Please make a dumb car
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow.
So smart.
Don't get me wrong, the car is absolutely wonderful, but the UX is so badly designed it makes me question myself.
For starters, I have absolutely no clue how to use the lights, fans and wipers. Just last Saturday, a design oversight (and idiocy from my part) caused me to reverse into another car parked behind me, I reversed to leave the parking spot, then instead of switching to D, I forgot it on R all while the rearview camera is showing red lines. For a car equipped with driving assists (collision avoidance and line assists), it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping the rearview camera, it only beeps for 5 seconds when it sees an obstacle then stops, same for the open door and seatbelts.
There is also the odometer, there are 3 different odometers in the car and all of them are showing different values, one with a TM next to it, another one with this symbol Ø and a third one in the "Driver performance" tab. So which one is the real distance and what's the difference? Only the norse gods know.
Also, the charge and fuel left gauges adapt to your driving by going up or down instead of showing you the real amount of fuel/charge left. And it already nearly left me stranded on the highway with 5km left of fuel.
This car is amazing but there are a lot of design oversights when it comes to UX.
This is common feature in other cars - I rented mazda few years back and it did automatically stop when I almost reversed into another car.
This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying.
Yes, I know I'm responsible. I do not want/need car/manufacturer to be responsible, I just want technology to help where it could.
> Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably
This maybe is your opinion, but that's not how it works. There is plenty of manufacturer's who manufacture things which are not affordable and plenty of people buy it. Pretty much any industry has luxury segment which also tends to be most profitable
> This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying
Humans are imperfect. Stress, distractions, tiredness etc could make anyone to make mistake, even yourself. Why would adding safety features be horrifying?
People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.
Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.
The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.
This Volvo like I said, is absolutely wonderful on the road, and the safety features it's got even in the base model are a godsend and make the car feel like it has a mind of its own, in a good way. It saved my butt from so many accidents that I never even noticed, it sees danger before it even happens, it's amazing.
So my point from the beginning was, if a car is capable of detecting/anticipating and dealing with danger at 100Kmh, it sure as hell should be able to prevent dumbass me from reversing into another car by mistake.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.
You can’t press too hard to accidentally go the wrong direction. Up is R and down is D. Distinguishing up from down is very easy. Changing direction can only be done at standstill. Pressing too many times does nothing, except toggle D and B, that have same behavior from intent at parking point of view.
What might happen though is you thought you were in N but are actually in gear, as you accidentally clicked twice instead of once. But if you want to go N you should really just press P instead.
On the one hand, it is easy to point to this as user error and you're not wrong.
But older cars have a significant tactile difference in operating different systems in the car. Shifting a gear is very, very different physically than pushing the button for your hazards. Your body moves in very different and operates these controls very differently.
This distinction was made clear to me years ago when we bought a 2013 Mercedes wagon - the physical action to: shift to park, turn the car on, turn the radio on were all nearly identical - just a button press. In fact, the buttons themselves were almost identical.
So, although I never actually did this, there were a number of times when I got relatively overloaded, cognitively, and I pressed the power off on the radio in an attempt to shift to park. Or I pressed the park button a second time in an attempt to turn the car off.
I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Absolutely.
For example, in a manual VW/Audi, you have to push the stick down, then way over into R.
It's one of the nicest feeling gestures, makes your intent extremely clear, and is impossible to do by accident.
Airplane cockpits are designed like this, for obvious reasons.
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98
My 2002 VW has the same and it means average over multiple trips. TM probably means this trip? You may have distance of the current trip and average consumption of the current trip (eg 40km, 6.3l/100km), then the last few trips with a combined average for those (eg 1500km, 5.4l/100km).
1. The standard "life of the car" odometer is permanently on the left gauge, top reading
2. There is one (two?) manually resettable trip odometers
3. There is an auto-resetting trip odometer - it resets when the car has been off for four hours.
You can configure which of the second two are displayed by going to in-dash "app" menu and selecting what you want in the "Trip" tab. On my car, this configures the lower displays on the left and right gauges.
Update Re: your high beams - It sounds like you have them on auto. There's a spring loaded ring on the left-hand stalk that engages auto vs. manual high beam. Twist it and the light-with-an-A sign on your dash should change to a normal light symbol. You can then use the twist knob with detents to select parking light vs. low beam and whether you want auto-on or manual on. High beams are engaged by pushing the lever (or you can pull to flash).
I had a Tucson before this Volvo and it was just so intuitive and easy to use. It's something that needs to be standardized, they are tools that no car would be street legal without and thus, should have identical interactions no matter the manufacturer.
There are plenty of times when ergonomics and feature discoverability are at odds, and I heavily prioritize ergonomics when I'm driving a large, lethal object at super-human speeds.
My backup camera frequently loses its shit because it gets obstructed by rain or snow, or sometimes paint on the ground fakes it out. If the only sensor is a camera, that must not override the driver. Beeping is fine. I might feel differently about lidar.
On that topic, though... I really wish backup cameras had some sort of wiper.
Hopefully the system on your Volvo can be updated to fix what are presumably bugs in the system!
My '05 Nissan Altima let me start the engine with a physical key, and then lock the car with the fob.
I think manufacturers are hoping that certain aspects of the modern auto become "can't live withouts", e.g. bluetooth, which helps them smuggle all the other more marginally useful, security and ux intrusive features into your model. Now as others have mentioned, these unwanted smart features might actually be required by law/regulation/tax-credit/legal-dept, so it's not bad programming/design but "design by committee" that's dooming our chances of a good dumb car.
I wonder how well my car will age when miscellaneous sensor all over the car start failing. It used to just show a light on your dashboard, now I wonder if I'll be grounded - stuck in park - or hounded by incessant bells repeating the same spurious warning over and over again.
However, it's not a new phenomenon, manufacturers and dealers have done this with "luxury" or "sport" features for a long time. This has usually meant adding stuff like alloy wheels, different interior trims, better speakers etc. The difference now is the huge amount of complexity that modern "smart" features bring.
So we found a van didn't have those things but my wife insisted on BT and a backup cam. So we negotiated with the dealer and they were able to make a deal with us to have their shop install a backup cam and Bluetooth for cost, and we love the van ever since.
My point is that a lot of features can be put in the car after market and you don't have to deal with having to buy the whole upgraded package.
The quality of tactile representation and response on the knobs/buttons are not as good as my old 89 caprice was. But that's true of all cars today.
I did have to spend 5 min setting up some little adhesive wire straps to bundle the little cables out of the way, but total cost was maybe $25-35 for the USB power adapter and Bluetooth rx. Granted, it wouldn't have been necessary if so many phones didn't ditch the dedicated audio output, but at least it wasn't an expensive workaround.
Anyway, yes, Subaru should be a possibility, but obviously research the specific model first.
That's just it, the tech is making the cars less reliable. Will all of these bespoke parts be available in 10, 15, 20 years? I would hate to have to dispose of a working car because the dead now obsolete chip on the bespoke LCD dash module shaped like the cars dashboard is no longer in production. I had cars who's odometers didn't roll 100k miles until they hit 15 years. I have a 2002 van that has 102k miles on it.
> Now as others have mentioned, these unwanted smart features might actually be required by law/regulation/tax-credit/legal-dept, so it's not bad programming/design but "design by committee" that's dooming our chances of a good dumb car.
None of that requires LCD dash boards, tablets, touch screens, phone home, internet, subscriptions, etc. Everyone is just high on the concept of rent seeking and perpetual cash flows. They hate the fact that you buy something and walk away from them. They want you on a leash like a dog and they've been doing a damn fine job leash training you and your children.
Opinion: Mandated lane keeping and other lane keeping/self driving safety garbage is papering over the failure of the human race to govern itself. The people who I see swerving all over the road are either selfish assholes who insist on playing with phones/speeding while piloting a 3000+ lb machine or people who should not be driving at all. Now we have TV commercials that show people diddling touch screens while driving. We have failed.
I had 20 plus rental cars last year and very few had tech features I would ever pay for.
Lane assist with adaptive cruise are the only notable features for long drives. I did enjoy the red dash notification Toyota has. Totally caught me off guard the first time however, I tried out the ABS.
The other thing I'd like to see more or less mandated is blind spot warning. I especially like the kind that is visible to other drivers. I don't even have it on any of my cars, LOL. I just like to see it on other cars that I'm passing.
Lane assist I am ambivalent about. I had AP, it was okay. It does not drive as defensively as I do, however, which meant that it increased my tension on long drives rather than reduce it. I do like good adaptive cruise however. That means no phantom braking :).
It takes some getting used to, but once you learn to back via mirrors you won't want to twist around anymore. You do need to check behind the car beforehand because you cannot see directly behind you and thus might hit something on the ground. However you get much better visibility to things that are moving from the side to behind you, and that in my experience is where the danger is most of the time.
I do favor backup cameras though. They show you things you would miss either twisting to look backwards, or looking in the mirror.
Not everyone has the aptitude for good, calm driving. That might make them excel in other areas of life, just not at driving safely in traffic. Has humanity failed because we provided them transportation? No, but we have an open challenge to provide transport and allow these (really, all) people the freedom to mentally engage with something else that they deem more important than the chore of driving safely.
When's the last time you saw a broken-down car by the side of the road, and is this happening more or less often than 20 years ago?
Do you think cars require more or less upkeep and maintenance than 20 years ago?
Yes, cars do have some new components that have introduced new failure modes, and some of those may be doing worse than others. But as a whole, cars have improved.
The same? Cars 20yrs ago were already very reliable compared to say 30-40yrs ago. And breakdowns observed 20 yrs ago were mostly cars that were aleady old then.
If I see a broken down car now (which is rare anyway), it could almost be age from 30+yrs old to new. There doesn't seem to be a pattern with age. Adjusting for 20yr old cars having 20yrs more wear and tear, you would expect a pattern correlating with age. I wonder what todays cars are going to seem like in 20yrs?
Note: I'm not in the US or Europe, so my observations of the car population may be different to those that are. My cars have usually been 15-20 yrs old Japanese models, bought cheaply 2nd hand, mostly neglected, but still very reliable machines.
Yup. Just like my friends 2010 VW which went into limp home mode after he drove through a puddle a year after he bought it. Dealer had to replace some doodad to the tune of $500 for the part. He then bought a Mercedes in 2013 that started to kill the battery after a month because the park lamps refused to turn off. Mercedes could not figure out the issue even after swapping so they removed the park lamps. All caused by fragile electronics. Meanwhile I plowed the 2002 chevy van through a deep puddle once (being young and dumb) and it coughed, sputtered but kept going until it dried off and then resumed purring.
> Do you think cars require more or less upkeep and maintenance than 20 years ago?
Since I do my own upkeep including engine and tranny swaps (project vehicles), the upkeep is pretty much the same. Check/change oil, and check/top off fluids 4 times year. Then brakes and tires. Worst case check plugs and so on after 50k but those show up as misfires that are easy to feel. All the vehicles I have experience with are 1995 and newer with some 1980's trucks and vans thrown in.
You also have to account for a lot of wear and tear that came from fuel changes. When lead was eliminated the leaded cars suffered from premature ring and piston failure. And when we phased out MTBE we also suffered as alcohol was attacking metal and rubber components with oxidation causing failures. So these changes might make older cars seem less reliable but the fact is we forced them to be that way (for the better).
This will only get worse. Look at how many smartphones don't get security patches after 2 years.
When you're done riding that high horse, could you come up with a plan to actually make it stop? Preferably one that can't be dismissed as papering over the failure of the human race to govern itself like self-driving features, or dismissed as an authoritarian power-grab like putting fifty times as many traffic cops on the road, or dismissed as a dream like leveling LA and starting over from scratch with a bike-friendly layout.
