This is a win for consumers, touch screens are bloody awful when driving and take away far too much of your concentration
IMO the capacititive buttons with no feedback are even worse than the touch screen. at least with the touch screen, you will likely have a colored UI element on screen to press. with the cars that replace all the buttons with capacitive buttons with no feedback, theyre all the same color.
I'd be fine with one that works like the Taptic engine on iPhones or how ever the trackpad on my Macbook does. It's a solid surface with no moving parts but it clicks when you press it and it feels 100% the same as pressing a physical button. It's way different than haptic feedback done with just the vibrator motor.
That doesn’t work well in a car though. It works in a phone because you’re holding it, or a trackpad because you’re putting a lot of pressure on it. In a car it’s already shaking from the engine, road, etc. Plus those taps are generally much shorter and lighter and less likely to feel the vibration.
Touch screens should not be used for any controls needed to operate a car. You can't use them without taking your eyes off the road.
Technically the only thing you're allowed to fiddle with, while driving, is what you can operate from the steering wheel. You're not supposed to fiddle with radio, AC etc. from the center console while driving even if it's physical buttons.
I know people don't drive like this, but you're only allowed to take your hands off the steering wheel for changing gears if driving a manual, otherwise it's two hands on there at all times...technically
If you read the article this is specifically about things needed to operate the car. Radios and AC or whatever is fine, but car manufacturers are starting to move things actually needed like turn signals into touch controls, and that is not okay.
Wait... what? What???
Yeah, thank Tesla for that one. Because of course it was Tesla.
Seems like a few countries should go over their laws again and prohibit those models from being sold. I don't know what else would be effective
Tesla is very confident their customers won't need steering wheel anymore soon, so they went ahead and fuck the steering wheel even though the autopilot can't work in all circumstances yet.
Autopilot never will, you're thinking of FSD.
Yes touch controls, but the comment I replied to mentioned touch screens (so usually the centre console), which only contains thing you don't really need to manage while driving.
The comment you replied to also specifically said "controls needed to operate a car."
Clarify allowed. Is it actually illegal in the EU to turn on the radio or air conditioning while driving unless the buttons allow you to do it from the steering wheel?
Is it actually illegal in the EU
What's allowed differs per country.
It differs from country to country, but where I live you can technically be fined for it. You will also fail your drivers test if you do it.
Where I live changing the AC is a task they can ask you while on the test.
If you do it dangerously such as swerving or taking your eyes off the road for extended periods then you can fail the test.
Is "you're the passenger, you do it, please," an acceptable response?
I'm more concerned about fog lights, emergency lights, and Window heating, as law usually requires you to be able to use them if conditions require it.
This differ by countries. Here I'm required by law to operate the car as needed to operate it safely.
If the cloud vanish, I am allowed to put sunglasses, if I get vapor on my windshield I am allowed to push the button to remove it and so on.
But you have to do it safely and smartly. If you get in an accident that you would have been able to prevent otherwise, you may be found at fault. Even if you didn't cause it.
Didn't Tesla put the wiper settings on the center console
It's always been a button on the left stalk at the steering wheel, and for quite a while wiper speed has been adjustable from the left scroll-button on the steering wheel as well.
So if my windows fog over I shouldn't be able to put the defrost on?
You should have configured your AC before you started driving.
I haven't had windows fog up during a drive spontaneously since forever ago when AC became standard in even cheap vehicles since they dry the air.
You've never driven in a humid tunnel, or live in a place with changing weather do you?
Oh I do, we have almost 200 days of precipitation yearly, and temperatures fluctuating wildly between days all seasons of the year.
Some tunnels where I live explicitly instruct you to adjust your AC before entering.
I'm allowed to adjust anything within arms reach as long as I keep my eyes on the road.
It is my responsibility to familiarize myself with the controls before departing so I can do so.
I'm driving. There is not a drop of rain in the sky. 2 hours into my drive it starts raining and my windows fog up. Your answer is I should have turned on the defrost before I left. Interesting. Against reason and human nature. But interesting.
Touch screen, Vibration feedback/Color change or not, means that you have to look at what your hand is doing and not on the road.
A physical button means you can keep your eyes on the road and find the right button with easy.
So let's be honest.
At this point, touch screens are chosen by car makers because cost and not design.
So essentially, safety is less important than cost for the car makers.
It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.
But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.
Enjoying tech is one thing, wanting touchscreens everywhere is another. If they were so cool as an input device, all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards from their desks.
Maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and all the functionality packed in to them has created a “touch screen == high tech” association in the general public.
But those of us who work with tech rather than just consuming it know the difference between functionality and UI. And we use nice physical interfaces like mouse + kb to interact with various tech all day, even if we use our phones too.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone touch screens. On the one hand it enables us to have controls that would be impossible on a phone, like selecting a point on a map, infinite variety of button controls, etc. On the other hand I can't tell you how many times I've barely brushed the screen by accident and the damn thing is off doing something I didn't want. "NO! DON'T SHUT OFF THE APP YOU....sigh"
Yep, physical input devices all the way. I literally just upgraded my computer from an Aya neo (touch screen only), to a GPD Win 4 specifically to have more physical inputs. While the Win 4 is also a handheld gaming pc (that is even smaller than the Aya), it has a slide out keyboard and an optical mouse sensor, which has honestly made so much of a difference in being able to use the device. Even just simple things like scrolling through Steam has become easier, never mind situations that involve any sort of typing.
I still love my Aya though, things a tank.
I believe this thinking is what the car companies are banking on too, assuming people see 3-4 screens means it's more premium when I just screams the opposite to me and those I know.
I would happily buy an iPhone with a physical keyboard under a slider. Much faster and more accurate than using Swype.
It's not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.
Ooof. I remeber using light pens in the 80s at a dumb terminal at my local library to find books. It was painful...
Anyone remembers dumb terminals?
Dumb terminals were extremely prevelant throughout the 80s and into the early-mid 90s. Most people just didn't know that they were "dumb terminals" and either just thought they were early desktop computers or just heard them referred to as a "terminal". That same library didn't update their dumb terminals to actual computers until the mid 90s, but they did however remove the light pen in favor of a keyboard at some point well before then.
This is Lenny. Most users probably do. Good percentage still have a few. A few of us make new ones now and then.
(Technically not dumb ones, though. And completely excluding terminal emulators, which are of course ubiquitous.)
I never thought it would bother me, until I actually sat in a car where everything was dependent on software the first time.
At first I thought I was just getting old. But it dawned on me that relying on software to fucking roll down the windows or starting the car doesn't feel too good.
(It was also an extreme jump in technology for me because the last car I drove before that was an old Corsa around the year ~2005.)
To be fair you probably already had software in engine before 2000.
Quite likely even power windows were driven by microcontrollers close to 2000 and used bus messaging between buttons and (non driver window) controller. Mercedes, certainly.
As an IT guy I have a case of "familiarity breeds contempt" when it comes to tech. A lot of it feels unnecessary and overcomplicates things and increases the chance of a failure.
In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.
Another question why we need all that cloud infrastructure in first place
Because they are stupidly dangerous. The reason physical controls work is because you can memorize where they are and touch them without looking. With the touch screen you have to loo EVERY TIME you want to do anything, and that's an opportunity to not notice something on the road and end up in an accident.
There are so many things that can go wrong with software where in mission critical situations like cars electricity is the preference
Also tracking comes with that software.. nerd types (like me) hate that type of stuff. I think tracking data like that should be banned and is the reason why I won't buy a new car until that happens
There is no discernible difference to me between using a builtin touchscreen and a phone. If one is distracted driving, then so should the other. You have to take your eyes off the road to use both, and with physical controls, I might glance it it but most of the operation of them is done by braille. If I pressed a button, I know I pressed a button and I pressed the right one, I don't have to look back at it to know that. And if I have to follow it up with another action, my hand already knows where that control is relative to the one I just pressed.
