I’m apparently unique in this, but I prefer touch screens. Not because I fail to realize the value of buttons, but I don’t find sitting in an airplane cockpit with a few hundred buttons that much better than a screen that is contextual. I like having a few buttons for common tasks like audio controls, and voice control for most else. The rest of the stuff can be on a touch screen for all I care. I get others prefer buttons - but it’s not monolithically preferred.
Concur, I am a minimalist and I for one love clean interfaces. If the argument is ergonomics, majority of stuff should be controllable with voice. I often set temperature / enable seat heaters using voice.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I can’t imagine using a voice command to do something as simple as turn on a seat heater. That feels like way more effort (and honestly more distracting) than one or two button presses that I don’t have to look away from the road for. Don’t you have to hit a button to start the voice command anyway?
Sure, but you have to already know what the voice command is to turn on the seat heater and reproduce that every time, versus being able to look around and just... see an appropriate button.
And that's before getting into the mess of misheard commands that even Google and Apple still can't get right despite having gigantic teams working on it 24/7.
As is mentioned in a parallel comment this will change dramatically as LLM are introduced to voice assistants. LLM are much more robust in inferring semantic meaning from noisy language. As long as they don’t ask the LLM to solve partial differential equations and confine it’s originating prompt aggressively to only interpret voice text transcriptions to a finite set of actions, it’ll be amazing.
I don't doubt that voice recognition will continue to improve, but doesn't it seems kind of ridiculous for automotive manufacturers to pour millions of dollars into R&D (or spend millions licensing someone else's software) and add much more expensive processors to their cars at mass scale to solve an already solved problem? I can already adjust the climate control and other basic things without this sort of interface, and I don't have to look away from the road to do it.
If it sells more cars with more profit I fully expect them to, yes. I’d also note that wiring and layout of all those buttons as well as the manual work necessary to make a static user interface is fairly expensive. The slap a general purpose processor and use the existing AV in the car to control everything greatly simplifies both assembly and supply chain. Perhaps it’s counter intuitive, but buttons aren’t nearly as cheap as you might imagine, and computing resources are decreasing in cost rapidly. Finally LLM and voice recognition model computation costs are falling dramatically - you don’t need a GPT-4 to improve voice recognition outcomes, most of the smaller system scaled models would just as well. The more advanced models are only necessary for significantly more advanced semantic tasks.
I think "airplane cockpit" is an exaggeration. Sure early 2000's Mercedeses even had a phone keypad[1], because, hey, everyone needed that front and center, but by around 2010 most manufacturers figured out iDrive-style interfaces (maybe a better name would be iPod-style menus with a scroll wheel you click to enter submenus)
I've just upgraded from a very old Toyota to a new Mazda. There are so many buttons in my new car and so much more technology it is honestly a little intimidating.
Most of the buttons are for features I've never had before. There are buttons for Bluetooth (I think for receiving phone calls while driving and turning up and down audio volume etc) located on the steering wheel, There are a bunch of buttons for cruise control and I think lane keeping assist also on the steering wheel - I've never had a car with cruise control before and honestly I am a little intimidated to try it out. It seems so complicated. There are some buttons for the Front cross traffic sensors it took me a while to figure out what was going on with these. My car would randomly beep at me while at intersections before I finally figured out what was causing it. Then there is buttons to toggle the parking sensors and toggle between the front / reverse parking cameras.
On top of that quite a lot of things in the car are automated now too - headlights will automatically turn on, wipers automatically switch on etc.
My old car had a radio and heating/AC that was it. I've had the car for just under a month and I've already had to consult the manual 2 or 3 times because I've forgotten what certain buttons do.
If I’m fully engaged with a device a touch screen is great, especially when that device needs to do more things than you could reasonably make physical controls for.
But when I’m driving and need to adjust something, I don’t want to disconnect with driving to dive into a touch screen.
A physical control, in the same location means muscle memory can take over. And as we learnt decades ago, the controls themselves need to be physically distinct so that you can tell them apart without looking or thinking too hard.
I don’t think touchscreens need to disappear from cars, there’s a wealth of settings/config/etc they could be useful for.
But the core driving aids and temperature/volume control need to be physical.
Also, with a physical control, I find that I can glance over to locate the control, return my eyes to the road, then reach over blindly to touch it. That doesn't work with a touchscreen at all.
1. Reach over, grasp the screen under the target area using muscle memory.
Screen is strong as hell, you could put your full weight on it and it wouldn’t budge.
2. While continuing to hold the edge of the screen, move thumb to hover over suspected target area using muscle memory.
3. Glance and tap in one moment.
Done.
Not that I ever need to do this. Pretty much everything I need to do has a button. (And this in a car that the internet geniuses including here on HN are convinced does not have buttons).
If steps 1, 2, and 3 sounded distracting or hard, see again the part where I said “not that I ever need to do this” and why.
Voice control is a bit of a nonstarter as the speech recognition (perhaps combined with the weird acoustics of a moving vehicle) has never worked for everyone; eg my father's accent never seems to work in his Honda. My car is from 2014 and definitely has more buttons than necessary. I don't mind infrequently used controls behind a touchscreen, like do the controls to set the time on the clock really need dedicated buttons? But the issue as I see it is that whats frequently used for some is infrequently used for others. For example, I never take my car's drive mode out of eco, but my sister switches to sport when she goes up big hills. Once you get out of the category of obviously frequently controlled things (gear selector, climate control, media controls), you really have to start making judgement calls and picking and choosing who you're going to make uncomfortable. For example, do you prioritize a radio selector? Some people never use the AM/FM radio on their car. Some people only listen to AM/FM radio and never connect their smartphone.
I never liked voice recognition until I had to test it myself at my job, and seen firsthand just how much better it has gotten over the past few years.
I think voice commands would be much more widely used if they hadn’t rolled it out so soon, ironically. But most of us learned early on that it sucks and never tried it again.
> Once you get out of the category of obviously frequently controlled things (gear selector, climate control, media controls), you really have to start making judgement calls and picking and choosing who you're going to make uncomfortable.
User-assignable buttons might mitigate that. With profiles for individual drivers.
But perhaps those features would confuse some users even more
Speech recognition has mostly gotten over the accent hump, and with LLMs you can bridge the gap.
For fun I tried an experiment, in one context I told GPT to mangle sentences in a way that a speech-to-text might, and in another I told GPT to transform sentences into commands for a car's various ECUs.
Results:
"Torn the hair conditioning gown to 65 decrees." => works
"Can yew plays make it warmer in hear" => works
"It's weigh two, uh how due yew say, it's way to frayed in hear!" => works (!)
It actually understood a mis-transcribed French word in the middle of a series of English commands:
> I apologize for the confusion. I interpreted "frayed" as an incorrect transcription of "froid" (which means "cold" in French) considering the context of the sentence and the surrounding phrase "how do you say." Thus, I replaced "frayed" with "cold.""
It even realized that someone inserting filler like "how do you say" indicated they may be looking for a word in another language:
> The phrase "how do you say" is often used by someone who is trying to recall a word or phrase in another language, or when they are unsure about the correct term to use in the current language. In this context, it signaled that there might be a language-related issue, leading me to consider that "frayed" might be an incorrect transcription of a word in another language, such as "froid" for "cold" in French.
-
And
And in case you think it just guessed on past commands, I was able to replicate this in a fresh context window with no hints about what commands it should accept.
Voice is really about to stop sucking for the first time in the history of tech: It can go from "I'm tired of this shit man" to knowing it should change the current song.
100% agree. While they can’t do partial differential equations, they are very good at discerning intent in even very noisy language. Taking a free form language instruction and encoding in a structured form is specifically a powerful capability here. I have a feeling voice assistants are about to become extraordinarily powerful.
I'm disappointed that your comment has gotten downvoted. Hard to see why it should be, since it's just your opinion, and you even backed it up with a reason.
I do use the touch screen, but when doing complex driving tasks I don’t. I don’t think I specifically am advocating for touch screens as the singular interface. I’m advocating that buttons are a terrible singular interface. In fact, I use the steering wheel buttons extensively while driving. It’s only when I want something not core to the act of driving, like changing the song or some other ancillary function, do I go to voice command. The touch screen I use primarily when I’m stopped or as a passenger. But I’d rather that than have a hundred buttons decorating the center console. It’s not a reasonable user interface for things that aren’t necessary to have at a quick finger index.
