Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shortage
theverge.com
theverge.com
...and then there will be unicorns and flutterbugs and cotton candy, and everyone will be happy and nothing bad will ever happen again.
Additionally, distractions are already abundant in a vehicle. A crappy user interface, which most are, is a safety concern. At minimum, lag between screens loading should be extremely minimal. Staring at a screen for an extra second or two while it registers that you pressed a button and updates the screen is incredibly dangerous and has surely lead to some number of deaths.
Two years ago Mazda announced they were moving away from touchscreens, which was very well received on HackerNews. [2]
And I can't find the thread right now, but 1-3 years ago there was a really good discussion on here about an eye tracking study in a variety of car models.
Touchscreen-only interfaces in cars are kind of like electronic-only voting machines. Technical people who know about computers breath funny thinking about it and see issues left and right while large swaths of people really want it.
The car producer could save even more money if they released the non-security critical user-facing parts of the software as open source and let car enthusiasts fix the bad user interface.
When purchasing complex goods like cars (or smartphones), there's way too many things to simultaneously optimize for, and enough confusion (mostly intentional) about relative performance, so most consumers focus on few major indicators like price, availability, cost of ownership, appearance, etc. Few people are going to trade on those major points to optimize something more specific, like lack of touchscreen (or having a headphone jack), so there's no meaningful market feedback on this, and vendors are free to dictate the choice to the market.
Not to get too far on a tangent but one of the best ways to increase intuition of a control is to provide haptic feedback. This guy has a few projects related to that, this video summarizes them pretty nicely. https://youtu.be/9Eh1p_rUQMA
In the real world, once you put a screen anywhere, that's where the entire UX will go.
The temptation to do so it's seemingly irresistible.
BMW doesn't exist in some world of unicorns, it's a very real carmaker.
Right, and who decides what's important?
And how many physical controls still require you to look at the screen to use?
I looked at that dial/joystick thingie, and was non-plussed.
AC, radio, massaging seats, windows and lights can all be operated without looking at screens. Sure, the navigation requires you to look at the screen (duh?). You don't have to use the navigation.
>I looked at that dial/joystick thingie, and was non-plussed.
You never need to touch this while driving. The UX does not encourage you to do so. Unless you use the built in navigation, you'll only be touching the dial to do things like pair phones and navigate settings menus.
Last time we looked at cars we avoided anything like this, it was depressingly common.
Worst, I think, was Peugeot - the volume and (I think) AC were completely controlled by the touch screen - but you couldn't just press and hold, when you pressed it, it only moved one "setting" and you needed to tap-tap-tap to change more than one notch. Also, the above-steering HUD screen had frame-rate issues! It's completely absurd that they both sell this and people buy it.
We did end up going for a brand which had touch for radio channels/Carplay, but physical buttons for controlling AC, volume, start/stop/skip controls etc.
I really, really hope this trend goes away.
Yup, it's basically the only time when I use the touchscreen in mine: I start the car, enter the GPS coordinates/address and then I control everything from my steering wheel, using buttons with real feedback and without needing to take neither my hands off the steering wheel nor my eyes off the road.
My car also happens to have a gimmick: "voice control / voice command" but it's only good when you're alone in the car. As long as there are people talking, it sucks. It also interrupts the music and I hate that. I do use it once in a while but I'm not a big fan.
Touchscreen sucks and those who don't even have haptic feedback: I don't even have words for that.
If I recall correctly there as least one major japanese car manufacturer who decided to get rid of touchscreens a few years ago. Good ridance, it's a poor system.
Car maker supplied GPS is terrible too. Just give me car play and Siri or the android equivalent.
Its not all good, though. The Skoda Karoq has this split personality thing going on where it comes with its own sat nav, and that tries to take over your experience when you start navigating in Google maps. Its only a (first world) problem when you have the overly fancy glass cockpit, but it likes to replace your speedometer with a full screen map from the internal sat nav, which has none of the information from Google such as your next turn or the blue line showing your route.
I think I would much prefer a controller than a touch screen.
