardware panel. And the controls could be bigger on the touchscreen.

It’s not like trying to flip just the right toggle. You’ve flipped it thousands of times and memorized its exact location through haptic memory. You gently feel the surroundings to ensure your hand is in the right location and then you make the decisive motion with your fingers. You don’t need to look while doing this. This is how hands work. This is how you type. I wish people would stop pretending they don’t understand this.

BS.

Imagine trying to find the right switch on this by feel, without hitting the wrong one by accident.

https://live.staticflickr.com/6150/5990351987_fb9c159ea5_b.j...

Easy mode, given the variety of orientation points in form of switches you can gently touch with fingers to recognize position.

That said, usually you make a short look at the panel to benefit from that hardcoded visual-motion coordination hw in your head.

> flipped it thousands of times

This raises a question: how many times do an average pilot actually flip a switch over their carrier?

Many switches are flipped once or twice on takeoff, then again before or after landing. Depending on the plane (small GA aircraft or airliner or anything inbetween) there could be 4 or 5 switches to flip in total before takeoff, or 30-40. One of the most ubiquitously used controls in aircraft are concentric rotary encoders though, with a button integrated in them if you press the top of the encoder. Those are used to do menu navigation in the GPS units used in many planes, or for altitude/heading selectors in autopilot units.

Worth mentioning that these days GPS units seem to be getting touchscreens but usually still aren't losing the physical buttons.

Thiss os how i typw somtimws.

Just out of curiosity, do pilots still manually take off and land fully, or does auto-pilot / computer do this too nowadays?

The technology exists, but autoland functionality depends on the plane model and the airport. Usually, most of the approach is done with ILS with the final moments being manual.

Modern airliners are just short of autonomous. Even if they aren't, unless you are landing or on initial ascent, you are generally minutes away from catastrophic outcomes regardless of your control inputs. In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.

A car is very often fractions of a second away from a serious accident.

A plane at cruise altitude is rarely less than minutes away (unless, in some planes, you are actively trying to crash the plane/make the wings fall off)

> In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.

Unless you're flying a Boeing 737 MAX that is.

Indian Road Congress specifications recommend 3.5m minimum lane width for multi lane roads, 1.06m minimum center margin. Airplanes complex enough for touchscreen interfaces would be awful tight in those margins ;)

> it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds

Not really. Pilots are supposed to be visually looking for traffic 90% of the time, and the rest scanning instruments.

So to be heads-down for 10 seconds, the non-flying pilot would have to arrange that with the flying pilot.

Under VFR sure, obviously under IFR they are looking at the instruments as much as 100% of the time, including the instruments which inform them if planes are nearby, and instruments which inform them of their location, direction, and all of the variables therein.

It would be madness if pilots had to rely solely on their eyes to locate other planes nearby. There is thankfully instruments which do this as well.

In VMC you still have a responsibility to see and avoid, regardless of whether you're on an instrument flight plan or not. (Ref: Regulation 14 CFR Part 91.113 (b))

Radar coverage has become ubiquitous in most places, but there's not universal coverage. Heads-up time is very important unless you're flying in actual IMC.

Can't find equivalent rule from ICAO, is this regulation US only?

Refer to ICAO Annex 11 - it's not the exact point being made by the GP, but note that traffic separation for IFR traffic from VFR traffic is only provided in Class A, B and C airspace.

Or, you know just flying the autopilot, which many do like 90% of the flying time...

I think what GP is trying to say is that because your average airlines has around 10+ km of altitude to loose before rapid disassembly commences, which takes a non-trivial amoun of time, compared to a car, which can go on a short and unintentional offroad trip within a few seconds or less.

No, you don't. you can fly over high mountains, having a lot less distance between the plane and the terrain, but how you lose altitude is more important: just a single km drop can be unrecoverable if exceeding VNE and losing a wing in the process.

Not to mention that airplaines usually have TWO pilots onboard, so one can use touch screens while the other watches the sky ahead. Cars, on the other hand, have just one person in driver's seat.

Most planes in the world are not the big airliners, but smaller planes where single pilot operation is very frequent and many planes do not have a complex autopilot, but usually a 2 or 3 axis stabilization. Also in turbulent weather looking for 10 seconds at a screen can induce motion sickness even to seasoned pilots. We have to do that for map checks and calculations, not a pleasure.

Huh, I wonder if they can use a measurement to adjust the refresh rate based on turbulence. I think they did this for the space shuttle experiencing vibrations to make a screen readable.

It is not the refresh rate, it's the fact that you are looking at a screen that is not moving so much while the airplane and you body is shaking; your internal sensors are telling you are moving, the eyes do not correlate the information, you get motion sickness. I had this problem in my first 50 hours of flying, sometimes even after 100 hours.

Touch screens for all purposes? Probably good to distinguish if some things, even at your company, should not be dynamic (are they dynamic?). Some life-critical thing that is vulnerable to an uncovered sneeze?

A plane isn't a good analogy for a car.

Airplanes have keypads that control complex functions on a screen, going from that kind of keypad to a touchscreen is logical.

In the case of cars, a touchpad is overkill for controlling the cabin temperature, stereo volume, etc.

I wonder about the temperature settings. I have manual dials but I basically set them to 21C for winter and 19C for summer. Other than that, I don't readily touch the hvac panel at all: I could certainly do those rare adjustments over a touchscreen.

I can imagine people would need to tune a radio panel more often, so at least basic functionality would be good to have as physical inputs. But even then basic radio functions are usually accessible via steering wheel buttons.

It's logical? It's absurd. You can usually pull over a car and get out in the case of a critical hardware failure. There is rarely such a luxury in a plane.

Anything critical on a plane will be duplicated, including power systems. Sometimes triplicated.

You say that like the 737-Max incident didn't just happen.

That’s too bad. Imagine unresponsive touchscreen due to dry skin or wearing gloves, or hands are too sweaty.... or the controller goes out, etc.

Flight plans is one thing but controls are all together a different sort of thing.

Why ask for trouble?

Touchpads can't even be operated by a cat https://ask.metafilter.com/91541/Why-cant-Godfrey-work-the-t...

Actually the thread showed they can.

The theory I thought was reasonable for why the OP had troubles, was that Mac touch pads are sensitive enough to treat the separate pads of the paws as multitouch.

Testable: try with individual pad of paw on a Mac touchpad.

I have no idea how, but my smartwatch touchscreen remains responsive underwater, in a bathtub or swimming pool. It was with on every workout, and it both endured the energetic movements and sweaty hands were not an issue. The thing has more RAM and CPU power than my desktop in first half of the 90s, runs Linux, and is programmed with JS (well, there's gotta be some faulty part in every design). Anyway, if I can buy such a thing for a few hundred dollars, then - unless there are some physical limitations I'm not aware of - it should be possible for people who build the planes.

The sad but real reason a ton of this is happening is one very big word that is typically not present in things like car / airplane design: flexibility... flexibility to change the user controls, flexibility to fix problems, flexibility to let the SW team work up until the last minute to get stuff working, and the second part that goes with this is cost. Touchscreens mean increased flexibility for the design and better control over cost to deliver features. Unfortunately, if the display dies and you can't see anything, then the car or plane may crash... so sadly it will probably take a couple of those events happening for this to be changed to have some kind of redundant systems that the pilot can use when the display dies suddenly.

Planes have multiple screens which provides more redundancy vs broke physical switches.

You'll often see screens surrounded on all sides by physical buttons. The screen can be updated and changed over time but the interaction is still physical.

User controls should never change. It leads to people getting confused and making mistakes.

If something needs that much flexibility in it's UI that people are messing with it at the last minute it doesn't belong as something people should be messing with while driving. The OP talks about HVAC controls. How much flexibility do you really need for that? The interface has been standardized for a long time. It's a known quantity both from a design perspective and user perspective. Ditto for common audio controls like volume, pause/play, skip.

There already are redundant systems like the ones you want. Multiple displays. Most planes that are heavily reliant on screens for instruments/navigation, touchscreens or not, have two of them at least. If one fails, there is a button you press which condenses the information previously shown distributed over both screens on each individual screen (so, the remaining one if one has failed).

Touch screens add multiple points of failure to a device that, if properly built, would last decades. A single glitch in a software driving a screen could render useless all touch inputs displayed on it, information loss aside. I'm all for mechanical switches everywhere. As for potentiometers, sliders etc, we already have optical and mechanical encoders that hardly fail, or if/when they do, it happens gracefully leaving enough time for replacement. To me, the reason for touch screens is either cost or aesthetics, or both.

In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. A bug which would prevent inputs from working right on a touchscreen could also happen on reading inputs on other systems. Not that I'm arguing for touchscreen controls, just that these days having a physical knob does not mean you're directly manipulating things. Software glitches can still muck up physical controls.

Is this a good place for redundant microservices?

Each service handles data from a handful of physical of physical knobs.

At least that way you don't have the UI as a single point of failure.

There is no good point for "redundant" microservices.

They are, by very definition, an additional point of failure as you're always adding an additional interface. They're good for scaling, not for redundancy, and even that's wishful thinking for most applications.

EDIT: You could argue that microservices might free up the UI thread from locking mistakes, but if your team is going to make locking mistakes, you're also going to make mistakes in the microservice interfaces, so what's the point?

It's not about minimizing points of failure, it's about removing singular points of failure. Perhaps "redundant" was the wrong word but the point is instead of having a single UI component (touchscreen/UI thread) which can cause the whole system to fail, if you group buttons/knobs into individual microservices they are unlikely to all go down simultaneously.

I don't get how we can explain it in a simpler way? If you add a microservice, you're adding another point of failure. You add another interaction, you add more code. Add more code, you add more bugs.

It's pretty much the only empirical thing we have in software engineering, more code = more bugs.

Lots of little microservices means lots of extra code means lots of extra bugs.

Plus you've got to manage how they all interact. Which microservice has priotity? Did you even think of that? The breaking microservice? Or the volume microservice? Did you even think of that or try and test that? Your breaks get disabled every time you turn up the volume?

Whoops, you just killed a thousand people with your "redundant" microservices.

Erlang is build around the idea of microservices and message parsing. It's by far one of the best languages we have to make fail tolerant programs - it was invented to solve exactly that problem. While it does not mean you can take every program in any language and make them into a micro service architecture, it shows that if implemented correctly, the idea of microservices and messages absolutely increase reliability.

Do you object to redundancy under all circumstances, or only when it’s preceded by “microservice”?

If you add one microservice, you add a point if failure, but if you then add a few redundant copies of that microservice, for failover, then you don’t add a point of failure.

So… You're suggesting reducing the impact of potential error… By increasing the surface area of potential error…?!

It depends on the error. If its a logic error that will deterministically break all instances, then sure. If, on the other hand, its a transient error that a backup copy of the service can avoid, then redundancy adds safety. Sometimes safety critical software has multiple redundant units which need to agree, too, for example.

> In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting.

Even so, a program for processing a switch or dial can be really short and simple. You can print it out on a sheet and check and double check every line of code for to make sure it's correct and all possibilities are accounted for.

A program handling a touchscreen will be complicated. Millions of lines of code. Maybe even billions. The best you can hope for is empirically verifying it's mostly correct most of the time.

You've done a lot of programming for hardware switches and such then?

I do some. And the last device we built, we still fight with a simple rotary switch. You have to do things like debounce inputs that seem like obvious binary switches. Getting the debounce windowing right can be just as "guessy". And guess what the highest point of failure on said device is. That selector switch. Had similar experience with buttons. I think the software part is just two forms of the Law of Conservation of Ugly.

I do like tactile better, but more for affordance/discoverability (e.g. ergonomic) issues than what you're driving at above.

Yeah processing switch and button and encoder data manually is terrible. Once you install a library to wrap this hardware device in a sane process, how different is that than getting an x/y pixel coordinate from a touchscreen? Touch technology is incredibly reliable. I touch my phone probably 5k times a day or more and I don’t have touch failures, and I carry it around with me and get debris on it and drop it off of tables and all that too. I would argue that a touch interface is one of the most reliable from a hardware standpoint despite not being tactile.

Even modern AAA computer games sometimes miss mouse clicks, because they foolishly poll for transitions of the button up/down state in the main loop, for each frame they render, instead of properly tracking the OS event queue.

It's a very common (and lazy) way of programming games (and other more mission-critical apps): naively polling the input device state in the main simulation or rendering loop, instead of actually responding to each and every queued operating system event like mouse clicks.

It's entirely possible to get multiple mouse down/move/up/click events per render frame, if the system has frozen or stalled for any reason (which happens all the time in the real world). But polling just can't deal with that, so it sometimes ignores legitimate user input (often at a critical time, when other things are happening).

So it's still unfortunately quite common for many apps to sometimes miss quick mouse clicks or screen touches, just because the system freezes up for an instant or lags behind (like when the CPU overheats and the fan turns on madly and SpeedStep clocks the CPU waaaay down, or even the web browser opens up another tab, or anything else blocks the user interface thread), and it just doesn't notice the quick down/up mouse button transition that it would have known about if it were actually tracking operating system events instead of polling.

If anyone else is wondering what debouncing is:

https://my.eng.utah.edu/~cs5780/debouncing.pdf

Haha, this is actually a remarkably funny read with some grizzled, hard-won bits of wisdom sprinkled in.

"It’s surprising how many of those derelicts hanging out at the waterfront bars pick an almost random time constant. “The boys ‘n me, we jest figger sumpin like 5 msec”. Shortchanging a real analysis starts even a clean-cut engineer down the slippery slope to the wastrel vagabond’s life."

Pressure / proximity info is just as noisy and requires its own version of denouncing and x/y jitter handling on top. (Is it a click/drag/hovering over?) My partner can't even stop accidentally registering right-clicks on her laptop touchpad, which should be a really polished experience these days.

I'm not sure I buy touchscreens ever being simpler to handle. (or even in the similar range - they're strictly harder)

Are you debouncing on tactile or is the hardware doing it for you?

In my own brief stint in (non-critical) hardware development, all debouncing was done manually in software.

It all depends on application.... and perspective...

Hardware debouncing works well for most applications but may not be financially rewarding at scale. With time and effort software debouncing can render sometimes better/good or good enough results as hardware..

Remember the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail..."

In an ancient textbook I was reading, they were explaining how to debounce with transistors, capacitors and resistors - so at one time in history debounce was done in hardware.

I had a microwave that used a digital knob that was completely screwed up, from a debouncing perspective. You would turn the knob to try and add 30 seconds to the time and it would stutter between 5-10 seconds for a bit and then shoot up to 3 minutes and then you’d try to drop it down to 30 seconds and end up stuck between 1-2 minutes. It was infuriating! The old mechanical microwave dials were way more reliable than that piece of junk!

> A program handling a touchscreen will be complicated. Millions of lines of code. Maybe even billions.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/millions-lines-of-code/

Interesting link. Can anyone explain why a car needs so much code?

Instead of having a single computer that stores all the code, automobiles have lots of embedded systems with their own code and hardware, and lots of systems designed for validating safety critical functionality. When I say lots, I mean it's usually several dozen and can be over 100. Since many of these need to meet special regulations and oftentimes require hard real-time characteristics, this tends to add to the complexity significantly.

I mean ... we all know a car does not need that much code

Really, why do you know that?

I would expect a car to have tons of code.

Think of all the functions...

Engine management, Engine monitoring, Powertrain control, Emissions, Diagnostics, Infotainment, Satnav, Climate Control, Traction Control, ABS, Anti-collision radar, Cruise control, Lane keeping, Backup camera, Parking sensors...

Now keep in mind that these hundreds of components exist in many many possible configurations so the system needs to handle having certain hardware available or not, and also handle a multitude of failure modes gracefully.

Perhaps because cars ran just fine (albeit with fewer features) for a long time with zero lines of code.

So did horses without any gasoline

Yeah, and so did banks, and so did airplanes.

So the more important question is: did adding software improve things (enough to be worth the “cost”)?

With cars, there are certainly many things where it did improve things: satnav, reverse camera, traction control etc, but also some where it made a perfectly working system worse (ie the “fixed” something that wasn’t broken): touchscreen dashboards.

Because my car has exactly zero lines of code and it runs just fine.

I guess in cars they use less (public) librarys because of safety. So there own libs are included in LOC. If you look at a modern Microsoft licence, they list tons of used open source libs in there products. I guess if you include all the librarys, the LOC number should be much higher.

Apparently a lot of it is just generated templates coming from commercial SDKs. Adding to that, a car is a set of distinct embedded systems interacting in a sort of a ladder network topology rather than a vertebrate analog like multi-core PCs, so a lot of code in a car would be redundant or has little footprint restrictions.

The phone switch for Nortel's Meridian PBX system circa 1994, which supported SONET and IP, had about 16 million lines of code. The complexity of a touchscreen is less than 1%, maybe less than 0.1% of that. Lines of code, however an absurd metric, in this case does say something. I'm just not sure exactly what, though.

Isnt code just vastly different... abstracted from 94’ era lingo?

Billions? That sounds like a vast overestimate, no?

Are there any programs that approach a billion lines of code?

I'd think a few npm dependencies should do the trick ;)

a quick search brought up https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-biggest-codebases-in-h... which reports google's codebase is around 2 billion LOC. MS Office comes in close to 50 million, for example.

Not sure how accurate these are, but seem to give some rough comparisons, and yeah, not too many things are billions of LOC.

I wouldn't be surprised, the amount of crap that gets downloaded for a simple react app is incredible.

Mechanical switches and rotary controls require debouncing which is no picnic.

I can 100% tell from your comment that you've never had to work with one.

It's less science than black magic to avoid double presses or missed presses.

I've done a bunch of debouncing switch inputs, keypad, keyboard, rotory switches. And wrote some test code for capcitive touch display (long time ago)

It's the kinda problem that will tend to bite you in the butt if you aren't aware of all the gotchas. Difficulty is they are application specific. But I wouldn't describe the code as particularly complicated.

Most of this stuff a crusty old neckbeard embedded programmer can do half drunk on Friday afternoon.

So because an expert can do it easily means it's easy? In that case literally anything is easy.

OP was saying that mechanical switches could be deterministic, which is something that I haven't experienced.

I do agree that there is less to go wrong than a complicated touchscreen interface however.

There are plenty of individual use cases where touch screens make sense. The interactive map as it is enabled by the multitouch screen, with arbitrary rescale and repositioning and display of arbitrary layers of data, all handled at the speed of thought, is something unmatched by any other object or interface, for one example amongst many.

Multiple physical knobs and buttons add multiple points of failure: moving parts fail and even worse, they often fail intermittently. We all have that experience. Even optical encoders fail (I’ve had one fail on an engine, and obviously consumer mice, or the connectors fail).

A modern touch screen is superbly reliable because it has no moving parts, and it can be tested. The (consumer grade) iPad touchscreen is very reliable.

Anecdotaly, my touch screen devices's screens are less durable than my mechanical keyboard, but I agree with your overall points, touch screens can be made incredibly durable.

Very interesting... I wonder what it would take for a touchscreen keyboard to be as reliable or live as long as a mechanical keyboard. Maybe it already does, but my mental picture and experience of phone screens getting flaky, and taking secondary+ swipes does not give me the confidence a mechanical keyboard does.

If they can make a durable touchscreen keyboard with a good click sound and feel and reasonable key travel and resistance, and that doesn't get crudded up with skin oils and food film, I'm willing to pay big bucks for it.

A mechanical switch is easy and cheap to fix or replace. A touch screen is the opposite. It cannot be repaired, only replaced. A switch can usually be cleaned easily, to restore its function. And proper quality switches can be actuated millions of times before failure.

Point of fact; A touch interface digitizer and the LCD screen are two separate components just often glued and sold as a single unit. Replacing a digitizer, or a screen should be no more difficult than swapping out an analog component with a proper modular physical layout and connectors.

A cheap phone or tablet hardly represent best of breed for the technology as a whole.

> A mechanical switch is easy and cheap to fix or replace.

Not if it is in an airplane. Think of all the QC steps required to track the production, storage, shipping, installation, testing, etcetera for the replacement of a single switch. If a switch has failed it needs to be inspected to understand the reason for failure (no switch should fail; tracked to understand if it is a batch failure, plus other steps). I am only making an educated guess here.

> A switch can usually be cleaned easily, to restore its function.

Ummm, you think they put known failed parts back in planes? I think not. They do fix major parts, but the QC for that would be insane. You would make a switch to be hermetic and add anti-tampering - a manufacturer of any safety related device doesn’t want it to be “fixed”. Items are designed to be maintained (with proper schedules), or replaced.

> And proper quality switches can be actuated millions of times before failure.

On average? Or does it have a bathtub curve? Yes, quality switches are insanely reliable, but so are touchscreens.

If you have a variety of 50 switches and knobs, then the reliability is worse than 50x worse, because every item has it’s own reliability curve, and it only takes one failure to muck up your day.

>Not if it is in an airplane.

Even less so if it's on the space station. Or on a Mars rover. But we're talking about cars. Something a lot of people like to mend for themselves.

OP context of this thread is touch panels in aeroplanes, not cars.

I can say that an intermittent switch failure is hard to diagnose and potentially costly. The dash on a 2007 Ford I got cheaply had an intermittent fault where the whole dash would shutdown, and headlights would go off, while driving. Switching ignition off and on would fix it, so I presumed it just needed a reset. It was actually the barrel switch of the key - intermittent enough to cause a lot of dangerous trouble but hard to diagnose.

