Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
slate.com
slate.com
In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers."
Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally regulated to not fail response time tests, and if they do, they should be deemed unlawful to be equipped by either the manufacturer or the owner.
It's absolutely ridiculous that this still happens today, and it doesn't have to.
So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem.
It costs way more to build out physical ergonomic interior controls when they are permanent fixtures for several model years and any changes require new physical elements to be created and fit (and designed for mass production).
Software can be updated over the air, so there's less pressure on engineers to get it perfect.
The solution is not to point fingers and guess, but instead measure and revise. Study the amount of time drivers' eyes are off the road for routine tasks, develop acceptable limits and enforce them.
Software engineers of any ilk are just as capable of following sensible guidelines if everyone else in the company is obliged to as well.
touchscreens are worse but they don't have to be. manufacturers just don't care enough to make them better. they're too busy charging more for touchscreens while saving tons of money on buttons, which are expensive in comparison.
that's not a given at all. maybe for computer keyboards I guess, but not for cars.
car makers always seem to want buttons to be flush with their surroundings and have no bumps or dips on them to help you find the button you're after. I always have to look for the button if it isn't on my steering wheel, and I usually have to look when it's there as well.
the only control in my car I don't ever need my eyes to find and use is the volume knob for the entertainment system. maybe the hazard button, too, but I haven't needed to push it yet.
It's crazy that's replaced physical controls. Poking a large physical button and then turning a large knob can be done blind folded in half a second.
I remember the first time everyone decided we should have buttons for volume instead of knobs. Thankfully that lesson was learned. Now we do the same for touchscreens. They have their moments, but knobs and well-designed buttons are not replaceable with a touchscreen. No matter how much haptic feedback it might have.
Mini is not as good, but also similar - all the important buttons are physical and distinguishable easily.
there is no reason that a light touch couldn't produce haptic feedback as you move your finger around, so you can feel where buttons are, and when you find the button you want you simply remove your finger and tap again. not immediately intuitive, no, but not difficult to learn. as usual, a tap on a button at any time would simply press the button.
i'm a bit sad that experimentation isn't being done, here. I feel like there's a lot of unexplored stuff with regards to touch screens with haptic feedback.
Oh, it is! Just nothing of substance has made it into mass market shipping that I’ve seen.
I suspect that for myself, a fixed knob or set of fixed physical buttons is not the only interface that I could use without looking.
I'd like to see more experimentation, here. I feel like there's unexplored territory.
If you're accustomed to 90ms delay and the adjustment doesn't come in 250ms, then it pulls your attention, and even your eyes. "What's wrong with my volume knob" shouldn't occur to someone driving a vehicle.
Turn the physical volume dial on a car with a slow Apple CarPlay interface and tell me how that works out for you.
Oh, it's too loud? But it takes 2 seconds for the software to respond due to lag and now you're fiddling with the volume button trying to not make it worse?
A physical button didn't fix that.
If it worked, great; if not, oh well; no need to look at it and try again though. That's the benefit.
My Android phone has a similar issue while operating over Bluetooth. While holding "volume up", it takes several seconds for the volume change to register. So I have no feedback for how long I need to hold "volume up". If I wait until the volume is loud enough -- it keeps going up for another two seconds, to the point that it is painful and possibly damaging my hearing.
Rapid feedback is important.
When using a touch screen, if you don't know whether the lack of feedback is due to its lag or your bad aim, you would likely take your eyes off the road in order to aim better, given that bad aim is a likely culprit.
I know the one it was on, and I know how far to turn it to get to the one I want. This removes the necessity of looking at it.
Same for steering wheel buttons (e.g. Up - next track, down - previous track, same for volume)
Same for wipers - only 3 positions and you can tell by their speed which position it's in.
The problem is when manufacturers take existing solved problems and move it to a strictly worse system like touchscreen. That's an inexcusable regression.
If it doesn't change -> change it more
It it changes too much -> change it less
If you realise it needs to be moved slowly -> move it slowly
The car when started always turns on the radio at the last volume the radio was on at, regardless of whether it was on when the car was turned off.
More than once, I have turned it on, and it was playing at full volume the Sirius FM ads, and would not lower the volume or turn off ( via the other physical buttons) for at least half a minute. I've done some damage to the volume button after that, and I have taken to just getting out of the car until the stereo responds.
The default on the car is to turn on the radio on engine start. No way to change it. No way to make it remember that the last time the car was used it was set to Bluetooth audio. Switching back to Bluetooth requires navigating through 3-4 layers of menus. Even when you turn it off, it randomly turns back on for no reason. :/
My 10+ year old VW: remembers which audio source was last used. Phone autoconnects via Bluetooth every time with no hassle. Volume is never an issue (real buttons that respond in a timely manner on the steering wheel). Off is off until you turn it on again (with a physical button).
I know where the volume knob is and I can easily grab it and turn it without looking away. If it's slow to respond I can go again and dial it back down, without looking away. Or I can just keep my hand on the dial and spin it back a bit.
With a digital screen I can't leave my hand on it without continually pressing the input, and if I want to put the volume down I have to look and see where that button is.
A physical control absolutely fixes this
That's what tactile feedback is. It doesn't matter if the knob is connected to a digital or analog circuit. It has tactile feedback either way.
Major accidents are almost always a cascade of errors. It may not be perfect, but not having to take eyes off the road can really break the chain of a big accident in progress.
A touchscreen UI probably won't cause an accident on its own, but it will be a link in the chain of a driver already tired and lost in the area, trying to find the button to press to turn on the headlights. Because yes recently there was one car manufacturer that moved that function to touch also, and proudly claimed their software was 100% bug-free. I'm sure the audience here knows how ridiculous such a statement is.
For some reasons it tends to pop up every time I am approaching or already inside a roundabout, preferrably one of those where if you miss the right exit and take the wrong one it will take you 20 minutes in the traffic to get back to where you were.
My dad used to sleep in his car for an hour before work, with the engine on to provide heating in winter. Because traffic was too bad an hour later. Just one of the many examples.
I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits. Your brand new 2024 car’s system has been in development for 4 years. Product people have been picking at the design and asking for changes way too late, and someone in accounting has asked the hardware contractor to cut more cost off the BOM.
My colleagues were tremendously talented. Some of the brightest engineers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. The developers aren’t lazy or inexperienced, they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver.
In no world would automakers say, "Hey you know, we just did all of this tire engineering with this rubber, but let's change the composition at the last minute and not retest all of its physical properties."
So, why should it be any different with software? Because some sucker PM didn't have the brains to say, "We can't actually do that."?
But then the seats kick on automatically when the car starts and the driver tucks in with her morning coffee for a commute down the highway. The coffee kicks in, the cabin heats up, and suddenly that warm seat is like sitting on a griddle. She taps on the menu to bring up the seat controls, then lag, then has to hit the seat heat button twice to go from “high” to “low” to “off”, lagging each time. Oh, she hit it three times, now it’s on high again. Tap, tap, tap, tap… Meanwhile she has crossed three lanes of traffic and is staring down a jersey barrier at 70+ mph.
I'd actually buy that it's more a matter of the corporate sausage making machine that turns ok hardware and talented developers with good intentions into an output of barely usable poorly performing crap. Ie: exactly how we end up with something like Spotify.
A lot of these are good impulses but also feel like an unfunded mandate, like rear back up cameras being mandatory - obligating everyone pay a thousand dollars more every year.
The feel good comes from the DOT, the cost gets paid by the customer.
This. The devs don't have a say in the tech stack. The decsion is usually outsourced to the lowest bidder. Other than Tesla and Rivian, I can't think of any OEMs that I've dealt with who have full control over control over their display. Almost everyone outsources it to the Koreans who have a lock on that market – i.e. OEMs send in their designs but it's actually implemented by LG, Samsung etc. From what I've seen, any changes or new additions to any on-screen components has a 2 year lead-time unless (not a typo) it's safety critical or catastrophic in some other way.
Another big problem is a very high employee turnover and there is no redundancy in roles and skillsets because of severe cost cutting through the ages. Tech is chosen by senior engineers but vision, knowledge and experience are lost and implementation suffers every time anyone moves companies. My company has been working on an automotive project for the last 3.5 years. I deal with around 10 people on at least a weekly basis. Out of those 10, only one was around at the start of the project. We're also working with another Tier 1, where only 2 out the 12 have been around for 3 years.
Are you saying modern car infotainment systems have fewer resources allocated to the UI?
This was in a time when far fewer instructions were accelerated on the cpu, and my cpu at the time was something like a 66MHz 486-dx2, and even the (Frauenhofer) mp3 codec wasn’t as optimized as it was later.
Relatively speaking: Yes.
Response lag is always because the hardware is chugging to process all the bits in time (they're not in time). Between underprovisioned hardware and shittily written software, hell yeah fewer resources are allocated to the UI.
We need a small supercomputer's worth of resources allocated to bring the software of today up to snap like it was the 90s.
We're using small MCU (not CPU) to drive 480x272 or 800x600 screen. 240Mhz, 8MB of RAM. For example on ESP32-S2 or ESP32-S3.
If you had GPS, bluetooth, wifi, etc. to the mix, yeah that's a challenge and you need to make your UI pretty simple.
Despite that, automotive graphics ramain laggy because they normally build something barely gpu accelerated using java or QT or something else laggy by nature...
Anyway, when you're designing your UI, you've to take into account the computation power available and design around that, otherwise you're doomed.
Basically anything that involves copying pixels or solid fills without per-pixel calculations. 60fps at 800x600 is 28.8Mpixel/s. Copying and filling at that rate should be achievable by a 240MHz CPU with some tight coding. The rest is 2d geometry, mostly axis-aligned, with relatively few edges. That's not demanding at all.
(I used to write 2d and 3d rendering engines for slower CPUs than that.)
A GPU is necessary for fancier effects like fades and shading, but the basics can be smooth on a CPU and the fancy stuff too if confined to smaller areas.
Also, for the car, people would be happy enough if it could do a consistent 30fps I think.
Those annoyingly slow GUI updates you tend to see on TV set top boxes are not slow because of the hardware... it's usually the software not being written with sleedy rendering in mind.
All that said, you're right that if there's a GPU or even just a Blitter, it should be used and then the CPU speed almost doesn't matter as the geometry calculations are so simple.
> Product people have been picking at the design and asking for changes way too late
Sounds like classic everything-bolted-on-never-refactored-always-add-features you see in the vast majority of companies. Which is fine if you're making a social app or CRM but not okay when talking about heavy machinery. No company ever prioritizes making things snappy and it's ultimately always on the engineers to push back. Sorry, this one is still on the software developers to me.
Especially if the competition is roughly equally slow, the costs to engineer a responsive solution might be to high for its impact on sales.
Consumers, being used to feature rich phones, may indeed value feature count over quality (for the entertainment System). Despite what OEMs claim a car is first and foremost a means of transportation and a "software Plattform" only after that.
It's not clear whether that feedback is from sales channels (i.e. potential customers are shunning particular products) or from service channels (customers are reporting issues that require additional development spend resulting in profits being eroded).
Personally, I've been looking for a new car for 3+ years and the quality of controls (which are nearly all touchscreen based these days) is a major factor.
This is also a reflection that trust in car manufacturers to address software related issues is low - they are used to designing and building cars that are churned out in 3+ year cycles. Moving to a scenario where the product is changing monthly is a huge change. My 13 year old current car is extremely solid and the controls don't change month to month - something that does happen without any customer choice in more recent times. :/
UI is not something you can evaluate on a 30 min test drive under sales pressure. Sometimes there’s no way to test it (no rain, no snow, no free straight road, no immediate glitches). And there’s no reviews that cover it. It’s not a weighted decision, it’s a decision out of only parameters that are most obvious.
The same way you play a lottery with e.g. a washing machine, whether it beeps after unlocking the door or you have to go and sit near it like an idiot for a whole minute.
Wouldn’t surprise me, automotive-grade components tend to trade power for durability & certs, and then you cut down on BOM.
And then the infotainment is hardly ever a visible make or break, people will shrug, then sigh heavily for years as they try to use the POS.
It doesn't help that iphones from that time frame aren't really in use today. Car systems are.
Also, maybe the expected lifetime of something used to turn up and down the volume and show a map while being in a fixed case and not even having its own battery is different than a device running on battery, thrown around in everyday life and literally being pressed on 0-24. And even then an iphone from the last 5 years might well be expected to run for 5 more with a battery replacement at most. Mobile hardware went over a huge change in this timeframe.
I did not mean my post to dismiss the idea that we should expect better. I'm just worried that the practices we put up with elsewhere in software would not, necessarily, be the answer.
The first gen iPhone is highly responsive and has a highly capable UI, more so than even the current gen iPhone.
It's not the engineers, it's you who doesn't have a clue.
Decades ago, we had hardware that was so much less capable than anything anyone has put in a car in ten years that the comparison is absurd. Nonetheless, those old systems were often very capable of doing useful things, and the UIs were often very, very fast by modern standards. And a lot of this was that the software stack was tuned for performance and latency and did not do things that hurt latency too much, and this came at a substantial modularity cost.
Back when a TI calculator with a whole OS running on a Z80 was an order of magnitude or so faster than your average new car, it didn't have a compositor (which still eats a good frame or so of latency, maybe more, and, as an industry we still don't know how to solve this). It ran an OS that was surely far harder to tweak than a modern car stack, but it had fewer layers and could be kept performant. An Apple ][ and its clones were, of course, much faster than a TI calculator, and we still can't match that level of performance.
A group of engineers that were willing to keep the managers away and make a simple, limited-purpose system, could surely get excellent performance out of any currently available car computer hardware, but it would come at a cost. Buzzwords would not happen :) Also, the software developers had access to full data sheets for the hardware, and when you told the hardware to put something in its framebuffer, it was there, and no blobs or firmware were in the middle.
I still remember when Windows 2000 launched with "layered windows": an application could opt in to being composited, and it would gain the ability to be translucent, but it came at a very obvious performance cost. Sadly, 23 years later, that performance cost is still there, but it's not opt-in any more.
> management is much happier to get something less impressive but reliable.
^ this is accurate though. Management wants bells and whistles (animations) which are hard to build without abstraction layers
- Graphing a plot was slow due to slow CPU and high-precision math libraries (could take 3-10 seconds depending on function complexity and detail)
- MathPrint mode slows down printing expressions to an extent, IIRC even moving the cursor through history felt sluggish.
- The B&W LCD screen with slow color transitions adds more latency than a compositor does.
- Garbage collecting the flash memory could take dozens (IIRC) of seconds, and would happen unannounced when manipulating saved programs (IIRC not in regular calculations).
When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product.
I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering.
If the stake holder cares more about a tick list of features than how well the features work there's not much the engineer can do. In my experience stake holders are often much more interested in their burn down graphs and Gantt charts than in getting a really polished core which could later scale quickly with just config.
You need a product owner with real vision and understanding of what good looks like. It's almost a cliche now to reference Steve Jobs but he really did get that a few really excellent features are better than a laundry list of stuff that sucks.
I want a radio, a cd player and AC. I don't even use the Bluetooth, because I don't talk on the phone when I drive.
The features on these new cars do IMHO too much.
I looked into reversing the protocol between the CD jukebox and the stereo, and using an Arduino to inject the appropriate commands - maybe even get the "next" and "back" track buttons working too - but in the end I just fitted a cheapy bare-PCB bluetooth deelie into the cassette deck and wiring it to permanently think it has a tape in.
It works pretty well, and it looks pretty standard. My phone sticks to the flat 1990s dashboard (remember when cars didn't have to have swoopy curves everywhere?) with a couple of bits of double-sided sticky Velcro, and plugs into a USB-C socket fitted where the lighter socket used to be.
Good old farm truck technology.
Not really though. You played a different game using a much simpler sort of engine (probably a raycaster, similar to wolf3d) with much simpler level geometry (probably square on a grid, and probably without stairs, windows through walls, elevating platforms, etc) There are several games like that on the z80 line of TI calculators, for instance Gemini: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.htm...
But the real Doom isn't a simple raycaster, it uses an engine that exists in the space between a raycaster and a true 3d game like Quake. A so-called "2.5D engine". The level geometry had height data, but couldn't overlap itself (so no navigable bridges unless you fake it using raising and lowering platforms (or teleport the player to another part of the level, like the Build engine did.) Rooms could have arbitrary polygonal shapes, walls weren't all at right angles to each other, which complicated the process of rendering and necessitated the use of BSP trees to traverse the level geometry efficiently.
I know of one instance of such a game engine being created for the 83/84 z80 lines of calculator, detailed in a series of blog posts here:
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3720656
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3724115
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3725786
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3728004
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3729994
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3735869
http://www.benryves.com/journal/3739423
AFAIK these gifs represents the pinnacle of a Doom-like engine on the z80 line of calculators:
http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Movin...
http://www.benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.07/Walkt...
