The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

My impression is that almost everything that's made with touchscreen is a worse of an interface. I think the're four big reasons:

1) the notion of design has been subtly replaced with style;

Sleek wins over functional. For instance, scroll bars on desktop UIs were thrown away, because they were too fat for phones, and phone UI now sets the trend. So nobody among designers cared that the scrollbar you see with peripheral vision does help you orient in apps.

2) styles are in perpetual rat race, you must be trendy and throw away anything that's drawn to 5-year-old fashion;

3) constant feature creep; Social network VK offered music playing, but over the last 5-6 years the number of taps it takes to start playing grew from 3 to 6 or 8 if you need a particular playlist. It's just awful and irritating.

Consider public transit apps. In my city, you must do 15-20 taps to see the routes you need. I struggle to do this while walking. And I have a good vision -- imagine how tough it is for an old man. But a public sector manager, who drives a new sleek Mercedes and never took a bus/trolleybus last 20 years, tells you this is the future.

4) imprecision of touchscreens and curvature of a thumb. Feature creep requires to stick more and more items in the screen, and on a phone, you must be able to hit 1*1 mm area with a rather flat surface of your thumb.

I've only driven Renault Logan derivatives that have no touchscreen, and kinda scared of the perspective to have to deal with touchscreen while driving.

My Ford Edge has almost all the important controls accessible only through the touchscreen. If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature. Its terrible. Adjusting the seat warmers requires moving an onscreen slider which is weirdly overly sensitive and yet at the same time laggy. Adjusting it while driving is almost impossible without looking at the screen which is unsafe and absolutely unnecessary.

Here’s a thing I realized about climate controls that is NOT intuitive - it is not about the temperature/humidity in the car or room! That’s only an accident - it’s about how the person/people feel.

So the older cars work closer to that because they basically have the options “blow hot/cold air on me” instead of “try to maintain this temperature”.

I can be quite comfortable in a wide range of temperatures if I can get a blast of cold or hot air “on demand”.

I had an eight-gen (2005–2012) Honda Civic, and honestly I've never seen a car with better ergonomics. Climate and radio controls high up and within easy reach of the driver, different sized/shaped knobs so you can differentiate by touch, big digital speedo and GPS screen high up so they're practically at the base of the windscreen. I drove a ninth-generation Civic while mine was being serviced, and even that felt like a step back.

Please don’t automate the climate controls further. If it’s 20F outside, I’m probably bundled up and happy with 55F cabin temperature. If it’s 85 I’ll be wearing a tshirt and will freeze in 65F.

Then there’s a separate issue of the control system being crappy. Even if it’s 20F and you need to heat the cabin to 55F, I don’t want deafening heat blasting in my face for 2 minutes to get there ASAP. I’d prefer a 10-15 slow ramp.

I realize those are highly personal desires, but I’m way better served by an old school(hot/cold)x(1/2/3/45) control. I’m happy to be the PID controller for the system

As someone who doesn't want to navigate the touchscreens, I love that my 2021 Highlander has physical climate controls.

But I also realized that you no longer need them. My wife set her climate control to 70 degrees and never touched it since. In the winter it warms her up, in the summer it cools her down. Her car is a perfect 70 degrees all year round.

So for her, it doesn't matter how inaccessible the controls are, she never uses them. I suspect at least in part, the less accessible design reflects the lower usage.

Touchscreens have ruined car UX for a generation.

It’s not just cars. I think the touchscreen/iOS control set has some hard to use features.

For example, the slider wheel to specify a date or time is not very easy to use. I use Runkeeper to track exercises. If I have a 45 minute workout, I have to scroll through 0-44 to get to 45. This takes a few swipes and is more effort than tapping “4” and “5.”

I feel like the interface is superficially tested but not for routine functions where someone would like to speed up their interaction.

I think this inherits from the select drop-down html control where on the desktop everything is 1-2 clicks to select the drop down and then the value. But on a touchscreen it’s swiping.

This Carrie’s through to all these vehicle interfaces. I hope they get better. The S class interface in this article looks terrible. And that’s for a very nice car that other manufacturers are emulating.

Touchscreens should be outlawed. End of story. They are extremely dangerous. I’ve driven a Tesla for 5+ years now and I hate with a passion how the temperature interface is. It’s the single worst thing about it. And tesla loves changing it every few months including location. That should be outlawed as well.

A year ago they changed the air to a sliding bar which was inconceivably stupid. It was straight up dangerous to try to change the air level while driving because not only did you have to look to get your finger on it, it was so sensitive it was hard to get it to the level you wanted.

