This is exactly what I did recently. No more "you need to take this to the dealer to fix for thousands with their machine™", and I can replace every single component on the thing my damn self. The less parts, the less that can fail.
I had a frank conversation with an SSE in infotainment about all this not so long ago; he generally agreed with this drift , but when I asked why? Said that what the customers(focus groups) want =\",
I highly recommend TCL TVs. The remotes are super simple (with just the buttons you need), the UI is straightforward and you never have to connect to the internet. I’m on my second panel, only because I wanted to downsize from 65” to a 55” when I moved, and connected to an AppleTV it is a dream to use.
Edit, to add: the OLEDs aren’t to market yet… but they’re on the way!
They may be labeled as smart, but they’re not nerfed at all if you don’t connect to the internet. And there are no notifications or interruptions trying to get you to connect. You can even just hook it up to a set of rabbit ears and set ‘antenna TV’ is your default mode and every time you turn the TV on it’ll go right to over-the-air programs. I’m a big fan, obviously, as I hate smart devices.
Because society wants smart TVs. You and a lot of people here don’t, but collectively, people like the idea of having Netflix/Hulu/etc right on their TVs. The cat’s out of the bag now. If you/me want a dumb TV, don’t look at consumer TVs in BestBuy, but expect to be spending over $1000.
The alternative is a separate box (or something like a Fire Stick). But those became less of a thing once TV manufacturers started implementing them inside the box. And with that, it’s one less thing to buy (which consumers like).
If you tell customers that two TVs are identical except one doesn’t need a dongle for Netflix and is cheaper, they’ll choose the smart one.
That may be true, but you only need a ~10% share of the market to want a privacy-first (i.e. dumb) TV, and that'll at least keep the others in line. Sort of like the role Mozilla ought to play in the browser market.
Collecting data, sometimes spamming the network with faulty code, some of them have cameras a lot of people don't even know about (since they blend in with the frame), and of course showing advertisements in your menu bars and sometimes when you start the TV.
Since when have we become complacent in subsidizing our product purchases with... more ads for other products? It's absolutely ludicrous.
Samsung has TVs with the "smartness" in a separate box outside the TV and the display is just a display with one connector. Something like this should be a standard.
The One Connect Box has all the ports including power, HDMI, ethernet, USB etc. and the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.
It is - at least you can then exchange the box with the ARM CPU when the new versions of Netfix and Youtube apps start requiring 16GB of memory and a teraflop CPU, without having to chuck a screen that works perfectly fine.
Of course you can also just by an external Nvidia Shield unit and connect it by HDMI, like you can now.
WebOS is by far the least painful, but by no means good. You can disable some of the crap, but still it occasionally injects ads and other crap on top of the broadcast.
Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid.
I learned to live with it, considering how bad the Android TV alternative is.
It has become really hard to get a proper dumb TV, if they aren't using the well known OSes, they bundle some custom firmware that also pretends to be smart anyway, most likely using some FOSS POSIX OS.
I usually describe my "smart" TV (and all of them, really) as a bargain basement smartphone with an incredibly nice screen. All of the same issues - bare minimum specs to operate the thing in a typical fashion, lack of software patches and bundled "apps" that stop getting updates after a couple of years, questionable privacy policies, etc.
There was a previous HN thread where someone said they were attempting to make a dumb TV (a commercial endeavor) and others here said they were interested in working on that. I wonder where that effort is. Feels like there is a ready market for this product. I can't turn on my Vizio without it taking 10 minutes to check for updates, changing inputs take a minute. The Samsung keeps trying to update YouTube and some other apps which I've deleted hundreds of times before, there's probably 30MB of internal memory left. Nothing turns on instantly. More and more I feel like nothing I buy is ever the thing I really want, it's always a devil's bargain with the least-bad thing I can live with. Consumer-focused software, is that even a thing we make anymore.
I'm searching for it myself. There's been plenty of venting about "smart" TVs on HN in the past year. The fellow who wanted to start the project said he had a background in electronics, I should have stickied that thread.
I've considered getting a monitor-style dumb display for my next TV, but the issue is that none of them have an inbuilt TV tuner. I get pretty fantastic reception at my current place in Queens and I'd hate to give up all my OTA channels and switch to something like Sling or YouTube TV, which again just brings back around all of the same pitfalls of a smart TV.
edit: just saw that the one you linked does have a tuner and remote! Brilliant! Might actually end up buying the 32 inch one, it's very reasonably priced.
I think a lot of the smart car features have to do with legislation.
All new cars require a back up camera due to legislation. But a backup camera with a huge 8" screen is only useful for backing up. So the manufacturers try to use that screen real estate for infotainment when the car is moving forward.
This is a great point. It's only logical. After all, a customer who doesn't want to use the infotainment system can ignore it, but the customers who want one will reject your automobile offering out of hand if you don't include one.
Mechanical things break and require lot of design, testing and validation. A screen solves that problem more efficiently and eliminates 100’s of other parts and wires that go to other buttons.
Counterpoint: it locks all functionality behind a single point of failure, rendering all cabin controls useless simultaneously in the event of a failure of the screen or the upstream chain to the computer driving it (to say nothing of the distraction caused by a system you can't operate by feel with your eyes still on the road)
The screen in my Ford CMAX goes out on a regular basis. It appears to be trying to update its software, and hanging in the process. Eventually it comes back, but it could be weeks later. In the meantime, I have no backup camera, navigation, or radio.
Fortunately the HVAC is controlled via physical buttons.
Says the bean counter overseeing a software project or industrial offering who has never grasped why those pesky customers assume they factor into a product offering anyway.
Small LCD screens embedded behind double glass in the rear-view mirror are common in the aftermarket backup camera sets. Any sufficiently-motivated car manufacturer could design something similar to meet regs without moving their controls to a central screen.
I had a F-250 with the backup camera screen in the rear view mirror. It was a factory option and it worked perfectly. Kept my eyes on the mirrors with additional feedback from the camera. It was most useful when hitching trailers.
My last two trucks have been lower trim packages to avoid the distracting screens and other "features" I don't need.
I imagine this organization and similar orgs. It would be interesting to see if the new legislation has helped decrease the number of backover accidents.
This appears to be an example of technology solving a design flaw rather than rent-seeking capitalism.
There are multiple long standing "Project 0" efforts in the US that aim to get pedestrian fatalities down to 0.
They have a range of goals including reducing Urban speed limits to 20-25mph and adding more safety features to cars.
Sad fact is modern giant SUVs have very poor rear visibility and children are just not visible if they are behind the vehicle. Backup cameras are the only reasonable option aside from "stop driving obscenely oversized vehicles."
(Another solution would be changing current laws so that 3 row station wagons were legal again, right now SUVs and Minivans fill a need that the 3 row station wagon used to, but it was legislated away long ago.)
8" backup camera screen aren't required. I've seen some as small as about 4". The standard requires only that a certain spacing/size of objects behind the car is at least a certain visual angle. Screens in rear view mirrors and just below the bottom edge of the windscreen abound.
I have found that my Toyota Corolla Hybrid has about the right mix of smart and dumb (in terms of dials and knobs), and again in disagreement to the article .. I love my digital speedo! It’s high up on the dash and closer to the road, compared to my old space-wasting meters that were more difficult to read.
And the concern about the GPS in our cars invading our privacy.. this would really only concern a certain type of paranoid person. Most people don’t care. I certainly prefer the fully integrated GPS, that dims the radio and such whenever I need to do something. Removing it certainly won’t make any car fly off the shelves! Bad analysis.
My country's market is dominated by second-hand Japanese imports, a lot of the integrated navigation / entertainment systems are entirely useless if you're not driving in Japan, or can't read Japanese.
When my 2005 Mazda MPV suffered a flat battery, the centre console screen which was the navigation / radio / clock / DVD player (yes, really) was bricked, and to this day displays a message in Japanese asking you to please insert the manufacturer's navigation data CD to continue using it.
Which no-one has access to, not even in Japan (my brother has been living there for about ten years, and is very helpful for obscure parts requests), so now my radio and clock don't work, because I don't have a CD with data needed for a 16 year old navigation system that, when working, was thoroughly convinced I was driving long distances on the bottom of Tokyo Bay and was desperate for me to turn right and get back on dry land.
My Dad's old Subaru Legacy used its display to show Japan rotating around as we turned corners, us always in the sea.
I'm onto my second 2005 Mazda MPV (they're great cars). This time I've replaced the head unit with one of those nasty cheap Android things. Basically a confused tablet with some extra hardware, running any mapping or other app you want.
There's a good Geekzone thread on head unit installation. Especially useful if you want to keep the factory reverse camera operating. Note the camera needs 6V. Voltage conversion boards are ultra cheap on aliexpress or if you're in Wellington you could have one from my stash :)
I don't have a factory camera, but would be worth doing a third party one, the visibility while reversing is rather poor as soon as you get teenagers sitting in the back.
Most people have no idea that their car with telematics features (ie Onstar or similar) is almost constantly reporting their location and a slew of parameters back to the manufacturer.
This is true regardless of whether you have a telematics subscription. The subscription just enables the stuff you can actually use.
Manufacturers are monetizing that information, selling it to anyone who wants to buy it. I know someone that worked for a company using said data to try and enhance weather reporting (the data reported back includes outside air temperature, headlights, windshield wiper status, etc.) They were receiving data from multiple manufacturers.
Power seats are not a pointless luxury. I’m pretty sure they are continuously adjustable which is much better than trying to pull on some lever and get the seat to pop into approximately the right place. To say nothing of mulitple drivers with memorized positions etc.
I don't drive planes nor busses. I'm a passenger: The back seat(s) of passenger cars are often fixed too. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the bus driver's seat is powered.
I do drive cars, though, and sometimes other people's cars. I'd much rather be able to adjust while driving so that I can have better control over the car than have to fumble with levers, which might propel me back far enough that I cannot brake. Heck, I might have been having to adjust because I didn't realize how far i needed to press the brake in the first place.
