Hacker News Reader

Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

totally agree, especially when they're not tilted towards the driver and badly polarized to interfere with sunglasses.

drove my buddy's 2013 Subaru WRX, the "Limited" edition that has this touchscreen as a standard feature (as in, it cannot be opted out of) - a truly terrible experience. Just seeking radios stations is an exercise in anger management. Since you cannot feel where anything is, i found myself much more distracted from driving with hitting the correct place on the screen. Having a large screen adds to the frustration since you cannot even have good reference points while you hunt for what you're looking for. Any visual buttons that are not on the very edges of the display are just worthless to use (and there are lots of them). There's no muscle memory, every time it's like driving a different car.

View on HN

I assume that if/when Glass takes off, Google will follow-up with an integrated car-version. Glass is meant to provide non-distracting visual info at a glance and operated hands-free, so it's an obvious platform for cars.

edit: I'm always surprised how little the consumer electronics industry learns from the gaming industry. Games have refined the modern gamepad into something impressive - they force developers to shoehorn their games into the given controls, and adapt those controls to the correct context, and give the user good non-distracting HUD feedback.

Meanwhile, you look at a TV remote or car stereo controls and we're transported back to the bad mistakes of the '80s. Rip out half the controls and just give me some good text-to-speech to tell me the context of what menu I have currently selected.

...and so we'll get more of "standard feature (as in, it cannot be opted out of)" - smart glasses!

As another related point, let me remind you that we're having the idea of wearing smart glasses to have a convenient display in front of our eyes. In cars we already have car's glass placed permanently in front of our eyes.

I don't literally mean having a glass on your face while you drive. I mean integrating the technology that Google has built for Google Glass into your car - the new text-to-speech system and whatnot. Attach the physical display to the rear-view-mirror or project it onto the windshield or something.

I rent a lot of cars and I've seen some really bad touchscreens. But the Toyota Camry has a great one (as does the Prius) so it's possible for them not to suck. Hopefully all the car companies will get there soon :)

Off topic, I'm always extremely amused to see cars branded as "limited". "Ooh, this car has more limitations! Sign me up!"

pretty sure the implication behind 'limited' is that it is a limited production vehicle version and is thus more valuable because it has certain features that will not be provided in the standard.

The technology exists to create feelable/texturized buttons on a touchscreen. Even though the screen is flat your finger feels a small bump that would allow you to navigate the screen without looking at it. Alpine has used this on a few of their head units. Not sure why factory touchscreens aren't making use of it. Patents maybe?

I used to work for Panasonic Automotive. These things are universally awful because their tooling is still geared towards hardware-type systems. They can use linux all they want, but if it still takes two weeks to turn around issues brought up in testing, badly, then the result will be invariably awful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com