Of course computation was slow on the slow, under-featured CPU, but that was to be expected. My car’s touchscreen system doesn’t do anything that is computationally complex — a computer from the late 90s could run a media player and do work at the same time, and my car’s CPU is faster.
The LCD is what it is. I’m talking about latency too when the pixels start trying to change. Anything with a CRT avoided this problem.
And GC is a fair criticism. But my car’s touchscreen is always slow. Oh, and it also often. takes a minute or two to start working when I get on the car.
We've been controlling heating, cooling, audio source, and audio volume since the dawn of time.
How are technical requirements related to these basic functions changing such that their UIs haven't been absolutely perfected by now? Is the entire infotainment code being rewritten all the time so there's no chance to iterate and improve on the previous versions work?
The components that make up the infotainment a lot of times are actually developed by different companies. So navigation is one company, media player another etc.
Also, the deadlines usually make no sense and there is zero time for any optimization work. It's not the devs, it's the way the automotive industry works outsourcing every little button on the dash to another (cheapest) company. They just don't understand that that mentality doesn't work with software. Most of them are mechanical engineers not software people.
One thing Tesla did well was inhousing a lot of this.
Yeah, that's how the automotive industry works. For each car BMW will change the third parties manufacturing each piece and every model is completely rebuilt from scratch. They literally reinvent the wheels all the time.
You shoudn't read too much into the fact that you have a dozen or two of models listed under each version in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_iDrive because it's just a concidence that starting each time from scratch they arrived at the same thing.
That's very different from "This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract [...] For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch."
(And "code being rewritten" is very different from "no chance to iterate and improve on the previous version" when it comes to perfecting the UI - but it wasn't you who introduced that confusion. Rewriting the code could actually facilitate incremental improvements to the interface - and arguably that's what BMW tries to do.)
Maybe you're trying to tell me that I should have understood that you couldn't really mean what you wrote because that's just absurd? In that case you may be right.
I guess that when you say "nobody is iterating on anything" you cannot really mean that either - because it's just equally absurd to think that completely independent systems were designed from scratch multiple times without any reference to the previous ones and it's just by chance that the first version had a dial only, the next "non-iteration" a similar dial and two buttons, later more buttons appeared, etc.
Ah yes, the trillion dollar industry (that's been writing software in many forms for decades) just doesn't have people that understand software.
Meanwhile, you have the "software" people at, say, Tesla, who has the worst driving interface of all and the iPads were melting out of the dash in the summer time. But at least the latency was low!
Slightly yellowing screen I can deal with. Lag on every button press, and random crashes I cannot.
I get that we have families to feed, but I've seen far too much of a mindset shift in fellow engineers into thinking that we're warcraft peons rather than professionals. "The business" has engineering feedback as a necessary input, and speaking individually with steakholders they expect this - they'll push until we push back.
Contrast this with other engineering fields, where the engineer is truly responsible for the decisions they make. My civil engineer friends face losing their licenses, fines or jail time if they are found professionally negligent. The same is true of other high stakes professions - think doctors, lawyers, even accountants. It's probably not appropriate for most software engineering roles, but for safety critical systems it doesn't seem far-fetched to me.
I need to make as much money as possible in the little time as possible, and the best way to do this is to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.
These standards ought to be applied more widely and done in conjunction with tightened consumer law. In many cases the quality of electronics equipment has gone to the dogs. I could give instances of appliances I use that can only be used in a hobbled mode—numbers of published functions simply don't work—because their firmware bugs are so bad.
These devices are so bad they wouldn't pass as early developmental mockups let alone early prototypes in a professional engineering establishment. I'm damned if I know why the hell consumers put up with the situation and haven't revolted, it remains a mystery.
Things won't improve until they do.
Do you think B should face any personal consequences within a public justice system? Or Acme is just liable for a big payout and then upper management decide who takes the blame?
Yes he should. Reason, because he now knows the consequences of proceeding if the problem not fixed first (he was told them by engineer A.).
Once aware, everyone has the responsibility to act. The Occupational Health & Safety laws of many jurisdictions are written exactly on this principle. Such laws don't just apply to managers and decision-makers, a floor sweeper who overheard the conversion would also be culpable if it were proven that he did not inform authority of the fact and or if he had good reason to suspect Management would do nothing.
Same for Engineer A, he would still be culpable if after telling Product Manager B the facts and he knew or had good reason to suspect Product Manager B or others responsible did not or would not act to fix the problem. Moreover, unlike the floor sweeper, Engineer A, due to his extensive knowledge of the facts and his senior decision-making position (as an engineer—even if not in charge of marketing or production), the Law would still require him to follow though with either senior management and or external authority until he was satisfied (to the level of his professional ability) that the problem was sufficiently in the hands of responsible others.
Whilst these laws vary between different jurisdictions the common themes are if one—and that's anyone, inside or outside the company—knows there's danger and or potential for someone to be harmed or killed then that person has to act, irrespective—full stop. Second, the more responsible or more knowledgeable someone is as to the consequences of something or some process going wrong then the more incumbent it is for that person to act (the floor sweeper in Boeing's factory would not be expected to know the wrong alloy had been used in engine turbine blades but the engineer would).
These laws were introduced to avoid problems like the Challenger and the Boeing 737Max disasters, and the Purdue Pharmaceuticals opioid crisis. Unfortunately, the US lags behind in either implementing them or making existing laws sufficiently strong.
Especially since the boundaries of "making software" is pretty blurry.
Would creating a suboptimal Excel spreadsheet count as "making software too bloated"? A pretty strong case could be made for that.
Would creating a clunky personal homepage count as "making software too bloated"? A pretty strong case could be made for that.
I neither said nor implied this. To be clear, the products in question were sold under false presences, as they were sold with features that—as far as the lay consumer is concerned—don't exist (just because I'm a technical person and I know they are almost certainly software bugs and or are not designed as per specifications is immaterial). In essence, by deliberately selling a substandard product they've committed fraud.
Here's one of the many examples I could list but it's a clearcut easy one to understand. I have three identical PVRs/STBs (Personal Video Recorders/Set Top Boxes) of one brand and type—so the problem is not just a single faulty unit. These are the type that you add external storage via USB, 2.5" or thumb drives.
Advertised on the outside of their boxes is the statement that they will take external storage to 2TB in size, the scanty manual—if you can call it that—that's sealed in the box which you can't read until one unboxes the device makes a very clearcut statement that the maximum limit of external storage is ONLY 700MB drive (a rather strange limit methinks), and 1/3rd that published on the box. In practice, these units simply wiil not work with ANY external USB drive 2.5" rotary or SSD drives—even the lowest current SSDs of 120GB or smaller—which is in direct contradiction to what's stated on the box and in the so-called manual.
They will however work with thumb drives up to 128GB (I haven't tried bigger). Incidentally, have you ever seen a 2TB thumb drive? Right, I haven't either.
Thats not all, there are software bugs and an UNSTATED limitation that only six programs can be programmed at one time (this is an unheard of restrictive limit, I've never reached the limit on my other units although one type, which has other bugs and problems, says its limit is 32).
I also have three other PVRs but of a different brand (a well-known international mob). All three have the SAME identical model number but two have completely different electronics and their firmware operates in a totally different fashion to the first (clearly built by a different subcontractor), Even the boxes they came in are all identical.
I discovered this when the first unit failed and I bought two more of the same. Moreover, the first unit wasn't even out of warranty so the second purchase was only about six months on from the first.
To make matters worse, before the first unit failed and after getting nowhere with the local distributer I'd hunted around the internet for a firmware upgrade to fix the annoying bugs but couldn't find an ungrade (little wonder if different hardware exists for a given model). The so-called identical replacements are not only operationally very different but they have so many bugs that they are actually unusable. I'm still working on exchange/warranties and such.
Those two brands are not alone in having masses of bugs, I've three other brands—five all up with even more model numbers (yes, I've boxes of these damned things). The bugs in a third band are so bad that it allows one to program the same timeslot on different channels simultaneously—which channel takes precedent and is recorded is pot luck, at other times, about one in three, it fails to record the scheduled program, only a black screen (it switches to blank instead of a channel—but give credit where credit's due, it does switch to blank at the correct time)!
And believe it or not that brand/model has been on the market for several years and it still is without any firmware upgrages being available.
Here, I've presented only the tip of the iceberg—and that's only the PVR/STB story. Where else would you like me to start?
People should not have to put up with this shit, it wastes time and human effort not to mention wastes resources and the environment is clogged up with dead and discarded e-waste and other junk. A simple way around the problem would be to license both companies and their design engineers and threaten them with loss of license for producing junk. With importers, bring in junk and they'd lose their import license.
Implement these rules and most of the problems would soon disappear. In extreme cases where irresponsible designs threaten safety and life then loss of license and jail time would be a just measure.
As with other professions, civil, chemical engineering etc., when the outcomes are the same (people killed or injured etc.) then the punishment should also be the same.
Software design should be no exception to any other profession just because it's common for programs to have bugs.
Moreover, the profession of programming now calls itself Software Engeering, if it wants to play with the Big Boys then it must face the same consequences when things go wrong.
Sometimes you have to decide, do I build a better system, or do I feed my family. The craft and world suffer, but...
If you have a company and refuse to take the crazy deadlines and low quality and low pay then don't worry, there is another Tier 1 supplier across the street who will do it for you. OEMs know that you need them more than they need you.
Well, that is evil by design irrespective of the particular implementation, no? ;-)
Another thing that happens is when there is a 50ms response time mandated and at the start of the project you have 30ms and it slowly creeps up until you get to 55ms. Then the blame game starts. Like I said previously, each component is usually won by a different tier 1 supplier. So everybody puts the blame on somebody else. One tier 1 is building the linux distro, the other is making basic system libraries and the applications are written by another 20 tier 1 suppliers.
Then the deadline hits and the car needs to be sent to the showrooms. So whatever 50ms was chosen initially is changed to whatever it currently is so to say they are within spec and can ship the damned car.
I guess it's also up to buyers: don't buy cars with shoddy infotainment.
Not much, but, there is some.
After working on infotainment, I'm doing my best to avoid purchasing a car with an infotainment system. I had to compromise and got a Civic with an infotainment system for my wife, but I'll probably stick to late 2000s, early 2010s for as long as I possibly can to avoid them. Seriously hate touchscreens, and there's just not enough value in an infotainment system for me to be OK with what I'm losing by having one.
They will not tell the customer this because either the customer doesn't care, so why waste time and resources
...or when the customer realises they will open a Change Request to fix the issue. Change Requests are how you make an actual profit on unprofitable, low-balled contract and probably gain an extension on the unachievable timeline agreed to win the bid in the first place.
The "customer" is the person that signs the contract not the user of the product. They probably don't care that it's a pig to use. It just has to look OK in a presentation to their boss (...who isn't going to ever use it either).
If Tier 1 suppliers didn't behave this way they wouldn't be able to pitch bid responses cheap enough to win bids. The responsibility for crappy products lies entirely with the product owners. Only they know what's good enough.
Källenius explained the current system to Ars Technica like this:
"So some engineer in Sindelfingen comes up with a concept. You have to write that down. You have to send it to the supplier that needs to be quoted. Then procurement people need to negotiate with each other. Then that supplier goes to some sub-supplier in Eastern Europe and wherever they do. It goes back up the chain again. It gets tested and nine months later, you have actually changed something in your infotainment system. Now you go into the ESH [Mercedes' electric Software Hub]. To say, let's change this and you just do it."When the newborn is crying and wants food you do what you've got to do. And there are many people like that.
I am currently trying (again) to get into embedded development. I would gladly take the job of the guy that refused to make shitty software, if that means I can keep feeding my baby. Unless it would be too unethical. (I refuse to do work that will kill people, for example I won't work for Palantir, companies that make sketchy software related to flight controls or medicine or other critical applications and so on... but the car media player? yeah, I am willing to make a crappy one if I get the job, I prefer to make a good one, but if my boss want a crappy one... then what I can do? overtime to get a promotion, clearly doesn't work ;) )
Isn’t a crappy UI on a car something that could kill people?
We know that phone using drivers perform worse than drink drivers. They regularly kill people because they're not concentrating on what's in front of them.
If you change the car's UI from something with low latency[1] to something with much greater latency[2] then you are definitely putting others at higher risk because drivers spend longer not concentrating on driving.
--
1. See button, move hand, feel large physical button, look back at road, press button, feel feedback click.
2. See screen, move hand, see screen pops up menu on hand proximity, see menu item, click menu item, miss-press try again, wait for animation, attempt to select feature but hand moves due to bump in the road, move hand again, try to select feature again, miss-press try again, wait for feedback animation, look back at road.
Cost.
My guess would be that manufacturers want touchscreens because they're cheaper to develop and implement than an inventory of individual physical controls.
Adding a new touchscreen widget to a car that's already in production is just an over the air software upgrade vs a very expensive redesign/recall for physical controls.
Drivers don't think through the consequences of the control system at the time of purchase or have it as a low priority compared to things like purchase price.
I think it's pretty easy to tell yourself that your not going to mess with a screen while driving but in reality it's much harder to fight that compulsion. If it wasn't then we wouldn't need the "I'm Not Driving" feature on phones.
Anyway, I understand that they're doing it because of cost, but if you're going to start saying the guy who worked on the infotainment system has blood on his hands because he implemented some animation that takes half a second then surely the person who put a touch screen in the first place is more culpable.
Which is why (in the UK) I view the rise of strikes and unions positively - workers need to hang together - set standards that they won't go below, and also ensure the spoils are fairly shared out.
Recently the deputy governor of the bank of england said "inflation has made everyone poorer - get used to it not ask for wage increases". Which tone deafness misses the point that this is not about wanting a 10% pay increase - it's about how is society structured and how do we share the vast wealth.
The question is not how do I get more, it's how do I build a fair system that inwill be part of.
we are playing the sociopaths game as if it's the only game in town. There should be no game we all play where the rules include not feeding babies. That's a bad game
Which is absolutely horseshit, because the European countries that had the least amount of inflation (besides the super wealthy Switzerland and Luxembourg), were the countries where salaries are automatically indexed with inflation, like Belgium.
So it turns out that forcing companies to increase wages by inflation is a very effective deterrent against price gouging and inflation, yet those in charge try to convince us otherwise, that we should accept lower wages for our own sake lol.
Can you believe the nerve of these people? It's disgusting, but we get what we vote for. You want better, then vote better.
This doesn't help. Even if you were the guy that read all policies or whatever a candidate pushes, the vast majority if people are still just gonna vote with their emotions.
Nice idea
Let’s see that Tesla can change this or not.
There is, of course, a time and a place for a hard "no". I've genuinely threatened to quit rather than implement a particularly user-hostile feature in the past.
I was trying to advocate for the middle path, where there's healthy communication from both sides, to the point that developers trust when "the business" makes a decision - not to the point of engineering completely blocking the, unquoted, business.
TBF thats literally leaded gasoline
Then someone else didn't know what they were doing.
I don't buy it that a 4 year old SoC cannot run GPS navigation, play music, do whatever a car infotainment system does, without half a second delay
I’m not saying like the GP that this indicates inexperienced developers, but it does indicate poor technical leadership and priorities. Further, good/senior developers would have been more likely to call this out.
While we're there, lets put in the requirement that a random joe from the street, with no training, when given the UI and asked to complete a task (eg. Play me some coldplay, turn on the window defroster, pair a bluetooth phone, get directions to the nearest gas station), must be able to figure it out within 20 seconds and 6 taps on average.
Our hiring rate disagrees.
That might be true for run-of-the-mill sweatshops, but not for any tier 2+ companies.
When the managers bosses see the manager failed a project after firing all the people who said it would fail, it won’t look good for them.
Only reason "they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver." happens is because automakers know they can get past all regulatory approval with lead/silver or whatever metal you prefer.
I absolutely hate my Acura’s infotainment system. My “favorite” feature isGPS autocomplete.
You type in part of an address (which of course has a very slow response time), then you pick the completion off the list.
Sounds fine right?
But when you click it, you’re met with a SLOW ANIMATION OF THE COMPLETION BEING TYPED INTO THE SEARCH BOX. Motherfuck dude! What the hell is that? Why does anyone want to watch the keyboard flash for five seconds?
REAMDE, Neal Stephenson
What aspects of the hardware would lead to 500ms response times?
Way more work, as in, turn up the volume or display another thing on the screen?
How do you explain that not that long ago, when CPUs were slower, interfaces were faster?