Exactly, plus movement in more directions (up & down, didn't see a single car with manual adjustment that allowed this), very useful for us blessed with non-standard body dimensions (ie I am quite tall). It changes default-settings car where I touch roof with my head into one where there is more than 5cm/2" clearance.
Adjustable tightness of part of the seat above your hips which keeps you better in tight/fast curves. Heating for cold starts. Massage for luxury. My BMW has it all apart from massage and its makes longer drives much more pleasant.
I used to have a Neon many years ago that had the up-and-down adjustments for the seats - and it was all manual. You just turned a knob on the side at the base of the lever that allowed you to recline.
EDIT: It was still a tight fit for tall folks, though. In that particular car, the adjustment mostly helped short folks see better.
Try your favorite image search engine and query "manual seat height adjustment" and you'll find dozens of brands that have this. Most use a lever that you pump up or down to adjust the height. Some use a dial.
I recently accidentally moved my seat waaaay up without realizing it when I was cleaning my car. I spent a week worrying about my weight because suddenly the seat belt seemed to have a lot less slack, and my stomach seemed closer to the wheel. Went to weigh myself an no increase.
when I figured out what I had done I laughed at myself for a solid 10 minutes
> Power seats are not a pointless luxury. I’m pretty sure they are continuously adjustable which is much better than trying to pull on some lever and get the seat to pop into approximately the right place. To say nothing of mulitple drivers with memorized positions etc.
YMMV, but I have no problem using mechanical adjustments. Power is no advantage for me.
Except when you go to slide your seat back as you're braking to a stop, and you find yourself skidding to a sudden and complete stop with the steering wheel in your chest.
Mechanical adjustment is fine for up-down, tilt (if it uses a dial), and lumbar, but for forward-back I prefer electric. Also because manual forward-back adjustments are very coarse.
I would kill for Ye Olde Manually Wound windows. Electric windows struggle in temperature extremes, and seem to break down far more often than my old hand-cranked windows ever did.
Also, I had more precise control with the hand-crank.
I've had cars with electric and manual windows. I'm 27 (so you don't think I have been biased by a lifetime of manual) and I prefer manual crank in all but a single use case: the situation where I want to wind up or down the passenger side window.
the feature to have the window open itself fully after a long-pull of the button feels safer to me in certain situations - means I don't have to spend a few seconds with my dominant hand off the wheel
(and also more convenient in other situations where I need to quickly open the window and actively drive at the same time, e.g. toll booths, drive thru's)
I wait until I'm stopped to wind up or down the passenger side window, having an electric equivalent would save me.. actually 0 time. You have to stop at a toll booth to pay the toll, you have to stop at a drive thru to pay and collect your order. It's purely a convenience mechanism to save perhaps 3 seconds of time in the event it's really super hyper critical it's rolled down before stopping (for whatever arbitrary reason).
The saddenning part that the majority of the drivers are very proud and enjoy their electronic windows. I guess potentially manual windows could be an option in the new cars, but I'm afraid the most of the new car buyers prefer as much of gimmicks in their cars, about which they could boast right after their purchase. The adults are really just children with the thicker wallets.
Why is it sad that people enjoy a thing? They enjoy it because it works and is less of a pain in the vast majority of cases. That is not sad, that is a good thing.
It's sad because there are people who also hate it while they don't really have an option to use a product that fits them. Unless of course one is advised to buy Lada or Mustang 69.
People generally like apps that switch on the lights in the living room. Also they like to keep still on slowly moving escalator (yes even down), because it looks that a biggest joy for a consumer is to be able to lose any tactile and physical agency, presumably to conserve their energy that they so badly lack.
For the record, I hate electric windows, because of insensitivity of the button, it's almost impossible to open the window by few millimeters only (just to allow air circulation to avoid condensation on windows). Or in winter if it freezes to the frame, I want to be able to open without a need of warming it up first. Or not to buy the entire lifting mechanism because a 2$ plastic piece brakes inside.
I understand the few uses of electrical window, but those can simply be fixed by avoiding farting inside a car, or politely asking the culprit to open their window themselves.
The saddenning part that the majority of the drivers are very proud and enjoy their electronic windows.
Much like I enjoy the electric starter on the car, such that I do not need to crank it by hand to start it. I'm "proud and enjoy" my electric starter and windows, and make absolutely no apology for doing so. You want to warm your house with a fire started by flint and tinder, have at it; I'll be over here with my gimmicky heat pump.
I have an entirely unreasonable fear of getting stuck in my car as it slowly sinks, unable to open the windows. It makes me want to get hand-cranked windows.
According to Mythbusters [1] it's almost impossible to wind down the windows in a sinking car after it reaches a certain depth. Much better is to have a window breaker tool. You can have one which doubles as a seat belt slicer too.
[1] https://mythresults.com/episode72
Time is running out for those. I have a car that is now over 20 years old (awesome car, I will miss it once it fails) and even that had electric windows in the most basic variant. Of course they will fail in winter regularly...
Bought it 7 years ago for less than a modern GPU currently costs. If you have a mechanic as a friend it can be extremely cheap to own a car. I wonder how the used market will look in the future, I guess prices will be a lot higher and many not security related features will be broken.
Buying a car > $15,000 is always idiotic if you do in any way care about losing $15,000 in my opinion. If you don't care about the money, a happy spending to you. Otherwise get a company car that is financed by other tax payers.
Knew a fellow whose car flipped into a shallow lake on a dark rainy night. The warning signs for a turn beside the lake had been removed. He was trapped in the car and drowned. Perhaps with hand-crank windows he'd have survived.
Hopefully the crank doesn't snap off. I've seen that, too. It is also possible for the door handle mechanism to fracture. Sorry for your trauma. Upside down in water is generally a very difficult scenario to survive, no matter what vehicle you're in.
The only thing I don't like about crank windows is it's hard to roll down the passenger window while driving.
I've actually got 2 cars with crank windows and am in the process of converting one of them to power windows just because it doesn't have AC and I want an easier way to manage the windows.
Me and my family members have had multiple window motors fail, due to leaves falling in between the window and the gasket, on completely different car manufacturers.
The author's list of demands describe my 2011 Renault Kangoo II, a model they only stopped producing in 2021, very well. Knobs, analog gauges, but also a factory-installed reverse parking sensor. It's down-market and inexpensive, It's a very simple car, and also very simple to work on, as a consequence. 15000-page service manual, as well. Utilitarian (ex-)fleet vehicles (mine was a Swiss Post delivery van) might still check these boxes for folks.
Reading this made me happy I recently purchased a SUV with big, boring, rubberized knobs that I find myself adjusting without having to look while driving.
One addition to the smart tech a dumb car could benefit from - radar cruise control. Increasingly offered on new models and reduces cognitive workload of highway driving.
That is a genuinely nice user interface. I can see what virtually everything is from a distance in the picture.
I especially like the larger fuel gauge; I drove a car once that had a handful of little LCD rectangles like a coarse bar graph. I struggled to tell if I had 50% or 75% left!
This is what Dacia proposes in their cars. They know it's better to have a basic system with a radio, bluetooth and a place to store your phone, that will stay up-to-date and usable for years to come (check early-2000s high-end cars GPS and entertainment systems for a laugh).
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto serve the same purpose these days, since they're effectively acting as an external monitor for your phone. The OEM doesn't have to keep anything up to date.
Just providing a "dumb" head unit with as close to zero features besides CarPlay and Android Auto would be sufficient to have a good user experience at this point, at least in the context of a "dumb car".
Last time I was on Android (~5 years ago), you could actually run Android Auto as an app on your phone, so a phone mount like that would be fine (even if not amazing), but Apple doesn't let you run CarPlay directly on your phone -- it only works with an external display designed for CarPlay, so a phone mount like this is notably worse for iPhone users. CarPlay's interface is much better designed for use in a vehicle than the regular iOS interface.
Phone mounts like that have the additional problem that smartphones have continued to grow and grow, and a lot of cars from 5 or 10 years ago that offer any kind of phone charging spot or phone mount can't fit most modern smartphones in the allocated spot... so phone mounts like that can become obsolete even without any electrical components whatsoever.
> Not to mention the privacy and security concerns.
Heh. That ship has sailed.
Wait until electronic license plates using eInk roll out and update automatically. First they'll just change if you haven't paid your registration, then later if your insurance lapses, or maybe it'll light up with yellow LEDs when there's a kidnapping. It'll be integrated into Fast Pass toll-payment systems, why not? And over the next decade, as the taxes from gasoline disappear, the plates will have integrated travel tracking so you automatically pay $0.02 per mile road usage taxes. It'll be the most fair way to pay for the roads.
Yep, this is all coming. First, they'll be add-on plates, but then they'll be integrated into all new cars. Personal transportation is going to look completely different by the end of the century, anyways. Worrying about the number of knobs on your dashboard is like worrying about the color of your horse's blinders or whether your cart's wheels were made out of oak or cedar.
Lada is known for its low reliability. Dacia seems to be in a more gray area, sometimes scoring well above average, sometimes below.
I know someone who had a Lada Niva, and he got stranded because a low quality pipe joint blew. True, the repair was extremely cheap, and it could probably be temporarily repaired with a hose and two zippers. Are you a mechanic that can locate and fix those kind of failures? Then Ladas are for you. You can't tell apart the windscreen fluid from the blinker fluid? Your Lada will spend more time in the repairshop than on the road.
I think they are around the "good-tech" level, similar to late 90's / early 2000 cars. Just enough to get you going economically and comfortably but without tech intruding your ride with some infotainment, updates or window slide button in some weird place or with touch control.
My opinion so far is that a lot of people buy Ladas (Niva to be exact) with expectation of it being an offroader. It is not. It is a SUV and when used like usually SUVs are - it isnt as unreliable as some people make it.
Lack of airbags, shitty structure to absorb impacts, absurdly underpowered engine and weird ergonomy makes the Lada Niva viable only for offroading: farmers and hunters driving on gravel roads.
If you expect to drive more than 50% of the time on asphalt but money is tight, do yourself a favour and buy at least a Dacia Duster.
