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Comment by flyinghamster | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the most frustrating aspects of this whole kerfluffle is the automakers' longstanding willingness to ignore customers and double down at any pushback. It's downright stupid that it has taken this level of screaming from customers to roll back a design choice that should never have been made.

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It ain't just cars. I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example; nearly everyone I know who owns a TV also owns some device that not only does everything the TV's "smarts" can do but does them consistently better and can be trivially replaced should that ever change.

In both cases it's a cost/finance reason. "Smart" TVs can profit from selling customer data and touch screen cars save some cost over tactile interfaces.

Everyone always says this, but how much do they actually make per unit sale. I buy $2k+ TVs, are they making $50 off of my data, or $5? Does it even pay for the department they hired to write the software that collects the data?

Same for car. It's hard to imagine manufacturers would care to reduce cost by $5(20 tactile buttons likely costs lesser than that) on a $10k car, but what would I know.

>I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example

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.

im pretty sure nearly every single person in existence wants a tv that connects to the internet dude. people dont want to plug in an hdmi cord to access streaming services.

> im pretty sure nearly every single person in existence wants a tv that connects to the internet dude

I'm guessing you've missed every thread here about Smart TVs. ref: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=smart+tv

that must explain why 99.99% of tvs sold are dumb tv's because there is such a clamoring demand for them... oh wait.

Because manufacturers sell whatever profit seeking, cost-cutting measures best fatten shareholder dividends. You are exactly right.

you understand people still have to buy things for companies to make them right?

You understand companies have to make things for people to buy them right?

are you actually proposing supply side economics right now?

Hackers are outlier

My smart TV (LG C2) has never and will never touch the internet. Apple TV for all the functionality (and occasionally terreistrial)

It’s all about the bottom line. Touch screens consolidate a ton of otherwise expensive switch gear. Going back to physical knobs and buttons means going back to paying for engineering, assembling, testing, etc.

Profiting off of a less safe product that kills people could be seen as an egregious moral deficiency.

Corporations, being paperclip-maximizing automata, don't have morals in the first place, so no deficiency is possible.

But... but... corporation are people! Aren’t they? Mitt Romney, have you lied to me??

Indeed. Not uncommon but still unacceptable.

From a product and even financial standpoint, the trade-off doesn’t make sense. All the litigation that could occur due to accidents caused by a less safe design plus the reputational damage that an inexcellent product could cause to the brand sounds so expensive to me.

It seems carmakers have situated themselves fairly comfortably regarding liability. If a car hits someone in "the road" the victim immediately becomes a "jay walker" and it's their fault. Otherwise the driver made a mistake. Otherwise the DOT is at fault. It's nearly impossible to blame automakers for the damage their products do.

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.

It's great that you mention jay walkers because this wasn't a thing before cars. When cars first started appearing on the road there was a huge backlash because kids played in the street and people cross the street and they got hit by cars and people got pissed off. Car clubs started popularizing the term 'jay walker' and shaming people for it in order to reduce the backlash against cars and drivers for hitting people that were using the street. After a while it became normalized that people in the street are at fault and drivers are not.

> 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

If it was just about the bottom line, and consumers actually cared enough to be willing to pay for physical controls, then why wouldn’t there be plenty of options on the market?

Designing two different sets of controls costs even more.

Then are you still saying that, adjusted by willingness to pay, consumers actually tend to prefer touch controls?

in every large business there is a very simple formula for decision making: what option maximizes profit? if we have to kill 100,000 cyclists and pedestrians in the process, who gives a shit, people die every day for no damn reason at all. lets kill em all, bastards arent our customers anyway

Tobacco companies have no problem killing their customers.

People dying is just the cost of doing business.

Case in point: SUVs and trucks.

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