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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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 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.

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.)

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?

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

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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

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

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