That's quite interesting, as many of my friends in post-Soviet countries all rave about how you can run Ladas into the dirt and they'll keep running. Luck of the draw perhaps?
Dacias have gotten surprisingly good, yes. The initial models were... dubious, to say the least, but the recent offerings have had an amazing cost/quality ratio. Hell, their EV offerings are some of the best on the market.
One thing I was flabbergasted at recently was Tesla offering, and the government allowing, regular drivers to use a yoke steering wheel like F1 drivers. Not only is it harder for the average person to handle but their firmware hadn't accounted for the fact that if you steer fully left or right the yoke is upside down and if you try and indicate it ends up indicating on the wrong side.
What is wrong with a wheel and function stalks?
Gimmicks like this, and they are gimmicks, are dangerous and it's concerning no regulator seems to care enough to stop it.
You cannot buy a Tesla in Texas. Technically speaking, the transaction happens out of state and the car is shipped to you in Texas. Legally speaking Tesla has never sold a car in Texas. They have Tesla "galleries" where you can look at cars, take test drives, customize your order, and they'll help with the paperwork for you to buy it out of state.
I don't think Texas is alone in their dealer franchise laws.
For me I'd replace that with: scary. Full size A4 paper and bigger screens in cars you can stream movies on while driving (distraction leading to accidents); the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space); pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people). These aren't fascinating things.
I don't like the pedestrian killing murder-machine aspect of their vast In Vehicle Entertainment systems at all. The Vegas Loop tells such a strong tale though, to me, of control over infrastructure itself, in a vulgar & horrific way.
Just like Tesla's charging infrastructure! Can you imagine if you had to find a Ford or a Toyota gas station to fill up at? This world used to be able to get along, to find general welfare. Cooperation used to exist. Tesla keeps being more and more an example of anti-cooperative anti-civil market-capture horseshit. A car no one else can repair, with it's own charging infrastructure, it's own roads: this screams "THE ENEMY" to me. It's the most capitalist-lowlife Lawful Evil behaviors writ large here, on display: vulgar & primitive exercises in dominance, with no pretense that there's space for anyone else in the world, no sense in leaving any room for any one else on the planet.
Tesla's charging is different because they created their charging infrastructure before anyone else. The first supercharger was built in 2012. Despite Tesla open sourcing their patents[1], other EV manufacturers used different standards. Also Tesla is starting to let non-Teslas use their superchargers.[2] All Teslas can use other charging stations, though they'll charge slowly. Newer Teslas (since late 2019) have support for the high speed Combined Charging System standard and Tesla is rolling out CCS adapters.[3] Lastly, most EV charging happens at home using level 1 or level 2 systems, which are standard NEMA plugs that Tesla sells adapters for.
If Tesla's goal was to lock-in their customers and exclude other vehicles, they seem to be doing all the wrong things.
tesla was not even a notion when electric car charging was created. tesla did not create somethint feom nothing, other systems existed.
tesla making a patent pledgeh not early, in 2014- doesnt incentivize anyone to pick tesla's bespoke new charging technologies, if your cars wont reap the benefits of interoperability with their system. tesla didnt say their charging infrastructure would work with your cars, only that you could go make your own copies of either car or charger network.
your messaging is extremely strong & you raise some very good points. from my perspective though you are still concealing, hiding, denying more than hapf the facts. random irrelevant facts like teslas being able to consumer actual standards get thrown in, but of course tesla wants to be a parasite on othercs network externalities while providing no net benefit themselves, yet you describe this lopsided controlling behavior as if it's in their favor. you throw in non-network-effect charging as though it should have an impact on society growing positive network effects for itself: this also feels ultra-contrary to the point. even if true, it means i cant go to a friends and expect my non-tesla to get a charge.
everything here is shit. your "rebuttals" are examples of tesla insisting on their own game. you ignored the points about LV & the impossible-to-repair-out-of-network problems with tesla. i am not mived by your arguments, they feel distracting & misdirecting.
> Full size A4 paper and bigger screens in cars you can stream movies on while driving (distraction leading to accidents);
Teslas will only let you watch videos if you're in park. This has always been the case.
> the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space)
It cost $50m to construct, which is 1/5th the cost of similarly-specced people movers or trains. The second-cheapest bid was by Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group and would have cost $215m. The loop has met or exceeded all of the benchmarks set by the Las Vega Convention & Visitors Authority.[1] The program has been so successful that LVCVA purchased the Las Vegas Monorail system just so they could get rid of the monorail's noncompete clause and allow a larger Vegas Loop to be constructed.[2] Later, Clark county unanimously approved construction of the Vegas Loop, which is planned to have 51 stations and 29 miles of tunnel.[3]
> pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people)
No vehicle running the FSD beta has been involved in a death. You're talking about the autopilot features, which are a form of traffic aware cruise control. Many of the claimed fatalities turned out to be reckless drivers. For example: a fatal crash in Texas last April originally blamed autopilot and claimed that it was "100 percent certain" that no one was in the driver seat at the time of the crash.[4] The preliminary NHTSA investigation found that the driver was in the driver's seat, had not buckled his seat belt, and had pressed the accelerator to as high as 98.8%. (This was in a 778 horsepower Model S that could go from 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds.) NHTSA investigators could not engage autopilot on the road where the crash happened, since that road had no lane markings.[4] Also the owner of the vehicle had not purchased the the option to allow autopilot on surface streets.
There are many legitimate criticisms that one can level at Musk & his companies, but you haven't made them.
Front bumpers of most cars/truck are generally plastic and can at least absorb energy of an impact with a pedestrian (albeit the hood is often near neck high and can snap their neck)
Tesla paraded their new truck with 'stainless steel body panels all around'. I don't know about you, but I've banged my shin into a steel tow hitch. I don't want anything remotely close to that on the road.
That doesn't make sense to me. I watched some pedestrian crash test videos, there is no energy absorption by the bumper. It's bad news to be hit by any car. (I'm no Tesla fanboy)
Most pedestrian crash tests are at low enough speed that there isn't visible energy absorption, plus most dummies aren't equivalent to most human scales. They tend to be modeled after a 6' adult male at around 200lbs.
The bigger issue with larger vehicles is their height around people current full size or even mid-size SUVs and trucks have gotten larger than their former variants. You're much more likely as a pedestrian to get run over than to be hit by a car and land on the hood or the windshield (which is by far the better position to be in during an accident). The crash bar behind the bumper on all cars have a thick layer of foam that contributes to the 'softness' of a bumper.
The steering wheel in an F1 car only goes about 220 degrees in either direction (drivers have to keep their hands on the wheel and their arms aren't made of rubber). The steering in a regular car goes about 540 degrees in either direction (one and a half times around). When parallel parking you often have to turn the wheel three whole revolutions.
Your second video horrified me. What the hell are they thinking with the touch-sensitive inputs on the steering wheel? Nevermind the weird shape and the issues with orientation when signaling during a steering maneuver. Those aren't actual buttons, they're no better than a touch screen.
When I drive, my hands aren't always in the exact same position on the wheel. Muscle-memory won't reliably have my thumb landing on the correct signal direction. If I have to honk the horn, I need to be able to do that instantly, without thinking. Some cutesy icon located away from the edge of the steering wheel will guarantee that the horn sounds simultaneously with the "crunch" of another car backing into me.
My proposed rule-of-thumb: If a video game company wouldn't design their controllers this way, you shouldn't do it either for the most common—or most urgent—functions. Turn signals, wipers, horn, and hazard lights should all be real buttons that are in a consistent location. Horn should be in the hub of the steering wheel.
Glad i'm not the only one who thinks this is insane. I could maybe see a yolk, but dear god get me AWAY from touch screen style buttons in any serious process, let alone ones that can wind up in different orientations.
And why in the hell does a yolk need to have the horn on a button rather than the center of the yolk as anyone would expect? Maybe there's some technical reason i'm unaware of, but this seems actively dangerous for no gain. I can think of several better ways to do this that aren't actively confusing and hostile to the driver.
> And why in the hell does a yolk need to have the horn on a button rather than the center of the yolk as anyone would expect? Maybe there's some technical reason i'm unaware of
No you're right, it's change for the sake of change. It is now a status symbol to show off how well you drive a vehicle whose management is more challenging than other cars.
The horn thing doesn't seem like that big a deal actually. I've never used the horn in a potential accident situation because there's always something better I could be focusing on to avoid the accident. As pilot say: aviate, navigate, then communicate. [0] Some studies seems to support that [1].
The only accidents I can imagine the horn preventing are ones where you are stationary, which almost always means the other car is moving slowly - like somebody backing into you in a parking lot. Overall pretty low consequence incidents.
So to the extent that horn use is nearly all elective rather than emergency, is antisocial and has few benefits: make it a small, hard-to-reach button.
(With important exceptions like heavy vehicles that can't maneuver well and non-Western driving cultures that rely on routine horn use to communicate intentions.)
They don't give you a massive "hey WTF, stop doing that!" button for you to not use it in blind religious adherence to a shallow rule of thumb or misguided attempt at politeness.
People with your attitude toward horn use likely cause substantial harm to society through fender benders, delays, frustration, etc, etc.
I think I can maybe count on one hand the number of times I've had to move out of a lane lest someone merge into me. The times that situation has been prevented through horn use are innumerable. And that's just one example.
Touch-based buttons feels like a huge step backwards. Have we learned nothing from having to use touch phones for the last 12 years, either that or everyone is much better than me at not missing touch inputs
And everyone wants to be part of that cool touch movement too, by using capacitive touch buttons. So modern! And cheaper too, but that doesn't stop you from marketing it as premium. Try buying a stove with induction and normal knobs. Nope, it's touch. Cheap touch buttons, that don't work if your hands are wet, or greasy. Which totally never happens when you're cooking. So you're handling three pots, one starts boiling over. With knobs it would take me half a second to turn it off. With my awesome induction stove I'm stuck on mashing the button to select the proper field with my greasy hand which doesn't work, but at least when finally half the pot's content flows onto the touch controls the stove turns off entirely and starts beeping like crazy. But at least it's easier to clean than haptic controls.
