I'm not sure why car manufacturers thought it's a good idea to have essential controls on a touchpad you have to look at to navigate. I mean, shouldn't you be looking at something else when controlling a vehicle?
Unfortunately most legacy auto seem to have hired their talent directly from printer manufacturers like Canon and Epson. So blindly copying Tesla isn’t going to turn out quite so well for them.
Ye EVs could potentially have less software than ICEs. Simpler motor ECU and often no gearbox or clutch.
Instead the manufacturers take the opportunity to push more stuff on us.
That being said, I like the UX of our cars. But the newest ine is from 2020, the oldest one from 1982...
The SV motto
See also how every laptop is becoming a MacBook and every phone is becoming an iphone. Non removable batteries, touch screen car interfaces, soldered in memory, removal of things like headphone jacks ... Competitors fall over themselves trying to follow any design signal they see.
You can disagree but you really ought to be evidence based and not just vibes.
People tolerated it so there is no pressure for them to change.
To demonstrate the validity of this response, you can apply it generally to a wide variety of things they do.
The variations on the doors, all of them, the model release order being S3 X Y, it's kind of all over the place. Their logo even looks like uterus (https://twitter.com/Jam_0s/status/1531368537847214080).
They're obsessed with differentiation for the sake of it. Look at the cybertruck. It's a company run by a middle aged man with hair plugs, 3 wives and 11 children who bought a 44 billion dollar company as a vanity project.
Cap touch buttons or physical buttons both require a circuit board, so that costs the same, but cap touch buttons just need one big sheet of material with some screen printing placed over the circuit board. Physical clicky buttons require each button to be designed, manufactured, screen printed, and the clicky action to be tuned for feel and durability, none of which is cheap. Physical buttons may not all be exactly the same size and shape due to design considerations, so that's injection mold tooling variations, additional supply chain part numbers to manage, and additional ways that manufacturing can screw up assembly. Physical buttons can jam, get stuck, or fall out, so engineering time needs to be spent ensuring this won't happen 10 years from now, too.
I hate whoever was responsible this decision. After Internet connectivity, this is the 2nd worst trend in modern electronics.
I'm sure someone made the decision and said "I've just saved $10m by slashing our BOM by $50".
At least: Y * (1 cable + 2 plugs + 1 port at the controller + clips).
Wire Harnesses for modern cars are seriously complicated affairs[0]. And even using more modern variants they still need to be installed manually.
[0] https://www.carscoops.com/2022/05/carmakers-are-rushing-to-a...
It has a ripple effect for other parts.
Button for everybody: More expensive and can't be sold as a package
Button optional: No Button -> Hole in plastic molded cover -> Either need different molds/parts or an additional preparation step removing the plastic covering the hole. Car manufacturing is traditionally very low margin business and extremely streamlined. Sooner or later EVs will also end up in the same situation
To serve a level of functionality, you have a curve described as
PriceOfMonitor(MonitorQuality) + X * PriceofCheapButtons
Cheap cars simply have less feature while expensive ones have tons of features + associated settings.
Oh, come on. It's a laptop panel. It's not "smart", it's just the same display/touchscreen component you can find for $150 on Alibaba or whatever.
But hey, good luck sourcing your parts for serial car manufacture, or anything even remotely serious in a commercial environment, from Alibaba... What's your alternate source of choice, Wish or Temu?
I personally drive a Model 3 and would appreciate to have a few more physical buttons though. (But it's not a bug deal for me.)
Did you type this on a touchscreen? ;-)
Do you feel that way about other devices as well, or is there something special about cars?
And providing software updates doesn't mean you have to ship untested products, that's just dishonest.
I'm fine with the idea that navigation data or some nonessential entertainment stuff that mainly exists for passengers can be updated on a rolling basis, it can be OTA, whatever.
Anything else, I stand by what I said. It's silly to put it on a touch display for the sake of potential improvements via software update. A bigger improvement is just not having those things on a touch display, forgoing that ability.
However, my car has gotten better through over the air updates since I bought it.
I mean, look, I absolutely don't deny you your preference, and as I also said previously I would like to have a few more physical buttons. But it's not the end of the world for me (like some commenters in this thread pretend).
:)
Route planning typically happens when stationary — or if you have passengers, they'll obviously use the systems onboard (or on their personal devices) to do navigation.
But if you're driving alone, and no-one else is navigating for you… you'll have to stop.
the problem isn't that you're doing something with your free hand and sparing some mental capacity--else the manual transmission would be outlawed--it's that if you have a poorly designed car, you have to look away for long enough to lose track of what's happening around you.
good on you for realizing when you can't safely operate your car. but me, i just bought a car i can operate safely.
What makes you believe I think I can't safely operate my car? I don't know what “mirror checks” you mean?
I understand a lot of people don't and this significantly increases the rate of vehicle collisions and other accidents.