The real truth is that enforcement is non-existent and almost nobody gets in trouble for using a phone while driving even if it's specifically forbidden.
Why such a binary view of the world? Agreed, putting everything sans turn light and wiper control behind a touchscreen is a pretty reckless form-over-functionality idiocy, as you cannot operate vital functions of your car safely while driving.
But that does not mean a touchscreen does not have its uses: Navigation, for one - a proper keyboard to enter addresses and phone numbers instead of that awful rotary thing (or the embedded write-a-single-letter touch thing) that BMWs use is so much faster to operate. Speech recognition is outright unusable outside of the English-speaking world or if you have children or a loud party going on in your car. Not to mention that it is insanely practical on a phone to be able to quickly rotate and zoom a map view for complicated intersections, and having that as a proper part of the car would be perfection.
Media is the other major case - there absolutely need to be rotary dials for volume, station change and muting (e.g. if you get in a police stop and your music is blasting, or you hear sirens and need to know from where they come), but playlist selection and creation is so much better on a well-designed touch UI than (again) using knobs of any kind.
Let the passenger run the laptop that controls the media center and engine profiles and flamethrowers. Have a "next track" "off" and "volume" buttons for the driver.
[1] - https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...
On a whim, I checked out the Mazda CX-5. I'd never considered buying a Mazda before, but I found out they had institutionally banned touchscreens in their cars. And the CX-5 was so much more of a joy to drive than the RAV-4 that it made for a pretty easy decision.
You know who gets this? Airplane pilots. They use screens but with a great deal of care.
Screens are vital for safety - how do you back-up safely without a screen to show you what’s behind you?
Aeroplane pilots use an absolute ton of screens, front and centre.
Turn your head and look behind you.
It’s tragic how kids get run over, but it’s a tiny amount out of a country of 300 million.
When I had toddlers, I would make sure I could see them in front of the car before I would back out. If I didn’t know where they were, I didn’t back up.
Not a perfect system, of course. But the idea that rear cameras are a necessity is silly.
They reckon the mandatory backup camera law saves 95 lives a year.
Some cars do have remote-control drive features these days, so you can reverse it from outside the car, but that's a super high-end feature (designed for getting in to and out of extremely tight city parking spaces) and relies on the chips that are in shortage, so that's not a solution.
They don't make laws to force cars to add features for convenience.
It sounds to me like you think I'm against backup cameras, but I like them. My concern is that they are not always going to be present and working, so it's still a good idea to learn to safely reverse a vehicle without a camera. Speaking as someone who frequently drives fire trucks, ambulances, and large RVs, it's simply incorrect that it's somehow impossible to safely reverse a vehicle without a camera. Cameras are helpful tools but training and care should still be a driver's #1 safety priority.
I've worked in the auto Industry for a large part of my life in some form, and even when cameras are installed their are a lot of owners (mainly older) who don't use them.
I can use them or not since I've spent enough time staging cars, so while it's a useful tool to have them it's specious reasoning to think they are an absolute answer to all accidents that happen when you back up. It's just as odd as thinking as somehow cars with auto-dimming headlamps when the turn signals are on are what was necessary for others to see you want to turn--I have no problem seeing this even on motorcycles as I ride and tend to be rather vigilant to these lights just to not get hit. It's akin to thinking that all cars must have a self-parking feature.
Honestly, I place more blame on mobile phones for needless accidents than anything else on the road these days, second only to tired or careless drivers. Both of which I have been guilty of at some point, too.
Always-on silicon dioxide transparent amorphous solid with a sublayer of vacuumed deposited silver: a mirror.
Why do you think they made backup cameras mandatory? Why do you think they believe they save lives?
But all this feels like a moot point, anyway. I understood the main argument to be advocating the use of physical controls, not the removal of safety sensors and cameras.
US, Canada, EU (I think they allow an alternative 'detection system'), possibly others.
Backover accidents are real. Cameras help a lot. Arguments about "but they are not in all cars" forget that seatbelts, airbags, and ABS were also once in that category.