I'd like to introduce you to my grandmother's flat surface stove from the 70s with 0 touch controls. It's easy, just decouple the controls from the heating element.
3/4 of the reason they're touch is being 'cool' and none of the designers ever cooking a meal in their life.
Messes go further than just the heating element. Things splatter, run over. Even with controls on the face of the range (not always practical) you may need to clean them from messes.
Its definitely easy to clean my entire range being a flat piece of glass, and personally I've never had any problems with sensitivity on the buttons. Plus, that whole cook top is then still useful as a counter top as even the glass is only slightly raised over the rest of the counter surface. In my experience the glass top range I have has been wonderful, and I was originally planning on tearing it out and putting in a gas unit. I've since second guessed those plans and will probably keep the range for a while longer, no knobs has actually been pretty nice.
I'd rather have an actual button. The haptic touch doesn't always trigger e.g. if your finger is sweaty or wet. The button on the other hand always works. I've broken just about everything on old iphones but never that home button. When it comes to driving a car the buttons should always work, not just under ideal situations.
I am stunned. I am never buying a car that decides for me if I should be going forwards or in reverse. How did this anti-feature go through so many supposedly smart people? Does PHB work there also?
That second video is horrifying. Horn and signal inputs as touch buttons on a steering wheel and no clear gear selection? What absolute madness by Tesla.
I think these gimmicks and the new touchscreen UI serve a purpose for Tesla. Their goal is to make the car so divorced from human input that (1) it becomes increasingly reasonable to claim that an unfinished self-driving system is no more dangerous than a human in the loop, and (2) their fan base is conditioned to accept the eventuality of having no meaningful input (or feedback) at all. As for part two, I noticed it a couple years ago with a relative who bought a Tesla and was still just awed by its features. But all the ones he was awed by were the ones that took power away from the driver. I wondered then, why would anyone want to own this car once it really does all the driving for you? No one will actually own a Tesla at that point, they'll just call one on an app. Except for maybe a few silly people who want to feel like they're telling it what to do with a joystick.
Just like everything done by Tesla: they have absolutely no experience in making cars, and it shows really badly. Terrible construction quality that I don't even experience on a 10k € Dacia, touch screens everywhere (it's already bad enough when it's just the radio or Android Auto, but a bunch of critical features are on the touch screen), the yoke having no physical feedback and clearly no thought other than "wow futuristic" behind it.
Smoke and mirrors is Tesla's way of operating. Look at the coverage they got out of the yoke. Out of FSD. It doesn't matter that they are terrible: there'll be 100 articles about it releasing and 2 about it being a bad idea.
Honestly a lot of cars are ugly. Look at what they've been doing to BMWs lately. Safety features combined with an unwillingness to look very different from the rest of the pack anymore have created these designs by committee that are not truly terrible where they won't sell but also not very good where people will look to them as a piece of art like an old aircooled porsche.
Totally agree. I have a decent German-made car and it BLOWS Tesla out of the water in build quality. I remember getting into the model S in a showroom and just feeling like I was in a budget auto. For 100k it doesn't compare at all to a 50k Audi, it's just plasticy and flimsy. It felt like the McMansion of cars, all show.
I have an early 200s Prius. Its seen better days but the battery works and I can't argue with the fuel savings. it costs me about $30 to fill up and that lasts me for about a month.
I own two Toyotas myself ;) An 8 year old Corolla that I only occasionally drive, but it never fails to take me from point A to B; another is a new and exciting Highlander hybrid which I only need to fill once every 500 miles.
Pretty much everyone who clogged up the left lane in the '00s in their Prius is still doing the same thing today but in a Tacoma or 4Runner. The specific model of blind adoration may have changed but the fanboys still line the same pockets. If that is any indication Tesla will do just fine.
You've got that backwards. Prius weren't cool all the way until 2014, around the time environmental status symbol transferred to EV's and the used Prius started becoming very economical. Certain half of the political spectrum wouldn't be caught dead in them before hand and every other Hollywood movie had a cringy joke lambasting or praising them. Now they're just seen as a reliable financially savvy vehicles, not very "cool", but more popular now that regular people would have no problem driving them.
I am referring to the early 2000s when half the Hollywood celebs were driving Prius [1]. Prius carried the hype about hybrid cars back then the same way Tesla is doing now for EVs.
They were also pretty lambasted in popular culture around that time. The Other Guys (2010) is a good example of how the car was treated in the cultural zeitgeist at the time (though part of the joke that the movie makes is demonstrating how economical and great the car is despite its ‘uncool’ vibes).
2000s priuses were very cool amongst the aging boomer-hippy population. When they first came out it was a big deal to be in the school pickup line with your prius. You probably also shopped at organic grocery stores like whole foods (before the AMZN purchase), and just transitioned from pilates to yoga. Southpark even made an episode about the phenomenon.
When something is in the entire public sphere, it feels off to call it "cool" when it only appeals to a certain small subgroup. At that time, the much larger general population had the opposite take on them. It's like calling Dungeons N' Dragons "cool" because nerds and geeks liked it a lot.
You rarely need to reverse F1 cars and if you do you probably have bigger problems. A round wheel does make so much more sense and is far more comfortable to handle.
I've not seen any evidence that the yoke steering wheel is dangerous. The downside that you're describing can only happen at zero or near to zero speed. BMW doesn't even install turn signals at all so I think the occasional errant turn signal is fine. The reason the NHTSA hasn't "forbid" the yoke is because... it isn't unsafe, it's just stupid.
It would be significantly less stupid if it had physical buttons on the steering wheel.
After years of driving a several Mercedes E-Class cars, I now drive a 2004 Jeep Cherokee (not the 'Grand Cherokee'... In the US my Jeep is called the Liberty).
It's very basic compared to my Mercs, but oddly I enjoy driving it more - and I'm not one of those 'love cars, love to drive' people.
I relate to the point in the article about fancy screens; In my Jeep I fitted a very cheap (£30) Chinese radio head unit. It has almost no display, or useful functions, but it does have Bluetooth, so my phone does all the heavy lifting - internet radio, music, GPS etc. I can upgrade my phone at any point, and my jeeps infotainment system gets a bump-up at the same time.
It cost me over 300€ (new starter, new battery) to finally figure out myself that the cheap Chinese radio was draining my battery and preventing my car to start. Sometimes I had to turn the key 30 times (with a full battery) to start the car.
I'm sympathetic to the pleas here. But I'm a luddite. A real luddite, not, as this article is, a simple petty reactionary: the problem is not technology, it's who owns it[1], it's how we are puppet-ed along via technology (Ursala Franklin would call this example of the car a prescriptivist instead of a holistic technology[2]). Technology is good when it empowers folks broadly, when it is soft. But the car systems of today are all prebaked in a hard, demeaning way- unsoft in extreme- and their systems don't entirely align with the people's interest, & even more rarely align with the power-users interest. Ideally, to me, the car has some built-ins but is a tabula rasa, a blank slate: it presents a robust & thorough API for the car systems, including the main interfaces.
Basically I just want a Chrysler with the infamous "Jeep Cherokee" hack[3]. Those cars were a modern miracle of amazingly well designed, consistent API engineering. Users gaining access to those systems, remotely, was shunned as a horrible vile thing, but it was an act of beauty & amazingness, a revelation of wonderfully good engineering. The coverage focused on the malicious acts, & that FUD far out-shined the amazing limitless potential of letting the world try to enrich themselves, make better. Tragic miscarriage against potential: the press murdered any hope of possibility in it's cradle. These cars were/are amazing. QNX OS running DBus protocols to expose all the car's systems: an easy to interface with, exploratory inter-system API for the whole car. We could have built anything here, it feels like. Instead, we damned & cursed the makers for having left some portal open to this computer: we parroted out terror.
I guess my gravy-on-top nee-plus-ultra ask atop having access to a car via DBus- the FreeDesktop standard IPC system- would be for the buttons to be more software defined, independent of their subsystems, which I think still wasn't entirely the case. I'd love to have a phone or console app running which can read from the big giant volume knob, for example, as I adjust some windows or the sunroof or the temperature. Infinite flexibility, please. I've said this before[4].
It's disappeared quickly, but Webinos was a very very interesting decade old attempt to define a user-empowering IoT architecture, & had significant interest from BMW/Land Rover. It's basically bitrotted off the internet, last seen early 2021[5], but was a really interesting user-centric system, where devices were linked not to corporate cloud services but to systems of users choice, exposing their capabilities & offerings generally. We need more holistic potentials in the world. We need to stop consigning away possibility, choosing retro-minimalism because we can't imagine any other possibilities than the vice, than the authoritarian, restrained systems of control most technology imposes upon us. We need personal computing to be possible again, broadly in the world, across devices, we need choice, we need agency, we need to stop being damned by computers & start being served by them: this is only possible if we let the users back in, re-open the frontiers.
In the end, I think the Chromecast model is basically right. The car should have a pre-baked system, but present some HTML capable interfaces, which themselves expose a couple additional above-and-beyond Web IoT apis to adjust windows, sunroofs, hvac. There should be decoupling (which I think Webinos was an early & technically successful contendor for).
No web connectivity. Either you're plugged in through CAN, or F-OFF. There is no logical reason for an internet exposed portal to physical car systems. Period.
We have a 2008 Lexus, with the standard big screen on the dash; its UI is objectively terrible - it is like the thing has gone through zero user testing on any of its functions. The sat nav interface is probably the worst - we usually spend 5 mins out of sheer bloody-mindedness trying to program a destination in before giving up and plugging in a smartphone instead.
> Not to mention the privacy and security concerns. I was dubious the first time I saw a GPS in a car, my mom’s old RX300, about 20 years ago. “Yeah… that’s how they get you,” I thought
Well, that reasoning was flawed 20 years ago - GPS means YOU know where you are, not the other way around. There has to be other communication channel for that data to "escape". If your car is data-enabled with SIM card, only then it is a concern.