Another factor is having to keep a larger variety of inventory for mechanical switches, vs a single touch screen SKU standardized across many models.

I had a smartphone that at some point started to randomly create touch events. Kind of like if you put it in your pocket while the screen is unlocked.

I don't remember any physical light switch that ever switch on or off by itself.

In an aircraft flying through turbulences I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing that all switches are pyhsical. Try to use your smartphone while jogging...

Comparing a light switch to the switches and dials found in an aircraft is a it like comparing a light switch to a keyboard key.

Yeah they’re both switches, but size is incredibly important, and small mechanical devices are finicky and don’t produce nice clean digital output (that’s a lie that electronic engineers tell software engineers to keep things simple).

So yeah I’m sure you’ve never seen a light switch fail, but I bet you’ve seen a keyboard fail (especially if you’ve spent any time around a recent MacBook).

But I do agree with your point on using a touchscreen in turbulence. A counter point is that there are probably hundreds of controls or settings on a plane that you never touch during turbulence, possibly that you never touch in flight (like telling the flight computer how much cargo you’re carrying). Stuff like that is ideal for a touchscreen.

What happens if an object impacts a touchscreen and it breaks? I have my screens break (even behind a screen protector) and has failed to respond to touch. Imagine you are flying a plane and the touchscreen breaks due to impact. All your inputs are centralized behind that one touchscreen and you can no longer operate it. Wouldn't it be then better if there were multiple points of failure? You are decentralizing the impact a failure can have. Sometimes having multiple points of failure is a good thing. That way a failure in one component won't affect the other components.

Have a spare screen that you can just slot in and carry on.

While your plane is falling from the sky?

The airplane cockpits I've read about have multiple screens, with knobs selecting the function of each screen (and which of the redundant flight computers control each screen), so a failed screen can be replaced by selecting its function on another screen. This makes more sense (and is simpler) than carrying a replacement screen (which would be dead weight most of the time) and designing a hot-swap mechanism (which would be yet another potential point of failure).

The iPad touchscreen is very reliable until you splash water on it. I don't think splashing a cup of water onto 1995 car dashboard would trigger any of the buttons.

Multiple physical knows will never fail all at once like a single touchscreen can. As a small plane pilot I prefer to have as many independent systems as possible; I use an iPad for instruments and navigation, but every single function is duplicated by a separate instrument, so if I lose the iPad for any reason I have the instruments in the cockpit. I had several incidents where single components failed, but I was able to safely land the plane every time. Hardware failures are as much as a problem as software failures and dual-redundant critical systems are far better than multi-functional devices.

A wet finger makes my device go ballistic.

I wouldn't fly on a touchscreen plane, imagine Boeing going corporate with their airplane screens, nope, nope, nope.

Adding "touch screen calibration failure" to the list of things that can kill you.

I pray you all read the ux bible About Face on interaction design.

Big mistake, imnsho. It will work fantastic right up to the point where you actually need that control in an emergency and then it will fail you because it is impossible to hit the right area consistently in a bucking aircraft. It also requires visual confirmation rather than tactile confirmation, which requires you to take away your attention from the surroundings, something you do at your peril in aircraft.

and all SCADA systems

So in due time we can be almost certain to hear about a crash due to a bad touch or a wonky screen.

New isn't always better.

The big driver for this is reducing the number of components and thus manufacturing cost, and secondarily being trendy.

What happens during turbulence when you can't accurately touch a specific point on the screen? It doesn't take much turbulence, either, as I cannot reliably use the GPS on my phone, while driving, when it's in its (very stable) mount, and I'm on an average paved road.

Touch screen looks awesome on Star Trek, but in actual use it's an inaccurate, attention-magnet, nightmare.

Which control do you exactly need to adjust in the middle of a turbulence?

Most of them, as you find turbulence in all fases during the flight.

Roll? Pitch? Yaw? Engine RPM? Prop pitch?

Those are “most” of the controls... none of which require touchscreens.

What controls are you referring to specifically?

Murderers!

There's lots of discussion here about the benefits or otherwise of analog switches etc, but it's not about the failure or otherwise of the input device, it's about the affordance to the pilot.

Well designed physical UI allows pilots to use touch and haptic feedback independent of sight. Whether the switch/dial/whatever is analog behind the scenes or is a digital input to the control infra is not the important thing.

please tell then to stop

I hope this is known to the manufacturer:

"The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers

After a deadly 2017 crash between a destroyer and an oil tanker"

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john...

Too late! Boeing 777-X will have touch screen interfaces for pilots.

Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.

The problem is not "having touch interfaces", the problem is "having touch interfaces for critical systems".

I can assure you that PFD (primary flight display) interfaces are very much safety-critical. And they will be touch interfaces.

Personally I think it's an awful idea. I just watched the promotional video that I expected to give some answers as to why this design decision was made and I frankly ended up even more worried.[1] I can accept that I'm somewhat of a luddite when it comes to this and I might be wrong, I just hope these are thoroughly tested and actually solve real world problems, and aren't just a way for Boeing to save money or solve the problem of "hey why aren't there any cool touchscreens in here".

[1]: https://www.boeing.com/777x/reveal/touchscreens-come-to-777x...

You would have a difficult time finding an airborne system that does not already do this:

> I just hope these are thoroughly tested and actually solve real world problems

Changing from a legacy style to a new one is not cheap, and aerospace companies are not the type to spend money on useless, less reliable technology.

That sounds like a horrible idea.

If you're trying to say, lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions, you can probably smack the button a few times until it works, failing that, rip the switch out and short the wires inside the switch and get the plane landed.

With a touch screen? What if the glass breaks and the capacitive layer fails? Or the software running the screen crashes? Or a bug prevents you from switching from the "Climate control" tab to the "Landing gear" tab?

There are three redundant methods to lower the landing gear on my aircraft, depending on whether you still have hydraulic ability available or not. It is not unique. One is a big, fat lever that will not go away with a hypothetical touchscreen option, since we pilots tend to like physical backups for flight-critical systems like that (though I’m curious what pc86 is flying upthread, since even the G1000 aircraft I’ve flown have usually had airspeed dials).

It is even totally possible to gravity drop landing gear on nearly all commercial airliners, I would expect, though I can only speak on the types I’ve rated on. I don’t see you asking “what happens if the landing gear lever fails?” which is actually a totally reasonable question, and one manufacturers have thought of. Touchscreens aren’t magic devices, they’re just another type of input to build redundancy behind.

It sounds like a horrible idea because you probably haven’t flown an aircraft and don’t know this. That isn’t an indictment of you, just a request to not judge so soon. I like the idea of screens that adjust to phase of flight so what I need is where I need it, because pilot workload is a real problem that automation has addressed for decades.

> One is a big, fat lever that will not go away with a hypothetical touchscreen option

Thanks for the explanation -- This makes me feel much safer as a passenger if the touch screen is provided to you as a convenience instead of a replacement. Yep, I haven't flown an aircraft. I was thinking that it was like a car where they are getting rid of physical knobs and replacing them with touchscreen-only interfaces which I hate.

> If you're trying to say, lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions

If you're trying to lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions, you use the gravity gear extension handle, which is a completely independent system. You can also land without the landing gear in the worst case.

> What if the glass breaks and the capacitive layer fails? Or the software running the screen crashes? [...]

You use the other screen, which is controlled by the other computer. There are also knobs to switch which computer controls each screen. In the worst case, there are the standby instruments.

Airplanes have a lot of redundancy.

> Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.

Underrated comment!

Information - the user is already looking at the screen, so they can touch virtual buttons. And that is probably the best approach, as they are manipulating information that is being displayed and they can see.

For actions, you won't necessarily have your attention on the screen. The information may not even be displayed in the screen yet, so now you have to divert attention and manipulate the system to get it to a state you can then change(eg, moving to the climate control screen).

Well keyboards are an interesting one. Airliners have space to install hardware keyboards, light aircraft don't so they have touch displays.

You could argue that an onscreen keyboard is significantly less mental load for the pilot than having to scroll letter by letter on a "dumb" interface.

Where do accidents happen? It's fairly rare for a plane to just break. And even then, if your electronics fail there are usually mechanical backups for the critical instruments. It's much more common for pilots to reach task saturation and make mistakes.

> You could argue that an onscreen keyboard is significantly less mental load for the pilot than having to scroll letter by letter on a "dumb" interface.

I don't buy that argument. What kind of keyboard? QWERTY or something else? What language? English is the language of aviation, but if you're not a native speaker who uses keyboards all the time then chances are you're going to have a LOT of mental load using a keyboard. Even something like the French or German keyboards, which use mostly the same letters, may be different enough to cause frustration -- and when you have an engine on fire you don't need to be struggling with those details.

The ones I've seen are a-z, not qwerty:

https://www.simpits.org/articles/Boeing_simtour/simtour30.jp...

And English because anything you'd need to enter, like waypoints or airport IDs use roman/latin letters or numbers.

Airbus (A380 and A350) mounts both full size QWERTY on retractable "desk", and A-Z on the center console.

The keyboard is mainly used for planning ahead where you have more data to input. Both are equipped with mouse as well.

> The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to replace the hardware.

I mean, the other point of a dynamic interface is that you can now have more controls than would fit on a static interface. Touchscreen fit-to-purpose controls might suck more than hardware fit-to-purpose controls, but either option is better than a single set of generic controls that control multiple systems that "should" have different control paradigms, translating to the generic controls being a compromised bad fit for any use-case.

E.g. a hardware English-language keyboard is probably better than a touchscreen English-language keyboard (though people with modern Blackberries might dispute this); but both are better than entering English text through T9 on a dial pad. And the touchscreen has the benefit of allowing you to have more keyboards (for e.g. the multiple native languages you type that use different alphabets), which wouldn't even fit on the phone as hardware keyboards.

I bring this up, because eventually you run out of space to stuff additional controls. As airplanes become ever-more advanced, their cockpits will approach that point. At that point, dynamic affordances may be necessary, just so you can have some kind of "pagination" allowing you to squeeze more controls in. (Hopefully it'd just be for the non-time-critical switches to flip.)

I'm not disagreeing with anything you're saying and despite my somewhat ranting comment I am not completely opposed to a mix of touchscreens and hardware interfaces: but I think you'll agree that there needs to be a decision made in terms of safety when you decide to use a touchpad for input. If you're adjusting the screen brightness on your smart phone, that slider doesn't have to be perfect, and maybe adjusting the cabin lights for an airliner doesn't have to be either: I'm just dreading the day when things like navigational headings and airspeed creeps into a touch interface because of "convenience". But if my observation about this trend is wrong, which I hope, that separation of concerns will stay in future designs as well.

> I mean, the other point of a dynamic interface is that you can now have more controls than would fit on a static interface.

I think this point is lost sometimes, but is also useful. My car has a lot of physical controls. Some of the ones that are useful during driving are tucked inconveniently below my left knee!

Moving some less frequently used controls to a touch screen might actually benefit some of these designs.

There's always the possibility for hybrid UIs. Something with physical inputs with a dynamic display based on context, like a screen above a series of buttons and maybe a dial at the end ( think ATMs) or even buttons with OLED displays.

It's the best or worst of both worlds depending on your perspective, but they do offer superior hands-free operation over a pure touch device, but at the sacrifice of interface flexibility.

>Something with physical inputs with a dynamic display based on context, like a screen above a series of buttons and maybe a dial at the end

BMW's iDrive is, I think, the canonical early example of this in the automotive world.

Also known as an MFD, and used for many decades in the aviation industry.

MFDs were pioneered in fighter jets, where the cockpit physical space is extremely limited while the amount of information the pilot has to deal with is far beyond any civilian pilot workload.

MFDs combine the durability of physical controls with the configurability and flexibility of screens, and it's completely beyond me why they are not standard equipment in all cars.

That's a funny coincidence. Two days ago, I was searching the Web for cars with MFDs after watching a review covering the Porsche Taycan's touchscreen interface, thinking how odd it was that I couldn't find any.

Sure, but there are still tons of touchscreens in the cabin -- controlling the climate, the lighting, and the playback of the safety video.

Yes, and I have no problem with that. I don't imagine that an imprecise control of the climate, lighting or video playback will bring the plane down. I mean, I sure hope not.

This comment is off-topic: the article is about physical buttons for non-safety-critical systems. E.g. the article explicitly mentions climate control.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough about this but I was more trying to make a point that physical input is safer, and that the trend towards touchscreens in general worries me. So a return to "normal", which I guess is not so normal these days, is for me very welcome. Touchscreens in cars cause safety issues for other reasons, namely those of distraction, but my concern is what the future will look like if touchscreen normality takes the upper hand over safety concerns.

I am really sorry but foggy windshield is definitely safety critical.

You can still die if the driver spends too long messing with air conditioner settings instead of focusing on the road.

CarPlay and Android Auto make this problem worse, IMO. Now you have app publishers writing arbitrarily complex UIs for cars. Spotify is a bitch to use while driving and because of Apple's reluctance to enable Siri support for third party apps, it's not very controllable by voice.

yup, just rented a cool modern car and was distraught at how much menu-diving there was. and even if you memorize it, the lag was still huge vs. real-time controls!

"Siri, play the Eagles on spotify"

Been available for a little bit now.

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-siri-to-control-...

The ergonomics in question here are not about the driver being able to operate controls in a critical situation. They're about operating the controls without causing a critical situation.

If you want, you might think of radio, climate controls, etc as having negative values on the safety axis. You still want to shift them to the right as far as you can.

Climate control is something you will want to adjust while driving, so it should be as eyes-free as possible once the basics have been acquired.

I can’t think of a car I’ve driven where the climate control was not physical though, that seems pretty insane.

All Tesla climate is non-physical. All newer Volvos are except for the defrost controls, as well.

Will you though? You have a temperature you're comfortable at. Set climate control to that and let the software manage the air.

I suppose you don't include the flight manuals as a critical system, since those have been touch screens for almost a decade?

An airplane cockpit has two pilots and literally several hundred physical buttons. No one wants to drive that car.

In cars we're mainly talking about the volume and fan speed. Personally I much prefer knobs for those. But I wouldn't call those critical safety systems.

Someone already mentioned this: climate control becomes safety critical when your windshield fogs up. Good luck finding that goddamn touch button then... Additionally, I sometimes hear radio ads that have honk or siren sounds in them that immensely piss me off and cause me to immediately turn the radio off just to be able to hear if something's actually happening or not.

Great points.

BUT - touch screens can be used if people are trained, the layout is rational, the device is responsive.

There are two underlying things:

1) Tactile. As you spelled out.

2) Changing interfaces. This is the real killer. 100 screens, don't know what's what, supposed to be driving.

These UIs need some thinking but I suggest that the 'knobs and buttons' can possibly be mapped to different functions depending on.

> The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to replace the hardware.

They also enable the completion of hardware design before the interface design is completed. While the plastic molds and mechanical designs are worked out, the interface and software development can continue.

That sounds good, but for some reason, design of "virtual" controls always seems to end up far inferior to physical ones. Perhaps the thought is "We'll just toss something out there and we can fix it later", as opposed to "We only have one shot at this so we better get it right".

I'm reminded as well of web "app" interfaces. In the early days, with relatively fixed controls, one could often navigate sites more easily since there just weren't that many ways they could work. Now, with a blizzard of JS UI kits and an oh-so-wonderful variety of ways of doing everything, each site works differently. And it's not an improvement.

Yeah, sorry, I should have been clearer on my opinion on the matter: virtual controls are almost always worse than physical ones.

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems

For one, you're too late, touchscreens are prevalent in modern avionics, and unlabeled buttons on the border of a screen that change function depending on what screen you're viewing are the second most common. The more relevant part to the Honda discussion is that there are different considerations for a car and airplane interfaces, and they are so different it's not a good argument to say "planes don't/shouldn't do this so cars shouldn't either."

The issue with a car isn't the interface, it's the fact that people look inside their vehicle for too long to fiddle with the radio. Even if the buttons/knobs could be operated entirely without looking, most people would still stare at their radio while they are doing it. Pilots learning to fly are trained to look outside after pretty much any action, they shouldn't ever stare inside the plane. They do a quick instrument scan and look outside. They glance at their chart and look outside. If they need to change frequency they do it and then look back outside. It's kind of hard to break the habit of looking outside when you start instrument training.

But most car drivers don't have the same amount of training and fixate on things inside the car, like the radio or climate controls. TBH, pilots still get fixated on things, it's just that they usually snap out of it and regain situational awareness before anything bad happens because the skies are pretty spacious. But car drivers don't have spacious roads. There's another car right next to you going 75 mph and if you drift out of your lane you'll cause an accident.

The issue isn't the design of the buttons at all. That matters to a fighter pilot, but the issue for a car driver is the fact that the screen is even on and the radio is accessible while driving down the road. The real critical safety feature would be disabling the screen while driving, and either locking out controls or only allowing voice control. But people would never buy a car that doesn't let them fiddle with the radio or stare at their little screen, so the actual safety feature that needs to be implemented won't happen.

Edit: When I say "fiddle with the radio" I'm including all activities that take place in a car's center stack- audio, navigation, climate control, etc. I'm also a pilot, have designed tests for avionics upgrades for multiple fighter jets, and own my own plane. I have lamented the introduction of touchscreens into modern avionics at a professional level and the personal level. I own three cars with varying levels of touchscreen invasion. So I've thought about the issues surrounding touchscreen quite a bit, and have concluded that the interfaces in a car are so simple that the issue isn't whether you can operate it without looking, it's the fact that people aren't trained to do so.

Pilots already use iPads for checklists.

That's a different ballpark though as you can fall back to the paper version at any time.

More often than not, navigation charts are now on iPads and there is no paper backup carried anymore.

While not touch many Airbus aircraft feature a full keyboard and trackball for operating those screens.

The f35 has a large touch screen that pilots use. Maybe the $1m helmet has a way to interact without touching.

For some more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/cmypjd/the_finger... It's fun thread. You can catch some actual military pilots there.

I was about to ask if there are any pilots on this thread who could weigh in because this was my intuition as a non-pilot. Just to drive one of your points home further, you don't want the interface to change because that could confuse the pilot. Toyota's braking fiasco is an example where unfamiliarity led to mis-operation even though the hardware or the device itself was functioning "to spec".

I am not a pilot, but it seems like MFD (multi-function displays, a sort of touch screen with touch points at the edge of the screen) are very common even in fighter planes.

Yes, the basic controls do not change. But more advanced functionality is easier presented through menus and screens which guide you through a process -- instead of adding tons of switches for every possible function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-function_display

The problem here is not with the technology - it's from the people implementing it. Instead of leaving the design and software to tech companies, we have car companies trying to do it on their own.

The result is terribly designed software that looks like it's from 2000.

The arrogance of that statement is amazing. I recently bought an iPad for the first time in 5+(?) years.. before multi touch and pressure sensitive screens. I have no f'n clue what I'm doing anymore. I accidentally had Safari running two windows side by side with no idea how to stop that. I'm still not sure what I did to make it go back to one window..

My friends and I decided to try out a (new to us) game which required Microsoft Store / Xbox PC Game Console or whatever the shit it is. 4 of us cannot figure out how to add someone as a friend. It's not in any menu anywhere. I can follow, I can favorite.. I have no idea how to "friend".. which means we can't figure out how to invite people to games.

I'm convinced if Silicon Valley were to design car interfaces I'd be stuck in some sort of pay per action dark pattern captivity hell.

And as a student pilot nothing scares me more than touch screen controls. Maybe I spend too much time down low in the thermals but it's so much easier to hold on to a knob and turn it, while counting clicks, than trying to press a touch screen and hope you hit the right finger sized button the right number of times to change radio frequencies. Different story on heavy planes since they don't bounce around as much as GA planes but it sucks to fight the fight while trying to maintain control/coordination.

Unfortunately, that kind of arrogance is common on this forum.

While working from home, I was trying to figure out how to mute my Android phone on a conference call the other day. I eventually did, but the sequence of actions to get to the menu was very strange. I'm pretty sure it was more intuitive just a few years ago, but of course, you don't control whether you update software anymore. Interface design is accelerating downhill, and it's amazing how things have regressed since Apple and Microsoft published guidelines for good design in the 80s and 90s.

So because you had a bad experience on one Microsoft product, all of the tech industry has poor user interface design?

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. all have some of the best user designs created for technology. They have teams of researchers, psychologists, and designers working together to do this.

Have you heard of the auto industry doing anything remotely similar on this scale? Instead, they push away much better alternatives offered by Apple and Google for their own proprietary solution no customers asked for.

The arrogance of your comment is almost greater than your ignorance.

Honestly, if you told me that moving forward I could only have CarPlay or Android Auto then I would quit buying new cars. I dislike both of them. I also don’t want my car tied to a company that has a reputation for canceling products more than I change shoes. And if you think the auto industry doesn’t employ people to try and improve their user experience then you’re as daft as you think I am.

I'd argue that humans have evolved to physically manipulate their environment. Safety critical systems are the last place you want UI variation. Things need to be predictable and tactile to build muscle memory.

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems

Touch screens in the cockpit seem like madness to me. Cockpits sometimes fill with smoke and the pilot has to be able to find and operate the controls.