If you are worried about drivers not being hardcore enough and relying too much on cameras: do you know how to use a choke? What about a crank start? An unsynchronized gearbox?
(And yes, I know, also trucks)
TBH I have never heard anyone, not once, talk about mirrors being dangerous or about this even being an issue. Yet to hear you say it our children's blood is running in the street.
Who are you, and why are you pushing this so hard?
Then you're under-informed. They introduced laws about requiring backup cameras in multiple countries - I obviously didn't legislate them myself!
https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/car-backup-camera-la...
> 210 fatalities and 15,000 injuries are caused every year by backover crashes
No mirror is showing you where you need to see to avoid these fatal accidents.
People saying they want cars without screens are like people arguing for cars without seatbelts because they find them uncomfortable.
Always an excellent (if mis-spelled) rejoinder, if the burden of proof is on you, and you are failing to meet it.
>They literally introduced laws
You've claimed this 5 or 6 times in this sub-thread, and yet I've not seen a single reference or link. Here, you link to "fatherly.com", which I will not visit. Link to something reputable, ideally the law itself, or major news coverage of the law.
>210 fatalities and 15,000 injuries
I know a case is weak when they start quoting absolute numbers at me on national issues. The order-of-magnitude of people in the US is 10^8. 200 dead is close to the noise floor on unlikely death. Literally 1-in-a-million. It's like the number of people that die from snake bites and shark attacks and lightning strikes.
>No mirror is showing you where you need to see to avoid these fatal accidents.
Here's where you get to the actual danger of what you are saying. Because screens do not come without considerable cost, not just in terms of hardware, but in terms of distraction. Do you think the number of fatalities caused directly or indirectly by screen-use-while-driving will exceed 200? (I would bet it's at 20k right now).
BTW I will carve out an exception - it's probably a good idea to have a dedicated backup screen, as with a 3rd party dashcam you can install yourself. However this is a very different beast than the center console infotainment center that, for that brief moment it becomes vital safety equipment, becomes a massive, constant, deadly liability to the safety of everyone within eyeshot.
This is a bizarre reason to refuse to understand something - you can find these laws yourself in seconds, either the original legislation, or references to it in the media, by Googling for them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/02/backup-cameras-now-required-...
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ189/pdf/PLAW...
> I know a case is weak
Well take it up with the US and EU governments! I didn't write the laws - I'm just telling you what it is and why they introduced it.
You have to follow the law - and have a backup camera and screen in a new car - for other people's safety whether you like it or not! Just like you have to wear your seatbelt.
Not sure what your angle here is, but you clearly aren't an unbiased commenter. You have gone on and on about how many lives this law has saved, and how dangerous it is to drive without a screen and so on. So yes, I do expect you to make a better case rather than walk around acting as if yours is the foregone conclusion, obvious and right (of course, because it's for the children!)
You still have not responded to my central claim that these screens claim far, far more lives than they save.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/811024.pdf
> a statistically significant 28 percent reduction in crashes
You:
> You still have not responded to my central claim that these screens claim far, far more lives than they save.
Them:
> no evidence to support the hypothesis that driver’s backing behavior (i.e. speed and acceleration) was influenced by the presence of absence of an RV system
People said the kind of things that you're saying about seatbelts when they came out - they thought they'd get trapped and didn't want to wear them. At some point you have to listen to the studies not just gut instinct.
Let's assume that these screens eliminate 100% of all deaths and accidental injury from backing up.
My point is that does not outweigh the number of deaths that are caused when the screen distracts the driver and causes a crash. This happens frequently, at higher speeds, and with worse consequences. Worse, I bet these crashes are grossly under-reported because no-one is going to admit being distracted by a screen, and so accepting liability.
As for gut instinct, mine has nothing to do with it. I have been in enough close calls with other distracted drivers, and I have seen the PSAs about not driving distracted, to know that it's a 10 kdeath/yr issue, not a 100 death/yr issue.
I'm going to disengage because there's something about this whole interaction that doesn't sit right with me.