The only thing I could live with on touchscreen is music or diagnostics since neither are particularly necessary when you're in the act of driving.
The difference for me is that my phone is sitting in a holder stuck to the windscreen and looking at it means I'm only slightly looking away from the road, so I will still see movement in my peripheral vision.
By contrast, a large touchscreen in the middle of the dash necessarily means taking my eyes entirely off the road and probably also adjusting to the brightness of the display.
Neither are great, but one is worse than the other
Apart from being dangerous in a car they are also super annoying. I got a Walkman a couple of years ago just so I could pause and skip tracks by pressing a button in my pocket.
Time and place. Do I want everything on a touchscreen at home? More compact and allows more options. Yes.
While I'm trying to fumble for a control when I'm driving a 2000 lb deathtrap at 55 MPH? No.
I am doing car shopping right now, anything that doesnt have physical controls is out of the question no matter how good a deal it is or how cool the car otherwise is
AC controls, control surface heating heating/cooling (steering wheel, seat etc)
Volume controls
Turns, wipers, lights
Fog lights
Basically everything you might touch during the drive should be physical.
Wait, are there cars with lights/wipers on a touch screen?
Tesla for a very long time had wiper speed on the touch screen. Wipers were supposed to be automatic so they didn't provide physical controls. But of course auto wipers don't work all the time and Tesla's camera detector is particularly bad. They since changed the steering button to bring up touch control.
Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.
It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.
That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.
Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.
It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable
That's the case in all modern cars beginning in the 90s: Everything that's not directly mechanical is on the CAN bus. Not every single button individually, but button assemblies (the steering wheel counts as one), there's no wire going just for the blinkers through the wiring harness it's connected to the same bus that also carries signals for the brake lights.
Capacitive buttons are simply cheaper than mechanical ones, also, too many automotive designers seem to have no concept of haptics and UX they're in it for the sleek curves. Or, well, no concept of haptics that isn't about how satisfying the door closes, they still get that one right.
Tesla and VW’s idiotic light controls are touch (but not a screen) so you have to take your eyes off the road to turn fog lights on and off. The panel is completely flat and there’s a risk you might turn the main beam off. I mean, the mind boggles.
I think on the newly revised model 3, Tesla removed the steering column stalks completely.
The main reason why I didn't want high end packages for our last car was, that I am a cheap bastard. The second reason is, that I think touchscreens in cars are one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.
There are places where touch controls make a lot of sense. Cars is not one of them.
My stove also has touch controls and I'd like a stern word with whomever designed it because it's the biggest fucking bullshit. I've burned myself on those controls, I've had the stove turn itself off and refuse to turn on again because of water splashing onto the controls, I've had it turn on and glitch out because I've cleaned it off with a slightly damp rag.
When I'm driving I absolutely don't want to dig through non-tactile menus just so I can adjust the climate or turn on my heated seat. Plus, the lack of tactility sucks for blind people. Sure blind people won't drive, but imagine having to ask the driver to change your AC for you? In the dark of winter with ice on the roads that's just horribly irresponsible of whomever designed it.
When I’m driving I absolutely don’t want to dig through non-tactile menus just so I can adjust the climate or turn on my heated seat.
Look at Mr. Fancypants over here who can afford a heated seat subscription.
lmao I wish. I'd fucking never support that kind of behaviour. I don't have a car, but my roomie has a VW Golf with subscriptionless heated seats.
I happen to have a pretty decent inside view into the whole "heated seats" bullshit too. See, I used to work for a company that did a lot of work for Stellantis. You literally can't fathom just how much administrative bullshit work goes into the customisation of packages and spec sheets. It's a constantly ongoing thing, thousands of man hours are wasted on it. Things change between markets, and in some markets it affect insurance levels and whatnot, so there's just so much underlying complexity beyond "oh I want a red car with heated seats." I've legit no idea how it came to be as complicated as it is, but it's mindfuckingly idiotic. When I left I believe Stellantis was working on replacing the system with their own, but I somehow doubt that it's an improvement.
They are saving incredible amounts of money by flat out removing options and having them unlocked through a subscription fee. Lots of work is removed just from an administrative view, nevermind the fact that the manufacturing chain gets streamlined and money is saved there too.
On top of that, you're paying for the seat, it's not like they're including features out of the kindness of their hearts, you're paying for all of the hardware, and then they're trying to pretend like they're doing you a favour by letting you "pay for it when you need it." It's 100% a scam, and the EU isn't going to do shit about it because among the perps are some of the most valuable German companies, and they happen to hold the German government by their balls.
Touch controls on induction stoves do make some sense though. It simplified cleaning a lot when all you have to clean is a single large pane of glass
I think there are ways you can execute touch controls well on induction stoves, but in our case I just don't agree and overall I prefer actual tactile controls.
The controls lack tactility, so if you're blind you have no way of operating it. It's also so stupidly set up, if I want to turn the top-left plate on to max, I have to hold the power button, then select the plate, then press the minus button twice, then press the plus button once, alternatively just press the plus button 9 times. The child lock has a tendency to automatically activate after I wipe it down, so if that's engaged I have to disengage that first. Now if I were blind or visually impaired, it would be a nightmare to operate.
Before I got somewhat used to this stove I'd keep moving hot pots onto the controls. This is obviously a user error, but it makes sense because I've spent the last 20 years cooking on electric stoves. Because of the inertia in hot plates, if something is too warm you move it off the plate, usually towards you or to the side. This stove has a fairly small cooking area, so if I have something cooking on the other plate, I'll drag the pot towards me. Since it's induction I don't actually need to do this, but try to change a habit you've gotten used to by doing more or less daily for almost 20 years - it takes time.
As a result the stove would turn off, or glitch out because it doesn't handle multiple inputs, and then the controls would be too hot to touch.
None of these things would be an issue if instead of having nine buttons it had four knobs. Also I keep calling them buttons, but they're completely flat, non-tactile surfaces.
Oof, sounds like a nightmare. I have an IKEA induction stove and it's literally just four sliders that you click where you want the heat to be. 100% power is at the right of the slider. There are a couple other buttons (multi-zone heating, timer, etc.), but you don't strictly need them.
So it's way less frustrating and I guess a bit more accessible for people with bad eyesight, but for people with zero eyesight it still doesn't work.
The only induction stoves with physical knobs I saw online were several grand. Maybe there's business to be made by selling "touch-to-physical" conversion kits for appliances... Or I guess bumpy decals would work as well.
Agreed for induction, but I'd mich rather use one or two minutes more cleaning the knobs than having to almost cook my finger on this 60-90 degree Celcius hot conventional stove's touch surface to change the plate from step 7 to 4 for 10 FUKKEN SECONDS! OUCH!
Having to restart it 2-3 times during cooking because it got confused (pan moved slightly to the side) is also rather annoying.
Edit & tl:dr: Touch works decent on induction, just please keep it far away from any conventional stoves.
Anyone who stills sells a conventional stove in 2024 needs to be jailed. Induction is so damn cheap now (229 € entry-level fullsize at IKEA) and better in every way that trying to sell a resistive stove else is just a scam.
It simplified cleaning a lot when all you have to clean is a single large pane of glass
Alternatively, a combined oven+stove unit where the knobs are on the front panel and can be pushed in when not in use. That way you have a single pane of glass and knobs that aren't an annoyance when cleaning.
I think touch controls make sense in cars, but only for navigation and advanced settings, like for how long the headlights should stay on when you leave the car, should the mirrors fold when you lock the car, stuff like that.
Everything else should have a button.
Touch is still shit. Especially the much worse version cars have to use to be rated to manage heat and cold for decades.
It's not too bad with a little joystick like a Lexus has (no clue who else does). But touch screens for anything in a car are awful.
Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as "backup"
Bring back the standard DIN design. Then we can all change out our head unit with something that has Garmin but doesn't affect the physical buttons on the dash below it.
i wish that still existed, there's conversions for some modern cars, but it has basically vanished.
welp, gotta stock up on spare parts for my little nugget i guess...
but imagine how incredible physical controls for navigation could be
I’m imagining etch-a-sketch plan routing.
My 2012 Pathfinder was the last year of that generation and had navigation designed before UX was really emphasized. It mainly relies on physical buttons and it's overall terrible. Part of it involves an iPod-like scroll wheel, which is actually kinda nice to control zoom but that display is another kind of terrible.
100% agreed!
I don't want to take my eyes off the road while driving.
Just let me feel for the right button
Using my touch screen my sequence goes like this:
Glance once to locate the button I want to hit
Look back at road
Attempt #1 to hit the button: miss
Look back at the road
Attempt #2 to hit the button: miss
Look back at the road
Inhale Mr Miyagi breath, preparing to catch fly with chopsticks
Attempt #3 to hit the button: success!
Congratulations! You have now opened up the navigation tab, giving you convenient access to the many info and control screens for vehicle functions!
Your next press will take you to the climate menu (if you hit the right spot this time) where you can browse a complicated set of icons and visual aids we made way too stylish and modern to understand at a glance. Eventually I'm sure you'll figure out the very intuitive way that you can change the direction of AC airflow by swiping near the digital version of your vent and staring at it the whole time because there's no feedback on how far you're moving it except for the subtle, minimalist misty lines coming off the graphic~
This feature is unavailable while the vehicle is in motion (despite the pressure sensor detecting the passenger operating the shitty touch screen.)
According to a friend of mine the actor who played Mr. Miyagi would buy a lot of weed and sell joints he rolled himself to people who wanted a joint rolled by Mr Miyagi.
I really freaken wish I had some evidence for this story since it is the weirdest one I know.
Man who roll joint with chopsticks accomplish anything!
Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.
And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.
Don't forget heating and cooling too. There's a ton of things that are necessary to operate while the vehicle is in motion and should never be delegated to a touchscreen.
I'm fine with touchscreens for in car entertainment for the back seats and maybe a passenger one with the appropriate shutter technology to block the driver's view. None of those things are important for vehicle safety... but if there is a speaker that the passengers can control there needs to be a mute button for the driver to turn that shit off too :)
Any controls that aren't multimedia need to be separate from the infotainment system.
I want to be able to change the radio unit without losing my air conditioner. I don't want a cracked touchscreen to prevent me from turning on traction control.
I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.
Honestly, I thought I would love touch controls in my car. But I drive a LOT for work and what I've learned is there are very few things as frustrating as being on a bumpy road trying to press a touch screen button and hitting every other button on the screen in the process.
Yeah there's that too. It really isn't practical. At the very least you want some sort of tactile feedback so you have confirmation "yes I pressed the thing"
I'd rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.
Yes but if I have two friends on board that are talking I won't say
"SILENCE EVERYONE! I WILL NOW ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE NAVIGATIOM DESTINATION THREE TIMES WHICH WILL ALL FAIL!"
And zooming the map on skodas with touch screens is just THE WORST.
To be honest zooming isn't great on my 2010 yeti with a physical zoom wheel either.
These systems are always crap in cars because compared to modern phones they feel unbelievably slow; my yeti is now 14 years old but my phone is 2 years old so it's a pretty unfair comparison!
Great news. I wish they would also deduct stars if the heating/cooling controls are not physical too.
So one time someone broke into my car and tried to crowbar the radio out. They destroyed the whole dashboard, but failed to get the radio (it was nice of them to still take the face tho).
What this resulted in all of the controls hanging out by their wires. Everything still worked, I just had to sift through the exposed wires, pick up the proper control and twist the dial or push the button. It was ridiculous but still miles better than touch screen for these things.
What kind of car? Sounds like good build quality in their wiring, lol.
99 honda Civic. I loved that car. Abused the hell out of it because I was young and dumb, barely took care of it, and it still made it to 225k miles. Probably would have lasted longer but I got into a bad accident with it and it started leaking oil after that.
Ah, no wonder.
I had a 99 accord that I really liked. Manual transmission too. But it surprised me by blowing up its freaking engine not too far past 100k miles. (When my certified used warranty ran out, naturally) It blew out a cylinder valve hours from home, so I got back with a 3-cylinder that would stall if I let it idle. Just kept a foot on the gas at red lights. 😆
For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.
iirc.
He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.
2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.
I think what happened to Yelchin is a separate issue. The joystick was still a physical object that gave tactile feedback. The design was fine, but GM flushed the mouse on the implementation.
Where we have a bigger problem is when common vehicle controls are just an image on a screen, and a driver has to take their eyes off the road to do something simple like change the A/C temperature or skip a song track.
I've never heard the term "flushed the mouse". I tried to google it but all I got are -people flushing live mice down the toilet (?) and -the movie flushed away. Can you elaborate?
It's basically a nicer way of saying "shit the bed." I picked it up from the Tony Kornheiser podcast. It's a running bit there.
Thank you! That's what I guessed from context but wasn't sure if it was a regional thing.
Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don't give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it's quite possible that the button wasn't pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It's a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it's done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.
Antov Yelkin who played Checkov
You mean Anton Yelchin who played Chekov?
most definitely that. not the other. The guy who played Pavel Checkov, the Enterprise's navigator. Not the noted author born in 1860.
My father's Avalon has touch sensitive HVAC controls. They're not touchscreen, it's a panel of plastic that has little labelled sections that have grooves cut around them as if they are buttons, but it responds like a modern touch screen. The temperature control is used by sliding your finger along. It's SO GODDAMN STUPID.
I gotta rub my cars clit if I want the AC running
That's how new cars are made. Just gotta find the cussy.
Head out on the highway!
I'm lookin for adventure
I only have old vehicles and I'm actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff...
To change the temperature of the air, seats, or clear windows, I have to look down and across, away completely from the road, and watch my fingers press "buttons". Or worse, use menus!
At some point it feels like I'll crash because I can't see through the fogged up window, or I'll crash because I was looking at touch screen instead of road.
Not crashed yet, but lot swerves.
This is insane. Why is it illegal to use a phone while driving (here in the UK at least) but not that? They are basically the same thing!
Tesla's Model 3 uses a touchscreen for damn near everything. Some things are buried and require multiple presses in different places on the screen. It looks really good, but the actual purpose and the fact that humans driving at potentially deadly speeds need to operate it seems to have been placed a distant second to safety when the thing was designed. Given who is in charge of Tesla it's not much of a surprise.
I'd never realized how convenient/natural a joystick is for adjusting your side mirrors. I'm not even sure my wife has the reach to both press a touchscreen in the center console and have her head in driving position to adjust the mirrors with real time feedback. Even I'd hate to have to tweak a mirror while driving with a touchscreen.
Its mainly touchscreen due to two reasons: 1. Touchscreens are significantly cheaper than analog controls. 2. Touchscreens support the 'publish now, debug later' approach of Tesla and a lot of Chinese car manufacturers.
Not saying it's for everyone, but if it's not accessible from the home screen with a single press I can do without looking I'd rather just use the voice controls to keep my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
For someone who's the primary driver of a vehicle that's a good option, but there are plenty of Teslas out there that get driven often by secondary drivers who aren't familiar with the specific voice commands and IMO aren't going to learn them. Some standardization for controls is a good thing and although physical controls can vary, they're usually enough alike to easily figure them out. That's not going to happen with a touch screen.
it *used to look good, but then they fired the former-apple designer and hired some hack who worked on android, and it looks god awful
If their cheap-asses had actually done something other than cheapest possible implementation for the majority of input devices it might have been ok. Having driven several cars with touch input for various features the complaints I have are all the same:
too many menus with unintuitive directories that put what should be top-level systems several layers deep. IOW, I want to turn on the AC. I shouldn’t have to climb out of the Sirius menu then down 2-3 layers to turn on the AC and choose the ventilation configuration and temperature.
