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”
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Man I HATE touch controls, especially on stoves. Any time I use them I bitch and moan chronically.
This is an accurate description of me.
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.
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 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.
Do cars even come with lighter sockets any more?
Most do. But it might just be USB sockets around the dash area or center console. Still probably at least one 12 V one somewhere and often one in the trunk.
I use my 12v socket to power my portable air compressor.
Probably? I confess I don’t know. Car accessories that use them are pretty common tho, so probably.
Sockets, yes (often more than one, in fact). Lighters themselves, probably not.
The socket has evolved well beyond its initial use heating up a cigarette lighter.
And after thet, they will turn the lighter socket into a subscription model.
“The intent is to provide drivers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heated seat configurations.”
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 benefit of unified hardware and not having subscriptions can be easily combined: just replace subscriptions with a one-off charge for any feature. Warranty void if enabled not in a dealer shop. I think that would create much less noise than offering a monthly sub. Yes, I know, not great for the quarterly results, but then - so much less hate from your customers. And yes, touch screens in a car should wait until there is a full, proper self-driving capability in place.
Sure, but you’d still be ripping people off. If your car has an option to unlock heated seats through microtransactions, you’ve already paid for heated seats.
The definition of rip off may vary. Still, that would be a saner marketing approach, in my view.
As I understand, all the businesses are trying to replicate the IT-born business model of subscription for features. It should not be a thing in the real world, and I hope these managers come to sense, the sooner the better.
The way I see it, if I have to pay extra for a feature I’ve paid for, then it’s a rip-off. Like if I booked a hotel and then got told that I need to pay extra to have a bed, I’d be pretty miffed.
Say you have options to have regular seats or heated seats, as well as leather or fabric seats, that’s essentially four options. By making all seats heated and locking the usage via software, you’ve cut the amount of options in half. That reduces complexity during assembly and ends up cutting costs. You’re still going to charge the customer at least the full price of the seat, though. It’s not like you’re charging for
seat - heatinghoping that the difference would be covered by those that actually choose to subscribe.There’s also the question of; what happens 10-15 years from now? Nintendo closed the store on the 3DS in March 2023. The console was released in February 2011. At what point will you no longer be able to use your heated seats because the manufacturer has stopped updating the API for your car, and you’re no longer able to pay for it? How will that affect resell value?
I hate this sort of practise in smartphones and software. A car is order of magnitudes more expensive than a mobile game. If they want to apply mobile game tactics to vehicles, then the cost of the car should be comparable to a mobile game as well.
The fact that a heated seat subscription idea didn’t completely end the consumer market for the manufacturers attempting it shows us that too few people are awake to impact their income. The manufacturer will do whatever they want, including recording every possible thing they are able to inside the vehicle.
I am afraid you are right. Am driving a non-connected old car, and intend to buy a new one without that crap.
I do struggle to understand why the general population is so untroubled with this constant privacy breaching creep (a bit less worried with subs as when it comes to monies, people are a bit more alert). I have a lot of smart friends who click the “agree to everything you want from me” button everywhere, and they see no issue with it.
just replace subscriptions with a one-off charge for any feature. Warranty void if enabled not in a dealer shop.
The car owner has every right to use every hardware capability physically present in the car, “enabled” or not. Manufacturers have no right to deny warranty claims based on owner modification, unless they can prove that said modification caused the failure.
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.
Absolutely, I agree with this. Controls one might want to operate while driving, or that have frequent usage should be available as tactile buttons/switches/dials/what have you. If it’s something I’m like to set once or twice a year, or in my lifetime, it might as well be in a software menu somewhere.
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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 weird themselves would be, i.e. at the start of a sentence.
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
You mean w.i.r.
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Wonder if capacitive touch buttons qualify as ‘physical’ buttons. If not, VWs are going to need to make a lot of changes.
I mean, no fucking shit.
This seems like common sense to me.
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”
but imagine how incredible physical controls for navigation could be
I’m imaging 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.
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…
Touch screens are great in cars!
No, no they aren’t. If I have to stop to use a control in a car, it’s bad design.
Mate there’s like, a whole paragraph left in my comment. You can’t safely type any navigation information while driving. If you want to use voice control to navigate, it doesn’t really matter if it’s physical controls or a touch screen. Maybe read the whole comment where all of this was already addressed.
Ok, lets hear your idea for how to navigate while driving. Please don’t say voice control, because voice control rarely works as needed.
Passenger does it? Have a sensor to see if there is a passenger, then allow it.