For vehicles with an inbuilt cellular connection like OnStar or Starlink or any of the myriad of other systems like them, the vehicle will regularly phone home your GPS fix from time to time and there is no way to turn it off. I think this is what the author was trying to get at but phrased it poorly due to it being sort of a technicality.
Escape channel is called internet, not GPS. Obviously if your car has Internet and GPS, it can do it.
But if you had only starlink dish on your car, without GPS, I wouldn't be surprised if it was technically possible to track location to some degree of accuracy.
There are some devices that are charged with aux cables, although it is rare. I think that is a bad solution because they almost always cause a short circuit when connecting/disconnecting. Usually that is neglected for audio signals because the power is quite low and devices have respective protections, but if you would use it for charging...
Our Volvo doesn't let you adjust the volume when you're in reverse. That means if you're backing out of the garage and the music is blaring -- you can't turn it off!
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow.
My Toyota's head unit bulldozes to reverse mode and if I was in reverse for 10 seconds, the song resumes 10 seconds as if its been playing in the background.
My Toyotas head unit has similar behavior issues. It will connect to bluetooth and start playing the song as soon as you turn on the car, only no music will come out of the speakers until you pause the song, then press play. Why do I have to manually "wake up" the speakers instead of the head unit? Probably because this software took one engineer no more than a week to write before it was shipped out full of these annoyances that would have been avoided had you, you know, tested out connecting a blutooth device to the head unit before production even just once.
I'm a UX designer and I've taken delivery of an XC40 Recharge two months ago, and I've never felt dumber in my life.
Don't get me wrong, the car is absolutely wonderful, but the UX is so badly designed it makes me question myself.
For starters, I have absolutely no clue how to use the lights, fans and wipers. Just last Saturday, a design oversight (and idiocy from my part) caused me to reverse into another car parked behind me, I reversed to leave the parking spot, then instead of switching to D, I forgot it on R all while the rearview camera is showing red lines. For a car equipped with driving assists (collision avoidance and line assists), it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping the rearview camera, it only beeps for 5 seconds when it sees an obstacle then stops, same for the open door and seatbelts.
There is also the odometer, there are 3 different odometers in the car and all of them are showing different values, one with a TM next to it, another one with this symbol Ø and a third one in the "Driver performance" tab. So which one is the real distance and what's the difference? Only the norse gods know.
Also, the charge and fuel left gauges adapt to your driving by going up or down instead of showing you the real amount of fuel/charge left. And it already nearly left me stranded on the highway with 5km left of fuel.
This car is amazing but there are a lot of design oversights when it comes to UX.
I think what they are implying is that car with so many safety features should be able to handle this situation. Volvo has lot of "collision avoidance" safety features, so one would expect that they could handle this as well.
This is common feature in other cars - I rented mazda few years back and it did automatically stop when I almost reversed into another car.
At that point, the driver really is to blame though. Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably; not to save himanity from themselves despite the ongoing insistance by governments that somehow the industrial sector should take on the onus for technically enforcing whatever measures that some bureaucrat sets their sights on today.
This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying.
Yes, I know I'm responsible. I do not want/need car/manufacturer to be responsible, I just want technology to help where it could.
> Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably
This maybe is your opinion, but that's not how it works. There is plenty of manufacturer's who manufacture things which are not affordable and plenty of people buy it. Pretty much any industry has luxury segment which also tends to be most profitable
> This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying
Humans are imperfect. Stress, distractions, tiredness etc could make anyone to make mistake, even yourself. Why would adding safety features be horrifying?
People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.
Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.
The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.
This Volvo like I said, is absolutely wonderful on the road, and the safety features it's got even in the base model are a godsend and make the car feel like it has a mind of its own, in a good way. It saved my butt from so many accidents that I never even noticed, it sees danger before it even happens, it's amazing.
So my point from the beginning was, if a car is capable of detecting/anticipating and dealing with danger at 100Kmh, it sure as hell should be able to prevent dumbass me from reversing into another car by mistake.
Its' not some impossible ask here. My 16k yaris beeps then brakes the car when going forwards into an obstacle. Why cant a 56k volvo do the same in reverse? It definitely has this technology, I think its mandated now, but seems to me OP is saying volvo didn't bother putting it on the reverse side of the car. Which is a little bewildering that a car manufacturer might consider a reverse collision impossible, and makes you wonder what other common sense safety things they've screwed up as well, or opted to knowingly not include to improve their bottom line.
That's actually what I meant. It's unfortunate because the car already has everything it needs to handle this situation. I admit it was an idiotic thing from my part to do, but still, you gotta expect better from a 56K car whose main selling point is safety.
It's really a hardware/ergonomics problem. The gear selector in these vehicles goes back to it's original position after you select a gear. One major problem with these new shifters is that it's very easy to select the wrong gear. Likely what happened is the driver was trying to go into reverse but pressed a little to hard on the gear shifter and caused it to go into drive instead.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.
Driven many cars with these “click” type shifters, including recent Volvos, thought I would hate it before trying but after one drive it’s actually very convenient and never saw it as a hazard.
You can’t press too hard to accidentally go the wrong direction. Up is R and down is D. Distinguishing up from down is very easy. Changing direction can only be done at standstill. Pressing too many times does nothing, except toggle D and B, that have same behavior from intent at parking point of view.
What might happen though is you thought you were in N but are actually in gear, as you accidentally clicked twice instead of once. But if you want to go N you should really just press P instead.
"I’m having a hard time understanding how “I forgot to change gears and then hit the gas” can be classed a UX problem. Sounds like PEBKAC."
On the one hand, it is easy to point to this as user error and you're not wrong.
But older cars have a significant tactile difference in operating different systems in the car. Shifting a gear is very, very different physically than pushing the button for your hazards. Your body moves in very different and operates these controls very differently.
This distinction was made clear to me years ago when we bought a 2013 Mercedes wagon - the physical action to: shift to park, turn the car on, turn the radio on were all nearly identical - just a button press. In fact, the buttons themselves were almost identical.
So, although I never actually did this, there were a number of times when I got relatively overloaded, cognitively, and I pressed the power off on the radio in an attempt to shift to park. Or I pressed the park button a second time in an attempt to turn the car off.
I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Absolutely.
For example, in a manual VW/Audi, you have to push the stick down, then way over into R.
It's one of the nicest feeling gestures, makes your intent extremely clear, and is impossible to do by accident.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Airplane cockpits are designed like this, for obvious reasons.
If there were zero UX feedback as to which gear the car is in, it seems entirely possible for the problem to be the software and not pebkac. In a thread discussing that the manufacturer's UX is horrible, blaming the user seems out of place. Of course the user bares some level of responsibility but the UX of a vehicle clearly affects drivability of a car. Eg BMW's widely derided iDrive UI.
The odometer problem is really strange. I have done some work with Volvo and they used to take a lot of care over preserving odometer readings across any repair work done on the car electronics.
> Ø or ⌀ is sometimes also used as a symbol for average value, particularly in German-speaking countries. ("Average" in German is Durchschnitt, directly translated as cut-through.)
My 2002 VW has the same and it means average over multiple trips. TM probably means this trip? You may have distance of the current trip and average consumption of the current trip (eg 40km, 6.3l/100km), then the last few trips with a combined average for those (eg 1500km, 5.4l/100km).
Re the odometers, in my 2018 Volvo and my Wife's 2019 XC40. They are all accurate, but for different purposes.
1. The standard "life of the car" odometer is permanently on the left gauge, top reading
2. There is one (two?) manually resettable trip odometers
3. There is an auto-resetting trip odometer - it resets when the car has been off for four hours.
You can configure which of the second two are displayed by going to in-dash "app" menu and selecting what you want in the "Trip" tab. On my car, this configures the lower displays on the left and right gauges.
Update Re: your high beams - It sounds like you have them on auto. There's a spring loaded ring on the left-hand stalk that engages auto vs. manual high beam. Twist it and the light-with-an-A sign on your dash should change to a normal light symbol. You can then use the twist knob with detents to select parking light vs. low beam and whether you want auto-on or manual on. High beams are engaged by pushing the lever (or you can pull to flash).
It's quite telling the fact I needed a 3 paragraph reply from a user on HN to explain to me how to use the odometers and lights in my car.
I had a Tucson before this Volvo and it was just so intuitive and easy to use. It's something that needs to be standardized, they are tools that no car would be street legal without and thus, should have identical interactions no matter the manufacturer.
OTOH, maybe the other problem is that you're buying cars too frequently to be willing to study the manual.
There are plenty of times when ergonomics and feature discoverability are at odds, and I heavily prioritize ergonomics when I'm driving a large, lethal object at super-human speeds.
> it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping
My backup camera frequently loses its shit because it gets obstructed by rain or snow, or sometimes paint on the ground fakes it out. If the only sensor is a camera, that must not override the driver. Beeping is fine. I might feel differently about lidar.
On that topic, though... I really wish backup cameras had some sort of wiper.
I honestly don't think my volvo bases its rear detection on the camera itself, pretty sure it's the sensors because on the camera it tells you in segments exactly how far each obstacle is and doing that using video + ML would be overkill for a simple feature that could use lidar.
I find this hilarious, especially since they brag about having "Google inside", which already sounded more like a confirmation to me of a dystopian timeline rather than a feature.
Weird! My older (2007) Volvo doesn't let me change the station in reverse, but I can adjust the volume via a knob, or turn off the radio by pushing the knob/button.
Hopefully the system on your Volvo can be updated to fix what are presumably bugs in the system!
Same - I've a 2021 XC60. I can turn the volume knob, press the pause button, or use the volume controls on the steering wheel while in reverse. Just not use the touchscreen controls unless I press the "home" button which closes out the rear camera.
I get why, but my Volvo (2017) WILL NOT let me lock the keys in the car. Which is annoying if I'm trying to safely warm it up on a -15 Minnesota day and have the spare keys in the house. There's lots of forums detailing tricks involving rolling the windows down or locking the car from the back seat. I love all the tech automation and safety features, but at times I find myself befuddled by the designers choices.
