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
Head out on the highway!
I’m lookin for adventure
That’s how new cars are made. Just gotta find the cussy.
Fucking finally. Thank you.
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.
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.
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
This is an excellent example of why Steve Jobs was right to make Bill Atkinson add rounded rectangles to Mac OS
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.
I’d like a couple more physical controls, but I think you’re making it sound worse than it really is. I also don’t think the issue only is touch screen vs physical controls. Modern cars are a lot more complex - they have a lot more features.
I went for a few years renting higher end cars on a regular basis. The primary functions on every single one of the “modern cars” were easy to figure out with the exception of the Teslas. For occasional use Tesla’s controls are absurdly cumbersome verging on dangerous.
I can understand your experience would be different if it’s your primary ride.
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.
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.
It’s tech on wheel, so safety is always second.
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.
I’d rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.
We want buttons
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.
This seems like common sense to me.
Now actually do something about the touchscreens they bring with them
Touch screens are so dumb.
- 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 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.
Tesla: bringing back token ring networks, one shoddily-built car at a time.
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.
I know about Aç and volume controls. I hope the rest are not (yet) on touch screens.
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.
Thank you Europe!
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 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”
Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017
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.