And from the other side, there is a big push to add more and more fluff to make the UI design sleek, you could make it performant if you used DOS-style interfaces but no product manager is going to allow that and making animations from scratch (vs using a platform like Android or browsers that has a ton of abstractions to create fancy UIs) is extremely costly
I find this hard to believe. An Intel 486 from 30+ years ago could run Doom full screen with nearly instant key press response. A 6502/6510 C64 could repaint the entire text screen each frame. Why would today's auto hardware require 500ms to respond to touches on a static menu?
Probably not because they lack 10x l33t coding skills, and have fat fingers.
* I'm not sure if people realize that many automotive dev teams are buying enormous stacks of software from outside parties that often have motivation to throw you under the bus... if it's not an external supplier, it's probably another team on a different continent... but maybe it's different in infotainment?
My Volt's physical mute button seems to be software controlled. Normally it is very responsive, except when the car is starting up. It kills me whenever I start the car and the volume happened to be cranked up from earlier, music blasts, and the mute button is ineffective. Fortunately the volume knob seems to be hardware controlled and can be used to lower the volume when the car is starting. It's really unintuitive since both controls are physical.
That concept is roughly 20 years old.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....
1. The wipers perform a full sweep, clearing the windscreen.
And
2. The wipers' configuration appears on the screen, ready to be set to any configuration with a single tap.
I did not like it at first, but after some practice it really works well. I still hate the AC controls, though, and must enable lane keeping before even trying to adjust the climate.
It doesn't matter if it takes 1 second for the radio to change stations. The problem with delays is me spending 500 ms trying to get the buttons to react. When I touch a physical button, I instantly know I did.
Of course, if the button is sometimes ignored, that undermines the affordance and people learn not to trust it.
More so, the current hardware they use is quite faster than the original 2010 iPad, yet the og iPad is dramatically more responsive than all these laggy cars.
Meanwhile automotive software is developed by the lowest paid and most crunched people in the industry, in line with the gaming industry, in bottom of the barrel, race to the bottom of cost cutting.
Especially that in Automotive you often have tons of legacy code that gets carried over because nobody wants to touch the old codebase, so all the crust keeps getting carried over, with new layers added on top because the device can't exist in a vacuum or in a tightly controlled ecosystem of the same manufacturer like the iPad, bust must be compatible to all the the other ECUs in the car developed by other companies and still be backwards compatible with the old platform.
Imagine having the iPad team operate at 10% of their budget and write their SW on top of Symbian OS, and be compatible with the Android ecosystem. Good luck getting a smooth experience there.
I think you should specify which iPad here because the 1st gen iPad ran like a crippled sloth
No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot.
Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems.
If the actual action has a perceptible delay, that's annoying but not dangerous. Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control, you know the control has been activated even if the effect is delayed.
With a touch screen, if there is a delay, you'll have to keep taking your eyes off the road again and again, triple checking if you pressed on the right spot or not.
> Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control
I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it.
If a touch screen interface were properly designed with large enough touch affordances and the correct levels of responsiveness, I'd be just as happy with that as I would a big dashboard full of buttons.
For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.
For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster. Ideally it'll be somewhere you can see easily (like on the steering wheel), and most importantly of all it isn't dependent on context. In my car I can easily turn on the aircon, or change the music volume, or answer the phone without looking away from the road because I know where the button is and one press always does that thing. On a touchscreen you always need to give it attention because the screen area changes what it does depending on what you've pressed before pressing that area. That is a huge disadvantage.
Your point about pressing a button not doing what it's supposed to is right, but I have to admit I can't remember the last time that happened in any car I've owned. Buttons not working isn't a common issue as far as I know.
I found that I was using the wheel warmer button way more than I through I would. It's located right in middle of a cluster on the central console, in an awkward place to look at (right next to my hips in a blind spot).
I devised a nice and cheap fix for this UI problem that wouldn't be applicable on a touch screen: I put a googly eye sticker on it.
Better tactile feedback, no loss of function, and more whimsy in my otherwise boring car.
It illustrates the point that accessibility isn't only for disabled people.
It benefits everyone, and if you're lucky to live long enough, you'll need it more and more as you get older.
Unless you're planning to die young, you're not just abled, but predisabled.
https://twitter.com/BeingCharisBlog/status/14558902395205877...
I suppose we're all just pre-dead as well?
What a depressing way to look at life.
You may want to seek out help from a counselor.
Not everyone is predisabled: many unfortunate people won't live long enough to suffer the consequences of old age.
But I'd rather not die before I get old, myself.
Do you know anyone currently alive who isn't pre-dead?
I certainly hope I'm currently predisabled instead of just short lived, myself.
It sounds like you're the one who needs a counselor if you're so depressed and having such a hard time facing the fact that you're getting older and less abled every second, until you die.
If you're designing user interfaces, you might want to seek out help from an accessibility specialist.
I suggest we call the people on the other side of this divide "Daltreys" and prohibit them from designing any UIs.
The touchscreen latency issue discussed in parent posts is just that...
Do you look down at the shifter every time you use it? It's the same thing really.
With the entertainment system, it's a tree of menus on a touchscreen to find what I need to do and then the screen has several buttons neatly arranged which I need to look at (not just feel for) to find what I need. When I tap on something, it's not immediately clear to me without looking and verifying whether the function has been executed or not.
It's true of some buttons, but there are lots that you don't, mostly on the dipsticks: indicators, wipers, lights and the like.
Others are well delineated and just need a quick glance, but lining up your finger and multiple presses on a touchscreen is not that at all.
Huh? They cannot be. You cannot get the same level of tactile feedback from a touchscreen as from a properly designed knob.
> For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.
I have experienced that regularly in cars. When you have clear, unambiguous feedback that you gave the input exactly how you're supposed to, it's a minor annoyance; you instantly know that the UI failed to pick up on your input. Redo and if failure is consistent, have it repaired.
When you have to start debugging whether it's your input method or the UI having an off day, while driving, that's when things get dangerous to me.
That's true but also I feel like they could make much more tactile touch screen if they actually spent the money. For example, you could use a pressure sensitive touch screen so that mere touch doesn't activate buttons, and you could put a haptic feedback mechanism in it like that of Apple that actually informs you when you press something. The haptic feedback could even subtly tell you whether you are touching a button before you click it.
The reason they don't do that is that touchscreens are a cost cutting measure and making them as expensive as buttons would cut into margins.
You don't realize just how MUCH worse doing it on a touchscreen is.
A touchscreen button is in a specific region of space, yet that region jumps and jostles around because the car and the touchscreen are moving and your arm is moving (usually in a different direction).
If you bump or drag your knuckles on the touchscreen, you accidentally engage some other control.
It's not as bad if the control is at the edge, is a large enough target and the touchscreen has a raised bezel around it to rest your knuckles on, but you still have to use your eyes to locate the button.
It's really annoying with tesla - the targets have gotten smaller over time, they've adopted apple's ios 7 mess of buttons that don't look like buttons, and now the buttons move around due to context, or passenger in seat, or other nonsense. Some buttons have state, but it times out. Some buttons can be moved. Some buttons change depending on what you used last. lots of map stuff auto-hides. Buttons along the edge are good, but they made them smaller and left lots of unused space. many buttons are in the middle with no good reason. ugh.
My suspicion? I suspect the model S/X touchscreen was designed by people who don't drive a model S/X and test it at their desk with a crappy dell monitor and a mouse.
Even if that’s the case, you can lightly drag your finger across a row of buttons, and remember that the button is the third one in without taking your eyes off the road.
Are there no buttons on your car's steering wheel? Really, not even a horn? These can be pressed without even taking your hand off the wheel.
And what about indicators, gear shifter, lights, parking brake? Do you "briefly have to look at the console" to find those?
<laughs in old Citroën>
The only electronic thing on the whole dashboard is the clock, and it's never worked.
In a crowded field of craziness I'd personally have to place the Citroën Visa high up as bonkersiest of the bonkers.
Happy to hear other nominations though.
I liked the control clusters it had instead of stalks.
If I owned one of those I'd feel obliged to make myself a mix tape with Jean-Michel Jarre, Cerrone and Desireless.
I can just see me rocking up at the pub with Voyage Voyage drifting out the sun roof.
I keep my hands at about 2:30 and 10:30, just up against the the airbag cross-member. With my right hand I reach out and a tad down but not much and a bit forward and land on the temp knob (also a toggle push button for temp auto mode) and I can do this every time with perfect muscle memory, to the right of that are six buttons, the closest is the power toggle button, then there's the recirculate/outside switch button, then a pair of side by side buttons for fan up and down then vent modes and against the right edge is the ac toggle button.
It's a breeze to slide my finger across those buttons from closest to farthesst and know exactly where I am. Depending on which I'm after I can come in from the left or right side. Never need to look as the feedback for all of these is an environmental change I can sense by air movement or temperature or whatever, and so I generally know if I got something right or wrong without looking. On a rare occasion I'll be in a rush to flip from outside air to recirculate and will hit the fan down button but that's immediately recognizable and I correct and then easily reach the recirculate button.
Below that space under a lip in the dash face, is, first in line to the right of the temp knob, my 3 stage heated seat button, then the windshield defroster, then the big giant slightly elevated hazard button in the middle and the rear defroster to the right of that. Like with the controls above, I start at the temp dial for orientation and then can usually leap right to the button I want since that distinctive center hazard button provides wayfinding at the mid point.
Reaching down to the console I have two dials, a big one and a small one and I can easily land on the right one directly from the steering wheel in one jump. Then, still without looking, I can rest my hand on and move the dial leisurely, under no pressure for having my arm extended into space holding a specific pose, muscles poised to move quickly as soon as my gaze can align with my finger tips and the touch screen. Instead, my fingers fiddle the knob and usually get what I want on their own, or with only peripheral vision on the screen, but certainly those fingers can just sit there indefinitely until my eyes are safely free to make a glance that's not down at the knob, but due east, horizontally and to the right, atop the dashboard where a low and wide horizontal screen can be seen without losing peripheral vision directly in front of the vehicle and even some out to the left.
The two dials are also joysticks and push buttons. Navigating the stock software and Android Auto are about equally easy and only require peripheral vision on the high-mounted screen most of the time, or the occasional short glances where I can have my eyes on it and the road in front of me considerably more at the same time than if the screen were extending down toward or even to the console.
I've been through models of this same car that were screenless, fully touchscreen, hybrid, and now they've completely dropped the touchscreen and settled on dials and buttons far away from the screen. This is the way.
When you touch a touchscreen, you can't feel the buttons, and it always triggers whatever button you touched.
If you have so much trouble with physical buttons, then you'll have even more trouble with touch screens.
Maybe you should stay off the road.
Touch screens have no such luxury - a graze is a press, the same as an actual press, and because it's a smooth surface, so even if you know the button you want is the second from the bottom, you can't find the bottom button and then go up one.
Ultimately the problem with the touch screen interface is that it has to be looked at, in order for the user to know what mode it's in. Is it in climate control? Is it in radio mode? Is it in Carplay navigation mode or deep in settings? Who knows! Let's find out by not looking at the road where the cars and people are.
As a pedestrian, this does not fill me with joy.
Assuming you possess this basic competence, I find myself wondering how you managed to purchase a vehicle with such absurd ergonomics.
You have a strange, poorly designed vehicle
This "big dashboard full of buttons." Please provide a picture. Is this a custom design?
"For me, when things get dangerous, its [sic] when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its [sic] suppose [sic] to do."
What actions are you referring to? Changing the audio volume? The interior fan speed?
You may want to consider researching your vehicle purchases more rigorously.
This entire thread has me wondering the same thing. I've owned many cars and drive far more than average. What are y'all adjusting so much that's causing issues here?
If we exclude infotainment, which even the best have lousy driving ergonomics, you need to be able to turn wipers on/off (most are automatic now), turn the HVAC up or down (many you can just leave at a single temperature in more modern systems) and turn your headlights on/off, high/low (these have been automatic in the last few cars I've owned). Most other things should be adjusted before you start driving.
What are you having to adjust, outside your music, that's so difficult?
This may not be needed at the start of the drive if people's breath gradually steams up the windows or the weather changes. I have noticed that passengers from warmer climates probably don't have the same problems as they didn't understand this and were complaining at me to turn the fan off.
Though I always buy cars with physical buttons that are in ergonomic places and wouldn't buy something with a touch screen. I am also not sure how a touch screen would work with the thin gloves that I wear in winter when driving to work in the early morning.
Hazard button is pretty hard to miss in every vehicle I have entered
Do you find those difficult in your vehicle's layout?
HVAC--it does not compensate for ambient sunlight. What I want while driving in the sun is very different than what I want driving at night.
I do not have automatic wipers or lights. I have driven cars with automatic lights and I found them wanting.
Volume.
- Climate Control: -- A/C On -- Circulate / Outside Air -- Temperature Up -- Temperature Down -- Fan Speed Up -- Fan Speed Down -- Dual Mode -- Dual Mode Controls ( 4 buttons - Repeat the temp/fan buttons for passenger side) -- Front Defrost -- Rear Defrost
- Lights: -- Headlight mode -- Light dimmer -- Brights on/off -- Foglights on/off -- Flashers on/off
- Driving -- Gear Shift -- Turn Signal -- Cruise Control --- On/Off --- Set/+ --- Resume/- -- ESC (Electronic Stability Control) on/off -- Tripometer / info - check mileage to empty / range / etc
- Wipers -- wiper speed -- spray -- rear wipers --- spray
- Entertainment -- On/Off -- Volume Up -- Volume Down -- Mode (Switch between radio/android auto/sirius/etc) -- Next / Radio Tuner Up -- Previous / Radio Tuner Down -- Radio Presets (6 buttons) -- Play/Pause
- Calling / Voice -- Initiate Voice Command -- Answer call -- Hang up / Decline call
- Mirrors -- side mirror switch left/right -- side mirror adjust
- Windows -- front driver window up/down -- front passenger window up/down -- rear driver window up/down -- rear passenger window up/down -- window lock
- Locks -- lock/unlock
There are a few buttons I would need to look at but they are not something I would usually need while driving.
My chevy has fixed buttons/knobs, but the only one I don't have to look for is the volume knob. There are too many climate buttons that I use maybe once every two weeks for me to gain any muscle memory from pressing them.
A simple demonstration of this back from the 80s: My mother was blind. Along come microwave ovens with their flat control surfaces with push buttons behind. She had no way to find the buttons without inadvertently triggering wrong buttons. Labeling them would have been fine if she was alone but a problem with sighted people in the house. She solved it with a crude jig to let her locate buttons without applying pressure, but that was a two-handed operation that required concentration and still wouldn't work on a true touch screen.
I would be curious to see a well implemented, fast response touchscreen design. I am strongly in favor of buttons but I would love to try a touchscreen operating with the boundaries set by users in this thread (16ms reposne time etc...). I will keep an open mind but have not seen a working example yet.
Haptic tech I have seen are ways to vary the drag coefficient across the screen, tiny actuators that deform the screen, or use of interference to create vibration on a specific location. There is even touchless haptics, using ultrasound.
The only instance where a manufacturer seemed to care was with the iPhone 6 "Taptic Engine", which is little more than a better vibration motor, giving a better "whole screen button" effect. But they didn't improve further, in fact, if anything, the newer models are worse.
It's about stateful UI.
physical layout of buttons is usually stateless - press button thing turns on, press it again it turns off.
You don't need to think in which menu you are, and where to press, while driving.
Tactile buttons are usually much harder to press by mistake. I'm glad my i30 only seems to require the touchscreen for CarPlay (a necessary evil), or settings which I'd generally only check when parked.
I think this is key. I'm perfectly happy to adjust the frequency/folume of the rear reverse sensors, or the date/time format, or whatever, via a touchscreen.
Stuff I use while driving though is a different thing completely, that's where physical buttons come in.
Fortunatly my Skoda meets this - temperature, volume, radio channel etc all on buttons.
Tiny field, not an obvious button, hard to hit while moving. Takes way too much time or effort. Meanwhile trying to do it in my wife's Mazda 3? Just press the big FM button, can't miss it, and can feel for it.
Repeat ad infinitum for other functions. The touchscreen is great for when I'm in the driveway and want to change settings but otherwise terrible for everything else.
Not to be pedantic, but that is a state. But I get what you mean: the button has a fixed place. Know your car well enough and you won't even need to look there to turn the thing off or on.
OP means that the screen has different modes that you traverse between, the car is still stateful.
But gotcha, this depends on your definition of "stateful UI"
> It's about stateful UI.
Yes it is about 'looking and pushing' the button.
And yes it's about stateful UI.
Both can be true at the same time.
Are you sure you want to modify the temperature? Please read the following agreement and type I AGREE if you agree.
