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Comment by carom | Hacker News Reader

I would happily trade in the touch screen on my Jeep for some nice physical controls. It displays a safety dialog every time the car starts and controls (volume!) are disabled while that dialog is up. Similarly, it switches inputs constantly, so the radio plays if my phone is not connected. Just give me a knob to select input because I always want it on Bluetooth.

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I rented a car recently with a touch screen that would display that safety dialog and also not allow a destination to be entered into the sat nav without first placing the vehicle in park. Considering that this model of vehicle is often marketed to families it seems odd that they wouldn't consider the possibility that a passenger could enter the destination without distracting the driver. If touchscreens are that big of a liability (and I believe that they are since the touchscreen doesn't provide any tactile affordance for the driver to distinguish controls) then they shouldn't be in the car in the first place.

Yeah, the touchscreen is great for the navigator. It needs to be placed where the driver cannot even see it: the driver shouldn't even be able to help the navigator as just looking at the screen takes the drivers off the road for too long..

If you are driving solo I'm fine with a while in park mode that you can see a touch screen, but I can't think of a good way to implement it.

Head-Up Displays solve this by projecting the essential information on the windshield. So you don't have to move your eyes away from the road at all - and even when you're looking at the HUD data, you still have a view of the road, unlike those displays on the central column where the best you have is some peripheral vision.

Paired with a voice assistant, it could work nicely for the navigation. You say "navigate to $address", and HUD would show you the essential information for your next turn (rough distance, street or exit name, turn lanes).

The problem isn't where the eyes are looking though, it is where the brain is focusing. HUD still distracts the brains focus.

HUD is useful for essential information. I agree if it is only about turn left in X. However my radio (infotainment) has a lot of things a driver shouldn't have access to. Ever try to find the right genre of music for the trip?

I'm a driver and I want to be able to pick genres.

All else being equal, if the driver of car X can pick genres and the driver of car Y can't, I'm buying car X.

I've got my phone in the cradle and I can look at it whenever I want, even when navigating, and it has no stupid popups or park brake sensor.

I don't need stupid nanny-screens that I have to touch to tell me what to do, and I don't need the screens that I've paid for in my car put in a place where I can't see or use them if I want because I can't be trusted.

I'm an adult and I'm very aware that when I'm driving I should be paying attention to driving and not the screen.

I'm quite capable of deciding when I will look and when I won't look, and I won't have that decision taken away from me by some focus group full of brain-dead idiots or marketing people who derive some kind of sick pleasure from fumbling with touch screens with no tactile feedback.

Feel free to go ahead and design that crap because it will make my next car buying decision really simple.

If you put that kind of crap in a car and I can't turn it off, then I'm not buying that car.

To make it clear:

Any kind of touch screen that I have to press every time I drive to use the screen I paid for = no buy.

If the AC is controlled by a touch screen = no buy.

If volume can be controlled by a touch screen only = no buy.

While I'm at it, let's add this: any kind of tracking that I can't disable = no buy. I don't care about your app.

If I'm spending my multiple tens of thousands of dollars on your car, I'm the owner. Not your moron silicon valley focus group of Elon Musk idolizers and touch screen fetishists.

If nobody wants my money, I'll be very happy driving whatever older car I can buy that has none of this crap forever - and I probably can do that forever because it is likely much more repairable than your garbage touch screens built by the lowest bidder.

Your move, manufacturers.

"... not allow a destination to be entered into the sat nav without first placing the vehicle in park ..."

I am under the impression that this limitation is tied to the occupancy sensor in the passenger seat (which you undoubtedly have, or the seat-belt chime would sound incessantly ...).

I believe if you had a passenger those controls would be allowed while driving - did you have a chance to test that ?

"Passenger" could just be a backpack full of stuff. Or a water bottle. One of those large water boxes with the tap on the front should do it as well.

Yes, when my wife or I were in the front passenger seat we would still need to stop the car in order to set a destination. It's also possible that the occupancy sensor was disabled as the rental car wasn't exactly in pristine condition.

I think, car manufacturers are installing them to reduce manufacturing costs in the long run, because instead of building plastic parts, you install a module and get infinitely more ways to exploit the customers in various ways you see fit.

Also, it looks good on paper, and allows some useful controls while is backwards in many ways.

I'd rather have physical buttons which I can operate blindly rather than a touchscreen though. They're really dangerous when it replaces the physical buttons.

Pushing the puck/ok button didn’t dismiss it?

Yeah a friend of mine recently rented a car and it was so frustrating just to configure audio playback. Android Auto kept popping up on my phone, and I had to manually switch the car to bluetooth every time, which meant menu diving and then asking my friend to pull over so I could pair my phone/adjust the audio settings. Really stupid all around.

On the other hand, my car (a 2006 Hyundai Sonata) has a CD drive and a radio, with a knob for volume and a knob for tuning, and that's it. I keep a stack of CDs in the car plus a little bluetooth-to-FM dongle which I rarely ever use, because I usually either enjoy my CDs or want to hear what's on the radio!

Only feature I'd really want from a fancy HUD is rear camera, as I do a lot of parallel parking in Brooklyn, but idk, I've gotten pretty good at doing it without "assistance".

I occasionally need to rent cars and the UIs are often so bad I just ignore them. Set them up at start and use a car mounted phone instead. Suction cup mounts to the rescue.

Navigation UX is usually just annoying in most cars anyway.

My vehicle (different make/year) does the radio thing too.. even sometimes if the bluetooth isn’t playing anything. Super annoying. I found a somewhat reliable workaround though; I switch to XM radio which I’m not subscribed to and then to BT when that happens.. then when then it falls back it tries to play the locked XM channel (or channel 0 which just shows radio ID)

Not sure if they still do, but the infotainment in Mazdas used to do that. I very quickly learned to turn down the volume before turning off the car. I still do it in every other car because it has traumatised me so much.

For some reason Blueooth was a lot more quiet than the other input sources. So you play music from the phone whilst driving and turn up the volume. All good there. But then when you start the car again and it couldn't connect to the phone for any reason it would decide to switch back to radio with the jacked up volume and blast it in your face. It's a full on jump scare.

That aside their infotainment controls are actually really good. Better than many other cars including much more expensive ones. It was quite satisfying to build up muscle memory on the infotainment menus with the excellent knob controls and not having to look at it.

Does your Mazda not have the physical volume knob in the center console near the cupholder? The touchscreen and steering wheel controls are useless until ~30 seconds after starting the car, but the physical volume knob always works (at in the CX-5).

Yup, from what I remember I could mute it by pressing the volume button. But that was after I had just been blasted with radio at almost full volume. It also lulled me into it because it's silent for what feels like half a minute whilst it is not connected to anything.

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