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Comment by Eji1700 | Hacker News Reader

To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function-

> Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets and it's pin in the arse. Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it. (10)

This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. And while in normal cars they move units because features over functionality is acceptable, trucks aren't status symbols first. They do, at the end of the day, have to do the job they're designed for efficiently, and things like this are clearly just "trendy" not practical.

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The reason for the touchscreens is simple... compared to all the design and manufacturing needed for a good console of buttons, it's cheap just to slap in an identical tablet unit in every car model.

From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching.

This is an 80/20 problem if there ever was one, maybe even 95/5. In my car I really want the audio volume, heater fan speed, and wiper control to be tactile. But beyond that, I can probably deal, and even the heater fan speed might be negotiable.

In my 2003 car, the fan speed is buttons, oh well. In my 2013 it’s a paddle and I like it a lot better.

The newer car also has a knob for navigating the touchscreen, which isn’t perfect but is way better than touching a screen. The older car has no touchscreen and I like that better.

I didn’t rtfa because it’s a Twitter thread, and I didn’t see any comments on this in the 250 or so below. What else really needs to be a tactile control on a truck?

(Edited for clarification. I said “touch-based” when I should have used “tactile”.)

Could you please explain more about why you would prefer those specific controls to be touch based? Is it to have the possibility of finer-grained adjustment?

For me, wipers and audio volume are controls I want to be able to access immediately and without taking my eyes off the road, as they sometimes need to be used with urgency. (For example, turning down high volume to reduce distraction or activating wipers to clear a sudden downpour.)

It's so you don't have to look at them to use them while driving. Screens offer no tactile feedback that guides you, you have to look, which is dangerous.

Right, tactile was the word I should have used.

I think "touch based" is used here to mean knobs and buttons, not a touch screen.

I think his wording is off, and he means touch based as in tactile feedback. Not touch as in a touch screen.

or when another vechicle splashes you with a mass of mud or snow from a puddle or slush pile from plowing, or snow blows off the top of another vehicle etc, suddenly blind, at highway speeds with other vehicles, maybe with no barrier seperating the oncoming lanes, and your wipers require navigating menus on a tablet???

Even non-critical controls still need to be tactile, and not change from one day to the next, don't move location or change behavior from updates, because even if you don't need them in a hurry to avoid crashing, you still can't be hunting around in a multipurpose interface while driving just to change which direction the air vents point. Not a hyperbolic example, the Rivian actually has that.

Teslas have a button on the stalk to run the wipers, and you can use voice commands, is there a company that requires menu nav?

I get anxious even thinking about volume touch control. Got a higher pulse and everything :-D

Even Tesla knows this is a bad idea. They have a volume dial on the steering wheel, for your thumb.

I think tactile controls should be those things you would want to change while driving:

* Climate control heating/ac/defroster temp up/down fans higher/lower

* windows up/down

* signal left/right

* windshield wipers

* volume up/down

* audio basics (next track/previous track)

This allows you to keep your eyes on the road and rely on muscle memory to make the changes quickly. It's an important aspect of auto safety. Things like gps route selection, loading music into vehicle or configuring playlists can be done with touchscreens as these are complex tasks that are unlikely to be done while driving.

That’s a tidy list. Thanks. NO2 boost? ;)

Do trucks have additional tasks?

He's a basic switch and gauge cluster:

https://weaverauctions.com/assets/auction/105/34610-9.jpg

It seems they could have a set of programmable buttons with LED surface, as I've seen in computer keyboards for years. As sibling comment points out this is an 80/20 situation.

As much as I enjoyed my recent first time experience driving a Tesla, the screen controls frustrated me immensely. I guess they expect you will be talking to the car to make changes soon anyway, but we all know that doesn't work great either.

Edit: not to imply you were defending the choice. I can see why it is understandable when trying to iterate fast.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qj7GYU-wedo

My 2013 BMW has 8 physical buttons that can be easily programmed to do whatever I want. It's awesome. Unfortunately this feature has been deleted from the newest models...

