Someone in the comments pointed out that not only is this terrible, you can only open the glove box while stationary.
I thought GM had jumped the shark when they started leaving the reverse lights on when you park, just to make sure people or cars nearby don’t know whether it’s safe to pass you in the parking lot. This is a whole new level of stupidity.
Likely not, some pickup trucks can "force" the backup lights on as "bed lights" it seems. When parked, the car doesn't have tons of requirements vis-a-vis the lighting (the laws are usually worded like "when in reverse gear, two rear-facing white-burning lights must be visible with a power of X lumens" or something).
Um, what truck bed can be lit by using the reverse lights? The only way I can see this working is if there's another truck behind you so that your reverse lights are pointed at the other truck. Truck bed lights have always been behind the cab. I've never seen reverse lights considered as bed lights.
All pickups I've seen have reverse lights built into the third brake light which is behind the cab above the bed.
And with that it makes sense as a safety feature - if the only way to turn those on is go into reverse, people would be tempted to throw the truck in reverse and leave the parking brake on while they jump in the back to look for something. Unfortunately it seems not all of them are locked out as I've seen trucks driving on the freeway with the reverse lights on.
I think you may be confusing things. There is a separate switch for turning on the bed lights which has typically been above the rear window in the center. The reverse lights are part of the rear brake lights. It is absolutely possible to leave the bed lights on while driving.
The concept you propose is absolutely preposterous to the point I feel I'm feeding a troll
> Include Reverse Lamps
This setting turns the reverse lamps on when you switch the rear lighting zone on.
Switch this setting off if you have a backup alarm installed to prevent the reverse lamps from turning on and sounding the alarm when using zone lighting.
I hate the reverse light thing so hard. If I see a GM with reverse lights on I completely ignore it and never stop. Thanks GM for ruining something nice.
>(telsa's brake lights are triggered based on deceleration so they constantly flicker when you're just using regen a bit)
Thank the SAE (the de-facto regulators of this space since many laws are just pointers to their specs) for that. There's a spec for triggering brake lights based on how fast the car is decelerating. Depending on your regen setting you're probably right at the threshold.
I read on another forum that there isn't even a manual release somewhere. I understand for security it's nice not to but maybe hide one _somewhere_ so at least you have some backup option in an emergency?
That'd be nice .. or just bypass the entire added layer of relay controls and go back to a manual latch.
The article scenarios raise some of the real life issues:
* What if your battery dies, and you have your small emergency charger in the glovebox?
* What if you’re waiting in a turned-off car while your friend or parent or lover pops inside the liquor store, and you need to get, say, your hyper-important pills out of the glove box?
* What if you get pulled over by a cop, and they tell you to turn your car off, like they do, but then you have to explain to the already tense cop that you need to turn your car back on so you can open the fucking glove box door so you can get your documents? ( Depending on the cop and the circumstance, this can only make things worse. )
etc.
I've spent decades on bleeding edge tech .. and I still detest this kind of ill thought through "just because we can" stupidity.
Because on long trips, passengers NEVER use the glovebox?
When I go on long trips, my passenger often reads, uses their phone and store these things in the glovebox when we are stopped. It is a convenient storage box right at their disposal so why not use it?
As the other guy said, this is a classic case of "you are holding it wrong".
There is no way a 90lb, octataraien, is going to rip a seatbelt loose if stuck, or smash her car window by hand, if the power is out, or if underwater.
Yes she can reach the glovebox and get this tool, but not if the thing won't open!
I'm in an Australian rural farming district and a neighbour of mine used something similar when his 4x4 landcruiser was T-boned into a dam back when he was 90 or so (he's pushing 97 ATM).
If you or your mum haven't done this already .. get her a few old seat belts and passenger windows from a wreckers to practice on.
The theory is good but nothing beats a bit of muscle memory practice.
It's taught here in Australia as part of many "advanced driver training" courses which are common for many using company fleet vehicles (especially country, off road, or heavy vehicle).
Skid pans, broken road hill climb, basic first aid, accident protocols (both in accident (freeing yourself or not) or as first on scene) etc.
A conversation that should have happened during the development of this car, but didn't:
"Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu? Because that would be inconvenient, unintuitive, and doesn't allow quick access?
Then why the fuck would you do this with anything?"
> Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu?
“Because title 49, subtitle B, chapter III, subchapter B, part 393, subpart C, paragraph 393.40 of Federal Safety Regulations requires us to install brakes as specified by subpart B, paragraph 571.105 of the same regulations, which require a pedal. And if those did not exist, then we absolutely would install some other bullshit, make you pay extra for it, and bear no responsibility for it whatsoever.”
Glove box isn’t a safety feature? Do whatevs, land of the free.
Unless you really know what you’re doing, you’re better off trying to steer the car into the safest crash site/uphill possible than to try to stop it with the hand brake. The hand brake only locks the rear wheels and are not designed to brake at driving speeds (they are for keeping a stationary car from moving). Improper use of the handbrake results in the car spinning out.
This is exactly why I'm so sore about the newfangled button handbrake in my current front-wheel driven car. No more fun getting the rear to spin out by yanking the handbrake while exiting a corner at full throttle. Sadness.
It screeches warnings at me and fully engages the brake after a second or so. Which isn't optimal... because this is such a dumb ass dick move you need good timing over when you engage and release the rear brake. Or otherwise you'll end up outside the designated driving surface.
You the fuck do this with some things because if you didn't ever do it, modern cars would either look like a jet aircraft cockpit, or they'd have very few features. Anyone who's looked inside a Subaru from circa 2019 would know how physical button mania can make cars objectively worse.
(To be clear, I'm firmly on team mechanical glove boxes.)
A lot of them. There are multiple grids of buttons in multiple locations for enabling and disabling various active driver assistance and active safety features.
Most product decisions represent a tradeoff. The tradeoff the author doesn't mention is one of a clean look versus ease of use. The author also doesn't mention how frequently they actually open their glovebox.
From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.
A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.
Your argument basically boils down to you don’t really use your glove box and prefer the slightly cleaner aesthetics. In your case you might argue for a car that doesn’t have a glove box. But if the glove box is included it should be intended for use. To not be able to access it by the passenger while driving, or while the car is off can be very frustrating for people who like to have a glove box.
All the comments on this thread seem to ignore a basic simple truth.
On long road trips with passengers, they often use the glovebox to store things.
When we go on road trips the kids rotate sitting in the passenger seat. They store their books, kindle, phone, etc there as it is a very convenient storage space easily accessible to them.
I don't want touch screens in cars period and I can't stand this trend of using them. I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.
I think touch screens are ok right now for two things: settings menus that you set once and never touch again, and Apple CarPlay.
I recently moved backwards from a CarPlay car to a non-CarPlay car. Even with a very convenient MagSafe phone mount right where the CarPlay screen used to be, I still miss CarPlay. It was just easier and more convenient for controlling phone media, gps, etc.