You’re rightfully getting downvoted because having a passenger is not at all a given and before the days of navigation systems you had to handle physical maps at the next red light or pull over, but there’s a kernel of truth to your statement:
A passenger who can actually navigate is a godsend. I learned how to do it properly during my draft time (civil defence) and a proper navigator takes so much load off the driver it’s not funny any more. Incomparable to a computer navigation system. The driver is getting instructions exactly when necessary, confusing situations get called out and clarified, and when the driver makes a call “can’t drive left here” it’s the navigator’s responsibility to re-plan. You can actually focus on the road because the navigator takes on full responsibility for the route. It’s how you can get fast to a place in an area unknown to both driver and navigator, and with “fast” I mean with or without sirens, without that navigator backup sirens would generally be pointless, no brain cycles left to care about routes when you’re “breaking” rules of the street and dealing with apparently deaf and blind drivers left and right.
The average passenger, though, is magnitudes worse than computer navigation. And I don’t just mean people who need to rotate the map to not get disoriented, I mean practically everyone.
And of course, we can rely on the universally true mutual exclusivity of always having a passenger when we need to navigate, and never needing to navigate when we don’t have any passengers. As constant as the north star, that one.
If you need to do navigation, you stop your car. If you have a passenger, he or she can do it while you are driving. It’s not that hard
Read the full comment before replying you lemon
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. 😆
I guarantee this will never happen. Manufacturers picked touch screens and capacitive buttons because they are cheaper to produce. There is no way they’re going back to physical controls.
Well, if your vehicle can’t be sold in an entire economic zone because you aren’t complying with safety regulations, that’s a pretty big incentive to change your design.
I don’t really believe for a moment that a company would care really. They exist to make profits by any means necessary, legal or not. Changing designs requires changes in tooling, processes, and design. That all costs lots of money.
If any design is changed as a result of gov regulations I’ll eat my entire dick.
*Looks at the whole internal design of cars changing in the last 30 years due to the US’s increasingly stringent safety regulations… *
Ya in the past under different political and economic climate. Those changes if suggested today would never pass or be implemented.
So, uh, have you heard of a guy named Ralph Nader? He wrote a book called “Unsafe At Any Speed” in the 60s about how auto manufacturers were selling cars that they knew to be dangerous, and how they resisted changing in order to make vehicles safer. It resulted in the US DOT and eventually NTHSA, and a whole bunch of new regulations that auto manufacturers were obligated to comply with.
You also have things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission that can force companies to recall products–at their own expense–to fix products with health and safety defects. The results of recalls can be fines, as well as the product being entirely removed from the market, which can easily end up costing more than has already been spent on tooling and processes.
So, yeah, companies can, and do, change designs as a result of regulations.
Now, how were you planning on eating your entire dick?
Everything you listed happened in the past in different political and economic climates. Those changes would never be able to be implemented in today’s climate.
]I see your view as jaded not wrong. Don’t want to gaslight you and say things are like they were, your view is valid through your expereinces, but Apple was forced to change a charging port to the cost of god knows how much. Also we can only list things in the past, if i try and list a now its already past, semantics I know but language is powerful in teaching your brain what is possible.
See, that’s what we call “moving the goalposts”.
And if you think that they EU won’t regulate companies and force them to change their business practices in order to do business in the EU, well, you haven’t been paying attention.
You’re a very unpleasant person to communicate with. There are much better and less aggressive ways to communicate your opinion.
If any design is changed as a result of gov regulations I’ll eat my entire dick.
Is this you? Kinda looks like you.
What, exactly, did you expect when you said that? How did you anticipate people responding to the tone you set in your top level comment?
I don’t know if you noticed, but iPhones are using USB-C now. That’s not out of the goodness of Apple’s heart.
100% agreed! I don’t want to take my eyes off the road while driving. Just let me feel for the right button
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, 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.
You know what would save many more lives than car physical controls? Mandating car mode on phones.
Good luck determining who is driving.
Noone gets to use their phone. Bring a deck of CDs or talk. Let’s go back to the good days.
I’m sure that will make people feel super safe while ubering.
The good days didn’t have uber ;)
But Uber exists now and it’s not going away. You need to account for it.
No I don’t…
That’s not as feasible as regulating how cars are made, because many phones can be rooted and flashed for full user control, unlike most cars.
Touch screen controls shouldn’t be in cars regardless of all the above.
Hard disagree. The facts are that phone use is a far more likely cause of death than having touch screen controls. To say “it can’t be regulated” is a cop out. It may not be able to be “perfectly” regulated, but the greater impact on preventing deaths (which is the goal here) is much much much greater by limiting phone use while driving than forcing cars to have physical buttons. I mean, what percentage of phone users are knowledgeable enough to root and flash a phone? 0.1%?
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.