Features like Heated Seats, Navigation, Spotify ...and Brakes.
Coming to dystopian future BMW, Tesla, Mercedes (terms and conditions may apply). :(
That’s not true with all buttons. Those infinitely turning dials have some of the same problems, especially with response latency and the same magnitude of input not always resulting in the same magnitude of change. The presence of the dial is better than the touchscreen, but with those dials you still need to monitor the screen to get feedback on how much change you’re (usually slowly) effecting.
I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.
What’s explicitly prohibited is texting/writing and driving.
I did laugh when of course sometimes they would pickup someone holding a chocolate bar while driving. While not necessarily the best thing to do with the one hand, not illegal all the same.
The way that the separations of powers work in the US, basically all driving laws are set by the states. The rules for driving can and do change when you cross state lines in the US, sometimes significantly. It really doesn't make any sense to talk about specific driving laws in the US as a monolith.
It is only one data point but my insurance went down when I got the Tesla.
Also, claim rates have all kind of confounding factors. Maybe a car is safer but more prone to theft, or more dangerous but easier to repair, or has better controls but is driven by inexperienced drivers etc.
They need to make a profit over their whole insured client population, not necessarily over any given segment or car model, so I wouldn't use insurance rates as data points in determining car safety without a lot of caveats.
In Germany it is only legal to operate a touch screen while driving for essential functions with only a brief glance. For example, a judgement was handed down against a Tesla driver who tried to switch up the interval of the windscreen wiper via touchscreen and ran off the road in the process.
Source: https://www.burhoff.de/asp_weitere_beschluesse/inhalte/5723.... (in German)
We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items.
Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not
setting it to a high speed will fuck up the wipers when there is little rain, a /low/ speed will be useless when there is appreciable rain, and when driving you often move from one to another.
Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc.
Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.
This is completely untrue by third party metrics (both governmental and not).
Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into more dangerous operators.
You know, like on my appallingly primitive 1998 Range Rover, or pretty much anything from the same era?
Besides, what if you are on the road with no shoulders.
You've never driven in rain, have you?
My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.
Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.
She has never commented on Seattle "rain" since.
REAL rain.
We get that rain too periodically.
Sesttelites complain about rain because we regularly experience 100+ days of rain.
Seattle rain is not not a storm, it's a marathon.
There's a map here that shows that most of the eastern US gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle is very high on the number of days of measurable precipitation.
Many years ago we had a guy working for us who was sent over from our company's parent company in Southern Cali. He was not keen on going out in the rain at all, and was absolutely terrified that we still drove at 60mph when it was raining. "But what if you skid? It's raining!" he'd wail.
He'd never driven in rain. He just did not take well to a Scottish January, especially the bit where you get 140mph winds for a couple of weeks.
I guess we also have laws about keeping cars in good condition with decent tyres and stuff.
But also, you can now adjust wiper speed / interval on the steering wheel in a Tesla without using the touchscreen.
Feature was actually added a just a few weeks ago in a software update.
Yes, in theory it would be best to have the perfect speed without intervention but there isn't one perfect speed for the conditions.
The speed the driver wants changes from driver to driver and might depend not just on how much rain is coming down but on the amount of traffic on the road, proximity to pedestrians, eye sight and time of day and any number of other factors.
It's always going to be better to have an automatic system that can be tweaked by the driver because everyone is different. The more easily the driver can do that without thinking the better.
There is a specific ban on using phones while driving.
There is an obligation to drive with "due care and attention" so taking your eyes and attention off the road to spend time fiddling with a computer screen can be an offence as well.
I parked (where I could not be seen by the van) to warn oncoming drivers of mobile speed van 50 metres ahead over brow of hill.
While nearly all made eye contact with me and speeders instantly slammed the brakes, two drivers on phones (both women with kids), despite me flashing my headlamps AND putting my hand out of my car and waving at them, they still did not look at me or put down the phone.
This was after the penalty was doubled to 6 points.
(And yes I know its not legal for me to warn drivers of speed traps like this)
"Please click all the images of bicycles to access volume controls".
The adaptive cruise is pretty good, it's been fooled once by two cars moving in front of me at the same time and it appears to have no understanding of cars with huge speed differences. (Bozos that enter the road at half the speed limit.) It also refuses to operate below 28 mph which I dislike because cruise control is good for using the engine to hold your speed down on hills--and there's a certain 25 mph mountain road I sometimes drive. Yeah, maybe the adaptive stuff can't work but at least give me basic control so I don't need to use my brakes!
Insurance companies should have this data already. They should start setting rates based on it.
https://www.themanual.com/auto/touchscreen-in-car-less-safe-...
https://actslaw.com/dashboard-touch-screens-safety-hazard/
https://www.ala.co.uk/connect/in-car-touchscreens-more-dange...
Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down.
At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement..
Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading.
This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous situations.
UX in cars made in the 60s were better than this.
I don't think slapping on fake physical knobs onto laggy buggy software is a solution at all.
Problem is they probably had project managers breathing down their necks about "don't spend time working on non-release-blocking tickets".
1. throttle response, move your foot to 20% and experience between no throttle and wide open as the 'turbos' kick in in my outback
2. every time we get near an intersection with bollards, it thinks it's a kid and slams on the brakes
3. you're not allowed to persist auto start disabling
4. you will be nagged for looking anywhere other than dead straight, especially if looking around a curve, you'll get beeped at
5. sometimes when driving the main 'touchscreen' just dies, takes about 5 minutes to reboot, and the entire time i have no climate or audio control, luckily the adaptive cruise control seems to stay working, you just can't reenable it...
With all the fleet mileage requirements, there are much higher gear ratios for cruise and coast modes, so the engine can be bogged way down near idle speeds. Also, there are more software based throttle controls and interlocks. Some of this has to do with heavy-handed reaction to prior "unintended acceleration" panics, and some is just part of all the modern traction/stability control and efficiency programming.
The programming can get utterly confused and fail to dip back into a ground state where it is ready to accelerate. People doing various combinations of heel-and-toe or other transitions between braking and acceleration, including rolling stops, may get their car into a different mode than they would want, and the recovery from this seems like "turbo lag" or worse.
I personally don’t mind it, but thought it was indicative of how unpopular that feature was when a software update moved the disable button to my Subaru’s dock.
FWIW my Subaru doesn’t experience the other issues mentioned besides 1 & 5. 1 is like any turbo I’ve driven before so maybe my expectations are off but 5 is crazy annoying.
Is this limited to their higher end models?
The 5 speed outback sport I had before was absolutely a joy to drive.
Sadly the last year one can get it as a manual.
I do wonder if the mapping of the pedal is direct. Because one can do it in 2 ways: First one being: putting your foot down 20% means open up the air intake valve and derive fuel requested from that. Or 20% is give me 20% engine power, which then can actually continuously remap what that means in terms of how much we open up the air intake valve and how much fuel we inject as the turbos spin up.
3. I have never seen a car that allows you to do it as the user. I program it in my BMW.
5. If the car is new enough I'd start the lemon process.
It's a great car otherwise, but that makes the flaw stick out even more.
I have a 2015/16 Ford and Chevy with the infotainment screens - both have physical buttons and both respond instantly to my changes. They also both have an additional volume control on the steering wheel itself which also responds instantly.
I'm not advocating everyone go buy Ford/Chevy by any means, but physical buttons - when implemented correctly - are superior to touchscreen controls.
That's kinda the problem; these 'Infotainment' systems keep getting upgraded/etc for marketing purposes but don't have enough care put in the upgrades to make sure stuff works right.
"Move Fast and Break things" is not a good motto for anything that does in a car IMO.
fwiw my '20 Honda Civic doesn't have this problem. Volume knob feedback is instant.
Yes it does. We constantly ban entire classes of goods because some of them can be badly built or badly used by customers knowingly using them wrong. Sydney even banned a few hundred bars in 2013 because tenants were using alcohol then misbehaved on the public street.
Of course, a proven track of horrible implementations of OS for physical knobs should ban those companies from using them for 10 years. Come back to us when you can control how your gear behaves, we should tell them, this is the textbook implementation of no-upfront-regulation-until-you-misbehave.
As a Sydneysider you know we like those shame pages for bad restaurants and the like, maybe we need one for crappy UX
Do you have some examples of makes/models that used potentiometers for volume control?
That's because the switch happened earlier than that. Go back earlier than the "DIN size" head units of the '80s and '90s to the "shaft" style radios with two large knobs flanking a center section with an analog frequency display and maybe some preset buttons if you're lucky.
Also a rotary encoder doesn't age in the same way as a potentiometer. A potentiometer can wear out the area being used most heavily while simultaneously developing oxidation on the areas not being used. Eventually this leads to crackling, dead areas on the dial, and other misbehavior.
A rotary encoder on the other hand doesn't wear out in a practical sense. The only part that even could wear is the bearing or bushing supporting the rotating assembly, and if that's specced appropriately for the application it's effectively a lifetime component. It's possible to build a crappy rotary encoder that falls apart earlier than desired, and of course they can still be damaged by abuse, but a well built one should outlast the useful life of the device it's installed in by multiple orders of magnitude.
Good old reliable polling. That's where it's at. 2 second response for a volume knob should be quick enough for anyone!
"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all." -Rasmus Lerdorf
I'd much rather that than an analogue potentiometer that is guaranteed to be scratchy in a couple of years. Also you won't get steering wheel controls to work with a true analogue knob.
I have a 2018 Outback for reference
If you have any hope at all for Subaru to get better at software development, abandon it here. Subaru is a high watermark in my career for:
- "us-vs-them" fighting between "IT" and "Business"
- Siloing of teams within IT
- Team bloat / retention of non-operative team members
Most of the time it works fairly well, I can perceive some latency but I'm pretty sensitive to it -- my wife can't tell at all.
But when the car is first starting up the infotainment is clearly overloaded and the volume knob is suddenly a gentle suggestion. This is particularly upsetting if it decides to switch to a different input like Bluetooth then starts blasting at the last volume level of that input, and it takes a good 2 seconds to respond to the counterclockwise turn input.
My 2015 Ford Fiesta had a more reliable volume knob, and it was as bargain bin as they come (manual windows!).
If I do the same movement but in 1 second it'll only move up the volume by x/y where y > 2.
That doesn't explain the initial latency. It's probably being posted to a queue which no-one is handling.
It depends on how the physical button works. You functionally don't get tactile feedback if the response time isn't good. You don't actually always know that you've activated a control (e.g. Did I not press it hard enough? Did I need to rotate it further?) Cheap buttons or knobs or dials can often feel mushy and be unclear as to whether you've fully turned them or pushed them.
Not taking eyes off the road is definitely better, but general distraction is still a problem even if you don't have to look away.
I can triangulate my way to the right button on the dashboard with just my fingers without ever taking eyes off the road.
I can touch and feel a button without "pressing" or activating it. Impossible with a touch screen!
Buttons can be differently shaped to make this even better.
Touch screens invite and allow bad ux with nested menus. You need to know which screen you're on, which menu is activated.
I know distinctly if I pressed a button once or twice or thrice, or long pressed it. No dice with touch screens.
No software update will ever change the physical layout of those buttons. Period. So much simpler.
And if buttons are more expensive, well thats good ! Make it harder to put more buttons. We don't need more.
Anecdotally, my 2006 prius had a touch screen. Always worked as expected, no lag. I could never, through 5 years of ownership, change the temp, or start the defogger without looking at the screen. A nissan I drove last week with physical buttons, took me a day to get used to with physical buttons and knobs for these functions.
I dont see a single end user benefit for touch screens. I see a bunch of reasons for the manufacturer tho.
But then how will the suits save 5¢ per car by buying antiquated hardware instead of something appropriate that can perform the tasks requested of it efficiently?
No it's not. With mechanical buttons you have tactile feedback, that is you don't have to look except in the broadest sense to get the general direction. Tactile feedback not only tells you that you have the correct position but also lets you know when the job is complete. That's why rotary potentiometers with knobs make much better volume controls and so on.
Can you imagine trying to play a piano with a glass keyboard? It'd be damn near impossible even for the most skilled pianist as nearby keys wouldn't provide tactile positioning. Same goes for a typewriter or computer keyboard. If you've ever used a flat panel keyboard you'll understand the problem.
Luckily I was just the passenger. If I'd have been driving that car my distraction level would be higher until I got used to it. You don't want people crashing in general, but crashing their brand new cars is ugly.
I had a car radio with volume, tone, balance controls etc. that used rotary knobs for adjustment. The trouble was that instead of the knob being connected to a rotary potentiometer which adjusted an analog circuit that responded instantly to rotation, it was connected to a digital rotary shaft encoder which converted the rotation of one's hand—an analog function—into digital which then changed the level of the analog audio.
So what you may ask. When I rotated the knob a finite and very annoying delay occurred, one's hand could be already off the knob before the volume altered.
This is not a slur on digital systems but on bad shoddy design. First, one questions why bother with such digital complexity in an otherwise analog radio, the second why put a complex digital system in place of about the simplest adjustable system around—a variable resistor. Third, if one designs a digital replacement for an analog system then one would expect it to be better or at least as good as the system it is replacing. In this case the digital system was far substandard to an equivalent analog one.
We see shitty design like this everywhere and it's very annoying. I could spend considerable time outlining why but that's a whole topic of itself. I'll just say this, if enough customers complain then it wouldn't happen. This story shows that consumers can get bad design problems fixed if enough complain, however garbage design would be rectified much faster if many more did so. Unfortunately, many people have high tolerance, it takes a lot to make them complain (manufacturers know this and use the fact and there's essentially no laws to stop them getting away with building crap products).
I have a Toyota and when I want to change the audio source I have to press 'Source' and then it displays a carousel of inputs that I have to scroll through. Or I can press the 'All' button and it displays a neat grid with the options laid out, why not just show me the grid? That's quick and efficient, the current setup is not.
I agree about buttons, if we try and control computers with a button, we will end up with lots of buttons a la 90s ICE system, or a simple interface with mystery button syndrome where you are looking at a screen to see what your button is going to do next.
Point 1: I think the failure to respond in time is, while annoying, a minor problem. The real issue is that you HAVE to look to navigate 3 different incosistent submenus instead of just turning a knob using haptics only (unless you own the car < 1 week when you are still getting to know it).
I drive a lot of VW ID.3 and Audi A6. The ID.3 is hot garbage when it comes to its interface. It regurlarly crashes and freezes as well. Winter and freezing temps outside? Too bad the software for climate control just crashed. Have fun with your frozen windows and mirrors.
The Audi lets me turn all knobs without looking just by feeling their surface and clicks. No eyes off the road at any point once you know the car.
Point 2: it's much less the software than some assume although the engineers aren't entirely blameless. The CPUs used for these systems are the absolute ass low end crap you can find on the market to drop manufacturing costs by another $200 on your $50,000 car. Also management of the engineers is TERRIBLE from what I heard from colleagues at 2 different car makers (one being VW).
Oh my sweet summer child. If only it was the developer's fault and not their managers pushing ridiculous deadlines.
When I'm barreling down the road with 2 metric tons of steel under my ass I'll prefer the shittiest tactile UI that let's me FEEL by touch alone if a) the command I'm about to issue is the desired one and b) if i actually issued the command!
I'll take a physical button or dial for my AC over a touch screen submenu slider any day in a car, even if the touchscreen was <18ms and button had a second or two of delay.
In this scenario the responsiveness of UI is completely irrelevant if it requires me to take my eyes off the street to find it and to validate my input in the first place. When i operate a secondary control in a car i technically already have to shortly compromise ideal safety by taking one hand off the steering wheel and thinking about an additional process. That might be brief, but things happen FAST at 100 km/h. If __on top of that__ I have to stop observing what my car and other cars around me are actually doing, hence interrupting the control mechanism that would let me interrupt the current action and react in the case of imminent danger, I'll be compounding the risk of the whole operation (driving) by orders of magnitude.
"Waiting for response" might feel annoying, but it's nowhere near the safety concern "looking at a screen on the center console to hit the right thing on a glass pane while moving and experiencing inertia" will always present. And that's even without additional complications like "hitting the wrong thing because I didn't look and having to visually debug what i just did on the fly, all still while driving".
Touchscreens aren't an issue because their software is bad, but because they're the wrong interface in the first place.
If the UX is bad, the best UI won't fix it. And this goes x1000 for tools that can literally kill me and others.
It's a "Riddle for the Information Age" that in Alan Cooper wrote in 1999 [1] in "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". One of the riddles is: "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane?" but things have gotten much much worse since then, it needs an update with the contents of this article.
He writes: "That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car... Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines..."
We have seen this coming for 20 years now easily. iDrive happened and excuses were made.