Ever notice that the flap levers have little flaps on top of them? The nosewheel steering control has a little tire on the top? That's so the pilot knows without looking what his hands are on. These designs were not the result of some study group following fashion, but were the result of accidents.

Not just smoke. During explosive decompression the air turns to thick fog, and that's when you'll need to fumble around for the correct controls the most.

Another consideration is vibration; trying to press a virtual button while in a high turbulence situation can be non-trivial, for example.

Critical functions will (hopefully) always remain on tactile controls for these and other reasons.

well said. I for one don't like all those touchscreen buttons. Screens should be for maps and other non-interactive stuff.

Didn't the US Navy try this and end up crashing a destroyer or something?

You are correct.

> The US Navy is replacing touch screen controls on destroyers, after the displays were implicated in collisions.

Unfamiliarity with the touch screens contributed to two accidents that caused the deaths of 17 sailors, said incident reports.

Poor training meant sailors did not know how to use the complex systems in emergencies, they said.

Sailors "overwhelmingly" preferred to control ships with wheels and throttles, surveys of crew found.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

The thing I'd like to see more of is OLED buttons (Optimus Keyboard style). Physical, clicky, mechanical buttons, but each button is a screen. MFD buttons already change their function depending on what mode the screen is in, having the button also be an icon of what it will do can be very nice.

Otherwise I agree. You need the use of the interface to be as automatic as possible, and exploiting muscle memory & tactile feedback are very important for that. Touch screens fail there.

I don't think this is entirely true. The GA glass panels love touchscreens, and they are just as FAA-certified as their non-touchscreen counterparts.

You are right that they are flaky. Here's Martin Pauly (great YouTube channel!) using his touchscreen transponder and it just stops working: https://youtu.be/bopcQSJKcD8?t=732

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems

The F-35 Fighter Jet has basically only touch-screens (apart from Hands-on-throttle-and-stick controls for when you are busy pulling Gs)

Depends on your definition of "critical" but I don't think this is a great example.

And the F-35 is a great example of how not to do things, so of course it has touchscreens.

Perhaps, but on many pilot's knees will be a digital touchscreen kneeboard which having learned with paper approach plates and map books myself was a godsend.

I think that’s partially why the market for handheld game devices didn’t get crowded out by smartphones. Tactile inputs let the player’s muscle memory work as a more direct shorthand into the product for a lot of video games. It helps the repeated interactions of a video game be more accessible over a “look, then touch” method of input.

Dynamic interface can still be useful in some cases. Cars do require the driver’s active attention, but certainly not the passenger’s, who can operate the touchscreen. Further, undoubtably part of what makes controls intuitive is familiarity, and thanks to smartphones, tablets, and to some degree even modern laptops, it’s hard to argue against it from a familiarity standpoint. I’m sure it’s been attempted but, It’s hard to imagine a good mapping interface in a car with no touchscreen at all.

I’m still glad for what Honda is actually doing, which is not unilaterally removing touch screen controls but instead moving climate control back to physical buttons. These are things a driver ought to be able to operate safely while in motion, and touch controls only ever made them more complicated I think.

I think you're missing something pretty major -- a touchscreen can support multiple UIs, menus, and controls, with minimal hardware. If I have 20 user adjustable inputs, I would need 20 dials/buttons scattered around the cockpit. On the other hand, with a screen, I can display 5 on each page and allow the user to swap between pages.

It's not useful to compare cars to planes since cars can easily pull over to the side of the road.

Check out all the latest Garmin aviation equipment. Touch is here for critical systems including GPS systems used on instrument approaches. Super fun to reprogram in turbulence.

Pretty sure this has everything to do with planes being old. Boeing pretty clearly demonstrated that planes being planes doesn't mean they're immune from bad design, corruption, or any other problem.

One time I had to create a button for a in-flight software which would control a lidar instrument. The button would enable you to select when to turn on and off the instrument.

We went for a few iterations where the button would light up when the laser was on. There were tons of issues--the state of the laser was not stored in the hardware, so every time the button would disconnect briefly, the state would get reset and lost. After months of back and forth dealing with algorithms to save the state and deal with spurious button presses when the device disconnected, we ended up with a completely useless button, as disconnects would happen very often inside helicopters, rendering the button useless due to the spurious presses near disconnect/reconnect.

Finally, we decided to go with a hardware switch (which I wanted from the start). In about one day the whole thing blew over.

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems, because safety and stability matters to airline manufacturers, current ongoing scandals notwithstanding.

You might want to take a look at garmin's general aviation product lineup. They're pretty popular.

Look at the upcoming TEMPEST fighter to see touch screen displays in full force.

I'm afraid I have some bad news for you:

https://youtu.be/wfOD2y_AD_w?t=190

https://www.dynonavionics.com/SkyView-HDX/

https://youtu.be/1oyCzT6sB_4

Just a few examples.

Aviation very much uses touch screens quite extensively. The difference usually is that more thought is put into when and how to use them; you're not just replacing all the buttons with a touchscreen and letting some underpaid intern design the interface for it.

Cockpit design is strictly regulated by some very risk averse and conservative people. (And not just the cockpit, the passenger space as well.)

So it's hard to tell which parts of he design stem from being conservative and which parts actually enhance safety.

(I get your overall point. But your argument isn't really a good one for the point.)

Indeed when phones started moving over to touchscreen dial pads i always thought it was a step backward usability wise. I had one phone where I couldn't hang up calls easily as you needed to swipe in a particular direction and a number of my calls went though a VOIP number so that had a different way of hanging up. Same with whatsapp calls now answering and hanging up is different from a normal call. It's a real shitshow.

Touchscreens on phones are great for usability! There are so many things that are enabled by touchscreens that you couldn't do with an array of physical buttons or whatever. OP's comment was specifically for mission critical hardware where safety is paramount.

For making a phonecall they are crap in comparison to buttons.

One could argue that, despite still being called "phones," their primary purpose is not making phone calls anymore. I personally use my device for making phone calls less than 1% of the time I use it (and this includes talk time).

yeah the phone thing is just another app that I use about 5 times a month. it's nice that they include that app but if it wasn't there i'd prob still buy it!

"The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers

After a deadly 2017 crash between a destroyer and an oil tanker"

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john...

I see many people comparing automotive electronics to avionics, but there’s a big difference, in flight you can take your eyes off the “road” and in some situations even fly with 0 visibility, whereas in a car your next obstacle is only milliseconds away from you.

Nope, not anymore. Honeywell is making the new Gulfstream’s Symmetry Flight Deck for the G700 and it is touchscreen enabled.

All the latest Garmin avionics include touch screens. Airplane cockpits aren't the right metaphor because they are largely driven automatically.

Not to mention, touchscreens really disadvantage the visually impaired.

True, but they are already a little disadvantaged when flying an airplane.

I was thinking more of essentially everything else, from working a stereo to an oven.

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car's audio system, they suck. Recognition is slow and unreliable enough that I never bother, and if I did, the cognitive overhead would be unacceptably high anyway. They'd have done better not to bother implementing them at all and instead just offload that work to the driver's paired smartphone, which for a sedan that listed $32k new, it's very reasonable to assume will be present.

It's interesting, when I had my Windows phone and linked it with my 2014 Ford Fiesta which had Microsoft Sync, it was incredibly fast, responsive and a joy to use. Once you got the format of your queries down, it was super easy to use. They had a button on the wiper knob. Press it, wait for the beep and your're off and running. It synced up instantly. As soon as your phone was connected via bluetooth, you were good to go.

I had a text conversation with my GF back and forth for almost two hours, just by using the speech to text recognition capability of the Sync in my Fiesa, it was really amazing to me how well it worked.

My 2016 Toyota Corolla has something similar and pairs with my iphone and its a total nightmare. it takes literally ten minutes for it to sync up. That's after the phone has already been connected via Bluetooth. The command queries don't often work, you have to repeat them several times, and then after three of four times of saying the same thing over and over, you finally just give up. I'm not sure if its just with the iphone, but it really does suck.

It might just be the car. Unless I invoke the onboard voice recognition, my Altima essentially behaves as a Bluetooth headset powered by internal combustion, and Siri is as usable that way as via the phone's own speakers and mic.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if that were heavily dependent on the quality of the car's audio system, though; I went for the best available trim package, figuring that if I had to go back to owning a car again then it might as well at least be as comfortable as I could manage, and I might not have so good an experience here if I had economized a bit more.

>My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car's audio system, they suck

Using Siri is more dangerous than driving and texting:

"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...

Touchscreens should be banned in cars. I bought my car without any for that reason.

I'd be interested to see how having a conversation with a passenger lines up.

Yeah, well, people are selective in their concerns. How much does it affect reaction time to have passengers in the car who you may talk to, or may be doing all sorts of things that distract you?

Aren't passengers much better to have in your car, because they can "copilot" for you?

No. Even if they were helping, they would have to communicate things to you in a way where you could interpret them and react more quickly than just doing it yourself.

Passengers are largely not helping, and certainly are not good at communicating problems.

If you don't stop that right now, so help me, I'm going to turn this car around...

It's a little unfair to say that it's worse than texting. The increase to reaction time for texting was 34.7%, while Android Auto only showed an increase of 30% on voice. The 36% increase for Siri also was specifically for voice navigation, with voice media control showing no statistically significant increase in reaction time.

You're likely keeping your eyes on the road more with voice control over texting, though this one is hard to compare as the studies didn't measure it quite the same. Voice controls all came in under the NHTSA 12 second recommendation. The texting study showed an increase in time spent looking away from the road from a baseline of 10% to 40%.

Original Studies: https://iamwebsite.blob.core.windows.net/media/docs/default-...

https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/...

Voice command is unreliable.

Even human to human level, every safety critical application rely on voice commands has to implement very rigid and strong standards and rules on human speech.

Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better?

Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.

When it comes to it, I don't think it's as bad. In a manual car one hand is often off the steering wheel and that's not detrimental.

This is a great example of when "perfect is the enemy of good".

Humans have pretty good spatial reasoning (proprioception); the notion that touch controls should replace tactile well-spaced controls is dependent on the fact that both senses (sight, spatial awareness) are uncontested.

I would argue the point that sight is already in-use and must not be interfered with, if there's an alternative that does not use the same resources.

I think of it like hardware acceleration and parrelelisation; the brain has a hardware accelerator for sight, but only one, and has a bunch of cores ready for other tasks, and those other tasks can happen in parallel.

Or you could go for Tesla's strategy, which is try to get self-driving ASAP so you don't have the problem anymore.

Taking your hand off the steering wheel isn't so bad. It's loss of attention, even for 1 second, that's extremely dangerous. Touch screens make you look away from the road. Knobs and buttons do not. However, jamming them all into the steering wheel may then cause the same problem, as if there's too many things in the same area you'd have to look down to find what you're looking for.

I'm not at all convinced that voice recognition are better or safer than well designed physical controls.

I'm certain that it'll be worse. Consider spending 15 seconds to change a single setting.

Taking one hand off the wheel is nowhere near as bad as taking your eyes off the road. With physical knobs, I can use muscle memory to reach out and adjust them without taking my eyes off the road.

Having it on the dash rather than the steering wheel also allows the passenger to operate the controls, which is probably the safest way to do it.

Steering is a "good enough" problem outside of extreme driving conditions whereas in driver attention every bit of eyes-on-the-road counts.

That's actually the approach Ferrari uses:

https://images.app.goo.gl/KdEV4qWFEHouDEq28

No radio! As god herself intended.

Still a phone though - I guess you might get an important call on the road :D

>> Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better?

Yes. Most drivers are able to drive using one hand for a short period of time. Not so with eyes off the road.

In fact, it's a requirement in most countries where stick shift is the norm.

Some cars already do. My car has buttons on the steering wheel which allow you to navigate menus, control the radio, etc. As well as paddles to control over functions. The problem is if you are not on a straight road those controls become virtually impossible to use safely. Whereas if I quickly need to change the volume or even mute the radio I can do so one handed without even glancing at the volume dial on the radio and still steer the car safely.

Hand, not hands.

Also my steering wheel has both. I can do everything by feeling without my eyes leaving the road.

Yes, taking one hand off the steering wheel is much better than taking your eyes off the road. Let's be honest here, we're not driving F1 cars so we don't actually physically need to be with both hands on the wheel 100% of the time, but it can take only second of us not looking at the road and we could be hitting someone/something and be dead (or we could kill that someone that we've just hit).

I really, really love to drive, I think I'm one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there's nothing else that comes close to it.

Having actually used voice controls in a car, it is worse than taking one hand off the steering wheel. It is also worse than a touch screen interface. It really is the worst of all options.

Because they suck at recognition.

I've noticed the mental effort I spend in trying to formulate a voice command that the car (or even phone) will understand is significant - and that almost none of my brain is being used for driving. The likelihood of it not recognizing what I said is not low. With tactile buttons, it's almost automatic. I don't spend any time thinking. I know where the buttons are, and my finger is good at finding it.

On the few occasions where I'm not sure where my finger landed, I can still slowly move my finger to an edge and start counting. I can do this over several seconds. Often while doing this I have to attend to an event on the road, and it's trivial to do so: I pause my finger search, attend to the event on the road, and then resume. So even if it takes 10-30s to find my button (very rare), it can be done with almost no loss of attention on the road. The same goes if I need to pause to listen/respond to what someone else in the car is saying.

Contrast that with voice recognition: If I have to pause to attend to anything on the road, the recognition system assumes I'm done talking. This adds more mental stress (maybe it will execute the wrong command? In any case I'll have to start over).

Now I'll go further and make an even stronger claim: Even if voice recognition becomes almost perfect (better than humans), it will still be a greater cognitive load to use voice recognition. For me, changing stations on the radio or adjusting the volume or adjusting the climate control is pretty automatic. The cognitive load of finding the preset station is virtually none. Whereas just formulating the command verbally - even to another human where I wouldn't worry about voice recognition - takes more effort. Perhaps verbal skills are tied to the vision in the brain and tactile senses are not? I wonder if any studies have been done on this.

I do not like button on steering wheels. I drive at 10-and-2 so unless I know where the damn button I'm looking for is, I have to move my hands to look under them on the steering wheel. I have a Ford where all the buttons are mostly the same.

If you forced me to have them, I'd prefer something like a d-pad on each side because they are easy to locate without looking and intuitive to select. Critical controls should be stalks, IMHO. I can't use cruise control in the car I've owned for six years without looking at the steering wheel, but I test drove a Subaru, which I haven't owned for like 9 years, and immediately remembered how to operate the cruise stalk.

Voice controls are worse than texting:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...

I'm hoping they take up some kind of googles or periscope like interface.

Honda cars already have built-in voice controls, plus Siri (and I'm assuming OK Google) if your phone is plugged in.

hondas have had voice controls for ~20 years. they're in e.g. the 2004 acura tl. simple voice controls are cost effective and already implemented.

Yes but they're uselessly complex. I've owned a top-of-the-line Ridgeline with voice control for over a year and I still don't remember any of the sequences of specific commands it recognizes.

Any car needs to be connected to a central server where the processing occurs. Useful levels of voice recognition just aren't going to happen inside the car.

The problem there is that they try to parse voice as natural language -- if they instead made a simple programming language with a consistent format.. you'd be able to process the voice locally (speech-to-text has been mostly effective since like the 95s) and actually make it memorizable and semi-explorable.

And if you added a semicolon-keyword like "over" for radio, you'd avoid the issue where it waits a minute to see if you finished, making usage agonizingly slow.

But we somehow still haven't reached the point where people/corps finally realize that we simply can't parse natural language effectively

If they are as good as the ones in my Nissan, they are effectively worthless.

My 2007 Honda already has voice controls. Never use them.

I'm still waiting for the convenient floor-mounted headlamp dimmer switch to come back.

Now would be a good time, there are very few of us who use the engine disconnect pedal these days.

What is an "engine disconnect pedal"? You rewire the ignition or something?

OP is being a smartass. He means a clutch pedal.

The clutch pedal disconnects the engine from the transmission.

Complicated way to say clutch

I don't know of any teenagers who re-wired that switch to cut off the license plate lights....no, none.

Exactly - touchscreen offer no unique tactile feedback you can associate with an individual action. Also when the screen is multi use depending upon options then you really handicap the muscle memory and with that, cause distractions.

However, I do feel HUD display tech is one area in which could do with some love as would compliment and be less distracting over a screen located away from the drivers view of vision.

I like physical controls better, but I don't think that's a totally realistic contrast. Neither touchscreens nor knobs necessarily demand you look. I've known lots of people who looked while using physical buttons, and I can do my common touchscreen tasks in my car (e.g. switch to Bluetooth, hit play or pause) without looking. I suspect most people will look in both cases.

Voice control sucks IMO, even though a lot of people now grow up with Alexa and similar and adapt to the technology. Why does it suck, just like some "smart" buttons? Because it's not obvious what it can do. You have to learn the vocabulary it understands and its other limitations (tone etc.). For example, I tried to get my Tesla to text one of my contacts recently and failed. I didn't know whether it just didn't understand me or was unable to. Good UI are obvious and don't require you to memorize secret capabilities.

not obvious to you. I suspect younger generations won't have much of an issue with this, similar to how millenials learned how to utilize google search easily while it confounded their parents

Have you watched a younger person search? Most of them don't have any clue what they're doing either. Presumably it's just more socially acceptable for older people to admit their ignorance. :)

I'm a technologically-inclined 25-year-old, and I've been using voice commands since 2010, but I still think the criticism fully applies.

Voice control is like trying to use a command line interface that comes without any documentation or completions.

In a car it's even worse because you have to tell everyone in the car (or on the phone) to stop talking, give your command, wait for the confirmation and then everyone can continue talking.

> I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

They all suck and they’re literally not workable for rentals. Nobody will waste an hour configuring a rental car’s VA on departure.

I always hunt down and hit the “factory reset” menu option on every car I rent, though. If you don’t, you never know what weird settings the previous users have changed.

I also un-pair all the hundreds of paired bluetooth phones, if the reset hasn’t already done that. I often rent cars where the address book is full of names and numbers from previously paired phones.

The previous BMW one is pretty good and requires 0 configuration, at least in Spanish. I haven't tried the new one and my accent is very clear though.

It has few functions like call X or go to Y but in my experience, it doesn't do that many things but makes them very well.

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--allowing the car (me) to drive off the edge of the map--and didn't allow me to move the map, to re-center by touch, while the car was in motion, instead presenting an alert saying that the action was unavailable while the car was moving. As I was driving in an unfamiliar city, this issue forced me to stop several times so that I could see the map surrounding the car, it was simply horrible.

To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I'd think I had tamed the user preferences, the "other" set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons.

Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect.

Just give me a dedicated knob.

This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute.

Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?

That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.

The honest truth to why they do it is because they don't want to be in a situation where they're shipping keys around between locations (or even pretending to inventory/store them) because people keep forgetting to bring back both or lose one and the other one is in an office in another state. You're far less likely to lose both keys than just one because of how obnoxious it is. And having 2 keys is actually a reasonable increase in re-sale/auction value because of how expensive/difficult it is to re-key cars these days (unless you're a criminal then it's really easy and cheap apparently).

I suspect you are correct. I looked it up and, on the 2020 Q7, the fob itself is ~$350 and the Audi-dealer required re-programming is $150, so, at least $450 to replace a fob.

The two Audi smart key fobs together weighs too much for a pants or light jacket pocket, especially on that steel cable. A day or so after I removed the battery from one fob, I stopped at a Home Depot and used a bolt cutter to cut the cable and separate the fobs. I returned the keys to the rental agency on a large steel keyring. They didn't seem to mind.

Modern time developments: high tech high pace revolution for powerful and automated delivery of making the user miserable.

Showing off without sense, basically.

You just gave me flashbacks to renting my first Audi and not being able to leave the lot for a good 15 minutes before I could figure out what the hell was going on. Audi sponsored the whole thing but it backfired because I would NEVER drive one again after that, or recommend to anyone - what happened to cars?

Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it's all located on one panel.

Most everything on the Tesla screen is non-essential other than the current speed (which while driving is always displayed prominently in a large font and in the closest place) and possibly some alerts that rarely happen, such as “tire pressure low” in actual words, not just a cryptic glowing red icon on the dashboard.

Voice control still isn't there yet. Siri frequently thinks I'm talking to her when I say "hey [kid's name]" — despite the fact that my kid's name shares zero letters with "Siri", either in English or in IPA.

This is pretty surprising/disappointing, considering that the /s/ sound is pretty distinct, and considering that I did the "hey Siri" training when I got my phone.

It's started working pretty well on my Tesla. I can tell it to set the thermostat, turn on specific heated seats, play music, call or text someone, etc. It's not perfect but it gets better every update and we get an update at least once a month if not more.

Thinking of voice-activation in a car in lieu of analog manual controls misses the point - perhaps you weren't advocating for it as a replacement, but the article above seems to.

There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:

1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)

2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)

3. Female voices [1]

4. AAVE voices [2]

5. Immigrant voices [1]

Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.

Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.

All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-signific... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...

I drive a 2010 Honda Jazz (Honda Fit in the US I believe) and I love it.

Not only does it indeed have buttons, but good buttons as well. Clicky where needed, rubbery where appropriate, with the righ amount of resistance etc.

