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Comment by throwaway625637 | Hacker News Reader

If they didn't do the test with people already quite familiar with the car's interface, I don't consider the results all that valid:

Most cars, most of the time, are driven by people who are very used to their particular interface. I couldn't find mention of this in the article, but it's necessary to state.

Furthermore, increased automation in many of these cars means you don't have to do many of the listed sequences as often, or at all:

"Lower the instrument lighting to the lowest level and turn off the center display." Why would I ever do such a thing when this is fully automated already?

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My wife drove a 2002 Honda Insight for 2 years. She never did understand the "window override" switch on the dashboard that disables the power windows in the doors. She taped plastic over one side for a week the first time she hit that button and the windows stopped working. She took it to the mechanic a couple times "the windows stopped working again" because the switch on the dash was easy to frob by accident.

Why was that switch there in the first place? Being familiar with the car didn't help her remember it existed, even when she encountered the "windows wont move" problem repeatedly. Assuming you want a "stop the windows working" switch, why put it up in the corner of the dashboard and in a form where it's easy to hit accidentally and hard to tell that it's not in the right position?

The problem is deeper than screens and older than "legally required backup cameras;" the ergonomics of the car interior became secondary to "but marketing says people want feature $X" checklists.

Genuinely curious, how does she hit a button on the dashboard by accident? To me, the dashboard is behind the steering wheel and shielded from accidental presses.

Its up in the top left corner by the vent, and its a rocker switch. Quite easy to hit without noticing on entering or exiting the car, it got me several times too.

It gets others, too: https://www.insightcentral.net/threads/passenger-window-stuc...

> by the vent

Ahh, that is a high touch area. Thanks for the response, I was worried that my question was a bit blunt.

The switch typically disables the passenger and rear windows, and is there is that the driver can stop kids or pets controlling the windows. It’s been next to the window controls in every car I’ve ever driven that had electric windows.

To verify that a mountain was indeed being made out of a molehill, I checked the manual [1] for the 2002 Insight: page 78 explains this is the case in a single sentence.

[1]: https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/OM/AH/AIN0202OM/enu...

Yes, the test was devised with people who had learned how the system and the screen work.

FTFA:

> One important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started.

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