On the settings app, the choice is between a crappy touchscreen UI and a crappy non-touchscreen UI, so I’m kind of neutral.
I have never driven a Mazda but I watch a lot of car reviews. It seems to me they're the only car manufacturer that gets car interactions right. They actually have a philosophy how human-cars should interact and design everything based on it. Hence everything comes natural and consistent and logical.
Dad has a Mazda. Can vouch for this 100%. It's very clear to me when I drive it that their car interfaces are very deliberate and properly designed. That rolling knob thing which controls the screen is amazing and I wish it were standard
I’ve got an off button in the center of my controls. The only oddity is that I have to press it to lower the airflow from 5 to 0 (off) but otherwise pretty easy to find and use. It says “OFF.”
I misunderstood what you were looking for. AC seems easier for me as there’s a button labeled “A/C” that is lit up when AC is turned on and not lit up when it is off.
Really? What model do you have? I have a 330e and it does not have an A/C button, only a "MAX A/C" button. I can turn the A/C on with this button, but I can't turn it back off.
2018 330. That’s weird you don’t have an AC button. What I find curious is that “Max AC” is on the left side on a big round button but “AC” is on the right side on a square button with another square above it.
I don’t understand the layout sense but at least I’m lucky enough to have buttons.
They've had their hits and misses over the years. Not at all typical, I'm sure, but a fun anecdote: I had a 90s bmw at one point, with electronic controls for the adjustable driver's seat down near the floor between the seat and door. The buttons got wet one time when it was raining, and it led to the seat coming alive and trying to crush me against the steering wheel while in highway traffic. Mashing on the controls didn't work and the motor was quite powerful. I was barely able to pull over with the room I had to move. If I wasn't as thin as I am, I might have been pinned down and crashed.
I can't say it's the main reason I would choose a car, but bad UX (the whole thing, from UI to knobs) is certainly one of the no-compromise ones I would bail a car on.
I moved from a Mazda to Hyundai and find my Elantra very much like my Mazda 6 in terms of ease-of-use.
It has android auto/carplay. To change songs, increase the volume, mute you use buttons on the steering wheel. There is a physical volume up/down knob as well in case the passenger wants to use it and these can be done via the touch screen as well.
They have done an excellent job blending new technology and continuing to use "what works" from the past.
Too many of these touch screens in cars requires accessing menue's and sub-menu's to do basic things that should be on the steering wheel. My ex-wife's Lexus which cost 5x what i paid for my Elantra wont let her access the navigation system unless it is stopped and in park?? I can simply hold a button on the steering wheel to access Siri and state where i want to go. Far too often if you touch the screen on her lexis you get "vehicle is in motion".. Great.. and i'm in the passenger seat confused as to why this is an issue?
perhaps they should have done a better job planning this out before releasing it to the public?
Personally i feel Hyundai provides better "value for your money". By not having the incredibly complicated model and options packages you find in North American cars they keep their costs down and the variations on their products low.
No need to deal with the NA style "you want package A, you need to get packages B and C as well" crap.
This was the first thing I disable when I got my 2016 Mazda 3. SSH'd into the infotainment and locked the GPS position. Now the car thinks I'm always parked, even when rolling. I also reduced the warning/notice on boot to about 500ms.
Considering this, I don't think I've ever even had to touch the screen since; the wheel is just so nice. The volume knob down in that cluster is also very ergonomic.
Some cars like My ex-wife's lexus wont let you access the navigation system unless the vehicle is stopped.
This is VERY VERY stupid and TBH dangerous. Should se find herself lost on the highway she would need to leave the highway or stop on the side of the road to access the navigation system??
If you attempt to access the nav system while the vehicle is not stopped it simply displays some sort of "vehicle is in motion" alarm.
My Elantra wont let me use the keyboard to enter an address while the vehicle is in motion, but it will let me use Siri so i can make changes while moving if needed.
Is the system still disabled if someone is present in the front passenger seat (modern vehicles have sensors for this)? Oftentimes the passenger acts as the navigator and it wouldn't make sense for them to be locked out of the system.
Yes, it has been a while since i've been in her car.. i think you actually need to put it in park to "unlock" it, not just be stopped.
This is why I said the system is very stupid.. one would think that a passenger can access the navigation system given they are not driving.
The lesson I took away from this is: Never buy a car with a built-in GPS system.
Android auto/carplay are a much better - They are not likely to hold your car "ransom" for map updates or such, and don't have stupid rules like must be in park.
It's weird that they didn't think of the simplest solution, which is to use the speedometer, and instead chose to use GPS. I suppose that makes it so you can't even use the nav if you happen to be riding on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off .
I have a Mazda 2, touch is disabled as soon as the car starts rolling, but is available at a stop.
I like their rotating joyknob implementation, which can be used without looking nor stretching arms, and integrates well with CarPlay as well. It's so good I skip on touch even when touch would be a good fit.
Even their homegrown UI isn't that bad, which is actually praise given the crap automakers can come up with.
Side node: touch is useful for the passenger though, as reaching to the knob can be annoying for the driver, even at a stop.
Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
In 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving. According to automotive historian Michael Lamm, “Opponents of car radios argued that they distracted drivers and caused accidents, that tuning them took a driver’s attention away from the road, and that music could lull a driver to sleep.”
It's true but the physical buttons on my car radio let me get things over with very quickly.
The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.
No, the same couldn't be said about smartphone keyboards. The space in a smartphone is at an extreme premium and having the ability to display a keyboard or something else is very valuable. In a car this problem doesn't exist - you can have a touchscreen AND a normal glovebox latch. Removing the glovebox latch and replacing it with a touchscreen is nothing but idiocy, with zero benefits for anyone, ever, at any point.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.
> Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.
Nope. I bought phones with physical keyboards for as long as I could, because they work better for me. But I'm not in the majority, and manufacturers didn't want to keep selling phones with moving parts, so here we are.
And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.
The round knob to increase / decrease sound volume is simply the best UX in the car. Why do I have to navigate to a submenu to push a button repeatedly to change the volume. The less I look at the road the higher the risk of an accident.
Tried a quick search and couldn't find it. Is it like the scoll wheel on a mouse? Would be nice to have those on the steering wheel instead of up/down buttons.
I assume they mean the levers on the steering wheel, indicators and wipers... They look like whiskers in a cat's face that is the steering wheel (and you find them by touch, which is a nice double entendre)
Aye my skoda has a touch screen but I rarely use it (2016 model with touch screen and proper buttons, not the horrific current design of xbox style touch buttons) because I have 2 scroll wheels (volume and screen between the rev counter and speedo control), buttons to skip back and forward music, button for voice assistant, and a phone button. Its the best design out there I'm convinced.
Skoda is part of the VW group, as are Audi and Seat. There are some common parts used across the group, from chassis and engines down to much smller elements. But the different marques have different feels and appeal to different markets. Skoda cars have a reputation for being cheap and very reliable, unlike Audi which is positioned as a luxury marque
My old car has a navigation thing that pops up out of the dashboard. It's not a touchscreen: all control of that is by a four-way button plus a confirm and an exit button on the back of the steering wheel.
