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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

My favorite car control system is the BMW iDrive rotary dial.

Touch screens are fine for given much more fine-grained access to controls. But they should be limited to controls that you _don't need to set while driving_. It's absurd that it takes 3 taps on a screen -- diverting my attention to the screen -- on my Tesla to turn on defogging (a common event here!) while I can do it with a one touch (now muscle-memorized) on my Subaru.

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That's odd. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually turn on defogging. Often my Model 3 will say, "auto defogging". Maybe your humidity sensor is faulty?

I agree that physical controls for these things would be ideal, but nowadays the only one that annoys me is lack of the wiper controls. I think even that issue would go away if Tesla used rain sensors instead of cameras to trigger the wipers.

They’ve improved the wiper controls in the Tesla in a recent update.

I haven’t found the “auto defogging” - will check for it.

The wipers are certainly better than when I got the car 5 years ago, but they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions. I don't have much to compare them against, as my previous cars have all been from the early 1990s or cheap rentals.

I don't remember a setting for auto defogging. My car just does it sometimes.

> they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions

yeah, same here. Our Subaru does better in this regard.

Did you ever tried to use the rotary dial for text input? I gave up immediately. The car has a regular screen regular, no touch. Something is good only when balanced.

Only twice in seven years did voice control not work for me. I can't recall the last time bmw didn't have touchscreen in a car but it predates 2014

I haven't had many, so I do have a touch screen. But I've tried the rotary input on a rental 2 series that had a dial but no touch screen, and I had to use the GPS.

They have touchscreens now, so you can input text with an on-screen keyboard but do everything else with the controller.

Sure. That what I meant balanced.

Yeah, agreed on a rotary dial being terrible for text input. That's where a touch screen shines. But you shouldn't need to do anything requiring text input while driving.

I barely used the dial while driving, except for track selection. There are lot of different knobs in old models)

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