On the downvoting, don’t be obtuse. On HN people downvote if they disagree with an opinion. I don’t particularly take much notice of either direction on the voting. Internet points don’t count for much, and I’d rather enjoy my discourse than scrounge for points.
I'm not being obtuse when I say you'd have better odds if you stopped saying "hundred(s) of buttons".
My car has less than 25 buttons on the center console, plus three dials for climate control. If you removed the buttons dealing with CDs it would be more like 15.
This isn't about the complete removal of touch screens or moving to purely buttons. It's about providing a better balance between physical buttons for driving essentials and then having the rest under a usable touch screen interface.
There was a company (Tactus Technology - now defunct) that had a "morphing" touch screen wherein the surface of the screen could be raised up to provide tactile feedback about "where" your fingers are on the screen (e.g. 'raised' keys for a keyboard [0]).
I recall this being "the next big thing" in touch screens about 10 years ago but the tech didn't seem to go anywhere. For small screens such as your phone it was probably overkill but cars seemed like the perfect use case if they could have gotten the technology right.
Knowning little about the specs required for automotive grade it could be that the tech couldn't handle the vibration, temp extremes/changes and other hardships that car parts encounter. Just a theory.
Why is it overkill for phones? I spend way more time looking at my phone than I ever look at my car's AC controls. Ofc, my car's AC controls are physical buttons and I've had the car a while, so I don't need to look at them, but I think my point remains.
There were other groups that were looking at how piezoelectrics in a surface could create vibrational patterns that the finger interprets as texture. Apple even through some money at this avenue at one point but I haven't heard anything in ages.
Part of the problem of textured screens is that you have to be able to touch the interface without activating anything. That's newer enough tech that the prices are probably just now coming down.
I think morphing screens are impractical. But that doesn't mean we have to give up on tactile affordances altogether. I think there's a real missed opportunity for Tesla, with their floating touchscreen. The natural way to adjust the temperature and other controls in the bottom bar is to put your fingers behind the screen to hold your hand steady and use your thumb to press the buttons. The back of the screen is currently a featureless flat surface, but it could easily have tactile features for your fingers to find. If you could feel where your fingers are relative to the screen then you could hit the bottom bar controls without looking. And it wouldn't ruin the minimalist aesthetic because it's all hidden from view behind the screen.
Nothing wrong with touchscreens, just don't rely exclusively on them for basic vehicle operations! Thoughtless trend-following caused all these UX complaints in the first place, and it sounds like the automakers are hoping it will fix them as well. It won't.
Yeah but being the only one to not follow a trend when the trend goes wrong also has a huge advantage. I feel like it balances out. Ultimately, designers just need to be more thoughtful and purposeful about the choices they make
I also find it really difficult to wrap my head around how Tesla's turn signal buttons on their "yoke" could possibly have made it through any testing. Did none of the people they tested it on use turn signals?? Did they just not test at all? It seems like the smallest effort of UX testing would've immediately pointed out how terrible this is
Tbh it feels like ultimately it's just companies deciding to skimp out on design. Tight deadlines and lazy cost-cutting measures probably contribute
"Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls."
That surprises me. I seem to recall having read something about the difficulty Tesla had in getting their fancy screens and how much they cost. $50 for a tiny one maybe.
Teslas have 17" screens, and no one made an automotive-grade one at that size,
so it's no wonder they had problems sourcing it. But at scale, I could see the 7" properly automotive-grade screens being available for $50 when there are some availabile for less than that on Amazon.
Even my friends group thinks that Alibaba is a valid source of parts for large scale manufacturing. I've just given up on having this argument. Good luck.
Part of having a working relationship with a vendor is that you can ask nicely that they don't sell your designs to competitors or market their own knockoffs. Not to mention you can call them up and say, "I need 10k extra of those next month" and they don't just laugh in your face or let it go to voicemail and pretend they never got it.
Don't know how recently you've been in the market, but the days when you could do that in automotive are long gone. Now you call a supplier and they're like "I might have something in a year, maybe" or "I have a few dozen, take it or leave it". The sketchy chinese vendors and the expensive specialty vendors are the only ones with any volume left in common parts, but obviously the former lack any sort of plausible automotive qualifications and paying the latter needs higher approvals than engineers can give.
One thing I’ve learned about vendors over a few decades of professional life and also little vignettes from my father’s job, is that most vendors only wake up when the checkbook is coming out or going back in your pocket. There’s a whole theatrical thing you have to do to be an effecting ombudsman for your company that is effective but that I resent.
I think we can see the Checkbook Effect in how Apple has navigated for the last fifteen or so years. And maybe a bit of the Stanford Effect (anyone can get in if there’s a building named after their family, especially if it’s still under construction).
Hey we want this part
oh we might be able to make 100k a year
Umm… we need at least five million
Gee, sorry.
What if we loaned you some money to build a new factory?
They sourced screens that could not survive the internal temperatures of cars and just rolled with it from what I remember. It was like an industrial screen not one made for automotive.
> It’s more like using an iPad than using an infotainment system in a car.
And this is whole problem here, we shouldn't be doing it while driving.
We're trying to solve problems that haven't existed few years ago.
Touchscreens in cars in this form should just die
Having designed electronics, I absolutely appreciate how much a pain in the butt buttons are (maybe that's why they are called buttons!). It isn't just the cost... Each button requires mechanical design and tooling, graphics, manufacturing, etc etc. Plus no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" or tactical properties.
But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens!
Funniest button story.. one time we were working on a panel which includes a two way rocker switch to lift or lower a mechanism. Version 1 was backwards. Well, the electrical team swapped the wire harness to fix it, and the graphics team swapped the label markings. Version 2 was then also backwards (but flipped).
What do you mean by no one is satisfied with the feel?
I suppose you actually mean it is hard to get a strong majority?
One potential solution would be to make a modular system. You could even “sell” it as a “skinnable” DUI (driver user interface; why didn’t this acronym catch on???)
I think no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" in cheaper cars. The BMW iDrive controller feels fantastic to use, as does the Audi MMI (to a slightly lesser extent) (...before they canned it)
The bill for replacement when it dies, of course, will be 3000 dollars in parts and 1000 in labor.
And the new one will still be just as slow as Android tablets in 2010 were.
Pro Tip: So do ER Doctors and Insurance Companies.
What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a finger, but you could also just hit pagedwn tactile button.
Because they're not really a safety issue in an aircraft.
When you're in cruise flight, things happen slowly. Heck, on a pre-touchscreen general aviation GPS unit, you dial waypoints in one letter at a time with a single rotary knob. As annoying as the touchscreen is, it's still an improvement - and you still get your single rotary knob in case things are turbulent, so it's no really any worse.
Takeoff/landing is a different story. Things happen quickly there. But you're also not messing with the avionics during those phases of flight.
As the saying goes: aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order. Touchscreens are mostly the realm of navigation and (sometimes) communication.
On gliders it's common to have buttons on top of the stick. There are <enter> and <escape> like buttons and a 4-way button emulating the arrow keys.
Using these to navigate menus still demands a whole lot attention. It just isn't very predictable.
I drove a friend's Audi and it had the best input method possible, down on the center console next to the gear shift there was a little nub joystick that allowed 8 way movement on the map, the collar of the nub rotated to cycle around the menus, and you pushed it down to click. There was a back button next to it on the console.
This actually made me consider an Audi, except for the fact that by the time I drove it this was an older model, and that input had long been superseded by a pure touchscreen.
Yeah, those have been around for decades on all kinds of old specialised keyboards and equipment... The real reason stuff trends towards touch screens is people trying to keep the BOM cost low without considering cost to the user.
A generic touch screen with dynamic controls is cheaper than a larger custom made keyboard or physical controls. It's the same reason we end up with power inefficient IoT devices that could be made with very cheap and efficient microcontrollers, but developing for those requires expensive expertise, so we end up with huge powerful ARM cores because it's more general and easier to code.