The new car has a big flashy touchscreen, but there's no way to interact with it without taking a hand off the wheel and looking down below the dashboard line.
I don't know why they can't at least add button-based navigation to the UI.
Worth noting that that round knob, where it exists, has lost a lot of functionality:
1. Setting volume to 0 will pause the recording, even though I sometimes want to silently forward through some unwanted parts (intros or ads in podcasts).
2. These knobs are also infinity knobs, I liked to have fixed start and end position with an indicator how loud it's going to be when I switch on. That last part has been taken over by software and probably can't be done reliably any more.
3. On the leftmost, zero position that round knob was also used to switch a radio on or off. It is very convenient to have a single movement to switch music on, and with the same movement adjust the volume, or to lower the volume and while doing so, maybe decide to switch it all off entirely.
Analog potentiometers is what we all want. The worst are the rotary encoders (infinity knobs) that glitch when you turn them fast, like trying to turn down the radio your kid left on full blast, only to have it do nothing or actually turn it up instead.
Yep. Everything turned to garbage when "it all went digital", in the early 2000s. Now every single electronic product from appliances to vehicles are completely broken. Even the average thermostat spazzes out. There's no standard for anything.
It’s interesting to consider that your grandfather was probably wrong about somethings being superfluous. Im not saying that as a criticism — but there are probably necessities of modern cars you and I find magnificent and essential (whether we our conscious of them or not) that your grandfather disdained.
Don’t get me wrong, touchscreen gloveboxes are stupid as hell, but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m being discerning or closed-minded.
That grandpa probably complains about ridiculous things like having to uninstall the bumpers to replace a front lightbulb which don't matter in the grand scheme because I know a mechanic who does it for 20€ (excluding the cost of the parts) but it is still silly because it is something that anyone with zero training could have done.
Diminishing returns? Let me do an inverse car analogy. I know how to write a complicated SQL query in SQL and in maybe a couple of different ORMs, because customers don't know SQL and want everything in (say) Ruby, Python, Elixir. Then the world inflicts us another ORM and I have to waste hours to learn all of it again only for the ORM to build my original SQL query and send it to the DB. Rolling eyes and WTF!
That reminds me of payment processors. They usually have SDKs for PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and maybe others. Often these just end up doing a simple HTTPS post of name=value pairs.
It is almost always easier and cleaner to use their HTTPS name=value post interface directly if they officially allow it and support it.
Often you are going to get your payment information from the user in that format anyway, such as via a post from your checkout page, or as a row of named columns when you retrieve on file payment information from your database.
In that case submitting name=value pairs mostly just requires translating the field names from your checkout page or column names from database to the names that the payment processor uses, plus adding a few more name=value pairs.
Going through their language specific SDKs often requires building up some ridiculous object oriented mess.
> but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m
being discerning or closed-minded.
You're being discerning. And a little over-generous.
I'll counter - as a fellow 'older' one :)
There's a tendency to be over-conciliatory and exercise excessive
tolerance towards folly, for fear of being labelled a throwback.
Don't minimise the wisdom your age brings.
Some things just get worse, objectively, until a correction occurs.
Reality is, there are perverse design incentives and it's also the
younger people who are tearing their hair at the madness of gratuitous
tech and UX as a cult/ideology.
No, even worse. You can take phone to the front of your face. So you may still be able to peek the road depends on situation. But a damn touch screen fixed to the car itself? Enjoy your car accident.
The last thing I want to do when driving a car is turn my head away from the road.
Somewhat counterintuitively even just talking with your phone near your face or on speaker greatly increases your accident risk when compared to talking with someone else in the car.
This seems to be because when you are talking to someone in person there are two things that help offset the risk from the increased distraction of the conversation.
First, your conversational partner being in car provided another set of eyes that might spot something the conversational distraction makes you miss. I personally saw this once where I was driving and started to pull out into an intersection after a stop sign where cross traffic did not have a stop sign and somehow completely missed a car approaching from the passenger side. My friend in the passenger seat saw it and yelled "STOP!" and I immediately hit the brakes.
Second, when you are in situations where you need to devote extra attention to the road such as dealing with heavier traffic or trying to navigate an in person conversation tends to slow down or pause naturally. On the phone the other person has no clue what is going on at the car and so conversational flow control is not as good.
I’m pretty much with you and was exactly the same - until I got a Polestar. All the stuff I need is still an actual button - although not ac controls. Physical buttons for volume, front and rear demist, cruise, lights and wipers. So I only need the touch screen for maps and some audio - like changing radio or which streaming service. Can still be eyes off road for a second admittedly. My dad has a VW golf with this don’t have to quite touch it interface and it’s always changing stuff on him as he chats away, waving his hand about - it’s super dangerous imho.
"Blame" that on Volvo. They've had some of the best in-car UX imo. Dozens of physical buttons, but they're intuitively laid out and it requires almost no thinking to do something.
I wish they had left navigation to external devices which can be updated independently of the rest of the car. It took less than a year for the in-car navigation system to be effectively obsolete.
Sadly it's only going to get worse. Companies left and right are seeing the light so to speak (i.e. how much money can be saved by using touchscreens) and putting them in everything in tandem with switching over to being electric. Doesn't help that countries everywhere are demanding that ICEs be phased out despite EVs having a host of problems and having nowhere near the amount of reliability.
But there's no way that a manually-operated latch is more expensive than a latch that is controlled by an electronic component, and that's leaving aside any time spent by developers and product managers to design the look, location, and functionality of the button in the software itself.
While I agree things like volume, glovebox release, and other standard functions should stay far away from a touchscreen, I do like that touchscreens have enabled highly customizable options/settings that would be a bit tougher to achieve without a touchscreen.
Or at the very least a digital screen with manual navigation buttons, but in this case, a touchscreen is a bit more convenient (and you usually have to have the car parked to change settings, anyway).
> 'I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.'
I drive a 12 year old Focus that has just about the right amount of modern functions - such as aircon, bluetooth connection and rear parking sensors.
I guess the problem with cars nowadays is that there isn't much to differentiate between them so all these added features have become a bit of an arms race?
The irony, of course, is seeing all of these fancy Range Rovers and Mercs broken down at the side of the motorway waiting to be towed away because they have become so sophisticated to the point of not being able to fulfil their primary function of getting from point A to point B?
I feel similarly about my 2019 GTI. The fundamentals are available without the touch screen, but you still have CarPlay. The later model GTIs went fully touch screen and capacitive touch buttons everywhere, including the steering wheel. Disappointing.
Now extend this reasoning to see why everything has become touch screen. It will all make sense. My oven has touch buttons. No idea if I pressed it or not because it doesn’t give feedback for a second or two.
Good automotive quality switches and encoders are expensive. And they don’t make them anymore because market dumped them. See the dwindling alps catalog.