Just like the iPhone always has the nicest buttons of any phone. It's a little thing that makes using it a pleasure.

I love the big knobs and switches on my 2013 Honda Fit. They are big and chunky so it's easy to tell the difference between the vent and the temperature on the AC. Everything about it is simple and ergonomic. Although I kind of wish I went with the manual instead of the automatic sometimes.

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/honda/fit/2013/photos-in...

Our 2008 Honda Civic (EU-spec) was similarly well-designed. Controls you were likely to use while driving (temperature/windscreen-clearing, radio, hazard lights, etc.) were raised up closer to your eye-line[1]. It was a really ergonomic "cockpit"

[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/g...

Voice controls are a living hell with kids in the car.

Voice controls are nice. Except when you get a sore throat. I'm not talking about disabled people, people with funny accents (everybody speaks English of course and if they don't, they at least speak one of the five other languages we proudly support) and people with non-standard timbre of voice, also.

I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at hand and aware of what is happening around you. If camera designers know this, why don't automotive designers, where the task at hand is a matter of life and death?

I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).

Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

EXIF tagging.

Because you would want your photos to be geotagged.

Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.

GPS in the camera is handy for auto-tagging the location of the photos. Which is nice for when on trips.

Thanks. I am familiar with why you want location data in photos. I am not familiar with any justification for why this data cannot be acquired from my mobile.

If I'm using a standalone camera, I don't want to be fiddling with other devices just to get geotagging working.

It possibly could be done in real-time using Bluetooth but I doubt it would be reliable and remember that higher end cameras might be writing out images at maybe 6+ frames/second. Alternatively you can make a point of recording a track on your phone (which tends to be hard on the battery life) and then syncing them up later. But, as someone who has done this, it's a pain in the neck.

Geotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)

Depends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.

Not everyone carries a phone, let alone a smartphone.

Not everyone wants to.

Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.

Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.

> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.

The combination of the batteries in my phone and my laptop is clearly more capacious than the battery in the laptop alone.

> a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.

More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn't are.

Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.

I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.

Maybe this has been improved in the Model 3, but in older models: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/how-laggy-is-your-to...

> Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included

This is false, full stop.

Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development.

It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.

lower parts count as well. More commonality possibilities between vehicles are possible. the ability to add and remove features at different prive points without having to add/remove as many physical parts is huge. They price compete on bolts and screws...removing a button is a huge cost savings when multiplied by you

Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly interesting to learn about: https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...

Ya, Volvo has gone to a unified interface for their whole lineup. The standard stuff can be controlled with a few knobs and buttons and all the minor differences between models and trim levels are controlled on screen. I'm sure it saves them a ton since the part count would be very low now.

They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option, I want that to be easy to access, not buried a few gestures deep. Chrysler nailed it, they let you rearrange the touch screen icons and have a bar along the bottom where you can put items that are always visible. They also have more buttons and dials.

I would think that would be where good context aware software would come into play.

Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.

> Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode?

For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.

It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!

And customers apparently like them, when deciding what to buy.

I never buy this argument. I'm sure we could've focus grouped seat belts and no one would've liked the experience but thank god we have them now, for the better.

We did "sorta" focus group seat belts, and I was there to witness it.

Before laws mandated the use of seat belts, most people didn't use them. My mother bought a Volvo 122 in the 1960s, and people marvelled at the three-point harness.

But it's not like US manufacturers rushed to take advantage of Volvo making the patents freely available, and nor did Volvo take over the world by storm.

Some cars had alarms that nagged the driver if the seat belts weren't done up. I recall my uncle routed around this by looping the driver and "shotgun" belts -behind- the seats and fastening them.

Left to their own devices, large numbers of people prefer convenience and low price to safety. Only by regulation did the mass market adopt safer cars.

So I completely agree, no, people did not like wearing seat belts. They only did so when their option to forgo safety was removed.

p.s. I recall watching this PSA in Ontario. Everyone laughed about it, but soooooo many young men then went out and drove their muscle cars sans belt. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sri9j3PA5vE

Customers often don't have much choice. Most people don't make car buying decisions based on the head unit.

You can't use the market as an example of it, because the producers shifted in (almost) unison, and bundled it with other more valuable features.

The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.

When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.

You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.

You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.

The Macbook touchbar holds a likely never-to-be-surpassed record for "The World's Most Useless Touchscreen". I literally cannot imagine how this UI abortion got to market. To me, the touchbar was the canary that Apple's innovation days were done. Sometimes, it's really NOT a good thing to "think different"(ly)...

Apple replaced the function keys because they were increasingly disused (and to increase the BOM and consequently the margin in absolute dollars.) The Touch Bar gets used more often. The default modes aren’t to everyone’s taste, but they’re easy for inexperienced users (based on our user observation) and power users like the potential to customize (check out BetterTouchTool if you haven’t yet.)

It looks real nice on a render.

I'd like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen.

That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.

Unreasonable, IMHO, for a car meant for consumption by the masses. Few people actually care about that stuff in the real world

Then provide a reasonable set of defaults and then most folks don't have to worry about it :)

> physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen

Agreed, this is the end game.

The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.

Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!

BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.

There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.

I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.

Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.

Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.

Jaguar/Land Rover have been starting to do this. They have knobs where the knob label is a tiny screen and they change function based on the context of the menu you are in.

That seems like the kind of nerd wish that 99.99% of buyers would never use and would make it impossible to drive somebody elses car.

Its like people who insist on working with dvorak in a company but much worse.

Automotive designers are simply catering to their perceived marketplace in order to realize maximum profit extraction.

Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These "innovations" are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.

I think there's too much selection bias for this analogy to be particularly strong.

Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.

I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.

There's still a physical dial for switching modes even though that's not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.

I won't go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that's unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.

> I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.

So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just 'what I want' but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.

The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.

I'll just add that mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras mostly became serious tools once electronic viewfinders became good enough that they could reasonably replace optical viewfinders for the most part. (Still not as good but a reasonable compromise given the smaller and lighter bodies they make possible.) As the say the LCD back can provide useful feedback--and are occasionally useful for specific situations when shooting--but at least for handheld shooting they're not often used for framing the subject.

And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.

> So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder.

Sure, and you could do that with an SLR from the 90s too, as I recall.

Camera manufacturers are very innovative when it comes to capabilities and new features, but incredibly conservative when it comes to user experience and form factor.

Totally agree but the broader point stands that buttons have some very useful affordances

But that's not the original point, though. jetrink's claim was:

> they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. ... The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen

I agree that physical affordances are very useful. But I don't think the cause of DSLRs having them is because current manufacturers believe buttons have superior usability. It's because SLRs have had those same controls since before touchscreens existed and today's self-selected DSLR camera audience specifically wants products with that "vintage" user experience.

My evidence is that today's cameras generally only have hardware controls for features that existed since before the digital revolution. Purely new capabilities (like file management) have not included corresponding new hardware controls. Likewise, hardware controls that are no longer that useful, like mode selectors, are still present.

To me, this implies that camera manufacturers are not just trying to provide a "hardware control" UX, they are specifically providing "the hardware control UX of 90s SLRs".

Yeah, that’s what I hate about taking pictures with their iPhone, the lack of a tactile button for taking the shot. It’s especially bad when you have to photograph without a view of the screen.

(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)

FYI the volume buttons work as shutter buttons when using the native camera app.

Oh nice, thanks!

Does the iPhone not allow double-tap of the power button to start the camera? Volume buttons should work as a shutter button to take a photo.

I don't think it does anymore. You have to activate the screen and slide left to get the camera. The volume buttons still work for the shutter though, which I use all the time.

I think because cars, although primarily a form of transport, are often also a fashion accessory, or a statement of who you are (or aspire to be). And touchscreens are very fashionable[1].

Cameras aren't really like that. Nowadays if you've actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you're probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.

[1] I'll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.

They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer.

It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn't offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it's complicated to install.

The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.

For consumer cameras it definitely has happened. But for professional DSLRs you’re serving are market that absolutely puts function over form, and will happy pay a big premium for a devices that makes them more productive.

Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.

I suspect you’re assuming too much about Tesla buyers. You are overlooking the possibility that the product is actually good.

It's all subjective, to me the touch screen on Model 3 is a deal breaker - I don't want to make this big a compromise for something this expensive. Other people have different utility functions, but from my perspective it seems that part of the reason to buy it is Tesla hype. It's a car, it moves me from point A to B, it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car, am I really getting ~$10k more worth out of it compared to other products?

A lot of people don’t understand the touch screen isn’t really needed while driving, except for glancing at the speed maybe.

And since you ask, you get that 10k or more back in gas savings. On top of that there are other benefits, some of them objective and monetary such as resale value ($), safety ($$$), environmental responsibility, longevity of the car ($$), fun, and speed. So, yes. You should test drive one and see what it feels like.

And that’s just comparing to gas cars. Comparing to competing electric cars would be a different list of benefits.

>it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car

Ohhhh no no it is waaaay different because I make the lights that you don’t. Yes sometimes get stuck in traffic but not nearly as much. I can observe speed limits and still be way ahead of you because of the acceleration speed (quickness). Acceleration ability also means being able to keep longer follow distance in traffic without losing chances to pass safely when they open up.

Problem of course is that the interior of a Tesla has the aesthetic sense of a consumer electronics manufacturer, not of a precision automobile. It looks like a big fuckin' iPad stuck to the dashboard, almost aftermarket. It's tacky, even if the interface on the screen is better than most.

Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.

Tesla big goal is self driving and the huge screen being the only interface sort of makes sense, if they ever deliver the self driving part that is

What kills me is when "legacy" automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly. It's especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.

There shouldn't be menus at all. Modal systems in general are hard to use while driving.

You need HyperCar: HyperCard for Cars!

Then you could delete the buttons you don't use, and make the ones you do use really big, with cool pictures, and funny sounds when you touched them.

HyperCard Adventures (hypercardadventures.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052

https://hypercardadventures.com/

It works better in a sales pitch. "If you want to text your broker to punch in a few trades, it's just one button away!".

Nobody bothers to write sales copy saying "You can actually change the cabin temperature and the radio volume on this car"

There is so much misinformation in your mind.

Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.

>went with completely touchscreen based cabin

Absolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.

It would look much cooler if the display was in the middle of the steering wheel, and round, like a big old classic computer display.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4

If this reason is true then it has the very characteristic stink of reckless endangerment....

I just got a new camera, and the touchscreen wonderfully compliments the three dials I have. They have several physical shortcut buttons to back out of menus and to get to quick actions more quickly.

Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.

My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!

In the 90s and 2000s, cars had too many buttons and knobs. And car reviewers started using that as a criterion to judge the dashboard. So less became better. OCD!

It started with the iPhone and the software-ization of all buttons. Buttons were seen as the enemy, inflexible blackberry relics of the 1990s. Tesla took this trend and ran with it, and many other cars, like my 2008 Prius, had already begun with their incredibly crappy touch-screen. Mine broke years ago and the audio is ENTIRELY on the front-right speaker. It can not be changed ever because ONLY the touch screen can change sound balance and touch screen's broken. Welp, at least my co-pilot has ideal audio?

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said).

Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

even on phones it's "bad", it requires high focus.. it's was only good in the theory that smartphones would be used for prolonged dedicated tasks. how i miss blind use of buttons on old dumbphones

I've been hanging onto my Galaxy S7 just because it has actual home and back buttons. Don't know if anyone else still does that.

wait for 2025 invention of the physical extra-surfacic actuator, not a button, a xiaomi exclusive

I share your feelings. I had to buy a newer phone and I pinned the 3 buttons to the bottom of the screen where I used to have the buttons on the bezel. The screen is at least 2 cm / 1 inch too tall anyway. The alternative is swiping to go back, which is unusable.

Sometimes the buttons disappear but bringing them back is not as complicated as I feared. Of course it's worse than having them. I'd take a 3 cm shorter screen and 1 cm bottom bezel with buttons.

Next week's iPhone (9? SE2?) release brings back the home button and reliable Touch ID! It will fly off the virtual store shelves.

It's good on phones because it allows them to become multi-tools. You can't have physical buttons for every thing any app might want to do; with a touch screen they can make their own buttons.

On cars it's silly. Cars are not multi-tools; they have a finite set of dedicated functions. Even for functions that benefit from a large high-res screen (maps, music library browsing, etc.), the actual input requirements are narrow enough to work with physical controls. Just look at the original iPod.

You can't have physical buttons for every thing any app might want to do

This is why the cursor keys exist, also keybindings

that's a fair point but having 4 buttons would allow for generic physical input

humans can learn how to make most important and quick features easily

There are general purpose buttons like back or home.

Phone manufacturers need to bring back keyboards

To be honest, if I had a droid 4 with the specs of my pixel 3a I would probably not purchase another phone for a decade. I loved the slide-out physical keyboard on the droid line.

It was never a cargo cult of being good... it was a cost cutting play that they correctly thought they could shove down consumers throats. Glad to see Honda acting on behalf of the driver again.

Not looking to start a fight but was a touchscreen really the cheaper option? I would be strongly surprised if that was the case.

How could it not be cheaper? No molds (or just one bezel mold), far less industrial design, fewer individual wires. Not to mention the QA requirements for testing buttons vs a virtual screen.

I admit I am completely oblivious to those details. Quite interesting. I'd think 5-6 rolling dials and 3-4 buttons in total are still cheaper than a 8" touchscreen but apparently I was wrong.

They're probably cheaper at the small scale - big panel big price - but at the large scale might not be so cheap: Now you have a point of failure for each of those dials/buttons, the housing is more complex/expensive, you need to make replacement parts for all of those buttons, etc. More training for repair technicians, more parts they have to keep in stock. Possibly more damaged phones because each button is a weak point in the phone's housing.

Screen costs trended down pretty aggressively over time so over the course of a couple years it probably ended up being cost-effective even if it wasn't at day 1. If you're already throwing a relatively sizable high-quality panel into your phone making it a bit bigger may not be as much of a bump up in price.

Economies at scale. I didn't think of that. Thank you, this was eye-opening.

Molds and parts are cheap at volume and I would be surprised if the costs were above a few buck in total, including setup.

That said, a huge factor is assembly, maintaince, and repair.

Touchscreens are massively massively cheaper. Especially for products with warranties like cars. Thing fucks up, just swap out the entire brain+display unit.

You (or maybe the market) are misinterpreting Steve Jobs. In a phone context, he is correct.

Still loved all my physical buttons which made input a breeze and didnt require constantly correcting my dang text, in a phone context, nah, he's still wrong; maybe a hybrid is even better, but amorphous movement and inferring intent is not a great user experience as things get more complex.

My nieces and nephews seem to have zero problems navigating a touch screen and type faster than I can.

Might not be intuitive to us, but it definitely is to them.

Mine don't. They've only ever really had tablets, and I just recently got a Pi for one of them to learn physical touch typing on.

I'm always annoyed phone typing specifically because I can't do anything but focus on the damn on screen keyboard until the message is complete. I remember being able to write reams of text on my old cell with a pop out keyboard, or even with the T9 setup on a Nokia brick entirely by feel, and nigh-automatic.

I don't think I've ever communicated/operated as smoothly as When I have a haptic interface to work with. That even comes down to learning unfamiliar interfaces too. With a strictly defined series of controls to be actuated in a particular order, I tend to be able to permute and learn faster when I have some level of feel to work with.

Agree, now it is very difficult to find a phone that has physical keyboard, sdcard, phone jack and is current.

I really hate those trends.

Instead you get a phone that can get wet, that the charging port doesn’t break after a year, and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).

I love equipment I can hack and fix myself, but I love reliable equipment more.

> Instead you get a phone that can get wet,

For 10 years I had smart phones, this was never the reason for breaking. I know that there are people who constantly break theirs, but I don't take my phone to shower.

> that the charging port doesn’t break after a year

That has nothing to do with it, micro USB had this failure and looks that USB-C is much more durable, if they opted for mini USB (which is pretty much the same size as micro USB, we wouldn't this problem at all).

> and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).

Not sure what you did, but I never had that experience. Not even sure how an sdcard can fuck up a phone.

Only correct in a "whatever people buy is good, and people buy iPhones so everything they do is right" sense. Hardware keyboards on phones still are faster to type on than even the best swipe keyboard, and they work through gloves (rather relevant now in these wear-gloves, wash-your-hands days).

Of course, optimizing for WPM over other factors is not right for all customers. But a car is definitely not a phone, so.

Was he not coming primarily from a design perspective?

Design =/= usability?

How do you feel about the MMI scroll wheel? I don’t feel safe using that either; it still requires eyes on the screen to see what you’re selecting. Even my passengers, who can give it their full attention, are routinely stymied by the process of pairing their phones for Bluetooth audio playback.

At least I can get the volume and temperature knobs by feel.

I think there can be a balance between physical controls for actions that need to and will often be used while driving, and touch controls for stuff that you will most likely use when standing still.

Controlling the temperature or music volume will be done while driving so they should be actual buttons that your muscle memory will reach with no mental effort or distraction. Adjusting the suspension settings or typing in a GPS address can be done via a touchscreen since it's unlikely you'll do it on the move and touch offers a better experience for this.

yes, that's the best split--make frequently-used features and/or features used primarily while driving physical controls, while rarely-used features and/or features used while parked can be touch-based.

however, address input should be primarily by voice control rather than touch entry. changing destinations (for whatever reason) mid-drive on a navigation system is dangerous and somewhat common, and voice control is the best option for keeping your eyes on the road (absent a passenger who can do the touchscreen data entry).

Whats interesting about Honda going with a dial, is that they designed, what I thought, was a pretty brilliant absolutely positioned touchpad for Acura. Have peopled used these, what is there feedback. It seems much more natural, intuitive, and fast compared to a dial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScWOFtlLCyI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8

Lexus also has a touchpad, and an interesting "tactile joystick" type of solution. Takes some getting used to but the tactile feedback goes a long way to reducing the need to look at the screen.

I think the MMI interface, in one specific generation (the one just before they introduced the touchscreen, where the four-corner buttons were dropped), has one big advantage: you learn the amount of clicks things are away.

It's been over a year since I had an Audi A3 with the system, but I still remember that going from anywhere to Android Auto would be pressing home, then just giving the wheel a big turn clockwise, then back one click counter-clockwise and confirm. You got used to the common operations, and you could do them blindly after a while. In a moving car, a touchscreen is almost always problematic because you need to see if your finger is going the right direction to compensate for car movements.

I mean, it certainly isn’t perfect at all. It has the down side that you are invited to stare at the screen. But if I’m disciplined, I can get away with a click-glance approach to adjusting things, which is still better than the multi-second hover I had to do with the touchscreen.

I always assumed companies were drawn to it not just because of the trendiness but because engineering and general development of these features are faster, cheaper, and easier to fix compared to dealing with physical parts (e.g. knobs, wiring).

Yeah, there’s probably an awful lot of truth to that. More software eating the world.

Audi may be doing some things right (I love the location of the audio volume knob), it doesn't compensate for that ridiculous touch pad which you're supposed to use to enter street names by writing the characters one by one with your finger... and many other UI warts.

The best thing about Audi's console is that fact that they support Apple CarPlay.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...

Using Apple Carplay is more dangerous than texting.

When you're driving: it can't possibly be more dangerous than the Audi system.

When you're not driving: irrelevant

Conclusion: CarPlay is better than the Audi system.

... I see your cargo cult, and I raise you Elon Musk and Tesla with gargantic touch screens in their cars. Aesthetically neat; realistically trouble.

Never owned a Tesla, but always worried about this when I’ve been inside one.

Elon says they drive themselves now though, so there’s that ;)

Any monitor manufacturers want to follow suit?

What I'd give for hardware input source buttons. This is a ridiculous UX:

1. Touch button to open menu

2. Select "Input Source"

3. Click up/down (possibly multiple times) to find your source

4. Click OK

...when your monitor has TWO sources. Just give me 2 buttons: HDMI and DisplayPort.

I don't care that this would be marginally more expensive. I'd pay it.

Touch screen controls strike me as not being about cost but being about incredibly lazy UI and a good example of worrying about problems you'll never have like "what if you have 10 input sources? That'd mean 10 buttons". But YOU DON"T. You can't add an input source with software after the fact.

/rant

Touch screens make complete sense for phones. You're looking at it. There is limited screen real estate. The second is why hardware keyboards died. It's even why the Home button on iPhones died, which makes me sad because I loathe Face ID with a passion (compared to Touch ID).

Touch screens require you to look at them. This seems bad when driving. Physical controls are tactile and you can learn to use them without looking. People seem to forget how important this is.

It's also why I prefer keyboards that split function keys into groups of 4 over the terrible design of putting them all together. Function keys are really too far to touch type effectively so you need a non-visual cue of which is which.

Beyond that, every touch interface I've seen in a car is objectively terrible.

Kudos to Honda for bucking this stupid trend.

My TV has capacitive psuedo-buttons even for the power button. Of course it isn't illuminated, since that would distract from the screen, which means that turning on or off the screen when the lights are out is literally a matter of making wild stabs in the dark.

That's why my TV is on a lightswitch!

That's a pretty good idea. I was thinking about retrofitting the capacitive buttons by gluing rubber domes onto them, but changing its outlet to one controlled by a switch seems like a more elegant solution.