To expand on that, it is because Tesla fundamentally approaches design like a tech company instead of a manufacturing company. For example, you see this with how they make changes to their cars. They don't have any real model year. Any car of one model can be slightly different from others of the same model from the same year. They could also be nearly identical to once produced two years earlier. It all depends. They just make changes to them whenever they feel like making a change.

The tablets are there for the same reason. Instead of spending years fine-tuning a dashboard design through research, they can throw a tablet in there and release whatever software they currently have. They will get feedback from people like this Twitter user telling them they have it all wrong, then they iterate and release a software update. Maybe that process eventually gets them into a better place like it often does for tech companies, but the bigger problem is that this approach completely fails when it comes to their other design choices. You can't push out a software update to change the angle of the windshield. And this lack of focus on the initial design is what leads to making the bad choices highlighted in that thread.

Physical buttons are far harder to produce and, once made, are set in stone until the car is recycled. Touch controls can be reprogrammed, updated, improved, etc, mixed with voice input, etc. Far more possibilities for improvement.

if only someone could invent a device with physical buttons that could connect to a device like a tablet or other computer.

Who said physical buttons cannot be mixed with voice input? Most physical buttons these days are just an interface to the CAN bus, where the function is performed (in software) in the BCM and can easily interface with the voice module.

"Improved" is an interesting term. How much improvement can you make to climate control buttons? Their function in most vehicles has not changed in 30 years and are largely the same aside from styling.

I feel like we just had this conversation two days ago, with the Amazon driver that has to use a touchscreen to open the cargo door in his new EV delivery van. Another ridiculous design courtesy of SV. Maybe the Juicero engineers found a new life at the EV manufacturers.

That's ridiculous. Multi-function displays/inputs have been a thing for decades. A physical button does not need to map to one and only one function. Just like MFDs in aircraft, physical buttons in a car display can perform different tasks depending on the mode of the display. I've had several car head units over the years with multi-function buttons.

Touch screens in cars are shit. Not only is there no tactile feedback but you can't place your finger on a button before pressing it like you can a physical button. To touchscreens a touch is a press so you better hope you touched the screen in the right place and your finger didn't move around because of a bump in the road.

When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.

Fast forward to now, even Android phones have lost all physical buttons for home/back/menu and now it is all just touch screens. This approach allowed changing button-controlled interface to gesture-controlled.

So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.

People spend a lot of time staring at their phones because of those touchscreens. Which is what the phone makers want. But automakers and fellow drivers -- not so much.

For the same reason, the US Navy announced it was moving away from touchscreen controls. When actions need to be taken quickly, muscle memory and tactile feedback are preferred.

https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to...

I didn't know car drivers need to be really quick when taking actions like climate control or music volume adjustments.

If they are driving, yes, they do, because their attention needs to be focused on the road.

Changing climate controls never requires any kind of immediacy.

Just today I had to turn on my windshield defogger while driving lest I be unable to see. Have you ever driven a car before?

Yes, actually. Never in decades in had to do something about climate control urgently. There is always a pause when you can do it safely even on a touch screen. I used Android Auto quite a lot before Google broke it.

As I said, if we're talking about advanced cars, touch panels are more versatile, better suited for future updates, and all important functions should understand voice commands anyway.

> When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.

Several things to unpack:

1. Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone. When the iPhone was released there were few truly hands free calling systems in cars, many jurisdictions have laws against phone use in cars. This is a moot point.

2. Touchscreens on phones before the iPhone were shit. The UIs were primarily designed for a stylus. In the rare situation UI elements were even big enough to hit with a fingertip the resistive screens sucked and wouldn't properly register a touch. Physical buttons were necessary because the screens and UIs were not designed for touch. The iPhone changed that calculus.

> So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.

Except for functions like the defroster on Teslas which requires navigating nested menus on the touchscreen to activate. So you definitely need to use the touchscreen while driving if all the physical controls have been replaced by a touchscreen.

> Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone

This is absurd. I could not only dial, but also answer to calls and write whole messages on keyboard phones without ever looking at the device. They were tactile and the home key (number 5) was easily located by rubbing the thumb against the keys.

With an iPhone, the simplest of these tasks, taking a call, still requires me to look at the screen and aim for the right place where the button is.

Otherwise I agree with your points.

The average driving-age person could definitely not dial and text on a T9 phone and drive safely. You could have but the uptick[0] in accidents related to phone use in the early 2000s are a testament that this was not a common skill.

You're not wrong that a tactile keypad was superior for dialing without looking. Touchscreens were a major step back for anyone practiced at blind dialing/texting.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951952/#!po=25...

Controls that change based on mode are terrible for a vehicle. IE, a physical button that's programmable and doesn't always do the same thing, is no good.

Controls that change location or behavior from one day to the next, are absolutely horrendous.

"From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching."

I don't think so. I think it was worse, and indicates a deeper (and more depressing) inadequacy:

I think Tesla put the big screen (17" ?) in the first Model S as a signifier of high technology and modernity.

So far, so good ...

Now, however, as the Tesla itself came to signify the steps forward to an electric car future and modernity in general, designers of other cars copycatted the Tesla so as to evoke the same sentiment.

Meanwhile, actual interior design of automobiles has regressed significantly - and very often, dangerously - and we have one, and probably two entire generations of vehicle models to get through before it gets fixed.

In the meantime, get used to monstrosities like this:

https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/bmw-7-ser...

... and if that wasn't bad enough:

https://media.wired.com/photos/625f4ef8536da34b19a67a72/mast...

These designers are clowns. They should be ridiculed. Screens are a poverty.

I drive old vehicles, but a few years ago I got the itch and walked into a Toyota dealership. When I was told they don't offer vehicles without the screen I walked out and have basically refused to purchase anything with such a screen.

I've driven a few rentals with them and yes, they're not the most terrible thing ever, but they definitely are inferior to not having them. I really hope what you're saying will come to pass and we'll get rid of them or have a better version of their functionality because they are so obviously unsafe it's nuts to me they were ever put in.

I think Honda announced they would be getting rid of them, if I were to buy a new vehicle today it would most likely be them for that reason alone, despite me being loyal to Toyota up to this point (I just trust their vehicles).

To be fair, it seems that all the other manufacturers have decided to join in on that penny-pinching. :(

I rented a Jeep today. It has most functions on a touch screen. But above 60mph (I think) the controls all lock so you can’t touch anything.

They probably did it for safety but it feels so dumb. I’m on a highway trying to turn off Bluetooth and then FM but I can’t. All screen functionality locked, no workaround.

That's probably a restriction on the rental that's just an option if you own it. My 2013 Ford allows me to limit several things over 55mph for drivers using my second car key.

Not just efficiently, safely.

Cars kill 1,500,000 people per year (= a 787 full of passangers every couple hours). What's the big deal about safety? /s

In the US that number is usually below 30,000, and majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

>majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

What's your source for this? Most sources I'm finding say alcohol-impaired driving is involved in about 30% of US traffic deaths.

I didn't make the claim but I thought to look it up. From NHTSA's report, if I'm reading it correctly, 2021 had 42,915 traffic fatalities, of which 8,174 were related to alcohol. I think those numbers are estimated. I'm not aware if there's better data.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

My information appears to be a few years out of date - probably from the last time I had this debate here on HN. 2021 does appear to have been a particularly bad year...

Regardless, the numbers are very good for the US, compared to the rest of the world. iihs.org[1] indicates the US is averaging somewhere around 1.5 fatalities per 100 Million miles traveled.

Compared to the rest of the world... that's pretty decent. Most of the places with significantly high fatality rates are not the places that will be purchasing self driving electric vehicles anytime soon...