I got a new washer. You have to push a touch button for four seconds to wake it up. Then wait a couple of seconds for the controller to boot and show the touch screen. Then you select what wash mode you want by pressing the touch screen for two seconds for each selection.
I hate a lot of the touch screen controls in the Tesla - like AC controls. But the glovebox is actually pretty nice. Being software controlled means I can require a PIN to open it. Also, there's no handle so it doesn't even look like a glovebox is there. If someone breaks in they probably aren't getting to any valuables in the glovebox.
So you store a weapon in the area where police are expecting you to reach for and instead store your license and registration to one of the spots where police are trained to prevent people from reaching into because of the fear of storing a weapon there.
I also hope that you either live in a state where there aren't any CCW permits required or that you have a CCW permit (which during my class, they went on and on about why you shouldn't store a weapon in the glove box).
Regardless - locks on glove boxes have been a thing for a long time. Having a PIN Enabled glove box even for your (imo very stupid) use case isn't enough of an argument to make touch screened glove boxes standard.
Right, but the average thief is probably not that familiar with a Tesla, and even if they are, these guys move very quickly. Their goal is to get in and get out and move to the next car. They're not going to sit there with an angle grinder unless they somehow know you have something good in there.
The average thief is probably not N is not a safe bet for most values of N. Pros exist and technique gets spread from person to person. BITD car stereo systems were the target of choice and I assure you they were significantly more difficult and time consuming to remove than popping open the glovebox on a car that's missing a button. All I'm saying is if car companies are shilling this bs as a security measure I'd take that with a rather large grain of salt.
I bet it takes mere seconds to angle grind your way into a glovebox. Thick hardened steel bike locks resist angle grinders for less than a minute. Thieves also talk to each other and spread techniques.
I’m the exact opposite of you. I like most of the touch screen controls, including the AC ones, but the number of taps it takes to open the glovebox always irritates me.
Yes. AC is ok to not be so accessible. After all, if the car has a decent temperature regulation system (as it should), with a decent PID, you set up the temperature once and don't touch it for long time.
Dude, the 2018 Citroen Berlingo (cheap family car) has a glove box without a latch. I didn't even find ours for the first week, because it is in an unusual spot where you would expect the airbag.
My car is 22 years old and has a key lock on the glovebox. It even rejects the valet key in case I wanted to give someone access to my car without giving them access to the glove box. This is a solved problem.
Not all cars support that, though. Due to licensing or tech, some cars (even new ones) only support Apple car with a cable (my case). I bought a wireless adapter on Amazon and it works seamlessly.
You’re mad that Toyota didn’t include an extra WiFi radio in your car, so that you can be more conveniently distracted by text messages and speed trap warnings, in the same thread where everyone else thinks that electric starters ruined cars forever?
Carplay lets me use the car to control audio with the car controls instead of the phone. That’s a big non-distractor. Your comment tells me that you have never actually used CarPlay (and perhaps that Android Auto is not so good—I wouldn’t know, I always assumed it was roughly equivalent to CarPlay in features and functionality). My phone doesn’t notify me about text messages when I’m driving and with the Prius, if I want navigation, CarPlay is the thing. Having the nav on the big display instead of the little display (which would be well out of the normal peripheral line of sight if it’s sitting on the wireless charger) is again an improvement in safety.
I like it. It means if someone breaks into the car they can’t get into the glove box. Also, with a Tesla, the car is never off so you don’t need to turn the car on again to get access to it.
Word “most” doing a lot of heavy lifting. I drove a lot of different types of hire car, and I’ve never seen an option to lock or unlock the glovebox, nor had a situation where it’s been locked.
Most glove boxes don't have large panes of glass? The sound of a broken window to get in will also motivate a thief to not stick around messing with a glovebox very long. Maybe leave something worth running off with in the center console as a deflection.
This is a seriously marginal bizarre contriviance of a scenario to piss off people daily who use the glove box.
For your benefit, you'd need to have a thief that somehow can break class (which is suprisingly hard to do if you ever tried it) and then can't defeat a simple latch on a glovebox where they now for sure valuables lie?
I locked the glove box on my old Honda once. All it got me was a new dash, since the thief took a screwdriver and pried it open, destroying a lot more than if I'd just left it unlocked.
I had a lock on the glove box on a used car. The lock was broken and it was difficult to open it so I never even bothered to use it. This has always led to awkward moments at borders.
People raise their blood pressure for nothing. You could have both a touch screen glove box release and a discreet manual release for emergencies. It’s just for aesthetics.
If it was just for aesthetics, you could have just a discreet manual release.
Anyway, you don't have "a discreet manual release" on actual implementation of that crap, so yeah that's the point: you could and you should have a manual release. At which point the touchscreen insanity for that would not make sense and would disappear.
It's worth watching the other few dozen seconds of the Cadillac video; not only is the glovebox overengineered, but so are the other doors on that car. Then again, it is a Cadillac, so "luxurious excess" is not surprising, but I'm not sure how having to go through that awkward indirection could be considered a luxury.
Excellent point. There are a lot of people for whom the #1 goal when purchasing a car is to stake out as high a spot in the "Who's Got More Bling?" pecking order as possible. If a car company CEO developed some weird obsession with maximizing profit, it wouldn't take much genius to start ignoring the practical & thrifty car buyers in favor of the bling maximizers...
It wouldn't take a genius because that would be a terrible business decision when you consider number of units sold. And profit-maximizing wouldn't be a particularly weird obsession for a CEO to have, in fact, it's exactly the obsession you'd want him to have.
one tangentially related extremely irritating “feature” of Teslas is automatic updates, which not only disable the car while they’re going on, but often rearrange the UI so you have to figure out where the buttons are all over again. it’s a flat out disgrace. you get into your extremely expensive car, ready to go, but no the car isn’t available because some dev team somewhere a few thousand miles away decided to push an almost certainly unnecessary change to YOUR possession. I don’t like this concept on mobile devices and PCs, but I despise it for cars
It's a very software idea to ship things unfinished and fix them later. At best it's annoying, in a car it's dangerous.
I expect when I buy a car that the manufacturers have spent time thinking about the layout, and they've got it the best they can, ironed out the bugs etc. I don't want to come in in the middle of an iterative process. I don't want buttons moving, I don't want 'improvements', I want to buy an actual functioning car from day one. One that the manufacturer is happy to stand by from day one, and they don't feel entitled to 'improve'.
And updates could totally be cancellable... Nearly every device has an "A" and "B" firmware stored, and therefore if you need to drive away during an update they could just stop the update and reboot every device back to the old firmware that's already stored and you'd be good to drive in 10 seconds.
In what model of Tesla are the updates automatic? I've always been prompted whether I want to install an update, or schedule it to be installed at some early hour in the morning. I'm also told about how long the update will take (generally 25 mins).
But I agree about the horribleness of the UI changes - I still hate whatever the UI update was that went out like a year ago and haven't figured out why they actually did it.
