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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

If UI designers were making a car, the pedals would switch spots for no apparent reason every year, and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.

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You jest, but we're almost there with Tesla, where the wheel is no longer a wheel, the turn signals are two buttons (on the same side of the wheel) rather than a stalk, the gear shifter is removed and the car literally tries to guess whether you want to go forward or backward, and every other control is on a touchscreen, and does indeed move around or disappear into a menu at least every year.

Based upon this alone, I cannot see myself buying Tesla -- especially with so many other options opening up.

The irony is I actually own a Tesla, but it's a Model Y, so fortunately doesn't yet have most of the worst of these.

You just described (almost) every real race car in the past few decades, where everything is bespoke engineered and done solely for "UI/UX."

Race cars are optimised for racing, not manoeuvring. Try applying their wheel geometry to you road car. You won't get far, though you will get there very fast and very sideways.

Aftermarket steering wheels are widely available for road cars. Most of them are wheel shaped.

This is not all that far from what's happening with touchscreens in cars.

Pros of touchscreens:

- You can make the UI look like anything you want.

Cons of touchscreens:

- You can make the UI look like anything you want.

The more important con of touchscreens for cars is that you have to look at them. Well-designed controls for cars can be reliably operated by feel once learned.

I'm less convinced by this: controls within easy reach while driving need to be physical because you can reach them without looking, but the center control dash is always a little bit too far away from a comfortable driving position to start with - and thus a reasonable candidate to be touchscreen-ifyed provided you don't put serious controls on it.

i.e. I don't mind touchscreen A/C controls or something, provided the driver's wheel also has those controls (which in my old Toyota Prius it does).

IMO the big innovation is making sure that everything I would want to do while driving is literally at my fingertips, which should be on the steering wheel.

While you generally have to do a quick glance to find the center console controls, after you get a hold on them you can put your eyes back on the road because of the physical feedback. You would need incredibly good haptics on a touch screen to accomplish the same (I haven't experienced incredibly good haptics on any car I've rented (my car uses mostly physical buttons))

I do not understand how Tesla was allowed to put de-fog button for the windshield in a submenu on the touchscreen. This is a critical safety feature. The only explanation is that it is not needed often in California.

biggest con is you have to look at it to do anything.

being able to turn the heater or defrosters on without looking is a pretty big upside when driving.

tesla changing where that is in updates and making you look for it in a new design just makes a bad problem worse

tesla changing where that is in updates and making you look for it in a new design just makes a bad problem worse

There was extensive discussion about that on here a short while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30140984

The problem isn't that you can make the UI look like anything you want, it's that only the manufacturer can do so, without authorization nor notice.

Actually being able to customise it yourself (and have the changes persist long-term) wouldn't be that bad.

I’d develop that argument a little further, you can’t stop the manufacturer from changing the UI you currently like arbitrarily at some point in the future.

I don’t like that on my computer and definitely don’t want it in my car. It’s bad enough when you buy a new car and things have been “improved”.

This was a real problem until US Gov mandated "PRND" shift order, among other things.

Now, if they could just make the windshield wiper controls all work the same direction...

Why not just remove the physical windshield wiper controls, try to make them automatic, and then bury the overrides in a touchscreen menu 2 layers deep? And what if you got rid of the PRND stock and putting your car in reverse involved making a gesture on the same touchscreen? Genius!

No see to put your car in reverse you need to throw your arm over the passenger seat and look over your shoulder, activating the pressure sensor in the back of the passenger headrest, and the face recognition sensor in the rear window.

To be fair, that's not a bad idea. It'd probably stop a bunch of drivers driving backwards without looking. Let's do it.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but this is a terrible idea. A family is driving on the highway. Kids are fighting in the back seat. The mother, who is driving, turns her head and tells them to stop. The car is rear-ended by a dump truck, and all three are dead.

I have to assume modern auto transmissions have computer lockouts to prevent you from money-shifting it into R while at speed, don't they? I'm thinking like modern dial-a-shift where you aren't directly manipulating the transmission with the shifter.

I've never tried to test it cause I don't like horribly expensive mechanical noises, but yeah.

If only we could have Tesla's excellent electric drive trains without all the rest of their "innovation".

So true. Victims of the 'We are better at this one thing than other automakers, so clearly we will be better at all of the other things too' mentality.' Like seeing metrics that defrost is rarely used so lets bury it in a sub menu.