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

You are deluding yourself if you think the US is doing well on traffic fatalities. From the graph at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest... we can see that US car deaths/capita have dropped slightly (10-20%?) since 1995. Meanwhile, in France where the rate about matched in 1995 they have dropped by 3x, leaving the US rate at about 2.5x the French rate.

But at least we aren’t French.

Recent US Traffic fatalities:

2021: 42,915

2020: 38,824

2019: 36,355

2018: 36,835

2017: 37,473

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... the last time the US had fewer than 30,000 traffic fatalities was 1945

Alcohol is 100% orthoganal.

If every single driver were legally drunk at all times, poorly designed vehicles will still result in more and worse accidents then well-designed.

If every driver were drunk at all times, roads would be designed with that in mind. It's much harder to dangerous things in a car with better designed roads

Sure, but irrellevant.

The point is that the design of the vehicle, or anything, needs to be as good as possible regardless of anything else, and there is no overriding excuse not to.

It's not like the poorly designed controls are necessary for some other even more important reason.

If both roads and drivers were all excellent, the vehicle still needs to be as excellent as possible. If all other factors are so good that only 10 people die each year from car accidents, there is still no excuse for making vehicles less safe and make that become 20.

Alcohol, lack of alcohol, good roads, bad roads, speed limits, none of that matters.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death of children under age 18. The number of deaths has risen in the US even as it's fallen across the rest of the world. I have begun to wonder if phones are just a convenient scapegoat, even if the criticism is in the right direction.

I wonder if it's a combination of phones, car centric city design with wide stroads, and automatic transmissions. The latter two make driving very easy and boring, with long waiting periods at red lights, high speed between the lights, and you can keep your phone in one hand all along because there's no stick to shift. No wonder people are not looking at the road.

Wide stroads definitely don't make driving easy and boring -- stroads make for high speeds and constant opportunities for crashes

They absolutely reduce the number of variables requiring attention, except the problem and the source of danger is they only appear to. They make the way appear to be free of things to look out for, and so appear to require less attention. That's the "boring".

In reality of course, all the same kinds of unexpected events can still happen at any time. A baby can suddenly appear anywhere along one of those roads. But that doesn't mean the road does not encourage inattention.

Is there any real data on this?

It comes up periodically here and it makes some logical sense but I don't know of any regulatory efforts or push back and I'm certain someone would blame in-car screens if it was the cause of more accidents. Screens seem to keep getting bigger and incorporating more function.

The other factor that counters it is there is also a lot more automation. I have a 10 year old car and the lights are automatic, the climate control is automatic (I think my wife or I adjust it about twice a year) Things like hazard lights are used fairly rarely and I've never needed muscle memory for it.

Several studies have shown touch screen are less safe. Having tactile controls doesn’t prevent automatic wipers etc, it’s a pure UI choice as your generally run everything through the CAN bus either way.

The initial idea for the CAN bus was simply to save copper by having fewer wires inside the car, it was only much later that touch screens leveraged that system. Basically if you want a truck release from a key fob and a trunk release from a door you might as well have both talk to a computer which only runs connection to the trunk. At which point you can redesign the controls more or less independently because they don’t change how everything is wired up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

Hazard lights need to be accessible with zero thought so you can warn people the instant a hazard arises, without taking your eyes off the road during hazardous conditions. My car has them on a big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and that's the way it should be.

From: December 23, 2021

“Tesla hiring drivers for reliability, performance and homologation testing of Tesla Semi”

Source: https://driveteslacanada.ca/semi/tesla-hiring-drivers-for-re...

It’s a bit silly to assume they didn’t solicit feedback from real truck drivers. While developing a multi-billion product. But “Musk/Spaceman Bad” right?

The complaints in the linked thread are not about reliability, performance or homologation.

That’s just one of the many jobs they posted during the development of semi. They also have “real” drivers that put a ton of hours shuttling Tesla cargo from NV to CA and vise versa.

Not to mention the author is from the EU. Trucking in the U.S is vastly different. I drove in both regions during my time in the USAF.