Only within the niche HN-type tech crowd. Most people outside of this group want these features, even other techies, including myself.
It's the same discussion on any thread involving smart devices. People want this stuff, that's why there have been over 200M standalone smart speakers sold.
As far as why these things get bundled, that’s just how auto manufacturing works. Every unique configuration costs an additional overhead to the OEM. Bundling allows them to reduce this overhead.
I find it much more true that most car software simply isn't very good yet on average. Let's say most existing implementations of touch UIs in cars don't add value and are cumbersome to use, for example - but that just means they're individually badly realized, not that it's not worth trying. And in reality, it's also a much more nuanced "depending on the use case and the situation" or "impacted by bad performance".
There are quality differences out there. And there's plenty of use cases in cars that benefit from a thorough software approach. This is an area with interesting problems to solve and plenty of innovation left to happen, and where hard and good work makes a mark.
Then you add on the argument of what they are doing with the information, and if they can be trusted..
That's why people buy Teslas, they're a software company that makes hardware on the side. And participates in hacker challenges, offering cars to the winners.
No one actually wants cars with no computers, they just think they do because they don't realise how much computers do, like reduce the amount of wires by 10x, and output error messages on the level of a crappy microcontroller instead of maybe a flashing light if you're lucky
- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.
- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.
- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrics at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?
- Engine starter? Cars have starter motors since just after the hand crank ers, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.
- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him to isolate them so they only worked on their individual switches.
- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.
- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa.
- Where I live alarm systems are likely to get you a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.
- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. (It seems to me that the designers of these systems never anticipate what we drivers actually need. Perhaps they only test them in the most tame and predictable environments.)
All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes the car less reliable and more expensive to buy and fix. Moreover, they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles anf of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner that we could do with a more traditional car, often we could be stranded for days whilst waiting a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. What's more that's hellishly expensive.
You people are just gadget mad.
"in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km)"
Not sure why you think a load of extra moving parts is going to be more reliable than some solid state electronics.
Because cars can go anywhere including right outside tow truck range especially where I live. Here, being rescued can be days away. Then there's the adverse conditions, temperatures well in excess of 40° C and from my bitter experience, the electronics fail much more frequently under these harsh conditions than do the mechanics.
Then there's the issue of make-do. When one is hundreds of miles from anywhere, one can often improvise a mechanical repair whereas it's nigh on impossible to quickly sort out an electronics problem (unless it's trivial).
I recall being in a convoy of four cars in central Australia when the computer failed in the one and only Volvo in the group. What an unholy mess that was. None of us could fix it.
Note, everyone in the convoy was skilled in electronics (we were all radio amateurs on a field trip) and almost everyone had a full-time professional job in electronics. We even had lots of electronics test equipment as well as various electronic components with us - semiconductors, resistors, capacitors etc., as they were to service our HF transceivers when they failed.
That's just one instance albeit one of the worst cases.
My car chucked a universal joint on the same trip and although very inconvenient, we fixed it on the spot. Similar repairs were made on the spot when my petrol pump was ripped clean off the bottom of my car by huge ruts in the road.
From what you've said, I'd guess you live in a temperate climate in the suburbs of a city and only a few kilometers from a service garage.
The fact is, electronics and harsh environmental conditions (high thermal cycling) are not good bedfellows. Moreover, most electronics faults are thermally related (caused by thermal stress). I know firsthand as I ran the electronics department of a large corporation for years, before that I worked in the prototyping (design) department of a large US corporation designing professional electronic (not domestic stuff).
First rule of design: 'keep it simple stupid'.
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Edit: "1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km)."
Uh? When I was younger all I could afford were cars with over 150k on the clock - and that's miles not kms - and I usually drove them to about 300k. The usual reason for getting rid of them was was rust - not because of mechanical problems. Sure, there were 'junk' cars around but you'd have to be mad to buy one.
One final point, around the time the Volvo broke down I was averaging 44,000 miles per year (~70,000 km/yr).
As for typical cars, that's why it's bad to base your theories on personal experience.
Should the computers and software be open and fixable though? Yes
- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.
- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.
- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrical stuff at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?
- Engine starter? Cars have had starter motors since just after the hand crank era, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.
- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him isolate them so they only worked on their own individual switches.
- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.
- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa. It's a nightmare, any attempt to properly lock the car fails.
- Where I live alarm system are likely to get a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but rather from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.
- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. The people who design and program their operation clearly don't use them except in the most tame surroundings.
All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes car less reliable and more expensive to both purchase and fix - and they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner as we could do with a more traditional car. Often we could be stranded for days whilst we waited for a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. Moreover, that's hellishly expensive.
You people are just gadget mad.
The best automobile interfaces use knobs of different sizes and with different textures so that you can find them without looking. Buttons should be arranged in rows, so they are easy to find with a short look. Extremely common buttons should be located on the steering wheel. Etc.
Until screens can offer some kind of dynamic tactile experience, where you can feel what you're about to control, they can't be better than real tactile buttons and knobs.
Don't get me wrong, I love a big screen in my car for advanced features (360 camera, vehicle settings, navigation, music, etc). But the basics need to be tactile.
- Already in the pre-touchscreen, button-dominated area, plenty of more complicated use cases had terrible UX, and in many cases touchscreens have made them much easier. For example, do you remember how difficult it often was to program radio presets in 80s head-units? There were a lot of real clunkers there.
- There's plenty of newer use cases that would be hard or impossible to make easy with traditional hardware button UX, such as route and EV charge planning.
- Good software offers many possibilities to avoid interactions altogether, or make them single-step instead of multi-step. A good screen-based system will now often suggest interactions pro-actively and situationally at the top-level of the system and reduce interaction to a single multi-modal (touch/gesture/speech) confirmation on what used to be multi-step processes.
- Screens can offer tactile experiences - most recently with the introduction of screens that can do permanent haptic feedback via electrostatic friction coefficient modulation, emulating different surface feels as the finger moves.
- You already mentioned features such as 360 degree cameras: If nothing else, screens are great for showing information. Interactions aside, this alone has a lot of legs left and there's absolutely quality differences between good and bad implementations.
- There's absolutely nothing wrong with a good physical button (on the contrary - few things are more satisfying than a good, solid, weighty button) and having both for use in the appropriate situation. It doesn't mean there's no possible benefits from further investment into good car software.
I feel a lot of this is rooted in first-hand experience with bad systems - which I agree are plentiful, and just as awful as a bad, clunky, unrefined phone onscreen keyboard. Dare to imagine a good one.
Working on car systems means getting to own the form factor and the entire surroundings of a user, much more than working on software targeting rarely-changing phone and PC devices. It's an open field for software and hardware innovation and deserves a little more professional excitement and ambition to do it well.
I wouldn't rule out that tactile HVAC and Audio controls are always better than a touchscreen, but I have trouble seeing the benefit for some of those basic controls. I mean, let's take the volume control for example. It's a very simple linear concept, there are no branches in the options for volume. There are no sub-menus -- you either want it higher or lower. You always want that control in the same spot so it's easy to find and you always want it available so you can use it at any time. For those reasons, I have trouble seeing what a touchscreen can add to that particular parameter. A knob seems better suited by nearly every metric.
Touchscreens on the other hand, are great for controlling more complex parameters. Even a temperature control, while similar to volume, is actually more complex because the change is not immediate. You're setting a parameter that will be true in the future, and that is something where a dynamic display can be beneficial. That said, you still generally want that control to be in the same spot and always available so it's not an obvious win for touchscreens.
I absolutely hate my screens keyboard, and wish I could just buy a phone with a real physical keyboard. I get so angry trying to use this thing. It’s far less useful than a regular keyboard.
people want fancy bells & whistles in their vehicles right up until it makes them a maintenance nightmare—you want your car to just work, like they largely used to.
Most people have little idea what features they have, besides the obvious ones. Read through some of the features listed for a car - some aren't even explained.
I know that I, personally, love having a backup camera, but don't need or a screen for anything else, and would prefer physical controls for most things. Unfortunately that's not an option in most vehicles, so I am kind of coming to the conclusion that my next car will be an older model that's "dumb", since this is an overall better experience.
I don't think you could use the number of sales of cars with this kind of UI as evidence that people like it, since (the article mentions this) car manufacturers want to put it everywhere, regardless of popularity. It's got so many benefits from their side. It's not that I think they forced it on people, I think it was originally a cool novelty that people were excited about. But, after the novelty wore off, and a lot of people stopped wanting it in their cars, the industry had so fully committed to it that people just don't have the option to do without it these days.
Most everything else is just technological kitsch. This isn't that new though.
Stereo systems have had equalizers forever even though almost everyone is just going to make already mastered audio sound worse by filtering it. That is not the point really of an equalizer. It is just to have a series of useless controls that will never be used but looks cool when you first see it. Pure technological kitsch.
of course both my cars have power windows. the Honda interior is nothing to write home about but the BMW's all leather and wood. neither has heated seats, but I don't really need them where I live, and if I did, I'd just buy them on eBay.
it'll get harder in future, of course, but for now, if you want to skip all the excess computation in modern cars, all you have to do is know a little bit about cars. it's not rocket science.
what I'm really looking forward to is when electric vehicle aftermarket conversion kits become more common. you can find them for certain models already but it's very early days.
Actually this leads me to realize why some automakers like Ford integrate the screen into the rear view mirror, so when it isn't on, it disappears behind a one way mirror.
This law actually says that if a car can't meet a prescribed rear visibility threshold it needs a backup camera. Instead of make safer designs manufacturers just install cameras.
But I don't disagree manufacturers are using screens as an excuse to add superfluous bullshit they'll then use for data mining. See USC 2342 Unintended Consequences, Law of.
My favorite part of backup camera is manufacturers that put a warning overlay on the video telling you to watch your surroundings. An overlay that eats up some significant percentage of the screen occulting potential hazards you might otherwise see. I for one can't wait for the backup camera to display ads in the lower third. If they take up enough space manufacturers could make a mint selling personal injury and insurance ads.
Cars do not have large upright rear windows anymore because a sloping "fastback" design with a higher rear deck is more aerodynamic and gets an extra fraction of an MPG on the fuel economy rating.
Or maybe people just like to feel like their car is a rhino, but the same refresh also slightly lowered the roofline and the driving position feels lower too.
The other down side is that my wife always shouts that I'm going to crash when parking nose-in because the bonnet feels twice as long as it really is.
The "slope" back design seems to hit this sweet spot. Ease of entry, versatility, and capability while not appearing to be a "beast" of a vehicle.
Merging onto a freeway is scary in this thing, whereas in my 2003 car, there was a 360 view all around me. Like a lot of things, looks have become more important than function, even in something as safety-critical as a car.
However, I have it set to screen saver mode, and it is completely powered down until I put the car in reverse. It also wakes for certain things like displaying the temperature if I change it with the real knobs.
The Speedometer and Rev counter are physical needles. Newer models have replaced these with a central LCD, which means I will hang onto this one as long as I can.
There is no reason a car can’t have a display and be humane, other than stupid corporate design sensibilities.
Backup cameras were mandated as a result of cases of children being run over, because mirrors are inadequate to detect their presence.
Personally, I will research used cars with top end factory trim packages, looking for models with either a DIN sized radio slot or readily available aftermarket upgrades.
By double checking for compatibility ahead of time you can then retrofit carplay, bluetooth, etc. into a "basic" car, for example: https://gromaudio.com/vline/index.html
I also prefer to shop for used cars because I see them as more "stable" than new cars.