Does the average person who has never owned a Tesla know the updates work that way? And how many of the Tesla owners still dislike it, but have decided that the risk (which could have been prevented by Tesla) is worth the reward?
in any other industry you could say that and I’d agree with you, but cars are an exception. cars are first and foremost a status symbol, and, compounding, they historically didn’t have computers inside them. plenty, plenty of rich humans will be buying teslas as either a status symbol or simply the next cool thing to own without any thought for the specifics of the management of updates of the OS
Wow, that must be annoying. Imagine you're almost late to go somewhere, or you have an actual medical emergency and the car says nope, now I'm updating...
Seriously I would probably remove the antenna or the sim card for the car's data connection.
Can we make the steering wheel a touch screen too? Like a digital wheel you turn with your finger to steer the car. Wouldn't that be just super duper? Couldn't possibly go wrong.
The less used something is, the more apparent it must be how to use it.
If something is used once a year, most users won't know what myriad of menus to follow. Some won't even know it is a menu option, and may hunt all over the car for a hidden release.
It is provably different for you, but where I am (Canada), you'll open the hood release at least a half dozen times a year, just for windshield wiper fluid.
That said, the hood release has been on the driver side somewhere, under the dash, in every car I own.
With a physical release, you can often hunt for a thing, much faster than a dozen submenus.
The newer VW models (Golf, ID series, etc.) had touch controls on the steering wheels instead of physical buttons. Of course what happened is what you anticipated. Bad customer feedback made them reverse that for future models.
There was a prototype in 2011 that, though the wheel was still a wheel, was otherwise even worse than you're imagining: No touch buttons, it used gestures.
What you've described and what's described in the article are different. The steering mechanism is still a steering wheel with a steering column, it's just the display (speedometer, odometer, maps) is a touch screen on the wheel instead of behind the dash. Maybe not the best, but not approaching gesture-based steering.
I'm not looking forward to buying another car, since I've been hearing of a lot of criminally negligent human factors engineering for at least a decade, combined with increasingly invasive spying on people in their own cars.
Big +1 for Subaru, but some of their newer cars are starting to fall victim to these gimmicks now. But they generally give you some of the tech features without getting in your way.
Eg. you get CarPlay, but also physical climate controls and volume knobs. Automatic cruise control & lane centering, but you can disable certain parts of it that you don’t like.
And the Outbacks are some of the safest cars out there in terms of “deaths per million miles” statistics according to the IIHS [0], probably due to their over-engineered frames and engine-dropping crumple zones
No hope unfortunatelly, car-as-subscription is the dream of automakers and they will do everything to reach the goal.
Adding various gimmicks and as many electronic failure points as possible is to make device less reliable and obsolete in a couple of years so new one needs to be bought.
Mazda is all _out_ on touchscreens... There are knobs and buttons for controlling things. You still get all the standard bells and whistles (radar cruise, lanekeeping, heads-up display), and, at least in Australia, no phoning home or built-in connectivity beyond a GPS receiver and radio.
Mazdas higher end cars are pretty nice. And like anothother commenter mentioned about subaru, they are a smaller company who still makes most of their cars domestically (japan) and seems to care about quality. I will warn their pait always seems a bit thin, so get a clear cover if you do a lot of highway or dirt roads. They still use buttons for nearly everything even when they have screens.
Leaving aside the question of whether touchscreens make sense inside a car at all, I’m not sure how a control to open the glove box which is not situated on the actual glove box help? I mean, you probably opened the glove box to put something in or take something out. Once it is open, you would almost certainly physically reach inside it.
That doesn't mean you can't put a touch button on the actual glovebox.
Use the UI (with a pin) to lock the glovebox so that it doesn't open when the glovebox button is touched, use the UI (with the same pin) to reverse that at a later stage.
Putting the button anywhere but on the glovebox makes non-fanboys seriously question the suitability of the car as a convenience.
GM also has electronic primary door release mechanisms in their vehicles. So if the car has no power, you can’t open the doors from inside.
Granted, because of regulatory requirements there is STILL A MANUAL RELEASE… on the floor, near the chassis sill (and might be driver-seat only). So you save money going to electronic releases, but still have to put a manual one in anyways.
The glovebox is merely annoying (though I can think of edge case situations where it could lead to your death), but with the door release, there are documented instances where it HAS led to someone’s death: https://jalopnik.com/texas-man-and-his-dog-die-after-getting...
I was in a car crash as a child. Two cars caught fire, although I didn't realise it until I got out.
My door was blocked by another vehicle, as was my dad's. He was busy trying to get my sister to open her front passenger door, so he could clamber out after her.
The other rear door was damaged, and I had to pull the latch and then kick it to open it. (Not sure how that would work with one of these small manual release things.)
But parents: if you have a daft car with electronic doors, make sure your children know where the manual release is, both front and rear.
How does this work in a plain-old car with child locks set on the rear doors?
My children had opened the doors while the car was moving at least once before I had to use the child locks; now, as far as I can tell, nobody is getting out of the back doors unless they're opened from the outside.
Uninjured children can probably climb through to the front and use those doors, even if the driver is injured. I would think a 5 year old should manage that? But they would be familiar with how the doors normally open, and probably not an emergency release handle.
Maybe on some supermodern cars (which probably won't open at all after the crash breaks a few computers in there). But in all cars I have owned, the safety switch was mechanical, not electronic. If it's working, you can lower the window and open from the outside. But generally, children old enough to be able to take care of themselves in a car accident should probably have the safety unlocked already.
That's it isn't it; by the time my children are old enough to be able to do this, the child locks won't be on. I guess that's when they're old enough to be told not to open the doors "until it's safe" and actually listen and understand.
In my car they're mechanical, as I assume they still are in most modern, non-hyper-modern cars (like Teslas) so my curiosity was more of a "is there an exit strategy if the child locks are on and it's not possible to exit through the front doors"?
There's no mechanical override inside the boot (trunk) that I'm aware of and the mechanical child locks also have no internal override (that I'm aware of).
I guess in case of emergencies, the windows are the best exit strategy in such a hypothetical situation.
My impression is that all cars are intended to have a safety unlock in the trunk. I assumed it was mostly in case someone gets stuck inside, but maybe it's to escape through back seats in an accident.
That sounds super hard to pull off though, especially if injured and with an adrenaline rush that might help you problem solve but if this stuff is never habitually used it seems like a challenge even with no stress or urgency.
It's an escape room unless you've read the manual closely and practiced...
It might also be good to have a car window breaker tool (or maybe more than one) someplace easy to reach. They usually also include a seat belt cutter so you can get out of the crash has jammed your seat belt mechanism.
Some newer cars have switched from tempered glass to laminated glass for their side windows though which may make these tools useless on your car, so check that first.
Here's an article on these tools [1]. Here's one on the move to laminated glass [2].
Here are some links to window breakers that you might be able to find in stock locally and a couple at Amazon [3,4,5,6,7].