The common factor in both of these issues is cost to manufacturer vs cost to user (power, safety etc).
I believe what the OP meant by hatred is that ER doctors and Insurance Companies need to clean up after auto accidents caused by drivers who were distracted by mandatory touchscreen use (which is ironic when mobile phone use, and distracted driving in general, is outlawed in many jurisdictions.)
I am sure ER doctors hate to use touchscreens as well, but that's for another thread.
I did a project once for a touchless interface using a Leap Motion (remember those?) for use in operating theatres. The software was a 3D viewer for MRI scans. The surgeons attached to the project were excited, because currently they operated the software by telling the nurses how to rotate and zoom, which didn't work so great.
In the end it ended up not working well enough (the Leap Motion would often give glitchy positioning data), but I believe it's the way forward.
Touch screens are also pretty terrible for older people. Vision and fine motor skills both degenerate. Without tactile feedback, it is hard for older people to determine if they've successfully clicked on something. Gestures can be tough to teach and successfully implement without error.
Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV).
I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.
Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).
The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.
I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?
It's not just you. Most touch screens will have some sort of feedback (visual, tactile or auditory) to let you know when you've pressed a button. Those touch buttons on screens and monitors don't.
Yes, I'd love to have the touch bar as long as still had the function keys. It was not terribly useful, but it was very expedient for stuff like controlling volume.
I thought previously and how I'd be fine with it, but then realised its only tolerable when I can just completely ignore it and at that point I'd rather the cost go in to a part I do use. The 2021 model improved so many parts.
I rest my finger by the Esc key for some reason (vi use maybe) and every once in a while the screen would suddenly fade to black because it was registering a long key press on the Touch Bar[1] for the screen dim control. After a few times I realized I could customize the Touch Bar to only have a few necessary keys and keep them on the far right.
Just another case of inadvertent button activation for touch screens.
About touch buttons, I have seen once a lift with touch buttons for controls.
For accessibility, the floor were also written in Braille. I thought to myself: "nice, they thought about vision impaired people".
Then, a friend of mine, which has completely lost vision and can read Braille, jokingly said to me when he arrived: "Trying to find the right button, I probably send the lift to all floors!"
That’s funny. And sad. Vision impaired people have really been taken by a rollercoaster with modern tech. First the touch screen which is useless (not sure if that’s the case still?). But then tech companies invested massively in voice interfaces for completely unrelated reasons, which I assume, is a godsend.
> Touch screens are also pretty terrible for older people. Vision and fine motor skills both degenerate. Without tactile feedback, it is hard for older people to determine if they've successfully clicked on something. Gestures can be tough to teach and successfully implement without error.
And I've seen that when people are holding their phones in a living room. The cars are vibrating (normally), and the user is trying to drive, with one hand on the wheel, etc.
I’m not THAT old (although grew up without touchscreens) and touch screens are horrible when I’m in motion in the car. No chance in hell I’m able to hit what I what when there’s even a slightest minor bump. And with the state of USA highways it means - all the time.
Especially, as designers think it’s cool to have tiny buttons on the touch screen.
I am that old, and I don't need to be in motion to hit the issue. Tactile buttons feedback through your finger that your finger is indeed in the correct location, and when you get that positive feedback you click the button.
Touchscreens don't provide this. If your finger comes into contact in the wrong place, the wrong thing happens. So your first contact must be absolutely correct.
Your arm is extended. Your hand/finger partially blocks your view of the button. Your depth perception of that flat plane with fluid reference points is not good. Bang! The wrong app completely opens.
Now you have to spend time dealing with the consequences of that your error, even if you don't feel inclided to try again. Instead of rewinding to re-listen to the last 20 seconds of a podcast because traffic demanded your attention, you are now listening to the radio and have set an alarm for midnight.
I agree with you on the tactile angle, but the Tesla touch screen offers larger font sizes for people with presbyopia which is something that physical controls cannot offer.
Too many buttons is a problem, but how about a few physical buttons whose labels are screens (high-res LCD, e-ink, whatever) and change according to the mode.
The issue is needing to look away from the road. If I don’t know what the button will do right now because it arbitrarily changes, that’s just as much of a problem.
Good point. I suppose each mode could be color-coded, so the driver might identify the mode and function in their peripheral vision, or at least notice that the mode changed.
That’s still suboptimal but better, IF the labels never change. I’ll quickly learn that rear defrost is button 2 on screen 1 or whatever, but if some software update changes that I’ll be pissed.
I have an older Mercedes (2004) that is like this. There’s a screen, but it’s not touch. There is are columns of physical, pushable buttons at the left and right sides, and the labels appear on the screen next to the buttons.
fighter planes actually do that. In relation to another comment, the pilots memorise sequences of button presses, which slightly negates my own comment. I remember reading a book where a harrier pilot describes a systems pod which upgraded the plane. Unfortunately, the RAF couldn't afford the software upgrade to make the button labels match the actual function of the buttons so the pilots had to memorise every sequence.
Cockpit UI like on the F/A-18 are called Multifunction Displays or MFDs, but wouldn't they be terrible UI as well, until you memorize the sequence of buttons to do something? You'd still have to look at the display to see what the submenu options are.
Apparently they're available for flight sim games, if I had the time and know-how, it'd be neat to bu one (e.g. on AliExpress) and integrate it to my car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gysmVPYX2Fc
Planes have the nice feature that 99% of the time there's nothing but air around you. With the exception of features used in a critical moment (takeoff, landing, etc), the UI of planes can afford to be far worse than a car!
The way they're implemented, I've found them pretty intuitive.
Avionics manufacturers are generally pretty serious about Ux. Or at least the test pilots berate them into caring, when I was in Flight Test Engineering I remember a lot of "spicy" feedback about avionics usability issues getting sent back to the manufacturers lol
Fighters like the Hornet use HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) which places buttons, 4-way switches, or other controls (mini joysticks, etc.) under most of the fingers. So pilots have something like 30+ commands that they can perform at any time without moving their hands. Interacting with MFD's would mostly happen when the plane is cruising straight and level, probably on autopilot.
It would be best not to change what the buttons do very much. It could add unnecessary levels of confusion. "OK, I think I hit the wrong button, and now I'm not sure what mode the system is in... better look down at the controls while I drive along at 60 MPH."
Maybe I'm biased. My old car has a great UI. No touchscreen, just a panel of physical knobs and buttons for media and climate control. The phone integration could be better, but that would really just mean a place to put my phone (without clipping it onto a vent) and a stereo that lets me play/pause/skip songs on my phone using the car's physical media controls.
My 2020 Mazda has a touchscreen (that weirdly only accepts input below 10km/h, sorry passengers), but pretty much all the important controls are available as tactile buttons / knobs. The heads-up display is also nice for checking your speed without taking your eyes off the road
My 2018 Mazda3 has the knob and a touchscreen. However the touchscreen is so poor I didn’t even know it was touch-sensitive for quite a while after I got it
Hyundai I'm looking at has 2 customizable buttons. It's a cool idea, except they really limit what you can make the buttons do (I was hoping it would be possible to use them for climate controls but that's not an option)
That sounds like an excellent idea. Operating a fighter aircraft (flying is just one of the tasks the pilot does) is very complicated. So i'm assuming the manufacturers optimise for the ideal combination of versatility and accessiblity while leaving little margin for error. In the middle of a dogfight and flying at mach 2.5 a pilot has very little time to glance at the screen and press the correct button and cannot afford to make a mistake.
I'm not sure if it's the touch screen in my car that I love or the rest of the control system.
But for me the whole thing is set and forget, if I need to adjust volume it's a scroll wheel on my steering wheel -- air conditioning I never really need to adjust. Sat nav -- yes I need to adjust this occasionally, but it's either voice command or park and change the destination with a keyboard -- but I don't see this being different in any other car? (Maybe a scroll wheel with recent destinations?)
I actually don't understand what it is that drivers are changing so regularly that they need to take their eyes off the road and look at a screen or twiddle a knob?
My signular gripe is that there is no physical button to open the glove-box, which is an annoying but very infrequent occurance.
