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.
[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.
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.
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.