How does electronic release save money (or when is the breakeven), considering the engineering of the electronic / sw system and the new emergency release system vs adapting the usual manual system to a new car model?
Electronic locks create future revenue opportunities! Maybe the next auto industry innovation will be subscription doors. "Upgrade your vehicle from 3 doors to 4, just $19.99/month!"
The model s door latch will electronically release at the beginning of travel, and if that hasn't worked, continuing to move the latch will open the door mechanically.
At a height that is reachable by anyone with the myriad of disabilities that would prevent you from being able to lean down and search the floor near your seat in the middle of the night on an unlit road. Not even bringing in damage to the car.
The OP's comment implies that GM is responsible for this trend, whereas they may simply be trying to meet consumer demand. Many consumers would like their cars to feel as "premium" as a Tesla and they are willing to vote with their wallet.
> GM also has electronic primary door release mechanisms in their vehicles.
They often have them hidden, though.
The other day, a friend of mine had his keys on the table. His car key was the common "oblong box" variety. A small black box, with a couple of buttons.
I asked him if he'd ever had a battery issue, and he said no, but he had nightmares about it.
I then showed him his "hidden" manual key (usually, there's a fingernail slot).
Then, we had to spend some time, looking around his car, for the keyhole.
It turned out to be under the driver's side door handle, covered by a plastic plug.
I was so looking forward to the Rivian suv ever since the truck came out, and then saw the first video of it where it requires navigating menues to AIM THE AIR VENTS.
That Rivian was so bad I feel like it should be illegal. Who the F comes up with this stuff?
Doubt it. It's still a latch but now you need a power release and some wires. Glovebox cover is still made in 1 operation regardless if it have the opening for the latch on front or not, you still need someone to install that latch in the cover, but now you need to trace wires to it.
> The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
> In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
I can fully relate to the criticism expressed, but does the article have to be that filled with expletives? I would argue that it could appeal to a far wider audience if the writer would be able to find a way around this crude use of a language. Less is more.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadI thought GM had jumped the shark when they started leaving the reverse lights on when you park, just to make sure people or cars nearby don’t know whether it’s safe to pass you in the parking lot. This is a whole new level of stupidity.
And with that it makes sense as a safety feature - if the only way to turn those on is go into reverse, people would be tempted to throw the truck in reverse and leave the parking brake on while they jump in the back to look for something. Unfortunately it seems not all of them are locked out as I've seen trucks driving on the freeway with the reverse lights on.
The concept you propose is absolutely preposterous to the point I feel I'm feeding a troll
> Include Reverse Lamps This setting turns the reverse lamps on when you switch the rear lighting zone on. Switch this setting off if you have a backup alarm installed to prevent the reverse lamps from turning on and sounding the alarm when using zone lighting.
(telsa's brake lights are triggered based on deceleration so they constantly flicker when you're just using regen a bit)
Thank the SAE (the de-facto regulators of this space since many laws are just pointers to their specs) for that. There's a spec for triggering brake lights based on how fast the car is decelerating. Depending on your regen setting you're probably right at the threshold.
The article scenarios raise some of the real life issues:
* What if your battery dies, and you have your small emergency charger in the glovebox?
* What if you’re waiting in a turned-off car while your friend or parent or lover pops inside the liquor store, and you need to get, say, your hyper-important pills out of the glove box?
* What if you get pulled over by a cop, and they tell you to turn your car off, like they do, but then you have to explain to the already tense cop that you need to turn your car back on so you can open the fucking glove box door so you can get your documents? ( Depending on the cop and the circumstance, this can only make things worse. )
etc.
I've spent decades on bleeding edge tech .. and I still detest this kind of ill thought through "just because we can" stupidity.
But they still show just how dumb this design is, because it doesn’t fit how people use glove boxes.
Maybe you forgot the /s?
When I go on long trips, my passenger often reads, uses their phone and store these things in the glovebox when we are stopped. It is a convenient storage box right at their disposal so why not use it?
As the other guy said, this is a classic case of "you are holding it wrong".
https://www.amazon.ca/Luxtude-Pack-Car-Safety-Hammer/dp/B087...
There is no way a 90lb, octataraien, is going to rip a seatbelt loose if stuck, or smash her car window by hand, if the power is out, or if underwater.
Yes she can reach the glovebox and get this tool, but not if the thing won't open!
I'm in an Australian rural farming district and a neighbour of mine used something similar when his 4x4 landcruiser was T-boned into a dam back when he was 90 or so (he's pushing 97 ATM).
If you or your mum haven't done this already .. get her a few old seat belts and passenger windows from a wreckers to practice on.
The theory is good but nothing beats a bit of muscle memory practice.
Skid pans, broken road hill climb, basic first aid, accident protocols (both in accident (freeing yourself or not) or as first on scene) etc.
For many cars, it involves popping off the cover around the shifter and holding two tabs out of the way - here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEui4r1AKhg
Also works if you don't have the key, which can be useful.
I love manual transmissions, but I will have to give this up soon. Likely so will you, sadly.
But that’s only somewhat better.
You can buy S3XY buttons to give yourself a physical button for it.
"Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu? Because that would be inconvenient, unintuitive, and doesn't allow quick access?
Then why the fuck would you do this with anything?"
“Because title 49, subtitle B, chapter III, subchapter B, part 393, subpart C, paragraph 393.40 of Federal Safety Regulations requires us to install brakes as specified by subpart B, paragraph 571.105 of the same regulations, which require a pedal. And if those did not exist, then we absolutely would install some other bullshit, make you pay extra for it, and bear no responsibility for it whatsoever.”
Glove box isn’t a safety feature? Do whatevs, land of the free.
My previous car a big lever that the passenger could easily yank in an emergency. No thought required, it's a big level you grab and pull.
By the time you find the little black plastic tab amongst all the other similar black plastic doo-dads, you're dead.
(To be clear, I'm firmly on team mechanical glove boxes.)
From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.
A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.
Problem solved. Dozens of new problems not introduced.
On long road trips with passengers, they often use the glovebox to store things.
When we go on road trips the kids rotate sitting in the passenger seat. They store their books, kindle, phone, etc there as it is a very convenient storage space easily accessible to them.
I recently moved backwards from a CarPlay car to a non-CarPlay car. Even with a very convenient MagSafe phone mount right where the CarPlay screen used to be, I still miss CarPlay. It was just easier and more convenient for controlling phone media, gps, etc.
On the settings app, the choice is between a crappy touchscreen UI and a crappy non-touchscreen UI, so I’m kind of neutral.
I don’t understand the layout sense but at least I’m lucky enough to have buttons.
It has android auto/carplay. To change songs, increase the volume, mute you use buttons on the steering wheel. There is a physical volume up/down knob as well in case the passenger wants to use it and these can be done via the touch screen as well.
They have done an excellent job blending new technology and continuing to use "what works" from the past.