They should outlaw changing the interface of a car once it had been released. This isn’t a computer it’s a car. Lives are depending on it and the hubris tesla had to change it Willy nilly is infuriating.

I feel like I'm the only one that uses the manual controls. It bugs me getting into someone's car where the heat is set to 85 degrees and the HVAC goes full blast once you turn the key, but you know nothing warm is going to come out of the vents for at least ten minutes, when the engine starts to warm up (in the winter)

Around 5 years ago I was buying a car and tried out a whole bunch of them. One thing that stood out at the time was trying a Ford Fusion - not only were all the controls touch screen, the touch screen was painfully slow. You had to navigate pages of settings and page changes weren't instant. Even stopped the experience wasn't satisfactory. I ended up not buying that car 100% because the environmental controls (really all the controls) were so slow and bad.

Hilariously, though, its not just the car companies that are bad. Google used to have an acceptable solution with google maps and voice commands to change songs in google music. It worked without much effort. Today I can't get my pixel to reliably start music or change a song. Android auto, instead of being its own app, seemingly has to detect you're moving a car and then does stuff. It's a disaster - I'm not sure why anyone would have wanted it that way but I hate it, and have been thinking of getting a dedicated GPS unit instead.

I am surprised so many talented engineers went the touchscreen route. Volkswagen, Mercedes and more recently BMW are going this way. In my experience it is not only annoying, it is a safety hazard. In my old car, I could feel for the button to turn on the defrosting without ever taking my eyes off the road, it was so well designed!

In a way, it feels that the current trend is very much like the Apple laptops at some point, where they god rid of the physical function keys and replaced them with touch sensitive controls. Thankfully, Apple is reverting this change.

I think at some point car manufacturers will realise that it leads to more accidents and they will also reverse course. Perhaps touchscreens will even be forbidden?

Caveat: I was wrong before on touchscreens. I though phones with touchscreens will not work out, but they have. However, it is because we no longer use phones for phoning, but to watch movies, read text, etc.

Are there any reliable modern vehicles with a UI more like a decade or two ago? (eg. physical knobs and a dash that doesn't blind you)

I do loathe the screen, however, am I the only person to note this problem with the new car climate controls? I see this on Honda, Nissan, Acura, Toyota (that I know of):

  - Set the climate control for say 70
  - If it is 80 outside, the AC comes on. Great!
  - If it is 69 outside, the HEAT comes on. Even if the car HVAC is off. Uh, not so great?

So you end up during the milder months in this strange battle of the AC. Even when the unit is off, the car lets in some outside air. That air passes over the coils of the system, which are primed for heat or cold depending on where the control is set. This sort of drives me nuts in the nissan (it does it the worst). The system should be off when it is off.

Back to the OP article, wow that Benz control is nutty. I had a (very) old Mercedes that was gifted to me years ago and the controls were a dream. Not one of them had words on it just symbols, and you could muscle memory them in no time. A very well thought out design. A wheel for temps and fan speed, buttons for activation. I think it might have been a total of 6 inputs. I would trade that for my Hondas sucky four touch screen buttons to turn the fan down screen any time, even if I had to pay dearly for it.

I knew there was an upside to having a 21 year old car!

The switches on the Ineos Grenadier look great - reminiscent of airplane cockpit. There's still a touchscreen but seems to be controllable by a rotary controller.

https://ineosgrenadier.com/en/us/the-vehicle/the-grenadier

I enjoy tactile controls for most functions in a vehicle. I think they seem safer and easier to use.

Although, it seems like a major benefit for touchscreens are the ability to update the interface. I'm fairly sure Tesla does this (don't own one so not 100% sure). It's an interesting idea, also if owners are able to customize to fit their preferences.

I like my Prius Prime's climate controls. I have a lot of problems with the in-dash system in general, but two big permanent buttons for temperature and a menu screen for everything else seems right. My only complaint is that I'd like a physical button to cycle through blower modes, since I hate having the air blowing in my face.

And for navigating menus, there's a mini-screen just under the windshield that can be controlled by a d-pad on the steering wheel. I can manage the audio in every way without ever taking my hand off the wheel.

My impression is, that 90% of people don’t understand classic climate controls and always use them wrong. And in the end they are not satisfied with the result.

That’s probably why car manufacturers nudge the user to only chose the temperature, and try to figure out everything else automatically. For the remaining 10% of power users, they hide the settings in some submenus.