Since DisplayPort can normally be passively converted to HDMI, your easiest option is probably to get a convertor and also an HDMI switch box. It'll be external to the monitor but there are plenty to choose from that have physical buttons. There are even some with remote controls!

> Since DisplayPort can normally be passively converted to HDMI

What actually happens is that some (but not all) DisplayPort sources can also output HDMI signals, so the passive converter only has to change the voltages and pinout. But if the source doesn't output HDMI signals, you need an active converter.

Dell Ultrasharp gives you shortcut keys that you can assign to any function. I have one for Displayport and a second for HDMI.

> Touch screen controls strike me as not being about cost but being about incredibly lazy UI

It's almost always about cost. Touch screens are shocking cheap thanks to smartphones driving the prices down and physical controls can be shockingly expensive per control.

Do you have an idea of why dials and buttons are so expensive? That surprises me. The components aren't particularly high tech.

I would imagine it's more the one-time cost of the R&D for developing the digital menu system vs per-unit hardware costs for the dials/buttons over time.

I should probably elaborate on what I mean about "lazy UI". For a touchscreen UI, the thinking seems to be that they view this is something they can fix later with an update because a touch screen is an updatable blank canvas. The effect of that is you end up skimping on UI design because it's "optional".

Hard buttons force your hand more. You have to think about what buttons you want and how they're going to work in a way you just don't have to with touch screens. So you're forced to do a level of UI/UX design that you're not with touch screens.

I dunno, when it comes to configuring monitor settings, I'd trade a touch screen menu for any of the physical button configuration schemes on any monitor or TV i've ever owned.

Totally agree. I have Dell monitors, which are fantastic in every way bar one - they have invisible, capacitive buttons at the bottom right of the bezel. I literally have to put my face right up beside it and squint to have any idea where the buttons are.

You can't easily see where they are, and you get no feedback at all when you press on them, and it seems to be 50/50 whether a press is registered. Horrible, horrible UX!

The newer ones ditched the capacitive buttons for regular pushbuttons. Unfortunately being budget constrained (or profit motivated) the buttons are the cheap kind that move your monitor when you poke at them (and make creaky sounds of course, to compliment the creaky sound the monitor stand makes haha).

Still, it's an improvement.

Were there ever monitor buttons that didn’t move the monitor when you poke at them?

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...

A more in-depth article last year on why Mazda is doing this.

I love the Command Center in my Mazda. I can switch modes, change content, many other things, all without looking at the knobs. Voice controls using Android Auto makes it even better, but I do not use it much since the knobs do a great job. I never use the touch screen.

Yep, Mazda were the most vocal about rejecting the touch screen trend, and Honda and Toyota are losing a lot of customers to Mazda who have been producing the best cars in their class in the last several years so it makes sense that they are jumping on the bandwagon.

Since peaking in 2015 Mazda is not growing. They are steadily losing market share over the last 10 years. They make attractive cars, but they bet on pretending that they are a "premium" brand and priced themselves out.

https://carsalesbase.com/us-mazda/

https://www.autonews.com/sales/mazdas-complicated-journey-pr...

Interesting. I from what I have seen of Mazda's price range, even within a model, it's pretty large. You can get a CX-5 base for mid 20s, or the turbocharged, leather-wrapped nav-included tour package for almost 40.

The CX-5 is at the higher end of their starting prices, too. They have the Mazda3, CX-3, CX-30 and Mazda6 that are all cheaper base.

And to be sure, Mazda's crossovers look much better than Honda or Toyota - at least Toyota finally refreshed their interiors two years ago to look like something other than 2003 era.

In terms of sales volume in the US, you are correct: Mazda is not selling more cars. If you look at their financial reporting, they're making more money from car sales. Looks like ~60% more.

Anyone with a lick of business sense would happily trade -10% sales volume for +60% profit from higher margins. They didn't price themselves out, they just decided to not play the loss-leader volume game Ford/Honda/Toyota is playing.

Looks like ~60% loss to me. (From $1.1B net in 2015 to $572M net in 2019)

https://money.cnn.com/quote/financials/financials.html?symb=...

EDIT: $1.1B in 2016. In 2015 net income was $1.45B :-(

From what I can tell from the investor docs, the overall loss was from exchange rates and tariffs from losing access to sharing Ford's factories and costs and the high capex to building a replacement factory and generally transitioning to a fully independent automaker.

Every shareholder report in the last couple years stated that their premium offerings are doing better than they expected and they're making more money than they expected given the capex.

JPY/USD rate changed 9% over the last 5 years, are you sure it explains 70% lower net income?

You stated that they make 60% more money. If the point you are trying to make is that they make 60% more than they expected, I won't argue with you.

Mass market automakers usually target ~7% margin, so a 9% change in exchange rate without adjustment in price would make an automaker flip from profitable to unprofitable (observable with Nissan as a real world example). It doesn't decrease their profit by 9%.

Mazda raised their margin target to ~10% per vehicle, which is pretty standard for the premium segment. Which if they performed to expectations, would mean 40% more profit; they're slightly overperforming at ~60%.

My Mazda3 has no touchscreen controls and I am very happy with that.

Link [1] to HN discussion around the Mazda announcement

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

> Honda has done what no other car maker is doing,

Huh? The author is not familiar with Mazda - their latest models of the CX line (possibly others) have full control of the interface with a very functional physical knob / dial along with other tactile controls.

Also, the headline is a bit misleading - they aren't removing touchscreen controls entirely - only removing them from "some" controls as their preface text indicates, which to be clear is solely A/C controls.

I have a Mazda from 2019 (not the CX), and I can do everything with a couple of knobs. Even the extra buttons you mention (volume up/down in the wheel or quick access to media/navigation/radio in the center console) are redundant and nearly useless. Just a couple of weeks after I got the car, I have never touched the screen again.

A/C controls are completely manual. Mazda got it right from the beginning.

Yes, thank you. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was positive I read an article last year about how Mazda was doing away with touchscreens. I think someone just pasted the Mazda article above.

I will defend the screen in the Tesla 3, the simple fact is that you really never have to use on your typical drive and yes muscle memory works for simple UIs like what the Tesla employs.

Compared to 40+ buttons in my previous Volt AND a screen. Many cars have that many or more buttons and this is easier? Where screen's become distracting is when the UI is shit, having more than one or two clicks to do anything, and worse duplicating features there are physical buttons for but naturally distract the driver who thinks they should use that screen.

From automatic headlamps, climate control, and wipers, I really have no reason to interact with the screen except as glances while I do the standard look around while driving.

My favorite test... put a sticky on every button and only remove one if you truly had to use the function. bonus points for not having to remove the sticky to find out what the button did.

edit: spelling error

Touchscreens that are huge are somewhat less of an issue because tap targets are much bigger. But most non-luxury vehicles come with 7 or 8 inch screens, so tap targets are small/clustered. Layer on that the fact that many screens aren't capacitive (and instead require a certain amount of pressure from your finger/fingernail), and things get even more annoying/dangerous.

"Somewhat" is not really good enough given the stakes. You cannot "feel" your way through a touchscreen interface and you cannot rely on muscle memory. You will take your eyes off the road to see where the button is and "aim" at it. And a bumpy road just makes it worse because it only takes an accidental light touch to trigger some random function close by.

Even a 17" screen or great UI won't fix the problems, they will just ameliorate them.

The are functions that just fit better into a touchscreen experience, and some that should have physical buttons even if it takes regulation to make sure of this.

I have a Tesla and previously owned a Lexus, I find that in practice it's pretty much identical with respect to taking eyes off the road. The only on-screen setting I ever adjust while driving the Tesla is the AC and in my Lexus I also make a quick glance down at the console because the row of buttons controlling AC functionality all feel the same.

After a few weeks of using any car I owned I basically stopped needing to look at the buttons. Even when there's a row of 4-5 identical physical buttons I just run my fingers across the row, this is where muscle memory comes in (like blind typing). The huge advantage being I can touch every button without triggering the function until I press.

I mean I'm not against huge screens in the car, as long as I can turn them off or dim them to the point where I consider they don't impede my driving. But I'd still very much like to see basic functions of the car tied (also?) to physical buttons. Whether the manufacturer also wants to put them on a screen that's fine but I see no good reason a handful or buttons and knobs can't fit in a car. The minor savings or the wow effect don't really offset the downsides of distracting attention.

> I'm not against huge screens in the car, as long as I can turn them off or dim them to the point where I consider they don't impede my driving.

This is an excellent point. Screens always emit more light than analogue gauges and buttons. When driving at night, dashboard lights annoy me so much that I avoid turning on the high-beams because the blue alert cluster light is so bright. I went so far as to wire up the dash lights to a toggle switch so I can shut them off independently of the headlights. This is on a 2003 VW Jetta, which has no back-lit screens.

With physical buttons we can keep eyes on the road, one hand on the wheel and the other one looks for the right button. With a touch screen we have to look at the screen, hoping we made the right decision about what's going to happen on the road. If there are laws against texting there should be laws against using touchscreens when the car is moving.

Fitts’s Law is really relevant here, even if the buttons were physical, but especially if they are touch based. Not all hit targets are the same in terms of safety.

Just how many controls are you manipulating that are not duplicated to your steering wheel on your drive? Modern cars feature nearly automatic everything, set and forget.

Just a note about laws against texting. So my state recently, finally last year, put in place a law which said you must use hands free.

Guess what happened, now half the dolts have their phone mounted to their windshield in their field of view or on their dash. So yeah, its hands free but even more distracting. Apparently this loop hole exists in many states!

It's great if you don't have to use the touch screen in the Tesla while it's driving, but it shouldn't even be possible to use it with the car in motion.

I almost never drive by myself. Things that lock out my girlfriend from using them are very annoying to me. Android Auto does this on some features.

It's not like it stops people from just using their phones anyway.

It's not like it stops people from just using their phones anyway

By that logic, doors needn't support locks, because people can just break windows anyways. Likewise, why put safety features in cars, people can just ride motorcycles?

When you're making a thing, your job is to make that thing safe. The fact that people can use other, less-safe things does not in any way abrogate your responsibility for the safety of the thing you make.

If people routinely wore capacitive clothing, the screen could determine which seat the finger's owner was sitting in.

I know this is comment in jest, but could you actually identify who touched a screen? Do people have different physical characteristics that would give them a detectable capacitive "fingerprint?"

> It's not like it stops people from just using their phones anyway.

I'm finding that more and more people are bringing a software mindset to cars.

If it can be done wrong, we should add a technology fix to stop them!

It hasn't always been this way to anywhere near this degree.

It's not a software mindset per se. It's a level of control freakery that was kept in check by the fact technology didn't integrate as effortlessly before digital systems became ubiquitous.

One can be a software developer and resist the urge to control the user through dark patterns/software interlocks; unfortunately it seems there is a type of person drawn toward software development in the first place by the degree of empowerment and capacity to control it offers.

I've always understood the impulse/satisfaction I've gotten out of writing it; but for me the end goal was writing the perfect tool to satisfy the end-user's workflow/experience. I've never been fond of using software as a means of mass coercion via "middle-users"; and when I see, or am asked to be part of it, it's generally a safe bet a philosophical rant/entreaty isn't far away.

And besides which, screw Software interlocks. If it's important enough, dedicate hardware to it, lest you feel like ending up as the next THERAC-25/737-MAX.

The backlit display on the Tesla 3 is wayyyyy too bright for night driving, even at its lowest backlight intensity and in night mode. It is like they intentionally ignored all available human factors research. Tesla is not alone here. Many automakers these days have too-bright interiors for night driving.

I've been turning the dash light intensity almost all the way down for 30+ years. They've always been too bright. If the Tesla is as bright as you say, it would literally be undriveable for me at night. (No screens or touch in either of my 18-20 year old vehicles)

I have a model 3 and have no idea what they’re talking about, fwiw.

They should probably switch to an AMOLED and go with a dark mode for night driving?

What I always get from these discussions is that people fiddle with their cars settings a lot more than I do. What are people doing that requires immediate attention? The only thing I am really tempted to use the screen for while actively driving a Tesla are to adjust the temperature and turn on defrosters. Everything else is handled with physical controls or can wait until I am stopped.

The Volt had the worst of both worlds, though -- touch controls that weren't even a screen.

I own a Tesla 3 as well, and I mostly agree-- I have 0 need to adjust most controls manually, the auto stuff works really well.

But I don't think voice controls are a good 'fix'. I still wish the car had a physical glovebox button and physical wiper controls.

I remember i have read this a year ago.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tesla-big-touchscreen/

A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface

And it was discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19968970

Im curious, have any of these problems been fixed?

  - Soft Buttons That Demand Attention
  - Poor Target Design
  - Target Size
  - Accidental Touches
  - Map Always on Screen

I work in data visualization. Every programmer who gets into datavis goes through a "3D all the things" phase where they look around and realize that 3D visualizations aren't used in a lot of areas where it seems like they should. Eventually you realize that there are big tradeoffs and 3D is very difficult to get right for the human brain.

Touchscreens are similar. The appeal is obvious. Screens are space efficient, customizable, upgradeable, flashy, etc. But they simply aren't as nice as physical controls with tactile feedback. Not only should we not be forcing touchscreens into every HCI situation, I think we should be moving the other direction, adding more physical buttons, dials, sliders etc to our computers and smartphones. In school a couple years back I worked on a project[0] for adding generic bluetooth buttons on a wrist device.

Imagine if you had 4 extra physical buttons, a scroll wheel, and a slider all sitting on your wrist, and your phone and apps were designed in such a way that you could map these to whatever you wanted.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJD...

> Imagine if you had 4 extra physical buttons, a scroll wheel, and a slider all sitting on your wrist, and your phone and apps were designed in such a way that you could map these to whatever you wanted.

Well this is kind of what Tesla is doing isn't it? You have some general purpose scroll-wheels/buttons on the steering wheel

I've never driven a Tesla, but if so that's cool.

Last year I bought a motorcycle (Honda CB300R) and it was a revelation.

No touch screens. No stereo. No GPS. No Bluetooth. No automatic transmission. No cupholders. Basically no "modern car features". And it's a much, much better road experience than any car I've ever been able to afford to drive.

Get rid of all the distractions at a price point under $30k with an engine that doesn't feel sluggish and maybe I'll consider buying a car again.

(Necessary disclaimer: I live somewhere where it's sunny and warm the majority of the year and where car parking is nigh impossible. Maybe I'd feel differently if I lived in rural Canada.)

"You lost me at 'under $30k', I'm trying to figure out how to credibly raise prices, not lower them", Head of Strategy, Automaker XYZ.

Toyota GT-86. Starts around 27k, three flavors (Scion FR/S, Subaru BRZ). Excepting some radio controls, all button (has steering wheel volume, tuning, etc.) And as a bonus, it's a six-gear rear wheel drive.

Eject button sold separately: https://i.imgur.com/wHL5Xnc.jpg

You'd probably be better off with a snowmobile there, too

Get a Miata and call it a day.

The latest-gen Goldwing has a fancy non-touch screen, stereo, CarPlay, GPS, Bluetooth, dual-clutch transmission w/ automatic mode. Screens are invading all segments of motorcycles with varying degrees of functionality.

I buy cheaper cars, because I don't really care about any of the high-end features that cars offer, and this has been one legitimate advantage, at least as of the last time I was shopping; cheap cars cheaped out on the display, so they still had physical controls for things like volume. I hope this trend takes off before I buy another.

I think it would be possible to make a decent touch screen, but it seems like the only people who give even a quantum of a damn about latency are the video game folks. A UI with 95th-percentile or 99th-percentile multi-second latency is an active hazard on the road, even if it is normally acceptable, which itself is fairly rare and expensive.

Interfaces to the car should have standardized use cases/requirements that are interface independent.

There should be requirements like - user should be able to rapidly change stations manually without looking at the interface.

For example I have a dial for my XM radio in my tundra, if I want to go from station 10 to station 100, I can easily do it by spinning the dial really fast two or three times without looking at the screen.

In my honda, to get to that UI where I can arbitrarily tune, I have to hit 3-4 buttons all in different places. Then I have to hit the up button 90 times.

I could imagine a digital tuner that is a bar that lets you simply touch where on the spectrum you want to select a station. But up/down arrow to tune should be banned.

Funny coming from Honda. My parents own a 2017 (I think) Civic and the only way to adjust volume is by tapping +/- on the touchscreen. It's the most unusable volume adjustment I've ever experienced. It was completely unusable with a glove in the winter.

So while most other companies only implemented touchscreen controls for secondary features Honda did it for the most widely used one. Now they are backtracking 100%, go figure.

I just got a 2020 Civic. There are touch screen control, but volume, music, climate control (up and down, not which vents), tuner, cruise control, and a number of other things are all physical buttons and knobs. I mostly have Android Auto up with music and map going on the touch screen while actually driving anyway, so more physical interfaces are a-ok by me.

I'm in the same boat with my 2019 ridgeline. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Most days, I don't even have to look at the touchscreen much less interact with it.

I have a 2015 Fit (Jazz in the not US), and it has the +/- on the touch screen, but also physical buttons on the steering wheel. I guess the compromise is that the driver doesn't need to use the touch buttons because they have the ones on the wheel, and the passenger can take their eyes off the road.

I'm curious to know if the buttons are in the base model or are an upgrade.

I DO have the highest trim level, so maybe that's why.

At least in the US models of the Fit there's no difference in the interior trim levels. I think part of the confused nature of this discussion is that Honda never shipped the touch-only dashboard that this article is talking about in the US market. The Fit and as far as I have seen every model Honda sells in the US has always had real knobs and switches for the climate controls. The touch climate controls were available in Japan and elsewhere.

ETA:

Non-USA interior: https://img.sm360.ca/images/article/the-honda-way/58810//the...

USA interior: https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/StJ/1082...

For the 2016 year model, the base model has a volume knob but the higher models do not. The 'USA interior' link above seems identical to the Non-USA link vs audio volume knob not being there. This is what the dash looks like for models with the knob (could only find 2015 lx but looks identical to 2016 lx): https://cdn.jdpower.com/ChromeImageGallery/Expanded/White/64...

Oh yes, I'd quite forgotten about the base model radio. Almost surprised it has no tape deck.

My 2017 Honda had a dial for adjusting the volume (it could also be pushed in to switch off).

The issue with new Hondas is that switching off/on the air conditioning, or air flow/fan speed, has to be done via touch screen. They do have dials for temperature control and a button to bring up the Climate UI.

One of the major changes between the 2018 and 2019 Honda model years was the addition of a physical volume knob on the main touch screen. Evidently this was one of the biggest complaints and they actually listened.

Bout time this started happening. Now, the rest of the industry just needs to follow suit.

the industry: improve usability or save $0.20. hmmm, touch choice. good bye, hardware buttons!

Including the movie industry.

BMW and Mercedes have always had physical dials to control the infotainment system.

The first and best microwave I ever had simply had a dial, a cook button, and an open button: that's it. The more you turned the dial, the longer your food would cook, and the hotter it would get. That's all you needed to know or do. And you could even turn it back or forth while it is microwaving, to change the time after you start, or finish cooking immediately. But it's almost impossible to find one with a dial, now.

Microwaves with digital keypads are terrible, even with those "convenient" +10 sec / +1 min / hot dog / peep buttons, you still have to hit a little target you can't feel, instead to twisting a big knob you can.

Entering time by touching digital buttons isn't a rapid, reversible, and incremental action with continuous feedback -- i.e. "direct manipulation", like turning a dial is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface

Great! I may actually consider a newer car for the first time in a long while.

I rent regularly and the last decade or so of car UX has been pretty terrible.

Some features are compelling, but distraction limits their effective value.

Feels a lot like early smart TVs to me. Better experiences are had by turning all the crap off.

With a car, the stuff is just there, often does not stay off, requiring constant attention to push out of the way, etc...

An older vehicle, equipped with a bluetooth capable radio, smartphone with voice is better than just about all the new car goodies nearly always.

Frankly, the metrics, mpg, other performance data and sound processing where present are great! I use them when present.

The rest is just a mess.

My other quibble is LEDs. The flicker used to prolong LED life and power use is very seriously distracting both in car, and outside to other drivers.

In car, lots of bright things will often inhibit night vision. Displays, dash lighting, indicators all increasingly bright and many flicker.

As a driver, a quick glance to and fro results in a field of dots. I have asked others about that and have done a few tests when road conditions and traffic present an opportunity.

Older car dashes are not distracting much at all. Can run very dim too. Newer dashes distract far more. Won't always dim, or worse, will dim, sans for one bright thing, usually a little display.

The always on bulbs do leave a vision trail, compared to the dots from LED lights. For many, that trail appears to be processed in a less distracting way.

LED tail lights are the big offender here.

Over time, as I land in various airports, the conversion to LED has been completed. The pattern of speckles are crazy! Various colors, and modest duty cycle rates make for a mess.

Any pilots care to comment?

Mazda also did this. Long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

Thank god.

I just got a 2005 Porsche Boxster with a CDR-24 radio, and one of my favorite things about it is how simple the interior controls are. Knobs, buttons, switches. The PCM radio I think might have had touch screen, but anyway...

My main point is that my 15 year old car doesn't feel anywhere near as dated as many cars from 2009, that have slow, low resolution, or awkward touch screens. The only car I've used with an acceptable (but still flawed in many ways) touch screen is a Tesla 3 or S.