Too many of these touch screens in cars requires accessing menue's and sub-menu's to do basic things that should be on the steering wheel. My ex-wife's Lexus which cost 5x what i paid for my Elantra wont let her access the navigation system unless it is stopped and in park?? I can simply hold a button on the steering wheel to access Siri and state where i want to go. Far too often if you touch the screen on her lexis you get "vehicle is in motion".. Great.. and i'm in the passenger seat confused as to why this is an issue?
this is such a problem that there are instructions on how to override it? https://www.wikihow.com/Override-Lexus-Navigation-Motion-Loc...
perhaps they should have done a better job planning this out before releasing it to the public?
Personally i feel Hyundai provides better "value for your money". By not having the incredibly complicated model and options packages you find in North American cars they keep their costs down and the variations on their products low.
No need to deal with the NA style "you want package A, you need to get packages B and C as well" crap.
Considering this, I don't think I've ever even had to touch the screen since; the wheel is just so nice. The volume knob down in that cluster is also very ergonomic.
This is VERY VERY stupid and TBH dangerous. Should se find herself lost on the highway she would need to leave the highway or stop on the side of the road to access the navigation system??
If you attempt to access the nav system while the vehicle is not stopped it simply displays some sort of "vehicle is in motion" alarm.
My Elantra wont let me use the keyboard to enter an address while the vehicle is in motion, but it will let me use Siri so i can make changes while moving if needed.
This is why I said the system is very stupid.. one would think that a passenger can access the navigation system given they are not driving.
The lesson I took away from this is: Never buy a car with a built-in GPS system.
Android auto/carplay are a much better - They are not likely to hold your car "ransom" for map updates or such, and don't have stupid rules like must be in park.
I like their rotating joyknob implementation, which can be used without looking nor stretching arms, and integrates well with CarPlay as well. It's so good I skip on touch even when touch would be a good fit.
Even their homegrown UI isn't that bad, which is actually praise given the crap automakers can come up with.
Side node: touch is useful for the passenger though, as reaching to the knob can be annoying for the driver, even at a stop.
The latest models go one further - the screen is not touch capable at all. It’s honestly great.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29631/when-car-radio-was...
The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.
The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.
When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.
https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...
how?
Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.
And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.
Tried a quick search and couldn't find it. Is it like the scoll wheel on a mouse? Would be nice to have those on the steering wheel instead of up/down buttons.
Searching for ”steering wheel stalk” seems to bring up entire center shaft assemblies though, while ”whisker” is only referring to the controls.
The new car has a big flashy touchscreen, but there's no way to interact with it without taking a hand off the wheel and looking down below the dashboard line.
I don't know why they can't at least add button-based navigation to the UI.
1. Setting volume to 0 will pause the recording, even though I sometimes want to silently forward through some unwanted parts (intros or ads in podcasts).
2. These knobs are also infinity knobs, I liked to have fixed start and end position with an indicator how loud it's going to be when I switch on. That last part has been taken over by software and probably can't be done reliably any more.
3. On the leftmost, zero position that round knob was also used to switch a radio on or off. It is very convenient to have a single movement to switch music on, and with the same movement adjust the volume, or to lower the volume and while doing so, maybe decide to switch it all off entirely.
Because we hear logarythmic, it then makes the top half almost useless, while in the lower parts it's way too sensitive.
Don’t get me wrong, touchscreen gloveboxes are stupid as hell, but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m being discerning or closed-minded.
It is almost always easier and cleaner to use their HTTPS name=value post interface directly if they officially allow it and support it.
Often you are going to get your payment information from the user in that format anyway, such as via a post from your checkout page, or as a row of named columns when you retrieve on file payment information from your database.
In that case submitting name=value pairs mostly just requires translating the field names from your checkout page or column names from database to the names that the payment processor uses, plus adding a few more name=value pairs.
Going through their language specific SDKs often requires building up some ridiculous object oriented mess.
You're being discerning. And a little over-generous.
I'll counter - as a fellow 'older' one :)
There's a tendency to be over-conciliatory and exercise excessive tolerance towards folly, for fear of being labelled a throwback. Don't minimise the wisdom your age brings.
Some things just get worse, objectively, until a correction occurs. Reality is, there are perverse design incentives and it's also the younger people who are tearing their hair at the madness of gratuitous tech and UX as a cult/ideology.
The last thing I want to do when driving a car is turn my head away from the road.
This seems to be because when you are talking to someone in person there are two things that help offset the risk from the increased distraction of the conversation.
First, your conversational partner being in car provided another set of eyes that might spot something the conversational distraction makes you miss. I personally saw this once where I was driving and started to pull out into an intersection after a stop sign where cross traffic did not have a stop sign and somehow completely missed a car approaching from the passenger side. My friend in the passenger seat saw it and yelled "STOP!" and I immediately hit the brakes.
Second, when you are in situations where you need to devote extra attention to the road such as dealing with heavier traffic or trying to navigate an in person conversation tends to slow down or pause naturally. On the phone the other person has no clue what is going on at the car and so conversational flow control is not as good.
This is a really good UX match, but they should've stopped there for sure.
While I agree things like volume, glovebox release, and other standard functions should stay far away from a touchscreen, I do like that touchscreens have enabled highly customizable options/settings that would be a bit tougher to achieve without a touchscreen.
Or at the very least a digital screen with manual navigation buttons, but in this case, a touchscreen is a bit more convenient (and you usually have to have the car parked to change settings, anyway).
I drive a 12 year old Focus that has just about the right amount of modern functions - such as aircon, bluetooth connection and rear parking sensors.
I guess the problem with cars nowadays is that there isn't much to differentiate between them so all these added features have become a bit of an arms race?
The irony, of course, is seeing all of these fancy Range Rovers and Mercs broken down at the side of the motorway waiting to be towed away because they have become so sophisticated to the point of not being able to fulfil their primary function of getting from point A to point B?
Car companies, like software companies, want to go to a subscription model.
"You can open your glovebox up to 10 times for only $9.99 per month!"
Even for a rental car, I think that's taking it a little too far.
Good automotive quality switches and encoders are expensive. And they don’t make them anymore because market dumped them. See the dwindling alps catalog.
I also hope that you either live in a state where there aren't any CCW permits required or that you have a CCW permit (which during my class, they went on and on about why you shouldn't store a weapon in the glove box).
Regardless - locks on glove boxes have been a thing for a long time. Having a PIN Enabled glove box even for your (imo very stupid) use case isn't enough of an argument to make touch screened glove boxes standard.
I bet I can rip it open in a second. The box itself is all plastic, not steel. A good yank and it will deform.
I can rip the whole console/dash plastic off if I want. It's just plastic tabs holding it in.
The lock only prevents sneaky access.
They also network and know a lot of stuff.
https://youtu.be/cNpGQWtgoRA?t=2m15s
Mechanical hidden latches existed for ages now.
Combination locks have existed for centuries now.