> My signular gripe is that there is no physical button to open the glove-box, which is an annoying but very infrequent occurance.
That's really weird. Button nothing, why is there not just a handle on the glove box? Who thought it was a good idea to hook that up to the computer? Does that mean you can't open the glove box unless the car is turned on?
Tesla's are always on, there is no off button. The glove box is software controlled so you can restrict access to it in valet mode, or set a pin to open it. In the latest update you can configure the long press on the steering wheel button to open it.
IMHO, don't blame touch screens, blame bad UI design.
My touch screen annoyance: "oops, it detected a swipe instead of a press, because the car just went through a bump!". Or, "Oops! I accidentally pressed cancel instead of back button, now my map navigation is gone!!!".
Design the UI well, so that drivers can't screw things up easily.
I agree some drivers prefer real buttons, I disagree that "Drivers hate touchscreens" as it implies 100%. I manage fine with just a touch screen and a few basic controls on the steering wheel.
If you're driving you shouldn't be fiddling with anything extraneous. Lights/windshield wipers should be automatic in 99% of circumstances and if they're not then that's what needs to be improved.
You shouldn't need to reach for anything because if you do that's already either a design fail or operator error.
I recently test drove a Mazda, and while I’ve seen people online complain about their “commander knob” and lack of touch screen, I liked it pretty well. Screen up further on the dashboard is nice for glancing at maps.
It's why I left Subaru and skipped on Toyota to get my CX-5. It does take a little too much attention sometimes, but it's definitely better than the touchscreen systems overall
I have a new miata, the touch screen is disabled above a certain speed. It's the worse of both worlds. Touch screen sometimes, jog wheel other times. The cursor on the screen lags so you're looking at the screen trying to figure out what is highlighted vs taking 1 second to touch the button you want. It's so bad I ripped out the screen and installed a 3rd party wireless carplay screen before the first car payment. It's 1000% better now.
Their new models allow you to enable it all the time (CX-50, I assume CX-90 and the upcoming CX-70), which I do think is a good idea.
Not even just for the driver to be touching it, but if you have a passenger you can let them deal with putting in directions or managing your audio and the wheel is a lot less obvious than a touchscreen to someone who isn't familiar with it.
And as a driver, it felt like there were some things where it'd be easier to just touch the screen too. Like for the buttons scattered around the corner of Maps, scrolling through a list or a grid is easy to navigate, random stuff all over the screen you'll have to learn the order.
I'll usually be driving with a visually impaired passenger, so it'd be more like "lean up close to the screen to try and find where the little selection highlight is and then reach backward to try and use the knob to move it around" so for us in particular a touchscreen would be easier. Realistically I would just end up doing everything myself instead, but a touchscreen option would be nice.
Apparently the Japanese market version for 2024 is getting a 10.25" screen which I'm guessing is the same part as the CX-50. That could mean adding touch for CarPlay, but none of the articles mention it one way or the other. Maybe I'll wait and see about the US update before making any buying decisions.
Let's say like the FAA now, if an auto has a distracting touchscreen interface, a navigator in the passenger seat is mandatory, and must be well-trained on the user interface. That legislation should go over like a lead balloon!
A have a 2016 Mazda3. The infotainment is useless, so I just leave it on the home page usually. I've ordered a CarPlay retrofit that uses the stock screen, wondering if the enabling/disabling behaviour will be the same it CarPlay.
All hail Mazda.
I love the spinny wheel in my cx5.
The screen far away from arm reach is something they deliberately did because they argue you shouldn’t touch a screen while driving, you should only use the knob as that minimizes time you don’t look at the road.
Personally, I'd rather have the rest of the HVAC controls on buttons/knobs (for that matter, I'd rather have the temperature on knobs instead of buttons), and the screen is really low. The top edge of a map on that screen is going to be under the bottom edge of where a more dashboard integrated screen would be.
actually that seems fine. there's probably >30 physical buttons in that picture, not including the touch screen. and it has physically buttons for volume and climate. I'mn pretty happy for most other things to go into the screen.
The Mazda software works ok with the wheel, but using something like CarPlay with it is almost impossible without taking your eyes off the road for a long time. It’s worse than touch-screens in that respect: what will the spinning knob select next on a screen which has three separate panes?
Yes, it's terrible, CarPlay was designed to with touch in mind. You spend more time looking at the screen to figure out where your "cursor" is. I found the Tesla touch screen to be much safer to use.
I think one of the most frustrating aspects of this whole kerfluffle is the automakers' longstanding willingness to ignore customers and double down at any pushback. It's downright stupid that it has taken this level of screaming from customers to roll back a design choice that should never have been made.
It’s all about the bottom line. Touch screens consolidate a ton of otherwise expensive switch gear. Going back to physical knobs and buttons means going back to paying for engineering, assembling, testing, etc.
From a product and even financial standpoint, the trade-off doesn’t make sense. All the litigation that could occur due to accidents caused by a less safe design plus the reputational damage that an inexcellent product could cause to the brand sounds so expensive to me.
It seems carmakers have situated themselves fairly comfortably regarding liability. If a car hits someone in "the road" the victim immediately becomes a "jay walker" and it's their fault. Otherwise the driver made a mistake. Otherwise the DOT is at fault. It's nearly impossible to blame automakers for the damage their products do.
A good example of this might be the lack of intuitive feedback regarding headlights. More and more, dash lights stay on despite exterior lights being off, giving the driver the impression that everything is normal. IIRC several countries including Canada are moving to require exterior lights to be on at all times now, but it boggles my mind that such a simple to understand phenomenon with so many straightforward solutions has to be solved through regulation instead of the automakers just, you know… doing better.
Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.
It's great that you mention jay walkers because this wasn't a thing before cars. When cars first started appearing on the road there was a huge backlash because kids played in the street and people cross the street and they got hit by cars and people got pissed off. Car clubs started popularizing the term 'jay walker' and shaming people for it in order to reduce the backlash against cars and drivers for hitting people that were using the street. After a while it became normalized that people in the street are at fault and drivers are not.
> Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.
I'm inclined to think it shouldn't. Cars are highly regulated. There are a great many very specific standards cars have to meet to be legal to sell for road use in most countries. There's stuff we all know about like crash testing for occupants, and more recently for pedestrians, but there's also weird stuff like cars not being allowed to have required lighting on movable bodywork in the US market[0].
I'd set a much higher bar for defective product claims when the design of the product is already subject to a great deal of specific regulation. Courts do not have expertise in car design and are probably worse at specifying design standards for cars than regulatory agencies staffed with experts and dedicated to that task. As you mention, there's a regulatory solution to the problem you're describing already in use in some countries.
[0] Exceptions to that one are occasionally granted on a case by case basis
If it was just about the bottom line, and consumers actually cared enough to be willing to pay for physical controls, then why wouldn’t there be plenty of options on the market?
It ain't just cars. I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example; nearly everyone I know who owns a TV also owns some device that not only does everything the TV's "smarts" can do but does them consistently better and can be trivially replaced should that ever change.
In both cases it's a cost/finance reason. "Smart" TVs can profit from selling customer data and touch screen cars save some cost over tactile interfaces.
Everyone always says this, but how much do they actually make per unit sale. I buy $2k+ TVs, are they making $50 off of my data, or $5? Does it even pay for the department they hired to write the software that collects the data?
Same for car. It's hard to imagine manufacturers would care to reduce cost by $5(20 tactile buttons likely costs lesser than that) on a $10k car, but what would I know.
>I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example
Count me in the camp that does. My TV runs GoogleOS (Android), and it's great, because I don't need some other device plugged in to do what I want to do with it. There's only 2 things I want from this thing:
1. Playing external media. It has a USB port, so I can plug in thumb drives and play video files from them. The built-in OS works fine for this, and seems to handle any media file or codec I throw at it.
2. Playing YouTube with a good player. Since it's Android, I can load APKs from wherever I want, and so I installed "SmartTubeNext", which blocks ads and sponsor segments automatically. It works almost too well.