You could disable the screens while driving forward or at higher speed if you think that's important for safety. But we shouldn't remove them.
And I feel the same for the baseband chip (phone and data), speaker, noise-notification in phones. Yes I'm punishing passengers, waze, etc, but the #1 (observed) danger these days to me, cyclist and pedestrian, is the driver's phone. It's such a problem, I feel we're not being serious about it.
It it possible to mitigate this by visually checking that blindspot before you get in the car, and keeping aware to make sure nothing sneaks into it while you're getting in? Sure, just like it is also possible to backup with no mirrors whatsoever by getting out of the vehicle and surveying your surroundings.
But on the whole, enough people don't do this that backup accidents are indeed an issue.
What my neck really wants is an auxiliary backup camera that you can stick on a towed trailer.
(Also I'll just chime in here - "screw touchscreens". The damn things should be illegal for any function the driver might need to used while driving. Software defined display screens are fine, but should be fully navigable through straightforwardly-predictable states using directional buttons on the steering wheel)
It's not hard to keep track of what is entering and exiting your blind spots so everything is accounted for. This is how every trucker does it.
The way they’ve been doing it for the past 100 years?
The older style of parking sensors based on ultrasonic sensors which use beeps and a diagram of the car to indicate what’s behind you and how far away is superior to a camera and doesn’t require a screen (could be done with a few LEDs if necessary)
If you have to look at a camera in front of you to back up, you can’t see everything else in the field of vision behind you that’s not covered by the camera. Furthermore screens have much worse resolution and dynamic range than your eyes.
I'm not suggesting touchscreens in cars are "a good thing", but I get the economics.
*Boeing makes around 700 aircraft per year. GM makes that many cars every hour.
You can go buy a brand new 7er, all the important things have physical buttons. The screen is really only there for navigation and more complicated settings.
Originally their interface could only be controlled by a knob, so the knob is a 1st class citizen in navigation.
The touchscreen is there, but you never need to use it to navigate.
My 124 Spider uses a Mazda infotainment system, and that takes it a step further by only enabling the touchscreen at a standstill. Once the car is in motion only the knob works
In an industry arguably more obsessed with safety (from regulators down to pilots), surely this would be a more heated debate in that space?
Dials and buttons provides a tactile feedback that allows you to keep focus on the road and can be operated even with gloves, which is great in Canada winter season.
You’ll be setting up adresses, contacts, switching climate control patterns, connect playlists, pair and delete devices, setup accounts, manage diagnostics. Why wouldn’t you want a touchscreen for all of these tasks ?
Be mad at car makers for being dumb at UX, intrinsically touchscreens have nothing to do with that though.
All the common tasks that may have an impact on safety while driving need a physical control, and anything else can be relegated to the magic rectangle because I've no need to use them. As it stands I only use Android Auto to tap "Maps>Work" or "Maps>Home" just so I can have the best route through Milton Keynes with it's ever changing traffic.
It should be a regulatory requirement to have volume mute, max defrost, wipers, headlights and other safety critical features as tactile non-touch screen input.
The idrive module has been in every bmw with an infotainment system since the 745i in 2003; a touchpad was slowly introduced to the center control wheel about a decade later.
The one in the video was also present in my 2014 model. It works well; they haven't had much of a reason to change it. The touchscreen was intended as an added input method.
The impression that I had from the headline, and what seems like a large percentage of others had, is that they are doing away with modern infotainment and going back to 90s style analog controls, which they are not. I think this is unfortunate.
It would be nice to have a new, modern retro performance sedan with totally analog controls. I think car controls were the best in the mid-late 90s, when there were levers and switches and dials for everything, and very few computers.
And I say this as a long-time Tesla (X) owner. The Tesla climate control never fails to piss me off. Its amazingly hard to get it to just blow outside air at me. In an older car, nothing would change the fan speed or enable/disable recirc if I had the audacity to park my car overnight.
As far as I can tell, the only things that don't have 90s style analog controls are 2000s digital features like navigation.
