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Comment by samd | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else get the feeling that the entire automotive industry could be disrupted by a company that focused on design, usability, and modern technology in their car interiors? It seems to me you could replace just about every car's dashboard with an iPad and already be light-years ahead of the industry standard.

In fact the problem seems to get worse as you add more technology and money; if Top Gear is any indication the supercars of the world are all a usability joke. They have a dizzying array of meaningless, misplaced, and practically useless buttons. I believe on the latest Ferrari you can either see your speed or your position on a map, but not both.

It seems very similar to the phone industry before the iPhone.

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Controls and instruments in a car are meant to be used while driving. They should be fairly standard, non-distracting, and not require a lot of thought. Analog gauges do this well. Controls should be simple to operate and always do the same thing so you can use them without taking a large fraction of your attention off your primary task: driving. Once you learn where the knobs and switches are you should be able to operate them without looking or with maybe a quick glance. Many of the newer multifunction touch screen controls violate this. I rented a Ford Flex last year and every time I needed to adjust the climate controls I would nearly run off the road because it was impossible to do it by feel, in fact you needed to watch the screen carefully and navigate through several UI buttons to effect a change in temperature.

It is hard (but doable) to make a car. It is nearly impossible to make a car that is cost-competitive and reliable.

Just one item: in order to cost-compete you need very high volume, and that means putting huge amounts of capital at risk. Automotive engineers care about component pricing at the sub-cent level since volumes are so high.

Top level Mercedes don't have a traditional 'dash panel'. The entire area is just one large LCD display. This generally is used to display speed/engine revs/temp etc, but can also be switched for infra-red imaging, reversing camera, navigation overlays and other things. It also can be themed with the rest of the car, so you can choose a blue, red, yellow, etc theme for your interior.

BMW have had HUD for several years, which overlay speed and turn-by-tun navigation, which are very usable.

You can expect this type of thing in entry and mid level cars within the next 5-10 years, as the current model cycles pan out. Top Gear love to make fun of these features, and indeed some are silly. But the vast majority work well and have a lot of thought behind them. The version 1.0 of all this stuff is already 10 years old.

Early experiments into touch-screen everything have proven to not be popular with the car-buying public. Through experimentation, designers have found that, for important functions (ventilation, radio, etc) a physical button in a known location outperforms a touch screen interface every time. In my case, this is because you can memorize the location and feel of a button and can push it reliably without taking your eyes off the road. You can push it in the dark at night time, and you get tactile feedback.

Touchscreen systems are already here, but will always bury less-used functions like options and navigation, which is designed to be used while stationary, while the more common functions will remain as dedicated push buttons.

Outside of the tech-geek world, function, function and function is prized much more than interesting neat features. Take a test drive with the average car buyer and you'll find that a simple, familiar and well-designed user interface will trump a tech-fest every time. While there is a lot of technical interest in 'carputers' the general public won't ever really warm to them. The big sales winners are in things like self-parking and parking cameras/sensors, accident avoidance and other passive safety systems.

So touch screen only controls aren't the way to go. But it may not be necessary to reinvent the basic controls of the car. Making a better climate control system isn't going to win hearts and minds. But what would be very interesting is a web-connected car with an API and a touch-screen device with an open app ecosystem.

I don't understand cars, at all.

But to me, it seems car market is very different from consumer electronics. First, building a car is still a hard task, harder than putting transistors together. Second, risk of car failure is much higher than risk of computer failure.

In other words, I would be afraid to ride 120 kmph on a highway if I knew the probability of random failure is as high as on my computer. I can't just backup my life regularly.

edit: OK, I misread your post a little, but I am letting this comment here since I wrote it already

Ford seems to be taking usability and integration with our modern "technology" (in the consumer electronics sense) quite seriously. They even have a website going into the details: http://www.ford.com/technology/

Since we're talking IE6 here, we should note that SYNC is made by Microsoft. Don't panic.

Tesla has already done that to Model S: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/2615-Model-S-D...

Except that the interface is... kludgy, at best.

Yes, the dashboard / HUD could be a sweet mobile device if only manufacturers thought of it as a computing platform.

They could ship with a package manager (or "app store", what have you), and offer an API to the car. If they allow competition amongst app makers then usability standards should naturally increase.

Of course it would be necessary for car-makers to set high minimum standards of safety in app design, and to enforce those standards strictly.

I've considered starting a car company around this principle, but the barrier to entry is daunting.

Seems like a lot of industries are like this. They're too focused on things people don't care about, and haven't woken up to the fact that consumers now have much stronger voices when it comes to poor UX. With increased transparency and faster feedback loops comes a greater emphasis on features people actually care about.

Banking is another example, hence BankSimple. A decent web UI/experience will get them more brand loyalty than a TV ad with ponies. This logic applies across all traditional industry verticals.

Perhaps it could be- but the trouble is, building a car is still so much more than just making an nifty interface.

The dashboard is not the most important thing in the entire automotive industry.

Car companies are focusing on design. They are spending billions on it.

Regarding the Ferrari 458, it can show the current speed as a number while showing the map at the same time.

I know it's not the important thing in the entire automotive industry. But I think it just might be to the average driver. Assuming, of course, you've got the mechanics right. Like a hierarchy of needs, having a reliable car to go from point A to B is the foundation. If you had already had a car with the same performance, reliability, safety, efficiency, etc. of a Honda Civic how could you beat Honda?

when today's cars were designed, ipad didn't even exist. it's a very long process where economy is crucial, there is no place where somebody will jump in in the last moment and "hey, have you heard of tablets? let's put it there!", it's technically and economically impossible.

even if somebody today put your beloved ipad in a concept, you would still laugh it off in 7 years when/if it got into production.

Cars are a lagging indicator for technology in every feature that isn't specifically automotive.

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