What I mean by that is, major flaws in the model/year have been reported and ideally fixed (but are at least known) in the years since release. Common issues/symptoms and repair details are much easier to find online via forums, etc. after a car has been around for a few years.
I wish modern cars still followed that philosophy, but it's hard to find cars with DIN radio slots these days since all the electronics are so integrated into them. It feels like you'll be stuck in pre-2015 cars if you choose that. Not that pre-2015 cars are terrible, but it makes it harder to find low millage ones.
I also think about the environmental impact of buying a new car. Manufacturers try to sell you on the idea that getting a new car is better for the environment but I really wonder how much fuel you need to save over the lifetime of a car to make it worth the cost of building a new one, in comparison to just fixing and older one. Who knows, maybe it's better to keep driving a '80 olds than to buy the latest ford electric truck.
When shopping for minivans, they all "have" comparable features. But
Manufacturer A base model has no advanced safety features; you need to buy $10k of leather seats and chrome highlights to get them.
Manufacturer B offers a $2k safety pack to any and all levels.
Manufacturer C simply has those same safety features across all levels.
Similarly, features such as Android/Apple Car/Auto play; or Sirius XM; etc. The bundling strategy is completely different across manufacturers.
For us, the last three practical family cars we bought (as opposed to cars of desire:), were hugely influenced by which manufacturer had a bundling/segmentation/feature strategy that worked for us.
I wonder how much all the screens have contributed to the increase in accidents in the last couple years
So of course manufacturers are eager to sneak in anything to make a car seem "worn out" and in need of replacement sooner than later.
What's frustrating is there seems to be no shortage of willing buyers eating this crap up, apparently looking forward to replacing their vehicles in lockstep with their other consumer electronics.
I think that implies nefariousness that probably isn't there. It's more likely a combination of:
1. Marketing/sales wanting whiz-bang features to use in their pitches.
2. Copycatting competitors, also for marketing/sales pitches.
3. Customers that are often not aware of the downsides, have been conditioned to accept them (e.g. they'll all like that now), or are uncritically enthusiastic about shiny new things.
4. Lazy design thinking, of the kind that causes Mozilla to drop good features from Firefox.
5. Cost cutting, of the kind that causes almost all companies to consistently choose to make their products marginally worse over time (e.g. lets not pay for feature X, since the users can use a cheaper awkward workaround instead).
Personally, I think we should have some federal standards for car UX: a required set of standard physical controls for commonly used standard functions (e.g. car operation, climate control, audio entertainment) and plus minimum standards for screen UIs (e.g. touch sensitivity & accuracy, UX latency, etc.).
While I'm wishing, cell modems and other data transmitters should be required to be separately fused, and that the car should be required to operate without annoying error messages if that fuse is pulled.
There's a very slow, very week feedback loop that may be too weak at the moment to fight against this trend: the customers who are dealing with and worry about perpetual sensor failures and computer issues at 150,000 miles are not the same customers who are buying the car off the dealership lot. Meanwhile, the people with brand new vehicles are not worried about those problems, they're only slightly (and only long after it's too late) worried about the eventual resale value. I trust that my old Toyota and Subaru will still be dependable and repairable for many years, but I won't buy an old BMW or Mercedes because my family and coworkers have too many horror stories of expensive, exotic gadgets that have gone bad in mysterious ways.
But we're 40 years removed from the bad old days of the 80s and 90s when those imports were decimating the lethargic Big 3 in quality and cost, which is more like the time scale on which consumer attitudes like that began to be formed. 2018 laws regarding rearview cameras are really new in comparison to a cultural thing like that.
I predict that 50 years from now there will be more functioning cars from the 1960s than from the 2020s. With the combination of quickly obsoleting technology that won't be fixable and overly interconnected electronics that become impossible to diagnose after a while, there's not much hope for current and future cars to be anything but disposable.
Old mechanical cars though, can be kept running essentialy forever by just someone with access to a machine shop and some patience.
Sure there are one-offs and some drop-ins available, but they'll never get dialed in the way cars do after a year or two of mass production.
The car that makes me cry a little every time on the what-could-have-been topic is the Honda CRX HF. 54 MPG in 1988. Most cars can't match that today over 30 years later.
If Honda was allowed to do a modern version with some use of carbon fiber for even more lightness and all the advances in fuel injection tuning and engine manufacturing, surely we could have a ~70+ MPG CRX by now.
However, I'm willing to bet the O2 sensor was actually giving the correct read and was working fine, and the source of the issue is probably well upstream of the O2 sensor.
No check engine light though.
You can have all that when you buy a "good" base and get your features on the aftermarket. For the definition of "good" also consult your mechanic, he should know which cars are easy/nice to work with. I've been looking at reliable 4x4s that I can trust for daily off-road use in the outskirts of the Sahara and I currently favor a UAZ (20k Euro) base and modifications for 5k Euro (more gas tanks, proper seats, navigation and entertainment system).
The only outstanding problem, however, is that American infrastructure has been deliberately designed solely around the car. Those who suggest alternative modes of public transportation are immediately written off as "impractical". Discourse ought to be centered around democratizing and diversifying the ways people can get around, not on how one ought to "make dumb cars".
I've also been contemplating how to use my skill set to further decrease our dependence on car centric infrastructure, or help others engage in reducing it.
There seems to be a very large community of people in the US who are opposed to more cars. /r/fuckcars has gained a large following rather quickly. Clearly there is demand, but how do we enable people to start making change? Money and NIMBYs are hard to challenge single handedly.
Not my sense of comfort.
> as long as the roads are clear or your bike has appropriate tires.
I live in a country where we have snow in winter, at least casually. I think driving safety is severely affected when driving single-track? Wouldn't ride my motorcycle in winter either.
That said I live in a snowy country and ride a bike. I absolutely wouldn't ride a motorcycle. Speed is by far the largest reason. On a bike, you can see black ice before you hit it. You can run a foot along the ground for extra traction. You can get out and walk and push your vehicle. You can just jump off if shit really hits the fan.
That said, I also ride slowly when the roads are poor.
Where I live, it's not usually safe to ride a bike because of snow clearing. We get huge snowbanks and there is no safe place to ride. I'd be riding if I could though.
We do have off-road trails that are groomed for fat bikes that are a lot of fun. It's a nice alternative to downhill skiing or snowboarding which can get pretty pricey!
Also, if you're traveling by bike in freezing weather, you have to be dressed for freezing weather, and you'll be stuck with that during the entire time you spend at your destination.
Gloves needed at 0°C are reasonable. Sure, don't take gloves that let the wind go through.
I used to bike without gloves and a hat when freezing. Because I always lose them. The hands hurt, you end up being very cold. With appropriate clothes it's night and day, biking becomes enjoyable in winter.
Great. I'm going to the mall. How do I remove my clothes while I'm there?
Yes, you need a backpack or some sort of bag. Is it a big issue? If it's not raining you don't even need the overtrousers and the coat might as well be the one you usually wear when it's cold. This coat probably has pockets big enough that you can put the gloves and the hat in them.
Not as enjoyable as sitting on my heated leather seat, sipping coffee, listning to an audiobook and moving my right foot back and forth between the the accelerator and brake while my wipers and heater keep the sleet off the windshield.
If you objectively think that riding a bicycle with two sets of clothes on your back in the dead of winter is as convenient as driving, you've are either delusional or have never actually been inside of an automobile.
If you objectively see convenience in spending 50k on a car, 30k on a parking spot, and 100/mo for insurance just to be able to pay other marginal costs to be able to go to a store and avoid exercise in the morning, you're either delusional or have never considered how that money could buy you better conveniences.
I'd recommend anyone give it a try if there is a safe way to get to work. Especially in 0C, because it's just not that cold and you don't really need bulky layers. You can get away with just a winter coat or a warm fleece and windbreaker. I dress a little lighter than when I go downhill skiing or snowboarding.
I am still wearing a winter jacket and sometimes an extra layer when I am driving to work in the winter, so there's really no difference from that perspective.
The problem is that "infrastructure" doesn't just mean roads. It's where houses are. Where schools are. Where food is transported. It's where water and electrical service runs. It's how property is zoned. It's how police, fire, and hospitals are located. It's how municipalities design snow removal and garbage pickup. It's where shops and services are.
In many ways, fixing the infrastructure problem in the US means razing the whole continent and starting over.
In some places, particularly cities designed around cars (i.e. the last 100 years). Other cities just need things to be upgraded. E.g. I recently moved to Pittsburgh. It's pretty dense in terms of housing and infrastructure--not suburban with big lawns. That's partly because it's hilly. Around here the investment needs to be in fixing bridges and roads, adding some trams (they used to have them!), and maybe tunnels. Also, burying the power lines wouldn't be a bad idea.
On most days I like the idea of razing things to the ground, but probably not around here. We need to actually look to the past in some areas and add the appropriate future, as opposed to nuking and paving.
Fixing requires people to assess and evaluate the specific needs of a situation, engineer and design solutions, and then deploy them. That drives an engineering and problem-solving, educated populace full of professionals, rather than a machine that cranks out endless, throwaway garbage. America has strayed from engineering and fixing towards "scale"--but mostly scaling the last part, the deployment. It's short-term thinking. It's a pervasive baseline mindset shift that has happened because of bad accounting centered around dollar costs and not societal costs.
Isn't this the city that gave a few hundred million away from it's earmarked infrastructure and maintenance budge to the police department over the past half decade?
And I know urban environments are overall better for the environment, but they're not better for people's psyche. They're crime ridden. Theyre smog ridden. Theyre awful environments to live in during a pandemic.
People were moving into cities until a pandemic struck and riots became commonplace. Then they started to leave with the speed in which they arrived.
Where do you live?
The 'riots' you're thinking of took place in a rather racially segregated and historically significant part of my city that isn't downtown... Urban environments have existed for centuries, even millennia. Ancient cities were dense and had many a people within their walls.
If anything, this is a distraction from real UX issues with cars. Classic switcheroo - “Lets not focus on improving cars because public transportation”. Infuriating, as if car UI/UX wasn’t infuriating enough!
Meanwhile in reality, diesel runs the equivalent of 8-9 dollars a gal, cars are heavily regulated (mandatory inspections, required snow tires, much more stringent licensing) and medieval city planning didn't really take parking into account...
If I complain that beef from a small oligopoly of suppliers is contaminated with E. Coli, will you recommend that we talk about turning the entire world vegan first?
edit: I do not own a car and have never had a driver's license. Your values are laudable, but are unrelated to the story.
There are 292 million registered cars in the EU (2019 data).
Most people in America also don't know of alternatives because they've been taken away. We don't have to make people want to live in the inner city. We have to show them that driving isn't the only solution to transportation problems.
If you could have a small market in a neighborhood that provides basic necessities, we could probably eliminate a lot of vehicular traffic. But zoning and parking minimums don't allow for that.
Yes a bus or the tube "solves" these problems of not having a crap UI, but they also introduce so many more and worse problems that don't make up for it. Expensive, inconvenient, dirty, late and/or slow, uncomfortable. And at least a car with crap Aircon controls actually has Aircon at all!
My car is clean, arrives and departs on my schedule, can go nearly everywhere, and is available at my doorstep. I don't have to deal with homeless people, sick people, poop, mystery fluids, or animals. And it can take me either down the street, or hundreds of miles away.
The automobile solves my problem, public transportation doesn't.
Thank god Mazda currently has the "driver first" mentality.
NO Touchscreen!