An absence of features often for me turns out to be a feature. It's a car; do I even really need that many buttons or controls?

My spouse has a 2019 Honda HRV and I hate dealing with the touchscreen while driving. It's cognitively very difficult to do the degree of fine motor control and visual attention the touchscreen requires while also driving safely. It's actually a little terrifying.

I remember reading an article a while back about some manufacturer, can't remember which one, adding a clickable knob to control the "smart" functions. Since so much of what we use a touchscreen for is actually menu selection, that could cover most of what we need to "touch".

Let me give you another perspective - I own a Suzuki SX4 S-Cross that comes with a fluid, super responsive and intuitive touchscreen with voice commands in it, which can also be controlled from the steering. You can do stuff like ask to call someone's phone, or read a text message or ask you to give directions.

But the real highlight is the UI + UX. It's super intuitive in that the volume controls, although touch, are always in a fixed location and you just drag over towards the edge of the screen up or down. In addition, you also have steering mounted controls to control the volume. The whole screen is divided into 4 quadrants and clicking anywhere in those quadrants will take you to either of the main screen (Eg. Navigation or FM Radio). It doesn't take long to get used to remembering which quadrant is for which. Also, for safety, you can't use some core features of navigation while driving the car. It will ask you to stop first if you want to say, type for a certain address.

I have never seen such fantastic UX in such mid-tier cars. To me, it seem's Honda's move is backward - perhaps it could be solved by simple UX..which Suzuki and Bosch (the supplier of their infotainment units) have already solved?

I find it super convenient because I don't even need to take my eyes off the road...while enjoying the convenience of a touch screen.

A picture (or video is worth a thousand words): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvERUKfjufg

That's only one control though. You can still accidentally touch something else while you fish for this control. I'm sure most users would prefer dials that provide touch feedback.

> The new Audi A3’s electronics boss Melanie Limmer told Autocar recently its decision to remove some physical buttons was made as “more and more people are getting into touch functions with smartphones”

That is totally the wrong lesson to take from the popularity of touchscreens on smartphones.

Hardware buttons were eliminated from smartphones for one reason: the devices are small and screen real estate is critically important. So the screens need to take up 100% of the usable area of the front of the device, leaving no room for buttons. (The first iPhone proved how game-changing it was to be able to any web site.)

It's not because touching the screen is better than pressing a button. It's because eliminating buttons is an acceptable sacrifice for something even more important.

But in a car, of course, you don't have these constraints on size, so the reasoning doesn't translate from one type of device to another.

It's the equivalent of saying, hey, we noticed that having only one burner is overwhelmingly popular on camping stoves, and campers really seem to prefer it that way, so for all our new models of kitchen ranges, we are going to just have one burner too.

Of course, I am assuming it even is a sincere belief. It's also possible they have some other reason (maybe cheaper?) and this is just a way of justifying the choice.

I have a 2013 Accord with a touch screen (bought it used and it's what came with it) instead of button controls. The latency on the screen is terrible and my father's Acura RDX which does not have a touch panel is much more user-friendly. I would love if more manufacturers started to put more analog controls back into their cars, but kept the non-touch screens for info display/backup cameras.

There is a trend to assume new technology will always replace old technology.

During the Vietnam war the F4 ditched its cannons for the sidewinder air to air missile.

The sidewinder is fire and forget for the most part and somewhat of a no brainer whereas cannons require more skill and training in dogfighting.

It also gave the US a MAJOR advantage (in theory) vs the MiG.

The problem is that the Vietnamese picked up on this and changed their tactics.

Before this the US had air superiority and a significantly higher kill ratio.

The Vietnamese built 'hidden' airfields and would dispatch their MiGs when the F4 was directly overhead and engage them in head to head dogfights.

The F4s needed to build distance to launch a sidewinder and this dramatically rebalanced the kill ratio and during this time it came out to close to 1:1 with the US having a slight advantage.

They US realized their mistake and subsequent F4s had cannons...

Same thing here with cars. When the new screens came out everything was done through software but it's just NOT a good design.

When I'm driving I want to push a button and be done. IF just for safety.

When the UI locks up or is slow it's literally a safety risk.

The vietnam era missiles were really bad missiles with a really bad pk. Lack of a cannon wasn't the problem, and adding one wasn't the solution. Fixing crappy missile technology was the solution.

I don't think there's been an air to air gun kill in four decades, maybe five (US at least). Essentially all air to air combat is with missiles, to the point two of the three JSF variants don't even have a built in cannon and will likely almost never fly with the gun pods they are building for them.

Wasn't another factor of the drop in head to head kills and then the subsequent improvement due to the energy-maneuverability of the fighter jets? John Boyd's biography (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd) talks a lot about his work while an instructor at the Air Force.

EM theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93maneuverability...

Funny anecdote: when I was working on the Ultimaker S5 touch screen interface, there were lots of tests done with new users. Many people had trouble figuring out that the previous version did not have a touch screen but a tiny, tiny OLED display that was controlled by a rotating button. People poking their finger at this tiny OLED which was not giving a damn about what they did there. Really funny to look at, but made it very clear customers expected us to have a touch screen.

That allowed for a much nicer interface (we won some award with it), but the only thing that was not better with a touchscreen (IMO) was manual bed leveling, where you look at the print head and not the screen. We did our best on that and to make it as unneeded as possible. I don't have a such an S5 3D-printer and I don't work for Ultimaker anymore, so I'd be glad if anyone here could tell me how they like the bed leveling UI, if they ever used it :-)

The best "driver UX" I've ever had is on a 1995 Rover Coupe, with its dashboard and switchgear carried over from a 1988 Honda Concerto:

https://imgur.com/a/YvpSUFa

Just 3 knobs for regulating blower fan speed, blown-in heat level, and flow direction. One switch for letting/stopping incoming air flow, another for recirculating/capturing cabin air. A single on/off button for the AC.

Left steering column switch is entirely light-related, right switch is entirely dedicated to the wiper system.

Three buttons just below the dials: emergency lights, fog lights and rear screen heating.

Just the bare essentials that you'll be using 99% of the time, easily discoverable at the most sensible locations, with a solid mechanical "clicking" feedback. It's a significantly safer car simply by virtue of lacking distracting controls.

That is very similar to early-2000s Volkswagens (mk4) except for the addition of a radio and seat heater dials, and cruise control on the left stalk (or the steering wheel):

https://justdrivethere.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/dscf1441....

The only (IMO) necessary features these cars lack compared to modern cars are audio Bluetooth/line in, and navigation. But both are easily added: audio bluetooth/line in with a module that plugs into the CD changer port on the back of the OEM radio, and navigation using a separate GPS unit (such as the ones Garmin make). Maybe a backup camera too, but you can buy a wireless one that works with a Garmin GPS screen.

Fuck Honda. I'm never buying another "new" Honda:

While their new and "certified" inventory is rusting on dealer lots, they have declared [0][1] that peons owning Takata NADI inflators (SHRAPNEL BOMBS sitting inches from our faces) should just wait (NO FREE RENTAL) a few MONTHS (sometime in 2021) for them to redesign, test, manufacture, ship, and ultimately replace said shrapnel bomb.

[0] https://hondaairbaginfo.com/nadi

[1] https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-corporate/releases/release...

Unrelated, but this line stood out, and now I have a question:

> Honda’s decision to return to physical controls will be popular with some - including, no doubt, its ageing owner base in the UK

Ageing? Is there some stat showing Honda owners are older than owners of other models? Or that young people aren't buying Hondas?

I'm young and I love tech, but I'd rather feel for the volume control knob while I'm watching the road than stare at a touch screen and try to position my finger to hit an icon in a moving car. Those interfaces were just a terrible idea.

In my brother's old Prius it would randomly switch to a diagram showing how cool its power train system was/energy transfer etc. Just what I need while I'm driving - a useless distraction which I have to close before I get access to the controls I need!

(I don't remember exactly how it worked though because I haven't driven it in a while.)

I think that's just the perception/bias by the writer. It does not stand as a quote from industry source or manufacturer.

I haven't seen any stats, but anecdotally, I remember watching TopGear episodes a decade ago where they would go on about how Hondas were boring "old people" cars. Its funny because in my region on the US Hondas are very popular with young people hot-rodding them up.

Excellent move. I totally support this. Touchscreens removes all the accurate tactile feedback of what you are doing to a control and that forces the user to fallback to taking a look, hence deviating the center of the sight from the ideal zone for a really unjustifiable reason.

Good. Touch screen controls are a good tool for communicating visual information while having some way to still give users some controls. Tactile controls are good tools for when the operator needs to visually focus on something else and feedback can be sensed in other ways. For cars, the only visual information it should show to the driver are either things that are controlled outside of a touch screen (speedometer, tach) or can't be controlled while the vehicle is in operation anyway (oil temp gauge, etc). Everything else can be intuitively sensed by the driver's other senses and the important part of the control is the feedback saying that you are in fact manipulating the controls properly.

> While Honda’s decision to return to physical controls will be popular with some - including, no doubt, its ageing owner base in the UK - the predicted move towards more voice-controlled actions in cars could eliminate the debate around touchscreens versus analogue controls in the future.

No, I will not be talking to my car.

Knobs and buttons with tactile feedback were great and should be used for major functionality.

My favorite fan controller of all time was a fan pull knob on a FJ40, which had physical clicks for each fan setting as you pulled it out:

https://forum.ih8mud.com/attachments/p13-jpg.509941/

It was intuitive and deeply satisfying.

The way my brains works, it’s hard for me to even read road signs when I’m driving (excepting simple ones like speed limits and one-word signs). Switching contexts is just really slow. If I try to use voice recognition I basically go blind for three seconds.

Just and knobs for everything I need when driving. But please keep touchscreen for everything complex I can do while standing still. Complex setup of display options, car setups or whatever is infuriating without touch.

This is how every other device works such as a digital camera. You can’t have an unlimited amount of knobs and buttons but you can have a dozen so you choose very carefully which functions need direct manipulation.

I don’t think it’s so bad currently in many cars to be honest. My VW does what I want, there are knobs and buttons for climate and radio, but setup and other things are touch. Only complaint is that switching source between line in and bt is touch only (and is used a lot).

Car audio systems pose greater dangers than texting, pot

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-03-car-audio-pose-greater-d...

Thank goodness. I bought a Honda quite a few years ago and got the top trim, but insisted that they remove the navigation system as just using it as a radio was far worse because it was entirely touchscreen focused. This might keep on me on Honda's for a while.

Edit: Wait... they're just talking about climate controls here. They're not adding any dials. Apparently other carmakers are going just touchscreen for everything. I guess its just gotten worse over the last few years. Tesla can sort of get away with it. But goodness a huge part of the reason I liked a lot of luxury cars was they tended to do more dials instead of touchscreens.

Who thought of the "touch-screen in cars" idea and how did he bait the entire industry into copying such a shitty idea? Touch screens in cars don't even make sense in fully self-driving cars, since you'd just lay down in the backseat on your phone on your way to work.

I still have no idea how to work the screen in my dad's old car. I would literally have to pull over and whip out my phone to Google how to use the damn thing. It made setting/changing the music way harder than it should've been. No one wants to pull over to look up a dissertation on how to use change the channel on your radio.

Did you know that in a car you can change the climate control temperate for when the system is "off"?

Try it today. In an old car, set the fan speed to off. Then adjust the temperature. Switch it back and forth a few times and test it.

In a new car you need to turn the fan on, then change the temperature and then turn it off again, in order to change the "off" temperature.

On a touch screen this task requires many seconds of eyes-off-the-road-time to accomplish.

But hey, designers need flexibility because changing temperature is a new concept and they couldn't possibly handle a deadline to work with component selection and other parts of the product team.

All they did was put the analogue A/C controls back. I don't see this as a big deal and I kind of like that some of the basic controls don't require digging through menus. One of the drawbacks of touchscreen controls is you have limited screen space to cram everything that used to cover the whole dashboard.

New features like navigation and music makes sense when moved to the touch screen, but adding things you don't need to just means I have to switch away from navigation or music controls just to change the A/C.

I think Honda is making a good choice in terms of User Interface design.

I think what Tesla did was cost cutting by putting everything in one big screen - no need to think about hardware knobs and buttons - have the screen UI and update it remotely if it is not intuitive.

It seems like the middle way would be:

Build your console with a big hole in the middle. Mount the buttons to the insert, figure out your UI and adjust the button placement, so really most of the last minute design is producing a new mounting bracket for the electronics and physical controls.

The biggest problem I see there is that you are very limited in button placement without resizing the panel. But if you pick a clever panel size to console hole ratio you could buy yourself some flexibility. For example, an almost square panel could allow you to rotate it and move some buttons from vertical to horizontal.

I have a touch screen in my Nissan and it's almost useless when I'm driving down the road at 60 miles an hour and trying to navigate menus 8 layers deep to do something simple that used to be a button press on my old Honda.

Relatedly, the US Navy removed touchscreens from all vessels after a collision happened because someone couldn't navigate the interface in time. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

The dirty secret of the electronics industry is that the reason for moving to sensor buttons is cost.

When first capacitive touch devices appeared around 2005-2006, everybody immediately noticed that you only need a single digitizer for the whole front panel of the device, or dirt cheap cap sens circuits for point sensors.

For as long as the sensor is just a piece of polyimide pcb you can glue to anything, but a metal surface, things get really cheap without mechanical buttons, holes in the case to cut, and PCB to hold the buttons.

Touch controls in the car should not be used for anything that is supposed to be used while driving. 1) They give no haptic feedback and require to look at them to do anything. 2) They are very finicky if the hands are wet/dirty/sweaty/cold. Knobs can be rotated and buttons pressed without looking. Physical objects can be manipulated as long as you can move your fingers.

One more reason to consider Honda when the time comes to buy a new car. Another reason is their outstanding reliability ratings.

I recall Mazda doing this a while back. [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

Mazda have also announced the same thing. (https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...)

Favorite quote: “Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,”

I understand the problem that touch-screens solve on cell phones. How do you squeeze the most functionality onto the smallest surface? By doubling up on functions, and reusing existing functionality to be context-sensitive. The trend of moving designs from where they make sense to where they do not because the inferior design is seen as more modern since the devices with these constraints are modern has been a very annoying one. Designers have been making software and technology progressively worse. It isn't in any way surprising, it's just annoying that when a piece of equipment or technology can fully utilize the features and interfaces that cheap and mobile technology is forced to do without, they choose not to use it. It'd be like if bicycles became really popular all of a sudden, so auto industry stopped putting in seatbelts and airbags in cars, because bicycles are modern and they don't have those things in bicycles. You're building a car with a fixed set of controls for the machine you're driving in: you can afford to use a physical UI, what are you doing putting in touch-screen?!

IMHO the physical controls invoke muscle memory and haptic feedback which enables driver to keep attention on the road. Touchscreen does not give this to same/any degree. I should not have to take eyes, or attention, off the road for longer than it takes my hand to find the right control. Physical controls current significant advantage over digital is "no interpretation required" - feel or microsecond glance tells you the state. Digital, other than big dials and flashing colors, needs you to think. Those thoughts take focus away from the act of driving.

Im summary i think Honda is right - digital controls for things with no time and attention pressure (like music channel), and physical for those that need near immediate action (like defogging a window or wipers).

FTR been driving cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles for nearly 50 years - 2 accidents, no hospital trips, and that includes plenty of 'hooning about' well into danger-zone for conditions/environment (wont say more or might get a visit from authorities :-p )

I've been driving for 40 years. I totally agree with you. Old school controls you can operate reflexively. Often with barely any conscious thought. Your brain adapts to treat the car an an extension of your body.

That simply does not happen with modal controls.

More accurately, they're putting back dials for temperature control in one of the only cars the make that doesn't already use dials. They're not getting rid of touch screens, nor are they pushing against the industry: they're aligning temperature controls in one of their cars with their other cars and much of the rest of the industry.

I do hope other automakers follow, because why should a head-unit should be considered safe to operate while driving, while touching a smartphone display isn't.

Both lacks the tactile feedback buttons are offering, both don't work with gloves and both requires you to look at the display (and stop looking at the road) to know what action you're making.

My preference in cars is touchscreen for rarely used functionality, and then dials, buttons and sliders for everything else.

Messing with audio is a peripheral task so expecting me to take my eyes off the road etc is still unacceptable. Especially to change the track or adjust volume.

That said, we're all used to small touchscreens. These tend to require the user to maintain the current context on what is on screen. The whole screen is subject to change and this complicates / weakens muscle memory. I've used larger touchscreens where controls don't change around so much and muscle memory can easily kick in if the design is sane. The difference is tangible. Eg you can blind press using peripheral vision and it can work well.

The real answer might just be that we're in the early days of touchscreen use. The technology and application thereof is still immature. The design language, for want of a better term, is still evolving.

Not all touch controls are created equal.

I'm really happy with the interface in my Model 3 and I've found every other car interface I've used to be on the spectrum from terrible to okay (BMW, Mercedes, Mazda, VW, Porsche).

I think you can probably do either well, but it seems like the car companies (other than Tesla) just don't have this capability.

Weird how the article says that Honda is the only manufacturer doing this when I read about Mazda doing it in Feb

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...

If Honda is "bucking a trend" here it just shows how much professionals, experts and decision-makers can be fooled by trends.

I speculate that Tesla made it something other luxury brands wanted too, and then those brands went bezerk: E.g. the newest Range Rover models feature multiple touch screens, they turned your AC-control-knobs into touch-screens as well, and even the once-handy controls on your steering wheel. What's the point then of still having a phisical gear shift?

I applaud Honda for making common sense an official statement again. I ditched the newest lineups of all new premium brands (also) because of that touch-screen nonsense and choosed a cheaper brand instead where it's at least just one touch device.

Premium brands still don't seem to get how un-premium a dashboard full of thumbprints and smudges looks like, even less if everything else has a piano finish.

I thought TSLA was doing it because they want self-driving now and this makes it easier.

I didn't meant TSLA as a part of premium brands. Rather that TSLA using those large touch screens in their Model S, I think, to a large part drove premium brands into buying into touch screens as a trend.

BTW installing a large touch-screen under the premise of soon-to-be fully self-driving vehicles in 2013's Model S has to be a loooong waiting for "making it easier" ;-)

But I guess the car-makers touch screen folly might be even more attributable to the impact the iPhone made at that time.

I've designed hardware and software for a number of touchscreen devices and applications. I even invented the double-sided touchscreen, which may show up in phones in another few years.) So I love touchscreens, BUT, he lack of feel makes knobs, buttons and switches a far better choice for moving environments - I hate most new cars that lack real controls for at least commonly used functions. It's hard to beat the knobs and sliders in most 50-60 year-old cars for easy work-by-feel operation.

(FWIW, I always thought it would have been cool if someone in StarTrek TNG/DS9/Voyager had sat down at one of those smooth glass LCARS interface panels and been surprised that they could "feel" 3D controls on them. That seems to be the sort of thing that would be done given the obvious capabilities of their holo/forcefield generators...)

To be fair to touch screen controls, Honda had exceptionally poor ones. There’s always at least a second delay on brightness/volume/etc. adjustments in our 2018 Honda. I think the unit is just incredibly underpowered, because CarPlay (phone driven) doesn’t suffer from the same issues.

Not all touchscreens are same. There are few touchscreens that are good. Most Honda touchscreens are bad.

As long as my fingertips cannot read touchscreens, touchscreens in cars are all inferior to physical dials and buttons.

All touchscreens provide zero tactile feedback or spatial info about its setting. Thus to use any touchscreen, you always must take your eyes off the road to look at it. Thus no matter how logical or attractive or fast the display, screens are always less safe than any tactile alternative control that lets you keep your eyes on the road.

Also, for car devices that provide intuitive feedback on their activity (wiper motion, fan noise, air temperature from outlets, audio volume, etc), you don't need a screen to confirm that it has changed.

And since these devices are the ones that I change most often (and music), I'd much prefer to control them on the steering wheel or verbally, and never use a screen.

"Honda is doing what no other car company is doing..."

Except Mazda. 6 months ago. Oof.

https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-...

Hallelujah, at least one auto maker is willing to publicly come out against this insane trend of making car controls visual only. I mean, one would think that when you are inside a ton of metal speeding along the road at 60 mph, you would insist on controls that allow you to have 100% of your visual attention on the road and rely on your other senses to change the channel on the radio or adjust the AC. But somehow people think driving a car should be something like playing candy crush on your tablet. That means going forward I'll always have a car manufacturer I can rely on to not sacrifice my safety for a marketing coolness. Too bad makers like Tesla (who have a lot of leadership in other areas) completely drop the ball in this regard.

This is a great decision by Honda. Touchscreens are a terrible UX when driving. Its difficult to be accurate with the touchscreen in a car when its moving, even as the passenger. Physical controls are much easier to control, less distracting, and we develop muscle memory for knobs dials and switches easily.

As an example, I personally am not a fan of the extreme minimalism in Tesla cars. A fully touchscreen experience makes sense only after a car is capable of fully autonomous self driving. As long as a human is responsible for controlling/monitoring the car, physical controls are better than touch controls.

To be fair, touch screens are better for changing settings, monitoring the health of the car, and any other action that we do while the car is parked.