In your honest opinion. Do you think they just developed the semi without gathering/soliciting feedback from real truck drivers?

Musk's whims clearly took precedence over any sort of received feedback.

That a very opinionated yet empty statement. Please elaborate and share your experience driving long haul semi trucks in U.S. interstates and city streets.

flight yoke

Can you point out where? This looks pretty circular to me: https://www.tesla.com/semi

I am responding to the challenge that Musk doesn't ignore all sense and advice and feedback and established best practices in favor of simply what he thinks is cool.

You know Elon Musk didn’t design this truck, right?

Perhaps, but SpaceX interfaces share the same issue: focusing on looks at the cost of usability, so I would think that either he's involved in this quite a lot, or he built both companies to have similar cultures. For example, the first mockup of Dragon v2 control panel presented to the public [1] looked all sci-fi, but as someone who actually knows how spacecrafts function I can tell just by the look that this was unusable. They were forced to switch to a much more pragmatic design [2] during the development, probably because folks from NASA shared some real-life experience and had their own requirements written in blood. Still touchscreens, but only where it doesn't matter (hard to have tactile controls in a spacesuit anyway), with a handle to hold onto under acceleration and to provide a basepoint for muscle memory, and buttons under protective caps for critical commands.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/sWHPfFR.jpg

[2] https://i.imgur.com/RZ7ucEu.jpg

So what you're saying is that his company posted a mockup then listened to people with real life experience through the development process and produced a good actual product?

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

It's true that physical buttons are superior, but the upside of the screen is that the UI can be updated by software.

And it is nearly impossible to reliably tap a button on a touchscreen in a moving vehicle on even smooth roads (at least by me).

One technique is to dock some of your fingers against known reference points such as the corner of the screen, then you can stabilize the finger pressing the button and rely partially on muscle memory to locate the target button.

Yeah, this is the way. Still much less comfortable than a physical button, but not a great issue for power users either.

or best of both worlds and have physical soft keys down the side like oscilloscopes and other test equipment have.

Yes, that's the downside.

Why don't we have any physical "dynamic" controls yet? A "3D" touchscreen? Something like a ferrofluid [0] layer underneath a flexible display. It seems both technically possible, and a way for us to have our cake & eat it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid#/media/File%3AFerro...

Or something like the new Stream Deck? https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-plus

Actual buttons/dials that can be customised to what you want them to be?

You still have to look at the screen because you can just feel it with your fingers without looking at it.

Updating UI and potentially getting used to new layouts is really something that will improve road safety..

People, this isn't kindergarten or high school. Traffic is serious thing, not a playground

> This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle.

That’s a very confident statement to make without data to back it up.

Strong disagree. I see a huge number of benefits from the touchscreen in my Tesla. Continuous improvements to how the fundamental controls operate. New features that could only have been possible due to the controls not being hardware…

And generally speaking my vehicle seems to save me from human lapses in judgement even when I’m paying perfect attention so I’m not convinced about the argument that they purely increase distraction.

You have to take your eyes off the road for multiple seconds to turn the defogger/defroster on, as one example. Maybe there are studies to back it up too, but intuitively, this seems unsafe compared to turning a knob that you don't have to look at.

Are you able to perform a good majority of functions without taking your eyes off the road over 95% of the time? In my perfect setup I would have configurable buttons to map critical functions to and then a touch screen for non-important things. I have a very hard time seeing how a touch screen alone would be better than touch screen + a couple buttons.

Yes. Everything you need while driving is on the wheel or at a well defined corner of the screen (which big touch targets). And that too can be avoided if you’re willing to use voice control.

I'd love to hear how the car has saved you while you were paying attention.

- Changing lanes with someone in my blind spot just behind the B pillar

- someone changing lanes into me while cruising

- car tried to cut across from lane to my right to lane to my left. Got blocked from going to left lane and slammed brakes in front of me

- saw brake lights farther than I could in a snowstorm

It’s like having someone with 100% attention and 360 visibility watching your back at all times.

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