Horrible UI design. Things that need to be tapped/touched are either too small and/or too close together. You shouldn’t need to divert your attention to focus on a 1/4” square “OK” touch element when this should have a touch area minimum of a square inch so you can hit it without too much concentration. UI’s are too cluttered.
closely related to #2 - awful sensitivity of the screen. Small buttons that are hard to accurately hit are worsened by touch screens that don’t register input. Now you’re trying to accurately hit a patch of screen that is refusing to accept the tap, so now you’re further distracted and frustrated trying to get you music stream to play or whatever.
I don’t hate touchscreens, they can be useful, but manufacturers have implemented them at the expense of actually driving the car.
Damn, am I just getting old or did anyone else have to google what "IOW" stood for?
Any control that requires you to take your eye off the road for a split second just to confirm that you even activated it, is dangerous. Then multiply that by each control they've moved to touch screen. So dumb.
funnily enough, we already had an abbreviation for "IOW" (In Other Words), "I.E." (Id Est - That Is)
Worth noting that, by convention, "i.e." is usually in lower case, and only capitalized when the words themselves would be, i.e. at the start of a sentence.
Edit: typo
I THOUGHT it looked weird capitalized, but the other guy capitalized IOW so I figured "When In Rome"
i think ie looks weird no matter how you present it
The only semi nice thing my car did for the touchscreen is let you put shortcuts at the top, which is just the stupid screen for the heated seats. Everything else has a button in a easy to reach spot. I use Android Auto and I only have to bring up the actual car menu every few months, and not while driving. It isn't a perfect infotainment system, but it has certainly been the least annoying.
Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.
Airbags are several hundred dollars added to the cost.
BAS inputs (all physical inputs really) require muxed and addressed circuits on the board level to accomplish some connection to the software interface, whereas one touchscreen can have an arbitrary number of software interfaces it interacts with.
True but wasn't really thinking of it that way when I said $100 dollars, since I usually have way more I/O than I need. It is the physical operators, the running wire, the mounting, the inventory etc.
Same I sell access control and my comment was really more additional context for the normies. Recently I've been thinking about what the barrier of entry for Bacnet native access control hardware would be, and I can't come up with good reasons that jci or kaba hardware is priced at the level it's at except to consider it's proprietary software interface.
Manufacturers don't want to supply complete interoperable devices, because then they couldn't sell software
The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly, but I also have physical climate control so I can't fully relate
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly,
Are you suggesting a Wi-Fi Bluetooth device inside of the same vehicle its trying to connect to via Wi-Fi Bluetooth would have connection problems, and not be able to connect, at that short range?
It uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired. Have you ever been on Wi-Fi and had connection issues right next to the router? All of those factors also affect Bluetooth.
That said, I've never had any issues connecting my phone to AA via wireless.
It uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi.
Yeah sorry about that. I actually know it's Bluetooth and not Wi-Fi, but I was just working on my Wi-Fi in the house before I posted that comment, so it got stuck in my head. I connect my phone to my stereo system in my car via bluetooth.
But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired.
Over long distances, sure. But in a vehicle, with that short of a distance?
It would have to be one hell of another thing interfering to break a Bluetooth connection in a car.
I have an irrigation valve that turns the water on and off for the garden. It talks to the app via Bluetooth, and I've found that my phone has to be at least 3m away from it or it won't connect. Any closer and the signal must overload it to the point where it can't interpret it. The first one I bought, I took back to the store and swapped it for another before I figured out what the problem was.
I'm sure it's a bad design on the valve's Bluetooth implementation, but nevertheless, it exists.
Just trying to get more information about their experience as well, maybe it's not actually Android Auto and it's a weird half baked system built into the car
Being honest here, I have a car with android auto and I hate having to plug it in for a variety of reasons.
I just want to get in and drive, the music should just play and all the stuff should just get out of the way.
I don't want to charge my phone every time I drive my car, it's not necessary and can be hard on the battery
This is doubly important for an EV, I don't want to waste EV power charging a phone that doesn't need charging
My opinion, Phone OS makers need to get their shit together around android auto / apple carplay. Too much nonsense gets in the way of all the actually important pieces. When you get in a car with only a radio, the music just starts playing when you get in. Which means, your experience is better with old tech. That's just ridiculous.
I personally think a better idea is to just start equipping cars with cell modems that you add to your plan or something. There is no need to offload this work to your cellphone when the car has more physical space for that kind of thing anyway. I mean tesla's just have a borderline gaming computer in them these days.
You can get an adapter that makes wired Android Auto or Apple CarPlay wireless. I bought one off AliExpress for like $30 and it works great.
Ironically I've had an issue with Spotify not automatically playing when I wanted it to, unrelated to Android Auto lol
Also I think some cars do have cell modems, but it's mostly to provide in car wifi
Well duh. Even when they were introduced, touchscreens in cars got a lot of pushback. I’d much rather flip a switch or turn a knob for things I do daily, rather than futz three levels deep in a car maker’s software. They put things in there that really should be simple pushbuttons.
Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.
Fucking finally. Thank you.
We want buttons
Well it could also be a lever or a switch.
I mean, no fucking shit.
I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.
It states this fact in the article, although that 5 star rated is highly coveted so if they say a car with no touch buttons will only get 2/3 stars things will change pretty quick, at least in europe
Let's hope important enough.
"Back"?
There are people who'd entrust their life to a touchscreen?
I, for one, would like to see single-function, physical switches for everything that isn't specifically infotainment. I want turn signals to be a single switch, and I don't want any other features integrated into that switch, and I want each individual module to be easily replaced.
God yes. Having ten buttons on the turn signals is a nightmare. No I don't want to play "guess which button controls the wipers" when I sit in an unknown car for 10 minutes. Thanks.
Imagine changing gear without feeling which gear you have/changed to.
You have now given me the nightmare of a touchscreen gear shifter.
Paddleshift ever?
It's almost like the Tesla cars where you started the engine via the touch screen.
I'd like to introduce you to the manual drive option on my 2014 Kia Soul.
Is it otherwise automatic? I never use the manual option for automagic gears.
As someone who relies on GPS, a doordasher I kinda think it should be only for multi media and maps. AC and other controls should be nobs. Also steering wheel controls
Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.
My rented Chevy Bolt does this. It will start playing whatever it can find, even if the last moment when the car was turned off, I had nothing playing.
I think I'd rather use a phone with bluetooth. Radio is pretty dead these days IMO. Are you syncing with bluetooth buttons or is it radio? Bluetooth control would be pretty rad. What kind of car do you have?
I have never listened to the radio in my car by choice. My phone is plugged in (currently Apple CarPlay but I used Android Auto with my last phone) but for simple play controls the buttons on the dash or steering wheel are still superior.
Right on. I have to do an aftermarket BT solution due to age of my car
Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017
I'm watching an episode of Bluey with my kids right now and they're playing Pass the Parcel and Lucky's dad is trying to stop the music on his phone but his touch screen isn't working lol.
It’s the rotary shifter knobs and the AC controls buried in touchscreen menus that kill me
Now actually do something about the touchscreens they bring with them
This is a win for consumers, touch screens are bloody awful when driving and take away far too much of your concentration
IMO the capacititive buttons with no feedback are even worse than the touch screen. at least with the touch screen, you will likely have a colored UI element on screen to press. with the cars that replace all the buttons with capacitive buttons with no feedback, theyre all the same color.
I'd be fine with one that works like the Taptic engine on iPhones or how ever the trackpad on my Macbook does. It's a solid surface with no moving parts but it clicks when you press it and it feels 100% the same as pressing a physical button. It's way different than haptic feedback done with just the vibrator motor.
That doesn’t work well in a car though. It works in a phone because you’re holding it, or a trackpad because you’re putting a lot of pressure on it. In a car it’s already shaking from the engine, road, etc. Plus those taps are generally much shorter and lighter and less likely to feel the vibration.