Main input is through a comfortable knob in front of the arm rest, where your hand naturally lands when resting.
Gauge cluster is digital, but analog type dials for spedo, etc.
AC, Power Cool/heated seats, driver assists, auto-park, all controlled via BUTTONS!
It's a modern miracle and one of the big reasons I chose to buy it over a new Tesla Model 3.
"Horse and rider" is truly a wonderful concept... Go Mazda!
I really hope this is just another fad/trend in automotive design like 6-disc trunk CD changers or phosphor display gauges.
Why is this considered an upside?
When I shopped for a car, I've specifically looked for one with a simple (uncluttered) large digital number-only speedometer. Ended up buying 2013 Civic, which is still bad in other regards but got this one right, with a large digital speedometer conveniently located not behind the steering wheel but right below the windshield (less eye travel; and still in peripheral vision even when looking at the road). https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Honda...
I can read a number in a few milliseconds, ending up with an exact reading. So, I instantly know e.g. if I'm at, below, or above the speed limit (or desired/safe speed).
All those analog gauges take me - personally - at least an order of magnitude longer to mentally process. I can get a rough idea (±5 or ±10 {mph,km/h} depending on the dials) relatively quick - but still much longer than it takes for me to digest a readily spelled out number. Or I can spend an eternity (2+ seconds) to get a more precise reading.
And it's not as if acceleration rate normally matters, so unlike some other instruments, ability to watch the speedometer needle moving doesn't make much sense to me.
---
Oh, and I can't say I want a "smart" car, I just have a pet peeve about an awful (IMHO) designs of instrument clusters in most cars. It's either a bunch of round analogue gauges straight from grandpa's dream car (with special love for a huge engine rpm indicator, no matter the type of transmission - I really don't get this) or cyberpunk neon all the way with so much visual clutter and total absence of any sane color coding, and pray to manufacturer they don't decide all that stuff goes onto that giant iPad strapped somewhere next to your knee (thanks, Elon! Although, to be fair, at least it's plain, large and black on white)
I agree with all the reasons given in the article - namely that it's easier to tell with your peripheral vision if a needle has moved a small amount or a big amount than it is for your brain to register the difference between 69 and 71 and then think about whether that's significant, compare it to the limit, etc.
The downside of digital readouts is that they take mental processing to actively look, read and interpret. You can't notice in peripheral vision if 89.9 suddenly changed to 89.7 (ok bad example since you'd hear the radio progam change, but assuming we're talking about visual display only here).
Rate of change and peripheral vision of approximate values is where analog gauges shine. I don't care to know if speed is 36 or 37, it's more valuable to know the approximate spot where the needle is without ever having to look at it directly. Same for tachometer, there I care about rate of change and will definitely never look at it directly since as I approach redline my eyes are far ahead on the road.
But I want buttons and knobs for everything I use while driving.
I probably wouldn't pay extra for built-in navigation (it generally comes with other options that I do want), but I've found it useful a few times when I was outside of cellular coverage.
The voice response system is horrible, if I have to use the Honda navigation, I almost always need to stop so I can type in my destination. But since I use Android Auto 99% of the time, it doesn't really bother me.
Please drive your car.
My Subaru Impreza has a physical power/volume knob but it won't do anything when you start the car and then shift to reverse (to back out of the garage). It's like it's dedicating its resources to the rear view camera and doesn't have any cycles to handle the input events on the control knob. Also it decides to turn on the radio even if you weren't using the radio when you turned off the car. So, you have to listen to the radio blasting (at whatever the volume was when I got there, which might have been different media with lower volume such as a podcast) while you back up (might be a good time to be able to hear instead) until a few seconds after you shift to D. At that point, it processes the queued up inputs from the knob and will suddenly turn down or off depending on the inputs.
I would prefer it to be a variable (logarithmic, because that's how audio perception works) resistor directly controlling the amplifier or whatever, like radios used to be.
I love adaptive cruise. I use it 90%+ of the time. But this is also one more reason that I hate cars and will probably sell it soon. But I'll still have to deal with similar issues if I rent a ZipCar or something.
It falls into a larger category I've been thinking about a lot lately about how a lot of problems with technology these days is due to the difference in how the desires of software creators and those of users diverges and creates those problems. I'm leaning towards suggesting that everyone needs to write their own software, using shared knowledge, not just use software that other people wrote for you.
When someone crosses 3 lanes in front of me ACC will hit the brakes hard to maintain the correct distance. It's jolting and scary.
LKAS only sees about 80% of the lanes. Rather than just driving like normal which I'm experienced with I have to sit there paranoid that something will go wrong and I'll need to react to a surprise event.
I don't know if it's the idea or the just the implementation that I hate. Am considering comma.ai
The LKAS is hit and miss, like you said, unless the lines are very clearly visible, it can't stay in the lane. I wish it looked at the car ahead to help with lanekeeping. But it's never surprising when it loses sight of the lane markers (though it does tend to drift to the right at exits, but it doesn't make a sharp move). But even in its current state, LKAS is great for long freeway drives.
The specific situation is this: I live in Los Angeles and set ACC for max following distance on the freeway. Inevitably this means that someone will use that space to cut across 3 lanes and, as soon as do, ACC will rapidly slow me down to put distance between me and the new lead car. I'll find myself suddenly under 50 on the freeway as a result. maybe that's just how ACC is but imo the PID controller or whatever could be toned down a bit.
Are the features worth it?
Please drive your car.
I don't care what choices you make wrt bluetooth or heated seats or iphone integration ... but if you can't be bothered to drive the car then perhaps a different transport option would be a better choice for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
"... as we look at this accident history what we find is that in 68% of these accidents, automation dependency plays a significant part ..."
"... automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."
You should be more concerned with what I'm doing bluetooth than whether or not I let the car keep a safe following distance from the car in front of me since if I'm in a heated discussion with my ex on the phone, I'm paying a lot less attention to the road than I should be, and I'd be better off letting the car do most of the driving.
None of the driver assistance features I listed above allow hands-off driving, if ACC fails, my car will slow down, or maybe get too close to the car in front of me, but since I've already got my hands on the wheel and looking ahead, it's not a big deal.
The poor state of automation for most cars actually ensures better driver attention -- LKAS works around 80% of the time on the freeways. If it worked 99% of the time, I'd be less focused on driving.
But even looking at airplanes, even if automation is implicated in some portion of accidents, is that worse than if pilots have to actively fly the entire time and end up exhausted by the end of a cross country flight when it comes time to land and they need to be at their best.
What is wrong with a wheel and function stalks?
Gimmicks like this, and they are gimmicks, are dangerous and it's concerning no regulator seems to care enough to stop it.
FSD beta. The yoke steering wheel. Like a quarter of everything SpaceX does.
Does he just have really good lobbyists? Is his force of personality just that good? It’s kind of fascinating.
Have you seen Tesla being the only company not invited on electric car day in white house?
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a37244461/elon-musk...
Do you know that Tesla will be excluded from tax credits for EVs?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/energy-secretary-defends-tes...
Do you know that Texas where Tesla is building its next factory does not allow to sell Teslas?
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-law-keeps-teslas-made...
> Do you know that Texas where Tesla is building its next factory does not allow to sell Teslas?
You think you can't buy a Tesla in Texas? What planet are you on?
You have to buy your Tesla out of the state and Tesla will deliver the car to Texas.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-law-keeps-teslas-made...
https://insideevs.com/news/510302/tesla-no-sales-allowed-tex...
Biden administration is explicitly designing laws to prop up other car companies and exclude Tesla.
It's not just about labor PR, they want to force Tesla to unionize.
But Tesla will not unionize and they will be the only ones without subsidies. Extremely shitty lobbing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/energy-secretary-defends-tes...
Uhh, Texas?
You cannot buy a Tesla in Texas. Technically speaking, the transaction happens out of state and the car is shipped to you in Texas. Legally speaking Tesla has never sold a car in Texas. They have Tesla "galleries" where you can look at cars, take test drives, customize your order, and they'll help with the paperwork for you to buy it out of state.
I don't think Texas is alone in their dealer franchise laws.
For me I'd replace that with: scary. Full size A4 paper and bigger screens in cars you can stream movies on while driving (distraction leading to accidents); the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space); pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people). These aren't fascinating things.
Just like Tesla's charging infrastructure! Can you imagine if you had to find a Ford or a Toyota gas station to fill up at? This world used to be able to get along, to find general welfare. Cooperation used to exist. Tesla keeps being more and more an example of anti-cooperative anti-civil market-capture horseshit. A car no one else can repair, with it's own charging infrastructure, it's own roads: this screams "THE ENEMY" to me. It's the most capitalist-lowlife Lawful Evil behaviors writ large here, on display: vulgar & primitive exercises in dominance, with no pretense that there's space for anyone else in the world, no sense in leaving any room for any one else on the planet.
If Tesla's goal was to lock-in their customers and exclude other vehicles, they seem to be doing all the wrong things.
1. https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#patent-pled...
2. https://www.tesla.com/support/non-tesla-supercharging
3. https://driveteslacanada.ca/model-y/tesla-ccs-adapter-activa...
tesla making a patent pledgeh not early, in 2014- doesnt incentivize anyone to pick tesla's bespoke new charging technologies, if your cars wont reap the benefits of interoperability with their system. tesla didnt say their charging infrastructure would work with your cars, only that you could go make your own copies of either car or charger network.
your messaging is extremely strong & you raise some very good points. from my perspective though you are still concealing, hiding, denying more than hapf the facts. random irrelevant facts like teslas being able to consumer actual standards get thrown in, but of course tesla wants to be a parasite on othercs network externalities while providing no net benefit themselves, yet you describe this lopsided controlling behavior as if it's in their favor. you throw in non-network-effect charging as though it should have an impact on society growing positive network effects for itself: this also feels ultra-contrary to the point. even if true, it means i cant go to a friends and expect my non-tesla to get a charge.
everything here is shit. your "rebuttals" are examples of tesla insisting on their own game. you ignored the points about LV & the impossible-to-repair-out-of-network problems with tesla. i am not mived by your arguments, they feel distracting & misdirecting.
Teslas will only let you watch videos if you're in park. This has always been the case.
> the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space)
It cost $50m to construct, which is 1/5th the cost of similarly-specced people movers or trains. The second-cheapest bid was by Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group and would have cost $215m. The loop has met or exceeded all of the benchmarks set by the Las Vega Convention & Visitors Authority.[1] The program has been so successful that LVCVA purchased the Las Vegas Monorail system just so they could get rid of the monorail's noncompete clause and allow a larger Vegas Loop to be constructed.[2] Later, Clark county unanimously approved construction of the Vegas Loop, which is planned to have 51 stations and 29 miles of tunnel.[3]
> pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people)
No vehicle running the FSD beta has been involved in a death. You're talking about the autopilot features, which are a form of traffic aware cruise control. Many of the claimed fatalities turned out to be reckless drivers. For example: a fatal crash in Texas last April originally blamed autopilot and claimed that it was "100 percent certain" that no one was in the driver seat at the time of the crash.[4] The preliminary NHTSA investigation found that the driver was in the driver's seat, had not buckled his seat belt, and had pressed the accelerator to as high as 98.8%. (This was in a 778 horsepower Model S that could go from 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds.) NHTSA investigators could not engage autopilot on the road where the crash happened, since that road had no lane markings.[4] Also the owner of the vehicle had not purchased the the option to allow autopilot on surface streets.
There are many legitimate criticisms that one can level at Musk & his companies, but you haven't made them.
1. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tourism/boring-co-s-t...
2. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tourism/lvcva-expecte...