Nobody cares about response times or human-oriented design, it seems, which is incredibly baffling in a car! Where the rest of the controls are supposed to be designed with humans in mind.
My 2022 Subaru's Harman Kardon-built head-unit will block out my entire navigation view for 3 seconds if I dare to brush the volume control with my hand. I've learned to not adjust it after that because doing so only prolongs the time that I can't see where I'm supposed to be going. Also, if I am so unlucky as to lower the volume while the navigation speaks, I end up adjusting the "voiceover volume" and not the "radio/media volume." So when I wonder: "hey why did the navigation stop talking?" I have to remember that I hit the unlucky time to use the invisbily-modal volume knob. Of course, nobody cares and they let this travesty out the door because it's just the "entertainment system."
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...
You are no better.
I would appreciate if the law were extended to cover cheap tablets mounted to the spot in cars where our physical buttons belong.
Two US Navy crashes (17 sailors dead, unfortunately) are attributed to touchscreen complexity and unfamiliarity with the controls. [0]
The Navy is ditching touchscreens too, and going with mechanical switches and wheels. Maybe cars and ships make a larger trend away from touchscreens?
This is the only real topic about buttons and driving.
At least for me, response time isn't the issue. It's being able to reach without looking, feel the position of the button I want in relationship to other buttons, and then press it and get the desired results. That is something that can't be duplicated with a touch screen, particularly one on which the button I want isn't on the very top level.
Edit: Fuck it, let's put some AI in there too. Volume adjustments should pass through a 100M parameter model first to determine if we should change the volume and by how much.
Everything I generally need to do while driving I can do without using the touch screen. Being experienced with my car I can do it purely by touch, no looking *at all*.
We make a big issue about hands-free use of phones while driving--other than for a new driver I do not believe that matters. I learned on stick, that most certainly isn't hands-free but nobody says it's unsafe. What's actually important is that driver tasks be eyes-free and concentration-free. (And, yes, once you've learned stick is concentration-free.) And hands-free doesn't eliminate the problem of people taking phone calls that require thought--that's what is actually dangerous.
I don't give the slightest hoot about the response time of the controls so long as they count activations independent of the response time. (I click a control 5 times, I care that it actually moved the relevant value 5 but if it takes a second per click to acknowledge that's irrelevant. I'm unlikely to even look at the result.)
these imbecile developers ... under-experienced software "engineers."
Yes, I know we've all been conditioned by the relentless pecking order of this industry to direct our ire downwards and sideways, rather than where it belongs.
But in my experience, at least 80 percent of the time the developers (whatever their caliber) are perfectly aware of when stuff is inadequate, and how to do stuff better. Ultimately it's managers and executives who make the call on what to create, and when to release.
Boundary setting is a two way street. There's a certain ratio of 'no' in your responses and if you don't hit it then you don't have a healthy relationship. And as the member of a group dynamic, you're letting down your peers.
But the real shocker was when I caught developers agreeing with me in philosophical discussions and then sitting around doing nothing when slack occurred in the schedule. It didn't occur to me that developers would agree with engineering philosophy only to appear high minded, and then defect when the cameras weren't rolling. Boy was that a hard (and angry) week.
Vastly more common (and destructive) than simple incompetence, I have sadly come to find.
I was just thinking this morning that Ted Lasso may make it easier for some of us to try again to reintroduce some of these concepts.
The logarithmic increase in set/insert times as your user base swells by orders of magnitude, for instance. This was all fine when we had 100 test users in our database. Response time is not so great with 100k. The first app I ever did performance tuning on essentially had time series data and (when I got there) quadratic search time with 2 criteria. Nobody before me had bothered putting a year's worth of data into the sample data, let alone 5. They also hadn't dreamed of 3 search criteria (surprise, cubic time!) Of course before me the app was too slow to care - literally could watch the UI paint it was so slow.
When you have two buttons on the interface everything is snappy. Each new button should reasonably expect logarithmic overhead, decent designs often add square root overhead (memory costs on real hardware are n^0.5), and bad designs add constant or quadratic overhead, and either nobody checks or is so focused on the deadline that they can't see the project burning down around them. Every day that click takes a few milliseconds longer.
The "ipad-like" touch screen looks cool, but it's very uncool as software updates have slowed it down over time... When I shift into reverse, the camera often doesn't come on for what seems like ages... The car also does not turn completely off when I turn it off, completely bewildering to me, as the battery can go dead easily in a crisis because of this issue, especially when the car is connected to Android Auto, the car never wants to turn itself off.
The volume control on the car turns up every time I switch the radio to a new station or input, even when the stereo is on mute, which is verrrrry jarring. The car beeps constantly for no reason as well, reverse sensor noises and a lot more unhelpful options need to be turned off every time the car is started, almost feels as if they want to frustrate drivers.
I am really beginning to hate advanced technology in cars, because the software in them is geared towards people that constantly want to be distracted and entertained by the tech, whereas I like to stay focused on the road. Mobile phones also drive the tech and stimulation obsession for many, whereas old cars just serve a common and simple purpose, and with an audio jack and car-native GPS (which phone/car makers got rid of) life was so much more simple and enjoyable while driving from what I can recall.
Software driven cars create tons of distractions that translate into real world accidents that could be preventable, especially with developing hands free commands (they work very poorly still in most cars to this day).
I also suspect many of these in-vehicle infotainment systems are using a non-realtime OS like plain-vanilla Linux without PREEMPT_RT.
Other touch screens (or similar things) I dislike:
- the controls on my stove top
- the controls on my monitor
- the controls on my tv
- the controls on my thermostat
- probably more
All of these should have physical buttons for the limited number of functions required. Or, at a minimum, for navigation and confirmation. Touch screens there suck.
My wife's car has a touch screen on the control/infotainment center whatever it's called (where the radio is), and a few physical buttons on the steering wheel. There are two clocks: one on the control center, and one in the main dashboard display.
The dashboard clock is controlled by the buttons (just one for menu nav and one for confirm selection) is super simple and frustration-free to change. The touch-screen controlled one is a shitty pain the ass.
By far the worst though is my touch-controlled stove top. Just give me some damned knobs.
How were these stove-top touch-buttons ever considered an upgrade to their predecessor? They always have no feedback, or that annoyingly high "beep" feedback. They are always slow to respond. They typically use only two or three buttons to control the actual temperature, forcing you to select location first, which is typically slow and terrible as well. Nobody in their right mind can prefer these to the good old separate knobs which we used to have; which my relatively new stove still has (they still exist luckily). I'll add a link to the one I have, for others looking for stove's without the annoying touch controls.
https://www.bosch-home.no/produktliste/komfyr-ovn-platetopp-...
Disagree. Spills can turn hobs on & off, and at best cause the entire control surface to lock up and start beeping - which can quickly turn worst, if a hob happened to turn on a split second earlier.
Knobs. On the front, not on the top.
How do you do knobs on the front (or side) with an embedded cooktop? Raise it by 3 inches so you have space for knobs?
I have never in my life seen a stovetop knob that isn’t easily removable for cleaning. The shitty touch panel on my cooktop is recessed in a way that it is impossible to fully clean a liquid spill out of the seam without disassembling the appliance.
I'm looking for an induction top or an oven combo with knobs and it's difficult.
No, it's not induction. The BOSCH stoves with induction all have that nutty touch interface :/
Seems like a pretty big problem if that's the case for any of those touch controls on a stove; perhaps they're even worse than I thought :-)
I don't think it's anything to do with touch buttons being easier to clean. I think it's just that they are cheap.
I did choose the touch version specifically because I was tired of all the work cleaning my natural gas cooktop. Now that I've used it for a few months, I think I'd like the knobs better because the cooktop would still be a lot easier to clean overall, but it's not terrible. My biggest complaint is that the cat walks across it at night and I can hear the dings as it steps on the buttons. And then there's the paw prints on the glass. Sigh.
I still prefer physical buttons though.
The problem is that you don't realise any of this until it's too late and your only option is to rip the stove top out and replace it with another brand.
Honestly it is unreasonable to think something so ridiculously overcomplicated would ever work.
Key for me was to learn that to activate the knob, you needed to make sure to touch both metallic rings on the knob at once.
I overall preferred the UX over a pure touch based interface. We stored the knob by attaching it to the hood (the knob contains a magnet), so it was always at the same location.
I don't know how one can loose/have to find them, mine is always on the stove, I only take if off while cleaning and put it back on afterwards, which is a thing of milliseconds, thanks to the magnetic attachment.
The control knobs are extremely easy to clean: I just pull them off and throw them in the dishwasher.
The display is never clean. It has grease on it and I can't ever scrub it hard or use caustics for fear of damaging it.
Touchscreen is fancier, looking and cheaper to make them buttons or knobs.
It’s just cost it always was. They made it shiny, so you thought it was better.
Guess what happens during the cold season when you you've got your gloves on? Yep, absolutely nothing! (bonus f.u. points if you are carrying stuff and cannot easily take the gloves off)
Luckily have a fully analogue car so I'm maintaining my sanity somewhat.
Also, the people making the warmer gloves are more interested in keeping hands warm than in adding such features.
The extra knife twist is that if I misjudge how wet my hands are, I get a little water on the dishwasher controls and then they don't work at all until I dry them thoroughly.
Buttons meant there was less space for a screen. They couldn't make the display any bigger, or the buttons any smaller, so an innovation was needed. It's a unique device; the input is as important as the output. Designers don't seem to understand that.
A car has more space to put button and knobs than a mobile phone ever will. Not only that, while the output to the user required is minimal, but the input is critical. I need an input that is as easy and clear to activate as possible. All I need in response is a noise or light to tell me that the feature is active. A touch display might give me more visual feedback, but that is not the important factor!
Don't even get me started on capacitive touch buttons...
I normally have to push start a few times to get it to actually start, and there is no feedback that I've even pushed start at all. So I don't know if it's just not registered the push, or it has and it's just not doing anything.
It's so dumb, I don't know what is wrong with a physical button.
Problem #2, which makes Problem #1 ten times worse, when when you get crap like Tesla does where the UI changes every month. They don't have any genuine functionality improvements to make, so they just move buttons around and hide or eliminate buttons "in preparation to make the car driverless". I never use Autopilot, much less Partial-Self-Driving. Give me back my UI from five years ago.
What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a finger, but you could also just hit pagedwn tactile button.
https://www.google.com/search?q=airbus+a380+keyboard&tbm=isc...
Maybe that's the endgame -- dedicated buttons for commonly used functions, keyboards for everything else.
When you're in cruise flight, things happen slowly. Heck, on a pre-touchscreen general aviation GPS unit, you dial waypoints in one letter at a time with a single rotary knob. As annoying as the touchscreen is, it's still an improvement - and you still get your single rotary knob in case things are turbulent, so it's no really any worse.
Takeoff/landing is a different story. Things happen quickly there. But you're also not messing with the avionics during those phases of flight.
As the saying goes: aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order. Touchscreens are mostly the realm of navigation and (sometimes) communication.
This actually made me consider an Audi, except for the fact that by the time I drove it this was an older model, and that input had long been superseded by a pure touchscreen.
Silicone is inexpensive and suitable for cookware that gets exposed to heat. I bet that sort of thing could survive an autoclave.
A generic touch screen with dynamic controls is cheaper than a larger custom made keyboard or physical controls. It's the same reason we end up with power inefficient IoT devices that could be made with very cheap and efficient microcontrollers, but developing for those requires expensive expertise, so we end up with huge powerful ARM cores because it's more general and easier to code.
The common factor in both of these issues is cost to manufacturer vs cost to user (power, safety etc).
I am sure ER doctors hate to use touchscreens as well, but that's for another thread.
In the end it ended up not working well enough (the Leap Motion would often give glitchy positioning data), but I believe it's the way forward.
I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.
Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).
The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.
I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?
Just another case of inadvertent button activation for touch screens.
[1] iPad decided this should be capitalized, lol
Then, a friend of mine, which has completely lost vision and can read Braille, jokingly said to me when he arrived: "Trying to find the right button, I probably send the lift to all floors!"
And I've seen that when people are holding their phones in a living room. The cars are vibrating (normally), and the user is trying to drive, with one hand on the wheel, etc.
Especially, as designers think it’s cool to have tiny buttons on the touch screen.
Touchscreens don't provide this. If your finger comes into contact in the wrong place, the wrong thing happens. So your first contact must be absolutely correct.
Your arm is extended. Your hand/finger partially blocks your view of the button. Your depth perception of that flat plane with fluid reference points is not good. Bang! The wrong app completely opens.
Now you have to spend time dealing with the consequences of that your error, even if you don't feel inclided to try again. Instead of rewinding to re-listen to the last 20 seconds of a podcast because traffic demanded your attention, you are now listening to the radio and have set an alarm for midnight.
I have an older Mercedes (2004) that is like this. There’s a screen, but it’s not touch. There is are columns of physical, pushable buttons at the left and right sides, and the labels appear on the screen next to the buttons.
Apparently they're available for flight sim games, if I had the time and know-how, it'd be neat to bu one (e.g. on AliExpress) and integrate it to my car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gysmVPYX2Fc
Avionics manufacturers are generally pretty serious about Ux. Or at least the test pilots berate them into caring, when I was in Flight Test Engineering I remember a lot of "spicy" feedback about avionics usability issues getting sent back to the manufacturers lol
"Soft keys" [0] are what you're describing. Very commonly seen on ATMs.
Maybe I'm biased. My old car has a great UI. No touchscreen, just a panel of physical knobs and buttons for media and climate control. The phone integration could be better, but that would really just mean a place to put my phone (without clipping it onto a vent) and a stereo that lets me play/pause/skip songs on my phone using the car's physical media controls.
Mach-E famously have a scroll wheel that imitates touch-swipe to adjust volume.
FWIW I don't hate Tesla's touchscreen yet, but I dislike the fact you can't shut it off or disable all the stupid FSD animations there.
Given that, automakers figured they may as well use the damn thing for everything else too and cut costs.
It wasn't just that they wanted to take away tactile controls to save money. It was that they had to make room in there for the screen anyway, so they figured they'd make the most of it.
Plus those screens can be useful for safety. I much prefer the screen on my dashboard for maps compared to having it on my phone (even with a mount it's bouncy and small)
When Tesla introduced giant screens, then ran into problems with panels not being "automotive grade."
See: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
Wouldn't imagine a reversal killing most healthy adults, so the fatality rate isn't a great measure
"He had gone under the vehicle, I had gone right over his head and killed him. I jumped out of the car, tried to do CPR.” Gulbransen can still taste his blood in his mouth, remembers the way Cameron bled from his nose, his ears. “I knew at that moment he was dead.”"
[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/2018/05/14/after-his-sons-tragic...
Just whose sensitive feelings are you trying to protect with such censorship, and why?
Did reading that upsetting quote ruin your day as much as backing over and killing your own kid would?
Some times you just have to upset people to affect change.
Do you also oppose quoting grieving parents to pass gun control laws too?
If you feel so strongly about it, then instead of just telling people to shut up, why not spend 15 years of your own life trying to pass a bill and enforce government regulations to prohibit quoting grieving parents -- maybe they'll name it after you.
>But while King and then-Senator Hillary Clinton got on board early, automobile maker resistance made sure that results came slow. King and Clinton introduced backover safety legislation in Congress and the Senate in 2005 and Congress enacted the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act in 2008 requiring federal transportation officials to write a regulation to correct vehicle rear visibility problems. President George Bush signed the bill into law. But the the bill languished, thanks to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
https://associationsnow.com/2018/05/advocacy-battle-behind-r...
>The Advocacy Battle Behind Rearview Cameras in Cars Tragic "backover" accidents involving young children gave advocacy groups a reason to push for a law requiring the use of rearview cameras. This week, federal regulations will require the devices in every new car on the road—a decade after the law was passed.
>[...] “I’m a pediatrician, I baby-proof my house, I go out of my way to make sure children are safe and healthy,” Gulbransen said in a recent interview with WABC. “And it happened to me? OK, guess what? It can happen to anybody. So use my example. I own it, I took responsibility, here it is. Let’s channel our grief and get something productive done out of it.”
>[...] “It took a long time, and sadly, along that journey, we had more families joining us in our fight because they had lost their children while knowing there is this preventable technology,” Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Backup cameras are the unholy trinity of upper middle class moral panic and shirking of responsibility, government Doing Something (TM) and people's inability to accept small but concentrated bad things versus large diffuse and hard to measure bad things.
But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.
>But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.
Tape won't undo all the other changes to cars that OEMs engaged in once they were required to have a screen.