I’m also unable to lock my 2019 Toyota if it is running and I’m not in the car. It’s implemented this way so they can sell you remote start. Pity about all the car thefts that happen as a result of auto manufacturer greed.
My 2004 Ford Escape won't let me lock or unlock the car with the key fob if the engine is running. So I can't warm it up in the morning without either risking it being driven away or having an extra door key for just that purpose. Ugh.
I had a rental V90 last year, and it was easily the dumbest smart car I've ever had the displeasure of driving. Comically bad in some cases. Death by a thousand cuts. Little things like you say, or the fact that it would blare about the front parking sensor detecting the wall when I put the car in reverse, etc. I ended up spending a few minutes going through all the menus turning stuff off.
I had a rental Camaro a couple years ago that would pop up a notification if you were driving a bit spirited that said "Sport Shifting Mode Engaged" or something to that effect. Which was prominently displayed on top of the speedometer.
Haha, the 'smart' cat is well and truly out of the bag now, and the sad thing is we kind of did it to ourselves by demanding, or at least, buying, these features.
'Smart' means manufacturers can put ads on everything, sell your usage data, and of course all the smarts become obsolete or break easily after just a couple of years, often turning otherwise perfectly good hardware into a doorstop.
As part of 'right to repair' we should also demand 'right to own UI'; appliances have some standard (electronic/data) interfaces, and you can add off-the-shelf, or even custom UI of your choice.
I have an old Renault Kangoo. It's a box on wheels. Big enough to fit a bicycle or a bed, small enough to drive like a car. I'm going on a road trip today.
This car is a breeze to work on. It's a bog standard car. If something breaks, it can be fixed. The only things that can break are the things that make the car run. You don't need a specially trained technician. You don't need to remove a layer of plastic to get to the engine. There is no touch screen.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadIf your parlance uses it for the transmission, your parlance is wrong. It is like calling square a circle.
Edit, to add: the OLEDs aren’t to market yet… but they’re on the way!
Edit: grammar.
If you tell customers that two TVs are identical except one doesn’t need a dongle for Netflix and is cheaper, they’ll choose the smart one.
Since when have we become complacent in subsidizing our product purchases with... more ads for other products? It's absolutely ludicrous.
The One Connect Box has all the ports including power, HDMI, ethernet, USB etc. and the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.
I'm not sure that's what the parent commenter was asking for.
That is not a step forward.
Of course you can also just by an external Nvidia Shield unit and connect it by HDMI, like you can now.
Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid.
It has become really hard to get a proper dumb TV, if they aren't using the well known OSes, they bundle some custom firmware that also pretends to be smart anyway, most likely using some FOSS POSIX OS.
The reality is, simple is only available in the luxury segment.
I am prolly going with a 'OK' brand one. Even thought I hated their ugly OS it is the only I've found so far that somewhat acts as a 'classic' TV.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1629170-REG/nec_e438_...
edit: just saw that the one you linked does have a tuner and remote! Brilliant! Might actually end up buying the 32 inch one, it's very reasonably priced.
All new cars require a back up camera due to legislation. But a backup camera with a huge 8" screen is only useful for backing up. So the manufacturers try to use that screen real estate for infotainment when the car is moving forward.
Fortunately the HVAC is controlled via physical buttons.
My last two trucks have been lower trim packages to avoid the distracting screens and other "features" I don't need.
This appears to be an example of technology solving a design flaw rather than rent-seeking capitalism.
http://www.kidsandcars.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Backov...
They have a range of goals including reducing Urban speed limits to 20-25mph and adding more safety features to cars.
Sad fact is modern giant SUVs have very poor rear visibility and children are just not visible if they are behind the vehicle. Backup cameras are the only reasonable option aside from "stop driving obscenely oversized vehicles."
(Another solution would be changing current laws so that 3 row station wagons were legal again, right now SUVs and Minivans fill a need that the 3 row station wagon used to, but it was legislated away long ago.)
I have found that my Toyota Corolla Hybrid has about the right mix of smart and dumb (in terms of dials and knobs), and again in disagreement to the article .. I love my digital speedo! It’s high up on the dash and closer to the road, compared to my old space-wasting meters that were more difficult to read.
And the concern about the GPS in our cars invading our privacy.. this would really only concern a certain type of paranoid person. Most people don’t care. I certainly prefer the fully integrated GPS, that dims the radio and such whenever I need to do something. Removing it certainly won’t make any car fly off the shelves! Bad analysis.
When my 2005 Mazda MPV suffered a flat battery, the centre console screen which was the navigation / radio / clock / DVD player (yes, really) was bricked, and to this day displays a message in Japanese asking you to please insert the manufacturer's navigation data CD to continue using it.
Which no-one has access to, not even in Japan (my brother has been living there for about ten years, and is very helpful for obscure parts requests), so now my radio and clock don't work, because I don't have a CD with data needed for a 16 year old navigation system that, when working, was thoroughly convinced I was driving long distances on the bottom of Tokyo Bay and was desperate for me to turn right and get back on dry land.
My Dad's old Subaru Legacy used its display to show Japan rotating around as we turned corners, us always in the sea.
I'm onto my second 2005 Mazda MPV (they're great cars). This time I've replaced the head unit with one of those nasty cheap Android things. Basically a confused tablet with some extra hardware, running any mapping or other app you want.
That's not a bad idea at all on the head.
I don't have a factory camera, but would be worth doing a third party one, the visibility while reversing is rather poor as soon as you get teenagers sitting in the back.
This is true regardless of whether you have a telematics subscription. The subscription just enables the stuff you can actually use.
Manufacturers are monetizing that information, selling it to anyone who wants to buy it. I know someone that worked for a company using said data to try and enhance weather reporting (the data reported back includes outside air temperature, headlights, windshield wiper status, etc.) They were receiving data from multiple manufacturers.
They are fixed in place to a vehicle with a battery, still you don't have them powered.
Not that car ones (powered, heating, massaging, etc.) are not nice and comfortable, only that they remain a form of luxury.
I do drive cars, though, and sometimes other people's cars. I'd much rather be able to adjust while driving so that I can have better control over the car than have to fumble with levers, which might propel me back far enough that I cannot brake. Heck, I might have been having to adjust because I didn't realize how far i needed to press the brake in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603532
Direct link:
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/archives/manuals/71bus/page1.jpg
Modern business and first class seats are indeed powered.
Adjustable tightness of part of the seat above your hips which keeps you better in tight/fast curves. Heating for cold starts. Massage for luxury. My BMW has it all apart from massage and its makes longer drives much more pleasant.
EDIT: It was still a tight fit for tall folks, though. In that particular car, the adjustment mostly helped short folks see better.
My 2010 Kia Soul has manual seats that can go up and down.
Although when the Kia Soul was first introduced, Kia threw almost every feature they could in it to win market share!
when I figured out what I had done I laughed at myself for a solid 10 minutes
YMMV, but I have no problem using mechanical adjustments. Power is no advantage for me.
Mechanical adjustment is fine for up-down, tilt (if it uses a dial), and lumbar, but for forward-back I prefer electric. Also because manual forward-back adjustments are very coarse.
Also, I had more precise control with the hand-crank.
(and also more convenient in other situations where I need to quickly open the window and actively drive at the same time, e.g. toll booths, drive thru's)
For the record, I hate electric windows, because of insensitivity of the button, it's almost impossible to open the window by few millimeters only (just to allow air circulation to avoid condensation on windows). Or in winter if it freezes to the frame, I want to be able to open without a need of warming it up first. Or not to buy the entire lifting mechanism because a 2$ plastic piece brakes inside. I understand the few uses of electrical window, but those can simply be fixed by avoiding farting inside a car, or politely asking the culprit to open their window themselves.
Much like I enjoy the electric starter on the car, such that I do not need to crank it by hand to start it. I'm "proud and enjoy" my electric starter and windows, and make absolutely no apology for doing so. You want to warm your house with a fire started by flint and tinder, have at it; I'll be over here with my gimmicky heat pump.
Bought it 7 years ago for less than a modern GPU currently costs. If you have a mechanic as a friend it can be extremely cheap to own a car. I wonder how the used market will look in the future, I guess prices will be a lot higher and many not security related features will be broken.
Buying a car > $15,000 is always idiotic if you do in any way care about losing $15,000 in my opinion. If you don't care about the money, a happy spending to you. Otherwise get a company car that is financed by other tax payers.
I buy only vehicles with hand-cranked windows.
I've actually got 2 cars with crank windows and am in the process of converting one of them to power windows just because it doesn't have AC and I want an easier way to manage the windows.
One addition to the smart tech a dumb car could benefit from - radar cruise control. Increasingly offered on new models and reduces cognitive workload of highway driving.
I especially like the larger fuel gauge; I drove a car once that had a handful of little LCD rectangles like a coarse bar graph. I struggled to tell if I had 50% or 75% left!
Just providing a "dumb" head unit with as close to zero features besides CarPlay and Android Auto would be sufficient to have a good user experience at this point, at least in the context of a "dumb car".
Last time I was on Android (~5 years ago), you could actually run Android Auto as an app on your phone, so a phone mount like that would be fine (even if not amazing), but Apple doesn't let you run CarPlay directly on your phone -- it only works with an external display designed for CarPlay, so a phone mount like this is notably worse for iPhone users. CarPlay's interface is much better designed for use in a vehicle than the regular iOS interface.
Phone mounts like that have the additional problem that smartphones have continued to grow and grow, and a lot of cars from 5 or 10 years ago that offer any kind of phone charging spot or phone mount can't fit most modern smartphones in the allocated spot... so phone mounts like that can become obsolete even without any electrical components whatsoever.
Heh. That ship has sailed.
Wait until electronic license plates using eInk roll out and update automatically. First they'll just change if you haven't paid your registration, then later if your insurance lapses, or maybe it'll light up with yellow LEDs when there's a kidnapping. It'll be integrated into Fast Pass toll-payment systems, why not? And over the next decade, as the taxes from gasoline disappear, the plates will have integrated travel tracking so you automatically pay $0.02 per mile road usage taxes. It'll be the most fair way to pay for the roads.