I recently purchased a 2020 Honda Odyssey. I hate the touchscreen controls, and I hate the button gear shifter (i.e. press a button to reverse...)

For example, it's so difficult to change AC controls w/o looking at the screen. It's very dangerous. I don't do it unless I'm at a light, or if on the highway, no one is around me.

Toyota Sienna still has their AC controls as buttons/knobs, still has a regular shifter, and probably more traditional controls.

But the Sienna was lacking in many other areas...so we went with Odyssey. Looks like we coulda waited a few more years!

The article also refers to "voice control". No, I don't want to yell at my car to lower the AC when my baby is sleeping.

I'm all for innovation...but please leave controls as it is!

Wasn't it the US marine that moved back from touch screens to physical controls in their ships?

While the actual reason could be a case for discussions, the decision is correct in my humble opinion. The reason was, the loss of (I think) one destroyer, that crashed with a civil ship (a big freighter or tanker), because of misinterpretations of the steering control on the bridge of the destroyer.

In my humble opinion, when it comes to mission critical and distraction free control, nothing is better than physical control systems. In a good car, not only you have physical control systems, but also buttons and switches are of different shape or size or way of control (pressing, twisting, ...), so they can be identified simply by touching them.

I very recently bought a BEV Hyundai Ioniq of the first Generation, and one of the reasons I chose the 1st gen was that it still has some knobs and dials. The new generation has almost only touch controls, and this feels kinda wrong. Notably, it’s not a pure touch screen, but the knobs and dials have been replaced by a lot of capacitive touch elements with backlights. When it’s dark outside, it would take me a few hundred ms to find the right button, and then I still have to visually guide my finger there. And then there’s no physical feedback when pressing.

There are other reasons for why I chose the 1st gen (better fast charging capability), but the touch elements were the last straw.

Me in my bit older Mercedes, my gears, lights, whipers all go automatic, im left with radio control and temperature. Audios is easy, it on the steering wheel, so is answering the phone. Two knobs for warm/cold and airco. No need for touchscreen.

In my opinion, we need a mix of both. Trying to interact with an entertainment unit with some type of abstracted/bastardised joystick or touch pad is just plain awful. Whereas interacting using touchscreen is just so much simpler, plus allows for UIs that weren’t part of the original product development (e.g Apple CarPlay).

But for other things, we need dedicated physical controls that mean we don’t have to take our eyes off the road to use; for example, climate control, volume control, cruise control, hazard lights, etc.

A good manufacturer will integrate a mix of both, and user test at each stage of the manufacturing process to ensure what they’re doing is in the best interest of the user.

My Prius prime has the worst controls possible. During spring and fall, when one part of the day is cold and the other warm, it’s annoying to turn on the car. For instance, if I commute home and used A/C, turning on the car in the morning will have the A/C blasting when it’s also cold outside. And I have to sit through the animation and boot up of the screen and then go to the climate control settings which usually is a very uncomfortable 30 seconds every time. And then, the touch is not as smooth as a modern smartphone. This is a 2019 Prius too so idk what Toyota was thinking going all touch on this one.

If my blood is on the touchscreen, it shouldn't break my car or prevent me from getting to the hospital. Who needs more controls? I want physical levers and switches on the dash. Case in point, Ford Mustangs have electronic controls to pull heat off the engine, but the valve only opens when the thermostat says it okay so when it breaks (and costs $250 to fix, and breaks regularly) you're stuck with cold air in the winter until you exceed 50MPH. Just give me a freaking lever that manually/physically opens the valve to and pull the heat off the engine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Good. Those damn things were clearly never tested on real roads with bumps.

> "Oops you fat fingered the main menu icon while you were 5 layers deep! Guess you have to start over!"

Physical controls have their place, and in a car is one of them

My Mazda 3 sGT (and current year model) already does this and it's a joy to use, no touchscreen climate control!

Pics: http://www.2wired2tired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Mazda...

https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45...

My 2018 Opel Insignia also has mechanical dials and buttons for climate control and answering phone, setting cruise control and other “critical” things. But if you want to do detailed configuration for radio, sound balance, music etc you have a rich touch screen available with big buttons to hit. I find navigating between radio stations and navigation so much more accessible with touchscreen that I wouldn’t want these things in another way. Anything that has to be accessed using a joystick like interface should be on the touchscreen and critical one dial features on mechanical where possible.

I like touchscreen controls for my apple car play, but literally nothing else.

I can adjust the climate control temperature with dash buttons, but if I want to control which vents the air comes through, I have to use the touch screen.

Same for if I want to turn on the heated steering wheel. I don't use it too often so that doesn't bug me _too_ much, but sometimes if it's cold when I start my car, it turns it on for me. So when my hands get too hot I have to minimize apple car play, select the ford app, select climate control, and tap the tiny button for the steering wheel.

Seems way more dangerous than reading a text.

I really wish Bevi (and similar kiosk type coffee or dispensing machines) would add physical buttons for dispensing and use the screen only for flavor information. I think our machine's screen isn't properly grounded or insulated from the refrigeration motors. I'm appreciative we have one in the office, however, and look forward to getting to see it again sometime.

Definitely agree with the sentiment that touch screens have gone too far. Feels kind of like the over use of plastic as we got better at manufacturing it. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back on touchscreens too.

I don't think anybody even bothered to read the article!

It explicitly states, right below the top image -

>> The new Jazz has a touchscreen for many functions, but not temperature control

So, only the temperature control is via a dial. Everything else is still on the touchscreen.

Image - https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/g...

I could only image being blind and having to navigate a world that is completely flat. Knobs and controls add something to grab onto. to me it's also safer, if I'm driving and want to change the radio channel, i can feel for the knob without having to take my eyes off the road. i can't do this with a flat, touchscreen display and I also find that voice command work most times but, on the time they don't, i get frustrated and that's not good when driving either as it can cause road rage.

innovation is wonderful, however sometimes the old ways win out.

Until voice control (or fully autonomous vehicles) is 100% awesome, nothing beats tactile, physical controls. If designed right, you never have to leave your eyes from the road (good luck doing that with a Tesla, for example) and you know 100% what you're controlling.

What also nobody discusses (except for maybe Doug DeMuro): digital screens and controls age POORLY. Any car that's 10-ish years old with tons of tech looks ancient, where an even older one with mostly-analog controls can still look sharp. This obviously mostly matters for high-end cars.

Good. There is no way to use a touchscreen effectively while going 80km/h.

It would have to be the smartest touch screen ever, and be able to make assumptions as to what i'm trying to press -- fudge a lot of precision -- and even then I wouldn't know if what I'm touching and what the machine thinks I'm touching are correct without taking my eyes off the road. Meanwhile, I can feel for the 3rd knob or 3rd button and be sure what it is without taking my eyeballs off of the bumper of the car in front of me.

My mom she has a Honda Jazz and the UI is one oft the most terrible from all cars I have seen so far. A few things at least like Audio volume, some radio channels and temperature should have hardware knobs or buttons, so I easy can change it without looking on the screen. Then also should be a place under the screen where i can rest my hand (like has something, at least in a new car I drove recently), so I can touch the screen with a single finger multiple times on the same spot without looking on the screen.

Great.

I think voice controls are obviously the theoretical best for automotive and I hope that in the near future every car will have built-in functionality - that will even work offline.

Obviously Siri can't control my AC right now but it infuriates me that CarPlay voice controls don't work without internet.

I have a hard time imagining it would be difficult to increase offline functionality when in my old 2010 Ford I had Microsoft Sync with the functionality to voice control an iPod offline and it worked pretty much perfectly.

My 30 year old Land Rover has one of my favourite user interfaces.

For example, the cooling system. It's a big lever on the dash connected directly to a big flap on front of the car. You pull down the lever and it opens the flap, and air gets rammed in through the vent. The only moving part is the lever.

Everything is just so tactile. The cooling system, the gear stick, the transfer box, the switches. The user interface goes CLUNK and you can feel the thing on the other end doing the thing you made it do.

Another fad that should go away is blue light dashboards. They give horrible afterimages in dark conditions. BMW's red-orange lights are so relaxing to look at in comparison.

Ugh! Blue light should never be used at night.

If a car uses blue dash lights, that will stop me from buying it instantly and unquestionably. Blue is extremely saturating to my eyes' receptors and uncomfortable to look at in darkness even for a moment. Red is 100x more forgiving.

Touchscreens are not the only UI problem in recent cars. I have a recent Honda, it suffers from the problem that they decided to make the crucial buttons below the touchscreen touch sensitive (with no tactile feedback). So for eg. if you wipe them should some dirt land on them, you set them all off/on by accident! What's worse, they are glossy, and hard to see with glare. It looks good though and sells cars, I call it "the iPhone" design.

I was somewhat dreading what the interface would look like on my next car purchase. On the one hand I'd love the idea that the navigational map on my phone may be displayed on the car's "big screen", but I didn't know what to make about this touchscreen stuff.

Makes a lot of sense! Right now I can adjust almost everything by touch alone: cruise control, volume, etc. I would hate for those to get buried in an inevitable submenu on a touchscreen.

I see the benefits of touch screens, but I really miss tactile controls, like the temperature controls on my Dad's 1978 GMC pickup truck, which is the vehicle I learned to drive in. Three super simple, super intuitive slider type controls for all temperature settings: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iVtb4z2QozY/maxresdefault.jpg

I for one will be really glad if this sparks and industry wide trend to go back to buttons and shift levers rather than buttons or levers that aren't actually good.

GM had it right!

http://carphotos.cardomain.com/ride_images/2/4797/3641/24491...

https://bestcarmag.com/sites/default/files/65564525286387311...

I own a Honda HRV and I agree. The fucking touch-slider for volume control is absolutely atrocious.

There are buttons on the wheel but these are slow compared to a good old knob.

I like the UConnect system in my ‘19 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It has a mix of touch features and dials/buttons. Some features you can control with both touch and dials/buttons. Front seat warmers and coolers do no have physical buttons and I dislike it a lot.

Physical and touch controls should complement each other. Too much touch is bad and too many buttons are bad. I remember looking at Acura’s with to many buttons a few years ago.

Ha! This reminds me of Navy and it’s destroyer doing the same thing.

“The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers” https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john...

This is fantastic news. Reminds me of this GREAT READ: https://www.amazon.com/Hand-Shapes-Brain-Language-Culture/dp...

I would not be surprised if this decision resulted in even greater brand loyalty, e.g. drivers becoming attached to the "feel" of a Honda.

I'm glad they're going in this direction. Mostly all BMWs use the screen for simply displaying informational content and for input and navigation it uses a multi-direction knob right by the arm rest and it's best most intuitive way to navigate the screen imo. Car screens are either matte and less responsive or glossy and more responsive but less visible in sunlight.

Physical devices are far superior to touch controls. Not only can you operate them much more reliably under movement and vibration, you can reliably control them without looking.

Or would you replace your (_mechanical_) keyboard with a touch keyboard of current tech?

Anyone pushing touch screens to replace physical input devices in situations where you need to be doing other things at the same time is just insane.

I've always been very happy with Honda's car interfaces. Everything from basic driving stuff to climate control and the radio seem... well, not great, but simply, fine. Most other manufacturers seem to have some trick up their sleeve, with crazy turn signal mechanisms or some other nonsense. I think they have relatively sensible people working in that department.

What I really hate about touchscreen, and love with analog input, is the "speed control" of rotary dials.

For example, if you want to change the air speed of your ventilation system down to zero from max, a quick rotation of your vent speed knob will bring it back to zero and you can rotate it back to put it to one, without looking.

With touchscreen, it's hard to do the same without looking.

The only feedback I've seen has echoed my own sentiment: "Good". What is the opposing point of view? Is there anyone out there who is willing to defend touch-screen interfaces in vehicles? What's the advantage to the driver? Is it even that much cheaper to the manufacturer? Surely plastic knobs are not a big hit to the bottom line of car makers.

Repairability and features as software instead of hardware. For example, Tesla was able to enable Spotify in all its cars with an OTA update. Hell, you can enable rear heated seats in the Model 3 SR+ via an OTA.

Tesla also takes away features via OTA updates. It's a double-edged sword.

You're referring to the AP / FSD situation?

I believe that was a misstep and was rectified. The "features" I'm talking about are different.

Unfortunately we won't get this car in the US. I love my 1st gen Honda Fit and plan to keep it pretty much forever, they're such a great vehicle. Incredible gas mileage and they're actually fun to drive with the short wheelbase. In tune with the article I put the only Carplay receiver with a physical volume knob in it and it's perfectly easy to use.

I gotta say... I got a Fit in 2007, pre-ordered before they were available, and at 300k+ miles it's doing great. The guy at the oil change place literally turned his eyes to the heavens and said that he couldn't find any service to recommend. He'd never seen a car of such age that clean; it should surely be leaking something.

I've heard Honda has gone downhill in the last decade, and my next car probably won't be a Honda. But at this rate, my next car will drive itself. (Especially since I'm no longer putting miles on it at the rate that got me to 300k in a decade.)

“The new Audi A3’s electronics boss Melanie Limmer told Autocar recently its decision to remove some physical buttons was made as ‘more and more people are getting into touch functions with smartphones’ and added that the new system is as user-friendly as the previous one.” - her model is the thing that is responsible for countless distracted driving deaths... great

Now let's go back from this flat UI nonsense everywhere to the kind of solid look that Windows '95 had and make my decade, not just day!

https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

Hardware graphics acceleration on High quality, high resolution displays are to blame. And then designers started pretending computers was like paper, they used the same design principles

Interfaces became flat well, because paper design isn't interactive.

I know this sounds stupid, who'd make such a mistake! Look at where the trendsetters cribbed their design inspirations from, and you'll find a classic 2d printed world.

If we relimit ourselves to EGA16/640x480 thinking, at least in thought as an exercise, we'd be good.

The only touch screen in any car should be a dumb terminal for CarPlay/Android Auto. Everything else should be dials and buttons.

As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing inherently wrong with "touchscreen controls", it's the usage and user interface assumptions.

Make a touchscreen slider and who knows, perhaps it's even more durable and reliable than a moving part. It's the whole sets of modal interfaces, and jenky controls which make this stuff unsafe, and irritating.

Touchscreens unfortunately only provide visual feedback. I can feel the wheel turn without taking my eyes off the road.

There are lots of development-related reasons touchscreens are appealing, but in situations where the user cannot reasonable look at the screen much, it's not obvious a touchscreen is a good solution. Maybe with haptic feedback of some kind.

Real buttons provide tactile feedback. Plus they don't move around for each menu screen and with software updates. They can be operated by muscle memory. Buttons also provide information about the current state (think ventilation/heat). It's not about comfort but security that is maintaining visibility while keeping eyes on the road.

I believe Mazda made this decision not too long ago.

I hope this is a sign of things to come for the automobile industry.

Essentially, why I don't like touchscreens in automobile media interfaces:

-no tactile response

-more distracting due to the increased dexterity required to get where you need and the greater necessity to focus your eyes

-less intuitive than button/wheel controls (in my experience)

-uglier interfaces (again, in my experience)

There should be UX research about an ideal combination of tactile physical interfaces (knobs, dials, push buttons, whatever) and voice-activated and voice-feedbacked control while driving.

I we're missing out on not only voice-activated commands, but AI responding and updating about the situation through speakers, not just through the screen updates.

From the article, “ Honda has done what no other car maker is doing”.

False, Mazda started this with the Mazda 3 in 2019 (https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...).

> We changed it from touchscreen to dial operation, as we received customer feedback that it was difficult to operate intuitively. You had to look at the screen to change the heater seating, therefore, we changed it so one can operate it without looking, giving more confidence while driving.

Finally, logic, reason, and listening to customers.

This is #1 reason why I still love my Toyota over Tesla. Physical buttons make a huge difference in driving experience.

If only someone invented a tactile touchscreen, i.e it would bulge where user can interact. like dynamic braille. Material design where different elevation levels are literally popping out of screen at different levels.

Apple should follow and ditch the Touch Bar. Also, the excellent The Best Interface is No Interface book [0] talks quite a bit about unnecessary touch screen controls in cars and related topics.

[0] http://www.nointerface.com/book/

What you need is both. The screen should still be a touch screen, and there should be buttons and toggles around it.

For example, I hate it when I can't pan/scroll through the map on the car screen for lack of touch screen. But I also hate it when I have to use touch buttons to change the music that's playing.

Is there a name for this phenomenon where manufacturers build harmful features into their products purely for the technical credibility? It's the same with motion smoothing and televisions -- the experience is massively degraded, but the technology is impressive, so presumably sales will increase.

I'd like to point out Mazda has been doing this for a while. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...

> the predicted move towards more voice-controlled actions in cars could eliminate the debate around touchscreens versus analogue controls in the future.

Oh yuck, voice controls are the absolute worst. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably only drives alone (or at least without kids yelling in the background).

I find the climate control on my Honda Civic to be maddeningly confusing for reasons that aren’t really too related to the fact that it has some touchscreen elements, but I’m glad nonetheless. I feel like forcing things to physical buttons forces certain design decisions that you want anyways.

I have a 2019 civic. even with the non touch screen option, a weird glitch in bluetooth freezes the entire media center. I have to pull over and park the car and turn the engine off to reset.

Hitting the power button does not solve this. So in some sense having hardware buttons does not solve everything.

It seem like what I would really want is a big screen in the middle Tesla style and glue an xbox pad on the steering wheel. And give me a fold out keyboard if I need to type something real. And maybe a minimal hud with just the speed and top speed. That's at least what I would do.

I remember years back there was a company that had and inflatable layer ontop of touch screens for flexible "buttons". I'm sure there's ergonomic pros/cons of different kinds of physical switches but seems like we need to move on better touch screen haptics.

My parents have a Subaru with a touch screen for the radio, and I guess some apps.

For the radio, it's crap. For anything else, why would I want something built into the dashboard that'll cost 10x what it's worth to repair?

I don't understand what's so appealing about an in-dash touch screen.

Wow, this is easily the most annoying site I've come across recently. Not only does it block the whole page if I'm using adblock, but it doesn't even start working when I disable it (I'm using uBlock Origin).

We really need to figure out a proper anti-anti-adblock technology...

"Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

Mazda began doing this last year [0]. If anything Honda are jumping on the trend they started, and I'm really happy to see it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

I'm hoping to get an EV or hybrid for my next car - probably a sedan. My biggest apprehension with most of the ones I've seen is the excessive dependency on software/touchscreen based controls.

Does anyone have experience with Honda EV or hybrids? Would you recommend?

Isn't this the perfect application for ASR technology? Instead of fiddling around with buttons, or worse, a touchscreen, you could just say "Honda: heat up", "Honda: heat two down", "Honda: aircon off". I would love that in my car.

In an odd way that Douglas Adams predicted this weird evolution of controls making fun of how manual controls were eventually replaced by controls that forced a pilot to sit perfectly still so as not to change a radio station.

I applaud Honda. Touch screen is a distraction in my car.

Didn't Mazda do it first?

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1148040/Mazda-3-to...

Why not do a standard benchmark, perform a number of actions in different conditions and configurations, and see whether humans can react faster and more precisely with 2 touchscreens (let's level the 2 hands advantage) or multiple hardware controllers...

Probably the one thing that bugs me about my M3. 90% of the time, it's fine... but that once or twice a week where I'm actively driving and need to turn on AC or whatever and have to navigate while trying to interact with the touchscreen is rough.

Tactile buttons and switches are much easier to use by muscle memory. There is very little muscle memory with touch buttons and touch screens.

Also, touch screens are much harder (thus more dangerous) to use while you are in motion, hitting bumps, going around curves.

The physical dial and nobs and the tactile feedback when human drivers get from operating them is much better than touch screen controls. I applaud Honda's the design, as well as some German automakers' design in the same vein.

Touch controls have their place in the car - they are a MUST for a quick map navigation and they are very handy for entering addresses.

Otherwise - yes, 100%, physical buttons and knobs are far superior. Especially for making adjustments without looking.

"Honda has done what no other car maker is doing" isn't correct. For the latest Mazda 3 (2019) Mazda has made the same decision. There's a non-touch screen which can only be controlled by a center knob for safety.

What physical controls are an ABSOLUTE MUST for you?

Leaving aside Legally mandated: Wipers, Headlights, Gear Selector, Brake, Accelerator, Horn, Hazards.

Me: Required: Mute Music, HVAC temperature and fan speed. Strongly preferred: All audio controls, Cruise control.

I've long wanted to create an after market midi style controller that people can put on their dash to give their car the spatial, tactile control again.

Integrating it with the vehicle though... Somewhat dubious if you're just CAN writing

Good. I recently told my local honda dealer I wouldn't be buying another of any car because of touchscreens exactly because of the need to look and lack of tactile interaction.

Clearly this change is because of me, specifically, only me. ;)

I wouldn't mind a tactile touch screen [1] with optional voice prompting, and a jog dial.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiM0u79fals

> Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls

It's what I like with the Up! no touchscreen, no stupid added function: just a good mobile phone fixation for the infotainment and good old buttons.

I bought a Kia minivan in 2018 just because it had the most real buttons and dials.

Odd article as this isn't new. Is it new in that other manufacturers have started and they have no plans to? My current Honda has a very comfortable interface, probably my favorite of any car I've driven.

Yay Honda!