Just have it swerve when you press a button!
Not really a "win" for anyone since it's nothing but a suggestion:
Touch screens should not be used for any controls needed to operate a car. You can't use them without taking your eyes off the road.
Technically the only thing you're allowed to fiddle with, while driving, is what you can operate from the steering wheel. You're not supposed to fiddle with radio, AC etc. from the center console while driving even if it's physical buttons.
I know people don't drive like this, but you're only allowed to take your hands off the steering wheel for changing gears if driving a manual, otherwise it's two hands on there at all times...technically
If you read the article this is specifically about things needed to operate the car. Radios and AC or whatever is fine, but car manufacturers are starting to move things actually needed like turn signals into touch controls, and that is not okay.
Wait... what? What???
Yeah, thank Tesla for that one. Because of course it was Tesla.
Seems like a few countries should go over their laws again and prohibit those models from being sold. I don't know what else would be effective
Tesla is very confident their customers won't need steering wheel anymore soon, so they went ahead and fuck the steering wheel even though the autopilot can't work in all circumstances yet.
Autopilot never will, you're thinking of FSD.
Yes touch controls, but the comment I replied to mentioned touch screens (so usually the centre console), which only contains thing you don't really need to manage while driving.
The comment you replied to also specifically said "controls needed to operate a car."
Clarify allowed. Is it actually illegal in the EU to turn on the radio or air conditioning while driving unless the buttons allow you to do it from the steering wheel?
What's allowed differs per country.
It differs from country to country, but where I live you can technically be fined for it. You will also fail your drivers test if you do it.
Where I live changing the AC is a task they can ask you while on the test.
If you do it dangerously such as swerving or taking your eyes off the road for extended periods then you can fail the test.
Is "you're the passenger, you do it, please," an acceptable response?
"I won't always be here to passenge for you!"
Of course
I'm more concerned about fog lights, emergency lights, and Window heating, as law usually requires you to be able to use them if conditions require it.
This differ by countries. Here I'm required by law to operate the car as needed to operate it safely.
If the cloud vanish, I am allowed to put sunglasses, if I get vapor on my windshield I am allowed to push the button to remove it and so on.
But you have to do it safely and smartly. If you get in an accident that you would have been able to prevent otherwise, you may be found at fault. Even if you didn't cause it.
Hands on 10 and 2 while operating the 2 ton death trap!
Phew im good then, my car weighs 1 ton so i can just drive with one hand right?
The math checks out.
Didn't Tesla put the wiper settings on the center console
It's always been a button on the left stalk at the steering wheel, and for quite a while wiper speed has been adjustable from the left scroll-button on the steering wheel as well.
So if my windows fog over I shouldn't be able to put the defrost on?
You should have configured your AC before you started driving.
I haven't had windows fog up during a drive spontaneously since forever ago when AC became standard in even cheap vehicles since they dry the air.
You've never driven in a humid tunnel, or live in a place with changing weather do you?
Oh I do, we have almost 200 days of precipitation yearly, and temperatures fluctuating wildly between days all seasons of the year.
Some tunnels where I live explicitly instruct you to adjust your AC before entering.
I'm allowed to adjust anything within arms reach as long as I keep my eyes on the road. It is my responsibility to familiarize myself with the controls before departing so I can do so.
I'm driving. There is not a drop of rain in the sky. 2 hours into my drive it starts raining and my windows fog up. Your answer is I should have turned on the defrost before I left. Interesting. Against reason and human nature. But interesting.
Technically, you know vehicles went 80 years without any steering controls? Buttons on the wheel still isn't a requirement.
Touch screen, Vibration feedback/Color change or not, means that you have to look at what your hand is doing and not on the road.
A physical button means you can keep your eyes on the road and find the right button with easy.
So let's be honest. At this point, touch screens are chosen by car makers because cost and not design. So essentially, safety is less important than cost for the car makers.
It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.
But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.
Enjoying tech is one thing, wanting touchscreens everywhere is another. If they were so cool as an input device, all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards from their desks.
Maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and all the functionality packed in to them has created a “touch screen == high tech” association in the general public.
But those of us who work with tech rather than just consuming it know the difference between functionality and UI. And we use nice physical interfaces like mouse + kb to interact with various tech all day, even if we use our phones too.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone touch screens. On the one hand it enables us to have controls that would be impossible on a phone, like selecting a point on a map, infinite variety of button controls, etc. On the other hand I can't tell you how many times I've barely brushed the screen by accident and the damn thing is off doing something I didn't want. "NO! DON'T SHUT OFF THE APP YOU....sigh"
Yep, physical input devices all the way. I literally just upgraded my computer from an Aya neo (touch screen only), to a GPD Win 4 specifically to have more physical inputs. While the Win 4 is also a handheld gaming pc (that is even smaller than the Aya), it has a slide out keyboard and an optical mouse sensor, which has honestly made so much of a difference in being able to use the device. Even just simple things like scrolling through Steam has become easier, never mind situations that involve any sort of typing.
I still love my Aya though, things a tank.
I believe this thinking is what the car companies are banking on too, assuming people see 3-4 screens means it's more premium when I just screams the opposite to me and those I know.
I would happily buy an iPhone with a physical keyboard under a slider. Much faster and more accurate than using Swype.
It's not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.
Ooof. I remeber using light pens in the 80s at a dumb terminal at my local library to find books. It was painful...
Anyone remembers dumb terminals?
Dumb terminals were extremely prevelant throughout the 80s and into the early-mid 90s. Most people just didn't know that they were "dumb terminals" and either just thought they were early desktop computers or just heard them referred to as a "terminal". That same library didn't update their dumb terminals to actual computers until the mid 90s, but they did however remove the light pen in favor of a keyboard at some point well before then.
This is Lenny. Most users probably do. Good percentage still have a few. A few of us make new ones now and then.
(Technically not dumb ones, though. And completely excluding terminal emulators, which are of course ubiquitous.)
I never thought of it this way, but it make sense.
I never thought it would bother me, until I actually sat in a car where everything was dependent on software the first time.
At first I thought I was just getting old. But it dawned on me that relying on software to fucking roll down the windows or starting the car doesn't feel too good.
(It was also an extreme jump in technology for me because the last car I drove before that was an old Corsa around the year ~2005.)
To be fair you probably already had software in engine before 2000.
Quite likely even power windows were driven by microcontrollers close to 2000 and used bus messaging between buttons and (non driver window) controller. Mercedes, certainly.
As an IT guy I have a case of "familiarity breeds contempt" when it comes to tech. A lot of it feels unnecessary and overcomplicates things and increases the chance of a failure.
In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.
Another question why we need all that cloud infrastructure in first place
Because they are stupidly dangerous. The reason physical controls work is because you can memorize where they are and touch them without looking. With the touch screen you have to loo EVERY TIME you want to do anything, and that's an opportunity to not notice something on the road and end up in an accident.
There are so many things that can go wrong with software where in mission critical situations like cars electricity is the preference
Also tracking comes with that software.. nerd types (like me) hate that type of stuff. I think tracking data like that should be banned and is the reason why I won't buy a new car until that happens
There is no discernible difference to me between using a builtin touchscreen and a phone. If one is distracted driving, then so should the other. You have to take your eyes off the road to use both, and with physical controls, I might glance it it but most of the operation of them is done by braille. If I pressed a button, I know I pressed a button and I pressed the right one, I don't have to look back at it to know that. And if I have to follow it up with another action, my hand already knows where that control is relative to the one I just pressed.
The only thing I could live with on touchscreen is music or diagnostics since neither are particularly necessary when you're in the act of driving.
The difference for me is that my phone is sitting in a holder stuck to the windscreen and looking at it means I'm only slightly looking away from the road, so I will still see movement in my peripheral vision.
By contrast, a large touchscreen in the middle of the dash necessarily means taking my eyes entirely off the road and probably also adjusting to the brightness of the display.
