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Comment by r0fl | Hacker News Reader

To expand on #4

WINTER AND GLOVES!

Yes it’s a first world proven that I have to take gloves off to turn on my heated seats but buttons made sure stupid problems like this never happened in the first place

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Touchscreens can also leave fingerprints and those will catch light at any angle and reduce effective contrast

Counterpoint: the touchscreen in my car DOES work with gloves. Of course the knobs do too.

The screen is some different tech and not quite as responsive as an iPhone screen and does not do multitouch, but otherwise works fine.

What car do you have? Usually lower end cars have resistive touchscreens which yours sounds like an example of, but higher end ones have capacitive touchscreens and those don't generally work with gloves, but of course gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens exist and have for many years now.

There are gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens and have existed for 20 years now ever since the iPhone came out.

Those kind of gloves are too thin to be of any use when it's -10°F out (early mornings are frequently at least this cold in my area). In the winter I'm normally wearing thick leather gloves treated with Sno Seal (a waxy, oily substance derived from beeswax) with wool liner gloves. Even if I could prevent them leaving a residue on any screen they touch, and even if they had some substance in them (that wouldn't wear off) that made them work with a capacitive screen, the reduced finger dexterity from all that material would make actually using that screen very difficult. Practically, what I actually have to do to use a touchscreen is take the gloves off.

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