I think the mistake most other people make with smart TVs is that they get ones with crappy proprietary OSes, so with those you have no control over anything and can't run any 3rd-party software like SmartTubeNext. Of course, eventually this model could lose support from the mfgr, causing security issues or not being compatible with the apps I want, but for now it's quite nice.
im pretty sure nearly every single person in existence wants a tv that connects to the internet dude. people dont want to plug in an hdmi cord to access streaming services.
in every large business there is a very simple formula for decision making: what option maximizes profit? if we have to kill 100,000 cyclists and pedestrians in the process, who gives a shit, people die every day for no damn reason at all. lets kill em all, bastards arent our customers anyway
The job of the cockpit designer is to 1) minimize the workload on the pilot/driver while providing 2) maximum practical ability to control the vehicle. Period.
Ergonomic design to control the vehicle. Period. End of story. Style shouldn't even be in the top 10 considerations.
ALL of this touchscreen, flattening and making the buttons the same, making unique configurations may be wonderful for the mental masturbation of the designers, but it is not even in the same profession as vehicle design.
The pilot/driver should be able to make maximal use of prior knowledge (i.e., ways of doing things that are standard, either by law or by previous consensus), and make maximal use tactile and auditory feedback (e.g., buttons and dials with a familiar and distinct feeling and positive feedback) to minimize the need to direct vision anywhere other than out the windshield and mirrors.
Well-designed display controls can be fantastic - - - - IF AND ONLY IF - the work is put into the design to minimize pilot/driver workload. Anything requiring a menu structure as we use on desktop machines is potentially deadly. Just because we are familiar with menu structures does not mean that they can be operated while negotiating traffic in the rain hurtling down the road at 30 meters per second. Any designer or manager who thinks that is reasonable or acceptable is incompetent. (obvious exception here is extensive setup operations to be done whilst parked)
And, if you are going to put in a touchscreen that does have these characteristics, then at least allow the passenger to use it whilst in motion - you have the damn seat sensor data on the CAN bus for the airbag, so use it for the UI. I understand not wanting to be liable for crashing someone with your incompetent UI, but impairing use of the car & navigation just makes it worse
Which brings us back to: just do the hard and expensive work of properly designing the cockpit UI. And spend the extra few bucks for good knobs and buttons. I'll happily pay $1000 more for something that works, is a pleasure to use, and isn't trying to make me fight it and risk my life every time I use it for the designer's ego and/or the manager's budget.
For some reason that I take no credit for, my voice works perfectly with most voice recognition systems I've tried. I still hate encountering it on an 800 number.
My favorite story, though, was when someone left a voice message for me in Vietnamese, and Google's VR system tried to interpret it as English. "How about goddamn lunch?" is the thing I remember.
There's an older 'smart' knob out there that was meant I think for CAD interfaces. I don't recall if it's made anymore, but I do know that it's shown up on the bridge of a number of scifi aircraft/spaceships over the last decade.
But for the purposes of this discussion, having a couple three of those on the dashboard and using them a bit like radial menus would probably split the difference pretty well.
That's the one! Looks like they still make it. Not sure why I thought they stopped.
I thought I saw it most recently on The Expanse, but it does not appear to be part of the MCRN Frigate pilot's seat. So either I'm thinking of some other ship, or a different bridge.
Neat. Jog control knobs are great when you want fine control over a large dynamic range. They can feel wrong when used for for controlling a limited range that only needs coarse tuning. My microwave has a rotary encoder for the power level (10% to 100%) and it just feels so wrong that it doesn’t have a limit but can just keep turning (actually a slider would be a lovely UI for power level, however the knob is multi-functional and also sliders are harder to keep clean and physically reliable). My cheap stereo has a similar rotary encoder for the volume - uggggh.
I feel like it should be feasible to add a motor that gives tactile feedback by resisting turning by a little bit (e.g. for discrete power/volume level values within the allowed range) or a lotta bit (e.g. for the boundaries of said range).
Re: multi-functional sliders, I do know that motorized sliders exist in the pro audio space (e.g. to be able to program presets on mixers and such); shouldn't be too hard to adapt them to multiple functions (probably with some sort of indicator on or adjacent to the slider to show the function being manipulated).
Just FYI what you’ve described is exactly what the GPs video shows. I only mention it cause that knob and video are absolutely amazing and deserves a watch.
I think this mostly applies to bad or cheap touch screens, which most cars today have. I used to be strongly in the anti touch screen camp, but after getting a car where the touch screen is basically an iPad in terms of display quality and touch input quality and size, I surprisingly don’t really mind it. Good voice control also helps a ton.
The question isn't whether you mind it, the question is whether you're more likely to get in an accident because of it.
Without the tactile feedback of a physical button or dial, and especially in cases where button position varies based on which mode you're in, it's hard to imagine even a high-quality touchscreen being safe.
For the life of me I can't find the link, but there was an awesome HN or Reddit post a few years back where a designer tried to design a touchscreen experience that might work for cars that takes into account that drivers can't focus on the screen.
It's been years since I've seen it so I probably don't remember the exact details, but I think it worked by the system working based on gestures wherever the drivers' hand touched the screen so you didn't need to touch a specific tiny target in a moving car.
Thank you. That seems to be it. I don't think it's perfect, but it seems like a hell of a good improvement on the touch interfaces car companies try and come up with today that takes into account that a driver wants to use muscle memory and not stare at the screen.
Funny story, that demo only exists because the designer was mis-categorized as a software engineer after an acquisition by Apple. After nearly getting the person in question fired it ultimately resulted in a successful job category change for them.
The Ineos Grenadier (available now in Australia and Europe and apparently within the year in North America) has a buttonful dash and also cockpit-style switches above. With additional knockouts above to add your own. Fully gloved operation of anything critical.
Great trend for getting into a truck with cold, wet, gloved hands and wanting to do anything. Like adjust heat and seat heat and defrosters.
I can blindly feel may way around the dash of my 1999 and get some stuff done without taking my eyes off the road at all. I'll be glad if a 2028 shares that feature when the time comes.
We are just going to be ping-ponging back & forth between three idiotic subideal situations, buttons versus touchscreens versus phone control.
It's going to be a decade of no synergy, of no programmability, of no softness.
Ideally there are semi flexible reconfigurable systems, with a couple physical buttons & knobs, and some touchscreen displays, and the phones can also via local area APIs be given permission to control & manipulate the car too.
But we just don't have a mature software ecosystem in general to support the complex assortment of peripherals (av, hvac, lighting, windows, seats, etc) that cars present. This is a crisis because it's one of the softest most configurable most attuneable things mankind has made, and we have only crude ability to carve in stone some choices that then will broadly apply. These systems are firmer than soft, and that's a broad problem the CS world in general has helped little with in the last decade (after extremely involved & interested work in uniquotous & pervasive computing simmered away).
Using a touchscreen while driving has the obvious problem that you have to look at the screen vs physical buttons where tactile feedback and muscle memory can be sufficient.
But the problem is way beyond that and goes way beyond cars. Touch UIs are inherently lazy and they encourage you to create bad UI/UX. Why? Because your UI becomes software and you can always update it later. The net result is you don't.
Having tactile buttons forces you to do upront UI/UX work to make sure you have sufficient buttons, they make sense, etc. It's a cost-saving issue to just not do this kind of work.
In any touchscreen on a car you'll find abasic options buried menus deep to the point where you have to Google where to find it. That's a big reason why touchscreens suck.
remember the time when GM said it’s not going to include CarPlay in its vehicles? And how most of hn was in revolt?
here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this? (For the record, I hated touch screens in cars before that was a thing and I am OK with gm removing carplay.)
CarPlay replaces functionality built into the car that runs the navigation, dialer, podcasts, and music player. HN likely support CarPlay because the built-in functionality that does this is usually outdated, intuitive, or nonexistent. Most of the frustration around touchscreens involves them replacing AC controls, headlight stock, seat heaters, etc...
> remember the time when GM said it’s not going to include CarPlay in its vehicles? And how most of hn was in revolt?
Most OEM's made terrible infotainment software that is outdated, lacking features and often extremely sluggish and clunky to use. CarPlay and Android Auto are able to bring modern features OEM's can't seem to figure out, like Google Maps integration instead of some terrible maps implementation that is outdated, as in not having addresses added in the last few years, not just "old" and cumbersome to use. I can just open up google maps on my phone, type an address and directions appear on my screen. Same with music streaming apps like Spotify.