> Why not just remove the physical windshield wiper controls, try to make them automatic

FWIW, 25 years ago, I had some generic assignment when I was student, I don't remember the exact details, but I made it on auto-windshield wiping tech, and what I found was that multiple patents already existed back then (one from Mercedes or BMW, I don't remember which ; it might have been both). I'm mystified that we aren't seeing those everywhere yet.

That has been slowly but surely trickling down. I think the high trim Honda Civics have auto wipers now.

The new tech these days is to spray fluid out of the wipers themselves. The blades have a lot of holes laser cut into them, as the blades move across the windshield they spray fluid just an inch ahead of the blade. It's starting to become very common in the luxury car brands, even the lower tier Lexueses and BMWs are getting them as the newer gen cars are released.

It doesn't sound particularly cool, but when you try using them it is a very nice feature to have.

My Jetta GLI has automatic wipers, I don't quite trust them yet, though. Seattle rain has a way of making things hard to see without much actual liquid happening.

That sounds like a very effective way to replace cheap, generic, easily replaceable windscreen wipers with expensive, high margin, brand specific wipers.

On my old Peugeot 405 (from 1990) that was done by an additional tube attached to the metal of the wipers. The wipers themselves were just standard and not especially expensive.

It was interesting but I didn't find it especially better. They moved away from this and the later models just have normal sprayers. Maybe the very latest have that again, I don't know.

I drove a few rented cars in Norway. All automatic windshield wipers sucked. They did not active in a light rain and in heavier rain drove wipers unnecessary frequently. The least bad was Kia. At least they got frequency right.

I think I must be missing something in this discussion but my 2014 Golf came with auto-wipers, auto-headlights on, auto-rear view mirror dimming and auto-full beam dipping.

Isn’t this a solved problem and completely standard on most new cars for a few years now?

They might not be common in the US? All the cars I've had in the past ten years (French and German brands) had automatic wipers and they were not expensive models.

Some work better than others, but most of the time when they don't work well it's because the wipers are worn and need to be replaced.

> This was a real problem until US Gov mandated "PRND" shift order

Automakers also equip automatic transmission cars with paddle shifters, which really give you no tactile feedback to let you know what gear you're in. They also make it difficult to shift while turning. A traditional manual with the HH shift pattern gives you that feedback that allows you to know what gear you're in and doesn't limit your ability to shift while turning.

Conversely it's an automatic car - generally speaking you're not shifting. The flappy paddle style is just for the pseudo-racecar feel, not practicality.

When driving in mountains with a lot of downhill shifting gears is must unless one wants to melt the brakes.

You don't need paddle shifters or a manual transmission to do that, though.

Some automatics don't really give you much control over what gear you're in. I have a 2012 Honda Odyssey with a PRNDL button. With L, you can drive in first gear up to red line (not sure of the speed). There is a D3 button that will downshift to 3rd gear if the shifter is in the D position. You can downshift to 2nd if you move the shifter to the L position when going less than 60 mph, but that's not obvious. The car will also downshift to 1st if your speed drops below 30 mph and won't upshift to 2nd even if the speed goes above 30 mph (meaning I have to shift it back to D and then back to L if I want to keep it in 2nd). 3rd gear doesn't really provide much in terms of engine braking when going less than 50 mph

> UI designers were making a car

https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/cars/news/6272879...

Sounds like the spotify app. Why can't there just be a static button to get me to my recommended weekly/daily playlists?

There is? You can follow those playlist and place them at the top of your playlists. Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways.

> Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways.

I understand this 100%. Youtube is the same exact thing - the home page is total garbage unless you enjoy watching the same 8 videos you just watched. But we're in a thread about bad UI/UX, so I'm going to complain that the "default" being bad is a bad thing.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the browser extension Unhook^[1] can be used to clean up the Youtube interface pretty well. I use it to remove everything except the subscription feed.

[1]: FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

You don't have a "Made for you" button under the "Browse" tab?

This made me laugh and it also made me wonder if UI people have jokes about how annoying engineers are.

Now let's not give Tesla any ideas...

>and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.

The steering wheel is already motion controlled.

Saab made a car with a centre console stick instead of a wheel once

we've noticed you use the gas pedal significantly more than the brake pedal - in the next update we will be removing the brake pedal.

Lol you should look into car design pre-1970.

It was basically this.

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