There used to be a lot of crashes attributed to "playing with the radio" in the 90's / 00's. Maybe all those buttons on the wheel and a display centered in the drivers cone of vision were actually huge advancements in safety...
They are truly, as that one book title went, unsafe at any speed.
It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal.
A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.
Agreed -- this was also why the Apple Touchbar failed, IMO.
Typically keyboard use relies on a lot of muscle memory, and so the touchbar's "you get a different set of controls with different shapes and sizes that do different things depending on which app you're using" design ethos didn't really fit with how people actually use keyboards.
If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.
It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.
When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
It's such trivial things that people risk their lives for too. A sort of trashy naivety. Like smoking at the gas pump.
>I have zero sympathy for any of the edge cases people tend to bring up except checking your speed.
You're saying the speedometer is the only instrument that needs to be scanned regularly?
I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.
It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.
This may be naive, but I've assumed that it is practically impossible to enforce laws that a majority of the population habitually breaks.
> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble
That's really location specific, and situation specific. We can't go over ~5kmph faster than the limit here without getting fined by speed cameras. Also 10kmph faster on a highway versus 10kmph faster in town are very different. 10kmph faster in town could be the difference between killing someone or not hitting them at all.
I do somewhat agree though, I think "driving to the conditions" for me personally would be totally fine, I'd probably trend to driving slower than the speed limit. But if you had no limit and no enforcement, people would be abusing it all the time. Someone in a hurry in town would easily cause trouble. The tradeoff for limiting that is having to check your speedometer.
10kmph = 6.2mph.
I think of the difference between hitting someone and not hitting them as measured in distance, not speed.
Doesn't sound like heaps but that is actually your margin for error, just 4m. If something jumps out in front of you at 28 meters away, at 50 you will have had 4 meters to stop, which modern cars can do, and at 60 you will hit them at the full 60kmph. The Australian government has some great road safety clips on the subject, I might try and find them.
In practice, I'd hazard a yes.
Keyword: regularly...unless you're driving something that's pissing oil all over the place and/or has a cooling system that's out of service, at which point you clearly have much bigger maintenance problems and probably shouldn't be on the road with that vehicle anyways (perhaps even in a lawful sense).
> I would've said that the speedometer really isn't needed - if you go with traffic and don't hang out in the passing lane, you're never going to get in trouble.
The obvious naivety here is a dependency on another driver ahead of you both maintaining situational awareness and doing the right thing...never mind sparse traffic scenarios, e.g. super late/early hours, neighborhoods, small towns, rural areas, etc. In the case of incident, the police won't care; your insurance provider won't care.
> It's a lot more important to me to know if I've lost oil pressure or am overheating.
Contrived. There's a reason why high-contrast event indicators (termed "telltale" as defined by US FMVSS statutory regulation[1]) baked directly into every passenger vehicle which control for permissible location, identification, color, and illumination targeting driver visibility. These discrete telltales are explicitly designed to ping a driver's peripheral vision with the intent of eliminating a need for active monitoring in practice.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
I never had to use it as an excuse.
> And if the HVAC controls are unnecessary to mess with while driving, they are still not an "edge case". Nor is the radio.
I forgot to address these sorry.
I've driven some pants cars in my time so I get it, but I'd say you be the judge of just how distracted you are with mechanical worries and if that's a safe amount or not.
I think HVAC being on tactile controls makes the difference here, but ultimately you could check them when you've stopped if it's too much of a hassle. Sometimes I try to get it set, but can't figure it out quickly, so give up and just set it at the next point I'm idling.
If it weren't for the ability of the car to alert lane departures, cars braking ahead of you, etc., I likely would have had many accidents already, just using the touch screen for things should be physical controls.
Best bet is to engage autopilot then do whatever you gotta do.
btw: I had the exact same experience with another brand (rental car) where the touchscreen was so ill placed, that basically any interaction with it messed with the steering.