I hope I never meet a Toyota engineer in person, because it would be hard not to do something criminal to them.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0B8RKXK9R/donhosek
You can buy wireless CarPlay/Auto USB dongles for cars that only support cable.
If the attacker already broke into the car, I doubt the glovebox is going to put up much of a fight.
Also, I'm pretty sure the glovebox itself has a lock in a lot of cars.
For your benefit, you'd need to have a thief that somehow can break class (which is suprisingly hard to do if you ever tried it) and then can't defeat a simple latch on a glovebox where they now for sure valuables lie?
Get out of here.
Thief's who break windows to get into cars carry tools.. your glovebox is NOT secure.
Lastly, you seem unaware that most car thief's don't break the windows because this often leads to their capture.
Thieves will find a way.
When controlling the light, temperature or others from touch-screen, I need to wait those animations and a slight delay after touch the trigger.
What about form follows function?
Often designers privilege form over function.
Examples: lots of silly architecture, and the fact that my kitchen countertops are tiled.
Anyway, you don't have "a discreet manual release" on actual implementation of that crap, so yeah that's the point: you could and you should have a manual release. At which point the touchscreen insanity for that would not make sense and would disappear.
They do ask if you want to update now or wait + tell you that the car won’t be available for x amount of minutes.
It's a very software idea to ship things unfinished and fix them later. At best it's annoying, in a car it's dangerous.
I expect when I buy a car that the manufacturers have spent time thinking about the layout, and they've got it the best they can, ironed out the bugs etc. I don't want to come in in the middle of an iterative process. I don't want buttons moving, I don't want 'improvements', I want to buy an actual functioning car from day one. One that the manufacturer is happy to stand by from day one, and they don't feel entitled to 'improve'.
But I agree about the horribleness of the UI changes - I still hate whatever the UI update was that went out like a year ago and haven't figured out why they actually did it.
Also, who is buying such expensive cars without any idea how they operate?
Seriously I would probably remove the antenna or the sim card for the car's data connection.
The less used something is, the more apparent it must be how to use it.
If something is used once a year, most users won't know what myriad of menus to follow. Some won't even know it is a menu option, and may hunt all over the car for a hidden release.
That said, the hood release has been on the driver side somewhere, under the dash, in every car I own.
With a physical release, you can often hunt for a thing, much faster than a dozen submenus.
The newer VW models (Golf, ID series, etc.) had touch controls on the steering wheels instead of physical buttons. Of course what happened is what you anticipated. Bad customer feedback made them reverse that for future models.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43296926
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tesla+yoke+steering+wheel+controls...
Is there any decent automotive company remaining?
We are getting their ev next the Solterra which is a shared venture with Toyota.
Eg. you get CarPlay, but also physical climate controls and volume knobs. Automatic cruise control & lane centering, but you can disable certain parts of it that you don’t like.
And the Outbacks are some of the safest cars out there in terms of “deaths per million miles” statistics according to the IIHS [0], probably due to their over-engineered frames and engine-dropping crumple zones
[0]: https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...
That doesn't mean you can't put a touch button on the actual glovebox.
Use the UI (with a pin) to lock the glovebox so that it doesn't open when the glovebox button is touched, use the UI (with the same pin) to reverse that at a later stage.
Putting the button anywhere but on the glovebox makes non-fanboys seriously question the suitability of the car as a convenience.
Granted, because of regulatory requirements there is STILL A MANUAL RELEASE… on the floor, near the chassis sill (and might be driver-seat only). So you save money going to electronic releases, but still have to put a manual one in anyways.
The glovebox is merely annoying (though I can think of edge case situations where it could lead to your death), but with the door release, there are documented instances where it HAS led to someone’s death: https://jalopnik.com/texas-man-and-his-dog-die-after-getting...
My door was blocked by another vehicle, as was my dad's. He was busy trying to get my sister to open her front passenger door, so he could clamber out after her.
The other rear door was damaged, and I had to pull the latch and then kick it to open it. (Not sure how that would work with one of these small manual release things.)
But parents: if you have a daft car with electronic doors, make sure your children know where the manual release is, both front and rear.
My children had opened the doors while the car was moving at least once before I had to use the child locks; now, as far as I can tell, nobody is getting out of the back doors unless they're opened from the outside.
(I was 11.)
My children are only 1yo and 3yo so younger than your story. I don't imagine needing the child locks when they're that age.
There's no mechanical override inside the boot (trunk) that I'm aware of and the mechanical child locks also have no internal override (that I'm aware of).
I guess in case of emergencies, the windows are the best exit strategy in such a hypothetical situation.
That sounds super hard to pull off though, especially if injured and with an adrenaline rush that might help you problem solve but if this stuff is never habitually used it seems like a challenge even with no stress or urgency.
It's an escape room unless you've read the manual closely and practiced...
Some newer cars have switched from tempered glass to laminated glass for their side windows though which may make these tools useless on your car, so check that first.
Here's an article on these tools [1]. Here's one on the move to laminated glass [2].
Here are some links to window breakers that you might be able to find in stock locally and a couple at Amazon [3,4,5,6,7].
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/reviews/29811/best-car-window-break...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/aaa-laminated-glass-emerg...
[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Auto-Drive-2-IN-1-Rescue-Tool-Sea...
[4] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hyper-Tough-3-In-1-LED-Flashlight...
[5] https://www.oreillyauto.com/detail/c/custom-accessories/cust...
[6] https://www.amazon.com/RESQME-Original-Emergency-Keychain-Se...
[7] https://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Escape-Breaker-Reflective-S...
Not to worry, I keep one in the glove box.
Heck, "not buying a car" is one of those very few decisions I took when I was young which resulted in me not being in debt for the rest of my life.
It sounds like you're saying it's okay to do stupid stuff as long as someone popular does it first.
They often have them hidden, though.
The other day, a friend of mine had his keys on the table. His car key was the common "oblong box" variety. A small black box, with a couple of buttons.
I asked him if he'd ever had a battery issue, and he said no, but he had nightmares about it.
I then showed him his "hidden" manual key (usually, there's a fingernail slot).
Then, we had to spend some time, looking around his car, for the keyhole.
It turned out to be under the driver's side door handle, covered by a plastic plug.
--We should not mention it, and give the idea to the OEMs...
That Rivian was so bad I feel like it should be illegal. Who the F comes up with this stuff?
Is a robolatch cheaper, compared to a manual latch? Is there a cost saving for the manufacturer?
And with every oil change at the dealer, you unlock a cupholder. Get an extended warranty and unlock 2 driver and 2 passenger cupholders.
Doubt it. It's still a latch but now you need a power release and some wires. Glovebox cover is still made in 1 operation regardless if it have the opening for the latch on front or not, you still need someone to install that latch in the cover, but now you need to trace wires to it.
Doubtful, but as an extra "feature" they can probably use it to justify increasing the price of the car by more than it cost to add it.
Granted, to me, this would REDUCE the value of the car, but car makers are operating in fantasyland
> In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”