Yep, this is all coming. First, they'll be add-on plates, but then they'll be integrated into all new cars. Personal transportation is going to look completely different by the end of the century, anyways. Worrying about the number of knobs on your dashboard is like worrying about the color of your horse's blinders or whether your cart's wheels were made out of oak or cedar.
https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/dacia... https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/lada/
I know someone who had a Lada Niva, and he got stranded because a low quality pipe joint blew. True, the repair was extremely cheap, and it could probably be temporarily repaired with a hose and two zippers. Are you a mechanic that can locate and fix those kind of failures? Then Ladas are for you. You can't tell apart the windscreen fluid from the blinker fluid? Your Lada will spend more time in the repairshop than on the road.
If you expect to drive more than 50% of the time on asphalt but money is tight, do yourself a favour and buy at least a Dacia Duster.
What is wrong with a wheel and function stalks?
Gimmicks like this, and they are gimmicks, are dangerous and it's concerning no regulator seems to care enough to stop it.
FSD beta. The yoke steering wheel. Like a quarter of everything SpaceX does.
Does he just have really good lobbyists? Is his force of personality just that good? It’s kind of fascinating.
Have you seen Tesla being the only company not invited on electric car day in white house?
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a37244461/elon-musk...
Do you know that Tesla will be excluded from tax credits for EVs?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/energy-secretary-defends-tes...
Do you know that Texas where Tesla is building its next factory does not allow to sell Teslas?
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-law-keeps-teslas-made...
> Do you know that Texas where Tesla is building its next factory does not allow to sell Teslas?
You think you can't buy a Tesla in Texas? What planet are you on?
You have to buy your Tesla out of the state and Tesla will deliver the car to Texas.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-law-keeps-teslas-made...
https://insideevs.com/news/510302/tesla-no-sales-allowed-tex...
Biden administration is explicitly designing laws to prop up other car companies and exclude Tesla.
It's not just about labor PR, they want to force Tesla to unionize.
But Tesla will not unionize and they will be the only ones without subsidies. Extremely shitty lobbing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/energy-secretary-defends-tes...
Uhh, Texas?
You cannot buy a Tesla in Texas. Technically speaking, the transaction happens out of state and the car is shipped to you in Texas. Legally speaking Tesla has never sold a car in Texas. They have Tesla "galleries" where you can look at cars, take test drives, customize your order, and they'll help with the paperwork for you to buy it out of state.
I don't think Texas is alone in their dealer franchise laws.
For me I'd replace that with: scary. Full size A4 paper and bigger screens in cars you can stream movies on while driving (distraction leading to accidents); the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space); pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people). These aren't fascinating things.
Just like Tesla's charging infrastructure! Can you imagine if you had to find a Ford or a Toyota gas station to fill up at? This world used to be able to get along, to find general welfare. Cooperation used to exist. Tesla keeps being more and more an example of anti-cooperative anti-civil market-capture horseshit. A car no one else can repair, with it's own charging infrastructure, it's own roads: this screams "THE ENEMY" to me. It's the most capitalist-lowlife Lawful Evil behaviors writ large here, on display: vulgar & primitive exercises in dominance, with no pretense that there's space for anyone else in the world, no sense in leaving any room for any one else on the planet.
If Tesla's goal was to lock-in their customers and exclude other vehicles, they seem to be doing all the wrong things.
1. https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#patent-pled...
2. https://www.tesla.com/support/non-tesla-supercharging
3. https://driveteslacanada.ca/model-y/tesla-ccs-adapter-activa...
tesla making a patent pledgeh not early, in 2014- doesnt incentivize anyone to pick tesla's bespoke new charging technologies, if your cars wont reap the benefits of interoperability with their system. tesla didnt say their charging infrastructure would work with your cars, only that you could go make your own copies of either car or charger network.
your messaging is extremely strong & you raise some very good points. from my perspective though you are still concealing, hiding, denying more than hapf the facts. random irrelevant facts like teslas being able to consumer actual standards get thrown in, but of course tesla wants to be a parasite on othercs network externalities while providing no net benefit themselves, yet you describe this lopsided controlling behavior as if it's in their favor. you throw in non-network-effect charging as though it should have an impact on society growing positive network effects for itself: this also feels ultra-contrary to the point. even if true, it means i cant go to a friends and expect my non-tesla to get a charge.
everything here is shit. your "rebuttals" are examples of tesla insisting on their own game. you ignored the points about LV & the impossible-to-repair-out-of-network problems with tesla. i am not mived by your arguments, they feel distracting & misdirecting.
Teslas will only let you watch videos if you're in park. This has always been the case.
> the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space)
It cost $50m to construct, which is 1/5th the cost of similarly-specced people movers or trains. The second-cheapest bid was by Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group and would have cost $215m. The loop has met or exceeded all of the benchmarks set by the Las Vega Convention & Visitors Authority.[1] The program has been so successful that LVCVA purchased the Las Vegas Monorail system just so they could get rid of the monorail's noncompete clause and allow a larger Vegas Loop to be constructed.[2] Later, Clark county unanimously approved construction of the Vegas Loop, which is planned to have 51 stations and 29 miles of tunnel.[3]
> pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people)
No vehicle running the FSD beta has been involved in a death. You're talking about the autopilot features, which are a form of traffic aware cruise control. Many of the claimed fatalities turned out to be reckless drivers. For example: a fatal crash in Texas last April originally blamed autopilot and claimed that it was "100 percent certain" that no one was in the driver seat at the time of the crash.[4] The preliminary NHTSA investigation found that the driver was in the driver's seat, had not buckled his seat belt, and had pressed the accelerator to as high as 98.8%. (This was in a 778 horsepower Model S that could go from 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds.) NHTSA investigators could not engage autopilot on the road where the crash happened, since that road had no lane markings.[4] Also the owner of the vehicle had not purchased the the option to allow autopilot on surface streets.
There are many legitimate criticisms that one can level at Musk & his companies, but you haven't made them.
1. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tourism/boring-co-s-t...
2. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tourism/lvcva-expecte...
3. https://twitter.com/ClarkCountyNV/status/1450877187779796992
4. https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/19/22391890/tesla-driverless...
5. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/driver-was-behind-wheel...
Tesla paraded their new truck with 'stainless steel body panels all around'. I don't know about you, but I've banged my shin into a steel tow hitch. I don't want anything remotely close to that on the road.
The bigger issue with larger vehicles is their height around people current full size or even mid-size SUVs and trucks have gotten larger than their former variants. You're much more likely as a pedestrian to get run over than to be hit by a car and land on the hood or the windshield (which is by far the better position to be in during an accident). The crash bar behind the bumper on all cars have a thick layer of foam that contributes to the 'softness' of a bumper.
F1 steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVz6IW_wegs&t=45s
Tesla steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWtJu0q3sBQ&t=44s
When I drive, my hands aren't always in the exact same position on the wheel. Muscle-memory won't reliably have my thumb landing on the correct signal direction. If I have to honk the horn, I need to be able to do that instantly, without thinking. Some cutesy icon located away from the edge of the steering wheel will guarantee that the horn sounds simultaneously with the "crunch" of another car backing into me.
My proposed rule-of-thumb: If a video game company wouldn't design their controllers this way, you shouldn't do it either for the most common—or most urgent—functions. Turn signals, wipers, horn, and hazard lights should all be real buttons that are in a consistent location. Horn should be in the hub of the steering wheel.
And why in the hell does a yolk need to have the horn on a button rather than the center of the yolk as anyone would expect? Maybe there's some technical reason i'm unaware of, but this seems actively dangerous for no gain. I can think of several better ways to do this that aren't actively confusing and hostile to the driver.
No you're right, it's change for the sake of change. It is now a status symbol to show off how well you drive a vehicle whose management is more challenging than other cars.
But I agree, that second video is insane.
Used to turn the plane.
Also put on oxen to pull a plow.
> yolk
Yellow part of an egg.
The only accidents I can imagine the horn preventing are ones where you are stationary, which almost always means the other car is moving slowly - like somebody backing into you in a parking lot. Overall pretty low consequence incidents.
So to the extent that horn use is nearly all elective rather than emergency, is antisocial and has few benefits: make it a small, hard-to-reach button.
(With important exceptions like heavy vehicles that can't maneuver well and non-Western driving cultures that rely on routine horn use to communicate intentions.)
[0] Granted aircraft have an extra dimension to play in for collision-avoidance. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/11/honk-if-you-know-why-yo...
People with your attitude toward horn use likely cause substantial harm to society through fender benders, delays, frustration, etc, etc.
I think I can maybe count on one hand the number of times I've had to move out of a lane lest someone merge into me. The times that situation has been prevented through horn use are innumerable. And that's just one example.
Your comment fondly reminded me of my very first computer, which was a Sinclair ZX81.
Let's just say that it wasn't ideal for text processing.
About the same as this "steering console" doesn't look quite ideal for driving a fucking car.
I concur with your horrification.
The 800 had real keys, but the 400 was just a membrane keyboard. Didn’t matter; we only used it to play video games anyway.
I can’t imagine having to type on that thing.
3/4 of the reason they're touch is being 'cool' and none of the designers ever cooking a meal in their life.
Its definitely easy to clean my entire range being a flat piece of glass, and personally I've never had any problems with sensitivity on the buttons. Plus, that whole cook top is then still useful as a counter top as even the glass is only slightly raised over the rest of the counter surface. In my experience the glass top range I have has been wonderful, and I was originally planning on tearing it out and putting in a gas unit. I've since second guessed those plans and will probably keep the range for a while longer, no knobs has actually been pretty nice.
Smoke and mirrors is Tesla's way of operating. Look at the coverage they got out of the yoke. Out of FSD. It doesn't matter that they are terrible: there'll be 100 articles about it releasing and 2 about it being a bad idea.
Tesla has established a brand image based around a different set of attributes and they design, market and sell to it.
[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2082556/starring-role-hollywo...
It would be significantly less stupid if it had physical buttons on the steering wheel.