Congratulations. Your pet regulatory change has reduced back over deaths by under a hundred a year. In a vacuum with spherical cow that's great but reality isn't a vacuum with spherical cows. And now that you've put this hardware in cars and engineers have taken advantage of it you've increased back out accidents and merging accidents (both are inversely correlated with rear visibility) and you've made many of the critical 2nd order functions of operating a car less intuitive and more distracting to use. You've but you don't care about that because the metric you were gaming (back over deaths) is marginally improved. And when called out by people who want to look at the big picture you respond with insults. Screw you and the safety vest you rode in on.
Your sputtering anger and rage makes you an even less safe driver.
People tend to have to die before there's enough political initiative for real change to happen.
Exactly like sane and popular gun control laws to prevent thousands of childrens' tragic deaths per year from guns face fanatical well funded resistance from insane and corrupt institutions like the NRA and GOP.
Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-...
'Misfire' takes a hard look at nepotism, fraud and corruption in the NRA:
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/02/1051363337/misfire-takes-a-ha...
This leaves me with so many questions:
* Why is this not an (actively discussed) issue in the EU?
* Does this issue exist in other countries than the US?
* If the problem is real, is a camera the only, or even best solution?
These gigantic cars have a significant problem seeing things close to them, especially if they're small like little kids.
This is why backup cameras are so crucial in the US, but not nearly as much in other countries. Those huge cars need them for safety.
For smaller cars (sedans, coups, hatchbacks) the benefit is a lot less.
They are still not a guarantee against these incidents, I personally added backup sensors to my previous car - a Subaru Outback. They saved me from reversing into another car that had kind of snuck up on me once.
The Tesla Model 3 (Ryzen '22 w/radar edition) is far, far superior in all aspects of safety when reversing now. Both a huge responsive massive FOV screen with side displays and the ultrasonic sensors beeping.
For example, when I’m listening to a podcast I can turn the knob to highlight the skip forward button, and leave it there. Then when adds come on I can just feel for and press the knob without looking at the screen. In the Forester I have to awkwardly hold my arm out, breaking my hand with my thumb while I try to hit the right button. Usually I don’t bother because it feels too unsafe.
You can change what the forward/back buttons on the steering wheel do, such as changing them to skip, but then I’m In the same situation when I want to go to the next podcast or skip a few.
But it seems those two companies are moving towards touchscreens due to market demand.
Touch screen is fine for setup screens, extra info, fine tuning stuff etc.
Point is when I'm driving down the road I should be able to muscle memory/tactily skip song, change volume, change air-conditioning settings etc...
But Bluetooth settings... changing colour of display, changing voice assistant tone... leave that on the touch screen. Don't need it.
Wheels and buttons respond faster, it forces vendors to be concise, and it doesn’t gunk up my screen.
Muscle memory forms quickly for anything that’s a “one and done” setting.
A non-modal interface for controlling audio settings (volume, bass, treble, etc.) would be one knob for each function—not one knob which changes function when you click it, or having to dig seven layers deep through in a touch screen menu. I change audio settings all the time on my car depending on what I'm listening to, because there are 6 knobs for this (big volume knob, small knobs for bass/mid/treble/balance/fader.[1]
Modal interfaces in cars are bad because their results are unpredictable. Touch screens are bad because they allow for non-modal interfaces, and also because they're not tactile.
[1] https://d3inagkmqs1m6q.cloudfront.net/1517/media-photos/cp04...
Yes, anything that could ever conceivably be needed to be used by the driver while driving must have a physical, mechanical control.
Things that can be configured while the car is parked and never need to be changed while driving, can be ok on a touch screen.
If I really need to i.e. hunt for a particular radio station I'll do it when stopped.
I expected to dislike the screen but it's fine.
I was pretty worried about getting a tesla because of the screen/controls, and I spent months only considering other brands. But! No regrets.
But, I don’t drive every day, and when I do it’s usually a short trip, so I’m slow to build the habits.
AC voice command examples https://www.tesla.com/support/voice-commands
A generic command like “make it warmer” will bump it up 3 degrees.
For example, VW cars often have multiple knobs and buttons just for controlling the AC, which is far too complicated. If the car is electric, one might also need to put it into a regular mode (non-eco) to use AC and heating through a dedicated button/menu option. A better solution would be to emulate electric mirror adjustments, incorporating all climate control functions into one single knob - up-down for fan speed, left-right for temperature, and clockwise-ccw for zone/area.
Similarly, gear shifters come in various forms, such as buttons, levers, and sticks, or a combination of both, creating confusion. For example, it's common for AT vehicles to have a parking mode on the gear shifter, but also a parking brake button or lever. Sometimes drive, neutral, and parking are buttons, but there is a lever for multiple drive modes. The most dangerous configuration so far I've seen is where D and R buttons are next to each other. Electric cars, in particular, should only require a simple but clear switch between forward and reverse as their pedals already can stop and go, and many will be effectively parked if fully stopped, they won't roll.
Head units are also problematic with unclear and inconsistent button labels like "Media", "Source", "Input", "Map", "Nav", "Car", sometimes different on the head unit and the steering wheel.
In some cases, like Porsches, there are over 60 buttons within the driver's reach, making it difficult to operate without looking. This is not much better than a touchscreen, it totally distracts you from the road. I would even say that any interface with more than 4-5 buttons in a row that feel the same isn't much better than a touchscreen.
All these issues may not be as pronounced for those familiar with their own cars and are easier to see in rentals. And perhaps they are not big issues, there is still very significant room for UX improvement.
I would like to see more cars go in the way of Tesla and remove a lot that is not necessary. This is not to say that they can't keep buttons. But as I said, climate control could be one knob, the automatic transmission selector could be another. If the parking brake will be electronic, just make the car automatically engage it when parked and turned off. The content shown/played on the media unit could be controlled by another knob - up/down for modes and input sources, left-right to skip tracks or tune radio stations, clockwise-ccw for volume. And then sure, the rest can be on the touchscreen.
To sum up - many buttons (especially when mislabelled or when they handle the same function in combination with other inputs) are also attention-grabbing and inconvenient. Buttons or touchscreens - the UX in cars can be improved a lot.
I've heard that Americans prioritize comfort and practicality in their cars while Germans prefer control and performance. But I always assumed that individual preferences vary so much that any overall correlations to region would be weak. For example, I hail from Central Europe, but strongly prefer the Tesla aesthetic, even if I am not a fan of touchscreening everything.
Physical buttons for common car features should be non-modal and not context dependent, and in a consistent location you can memorize without looking. You should be able to pause the music without having to navigate to some UI submenu first. Same with climate control, volume, etc.
> 10 and 2 o’clock is no longer recommended because it can be dangerous in vehicles with smaller steering wheels and equipped with airbags.
(Source: https://driving-tests.org/beginner-drivers/how-to-hold-a-ste...)
and the implication that otherwise the trad 10 and 2 position recommended for decades is still 100% A-OK.
Also to always have two hands on the wheel, sliding it through one hand by a solid grip of the other .. all centred about off bitumen rough road driving with unexpected dips, cambers, holes that might catch you by surprise.
I suspect the higher hand position gives a greater advantage in older vehicles with direct under geared mechanical steering as there's more travel from the hand griping position downwards around the arc before "running out of travel" and having to move that hand .. ie better control on bad roads with odd cambers etc.
As far as I am aware, teaching students 10 and 2 has long since been phased out supposedly due to the increase of arm injuries in the event of an accident. 9 and 3 wasn't recommended to us because if your air bag deploys, your right arm will smash into your passenger or the passenger air bag. 8 and 4 is supposed to be safer but it comes with the caveat that you have to steer your car a specific way.
That being said, I prefer 9 and 3 and it's hard to find drivers in America that don't use this position as their default.
That said, if someone absolutely has their heart set on 10 & 2, that is still better than 98% of drivers out there with random single hand steering placement, so it's ok.
The absolute worst is single handed cross placement (e.g. right hand on 10'oclock). Please never do that, you stand zero chance of being able to do a controlled quick correction or emergency manouver if you have to.
I literally don't lose sight of outside situation for hours. I have all the info I usually need - current speed, limit, any navigation info if I don't use google maps, selection of songs. Few buttons to control things on steering wheel is all you need.
And yes touchscreens were and are crap, didn't like first Teslas exactly due to that, while crowds were hyped how new and cool it looked, ignoring practicality and safety issues.
Not only are there buttons and knobs for most of the obvious things (temperature, volume, etc.) but even the infotainment is controllable by buttons and a joystick+knob+touchpad. I virtually never touch the screen itself.
For some bizarre reason, they do have a separate single row of touch "buttons" for a few functions, namely, seat heating and ventilation, which whatever, but also fan speed. Not the hugest deal, but just why? They were so close!
A good example of this might be the lack of intuitive feedback regarding headlights. More and more, dash lights stay on despite exterior lights being off, giving the driver the impression that everything is normal. IIRC several countries including Canada are moving to require exterior lights to be on at all times now, but it boggles my mind that such a simple to understand phenomenon with so many straightforward solutions has to be solved through regulation instead of the automakers just, you know… doing better.
Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.
I'm inclined to think it shouldn't. Cars are highly regulated. There are a great many very specific standards cars have to meet to be legal to sell for road use in most countries. There's stuff we all know about like crash testing for occupants, and more recently for pedestrians, but there's also weird stuff like cars not being allowed to have required lighting on movable bodywork in the US market[0].
I'd set a much higher bar for defective product claims when the design of the product is already subject to a great deal of specific regulation. Courts do not have expertise in car design and are probably worse at specifying design standards for cars than regulatory agencies staffed with experts and dedicated to that task. As you mention, there's a regulatory solution to the problem you're describing already in use in some countries.
[0] Exceptions to that one are occasionally granted on a case by case basis
Count me in the camp that does. My TV runs GoogleOS (Android), and it's great, because I don't need some other device plugged in to do what I want to do with it. There's only 2 things I want from this thing:
1. Playing external media. It has a USB port, so I can plug in thumb drives and play video files from them. The built-in OS works fine for this, and seems to handle any media file or codec I throw at it.
2. Playing YouTube with a good player. Since it's Android, I can load APKs from wherever I want, and so I installed "SmartTubeNext", which blocks ads and sponsor segments automatically. It works almost too well.
I think the mistake most other people make with smart TVs is that they get ones with crappy proprietary OSes, so with those you have no control over anything and can't run any 3rd-party software like SmartTubeNext. Of course, eventually this model could lose support from the mfgr, causing security issues or not being compatible with the apps I want, but for now it's quite nice.
I'm guessing you've missed every thread here about Smart TVs. ref: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=smart+tv
People dying is just the cost of doing business.
I suspect most people in this thread piling onto the hate don't own a recent model Tesla. I know that some owners aren't fans, but most are. There are three things that make the touch screen on Teslas work unlike other cars:
1. The UX - big responsive displays with fast processors and properly designed UIs. They aren't an afterthought like most other vehicles. Every time I drive a car other than my Tesla I too hate the half-ass touch screens.
2. There are indeed still physical controls still on the Tesla for important functions, e.g. drive control, wipers, and audio selection and volume. It's not 100% touch screen.
3. Automation and voice controls handle most of the cases where you'd normally need a knob or button, e.g. wipers and lights are automatic. And voice control seems to be using a state of the art API (Google?) so it works pretty well.
The issue isn't so much with touch screens, it's every other car company being atrocious at software and software design.
I recently test drove a Mazda, and while I’ve seen people online complain about their “commander knob” and lack of touch screen, I liked it pretty well. Screen up further on the dashboard is nice for glancing at maps.
Not even just for the driver to be touching it, but if you have a passenger you can let them deal with putting in directions or managing your audio and the wheel is a lot less obvious than a touchscreen to someone who isn't familiar with it.
And as a driver, it felt like there were some things where it'd be easier to just touch the screen too. Like for the buttons scattered around the corner of Maps, scrolling through a list or a grid is easy to navigate, random stuff all over the screen you'll have to learn the order.
Apparently the Japanese market version for 2024 is getting a 10.25" screen which I'm guessing is the same part as the CX-50. That could mean adding touch for CarPlay, but none of the articles mention it one way or the other. Maybe I'll wait and see about the US update before making any buying decisions.
The screen far away from arm reach is something they deliberately did because they argue you shouldn’t touch a screen while driving, you should only use the knob as that minimizes time you don’t look at the road.
When we design synthesizers, the MAJORITY of the cost is in the UI. People need the UI because our industry is all about gestures and mastery. You cannot master when you have a large screen that is not consistent and requires too much interaction.
Musicians would call this a feeling of 'menu-diving' which is almost the worst thing you can say to describe a synth.
There are actually some technological advances here where you can create buttons in a touch screen (convex or concave) which does help with some of the issues here, but it isn't cheap enough to be an alternative yet. I need to find the links for those
Not only do I have to re-learn where everything is, but older memories interfere and confuse every time I try to access an infrequently used function.
This experience has been irritating at best. It has felt extremely unsafe on more than one occasion.
"We must change things otherwise our work is not visible."
They are so expensive, they aren’t used anywhere else but automotive (rumors swirl about iPads using this some day).
The LCDs with high nits are cheaper but only rectangular.
One of the big issues is it working in 120 heat in the desert while sitting in the sun (particularly for convertibles).
Could this be why headlights are so blindy now, to overcome drivers' permanently impaired night vision?
Part of having a working relationship with a vendor is that you can ask nicely that they don't sell your designs to competitors or market their own knockoffs. Not to mention you can call them up and say, "I need 10k extra of those next month" and they don't just laugh in your face or let it go to voicemail and pretend they never got it.
I think we can see the Checkbook Effect in how Apple has navigated for the last fifteen or so years. And maybe a bit of the Stanford Effect (anyone can get in if there’s a building named after their family, especially if it’s still under construction).
Hey we want this part
oh we might be able to make 100k a year
Umm… we need at least five million
Gee, sorry.
What if we loaned you some money to build a new factory?
Oh, uh, sure?
It’s fast, its huge, and it looks nice.
The latest design changes have been annoying, but Tesla is far and away the closest to anybody has come to a good touchscreen in a car.
It’s more like using an iPad than using an infotainment system in a car.
And this is whole problem here, we shouldn't be doing it while driving. We're trying to solve problems that haven't existed few years ago. Touchscreens in cars in this form should just die
But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens!
Funniest button story.. one time we were working on a panel which includes a two way rocker switch to lift or lower a mechanism. Version 1 was backwards. Well, the electrical team swapped the wire harness to fix it, and the graphics team swapped the label markings. Version 2 was then also backwards (but flipped).
I suppose you actually mean it is hard to get a strong majority?
One potential solution would be to make a modular system. You could even “sell” it as a “skinnable” DUI (driver user interface; why didn’t this acronym catch on???)
And a single point of failure.
I recall this being "the next big thing" in touch screens about 10 years ago but the tech didn't seem to go anywhere. For small screens such as your phone it was probably overkill but cars seemed like the perfect use case if they could have gotten the technology right.
Part of the problem of textured screens is that you have to be able to touch the interface without activating anything. That's newer enough tech that the prices are probably just now coming down.
But for the purposes of this discussion, having a couple three of those on the dashboard and using them a bit like radial menus would probably split the difference pretty well.
I thought I saw it most recently on The Expanse, but it does not appear to be part of the MCRN Frigate pilot's seat. So either I'm thinking of some other ship, or a different bridge.
Re: multi-functional sliders, I do know that motorized sliders exist in the pro audio space (e.g. to be able to program presets on mixers and such); shouldn't be too hard to adapt them to multiple functions (probably with some sort of indicator on or adjacent to the slider to show the function being manipulated).
There is a reason why your cognitive memory performs far superior with physical buttons and knobs.
There is a reason why formula 1 car steering wheel is full with buttons, not a touch screen.
There are plenty of well established UX laws, and principles form 60's like Hick's law Fitt's law and so on. Plenty of studies of failures, because of bad UX.
Every time I see tesla model 3 with that big screen, and not only model 3, I cringe so hard.
Screens should be integrated in cockpits. Software should enhance the experience not add more cognitive load.
I sometimes wonder do they even hire UX specialists or UI designers in those companies.
https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to...
As someone who has both a car with only a touch panel and a car with only physical controls, I prefer the physical controls every time, all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_F2dpj5Kas&t=42s
and if you have analog gauges too, there are no screens. (except the tiny one between the gauges which doesn't count imo)
They're also completely piano black free. Best car interior maybe ever. Thread here https://old.reddit.com/r/Audi/comments/w9dkcm/what_models_ha...
shame they made the dash shiny black though :P I hate it as much as I hate touchscreens haha shakes walking stick
If I find the dough I really hope to buy one before they're forced to go all EV.
Later model years removed the ability to retract the screen on demand, due to backup-camera laws, and the 2021-ish refresh ditched the retractable display for an in-dash display similar to the 10th-gen Honda Civic (which amusingly, ditched the in-dash display in its 11th-gen for the previous A3 style).