Neither are great, but one is worse than the other
Apart from being dangerous in a car they are also super annoying. I got a Walkman a couple of years ago just so I could pause and skip tracks by pressing a button in my pocket.
Time and place. Do I want everything on a touchscreen at home? More compact and allows more options. Yes.
While I'm trying to fumble for a control when I'm driving a 2000 lb deathtrap at 55 MPH? No.
I am doing car shopping right now, anything that doesnt have physical controls is out of the question no matter how good a deal it is or how cool the car otherwise is
Touch screens are so dumb.
Basically everything you might touch during the drive should be physical.
Wait, are there cars with lights/wipers on a touch screen?
Tesla for a very long time had wiper speed on the touch screen. Wipers were supposed to be automatic so they didn't provide physical controls. But of course auto wipers don't work all the time and Tesla's camera detector is particularly bad. They since changed the steering button to bring up touch control.
Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.
It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.
That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.
Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.
That's the case in all modern cars beginning in the 90s: Everything that's not directly mechanical is on the CAN bus. Not every single button individually, but button assemblies (the steering wheel counts as one), there's no wire going just for the blinkers through the wiring harness it's connected to the same bus that also carries signals for the brake lights.
Capacitive buttons are simply cheaper than mechanical ones, also, too many automotive designers seem to have no concept of haptics and UX they're in it for the sleek curves. Or, well, no concept of haptics that isn't about how satisfying the door closes, they still get that one right.
Tesla and VW’s idiotic light controls are touch (but not a screen) so you have to take your eyes off the road to turn fog lights on and off. The panel is completely flat and there’s a risk you might turn the main beam off. I mean, the mind boggles.
I think on the newly revised model 3, Tesla removed the steering column stalks completely.
The main reason why I didn't want high end packages for our last car was, that I am a cheap bastard. The second reason is, that I think touchscreens in cars are one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.
There are places where touch controls make a lot of sense. Cars is not one of them.
My stove also has touch controls and I'd like a stern word with whomever designed it because it's the biggest fucking bullshit. I've burned myself on those controls, I've had the stove turn itself off and refuse to turn on again because of water splashing onto the controls, I've had it turn on and glitch out because I've cleaned it off with a slightly damp rag.
When I'm driving I absolutely don't want to dig through non-tactile menus just so I can adjust the climate or turn on my heated seat. Plus, the lack of tactility sucks for blind people. Sure blind people won't drive, but imagine having to ask the driver to change your AC for you? In the dark of winter with ice on the roads that's just horribly irresponsible of whomever designed it.
Look at Mr. Fancypants over here who can afford a heated seat subscription.
lmao I wish. I'd fucking never support that kind of behaviour. I don't have a car, but my roomie has a VW Golf with subscriptionless heated seats.
I happen to have a pretty decent inside view into the whole "heated seats" bullshit too. See, I used to work for a company that did a lot of work for Stellantis. You literally can't fathom just how much administrative bullshit work goes into the customisation of packages and spec sheets. It's a constantly ongoing thing, thousands of man hours are wasted on it. Things change between markets, and in some markets it affect insurance levels and whatnot, so there's just so much underlying complexity beyond "oh I want a red car with heated seats." I've legit no idea how it came to be as complicated as it is, but it's mindfuckingly idiotic. When I left I believe Stellantis was working on replacing the system with their own, but I somehow doubt that it's an improvement.
They are saving incredible amounts of money by flat out removing options and having them unlocked through a subscription fee. Lots of work is removed just from an administrative view, nevermind the fact that the manufacturing chain gets streamlined and money is saved there too.
On top of that, you're paying for the seat, it's not like they're including features out of the kindness of their hearts, you're paying for all of the hardware, and then they're trying to pretend like they're doing you a favour by letting you "pay for it when you need it." It's 100% a scam, and the EU isn't going to do shit about it because among the perps are some of the most valuable German companies, and they happen to hold the German government by their balls.
The day they try to sell me a heated seat subscription is the day I put a heated blanket with a cigarette lighter plug on my seat.
If I had read this comment even just a decade ago, I'd have thought it was clearly satire.
But in 2024? Nope.
Thanks capitalism!
"The intent is to provide drivers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heated seat configurations."
Touch controls on induction stoves do make some sense though. It simplified cleaning a lot when all you have to clean is a single large pane of glass
I think there are ways you can execute touch controls well on induction stoves, but in our case I just don't agree and overall I prefer actual tactile controls.
The controls lack tactility, so if you're blind you have no way of operating it. It's also so stupidly set up, if I want to turn the top-left plate on to max, I have to hold the power button, then select the plate, then press the minus button twice, then press the plus button once, alternatively just press the plus button 9 times. The child lock has a tendency to automatically activate after I wipe it down, so if that's engaged I have to disengage that first. Now if I were blind or visually impaired, it would be a nightmare to operate.
Before I got somewhat used to this stove I'd keep moving hot pots onto the controls. This is obviously a user error, but it makes sense because I've spent the last 20 years cooking on electric stoves. Because of the inertia in hot plates, if something is too warm you move it off the plate, usually towards you or to the side. This stove has a fairly small cooking area, so if I have something cooking on the other plate, I'll drag the pot towards me. Since it's induction I don't actually need to do this, but try to change a habit you've gotten used to by doing more or less daily for almost 20 years - it takes time.
As a result the stove would turn off, or glitch out because it doesn't handle multiple inputs, and then the controls would be too hot to touch.
None of these things would be an issue if instead of having nine buttons it had four knobs. Also I keep calling them buttons, but they're completely flat, non-tactile surfaces.
Oof, sounds like a nightmare. I have an IKEA induction stove and it's literally just four sliders that you click where you want the heat to be. 100% power is at the right of the slider. There are a couple other buttons (multi-zone heating, timer, etc.), but you don't strictly need them.
So it's way less frustrating and I guess a bit more accessible for people with bad eyesight, but for people with zero eyesight it still doesn't work.
The only induction stoves with physical knobs I saw online were several grand. Maybe there's business to be made by selling "touch-to-physical" conversion kits for appliances... Or I guess bumpy decals would work as well.
Agreed for induction, but I'd mich rather use one or two minutes more cleaning the knobs than having to almost cook my finger on this 60-90 degree Celcius hot conventional stove's touch surface to change the plate from step 7 to 4 for 10 FUKKEN SECONDS! OUCH!
Having to restart it 2-3 times during cooking because it got confused (pan moved slightly to the side) is also rather annoying.
Edit & tl:dr: Touch works decent on induction, just please keep it far away from any conventional stoves.
Anyone who stills sells a conventional stove in 2024 needs to be jailed. Induction is so damn cheap now (229 € entry-level fullsize at IKEA) and better in every way that trying to sell a resistive stove else is just a scam.
Alternatively, a combined oven+stove unit where the knobs are on the front panel and can be pushed in when not in use. That way you have a single pane of glass and knobs that aren't an annoyance when cleaning.
I think touch controls make sense in cars, but only for navigation and advanced settings, like for how long the headlights should stay on when you leave the car, should the mirrors fold when you lock the car, stuff like that.
Everything else should have a button.
Touch is still shit. Especially the much worse version cars have to use to be rated to manage heat and cold for decades.
It's not too bad with a little joystick like a Lexus has (no clue who else does). But touch screens for anything in a car are awful.
Man I HATE touch controls, especially on stoves. Any time I use them I bitch and moan chronically.
Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as "backup"
Bring back the standard DIN design. Then we can all change out our head unit with something that has Garmin but doesn't affect the physical buttons on the dash below it.
i wish that still existed, there's conversions for some modern cars, but it has basically vanished.
welp, gotta stock up on spare parts for my little nugget i guess...
but imagine how incredible physical controls for navigation could be
I’m imagining etch-a-sketch plan routing.