This leads probably to better overall customer satisfaction.

And i have to admit that I also mostly use the automatic settings. If the automatics are good (and Mercedes does it well), that’s usually enough.

I'm very happy to see that the author has included more than one factor in their analysis:

> "The main goal of climate controls is to make the passengers comfortable. PO Fanger defines thermal comfort as being influenced by six factors: air temperature, heat radiation, air flow, humidity, activity level, and clothing. The car can control the first four factors."

I would like to point out that direct conduction is also extremely important, and that radiation is generally more important than air temperature in daily life. However, it is difficult to directly control conduction and radiation - those are generally changed by changing air temperature.

In fact, liquid water is a bigger factor than any of the named factors, but we generally do not try to control how wet a person is with our HVAC systems.

Here's one tiny case study: A person is cold, because it is wintertime, and it is cold and overcast outside. Their windows are cold, but do not leak much air. After they pull the curtains closed, they feel warmer because their body is no longer radiating as much heat toward the window (you feel the relative difference in heat radiation).

They turn on their home heating system, which increases the temperature, but does not add total humidity. Thus the relative humidity and vapor pressure of water decrease and they perceive that the air has dried out. The home heater raises the air temperature relatively quickly, but their outside walls are cold-soaked and do not heat up quickly - they still feel a chill.

They turn on an oil-filled electric radiator. The radiator consumes 1400 Watts, much less than the home heating system (over 5,000 Watts), so it does not change air temperature much; but it does give the person some comfort.

They turn on a heating pad on the couch. It only consumes a few hundred Watts, but all of the heat is transmitted directly into the person and they warm up quickly.

The person also consumes a hot drink and dries off from the drizzle they walked through. As they dry off, they feel much warmer as their skin is no longer losing heat to water phase change (evaporation).

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Now, do I expect a car climate system to handle all of that? Not a bit. But we are always telling ourselves simplified stories. The actual story of comfort is very complicated.

Here's some good examples of what climate controls looked like before computers took over; automated, yet easily operated without even looking at them, and with actual text labels instead of confusing pictograms:

https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cold-comfort/cold-comfo...

“The reason why humidity isn’t included in cars, or most HVAC systems, is that it is not possible for most of us to attach a specific value to the humidity level.”

I would argue that humidity control is included in cars by the air-recirculation button. It’s certainly not exact control, but if you recirculate the air in winter everything will quickly get fogged up (and often vice versa in summer).

Mazda had it just right in 2016 with mostly tactile climate controls, paired with the center console dial interface (also tactile). I think their latest models have regressed just a bit with the button climate controls instead of the dials, but that's still far better than touch screen.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to repeat a comment I made a few times before, as I think it's relevant:

In one of the talks at Google I/O a few years ago a VP from Audi (or Volvo?) spoke in a thick and lofty German accent about how "ve haf completely oferhauled ze driver exzperienze". He played a sexy video clip showcasing their new Android infotainment system (something like https://youtu.be/h_7_fKJ0PNs), and the first thing I noticed is how they'd taken away my traditional temperature knobs and replaced them with digital touchscreen ones. They looked just like physical ones, and were in the exact same place you would expect (https://9to5google.com/2017/05/15/android-cars-audi/). So, I've gained absolutely nothing, and now I have to take my eyes off the road and look down at the stupid console just to change the temperature.

TLDR: Tacticle feedback is a Good Thing(tm) and designers should cultivate - not fight - muscle memory.

Everything in a car that's gone from physical input to a touch screen, other than intricate and advanced media controls, is a step backward. The single biggest reason is that you need to be looking at the screen to operate the inputs.

The third-last image shows on interface which is still excellent in many cars: the seat adjustment switches that maps to the physical layout of the seat. Perfectly intuitive to use by feel only.

I like old style physical control as well, but I typically use a combination of steering wheel knobs and voice control to adjust climate control on my Model S, not the touch screen. That means I don’t have to take my eyes off the road, or even my hands off the wheel. Voice control is really the most hands-off way to adjust climate.

(Voice control could be more polished than it is, but it works great for climate control IMO. I really like it for enabling or disabling the defrost, which can take fiddling with if you use touch screen or old style controls… especially in a rainy/cloudy situation where you want both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road..)

I think Volvo promised to get rid of touchscreens in their cars

The design/usability of everything has gone backwards.

When the iPhone launched (all display), journalist said it’d fail due to lack of tactile buttons (Blackberry).