This might be cheating but if you want a mostly screen-free recent Audi your best bet is probably the TT (or its big brother the R8 :-), the only screen is the entire gauge cluster and it's certainly not a touch screen.
Just do _not_ get a modern VW with its touch sensitive steering wheel controls...
My 911 has physical buttons for pretty much everything, and the small touch screen can be turned off so it is completely dark. The new models are not interesting to me as they have replaced all the gauges and physical buttons with touch screens and touch sensitive buttons
and dont get me started on the fact that barely any 911s come in manual anymore
However, this is all stuff you wouldn’t do while driving. So while driving, you need something else: physical controls. I believe BMW’s iDrive knob is the best solution. It’s so good, other manufacturers copied it. So yes, cars should also have physical buttons!
Also, physical buttons must not be touch surfaces. They must be actual mechanical physical buttons. My EV has capacitive buttons on the steering wheel. They’re horrible.
It's been years since I've seen it so I probably don't remember the exact details, but I think it worked by the system working based on gestures wherever the drivers' hand touched the screen so you didn't need to touch a specific tiny target in a moving car.
That said, the general point of the article seems very correct, physical buttons have always felt radically superior to touch screens.
Once I got used to the rotary dial, I never needed to touch the screen again.
The forces the UI to be a flat list in terms of navigation (rather than a 2d-space-filling UX mess). And being a flat 1d list, it encourages the list be short, which means more submenus, which is good!
If menus are consistent, you can mostly control without taking your eyes off the road.
Apple CarPlay already works with this input method.
Give each menu item it's own tone and you could probably navigate it blind after a little bit of practice. Importantly, in this type of system, each menu list should be short—6-7 items max—so that it is easily navigable and memorizable.
All of my environment controls are on buttons and knobs beneath the screen. I'm comfortable adjusting with the smallest of glances. The only downside here is that the knob is just hooked up to the display, so it has no minimum or maximum: you see the level that is currently set on the screen. A reasonable compromise.
Music controls and cruise control on the wheel. Easily skip, pause, play, and adjust volume or radio stations with the left hand, and also voice control or hang up the phone. Right hand has cruise control. And of course blinkers, wipers, headlights on the sticks at either side of the wheel. Hazard lights are a physical button over the screen. Automatic gear shifter is at the center console.
The only things I can't do with physical button/knob and maybe a brief glance, are select playlists in Spotify, and make changes to Google maps. But for the most part, I don't need to do that while in motion, and I think they should disable those inputs at speed unless a passenger is in the car doing it. Voice control is a decent option for some of it, but it's honestly a bit distracting too, since voice control sometimes messes up and you need to focus on the screen/response too much.
So I guess all of that to say, please do get rid of some of the touchscreen controls for safety. (Also add speed limiters in cities and neighborhoods, for safety). But I guess I'm surprised that customers are the ones revolting here.
Indeed people aren’t complaining about stuff like this. My friend just bought a new Subaru that has 0 buttons. It now takes two presses on the not-very-responsive touch screen to change the power of the seat warmer. Same with all of the other environmental controls. It’s not just less tactile, it’s much slower.
Personally I appreciate having a screen of some sort for music and navigation, but for things that I’ll be changing often while driving such as environmental controls buttons are the way to go.
However, none of the cars primary controls are on the touch screen. Air-conditioned, volume, gear selector, menus for range and fuel consumption all have physical buttons.
You don't want to enter an address in the navigation system with buttons or a scroll wheel, that's just horrible. So you still need that touchscreen, but hopefully not while driving, or only very rarely so.
All the functions that you often need while driving should be accessible with buttons or other forms of UI that give you tactile feedback, and which you don't have to see to engage.
I think I observed full independence of feedback and effect with a physical button on a microwave oven: when you attempted to press the button you sometimes got a beep, and the time sometimes got incremented by 10 s, or perhaps 20 s, and sometimes you'd get both those things, and sometimes you'd get just one of them. It must take real skill to design an appliance with a physical button that "works" like that, but some genius engineer managed to do it. I hope that person never gets a job in the car industry.
So its not just an argument of touchscreens vs buttons, its how you interact with those buttons too. My pet peve as a driver of a car that still has a _key_ is that pretty much all the automakers have standardized on a single start button to reflect a state machine with 4+ distinct states and the process for transitioning between the states varies slightly from vehicle to vehicle. And now you might have to differentiate between short pushes and long pushes, and spend a moment considering what state its in before performing it. A tactile knob with off-acc-on would probably be just fine but wouldn't have been as "cool" and costs $.10 more a car.
I think touch screen has changed the landscape. The rapid development of touch user interfaces has put a tremendous pressure on car companies with time to market needs and they somehow got misled into thinking that they can do the same with "we can fix it in the software" mentality. Wish it was that easy.
It's got no idea what's going on, and I like it that way.
Slapping your ship bow from the crest might likely press the wrong coordinate or fire button instead.
All I need in a car is a knob for the air conditioning and a knob for the volume. I still just use a single din aftermarket stereo that plays music from an SD card. I will never have anything more. I will drive cars as old as myself if I have to for the rest of my life before I allow some car manufacturer to push me around.
First the touchscreens' esthetics are in the 90's.
Then the touchscreens' performance are in the 90's
Third the management strategy is to piss off the drivers by shoving down their throats the two above.
I dream of a car where I (that is me personally) can set up what I want to see.
I do not give a fuck about the temperature of the engine or my EV efficiency. I want a huge digital speed meter and a smaller distance I can drive with my current fioul. And that's all.
Is it that difficult to provide a default setup and then let the user choose what they want to see on their reactive touchscreen?
Toyota managed in my RAV4 to create the dashboard I hate most, with passion.
I do, and have spoken to many who agree.
I don't care about the aesthetics or performance, because I don't want to look at it to control it. Touchscreen control is for something you look directly at, focus on, and use as an input. That's incompatible with driving.
That cost Mercedes $150k.
They are the best driver. By far. Distance separation, 3-cars ahead aware, road wise, maintains situational awareness. They got driving.
I do the touch screen shit. Its voice activated, let my fingers do the walkin'
Seriously if they could get a car with only mecha buttons and knobs they'd be significantly better off. Otherwise, it's down to the co-pilot for that stuff, Driver's got drivin eyes for the road, no time to waste on touch screen.
Do they avoid participating in rolling roadblocks? When at a traffic light and at the front of the right-lane - do they pull to the left to allow folks behind to make their right on red? This is how a True Master drives. The rest of us schlubs can only realize our lesser skills.
Touchscreen craze is a suboptimal choice not out of some serious constraint.
What the article points at is just another manifestation of market arrangements (the relative power of manufacturers versus the information and power of consumers) that are slow to generate the counterwailing forces needed to correct course.
A decade of excess accidents here, a decade of screen addiction there and pretty soon you talk about serious negative impact.
I'm more on the button side of the argument, but that's not the point.
I rather wonder how many years from now would I think back of these arguments as some "could have happened in the past but now it's absolutely irrelevant", as autonomous cars* would take over, and human-driven ones would be lawfully banned on 99% of the roads*, as horse carriages are banned today compared to 100 years ago.
* or their future equivalents
I wonder if software will first check the subscription and social credit before starting the car. If you are in a remote area without mobile network coverage, then tough luck.
When I say autonomous, I truly mean autonomous, in the sense that for the basic functionality (go around, authenticate, communicate with the rest of the cars) the system would not need to be centralized at all. No Internet connection needed.
The ridiculous thing is we should just be about at the point of programmable buttons and instead we have an embedded webapp running our car.
Touch screens can be nice for a lot of things, but sometimes actual haptic feedback and positional consistency is worth more than the flexibility gained. Especially in devices or machines we interact with multiple hours a day, where flexibility isn't the point. E.g. a tablet using a touch screen makes a lot of sense, as that flexibility makes sense here. But it makes less sense in a car, except maybe for the entertainment system and even there actual physical switches, dials and levers can be superiour in terms of usability.
What I love are really nice things like motor faders on upper class mixing desks. You have a physical interface that can follow whatever digital state you have stored, it is just perfect.
There is a future in devices that combine screens, physical dials, levers and latches with haptic feedback, e.g. like this amazing project: https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob
(A dial with a motor and a screen, which allows for virtual "limits" and dedents)
But, people love them because they have what appears to be zero learning curve and people hate to learn even the simplest of tasks.
I really am not looking forward to what the offerings might be available when I likely will change out the current Landcruiser for something to help me tow a caravan for some retirement adventures.
Manufacturers continue to push unsafe changes on us, as well as infuriating changes, to save money. The comments here are full of people complaining about it...
Time for more regulation. Tactile buttons, reasonable response time. How about some actual qualifications for people working in this field? We have Chartered Engineers, Accountants etc. Why not software engineers?
Great trend for getting into a truck with cold, wet, gloved hands and wanting to do anything. Like adjust heat and seat heat and defrosters.
It's going to be a decade of no synergy, of no programmability, of no softness.
Ideally there are semi flexible reconfigurable systems, with a couple physical buttons & knobs, and some touchscreen displays, and the phones can also via local area APIs be given permission to control & manipulate the car too.
But we just don't have a mature software ecosystem in general to support the complex assortment of peripherals (av, hvac, lighting, windows, seats, etc) that cars present. This is a crisis because it's one of the softest most configurable most attuneable things mankind has made, and we have only crude ability to carve in stone some choices that then will broadly apply. These systems are firmer than soft, and that's a broad problem the CS world in general has helped little with in the last decade (after extremely involved & interested work in uniquotous & pervasive computing simmered away).
Mind you the "virtual cockpit" isn't a touchscreen and button only (mostly on steering wheel).
Personally, I want a car with as little interaction as possible. Sometimes I feel like a machine operator and not just a driver, especially when it's raining or when I need to defrost the windshield - constant hassling with whatever just to make things work.
How the hell is this progress? I want a car that does all the simple things for me - turn on the wipers at the right speed when its raining, defrost the windshield, knows when to heat/cool the car etc etc. You know - just learn me and do it. This recent (10+ years) idea of adding more and more levers and buttons and cool screens to a car, to a point where it looks like an F-15 cockpit, might appeal to under-developed young males, but I really had enough. When I was younger, when you got into a new car, it took 2 minutes before you understood everything that needs to be understood and could safely driver with it. Now days you have to spend 10-15 minutes just to understand how to release the parking brake.
But from what I have heard about many other vehicles with touch interfaces not all cars are so well designed
Without the tactile feedback of a physical button or dial, and especially in cases where button position varies based on which mode you're in, it's hard to imagine even a high-quality touchscreen being safe.
I had to take my car to the dealer for service and they gave me a loaner. Both my car & the loaner had physical buttons, knobs and dials in addition to touch screen (BMW iDrive). However they were different model years / models / iDrive versions so all the buttons/dials were in slightly different places.
It felt like driving my Tesla again where the muscle memory is lost for adjusting HVAC/wipers/radio since suddenly moved on me. It is noticeably more distracting and less safe since you need to take eyes off the road more often, for longer.
The ultimate for me is the on-wheel controls & HUD for some basic radio, nav, ADAS, speed, etc so you barely even need to look at your dashboard, let alone center touch screen.
Why do we cover the brake lever with the index and middle finger of the right hand on a motorcycle hurtling at barely legal speeds?
Because the coming impact is the space between your fingers and the brake lever, plus reaction time. Reaction time is a function of focus, but the fact that you'll hit the stationary object in about a second at 60 MPH depending on its distance, governs everything else, save for traction.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/fitts-....
Sadly, in UI/UX design this is well understood. For whatever reason, in the last several decades of the ascendance of design, we've not seemed to apply Fitts' Law to car driving design, presumably because cup holders.
I had hope when Peter Schreyer left Audi and became one of the presidents at Kia years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schreyer
However, given the current state of affairs, it's clear that cars have won the battle for our hearts and minds. The kids had a point when they stopped getting driver's licenses.
Much like autonomy as a general design idea in the culture. I can only hope that we have an inflection point where the realization is that, as cars get smarter, the resultant behavior of the car is a collaboration between car and driver.
That may not have been true when a car was just a mechanical object governed by physics, but it clearly is true now.
We could quote any one of McLuhan, Postman, or one of their contemporaries, but while their insights portended the dark future we occupy, none of their contemporaries intended that future.
My damn dishwasher has capacitive buttons…a dishwasher - something you use while your hands are wet like 90% of the time. Infuriating.
I've found a "look twice" method minimizes the time that my eyes are off the road. I take one quick glance, to find the button that I want to push. Then a second quick look to actually push it.
Based on complaints I've read about Subaru controls, they must have fixed a lot of problems in the latest version. It really does work nicely, though it does scold me once in a while. I love the adaptive cruise control, and I don't mind something that keeps me from falling asleep while driving.
But the problem is way beyond that and goes way beyond cars. Touch UIs are inherently lazy and they encourage you to create bad UI/UX. Why? Because your UI becomes software and you can always update it later. The net result is you don't.
Having tactile buttons forces you to do upront UI/UX work to make sure you have sufficient buttons, they make sense, etc. It's a cost-saving issue to just not do this kind of work.
In any touchscreen on a car you'll find abasic options buried menus deep to the point where you have to Google where to find it. That's a big reason why touchscreens suck.
Physical buttons can still be used without constantly looking at them, this is a huge difference.
Touchscreens should be considered as a low-cost fallback when better solutions are unpractical or too costly.
They rarely provide a better experience.
I can't think of a single racecar with a touchscreen for any control the driver must interact with while driving. And these are trained, experienced professional drivers. Auto makers want Grandma to keep the car on the road while messing with a touchscreen!?
Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes F1 cars would be a pile of smoldering carbon fiber almost instantly if the drivers had to use touchscreens. They would be impossible to drive.
As for dangerous trends and Tesla, they do have excellent safety related metrics. There's very little evidence of their cars being more dangerous. The opposite actually.
For the Teslas records, it might be because they're exclusively used for short urban trips.
I can only know what you write, not what you had intended to write.
In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touchscreens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles.
Has anyone attempted certifying a class?
I should have just replaced it with a different deck, but the area it fills with that screen is rather large and it will be hard to find something that looks good in the gap that doesn't also have a screen.
Why is this? My few datapoints are 2016, 2017, and 2021 Subarus.
Are there any cars out there with sharp, snappy UIs that actually work well?
The job of the cockpit designer is to 1) minimize the workload on the pilot/driver while providing 2) maximum practical ability to control the vehicle. Period.
Ergonomic design to control the vehicle. Period. End of story. Style shouldn't even be in the top 10 considerations.
ALL of this touchscreen, flattening and making the buttons the same, making unique configurations may be wonderful for the mental masturbation of the designers, but it is not even in the same profession as vehicle design.
The pilot/driver should be able to make maximal use of prior knowledge (i.e., ways of doing things that are standard, either by law or by previous consensus), and make maximal use tactile and auditory feedback (e.g., buttons and dials with a familiar and distinct feeling and positive feedback) to minimize the need to direct vision anywhere other than out the windshield and mirrors.
Well-designed display controls can be fantastic - - - - IF AND ONLY IF - the work is put into the design to minimize pilot/driver workload. Anything requiring a menu structure as we use on desktop machines is potentially deadly. Just because we are familiar with menu structures does not mean that they can be operated while negotiating traffic in the rain hurtling down the road at 30 meters per second. Any designer or manager who thinks that is reasonable or acceptable is incompetent. (obvious exception here is extensive setup operations to be done whilst parked)
And, if you are going to put in a touchscreen that does have these characteristics, then at least allow the passenger to use it whilst in motion - you have the damn seat sensor data on the CAN bus for the airbag, so use it for the UI. I understand not wanting to be liable for crashing someone with your incompetent UI, but impairing use of the car & navigation just makes it worse
Which brings us back to: just do the hard and expensive work of properly designing the cockpit UI. And spend the extra few bucks for good knobs and buttons. I'll happily pay $1000 more for something that works, is a pleasure to use, and isn't trying to make me fight it and risk my life every time I use it for the designer's ego and/or the manager's budget.
Hyundai promises to keep buttons in cars -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35253753
SHIFT [p] into range
I don't understand what that means. Is it telling me to put the car back into park? Why not just say the door is open? My '05 Subaru had lights on the dashboard that showed each door that was open - a really sensible way of indicating what to do without having to read anything.
If the door is not closed and you shift into drive, you also get a very loud annoying beep and visuals.
Not only that, the brakes engage and the car LOCKS ITSELF IN PARK AND DOES NOT LET YOU DRIVE EVEN THOUGH THE SHIFTER IS IN ‘D’!!!