3. https://twitter.com/ClarkCountyNV/status/1450877187779796992
4. https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/19/22391890/tesla-driverless...
5. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/driver-was-behind-wheel...
Tesla paraded their new truck with 'stainless steel body panels all around'. I don't know about you, but I've banged my shin into a steel tow hitch. I don't want anything remotely close to that on the road.
The bigger issue with larger vehicles is their height around people current full size or even mid-size SUVs and trucks have gotten larger than their former variants. You're much more likely as a pedestrian to get run over than to be hit by a car and land on the hood or the windshield (which is by far the better position to be in during an accident). The crash bar behind the bumper on all cars have a thick layer of foam that contributes to the 'softness' of a bumper.
F1 steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVz6IW_wegs&t=45s
Tesla steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWtJu0q3sBQ&t=44s
When I drive, my hands aren't always in the exact same position on the wheel. Muscle-memory won't reliably have my thumb landing on the correct signal direction. If I have to honk the horn, I need to be able to do that instantly, without thinking. Some cutesy icon located away from the edge of the steering wheel will guarantee that the horn sounds simultaneously with the "crunch" of another car backing into me.
My proposed rule-of-thumb: If a video game company wouldn't design their controllers this way, you shouldn't do it either for the most common—or most urgent—functions. Turn signals, wipers, horn, and hazard lights should all be real buttons that are in a consistent location. Horn should be in the hub of the steering wheel.
And why in the hell does a yolk need to have the horn on a button rather than the center of the yolk as anyone would expect? Maybe there's some technical reason i'm unaware of, but this seems actively dangerous for no gain. I can think of several better ways to do this that aren't actively confusing and hostile to the driver.
No you're right, it's change for the sake of change. It is now a status symbol to show off how well you drive a vehicle whose management is more challenging than other cars.
But I agree, that second video is insane.
Used to turn the plane.
Also put on oxen to pull a plow.
> yolk
Yellow part of an egg.
The only accidents I can imagine the horn preventing are ones where you are stationary, which almost always means the other car is moving slowly - like somebody backing into you in a parking lot. Overall pretty low consequence incidents.
So to the extent that horn use is nearly all elective rather than emergency, is antisocial and has few benefits: make it a small, hard-to-reach button.
(With important exceptions like heavy vehicles that can't maneuver well and non-Western driving cultures that rely on routine horn use to communicate intentions.)
[0] Granted aircraft have an extra dimension to play in for collision-avoidance. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/11/honk-if-you-know-why-yo...
People with your attitude toward horn use likely cause substantial harm to society through fender benders, delays, frustration, etc, etc.
I think I can maybe count on one hand the number of times I've had to move out of a lane lest someone merge into me. The times that situation has been prevented through horn use are innumerable. And that's just one example.
Your comment fondly reminded me of my very first computer, which was a Sinclair ZX81.
Let's just say that it wasn't ideal for text processing.
About the same as this "steering console" doesn't look quite ideal for driving a fucking car.
I concur with your horrification.
The 800 had real keys, but the 400 was just a membrane keyboard. Didn’t matter; we only used it to play video games anyway.
I can’t imagine having to type on that thing.
3/4 of the reason they're touch is being 'cool' and none of the designers ever cooking a meal in their life.
Its definitely easy to clean my entire range being a flat piece of glass, and personally I've never had any problems with sensitivity on the buttons. Plus, that whole cook top is then still useful as a counter top as even the glass is only slightly raised over the rest of the counter surface. In my experience the glass top range I have has been wonderful, and I was originally planning on tearing it out and putting in a gas unit. I've since second guessed those plans and will probably keep the range for a while longer, no knobs has actually been pretty nice.
Smoke and mirrors is Tesla's way of operating. Look at the coverage they got out of the yoke. Out of FSD. It doesn't matter that they are terrible: there'll be 100 articles about it releasing and 2 about it being a bad idea.
Tesla has established a brand image based around a different set of attributes and they design, market and sell to it.
[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2082556/starring-role-hollywo...
It would be significantly less stupid if it had physical buttons on the steering wheel.
I realize there's a joke in Germany about this, but to be clear, all passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. must have working turn signals. See https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2004-title49-vol5/xm...
Lots of after market mirrors support this, but admittedly I've only put them in cars that didn't have a camera to begin with.
I prefer the center console. The rearview mirror is shaped and sized to display the small sliver that you can see out of the rear window which are tiny these days due to increased pillar width, and rounded back to improved crash safety and aerodynamics. The size and aspect ratio of the center console makes it much easier to see details, and doesn't have to compete with bright back-lighting from the sun. Increasing the size of the rearview mirror would be an option - don't know how big you can get before it starts impeding forward view (again, because the front roof slopes down more for aerodynamics than they did in the past).
1. I know modern engines claim not to need to be warmed up, but I think that's a load of crap. Oil and other lubricants at very cold temperatures need to warm up and there's no evidence that it hurts anything. And it only uses a little sip of gas.
https://www.amazon.com/Vehicle-Backup-Cameras/b?ie=UTF8&node...
The backup camera genuinely is a great feature, but the touchscreen is itself awful. I agree with Mazda on this (and the US Navy, which is also replacing touchscreens with knobs).
I'm hoping we start seeing a renaissance of car customization -- for example I know that kit cars, almost all of which are pretty dumb - are gaining in popularity. One of the nice things about electric vehicles is the greatly simplified powertrain is going to create a lot of opportunities for customization and DIY, and I hope our regulatory environment is reformed to support that more. In the czech republic, everyone works on their own car and we have a friend who built his own car from scratch, but in the U.S. we see a lot less of that type of autonomy.
The Honda CR-V is like you say, it will only turn on if you had the radio on when the car was shut off (makes sense), but turns on long before it is capable of responding to the off button.
The Chevy Bolt infuriatingly turns on (almost) every time you get in the car regardless of whether the radio was on or not when you last used it. For the life of me I cannot figure out what heuristics cause it to (very rarely) not turn on. At least its off button is functional at the time it starts playing.
I fixed it by wiring a simple toggle switch into the the power line for the stereo and mounting it in the dash. Problem fixed. "Off" shuts off the stereo instantly.
You might be able to read up on your model/package and do this, or consult a car stereo installation shop to do this.
Did you find a newish one?
I haven't really had to adjust the climate controls in my current car since I bought it, aside from pressing the defrost button a few times. During that time outside temperatures have ranged from 15F to 110F, and my car is always comfortable inside. Even the heated steering wheel and heated seats are automatic, I haven't had to manually control those either. Automatic climate control has worked very well for me across 4 different models of cars ranging from a 2000 Honda Accord, a 2012 Ford Focus, a 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe, and a 2021 Mustang Mache E. All of them pretty much never required me to adjust it day to day, and I would go weeks to months without needing to do anything.
Given that you're talking about only being able to set the temperature selector down to 65, it sounds like you're doing automatic climate control wrong. You're going to have a bad experience if you're always setting it to max cold or max heat instead of just picking a comfortable temperature in the middle and letting the car get to that temp. Sure, it'll take a minute or two before it starts blowing air, because usually the AC needs to really start cranking before its doing anything or it takes a bit for the heater core to warm. During that time you're not really doing much blowing around the air, in fact you might make the experience in the car worse blowing non-conditioned air around.
Just like in your house, setting your AC unit to 60F isn't going to make your AC unit run harder. Do you go to your home thermostat and drag it all the way one way when you're warm, then drag it all the way to the other direction when you're cold? No, you set it for a comfortable temperature and let the system hold it there.
That's the issue. Suppose the car is at an ambient temperature of 50 degrees. I get in and start it up. I want air that's just slightly warmer than ambient but I can't get it. If I set it to 65, I get hit with air that's probably 90 degrees until the whole car hits 65, meanwhile I'm sweating like it's high summer. If I set it to Low, the only setting below 65, it turns me into a frozen dinner. Generally I'm forced to keep the AC off and just be slightly cold because I have no direct control of the air that's hitting me. There's no way to tell the car to blow slightly warm air if the ambient temperature is below 65 degrees.
I'm sorry your experiences suck and you have to manually adjust your AC system dozens of times per drive to make your car comfortable. Personally though I see that as a massive step back, not an improvement. Would you mind sharing the make of car so I can be sure to avoid it?
Also, when talking about automatic climate control, do you also have it set to automatic fan speed as well, or just temperature? Maybe your system would perform better if you let it also control the fan speed if you aren't already. For my experiences I pretty much always let directionality, fan speed, and temperature set to be automatically controlled.
There are four things that piss me off about the Spider. 1: Touch screen which I don't want lit up most of the time, but which doesn't respond to touch to turn it off while you're driving. 2: Stupid as hell autobrake comes on for 2 seconds if you clutch and brake on a hill over 8% grade. You have to toggle the emergency brake or do a heel-toe to not be pushing against your brakes when you start up off a hill. 3: It's beyond me how they could sell this car with a touch screen but without a boost gauge. 4: No ashtray.
This may change soon to only be the WRX and BRZ with a stick shift next year, but currently their lineup is rather competitive for AWD compact cars.
Back in the days of our 80's datsuns, when upping the boost you definitely need to keep an eye on it. These days, ECUs have that under control, there will be a MAP sensor that monitors pressure and boost cut / limp mode will follow any overboost situation.
My late 2000s BMW for example had a weird compound turbo setup that, to its credit, could build 23psi in a second but if any of the actuators failed could be disasterous for the baby turbo. The ECU was smart enough to measure the normal boost profile and would throw a fault code if it was over/under spooling. The control logic was impressive, I was happy with the response and the intake was kept FOD free, even on the day one of the actuators failed open.
Edit, to add: the OLEDs aren’t to market yet… but they’re on the way!
Edit: grammar.
If you tell customers that two TVs are identical except one doesn’t need a dongle for Netflix and is cheaper, they’ll choose the smart one.
Since when have we become complacent in subsidizing our product purchases with... more ads for other products? It's absolutely ludicrous.
The One Connect Box has all the ports including power, HDMI, ethernet, USB etc. and the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.
I'm not sure that's what the parent commenter was asking for.
That is not a step forward.
Of course you can also just by an external Nvidia Shield unit and connect it by HDMI, like you can now.
Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid.
It has become really hard to get a proper dumb TV, if they aren't using the well known OSes, they bundle some custom firmware that also pretends to be smart anyway, most likely using some FOSS POSIX OS.
The reality is, simple is only available in the luxury segment.
I am prolly going with a 'OK' brand one. Even thought I hated their ugly OS it is the only I've found so far that somewhat acts as a 'classic' TV.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1629170-REG/nec_e438_...
edit: just saw that the one you linked does have a tuner and remote! Brilliant! Might actually end up buying the 32 inch one, it's very reasonably priced.
https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/dacia... https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/lada/
I know someone who had a Lada Niva, and he got stranded because a low quality pipe joint blew. True, the repair was extremely cheap, and it could probably be temporarily repaired with a hose and two zippers. Are you a mechanic that can locate and fix those kind of failures? Then Ladas are for you. You can't tell apart the windscreen fluid from the blinker fluid? Your Lada will spend more time in the repairshop than on the road.
If you expect to drive more than 50% of the time on asphalt but money is tight, do yourself a favour and buy at least a Dacia Duster.
The specialist garage doesn't know what's wrong and I don't hold out much more hope for the main dealer who should know best but I've met people who work at main dealers.
What is annoying is that it seems to try to start and sometimes immediately stops like a stall. If you press the brake and let ago, it will try again but after this it tells you to restart the car so you have to move the transmission back to park, turn the key with your foot on the brake and then move back to drive to pull away. As you can imagine, this takes longer than it takes for the person behind to beep their horn. It makes it worse because I am usually looking down when it all kicks off so the people think I am not paying attention.