I realize there's a joke in Germany about this, but to be clear, all passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. must have working turn signals. See https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2004-title49-vol5/xm...
You can also buy a Caterham if you really want something simple and fun to drive (but unsafe).
It's very basic compared to my Mercs, but oddly I enjoy driving it more - and I'm not one of those 'love cars, love to drive' people.
I relate to the point in the article about fancy screens; In my Jeep I fitted a very cheap (£30) Chinese radio head unit. It has almost no display, or useful functions, but it does have Bluetooth, so my phone does all the heavy lifting - internet radio, music, GPS etc. I can upgrade my phone at any point, and my jeeps infotainment system gets a bump-up at the same time.
It cost me over 300€ (new starter, new battery) to finally figure out myself that the cheap Chinese radio was draining my battery and preventing my car to start. Sometimes I had to turn the key 30 times (with a full battery) to start the car.
Basically I just want a Chrysler with the infamous "Jeep Cherokee" hack[3]. Those cars were a modern miracle of amazingly well designed, consistent API engineering. Users gaining access to those systems, remotely, was shunned as a horrible vile thing, but it was an act of beauty & amazingness, a revelation of wonderfully good engineering. The coverage focused on the malicious acts, & that FUD far out-shined the amazing limitless potential of letting the world try to enrich themselves, make better. Tragic miscarriage against potential: the press murdered any hope of possibility in it's cradle. These cars were/are amazing. QNX OS running DBus protocols to expose all the car's systems: an easy to interface with, exploratory inter-system API for the whole car. We could have built anything here, it feels like. Instead, we damned & cursed the makers for having left some portal open to this computer: we parroted out terror.
I guess my gravy-on-top nee-plus-ultra ask atop having access to a car via DBus- the FreeDesktop standard IPC system- would be for the buttons to be more software defined, independent of their subsystems, which I think still wasn't entirely the case. I'd love to have a phone or console app running which can read from the big giant volume knob, for example, as I adjust some windows or the sunroof or the temperature. Infinite flexibility, please. I've said this before[4].
It's disappeared quickly, but Webinos was a very very interesting decade old attempt to define a user-empowering IoT architecture, & had significant interest from BMW/Land Rover. It's basically bitrotted off the internet, last seen early 2021[5], but was a really interesting user-centric system, where devices were linked not to corporate cloud services but to systems of users choice, exposing their capabilities & offerings generally. We need more holistic potentials in the world. We need to stop consigning away possibility, choosing retro-minimalism because we can't imagine any other possibilities than the vice, than the authoritarian, restrained systems of control most technology imposes upon us. We need personal computing to be possible again, broadly in the world, across devices, we need choice, we need agency, we need to stop being damned by computers & start being served by them: this is only possible if we let the users back in, re-open the frontiers.
In the end, I think the Chromecast model is basically right. The car should have a pre-baked system, but present some HTML capable interfaces, which themselves expose a couple additional above-and-beyond Web IoT apis to adjust windows, sunroofs, hvac. There should be decoupling (which I think Webinos was an early & technically successful contendor for).
[1] https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1478387800542224392
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
[3] salawat ↗ I'm with you except for one thing.
No web connectivity. Either you're plugged in through CAN, or F-OFF. There is no logical reason for an internet exposed portal to physical car systems. Period.
I thought aux only carries analog sound, is charging a new feature? Did I miss Aux-C? What does the author mean?
> Not to mention the privacy and security concerns. I was dubious the first time I saw a GPS in a car, my mom’s old RX300, about 20 years ago. “Yeah… that’s how they get you,” I thought
Well, that reasoning was flawed 20 years ago - GPS means YOU know where you are, not the other way around. There has to be other communication channel for that data to "escape". If your car is data-enabled with SIM card, only then it is a concern.
> Not having GPS or data (or hidden microphones or cameras) also makes your vehicle feel more private, obviously.
I can't exclude the possibility that the author is a moron, but I suspect it's just outrage-bait. Like that whole article.
Escape channel is called internet, not GPS. Obviously if your car has Internet and GPS, it can do it.
But if you had only starlink dish on your car, without GPS, I wouldn't be surprised if it was technically possible to track location to some degree of accuracy.
Friend of mine called me from his rental car asking why his phone notifications were still coming through the car despite having Bluetooth turned off.
Of course he was charging his phone from the built in USB port and it was actually a data port.
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow.
So smart.
Don't get me wrong, the car is absolutely wonderful, but the UX is so badly designed it makes me question myself.
For starters, I have absolutely no clue how to use the lights, fans and wipers. Just last Saturday, a design oversight (and idiocy from my part) caused me to reverse into another car parked behind me, I reversed to leave the parking spot, then instead of switching to D, I forgot it on R all while the rearview camera is showing red lines. For a car equipped with driving assists (collision avoidance and line assists), it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping the rearview camera, it only beeps for 5 seconds when it sees an obstacle then stops, same for the open door and seatbelts.
There is also the odometer, there are 3 different odometers in the car and all of them are showing different values, one with a TM next to it, another one with this symbol Ø and a third one in the "Driver performance" tab. So which one is the real distance and what's the difference? Only the norse gods know.
Also, the charge and fuel left gauges adapt to your driving by going up or down instead of showing you the real amount of fuel/charge left. And it already nearly left me stranded on the highway with 5km left of fuel.
This car is amazing but there are a lot of design oversights when it comes to UX.
This is common feature in other cars - I rented mazda few years back and it did automatically stop when I almost reversed into another car.
This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying.
Yes, I know I'm responsible. I do not want/need car/manufacturer to be responsible, I just want technology to help where it could.
> Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably
This maybe is your opinion, but that's not how it works. There is plenty of manufacturer's who manufacture things which are not affordable and plenty of people buy it. Pretty much any industry has luxury segment which also tends to be most profitable
> This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying
Humans are imperfect. Stress, distractions, tiredness etc could make anyone to make mistake, even yourself. Why would adding safety features be horrifying?
People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.
Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.
The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.
This Volvo like I said, is absolutely wonderful on the road, and the safety features it's got even in the base model are a godsend and make the car feel like it has a mind of its own, in a good way. It saved my butt from so many accidents that I never even noticed, it sees danger before it even happens, it's amazing.
So my point from the beginning was, if a car is capable of detecting/anticipating and dealing with danger at 100Kmh, it sure as hell should be able to prevent dumbass me from reversing into another car by mistake.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.
You can’t press too hard to accidentally go the wrong direction. Up is R and down is D. Distinguishing up from down is very easy. Changing direction can only be done at standstill. Pressing too many times does nothing, except toggle D and B, that have same behavior from intent at parking point of view.
What might happen though is you thought you were in N but are actually in gear, as you accidentally clicked twice instead of once. But if you want to go N you should really just press P instead.
On the one hand, it is easy to point to this as user error and you're not wrong.
But older cars have a significant tactile difference in operating different systems in the car. Shifting a gear is very, very different physically than pushing the button for your hazards. Your body moves in very different and operates these controls very differently.
This distinction was made clear to me years ago when we bought a 2013 Mercedes wagon - the physical action to: shift to park, turn the car on, turn the radio on were all nearly identical - just a button press. In fact, the buttons themselves were almost identical.
So, although I never actually did this, there were a number of times when I got relatively overloaded, cognitively, and I pressed the power off on the radio in an attempt to shift to park. Or I pressed the park button a second time in an attempt to turn the car off.
I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Absolutely.
For example, in a manual VW/Audi, you have to push the stick down, then way over into R.
It's one of the nicest feeling gestures, makes your intent extremely clear, and is impossible to do by accident.
Airplane cockpits are designed like this, for obvious reasons.
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98
My 2002 VW has the same and it means average over multiple trips. TM probably means this trip? You may have distance of the current trip and average consumption of the current trip (eg 40km, 6.3l/100km), then the last few trips with a combined average for those (eg 1500km, 5.4l/100km).
1. The standard "life of the car" odometer is permanently on the left gauge, top reading
2. There is one (two?) manually resettable trip odometers
3. There is an auto-resetting trip odometer - it resets when the car has been off for four hours.
You can configure which of the second two are displayed by going to in-dash "app" menu and selecting what you want in the "Trip" tab. On my car, this configures the lower displays on the left and right gauges.
Update Re: your high beams - It sounds like you have them on auto. There's a spring loaded ring on the left-hand stalk that engages auto vs. manual high beam. Twist it and the light-with-an-A sign on your dash should change to a normal light symbol. You can then use the twist knob with detents to select parking light vs. low beam and whether you want auto-on or manual on. High beams are engaged by pushing the lever (or you can pull to flash).
I had a Tucson before this Volvo and it was just so intuitive and easy to use. It's something that needs to be standardized, they are tools that no car would be street legal without and thus, should have identical interactions no matter the manufacturer.
There are plenty of times when ergonomics and feature discoverability are at odds, and I heavily prioritize ergonomics when I'm driving a large, lethal object at super-human speeds.
My backup camera frequently loses its shit because it gets obstructed by rain or snow, or sometimes paint on the ground fakes it out. If the only sensor is a camera, that must not override the driver. Beeping is fine. I might feel differently about lidar.
On that topic, though... I really wish backup cameras had some sort of wiper.
Hopefully the system on your Volvo can be updated to fix what are presumably bugs in the system!
My '05 Nissan Altima let me start the engine with a physical key, and then lock the car with the fob.
'Smart' means manufacturers can put ads on everything, sell your usage data, and of course all the smarts become obsolete or break easily after just a couple of years, often turning otherwise perfectly good hardware into a doorstop.
As part of 'right to repair' we should also demand 'right to own UI'; appliances have some standard (electronic/data) interfaces, and you can add off-the-shelf, or even custom UI of your choice.
Even more sad is it’s not like people looking for a new car have much of a choice.
This car is a breeze to work on. It's a bog standard car. If something breaks, it can be fixed. The only things that can break are the things that make the car run. You don't need a specially trained technician. You don't need to remove a layer of plastic to get to the engine. There is no touch screen.