My 2012 Pathfinder was the last year of that generation and had navigation designed before UX was really emphasized. It mainly relies on physical buttons and it's overall terrible. Part of it involves an iPod-like scroll wheel, which is actually kinda nice to control zoom but that display is another kind of terrible.
100% agreed! I don't want to take my eyes off the road while driving. Just let me feel for the right button
Using my touch screen my sequence goes like this:
Congratulations! You have now opened up the navigation tab, giving you convenient access to the many info and control screens for vehicle functions!
Your next press will take you to the climate menu (if you hit the right spot this time) where you can browse a complicated set of icons and visual aids we made way too stylish and modern to understand at a glance. Eventually I'm sure you'll figure out the very intuitive way that you can change the direction of AC airflow by swiping near the digital version of your vent and staring at it the whole time because there's no feedback on how far you're moving it except for the subtle, minimalist misty lines coming off the graphic~
This feature is unavailable while the vehicle is in motion (despite the pressure sensor detecting the passenger operating the shitty touch screen.)
According to a friend of mine the actor who played Mr. Miyagi would buy a lot of weed and sell joints he rolled himself to people who wanted a joint rolled by Mr Miyagi.
I really freaken wish I had some evidence for this story since it is the weirdest one I know.
Man who roll joint with chopsticks accomplish anything!
Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.
And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.
Don't forget heating and cooling too. There's a ton of things that are necessary to operate while the vehicle is in motion and should never be delegated to a touchscreen.
I'm fine with touchscreens for in car entertainment for the back seats and maybe a passenger one with the appropriate shutter technology to block the driver's view. None of those things are important for vehicle safety... but if there is a speaker that the passengers can control there needs to be a mute button for the driver to turn that shit off too :)
Any controls that aren't multimedia need to be separate from the infotainment system.
I want to be able to change the radio unit without losing my air conditioner. I don't want a cracked touchscreen to prevent me from turning on traction control.
I assume steering too, right?
i.e. a "If you brick your car's firmware, at least you can keep driving without unreasonable levels of difficulty or distraction" situation.
I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.
Honestly, I thought I would love touch controls in my car. But I drive a LOT for work and what I've learned is there are very few things as frustrating as being on a bumpy road trying to press a touch screen button and hitting every other button on the screen in the process.
Yeah there's that too. It really isn't practical. At the very least you want some sort of tactile feedback so you have confirmation "yes I pressed the thing"
I'd rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.
Automotive vim when?
emacs auto
alias emacs=/usr/bin/vimBuT tHeRe Is VoIcE cOnTrOl!!!
Yes but if I have two friends on board that are talking I won't say
"SILENCE EVERYONE! I WILL NOW ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE NAVIGATIOM DESTINATION THREE TIMES WHICH WILL ALL FAIL!"
And zooming the map on skodas with touch screens is just THE WORST.
To be honest zooming isn't great on my 2010 yeti with a physical zoom wheel either.
These systems are always crap in cars because compared to modern phones they feel unbelievably slow; my yeti is now 14 years old but my phone is 2 years old so it's a pretty unfair comparison!
Tesla’s on-wheel turn signal buttons are criminally bad.
So is their "swipe up or down to go forwards or backwards", ON THE SCREEN.
So is a missing shift stick, or the touch shift screen on the final roof.
Great news. I wish they would also deduct stars if the heating/cooling controls are not physical too.
So one time someone broke into my car and tried to crowbar the radio out. They destroyed the whole dashboard, but failed to get the radio (it was nice of them to still take the face tho).
What this resulted in all of the controls hanging out by their wires. Everything still worked, I just had to sift through the exposed wires, pick up the proper control and twist the dial or push the button. It was ridiculous but still miles better than touch screen for these things.
What kind of car? Sounds like good build quality in their wiring, lol.
99 honda Civic. I loved that car. Abused the hell out of it because I was young and dumb, barely took care of it, and it still made it to 225k miles. Probably would have lasted longer but I got into a bad accident with it and it started leaking oil after that.
Ah, no wonder.
I had a 99 accord that I really liked. Manual transmission too. But it surprised me by blowing up its freaking engine not too far past 100k miles. (When my certified used warranty ran out, naturally) It blew out a cylinder valve hours from home, so I got back with a 3-cylinder that would stall if I let it idle. Just kept a foot on the gas at red lights. 😆
For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.
iirc. He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.
2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.
I think what happened to Yelchin is a separate issue. The joystick was still a physical object that gave tactile feedback. The design was fine, but GM flushed the mouse on the implementation.
Where we have a bigger problem is when common vehicle controls are just an image on a screen, and a driver has to take their eyes off the road to do something simple like change the A/C temperature or skip a song track.
I've never heard the term "flushed the mouse". I tried to google it but all I got are -people flushing live mice down the toilet (?) and -the movie flushed away. Can you elaborate?
It's basically a nicer way of saying "shit the bed." I picked it up from the Tony Kornheiser podcast. It's a running bit there.
Thank you! That's what I guessed from context but wasn't sure if it was a regional thing.
Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don't give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it's quite possible that the button wasn't pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It's a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it's done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.
You mean Anton Yelchin who played Chekov?
most definitely that. not the other. The guy who played Pavel Checkov, the Enterprise's navigator. Not the noted author born in 1860.
My father's Avalon has touch sensitive HVAC controls. They're not touchscreen, it's a panel of plastic that has little labelled sections that have grooves cut around them as if they are buttons, but it responds like a modern touch screen. The temperature control is used by sliding your finger along. It's SO GODDAMN STUPID.
I gotta rub my cars clit if I want the AC running
That's how new cars are made. Just gotta find the cussy.
Head out on the highway!
I'm lookin for adventure
I only have old vehicles and I'm actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff...
To change the temperature of the air, seats, or clear windows, I have to look down and across, away completely from the road, and watch my fingers press "buttons". Or worse, use menus!
At some point it feels like I'll crash because I can't see through the fogged up window, or I'll crash because I was looking at touch screen instead of road.
Not crashed yet, but lot swerves.
This is insane. Why is it illegal to use a phone while driving (here in the UK at least) but not that? They are basically the same thing!
Tesla's Model 3 uses a touchscreen for damn near everything. Some things are buried and require multiple presses in different places on the screen. It looks really good, but the actual purpose and the fact that humans driving at potentially deadly speeds need to operate it seems to have been placed a distant second to safety when the thing was designed. Given who is in charge of Tesla it's not much of a surprise.
I'd never realized how convenient/natural a joystick is for adjusting your side mirrors. I'm not even sure my wife has the reach to both press a touchscreen in the center console and have her head in driving position to adjust the mirrors with real time feedback. Even I'd hate to have to tweak a mirror while driving with a touchscreen.
Its mainly touchscreen due to two reasons: 1. Touchscreens are significantly cheaper than analog controls. 2. Touchscreens support the 'publish now, debug later' approach of Tesla and a lot of Chinese car manufacturers.
Not saying it's for everyone, but if it's not accessible from the home screen with a single press I can do without looking I'd rather just use the voice controls to keep my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
For someone who's the primary driver of a vehicle that's a good option, but there are plenty of Teslas out there that get driven often by secondary drivers who aren't familiar with the specific voice commands and IMO aren't going to learn them. Some standardization for controls is a good thing and although physical controls can vary, they're usually enough alike to easily figure them out. That's not going to happen with a touch screen.
it *used to look good, but then they fired the former-apple designer and hired some hack who worked on android, and it looks god awful
before: https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/model-3-ui-1.jpg
after: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*zNdNui2-s30EEAqCDy8vRA.jpeg
Neither of those options look at all appealing to me
Spoken like an Apple fan. 🙂
I think they both look nice, but I wouldn't want to have to actually use either of them, especially while driving a car.