I've never been in a car that had a better designed interface than my '91 Accord. I'm sure they're out there but if a budget car can have such a pleasant interface there's no reason they all can't.

I wonder if you could take existing touchscreens and just have them vibrate differently depending on where the user is touching. Or have them vibrate differently as the user's hand moves across different buttons.

I just need a basic stereo, manually cranked windows, and a 5-6 speed stickshift.

It ia a about usability and safety of operation, not reliability. Touch screens need eye contact to operate. Knobs and physical buttons can be operated on muscle memory only, so your eyes can stay on the road.

Without seeing the buttons and knobs in question it's really hard to see whether this is a good or bad move. I've been in plenty of cars with conventional controls that were horrible to use.

Edit: fixed typo.

I'm pretty happy with the newest Rams - large screen with touch controls, but things like volume and temp are physical buttons. Volume is the one thing that should NEVER be a touch control (IMO).

Tell that to my 2019 HRV. Doesn’t even have CarPlay so I can’t use Siri to do anything for me. All AC controls are touch screen so I have to look away from the road just to change the fan speed.

Why did you buy it?

The headline had me alarmed. This is just moving heating and whatnot to physical controls. That's awesome. I was worried they were getting rid of the touchscreen entirely.

Android Auto has been an absolute game changer, and it works so much better with touchscreen. Voice controls actually do cover the majority of use cases, but things like being able to quickly see the next turn or zooming out on the map with one hand are simple, and can be done without really looking at the screen until you need to see the info.

Unfortunately, the car I ended up buying (Acura TLX) had Android Auto, but was controlled by a dial knob. It was really the worst of both worlds, since heating was still managed through a second screen that was a touchscreen.

A lot of mention of Mazda, but my 2018 Ford Escape has buttons/knobs for all the standard car features. I also have Apple CarPlay which is great for maps/media. Very happy with it.

New Mazda models also no longer have touchscreens. We lease one of the newer models and honestly do not miss the touchscreen at all. The rotary controls are intuitive and less distracting

Related (re Mazda) from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

Good for Honda. Frankly, some of these touch screen features were getting out of hand - no pun intended. I miss the tactile experience of touching a knob, a dial, flip a switch.

Hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit. In my view the large touchscreen / lack of mechanical controls is the single biggest deficiency of the Model 3.

I'm baffled by the insane number of upvotes this post has. "Honda is putting knobs in their cars" is the least interesting thing posted in HN history

Mazda waves hi. Touchscreens auto- disable when driving but buttons/ knobs are still usable to control it. Last I heard they wanted to move to a HUD system.

Dear Honda, my next car is now much more likely to be a Honda. I am literally at less risk of dying with controls I don't need to look at. Thank you.

Every single car - except Tesla - does a bad job implementing touchscreens, from my experience. They are generally a pain to use and unintuitive.

At least it's good that honda has been thinking about this kinda stuff. Some of their UI's have been pretty atrocious in the past.

Their touchscreen implementation is so horrible, that this sounds like the right move. This is the only thing I hate about my 2019 Clarity.

Solution here is generic knobs that can be assigned to different functions: Temp, fan speed, volume, for those with kids fader control :-)

Best thing that ever happened in the automotive industry. Thank you, Honda. The many accident victims will thank you for the rest of us.

Honda has good safety and UX in this. Touchscreens are sexy but distracting and probably not sensible. Tesla will fight back I am sure.

Voice control maybe works for folks in silicon valley but it is very lacking in quality for smaller languages or even non-existent

A friend bought a Tesla and he was very pleased with it. He insisted I drive it. I couldn't stand it. It was obviously designed to not have a human drive it. My friend doesn't care for driving, but I love it.

I think that's where the touch screen comes in. The driver is secondary. They have to let the driver access things, but they don't have to make it safe or convenient.

Now that the self driving hype is dying down, perhaps the driver will be put first again.

Top complaint of my Civic, touchccreen controlled volume/mute. TS buttons just don't cut it for some things.

hallelujah!

the controls were a big reason i got a subaru; its a car you can drive the ____ out of with eyes on the road/dirt/gravel. the layout on the honda looks astonishingly similar. i duno how it is formalized in business terms, but it seems neat how all the japanese auto companies seem to cooperatively share tech

God bless em.

RWD electric car, and tactile controls, and all the other cool stuff they're doing? Honda is becoming cool again.

Although I do not drive around much, fully hardware buttons + Siri voice controls(maps, music) does not sound bad.

Hooray! That’s why I didn’t get the EX-L and went with the EX, didn’t want a touchscreen, give me knobs and dials!

I'm surprised there's no mention of Mazda, who started doing this a year ago in more mainstream models.

https://outline.com/VugcGV

Hurrah!

I am suppose to be looking at the road, not a screen when I want to adjust the air con.

Give me something I can feel every day of the week.

This article talks about using dials for climate control. I have a 2019 CR-V and it still uses dials for that.

Never liked the touchscreen on my car. Tactile buttons are easier to control when your eyes are on the road.

Mazda did it first :) The new Mazda 3 2019 model (launched in october 2018) has no tuchscreen control.

Yay for Honda and common sense! Touchscreens are no good when you gotta keep your eyes on the road.

I still don't get it. For me banning touchscreens from every car interface is a no-brainer.

Well done!

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to repeat a comment I made a few times before, as I think it's relevant:

In one of the talks at Google I/O a few years ago a VP from Audi (or Volvo?) spoke in a thick and lofty German accent about how "ve haf completely oferhauled ze driver exzperienze". He played a sexy video clip showcasing their new Android infotainment system (something like https://youtu.be/h_7_fKJ0PNs), and the first thing I noticed is how they'd taken away my traditional temperature knobs and replaced them with digital touchscreen ones. They looked just like physical ones, and were in the exact same place you would expect (https://9to5google.com/2017/05/15/android-cars-audi/). So, I've gained absolutely nothing, and now I have to take my eyes off the road and look down at the stupid console just to change the temperature.

TLDR: Tacticle feedback is a Good Thing(tm) and designers should cultivate - not fight - muscle memory.

The elegance of the Apple Watch Series 5 crown with haptic feedback for scroll function.

The trend towards a touchscreen interface seems like a nod to startrek and the LCARS OS.

I think Land Rover has made one of the neatest and most balanced yet useful interior designs with Land Rover Defender 2020. https://carbuzz.com/cars/land-rover/defender

honda generally gets called out for having some of the most touch heavy interface of any cars in their reviews, im not sure if finally responding to that feedback counts as "bucking the trend"

Good, the Honda touchscreen controls in my 2016 Pilot are incredibly awful.

Mazda started doing this a couple years ago. Glad to see it spreading.

This is a thread of people arguing about touch vs physical buttons.

I love me some good switches and buttons.

Sadly cars are kinda bad at those too.

IIRC, Mazda are also pushing back against the touchscreen fad

good, can't count how many times I've had to mash a touch-screen (not in Honda, so may be different) to get something to "click."

i'm all for physical UX.

a great reason to buy a Honda... if this becomes the new normal, I wonder how much this will hurt Tesla since it'd be a pretty drastic change for them.

It takes courage to remove the touchscreen.

Larry Tesler would be pleased today.

Nice. I see a Honda in my future...

All I can say is, thank fk

these days I am having very difficult time unlocking my iphone with my facemask on

They're not wrong.

UX designer here, I approve.

This link is better: https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-to...

Autocar requires you to disable your ad blocker in order to view the website. Jalopnik does not, and does not even show a GDPR cookie popup.

Bret Vector's classic paper "Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface" boldly states: "Interactivity considered harmful"!

When I first read that, I was flabbergasted and offended, because I love interactivity. But he's right.

"Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic." -Bret Victor, Magic Ink

This is a critically important lesson to apply to automotive user interfaces. It's much safer if, as much as possible, instead of being interactive, the user interface predicts and infers from context and history what the user wants, when or before they want it, and presents it to them without them asking, so it's there when they need it.

http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Interactivity considered harmful

Chris Crawford defines interaction as a three-phase reciprocal process, isomorphic to a conversation: an interactant listens to her partner, thinks about what was said, and speaks a response. Her partner then does the same. See Crawford’s book The Art of Interactive Design (2003), or his essay Fundamentals of Interactivity (1993). For manipulation software, interaction is perfectly suitable: the user views a visual representation of the model, considers what to manipulate next, and performs a manipulation. The software, in turn, inputs the user’s manipulation request, updates the model, and displays the updated representation. With good feedback and an effective means of “speaking” to the software, this process can cycle smoothly and rapidly. It mimics the experience of working with a physical tool.

Information software, by contrast, mimics the experience of reading, not working. It is used for achieving an understanding—constructing a model within the mind. Thus, the user must listen to the software and think about what it says… but any manipulation happens mentally. Except possibly for signaling a decision, such as clicking a “buy” button, but that concludes, not constitutes, a session. The only reason to complete the full interaction cycle and speak is to explicitly provide some context that the software can’t otherwise infer—that is, to indicate a relevant subset of information. For information software, all interaction is essentially navigation around a data space.

For example, Amazon’s data space consists of their catalog of items. For a yellow pages directory, the data space contains all business listings; for a movie guide, all showtimes and movie information; for a flight planner, trips to and from all airports. In all of these cases, every interaction, every click and keystroke, search term and menu selection, simply serves to adjust the user’s view into the data space. This is simply navigation.

Alan Cooper defines excise in this context as a cognitive or physical penalty for using a tool—effort demanded by the tool that is not directly in pursuit of a goal. For example, filling a gas tank is done to support the car, not the goal of arriving at a destination. Cooper goes on to assert that software navigation is nothing but excise:

…the most important thing to realize about navigation is that, in almost all cases, it represents pure excise, or something close to it. Except in games where the goal is to navigate successfully through a maze of obstacles, navigation through software does not meet user goals, needs, or desires. Unnecessary or difficult navigation thus becomes a major frustration to users. In fact, it is the authors’ opinion that poorly designed navigation presents the number-one problem in the design of any software application or system… Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann, About Face (2003), p143.

If all interaction is navigation, and navigation is the number-one software problem, interactivity is looking pretty bad already. However, when compared with the other two sources of context, interactivity has even worse problems than simply being a frustrating waste of time:

The user has to already know what she wants in order to ask for it. Software that infers from history and the environment can proactively offer potentially relevant information that the user wouldn’t otherwise know to ask for. Purely interactive software forces the user to make the first move.

The user has to know how to ask. That is, she must learn to manipulate a machine. Donald Norman’s concept of determining a user’s “mental model” has become widespread in the software usability community, and is now considered a core design challenge. See Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things (2002), p9. However, Norman described this concept in the context of mechanical devices. It only applies to software if the software actually contains hidden mechanisms that the user must model. A low-interaction, non-mechanical information graphic relieves both user and designer from struggling with mental models.

Navigation implies state. Software that can be navigated is software in which the user can get lost. The more navigation, the more corners to get stuck in. The more manipulable state, the more ways to wander into a “bad mode.” State is the primary reason people fear computers—stateful things can be broken. The only state kept by a book is which page it is open to, which is why “getting lost in a book” describes a pleasurable experience!

Beyond these cognitive problems are physical disadvantages of interaction. The hand is much slower than the eye. Licklider described spending hours plotting graphs and seconds understanding them. A user who must manually request information is in a similar situation—given the mismatch between mousing and reading speeds, most of her time may be spent navigating, not learning. Further, the user might prefer to learn information while using her hands for other purposes, such as writing or eating or stroking a cat. Each time software demands the user’s hands, this activity must be interrupted. Finally, the growing prevalence of computer-related repetitive stress injuries suggests that indiscriminate interactivity may be considerably harmful in a literal, physical sense.

Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. As suggested by the above redesigns of the train timetable, bookstore, and movie listings, many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic.

It is unfortunate that the communities concerned with human factors of electronic artifacts have latched onto the term “interaction.” Most professional communities and academic programs use the term Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI; the ACM special-interest group is CHI, the converse. Many practitioners, following Cooper and Bill Moggridge, refer to their profession as “interaction design.” For information software, the real issue is context-sensitivity. Interaction is merely one means of achieving that. And as long as “speaking” is constrained to awkwardly pushing metaphors with a mouse, interaction should be the last resort.

The working designer might protest that interaction is unavoidable in practice, and may even consider my ideal of interaction-free software to be a scoff-worthy fantasy. This is only because the alternatives have been unrecognized and underdeveloped. I believe that with the invention of new context-sensitive graphical forms and research into obtaining and using environment and history, the clicking and dragging that characterizes modern information retrieval will be made to seem laughably archaic. But every condonation of “interactivity,” from the annals of academia to the corporate buzzvocabulary, postpones this future.

difficult to operate intuitively is exactly right.

Welp, looks like Honda's back in the running for my next car!

There's another Hacker News discussion about a related topic, a paper Ben Shneiderman wrote in 1993, "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just Do It".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22742100

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html

>It seems that you can hardly go to a computer conference without seeing a videotape of a futuristic computer system that talks to you from a wall, desk, or some random appliance. Is this the interface of the future? Over the last decade, Ben Shneiderman, head of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (Addison-Wesley, 1992), has been the most forceful voice against anthropomorphic interfaces. He argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people. He presents several examples of these predictable and controllable interfaces developed in the lab at UM.

Ben Shneiderman and his colleagues like Richard Potter, Andrew Sears, and Catherine Plaisant at his HCIL lab have performed a lot of research and user interface design with touch screens, like the "lift off" high precision pointing strategy, and early touch screen keyboards.

An experimental evaluation of three touch screen strategies within a hypertext database

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1044731890952595...

Clocks, calendars and schedulers on a touchscreen (1988, HCIL)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzMHqF9Pkv4

Touchscreen keyboards - Andrew Sears, Ben Shneiderman. Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDRKP2ATBRg

And he just dropped by HN to announce a new paper he's just published on a similar topic, the result of years of work, which also relates to this discussion:

Shneiderman, Ben (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction,36, 6 (Published Online March 27, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118

Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy

>Abstract

>Well-designed technologies that offer high levels of human control and high levels of computer automation can increase human performance, leading to wider adoption. The Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) framework clarifies how to (1) design for high levels of human control and high levels of computer automation so as to increase human performance, (2) understand the situations in which full human control or full computer control are necessary, and (3) avoid the dangers of excessive human control or excessive computer control. The methods of HCAI are more likely to produce designs that are Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy (RST). Achieving these goals will dramatically increase human performance, while supporting human self-efficacy, mastery, creativity, and responsibility.

>Introduction

>This paper opens up new possibilities by way of a two dimensional framework of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) that separates levels of automation/autonomy from levels of human control. The new guideline is to seek high levels of human control AND high levels of automation, which is more likely to produce computer applications that are Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy (RST). Achieving these goals, especially for complex poorly understood problems, will dramatically increase human performance, while supporting human selfefficacy, mastery, creativity, and responsibility. This paper focuses on the three RST goals, which may help to achieve other important goals such as privacy, cybersecurity, resilience, social justice, human dignity, and environmental preservation.

>The traditional belief in computer autonomy is compelling for many artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, developers, journalists, and promoters. I assume a broad definition of AI to include automated/autonomous systems using technologies such as machine learning, neural nets, statistical methods, recommenders, adaptive systems, and speech, facial, image, and pattern recognition.

>The goal of computer autonomy was central in Sheridan and Verplank (1978) ten levels from human control to computer automation/autonomy (Table 1). Their widely cited one-dimensional list continues to guide much of the research and development, suggesting that increases in automation must come at the cost of lowering human control. Shifting to HCAI could liberate design thinking so as to produce computer applications that increase automation, while amplifying, augmenting, enhancing, and empowering people to innovatively apply systems and creatively refine them.

>Sheridan & Verplank’s ten levels of automation/autonomy have been widely influential (Sheridan, 1992), but critics suggested refinements such as the four stages of automation: (1) information acquisition, (2) analysis of information, (3) decision or choice of action, and (4) execution of action (Parasuraman et al., 2000). These stages refine discussions of each of the levels, but the underlying message is that the goal is full automation/autonomy.

>Even Sheridan (2000) commented with concern that “surprisingly, the level descriptions as published have been taken more seriously than were expected” (see Hoffman & Johnson (2019) and Kaber (2018) for detailed histories). However, in spite of the many critiques, the 1-dimensional levels of automation/autonomy, which only represents situations where increased automation must come with less human control, is still widely influential. For example, the US Society of Automotive Engineers adopted the unnecessary trade-off in its six levels of autonomy for self-driving cars (Brooks, 2017; Society of Automotive Engineers, 2014) (Table 2).

>Critics of autonomy have repeatedly discussed the ironies (Bainbridge, 1983), deadly myths (Bradshaw et al., 2013; Mindell, 2015), conundrums (Endsley, 2017), or paradoxes (Hancock, 2017) of autonomy. A common point is that humans have to spend more effort monitoring autonomous computers because they are unsure of what it will do, often leading to inferior performance (Blackhurst et al., 2011; Strauch, 2017).

[...]

Yesssssss

The Audi MMI system consisting of a central dial is still the most intuitive and least distracting of all car systems I have seen in the market. And, as a bonus, it also works really well with Android Auto and CarPlay - without touchscreen.

Finally! Bring back some sanity to machine controls.

I much prefer knobs, dials, and switches to control things inside the car. And especially if I need to modulate it while operating the car.

The steering wheel and acceleration pedals should be made into touch screens. Physical interfaces are so old school.

Oh thank goodness. Haptics are a real.

Appeal to authority is one of the informal fallacies of logic. It can/should never be used to prove a point.

Thank you, Honda!

Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea (unless the vehicle is stationary, and even then...)

> Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea

Touch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls.

The only time they're an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.

One of the best features of switching from Android to an iPhone is the physical mute switch. Whenever I'm going into a meeting, I can mute my phone without taking it out of my pocket. With Androids (At least, version 6 from when I left) you have to take it out and go through all the separate volume menus. It was so refreshing to have the confidence that my phone wouldn't vibrate or disturb others during a meeting.

The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.

It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner.

Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls. Really, you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.

But yes, all controls that a driver would want to use while the vehicle is in motion should be controllable with hardware controls that can be located and operated tactilely.

> "It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner."

Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all. The "configuration screen with a gazillion tweakable settings" thing has generally fallen out of favor in desktop and mobile software, and I expect the car industry will eventually catch up.

> Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all.

How is this an improvement over having it on a touch screen?

I thought that was obvious; because then you can eliminate the touchscreen entirely. Cars are better without them.

> The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.

Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.

The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.

> It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.

My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.

> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.

I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.

Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.

I do like key-driven soft menus (like the steering wheel controls commonly used for HUDs or gauge cluster menus), but they get a bit unwieldy with longer lists. Some automakers (GM) address this by nesting all the options in a bunch of sub-menus, but I find this frustrating because I end up just having to search through a bunch of menus to find what I want.

Some automakers (Mazda, BMW) use a knob instead, which makes it a bit quicker to scroll through a longer list, but I have found myself overshooting and then having to back track which is sometimes annoying.

There's really pros and cons to whatever implementation is used. While I completely agree that any function that might be operated while driving needs to be able to be operable with hard controls, I also don't think it's a good idea to clutter those menus with a bunch of junk that you don't want or need while driving.

I think there's a good case to be made for 3 levels of controls:

* Things that must have dedicated hard keys: anything that must be adjusted rapidly for driver attentiveness, control, or comfort -- HVAC, audio levels and basic tuning, all lighting and vehicle controls.

* Things that must have hard keys, but can live in a shared menu: anything that a driver may want to adjust while driving, but is not essential for immediate use -- trip data, infotainment, non-critical gauge monitoring etc.

* Things that don't need hard keys and should not clutter any of the above interfaces: odd-ball configuration settings that a driver would not need to operate while driving -- key fob configuration, entry-exit preference configuration, software updates, integrations with external services, maintenance logs, etc.

What if--and stay with me for a moment--what if it's good for different manufacturers to have different approaches to the problem, giving people the option to choose Honda for buttons or Tesla for touchscreens?

What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it's good that there's both options available?

If your metric is safety, control, and effectiveness, there is not an argument. Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature.

> "Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature."

That's why there are so many high-end phones with lots of buttons.

"If your metric is safety, control, and effectiveness, there is not an argument"

not really the metrics for high-end phones

You left out the last part: "Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature."

> What if there are legitimate arguments for both

What if you made one?

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Touchscreens CAN BE DONE RIGHT. (or at least better)

I have an aftermarket JVC headunit in my 2003 VW. It has one button, that's the "Menu" button on single press, or Power button when held.

The screen itself is relatively intuitive to control without looking because of a gesture feature it has as well as button placement being useful.

If I want more volume I put one finger on the screen and make a circle gesture in the clockwise direction. Down is counter-clockwise. The play/pause button is in the very bottom right so you can find the button with feel. You can shuffle songs with another gesture (though I never use it).

I really like my touchscreen. And every time I am using a work vehicle (Ford Explorers), or my wife's GMC Sierra, I hate the controls because you have to look up to see what you're doing. Thankfully their steeringwheel controls are generally good.

Or you know, knobs and buttons which don't require any user on-boarding or discovery process.

there is a place for both kinds of controls. frequently used functions (volume, climate controls) should have physical buttons. infrequently used functions (like reset tire pressure monitoring) is best hidden in a touchscreen menu.

Absolutely. Use the right tool for the job, etc.

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