I can disable the auto-stop but it gets enabled when you go into Eco-mode so you have to remember this in traffic before the panic begins.
On another note, are you seeing significant gains in fuel economy while running on Eco-mode?
I especially like the larger fuel gauge; I drove a car once that had a handful of little LCD rectangles like a coarse bar graph. I struggled to tell if I had 50% or 75% left!
Just providing a "dumb" head unit with as close to zero features besides CarPlay and Android Auto would be sufficient to have a good user experience at this point, at least in the context of a "dumb car".
Last time I was on Android (~5 years ago), you could actually run Android Auto as an app on your phone, so a phone mount like that would be fine (even if not amazing), but Apple doesn't let you run CarPlay directly on your phone -- it only works with an external display designed for CarPlay, so a phone mount like this is notably worse for iPhone users. CarPlay's interface is much better designed for use in a vehicle than the regular iOS interface.
Phone mounts like that have the additional problem that smartphones have continued to grow and grow, and a lot of cars from 5 or 10 years ago that offer any kind of phone charging spot or phone mount can't fit most modern smartphones in the allocated spot... so phone mounts like that can become obsolete even without any electrical components whatsoever.
They are fixed in place to a vehicle with a battery, still you don't have them powered.
Not that car ones (powered, heating, massaging, etc.) are not nice and comfortable, only that they remain a form of luxury.
I do drive cars, though, and sometimes other people's cars. I'd much rather be able to adjust while driving so that I can have better control over the car than have to fumble with levers, which might propel me back far enough that I cannot brake. Heck, I might have been having to adjust because I didn't realize how far i needed to press the brake in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603532
Direct link:
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/archives/manuals/71bus/page1.jpg
Modern business and first class seats are indeed powered.
Adjustable tightness of part of the seat above your hips which keeps you better in tight/fast curves. Heating for cold starts. Massage for luxury. My BMW has it all apart from massage and its makes longer drives much more pleasant.
EDIT: It was still a tight fit for tall folks, though. In that particular car, the adjustment mostly helped short folks see better.
My 2010 Kia Soul has manual seats that can go up and down.
Although when the Kia Soul was first introduced, Kia threw almost every feature they could in it to win market share!
when I figured out what I had done I laughed at myself for a solid 10 minutes
YMMV, but I have no problem using mechanical adjustments. Power is no advantage for me.
Mechanical adjustment is fine for up-down, tilt (if it uses a dial), and lumbar, but for forward-back I prefer electric. Also because manual forward-back adjustments are very coarse.
All new cars require a back up camera due to legislation. But a backup camera with a huge 8" screen is only useful for backing up. So the manufacturers try to use that screen real estate for infotainment when the car is moving forward.
Fortunately the HVAC is controlled via physical buttons.
My last two trucks have been lower trim packages to avoid the distracting screens and other "features" I don't need.
This appears to be an example of technology solving a design flaw rather than rent-seeking capitalism.
http://www.kidsandcars.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Backov...
They have a range of goals including reducing Urban speed limits to 20-25mph and adding more safety features to cars.
Sad fact is modern giant SUVs have very poor rear visibility and children are just not visible if they are behind the vehicle. Backup cameras are the only reasonable option aside from "stop driving obscenely oversized vehicles."
(Another solution would be changing current laws so that 3 row station wagons were legal again, right now SUVs and Minivans fill a need that the 3 row station wagon used to, but it was legislated away long ago.)
I also want all of the information about the car I can get. For example, I don't want a "tire low light", I want an air pressure in each tire with an flashing indicator that its out of safe range. I don't want an "overheat", I want the temperature and big flashing when its out of range.
I do wish for a HUD just because I want my eyes on the road, but I think that's a lost dream.
I dearly wish someone would design a car for easy repairs, but we all know that isn't a profit positive thing.
In 1994, Mazda removed it, and put in a "Dumb" gauge. It looks like a gauge, but really is either on above a certain PSI or off below that. They did this because so many people were bringing in their cars for service because they didn't understand how the real pressure gauge worked, and thought something was wrong.
There are actually lots of cars like this. My Ford Explorer has a dumb oil pressure gauge. My Honda Fit doesn't even have a coolant temp gauge. So I only know when the thing gets too hot, or if the coolant is too cold. Can't tell if the car starts running hotter than normal to catch a problem before it destroys something.
As an aside, the 'dummy gauge' is arguably worse than a lamp because it's much easier to overlook a needle being out of range than it is a light that's always off suddenly being on.
The first generation Miata is an amazingly fun car to drive - it's not fast, but it feels 100% mechanical (even though there are a few computers in the engine).
> After a week of fun and wild-eyed frustration with the 2022 Volkswagen Golf R ... I was ready to scold VW’s product planners. Never has so good a car been so let down by its touchscreen, software and switchgear.
> But I just don’t have the heart. It’s not like the R’s deciders wanted to put a one-eyed, lowest-bidder monstrosity smack in the middle of their flagship Golf R .... But they had a number to hit, a belt to tighten, and nobody was going home until they did.
> ... The VW system’s boot-up is interminable; operators must wait many long seconds in the morning before they can adjust simple things like fan speed and seat heaters. The touchscreen response is like an ATM from the 1990s. The thin horizontal sliders for volume and cabin temperature are not illuminated so they are hard to see at night.
wsj.com/articles/2022-vw-golf-r-sporty-stylish-not-the-best-ux-11643317829
I want simple, +Bluetooth Audio
I want simple, +rear Camera
I want simple, +Cruise Control
I want simple, ....
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
* Media controls are handled by swappble receivers that can handle anything from tapes to Bluetooth and satellite radio depending on your preference. Everything else is physical nobs and buttons.
* Cars have cruise control, hydraulic power steering, probably power windows, push to start as an aftermarket add-on, and probably remote lock/unlock.
Broke teenagers in the early 2000s were able to figure out "basic car with add-ons." It's amazing that huge corporations can't manage.
In the car market you actually can get 80% of the sales with 80% of the features in defiance of Joel. That’s Honda and Toyota’s bread and butter.
I thought aux only carries analog sound, is charging a new feature? Did I miss Aux-C? What does the author mean?
> Not to mention the privacy and security concerns. I was dubious the first time I saw a GPS in a car, my mom’s old RX300, about 20 years ago. “Yeah… that’s how they get you,” I thought
Well, that reasoning was flawed 20 years ago - GPS means YOU know where you are, not the other way around. There has to be other communication channel for that data to "escape". If your car is data-enabled with SIM card, only then it is a concern.
> Not having GPS or data (or hidden microphones or cameras) also makes your vehicle feel more private, obviously.
I can't exclude the possibility that the author is a moron, but I suspect it's just outrage-bait. Like that whole article.
Escape channel is called internet, not GPS. Obviously if your car has Internet and GPS, it can do it.
But if you had only starlink dish on your car, without GPS, I wouldn't be surprised if it was technically possible to track location to some degree of accuracy.
Friend of mine called me from his rental car asking why his phone notifications were still coming through the car despite having Bluetooth turned off.
Of course he was charging his phone from the built in USB port and it was actually a data port.
I have found that my Toyota Corolla Hybrid has about the right mix of smart and dumb (in terms of dials and knobs), and again in disagreement to the article .. I love my digital speedo! It’s high up on the dash and closer to the road, compared to my old space-wasting meters that were more difficult to read.
And the concern about the GPS in our cars invading our privacy.. this would really only concern a certain type of paranoid person. Most people don’t care. I certainly prefer the fully integrated GPS, that dims the radio and such whenever I need to do something. Removing it certainly won’t make any car fly off the shelves! Bad analysis.
When my 2005 Mazda MPV suffered a flat battery, the centre console screen which was the navigation / radio / clock / DVD player (yes, really) was bricked, and to this day displays a message in Japanese asking you to please insert the manufacturer's navigation data CD to continue using it.
Which no-one has access to, not even in Japan (my brother has been living there for about ten years, and is very helpful for obscure parts requests), so now my radio and clock don't work, because I don't have a CD with data needed for a 16 year old navigation system that, when working, was thoroughly convinced I was driving long distances on the bottom of Tokyo Bay and was desperate for me to turn right and get back on dry land.
My Dad's old Subaru Legacy used its display to show Japan rotating around as we turned corners, us always in the sea.
I'm onto my second 2005 Mazda MPV (they're great cars). This time I've replaced the head unit with one of those nasty cheap Android things. Basically a confused tablet with some extra hardware, running any mapping or other app you want.
That's not a bad idea at all on the head.
I don't have a factory camera, but would be worth doing a third party one, the visibility while reversing is rather poor as soon as you get teenagers sitting in the back.
This is true regardless of whether you have a telematics subscription. The subscription just enables the stuff you can actually use.
Manufacturers are monetizing that information, selling it to anyone who wants to buy it. I know someone that worked for a company using said data to try and enhance weather reporting (the data reported back includes outside air temperature, headlights, windshield wiper status, etc.) They were receiving data from multiple manufacturers.
I replaced the stereo with the cheapest CarPlay unit I can find for navigation, phone charging, and media playback. I love this too since my only screen-based ui in the car gets updates with every new iOS.
Also, I had more precise control with the hand-crank.
(and also more convenient in other situations where I need to quickly open the window and actively drive at the same time, e.g. toll booths, drive thru's)
For the record, I hate electric windows, because of insensitivity of the button, it's almost impossible to open the window by few millimeters only (just to allow air circulation to avoid condensation on windows). Or in winter if it freezes to the frame, I want to be able to open without a need of warming it up first. Or not to buy the entire lifting mechanism because a 2$ plastic piece brakes inside. I understand the few uses of electrical window, but those can simply be fixed by avoiding farting inside a car, or politely asking the culprit to open their window themselves.
Much like I enjoy the electric starter on the car, such that I do not need to crank it by hand to start it. I'm "proud and enjoy" my electric starter and windows, and make absolutely no apology for doing so. You want to warm your house with a fire started by flint and tinder, have at it; I'll be over here with my gimmicky heat pump.
Bought it 7 years ago for less than a modern GPU currently costs. If you have a mechanic as a friend it can be extremely cheap to own a car. I wonder how the used market will look in the future, I guess prices will be a lot higher and many not security related features will be broken.
Buying a car > $15,000 is always idiotic if you do in any way care about losing $15,000 in my opinion. If you don't care about the money, a happy spending to you. Otherwise get a company car that is financed by other tax payers.
I buy only vehicles with hand-cranked windows.
I've actually got 2 cars with crank windows and am in the process of converting one of them to power windows just because it doesn't have AC and I want an easier way to manage the windows.
I have been driving since a lot of time, what happened to me lately a couple of times was that renting a car it takes me some time (I mean 10-15 minutes) to get a minimal confidence with commands and features of the UI, besides the most basic ones that thankfully remain the same, there are lots of them that are, in different make/models, completely different, and I am always scared that I can by mistake enable or disable this or that "smart" thing.
One addition to the smart tech a dumb car could benefit from - radar cruise control. Increasingly offered on new models and reduces cognitive workload of highway driving.
It was constantly trying to take the controls from me (god forbid you change lanes without signaling on a totally empty road!), the dashboard screen was constantly changing, and dynamically listed the speed limit in two places, but often it was completely wrong and sometimes it didn't even agree with itself. I am still not clear what it was trying to tell me. The console screen was 'dumb' in the bad way, and would lose connection with my phone constantly, but you couldn't re-connect it because you're not allowed to do that while driving. The interface was of course badly designed and slow to respond, so changing radio stations was a nightmare (which I had to do because my phone wouldn't connect. In the end I just used my ear-free headphones since it was easier.