> here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this?
Not eliminate touchscreens entirely, but rather stop putting every single control they possibly can into them making vehicles dangerous to operate. Putting climate, radio, lighting, etc... into a touch screen, especially when buried in sub-menus, is just lazy cost cutting. The other big complaint are touch capacitive "buttons" and sliders. They're distracting and difficult to use, especially on anything but perfectly smooth roads. For example, the Cayenne's interior is basically just a wall of touch capacitive "buttons"[1] that you can't easily reach down to press with your eyes on the road, you have to look down at it. The other issue is feedback from it. Constant beeping from input on menus, like Toyota, just becomes obnoxious. Buttons provide instant mechanical feedback that does't lave you guessing if you pressed on the right spot. Here's a clip discussing some complaints about VW doing all of this to the Golf [2] and how frustrating it is to use.
Also the VW group, but on the high-end luxury side, the rotating display (three positions) of the Bentley Continental GT (that car shares its platform with the Porsche Panamera, also from the VW group, but the Panamera doesn't have that rotating display):
They have also just been promoting the Activesphere Concept Car in the last few months that uses Mixed Reality / AR glasses developed in collaboration with Magic Leap.
It's a neat feature, but I'd be worried about it getting stuck and being unable to retract.
Later model years removed the ability to retract the screen on demand, due to backup-camera laws, and the 2021-ish refresh ditched the retractable display for an in-dash display similar to the 10th-gen Honda Civic (which amusingly, ditched the in-dash display in its 11th-gen for the previous A3 style).
This might be cheating but if you want a mostly screen-free recent Audi your best bet is probably the TT (or its big brother the R8 :-), the only screen is the entire gauge cluster and it's certainly not a touch screen.
Just do _not_ get a modern VW with its touch sensitive steering wheel controls...
Unfortunately these ones arent the recent ones (that A3 has been gone for a couple of years). They went from these style screens with MMI controllers in the centre, but if you buy an A4 or better now, you get 2 touchscreens and no tactile controls for climate etc sadly.
I hate that Porsche has gone all in on the touch screens instead of buttons, as they had been one of the last holdouts.
My 911 has physical buttons for pretty much everything, and the small touch screen can be turned off so it is completely dark. The new models are not interesting to me as they have replaced all the gauges and physical buttons with touch screens and touch sensitive buttons
and dont get me started on the fact that barely any 911s come in manual anymore
This keeps coming up on Hacker News. It's not that drivers hate touch screens. It's that most of them are terribly implemented. People hated smartphones until Apple released the iPhone. Just think about smartphones before that. The UX was horrid.
I suspect most people in this thread piling onto the hate don't own a recent model Tesla. I know that some owners aren't fans, but most are. There are three things that make the touch screen on Teslas work unlike other cars:
1. The UX - big responsive displays with fast processors and properly designed UIs. They aren't an afterthought like most other vehicles. Every time I drive a car other than my Tesla I too hate the half-ass touch screens.
2. There are indeed still physical controls still on the Tesla for important functions, e.g. drive control, wipers, and audio selection and volume. It's not 100% touch screen.
3. Automation and voice controls handle most of the cases where you'd normally need a knob or button, e.g. wipers and lights are automatic. And voice control seems to be using a state of the art API (Google?) so it works pretty well.
Taking your eyes off the road to adjust the AC is a terrible UX. And as for 'voice commands' bless your heart to imagine every car doesn't have screaming kids in the back seat or a driver with a heavy accent. I want a knob.
Yes I don’t think many people actually often need to fiddle the AC settings while driving. And that would be a very seldomly used knob when you have a good automatic AC.
Last software update allows to map many functions to long-press of steering wheel button. So you can assign AC temperature to it, then you don't need to take your eyes of the road - just long-press left button and scroll up/down.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] threadAnd that's before getting into the mess of misheard commands that even Google and Apple still can't get right despite having gigantic teams working on it 24/7.
[1] https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/gallery/MERCEDESBENZ...
https://bestride.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2016-Buick-C...
Which is awesome. I like buttons.
Edit, from grocery store parking lot: 92
Most of the buttons are for features I've never had before. There are buttons for Bluetooth (I think for receiving phone calls while driving and turning up and down audio volume etc) located on the steering wheel, There are a bunch of buttons for cruise control and I think lane keeping assist also on the steering wheel - I've never had a car with cruise control before and honestly I am a little intimidated to try it out. It seems so complicated. There are some buttons for the Front cross traffic sensors it took me a while to figure out what was going on with these. My car would randomly beep at me while at intersections before I finally figured out what was causing it. Then there is buttons to toggle the parking sensors and toggle between the front / reverse parking cameras.
On top of that quite a lot of things in the car are automated now too - headlights will automatically turn on, wipers automatically switch on etc.
My old car had a radio and heating/AC that was it. I've had the car for just under a month and I've already had to consult the manual 2 or 3 times because I've forgotten what certain buttons do.
But when I’m driving and need to adjust something, I don’t want to disconnect with driving to dive into a touch screen.
A physical control, in the same location means muscle memory can take over. And as we learnt decades ago, the controls themselves need to be physically distinct so that you can tell them apart without looking or thinking too hard.
I don’t think touchscreens need to disappear from cars, there’s a wealth of settings/config/etc they could be useful for.
But the core driving aids and temperature/volume control need to be physical.
1. Reach over, grasp the screen under the target area using muscle memory.
Screen is strong as hell, you could put your full weight on it and it wouldn’t budge.
2. While continuing to hold the edge of the screen, move thumb to hover over suspected target area using muscle memory.
3. Glance and tap in one moment.
Done.
Not that I ever need to do this. Pretty much everything I need to do has a button. (And this in a car that the internet geniuses including here on HN are convinced does not have buttons).
If steps 1, 2, and 3 sounded distracting or hard, see again the part where I said “not that I ever need to do this” and why.
I think voice commands would be much more widely used if they hadn’t rolled it out so soon, ironically. But most of us learned early on that it sucks and never tried it again.
User-assignable buttons might mitigate that. With profiles for individual drivers.
But perhaps those features would confuse some users even more
I want my doors to lock every night at 10pm in case I forget.
I want to bring up my favorite temperature and fan settings.
I want to lock just some doors.
I want the windows down just the right amount.
When do we get to take advantage that this is all software?
For fun I tried an experiment, in one context I told GPT to mangle sentences in a way that a speech-to-text might, and in another I told GPT to transform sentences into commands for a car's various ECUs.
Results:
"Torn the hair conditioning gown to 65 decrees." => works
"Can yew plays make it warmer in hear" => works
"It's weigh two, uh how due yew say, it's way to frayed in hear!" => works (!)
It actually understood a mis-transcribed French word in the middle of a series of English commands:
> I apologize for the confusion. I interpreted "frayed" as an incorrect transcription of "froid" (which means "cold" in French) considering the context of the sentence and the surrounding phrase "how do you say." Thus, I replaced "frayed" with "cold.""
It even realized that someone inserting filler like "how do you say" indicated they may be looking for a word in another language:
> The phrase "how do you say" is often used by someone who is trying to recall a word or phrase in another language, or when they are unsure about the correct term to use in the current language. In this context, it signaled that there might be a language-related issue, leading me to consider that "frayed" might be an incorrect transcription of a word in another language, such as "froid" for "cold" in French.
-
And And in case you think it just guessed on past commands, I was able to replicate this in a fresh context window with no hints about what commands it should accept.
Voice is really about to stop sucking for the first time in the history of tech: It can go from "I'm tired of this shit man" to knowing it should change the current song.
On the downvoting, don’t be obtuse. On HN people downvote if they disagree with an opinion. I don’t particularly take much notice of either direction on the voting. Internet points don’t count for much, and I’d rather enjoy my discourse than scrounge for points.
My car has less than 25 buttons on the center console, plus three dials for climate control. If you removed the buttons dealing with CDs it would be more like 15.