I really hope they will not be the norm in the future for other cars
However i very quickly developed disdain for how much of a dependency there was on the screen. It made the car feel very vulnerable and was super annoying.
It was great for the gps though.
And then, not that anyone needs to touch the screen normally (because auto mode as you say) but if they aren’t all triggered by such a possibility and want to, those multiple layers of on-screen UI (that the haters are always imagining having to click through) simply are not there because it’s already been surfaced.
A driver can even learn to use it with muscle memory without looking, since it comes right up in the same closest corner of the screen with the same layout every time. Again not that anyone would ever need to because auto mode.
I don’t know why people have to have such strong opinions on things they know nothing about.
OK, got a little excited ranting there :-)
> You have to actually hold it down, you can't just tap it in neutral. That's actually a nice safety feature.
The car has no physical shifter, but a long press is a safety feature? My eyes rolled back into my head...
The dashboard of a Tesla is covered with unused surface, so it makes very little sense to put no physical commands on it, and then over-fill a tablet UI with those in the strangest places. The "big tablet" trend just sounds like an interface for digital addicts.
On the other hand, Mazda's infotainment systems (https://m.faz.net/media1/ppmedia/aktuell/technik-motor/27493...) fix at least part of this, which makes me guess what my next car will be.
Maybe its just my age but I distinctly remember driver advice/instructions of having no bright lights in the car cabin because it would adversely affect one's vision at night.
Also knobs
Saab ftw
rip Saab
I get the touchscreen hate. But honestly, I prefer them.
I don't have the CX-30 anymore, but I suspect that my next car will likely be a Mazda (not only for this reason, but it does play a factor).
Of course there are good uses for touch screens, but like many technologies, we sometimes over-apply them for the wrong functions.
I actually think the Tesla touchscreen approach works fairly well especially when coupled with the level of automation they tie into it. Turning your wipers on by touch screen inst great, but if you just automate turning on the wipers as needed it doesn't matter.
It also eliminates the where is x control game you end up playing in some cars. You either find it via the UI or open the manual in the same place.
I've been dreading getting a new car specifically because I do not want the touch screen.
Fortunately, I still have a few years left of good life in this machine, otherwise I'd jump on one of those immediately!
I still wish something like this UI would have caught on.
To me, touch screens are usually an excuse for terrible UI/UX. Why? Because it makes the maker lazy. "We'll fix/update it later" I'm sure is the mantra as they cut corners to get it out the door.
Physical buttons force you to do more work up front and think about how the UI works.
And of course that "later" rarely ever happens. It's onto the next model.
Physical buttons, knobs and switches allow you to use the interface without looking at the screen, something incredibly important for a driver of a vehicle. You shouldn't have to look away from the road to adjust the AC, for example.
This may be a blessing in disguise.
Your friends company no doubt leverages the cheap labour arbitrage of manufacturing in China vs locally, but the Chinese buying chips and making arbitrage money is suddenly a bad thing.
On the other hand my Mazda CX-5 has a CarPlay touchscreen as well as knobs and real switched for volume, Nav and phone. It’s orders of magnitude easier to drive.
This whole touchscreen started when the MBAs at automakers started to barge into design rooms under the assumption that the “millennials are attracted to and at home with touchscreens”.
One could offer zero-chip models that would:
- continue production in times of chip scarcity, and
- roll on through EMP events with gusto.
Niftier than an NFT, these low-tech solutions.
It would be idiotic to worry about EMPs over emissions and crash safety.
Maybe better engineering captures the emissions and crash concerns in simpler, sturdier designs.
This is very unlikely, given that everything points towards sturdier designs being less safe.
Emissions can not be reasonably solved without chips, there really isn't any feasible alternative.
There is no need for SUVs or even anything as big as a 'subcompact' to exist for private travel in cities, microcars from the 70s are better in every way except for compensating for tiny penises and scaring mothers into making the roads more dangerous via a prisoner's dilemma.
All else being the same, the vast majority of people will opt for the car with the bigger touch screen.
Also thanks to common sense, I hope.