My old Skoda had none of this. Real dials / gauges, simple physical climate controls, and a hole which you can put a stereo head unit in (I put the dumbest one I could find with bluetooth in for €40). I had a strong magsafe mount for my phone and done.
I like Skodas. Although a Czech friend told me that Skoda in Czech is a car name, a common surname, and a casual term for "idiot".
It reminds me of one time I was sitting in a bar in Spain, and a chicken walked inside. And it was a female chicken, not a rooster, so I thought it should be "polla" instead of "pollo". So I waved at the bartender and said "Mira! Está una polla en la barra!" and all the guys in the bar started roaring with laughter because "pollo" is male or female for any chicken, but "polla" in Spain does mean slang for "idiot". After that every time I'd walk into that bar they'd ask if I saw a "polla" hahahahah
I had a rental car last year that did this. One speed limit is the (often outdated) speed limit it picks up from the navigation system's maps, and the second in the most recent speed limit sign the cameras OCR'd.
The speed limit from the maps is invariably wrong as soon as you turn off a major road, and the cameras seem to miss about every 3rd speed limit sign...
Well of course. "Nobody else is here" looks the same to you (and me) as "I haven't seen that other road user", and in the event that you haven't seen the other road user, the only chance they have is for them to take action and they really, really need the warning of your indicator lights.
On a winding two lane (same direction) mountain road with light snow and no traffic, it's silly to tell the car 'I am going to cross this stripe now' to avoid the car trying to steer me into the barrier. I am constantly driving on top of the lane lines to avoid snow, ice, minimize breaking, and generally drive smoothly so as not to put unneeded forces on a car in icy conditions. Edge case? Yes, but there are tons of them.
Examples (imagine snowy conditions at night):
Is this real? That sounds like a terrible terrible idea, can’t imagine any government body allowing this.
That's all that you need to know that the author is a tech blogger and not a car salesman.
People will continue to buy "smart" cars until both of the following happen: (1) they pull themselves out of purchase apathy and start caring about the quality of their purchases and (2) the information asymmetry favoring automakers is substantially reduced.
Incidentally, if both of these things happen, the consumer market in general will massively improve.
For example with navigation, I thought the phone does it the same but having experienced a Tesla I honestly vastly prefer the Tesla navigation. The bigger screen makes it much easier to glance where on the map I am. You can mount a phone anywhere and it won't be nearly as easily visible. (The GPS screens on my older cars are definitely worse than the phone though)
For climate control I agree fully that the older dials and buttons work better. The problem with temperature control is your body is human and you don't always want a constant temperature. I remember in my very old cars from the 90s and early 00s there's way less I have to adjust for temperature. There's a position on the dial that is pretty much always right to use for the entire season. Nowadays if I set it at 68 it's too cold on some days and too hot on some days, depending on what I'm wearing, how I'm feeling that day, etc. I have to adjust it up or down, and then next time I drive I have to adjust it again.
Probably the one thing I disagree with the article on. Power seat adjustment is a heck of a lot safer in the driver seat than manual levers, and it's not even close.
If a passenger accidentally adjusts the seat too far forward or too far back while the car is in motion, fine, it's an inconvenience. If the driver does this, they become a road hazard.
I rented a car a few years ago that had Bluetooth for the audio and it was wonderful. Stop the car and my music paused, start it and it got going again.
I test drove a few new cars recently and of course they all had Bluetooth, but the Dacia Sandero Stepway had wireless Android Auto. You set it up over Bluetooth but after that you no longer needed to plug the wire in to have Android Auto on the screen. Really impressed me, and being a Dacia was the cheapest car I looked at. The Toyota dealership claimed it didn't exist when I asked about getting that on the Yaris.
You should get a better BT dongle though. Mine switches on when the power turns on.
The "please make sure you observe local road laws!" popup obscures the whole touchscreen for over a minute when you start off. It's been showing me this each time I've driven off for three years. I've got the message.
The intermittent windscreen wipers are supposed to respond to the rain on the screen, but vary in their response from nothing to double speed, uncorrelated to the actual weather. Can I just have an adjustable "once every few seconds" control?
And the best one - timed charging doesn't work over Saturday night/Sunday morning. Every other night, fine, but not then. Completely reproducible. I suspect some sort of date roll-over bug, but Renault have given up trying to find a problem.
Proper old school stuff. 9ff https://youtu.be/P-BTTquGvAw?t=628
Von Schmidt Resto-Mod built to your spec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzVr4cpNC58
Ruf CTR https://youtu.be/ZJwF1BX5uQc?t=1147
Personally though, I'd like to see the knobs for the essentials like fan speed and temperature as these get changed all the time, radio channels, mp3/disc selection, and then the less likely things to be fiddled with can go on screen and activated with maybe a few buttons.
For example, the roads in the UK are full of potholes, the state use this to keep the speed down on the road, but when driving in Germany on the autobahns (or the continent in general), the roads are better made so being able to setup on the touch screen different car setups which control suspension, ride height, steering input, engine tuning which can then be activated by pushing a button to cycle through comfort mode and sports, would seem to be a better bet, a more efficient way of setting up a car.
I hope the car companies log all the buttons pushed and touchscreen settings so that they can optimise their "UX" within the cars better because what I hate about the touchscreen is even on dark mode, at night it still interferes with your night vision a bit, and I'd like to turn it off like I think Saab used to do with their console display at night.
Bluetooth, GPS sat nav and all that sort of stuff, its handy in my opinion, but I'm also aware of how you can hack satnav to make a target take routes the satnav wouldnt normally select. The way to do that is to make your targets satnav think there are massive delays on the road, and then it reroutes. I havent heard of anyone who has reported this in the media, but its a doable form of hacking.
For the speed freaks, if you havent seen a car doing 259mph (417kph) on the unrestricted German autobahn, this is the link. https://youtu.be/7pg1hhW5qhM?t=153
The Countach that killed the Cannonball, but it shows you need technology if you want to drive fast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b7erU_DOfE
It's very basic compared to my Mercs, but oddly I enjoy driving it more - and I'm not one of those 'love cars, love to drive' people.
I relate to the point in the article about fancy screens; In my Jeep I fitted a very cheap (£30) Chinese radio head unit. It has almost no display, or useful functions, but it does have Bluetooth, so my phone does all the heavy lifting - internet radio, music, GPS etc. I can upgrade my phone at any point, and my jeeps infotainment system gets a bump-up at the same time.
It cost me over 300€ (new starter, new battery) to finally figure out myself that the cheap Chinese radio was draining my battery and preventing my car to start. Sometimes I had to turn the key 30 times (with a full battery) to start the car.
'Smart' means manufacturers can put ads on everything, sell your usage data, and of course all the smarts become obsolete or break easily after just a couple of years, often turning otherwise perfectly good hardware into a doorstop.
As part of 'right to repair' we should also demand 'right to own UI'; appliances have some standard (electronic/data) interfaces, and you can add off-the-shelf, or even custom UI of your choice.
Even more sad is it’s not like people looking for a new car have much of a choice.
My mountain bike is even better. Nothing electronic at all and only mechanical things I can fix myself. I love working on it more than on code sometimes.
I'm in the same boat, I've got lovely heated leather seats, nice strong engine, good handling, and a traction control that doesn't piss me off in winter. That's all I need and as "cool" as Tesla's are, I don't expect it'll be nearly as usable after 22 years as my Jetta is. Even VW has now gone down the dark side of EVs, when all I want is an electric 2000 Jetta. It's sad how wasteful these new EVs are.
But as far as music. Yes I just want to listen to my motor sometimes. But... I probably shouldn't admit this, but the reason I love driving to loud music is that I drive to the music. I prepare different MP3 mixes for my cars. The Datsun mixes are only music from 1970 to 1983, but I rotate the bands and songs before any long drive. When certain songs really take off I shift in time - I play the car like a guitar, and inevitably I want certain songs to come on when I know I'll be on an empty stretch of road with no cops and I can drive way too fast and shoot the curves. Blasting Kansas in an 80 Datsun at twice the speed limit is probably the closest I've ever gotten to pure joy.
When I travelled to Mexico, I've seen it very popular there under Renault brand.
The car feels cheap, cramped, and has no discernible acceleration :D. It also gets the job done, is dirt cheap to repair, and has so much clearance you can build a whole lean startup under the floor.
This car is a breeze to work on. It's a bog standard car. If something breaks, it can be fixed. The only things that can break are the things that make the car run. You don't need a specially trained technician. You don't need to remove a layer of plastic to get to the engine. There is no touch screen.
I have physical controls for climate, and even a dedicated defroster button. The car supports Android Auto / CarPlay, so I don't have to interact with its horrendous navigation (my favorite part is that it announces route changes in backwards manner, e.g. "Turn left ... in half a mile").
The card was cheap, and has been running without issues. It's not a luxury car for sure, but it does its job.
As for worst car UI experience ever, it has to be the Seat I'm driving. It has a large touch screen. So you decide you're going to touch an option and your finger is under way to the surface. During this movement, the UI detects you're going to press something and tries to "help" you by moving some sticky menu out of the way or the opposite: revealing some hover menu. So now the thing you were planning to touch has moved during the 0.5s travel.
The car is also in constant paranoia mode it seems. I'm parking forwards at about 1mph, slowly approaching the end of the lot, a boundary of shrubs. The car apparently thinks I'm close to dying. Everything is flashing and buzzing.
It also has a helpful planning system. I'm in the middle of a huge traffic jam and then it tells me "busy traffic ahead".
It has a navigation system where you can pick from 3 routes: fastest, easiest and some mysterious in-between option. Yet all routes lead to the exact same navigation instructions, it feels like somebody just made up the 10 minute "difference" in the UI.
When driving this car, I sometimes have this feeling that the makers are laughing at me as I drive it, to see how much you can mess with somebody before they understand they're the subject of a joke.
But this is no joke. I'm really quite sure that crappy car UI leads to injury and death. A car is not a Battlefield game that needs 2 years of bugfixing before it's usable.
Here you go. I see this companies cars driving around sometimes.
Edit: Just saw that the Brawley is off-road only. It doesn't meet DOT standards. That would probably explain why I haven't heard of it.
And once the writing is seen on the wall, no one will want to be the last person to buy an ICE. Things will change pretty rapidly.
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/11/10/countries-automakers-agree-go...
Increasingly they are. Analog connections and dials, for example, are already more expensive than digital ones. It is like...if you wanted to buy a car without power steering you really couldn't.
I guess if you want a golf cart you can buy a dumb EV. I don't know how that translates into a real car, however.
[0] https://hothardware.com/news/bidens-infrastructure-bill-mand...
(hot hardware is an oddly good source of electrical engineering news too!)
[1] https://miami.cbslocal.com/2021/12/29/new-federal-regulation....
> This is a terrible description of what the law actually does. Let's shine some light on the FUD. The law, H.R. 3684 (as enrolled), defines an "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology" as a system which can do /one/ of the following: 1. "passively monitor the performance of a driver... to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired... and prevent or limit [car] operation if an impairment is detected."
2. "passively and accurately" detect whether someone's BAC exceeds the Federal limit, and prevent or limit car operation if it's detected.
3. Both.
This will apply only after the DOT finalizes a rule describing what all those things actually mean in terms of manufacture. The law requires that the Secretary publish this rule within the next three years, unless they think it can't be done, in which case they can push it out another three years. That rule must give car manufactures at least another two years to implement the requirement. It also gives the DOT an out to say that it can't be done, in which case in 2031, they need to write a report to Congress to say why it can't be done.