This isn't about the complete removal of touch screens or moving to purely buttons. It's about providing a better balance between physical buttons for driving essentials and then having the rest under a usable touch screen interface.
It's not all one or the other.
I recall this being "the next big thing" in touch screens about 10 years ago but the tech didn't seem to go anywhere. For small screens such as your phone it was probably overkill but cars seemed like the perfect use case if they could have gotten the technology right.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0
Part of the problem of textured screens is that you have to be able to touch the interface without activating anything. That's newer enough tech that the prices are probably just now coming down.
I also find it really difficult to wrap my head around how Tesla's turn signal buttons on their "yoke" could possibly have made it through any testing. Did none of the people they tested it on use turn signals?? Did they just not test at all? It seems like the smallest effort of UX testing would've immediately pointed out how terrible this is
Tbh it feels like ultimately it's just companies deciding to skimp out on design. Tight deadlines and lazy cost-cutting measures probably contribute
They are so expensive, they aren’t used anywhere else but automotive (rumors swirl about iPads using this some day).
The LCDs with high nits are cheaper but only rectangular.
One of the big issues is it working in 120 heat in the desert while sitting in the sun (particularly for convertibles).
Could this be why headlights are so blindy now, to overcome drivers' permanently impaired night vision?
Part of having a working relationship with a vendor is that you can ask nicely that they don't sell your designs to competitors or market their own knockoffs. Not to mention you can call them up and say, "I need 10k extra of those next month" and they don't just laugh in your face or let it go to voicemail and pretend they never got it.
I think we can see the Checkbook Effect in how Apple has navigated for the last fifteen or so years. And maybe a bit of the Stanford Effect (anyone can get in if there’s a building named after their family, especially if it’s still under construction).
Hey we want this part
oh we might be able to make 100k a year
Umm… we need at least five million
Gee, sorry.
What if we loaned you some money to build a new factory?
Oh, uh, sure?
It’s fast, its huge, and it looks nice.
The latest design changes have been annoying, but Tesla is far and away the closest to anybody has come to a good touchscreen in a car.
It’s more like using an iPad than using an infotainment system in a car.
And this is whole problem here, we shouldn't be doing it while driving. We're trying to solve problems that haven't existed few years ago. Touchscreens in cars in this form should just die
But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens!
Funniest button story.. one time we were working on a panel which includes a two way rocker switch to lift or lower a mechanism. Version 1 was backwards. Well, the electrical team swapped the wire harness to fix it, and the graphics team swapped the label markings. Version 2 was then also backwards (but flipped).
I suppose you actually mean it is hard to get a strong majority?
One potential solution would be to make a modular system. You could even “sell” it as a “skinnable” DUI (driver user interface; why didn’t this acronym catch on???)
And a single point of failure.
What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a finger, but you could also just hit pagedwn tactile button.
https://www.google.com/search?q=airbus+a380+keyboard&tbm=isc...
Maybe that's the endgame -- dedicated buttons for commonly used functions, keyboards for everything else.
When you're in cruise flight, things happen slowly. Heck, on a pre-touchscreen general aviation GPS unit, you dial waypoints in one letter at a time with a single rotary knob. As annoying as the touchscreen is, it's still an improvement - and you still get your single rotary knob in case things are turbulent, so it's no really any worse.
Takeoff/landing is a different story. Things happen quickly there. But you're also not messing with the avionics during those phases of flight.
As the saying goes: aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order. Touchscreens are mostly the realm of navigation and (sometimes) communication.
This actually made me consider an Audi, except for the fact that by the time I drove it this was an older model, and that input had long been superseded by a pure touchscreen.
Silicone is inexpensive and suitable for cookware that gets exposed to heat. I bet that sort of thing could survive an autoclave.
A generic touch screen with dynamic controls is cheaper than a larger custom made keyboard or physical controls. It's the same reason we end up with power inefficient IoT devices that could be made with very cheap and efficient microcontrollers, but developing for those requires expensive expertise, so we end up with huge powerful ARM cores because it's more general and easier to code.
The common factor in both of these issues is cost to manufacturer vs cost to user (power, safety etc).
I am sure ER doctors hate to use touchscreens as well, but that's for another thread.
In the end it ended up not working well enough (the Leap Motion would often give glitchy positioning data), but I believe it's the way forward.
I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.
Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).
The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.
I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?
Just another case of inadvertent button activation for touch screens.
[1] iPad decided this should be capitalized, lol
Then, a friend of mine, which has completely lost vision and can read Braille, jokingly said to me when he arrived: "Trying to find the right button, I probably send the lift to all floors!"
And I've seen that when people are holding their phones in a living room. The cars are vibrating (normally), and the user is trying to drive, with one hand on the wheel, etc.
Especially, as designers think it’s cool to have tiny buttons on the touch screen.
Touchscreens don't provide this. If your finger comes into contact in the wrong place, the wrong thing happens. So your first contact must be absolutely correct.
Your arm is extended. Your hand/finger partially blocks your view of the button. Your depth perception of that flat plane with fluid reference points is not good. Bang! The wrong app completely opens.
Now you have to spend time dealing with the consequences of that your error, even if you don't feel inclided to try again. Instead of rewinding to re-listen to the last 20 seconds of a podcast because traffic demanded your attention, you are now listening to the radio and have set an alarm for midnight.
I have an older Mercedes (2004) that is like this. There’s a screen, but it’s not touch. There is are columns of physical, pushable buttons at the left and right sides, and the labels appear on the screen next to the buttons.
Apparently they're available for flight sim games, if I had the time and know-how, it'd be neat to bu one (e.g. on AliExpress) and integrate it to my car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gysmVPYX2Fc
Avionics manufacturers are generally pretty serious about Ux. Or at least the test pilots berate them into caring, when I was in Flight Test Engineering I remember a lot of "spicy" feedback about avionics usability issues getting sent back to the manufacturers lol
"Soft keys" [0] are what you're describing. Very commonly seen on ATMs.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_key
Maybe I'm biased. My old car has a great UI. No touchscreen, just a panel of physical knobs and buttons for media and climate control. The phone integration could be better, but that would really just mean a place to put my phone (without clipping it onto a vent) and a stereo that lets me play/pause/skip songs on my phone using the car's physical media controls.
Mach-E famously have a scroll wheel that imitates touch-swipe to adjust volume.
FWIW I don't hate Tesla's touchscreen yet, but I dislike the fact you can't shut it off or disable all the stupid FSD animations there.
But for me the whole thing is set and forget, if I need to adjust volume it's a scroll wheel on my steering wheel -- air conditioning I never really need to adjust. Sat nav -- yes I need to adjust this occasionally, but it's either voice command or park and change the destination with a keyboard -- but I don't see this being different in any other car? (Maybe a scroll wheel with recent destinations?)
I actually don't understand what it is that drivers are changing so regularly that they need to take their eyes off the road and look at a screen or twiddle a knob?
My signular gripe is that there is no physical button to open the glove-box, which is an annoying but very infrequent occurance.
That's really weird. Button nothing, why is there not just a handle on the glove box? Who thought it was a good idea to hook that up to the computer? Does that mean you can't open the glove box unless the car is turned on?
My touch screen annoyance: "oops, it detected a swipe instead of a press, because the car just went through a bump!". Or, "Oops! I accidentally pressed cancel instead of back button, now my map navigation is gone!!!".
Design the UI well, so that drivers can't screw things up easily.
If you're driving you shouldn't be fiddling with anything extraneous. Lights/windshield wipers should be automatic in 99% of circumstances and if they're not then that's what needs to be improved.
You shouldn't need to reach for anything because if you do that's already either a design fail or operator error.
I recently test drove a Mazda, and while I’ve seen people online complain about their “commander knob” and lack of touch screen, I liked it pretty well. Screen up further on the dashboard is nice for glancing at maps.
Not even just for the driver to be touching it, but if you have a passenger you can let them deal with putting in directions or managing your audio and the wheel is a lot less obvious than a touchscreen to someone who isn't familiar with it.
And as a driver, it felt like there were some things where it'd be easier to just touch the screen too. Like for the buttons scattered around the corner of Maps, scrolling through a list or a grid is easy to navigate, random stuff all over the screen you'll have to learn the order.