I pray the door sensor doesnt fail while driving on the highway, or theres never a situation that arises where the car needs to be driven regardless of the door being open.
On top of that, the door locks /trunk locks act very strange while the engine is running /driver door is open. Still dont have that figured out.
I’ve suggested that we don’t purchase another VW.
I thought this was obvious. Why are we stating it?
Here's where things can get interesting. If you've ever used a fancy audio mixer before, they pack a lot of features into a board with a few buttons and sliders. Cars can do similarly with controls for rolling, sliding, and pressing but dynamically adjust based on what's on the display.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1646181161037713414
Cab drivers often try to reach around back and manipulate the POS for me, which I detest. They are not supposed to be touching that, especially when I am deciding their tip for them.
Anyway, the touchscreen, upon flag drop, immediately invites you to tap it thrice if you are vision-impaired, to activate an accessible voice interface. I did this once, and it apparently disabled the POS and we could't figure out how to pay my fare. Never again!
Does the ambient interior light from the screen + dashboard overpower your ability to see the road at night?
The only thing the screen does is backup camera and provide bluetooth connection to CarPlay and AA and _maybe_ some tucked away very rarely used settings for things I definitely don't need while driving. No car company is going to write software that is better than CarPlay because a: they aren't Apple and b: my phone is also where all of my music, podcasts, contacts, map history, etc. is located.
Everything else has a physical button.
Scott Jenson is probably one of the top UX people in the world. I hope Tesla listened to his valuable free advice.
It's just as likely that Musk declared him a "pedo guy," and ignored his advice.
Which might argue that drivers hate bad interfaces that most automakers are notorious for, but doesn't talk about touchscreens as an interface specifically.
2. We could be 50 years away from universal real FSD.
2. I very much doubt that, but even if there is no "true" L4 FSD in a consumer vehicle anytime soon, this thread is about tactile buttons and my points still stands.
But that may sound too conspiratorial for you, but how about just observing the current state of FSD, here's the first video of you search YouTube: https://youtu.be/JhmlKKVOWfI
Many times when I've had these discussions with people it boils down to misunderstandings of what Autopilot is vs FSD, or just impressions based on the tech 3 years ago. FSD is far from L4 but it's in a very advanced state compared to other ADAS systems.
My favorite story, though, was when someone left a voice message for me in Vietnamese, and Google's VR system tried to interpret it as English. "How about goddamn lunch?" is the thing I remember.
here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this? (For the record, I hated touch screens in cars before that was a thing and I am OK with gm removing carplay.)
Who knows, maybe they can. But there is no reason on earth to think so.
> remember the time when GM said it’s not going to include CarPlay in its vehicles? And how most of hn was in revolt?
Most OEM's made terrible infotainment software that is outdated, lacking features and often extremely sluggish and clunky to use. CarPlay and Android Auto are able to bring modern features OEM's can't seem to figure out, like Google Maps integration instead of some terrible maps implementation that is outdated, as in not having addresses added in the last few years, not just "old" and cumbersome to use. I can just open up google maps on my phone, type an address and directions appear on my screen. Same with music streaming apps like Spotify.
> here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this?
Not eliminate touchscreens entirely, but rather stop putting every single control they possibly can into them making vehicles dangerous to operate. Putting climate, radio, lighting, etc... into a touch screen, especially when buried in sub-menus, is just lazy cost cutting. The other big complaint are touch capacitive "buttons" and sliders. They're distracting and difficult to use, especially on anything but perfectly smooth roads. For example, the Cayenne's interior is basically just a wall of touch capacitive "buttons"[1] that you can't easily reach down to press with your eyes on the road, you have to look down at it. The other issue is feedback from it. Constant beeping from input on menus, like Toyota, just becomes obnoxious. Buttons provide instant mechanical feedback that does't lave you guessing if you pressed on the right spot. Here's a clip discussing some complaints about VW doing all of this to the Golf [2] and how frustrating it is to use.
[1] https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/2022-porsche-cayenne-...
Maybe I don’t drive far enough often enough. I honestly expected to hate it but it’s made almost no difference to me.
(Also it was so much easier to find settings in the Tesla)
Sometimes you drive a car and you can just feel that every component was designed in isolation and then tossed over the fence.
I do love the modern features. But hunting for that volume up/down button for a maddening while driving and unsafe.
I'm actually shocked that the various safety bodies in the US and Europe haven't already tried to limit the touch screen nonsense in modern cars.
Am 6ft.
Bmw used to do ergonomics and ui very well, what a disappointment.
TRUST:
The primary reason why some solutions proposed by other comments around how we can use smart knobs, touchscreens with protrusions don't work is that we TRUST the physical buttons most. If you feel it registers, you know it surely registers. You can reach your finger towards the panel without thinking beforehand whether to increase or decrease the volume without fearing accidentally triggering other functions. In words of the WWDC 2018 presentation "Designing fluid interfaces", the thought happens WITH the motion. Why do people still use physical camera blockers when there are already plenty of software solutions available? Trust.
Smart knob-like implementations would not solve the problem. For really important stuff like the volume controls/mute button, we really need something that we users can always trust. The ideal implementation is probably only using them to control variables currently showing on the screen(like the touchbar!)
I read an article before about choosing keyboard to maximize typing speed. It mentioned that the more confidence you have with the keys the better. The experience of typing with unreliable and low-feedback butterfly keys on a VPS over the globe with 300ms roundtrip latency is beyond hell.
I have always hated automatic forced updates, even when they do not cause any performance or stability issues. With physical buttons, you know it is here to stay and can never change. However even we manage to make users able to navigate the touchscreen without looking or just with peripheral vision, who knows when it would change drastically tomorrow when it updates itself in the night? The crux is that with touchscreens, car makers would treat them, and the car, as a massive mobile device, but we users actually expect them to be like computers, or single-purpose servers.
FREEDOM:
The actual implementation is much much more important than the idea itself. The problem is simply too much freedom for the developer. JS and CSS animations/transitions, when used properly, can make the experience smooth while not being dizzy and annoying. But observe the current fiasco of "BEAUTIFUL" and "MODERN" web "DESIGN"s. The thing is, the limit of how bad incorrect executions can be, is probably more important the limit of how good it can be when correctly executed. We can have the fastest processors, screen with the fastest response time, and still some UI "designer" can make it feel slower than the Windows 95 on Intel Pentium, remotely controlled over the continent.
(Please excuse my poor english and bad writing skills.)
Touchscreens are the wrong UI choice for cars. Full stop.
But for me the whole thing is set and forget, if I need to adjust volume it's a scroll wheel on my steering wheel -- air conditioning I never really need to adjust. Sat nav -- yes I need to adjust this occasionally, but it's either voice command or park and change the destination with a keyboard -- but I don't see this being different in any other car? (Maybe a scroll wheel with recent destinations?)
I actually don't understand what it is that drivers are changing so regularly that they need to take their eyes off the road and look at a screen or twiddle a knob?
My signular gripe is that there is no physical button to open the glove-box, which is an annoying but very infrequent occurance.
That's really weird. Button nothing, why is there not just a handle on the glove box? Who thought it was a good idea to hook that up to the computer? Does that mean you can't open the glove box unless the car is turned on?
I went from touchscreen only (model Y) to 1960's switchboard operator (audi Q6) for a trip helping my family and it drove me insane.
The number of button presses, light illumination meanings, automatic modes I had to learn to simply turn off the air conditioning was infuriating. To change the music or interact with navigation I had to click a spinny wheel and turn it like I was tabbing thru options with a keyboard.
When I picked up my father and got to swap back cars, it was like a Steve Jobs moment when I voice command "open glovebox" and "i'm cold" or simply rearrange the destinations with a finger drag. I'm pretty sure they are buying a Tesla next.
But please, continue to shit on any opinion positive about Tesla.
It depends on where you out them. Touchscreens on steering wheel seems a big thinko to me.
In that context, the question touch screen vs physical buttons doesn't matter.
Oh yeah.. how's that going?
I'm shocked that no government hasn't stepped in and regulated its push. People are already looking at mobile phones while driving despite being told that is extremely dangerous to do so and on top of that we also now have theaters on 4 wheels.
Operation critical controls are best delivered with buttons. The remainder can go on a screen that discourages use while driving - where most folks can safely ignore them forever (the same way they do for over-featured smart appliances).
There, I fixed that headline for you
For the love of fuck, don't control anything else with them.
Physical controls are simpler UX.
and only one use case for touch-screen 1. navigation
Other than that every use cases can be fulfilled by physical buttons. There is certainly no use case for a 16 inch screen.
Functional Safety
ASIL
MISRA
ASPICE
ISO 21434
ISO 26262
Yet ... touchscreens.
Modern car is much, much SIMPLER, it will be more simpler, so it's a natural direction to boost multimedia, not been a soviet era airplane.
You're wrong in that modern cars are much more complex than old cars for 2 reasons: reducing pollution (besides the point for this conversation) and safety. Safety makes a car much more complex.
And touch screens are apparent simplicity which reduces safety.
So they're a dumb idea for cars except for multimedia, as you put it.
I wonder if the various self driving technologies have anything to do with this?
The idiotic trend of applying Jony Ive's minimalist iPad user interface designs to automotive touchscreen kills people.
It pointlessly distracts from the primary purpose of designing user-friendly, intuitive, safe automotive touchscreens.
Jony Ive Spearheads Minimalist Design Overhaul For iOS:
https://bitrebels.com/technology/jony-ive-minimalist-design-...
Guide: The Art of Minimalism in UI Design:
https://sympli.io/blog/the-art-of-minimalism-in-ui-design
Jony Ive's minimalist designs could reshape the future of iOS, OS X:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/10/30/jony-ives-minimal...
The Art of Minimalism in Mobile App UI Design:
https://uxplanet.org/the-art-of-minimalism-in-mobile-app-ui-...
More practical less vain interface designers are finally calling for an end to this terrible trend in minimalist interface design on mobile devices, but it never should have been applied to automotive interfaces in the first place, and there is already lots of blood on the hands of cocaine-addled cargo-cult iPad interface designers mindlessly aping John Ive while working on automotive interfaces.
The designer behind one of the iPad’s biggest apps is calling for an end to minimalism:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90604970/the-designer-behind-one...
The point of designing automotive touchscreen user interfaces is not to show off to the world what a brilliant sensitive snowflake of a minimalist avant garde artistic designer you are.
It's not about designing beautiful enigmatic minimal screens uncluttered by pesky visual clues, signifiers, and affordances, more suited to be hung on the walls of art museums for patrons to stare at and interpret and argue over their ambiguous meaning in their leisure time.
The art-first, safety-last trend of prioritizing aesthetics over usability in automotive interfaces should be outlawed, because it has a fatal impact in driver safety, that kills people.
For e.g. you ask the voice assistant to play a song, it will deny that request saying that you need to buy their "premium" offering first.
Another fact is that voice integration to other apps which are not of the same vendor as that of the phone is virtually non-existent.
I also feel for the poor astronauts in a touchscreen only SpaceX Dragon cockpit (unless the design changed).
The feeling of being helpless, even if it’s perceived helplessness.
I also find it really difficult to wrap my head around how Tesla's turn signal buttons on their "yoke" could possibly have made it through any testing. Did none of the people they tested it on use turn signals?? Did they just not test at all? It seems like the smallest effort of UX testing would've immediately pointed out how terrible this is
Tbh it feels like ultimately it's just companies deciding to skimp out on design. Tight deadlines and lazy cost-cutting measures probably contribute
In my experience, most people who have driven their car for ages can’t use the buttons on their center console without looking at them. Maybe the volume control…
As an experiment, I challenge you to draw a picture of your car’s center console from memory. See how much of it you get right. This isn’t to say that physical buttons aren’t any better than touchscreens, but I think people romanticize how effective they are with their cars interface.
Don’t know every vent knob position, but the first (upper vents), second (adds floor vents), and last (defrost) are the important ones.
I couldn’t do the aftermarket Bluetooth radio, but the only buttons I use there are prev/next, plus the volume knob.
And that's before getting into the mess of misheard commands that even Google and Apple still can't get right despite having gigantic teams working on it 24/7.
[1] https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/gallery/MERCEDESBENZ...
https://bestride.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2016-Buick-C...
Which is awesome. I like buttons.
Edit, from grocery store parking lot: 92
Most of the buttons are for features I've never had before. There are buttons for Bluetooth (I think for receiving phone calls while driving and turning up and down audio volume etc) located on the steering wheel, There are a bunch of buttons for cruise control and I think lane keeping assist also on the steering wheel - I've never had a car with cruise control before and honestly I am a little intimidated to try it out. It seems so complicated. There are some buttons for the Front cross traffic sensors it took me a while to figure out what was going on with these. My car would randomly beep at me while at intersections before I finally figured out what was causing it. Then there is buttons to toggle the parking sensors and toggle between the front / reverse parking cameras.
On top of that quite a lot of things in the car are automated now too - headlights will automatically turn on, wipers automatically switch on etc.
My old car had a radio and heating/AC that was it. I've had the car for just under a month and I've already had to consult the manual 2 or 3 times because I've forgotten what certain buttons do.
But when I’m driving and need to adjust something, I don’t want to disconnect with driving to dive into a touch screen.
A physical control, in the same location means muscle memory can take over. And as we learnt decades ago, the controls themselves need to be physically distinct so that you can tell them apart without looking or thinking too hard.
I don’t think touchscreens need to disappear from cars, there’s a wealth of settings/config/etc they could be useful for.
But the core driving aids and temperature/volume control need to be physical.
1. Reach over, grasp the screen under the target area using muscle memory.
Screen is strong as hell, you could put your full weight on it and it wouldn’t budge.
2. While continuing to hold the edge of the screen, move thumb to hover over suspected target area using muscle memory.
3. Glance and tap in one moment.
Done.
Not that I ever need to do this. Pretty much everything I need to do has a button. (And this in a car that the internet geniuses including here on HN are convinced does not have buttons).
If steps 1, 2, and 3 sounded distracting or hard, see again the part where I said “not that I ever need to do this” and why.
I think voice commands would be much more widely used if they hadn’t rolled it out so soon, ironically. But most of us learned early on that it sucks and never tried it again.
User-assignable buttons might mitigate that. With profiles for individual drivers.
But perhaps those features would confuse some users even more
I want my doors to lock every night at 10pm in case I forget.
I want to bring up my favorite temperature and fan settings.
I want to lock just some doors.
I want the windows down just the right amount.
When do we get to take advantage that this is all software?
For fun I tried an experiment, in one context I told GPT to mangle sentences in a way that a speech-to-text might, and in another I told GPT to transform sentences into commands for a car's various ECUs.
Results:
"Torn the hair conditioning gown to 65 decrees." => works
"Can yew plays make it warmer in hear" => works
"It's weigh two, uh how due yew say, it's way to frayed in hear!" => works (!)
It actually understood a mis-transcribed French word in the middle of a series of English commands:
> I apologize for the confusion. I interpreted "frayed" as an incorrect transcription of "froid" (which means "cold" in French) considering the context of the sentence and the surrounding phrase "how do you say." Thus, I replaced "frayed" with "cold.""
It even realized that someone inserting filler like "how do you say" indicated they may be looking for a word in another language:
> The phrase "how do you say" is often used by someone who is trying to recall a word or phrase in another language, or when they are unsure about the correct term to use in the current language. In this context, it signaled that there might be a language-related issue, leading me to consider that "frayed" might be an incorrect transcription of a word in another language, such as "froid" for "cold" in French.
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And And in case you think it just guessed on past commands, I was able to replicate this in a fresh context window with no hints about what commands it should accept.
Voice is really about to stop sucking for the first time in the history of tech: It can go from "I'm tired of this shit man" to knowing it should change the current song.
On the downvoting, don’t be obtuse. On HN people downvote if they disagree with an opinion. I don’t particularly take much notice of either direction on the voting. Internet points don’t count for much, and I’d rather enjoy my discourse than scrounge for points.
My car has less than 25 buttons on the center console, plus three dials for climate control. If you removed the buttons dealing with CDs it would be more like 15.
This isn't about the complete removal of touch screens or moving to purely buttons. It's about providing a better balance between physical buttons for driving essentials and then having the rest under a usable touch screen interface.
It's not all one or the other.
My touch screen annoyance: "oops, it detected a swipe instead of a press, because the car just went through a bump!". Or, "Oops! I accidentally pressed cancel instead of back button, now my map navigation is gone!!!".
Design the UI well, so that drivers can't screw things up easily.
If you're driving you shouldn't be fiddling with anything extraneous. Lights/windshield wipers should be automatic in 99% of circumstances and if they're not then that's what needs to be improved.
You shouldn't need to reach for anything because if you do that's already either a design fail or operator error.