In software terms, this is a user story that was just submitted for development. It's Congress asking the executive branch to do some work, but not actually forcing them to do so.
(But in the far-right wing press, "request to explore tech that keeps drunk people from driving" becomes "bill will mandate kill switch!" because of the click bait sound of it)
Heh. That ship has sailed.
Wait until electronic license plates using eInk roll out and update automatically. First they'll just change if you haven't paid your registration, then later if your insurance lapses, or maybe it'll light up with yellow LEDs when there's a kidnapping. It'll be integrated into Fast Pass toll-payment systems, why not? And over the next decade, as the taxes from gasoline disappear, the plates will have integrated travel tracking so you automatically pay $0.02 per mile road usage taxes. It'll be the most fair way to pay for the roads.
Yep, this is all coming. First, they'll be add-on plates, but then they'll be integrated into all new cars. Personal transportation is going to look completely different by the end of the century, anyways. Worrying about the number of knobs on your dashboard is like worrying about the color of your horse's blinders or whether your cart's wheels were made out of oak or cedar.
I already saw one in a top-end car and it’s absolutely practical. I can’t imagine that it costs anything to embed that in a car (it’s just a monochrome, really bright LED screen) so I assume manufacturers just want to keep them as high prices options.
The main message is super pathetic.
It claim simplicity but yet targets ICE car. The amount of parts in ICE vs any complicated EV is at least 3 times less. Sometimes more. So you just shift the complexity of running and driving super complex combustion engine towards your safety and comfort in EV and still car is 3 times simpler.
1. So one of points was no GPS. Who want to rely on your phone to know if you able to make to the charging station? What if you forget your phone and you're in the middle of highway deep in the forest?
2. Music. That's not even fun. Aux oh, yeah, how about ~1 billion people with iphone that doesn't have Aux. What if I want to play my music from my apple watch? And good luck managing several bluetooth devices with no screen. And what if some people doesn't want to rely on their device for such a basic thing as music? Really wiring your car with cords to charge your phone, connect aux, mount the phone is the way to make your car simple???? Are you serious?
3. Manual seat control. It seems like every argument in article is a denial of " i hate opinion and need of other people, I want my particular car". If 2 people or more own the same car, they want to adjust it automatically, including mirrors. I bet most of them will be happy to seat in a car, it read their profile from phone in the pocket, adjust seats temp etc including while driving out from drive way. That's already done in tesla including doors. No clicks at all. Screen is used when you need to change predefine settings. Even that can be altered via voice. Btw using voice is also more safe.
4. Climate control zoning. Same thing. How about people want it blow differently with different temp not for a different average temp in the cabin but for different feeling.
It's very refreshing to own.
I'm like, weren't these things $15k brand new?
I paid $15k for an '08 in 2017, and would not sell it below $15k even without the COVID car shortage price bump.
I turn on the car, my phone auto-connects, and my last podcast immediately starts playing where it left off. I don't even know how it does that. I receive a phone call, and my music is paused and I can hit the green "pick up phone" button on the headunit, and I'm talking. Call ends, and my music resumes. I can pause the music with the "1" button, skip within a track, skip tracks, even thumbs-up or thumbs-down in music apps, all with a handful of manual buttons on a stock headunit. No "flipping menus", the existing buttons just work.
It's amazing. It just works. All without any god damn embedded mobile operating system or fancy graphics. ... oh, and because this headunit has a CDROM bay, it holds my magnetic phone mount better than any of the stick-on or vent-grippy ones. Thanks, dumb car!
Mine is a 2016 Nissan Frontier and it only has a backup camera (which is honestly needed with a camper top).
It has 1 door-key-hole, no power windows or power locks, and an aftermarket stereo.
As a software engineer, I feel much safer in it than a car with more sophisticated computer controls XD
My 89 Caprice was awesome and didn't even have this problem. You could operate it by feel, even counting the clicks on the radio tuning dial to know how far you were tuning.
I wasn't aware that 16000$ worth of car comes with the music hardware straight out of the 90s
Mine is 4 wheel and came with a mobile holder. So there is that :)
Even the 'base models' are loaded with touch-screens, assistive driving and loads of other stuff I don't want.
I understand there are people out there that do want this stuff. I would hazard a guess there are many like me that would opt for another car without this stuff if it were available.
Brand it 'security-hardened' or whatever, I just don't want to be driving around your IT security nightmare. I also don't want you remotely hot-fixing my ride to make up for it.
I think there are people that care about this stuff enough that you could create a brand around the concept of 'just enough tech to make it work'.
I think that backup cameras are required in US cars post-April-2018 [1]. I think that's how manufacturers justify getting a screen on the dashboard. Every other (bad) decision is just "let's make the software do _this thing_" and the feature creep leads to terrible UI/UX.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/driver-assistance-technologi...
The 1991 Chevrolet Suburban with a 5.7L engine and the 700r4 automatic trans. Comfortable, analogue, and great looking. Easily updated with a backup camera, a modern sound system and remote start, etc. Heated seats are possible, as is any luxury you'd want.
Even the engine could be updated to an OBDII compliant LS, and the drivetrain is already as stout as can be. With more modern spring technology, even leaf springs can be made to ride nicely.
There are already companies doing restomods like these and selling them, and I doubt they can keep them in stock.
Sion is reasonably priced (sub €30k), seems to have just the right amount of technology, is spacious and has a decent battery pack (~300km range). Production starts next year. Oh, and it has integrated solar panels, which is a nice bonus!
I drive a 20 year old car. It's perfect. It has a CD player and you can use one of those 12 volt bluetooth / aux bongles if you want more.
Eventually my local area will probably ban them because they're obsessed with health metrics (cars a few years older are now effectively taxed out of existence). Then I'll have to make do with the log burner.
Until one of my neighbours dob me in for that, then I guess I move to the countryside or Eastern Europe or something and leave my house to a VR headset wonk.
5 Speed Manual Transmission Heated Seats Cruise Control SXM Radio All-wheel drive
No turbo to consume oil, no software to control the car. The Radio has Android Auto, and some software updates available for some nice 'radio features', like showing you the news, weather, sports information, etc. Never used it.
I still own a 1999 Isuzu Rodeo, safety and gas mileage were my reasons for getting the Subaru, as well as my desire to modify the Isuzu.
You can also buy a Caterham if you really want something simple and fun to drive (but unsafe).
No dings or errors also means no airbag, no ABS, and no way of knowing if your tire pressure suddenly drops. And good luck if you have any issues whatsoever while on a roadtrip. You did expect all mechanics to give a fair and honest price to get you back on the roadway, right?
I do overall agree that the controls of modern cars just don't feel 'balanced'. But I don't think an extreme stance like this is going to improve car UX.
Putting a screen in the vehicle seems like an extreme stance. It's borderline nuts, even — we have massive campaigns trying to get people to stop looking at their phones while driving.
Of course, it isn't a hit. The fact is most people want smart cars.
I did upgrade the distributor to be an HEI, but that's about as "high-tech" as it needed to be.
A $50 used deck with bluetooth is all the tech I need.
Wait until you get bombarded with ads in your "smart" car. It's coming, have no doubts.
Such components would allow for the cost savings of control by wire, without the danger of control by screen.
The main problem is that the car manufacturer has a monopoly on selling you features and updates after you have bought the car.
I only need two functions, a knob to change channels and one to adjust volume. If I need to play music, some aux input would be nice - that’s it!
Why not just get better UI designers instead of perpetuating the idea of using more physical resources than necessary and not getting safety features like backup cameras?
BTW budget cars sold in Europe like certain Dacia models are still pretty basic, yet with efficient and modern (ICE) engines.
I have even head Dacia does not in EVs.
There apparently isn’t much of a market for dumb cars.
If we let big tech/companies sorround us by things that we don't know how actually works or how to fix them, then we are screwed and completely dependent on their rules and trends. For example imagine that car will be manufactured without opening windows, like modern trains. Or they have implemented CO2 meters that collect data and limit traveling based on regulations made by gonverments.
If your parlance uses it for the transmission, your parlance is wrong. It is like calling square a circle.
As soon as I can afford it, I'm getting one of these. Electric and no-nonsense:
EDIT: Oh no, they are changing directions and will focus on trucks instead!
My 2020 Kona Electric has a pretty intuitive and responsive touchscreen, buttons for climate control, and CarPlay is nice to use? All the smart driving features like emergency braking and lane centering have saved my butt multiple times as well.
The situation I have today (in France at least) is that I have cars that are full of electronics but the UI is done by the car manufacturer and is horrible.
My dream is to have a car where I would configure my display. In my case that would be a large speed indicator, the distance I can drive with the current gas I have, and a display where bad things would be displayed, as they come.
What I have is a display full of things I completely do not care about. Temperature of the engine? The engine RPM? I completely do not care about these so I would like to get rid of them.
I think however we are very far from that state of bliss.
So please do not.
We argue on good grounds, and the author mentions, that we need standards for safety and reliability, sure.
But at what point do we admit that Regulatory Capture[1] destroys innovation to the benefit of only the major players?
Basically I just want a Chrysler with the infamous "Jeep Cherokee" hack[3]. Those cars were a modern miracle of amazingly well designed, consistent API engineering. Users gaining access to those systems, remotely, was shunned as a horrible vile thing, but it was an act of beauty & amazingness, a revelation of wonderfully good engineering. The coverage focused on the malicious acts, & that FUD far out-shined the amazing limitless potential of letting the world try to enrich themselves, make better. Tragic miscarriage against potential: the press murdered any hope of possibility in it's cradle. These cars were/are amazing. QNX OS running DBus protocols to expose all the car's systems: an easy to interface with, exploratory inter-system API for the whole car. We could have built anything here, it feels like. Instead, we damned & cursed the makers for having left some portal open to this computer: we parroted out terror.
I guess my gravy-on-top nee-plus-ultra ask atop having access to a car via DBus- the FreeDesktop standard IPC system- would be for the buttons to be more software defined, independent of their subsystems, which I think still wasn't entirely the case. I'd love to have a phone or console app running which can read from the big giant volume knob, for example, as I adjust some windows or the sunroof or the temperature. Infinite flexibility, please. I've said this before[4].
It's disappeared quickly, but Webinos was a very very interesting decade old attempt to define a user-empowering IoT architecture, & had significant interest from BMW/Land Rover. It's basically bitrotted off the internet, last seen early 2021[5], but was a really interesting user-centric system, where devices were linked not to corporate cloud services but to systems of users choice, exposing their capabilities & offerings generally. We need more holistic potentials in the world. We need to stop consigning away possibility, choosing retro-minimalism because we can't imagine any other possibilities than the vice, than the authoritarian, restrained systems of control most technology imposes upon us. We need personal computing to be possible again, broadly in the world, across devices, we need choice, we need agency, we need to stop being damned by computers & start being served by them: this is only possible if we let the users back in, re-open the frontiers.
In the end, I think the Chromecast model is basically right. The car should have a pre-baked system, but present some HTML capable interfaces, which themselves expose a couple additional above-and-beyond Web IoT apis to adjust windows, sunroofs, hvac. There should be decoupling (which I think Webinos was an early & technically successful contendor for).
[1] https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1478387800542224392
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
[3] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463898
[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20210115211241/http://webinos.org...
No web connectivity. Either you're plugged in through CAN, or F-OFF. There is no logical reason for an internet exposed portal to physical car systems. Period.