This is an excellent example of why Steve Jobs was right to make Bill Atkinson add rounded rectangles to Mac OS
If their cheap-asses had actually done something other than cheapest possible implementation for the majority of input devices it might have been ok. Having driven several cars with touch input for various features the complaints I have are all the same:
too many menus with unintuitive directories that put what should be top-level systems several layers deep. IOW, I want to turn on the AC. I shouldn’t have to climb out of the Sirius menu then down 2-3 layers to turn on the AC and choose the ventilation configuration and temperature.
Horrible UI design. Things that need to be tapped/touched are either too small and/or too close together. You shouldn’t need to divert your attention to focus on a 1/4” square “OK” touch element when this should have a touch area minimum of a square inch so you can hit it without too much concentration. UI’s are too cluttered.
closely related to #2 - awful sensitivity of the screen. Small buttons that are hard to accurately hit are worsened by touch screens that don’t register input. Now you’re trying to accurately hit a patch of screen that is refusing to accept the tap, so now you’re further distracted and frustrated trying to get you music stream to play or whatever.
I don’t hate touchscreens, they can be useful, but manufacturers have implemented them at the expense of actually driving the car.
Damn, am I just getting old or did anyone else have to google what "IOW" stood for?
Any control that requires you to take your eye off the road for a split second just to confirm that you even activated it, is dangerous. Then multiply that by each control they've moved to touch screen. So dumb.
funnily enough, we already had an abbreviation for "IOW" (In Other Words), "I.E." (Id Est - That Is)
Worth noting that, by convention, "i.e." is usually in lower case, and only capitalized when the words themselves would be, i.e. at the start of a sentence.
Edit: typo
I THOUGHT it looked weird capitalized, but the other guy capitalized IOW so I figured "When In Rome"
i think ie looks weird no matter how you present it
I had to Google it too! "In other words"
The only semi nice thing my car did for the touchscreen is let you put shortcuts at the top, which is just the stupid screen for the heated seats. Everything else has a button in a easy to reach spot. I use Android Auto and I only have to bring up the actual car menu every few months, and not while driving. It isn't a perfect infotainment system, but it has certainly been the least annoying.
Thank you Europe!
I have better slogan: "EU, I belive in you!"
Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.
Airbags are several hundred dollars added to the cost.
Physical buttons are a safety feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
BAS inputs (all physical inputs really) require muxed and addressed circuits on the board level to accomplish some connection to the software interface, whereas one touchscreen can have an arbitrary number of software interfaces it interacts with.
True but wasn't really thinking of it that way when I said $100 dollars, since I usually have way more I/O than I need. It is the physical operators, the running wire, the mounting, the inventory etc.
Same I sell access control and my comment was really more additional context for the normies. Recently I've been thinking about what the barrier of entry for Bacnet native access control hardware would be, and I can't come up with good reasons that jci or kaba hardware is priced at the level it's at except to consider it's proprietary software interface.
Manufacturers don't want to supply complete interoperable devices, because then they couldn't sell software
The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly, but I also have physical climate control so I can't fully relate
Are you suggesting a
Wi-FiBluetooth device inside of the same vehicle its trying to connect to viaWi-FiBluetooth would have connection problems, and not be able to connect, at that short range?It uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired. Have you ever been on Wi-Fi and had connection issues right next to the router? All of those factors also affect Bluetooth.
That said, I've never had any issues connecting my phone to AA via wireless.
Yeah sorry about that. I actually know it's Bluetooth and not Wi-Fi, but I was just working on my Wi-Fi in the house before I posted that comment, so it got stuck in my head. I connect my phone to my stereo system in my car via bluetooth.
Over long distances, sure. But in a vehicle, with that short of a distance?
It would have to be one hell of another thing interfering to break a Bluetooth connection in a car.
I have an irrigation valve that turns the water on and off for the garden. It talks to the app via Bluetooth, and I've found that my phone has to be at least 3m away from it or it won't connect. Any closer and the signal must overload it to the point where it can't interpret it. The first one I bought, I took back to the store and swapped it for another before I figured out what the problem was.
I'm sure it's a bad design on the valve's Bluetooth implementation, but nevertheless, it exists.
I mean, yeah, it's possible
Just trying to get more information about their experience as well, maybe it's not actually Android Auto and it's a weird half baked system built into the car
Being honest here, I have a car with android auto and I hate having to plug it in for a variety of reasons.
I just want to get in and drive, the music should just play and all the stuff should just get out of the way.
I don't want to charge my phone every time I drive my car, it's not necessary and can be hard on the battery
This is doubly important for an EV, I don't want to waste EV power charging a phone that doesn't need charging
My opinion, Phone OS makers need to get their shit together around android auto / apple carplay. Too much nonsense gets in the way of all the actually important pieces. When you get in a car with only a radio, the music just starts playing when you get in. Which means, your experience is better with old tech. That's just ridiculous.
I personally think a better idea is to just start equipping cars with cell modems that you add to your plan or something. There is no need to offload this work to your cellphone when the car has more physical space for that kind of thing anyway. I mean tesla's just have a borderline gaming computer in them these days.
You can get an adapter that makes wired Android Auto or Apple CarPlay wireless. I bought one off AliExpress for like $30 and it works great.
Ironically I've had an issue with Spotify not automatically playing when I wanted it to, unrelated to Android Auto lol
Also I think some cars do have cell modems, but it's mostly to provide in car wifi
Well duh. Even when they were introduced, touchscreens in cars got a lot of pushback. I’d much rather flip a switch or turn a knob for things I do daily, rather than futz three levels deep in a car maker’s software. They put things in there that really should be simple pushbuttons.
Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.
Fucking finally. Thank you.
We want buttons
Well it could also be a lever or a switch.
I mean, no fucking shit.
I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.
It states this fact in the article, although that 5 star rated is highly coveted so if they say a car with no touch buttons will only get 2/3 stars things will change pretty quick, at least in europe
Let's hope important enough.
"Back"?
There are people who'd entrust their life to a touchscreen?
This seems like common sense to me.
I, for one, would like to see single-function, physical switches for everything that isn't specifically infotainment. I want turn signals to be a single switch, and I don't want any other features integrated into that switch, and I want each individual module to be easily replaced.
God yes. Having ten buttons on the turn signals is a nightmare. No I don't want to play "guess which button controls the wipers" when I sit in an unknown car for 10 minutes. Thanks.
Imagine changing gear without feeling which gear you have/changed to.
You have now given me the nightmare of a touchscreen gear shifter.
Paddleshift ever?
It's almost like the Tesla cars where you started the engine via the touch screen.
I'd like to introduce you to the manual drive option on my 2014 Kia Soul.
Is it otherwise automatic? I never use the manual option for automagic gears.
As someone who relies on GPS, a doordasher I kinda think it should be only for multi media and maps. AC and other controls should be nobs. Also steering wheel controls
Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.
My rented Chevy Bolt does this. It will start playing whatever it can find, even if the last moment when the car was turned off, I had nothing playing.
I think I'd rather use a phone with bluetooth. Radio is pretty dead these days IMO. Are you syncing with bluetooth buttons or is it radio? Bluetooth control would be pretty rad. What kind of car do you have?
I have never listened to the radio in my car by choice. My phone is plugged in (currently Apple CarPlay but I used Android Auto with my last phone) but for simple play controls the buttons on the dash or steering wheel are still superior.
Right on. I have to do an aftermarket BT solution due to age of my car
This is what I have in my honda civic, it's perfect.
Europeans are hardcore, we use plastic dummys to crash test our cars, theirs can talk!
Im.on board with buttons, and touch screens should be guesture only.
the 2010s was a mistake
Wonder if capacitive touch buttons qualify as 'physical' buttons. If not, VWs are going to need to make a lot of changes.
Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017
I'm watching an episode of Bluey with my kids right now and they're playing Pass the Parcel and Lucky's dad is trying to stop the music on his phone but his touch screen isn't working lol.
It’s the rotary shifter knobs and the AC controls buried in touchscreen menus that kill me
Now actually do something about the touchscreens they bring with them