Apparently the Japanese market version for 2024 is getting a 10.25" screen which I'm guessing is the same part as the CX-50. That could mean adding touch for CarPlay, but none of the articles mention it one way or the other. Maybe I'll wait and see about the US update before making any buying decisions.
The screen far away from arm reach is something they deliberately did because they argue you shouldn’t touch a screen while driving, you should only use the knob as that minimizes time you don’t look at the road.
A good example of this might be the lack of intuitive feedback regarding headlights. More and more, dash lights stay on despite exterior lights being off, giving the driver the impression that everything is normal. IIRC several countries including Canada are moving to require exterior lights to be on at all times now, but it boggles my mind that such a simple to understand phenomenon with so many straightforward solutions has to be solved through regulation instead of the automakers just, you know… doing better.
Still, despite a clear design defect and recognition by regulator agencies, no litigation is likely to occur.
I'm inclined to think it shouldn't. Cars are highly regulated. There are a great many very specific standards cars have to meet to be legal to sell for road use in most countries. There's stuff we all know about like crash testing for occupants, and more recently for pedestrians, but there's also weird stuff like cars not being allowed to have required lighting on movable bodywork in the US market[0].
I'd set a much higher bar for defective product claims when the design of the product is already subject to a great deal of specific regulation. Courts do not have expertise in car design and are probably worse at specifying design standards for cars than regulatory agencies staffed with experts and dedicated to that task. As you mention, there's a regulatory solution to the problem you're describing already in use in some countries.
[0] Exceptions to that one are occasionally granted on a case by case basis
Count me in the camp that does. My TV runs GoogleOS (Android), and it's great, because I don't need some other device plugged in to do what I want to do with it. There's only 2 things I want from this thing:
1. Playing external media. It has a USB port, so I can plug in thumb drives and play video files from them. The built-in OS works fine for this, and seems to handle any media file or codec I throw at it.
2. Playing YouTube with a good player. Since it's Android, I can load APKs from wherever I want, and so I installed "SmartTubeNext", which blocks ads and sponsor segments automatically. It works almost too well.
I think the mistake most other people make with smart TVs is that they get ones with crappy proprietary OSes, so with those you have no control over anything and can't run any 3rd-party software like SmartTubeNext. Of course, eventually this model could lose support from the mfgr, causing security issues or not being compatible with the apps I want, but for now it's quite nice.
I'm guessing you've missed every thread here about Smart TVs. ref: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=smart+tv
People dying is just the cost of doing business.
The job of the cockpit designer is to 1) minimize the workload on the pilot/driver while providing 2) maximum practical ability to control the vehicle. Period.
Ergonomic design to control the vehicle. Period. End of story. Style shouldn't even be in the top 10 considerations.
ALL of this touchscreen, flattening and making the buttons the same, making unique configurations may be wonderful for the mental masturbation of the designers, but it is not even in the same profession as vehicle design.
The pilot/driver should be able to make maximal use of prior knowledge (i.e., ways of doing things that are standard, either by law or by previous consensus), and make maximal use tactile and auditory feedback (e.g., buttons and dials with a familiar and distinct feeling and positive feedback) to minimize the need to direct vision anywhere other than out the windshield and mirrors.
Well-designed display controls can be fantastic - - - - IF AND ONLY IF - the work is put into the design to minimize pilot/driver workload. Anything requiring a menu structure as we use on desktop machines is potentially deadly. Just because we are familiar with menu structures does not mean that they can be operated while negotiating traffic in the rain hurtling down the road at 30 meters per second. Any designer or manager who thinks that is reasonable or acceptable is incompetent. (obvious exception here is extensive setup operations to be done whilst parked)
And, if you are going to put in a touchscreen that does have these characteristics, then at least allow the passenger to use it whilst in motion - you have the damn seat sensor data on the CAN bus for the airbag, so use it for the UI. I understand not wanting to be liable for crashing someone with your incompetent UI, but impairing use of the car & navigation just makes it worse
Which brings us back to: just do the hard and expensive work of properly designing the cockpit UI. And spend the extra few bucks for good knobs and buttons. I'll happily pay $1000 more for something that works, is a pleasure to use, and isn't trying to make me fight it and risk my life every time I use it for the designer's ego and/or the manager's budget.
My favorite story, though, was when someone left a voice message for me in Vietnamese, and Google's VR system tried to interpret it as English. "How about goddamn lunch?" is the thing I remember.
The ridiculous thing is we should just be about at the point of programmable buttons and instead we have an embedded webapp running our car.
[0] https://youtu.be/ip641WmY4pA?t=58
But for the purposes of this discussion, having a couple three of those on the dashboard and using them a bit like radial menus would probably split the difference pretty well.
I thought I saw it most recently on The Expanse, but it does not appear to be part of the MCRN Frigate pilot's seat. So either I'm thinking of some other ship, or a different bridge.
Re: multi-functional sliders, I do know that motorized sliders exist in the pro audio space (e.g. to be able to program presets on mixers and such); shouldn't be too hard to adapt them to multiple functions (probably with some sort of indicator on or adjacent to the slider to show the function being manipulated).
Without the tactile feedback of a physical button or dial, and especially in cases where button position varies based on which mode you're in, it's hard to imagine even a high-quality touchscreen being safe.
Physical buttons can still be used without constantly looking at them, this is a huge difference.
Touchscreens should be considered as a low-cost fallback when better solutions are unpractical or too costly.
They rarely provide a better experience.
It's been years since I've seen it so I probably don't remember the exact details, but I think it worked by the system working based on gestures wherever the drivers' hand touched the screen so you didn't need to touch a specific tiny target in a moving car.
That said, the general point of the article seems very correct, physical buttons have always felt radically superior to touch screens.
Great trend for getting into a truck with cold, wet, gloved hands and wanting to do anything. Like adjust heat and seat heat and defrosters.
It's going to be a decade of no synergy, of no programmability, of no softness.
Ideally there are semi flexible reconfigurable systems, with a couple physical buttons & knobs, and some touchscreen displays, and the phones can also via local area APIs be given permission to control & manipulate the car too.
But we just don't have a mature software ecosystem in general to support the complex assortment of peripherals (av, hvac, lighting, windows, seats, etc) that cars present. This is a crisis because it's one of the softest most configurable most attuneable things mankind has made, and we have only crude ability to carve in stone some choices that then will broadly apply. These systems are firmer than soft, and that's a broad problem the CS world in general has helped little with in the last decade (after extremely involved & interested work in uniquotous & pervasive computing simmered away).
But the problem is way beyond that and goes way beyond cars. Touch UIs are inherently lazy and they encourage you to create bad UI/UX. Why? Because your UI becomes software and you can always update it later. The net result is you don't.
Having tactile buttons forces you to do upront UI/UX work to make sure you have sufficient buttons, they make sense, etc. It's a cost-saving issue to just not do this kind of work.
In any touchscreen on a car you'll find abasic options buried menus deep to the point where you have to Google where to find it. That's a big reason why touchscreens suck.
here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this? (For the record, I hated touch screens in cars before that was a thing and I am OK with gm removing carplay.)
Who knows, maybe they can. But there is no reason on earth to think so.
> remember the time when GM said it’s not going to include CarPlay in its vehicles? And how most of hn was in revolt?
Most OEM's made terrible infotainment software that is outdated, lacking features and often extremely sluggish and clunky to use. CarPlay and Android Auto are able to bring modern features OEM's can't seem to figure out, like Google Maps integration instead of some terrible maps implementation that is outdated, as in not having addresses added in the last few years, not just "old" and cumbersome to use. I can just open up google maps on my phone, type an address and directions appear on my screen. Same with music streaming apps like Spotify.
> here comes News that says we should get rid of touchscreens, why is hn supporting this?
Not eliminate touchscreens entirely, but rather stop putting every single control they possibly can into them making vehicles dangerous to operate. Putting climate, radio, lighting, etc... into a touch screen, especially when buried in sub-menus, is just lazy cost cutting. The other big complaint are touch capacitive "buttons" and sliders. They're distracting and difficult to use, especially on anything but perfectly smooth roads. For example, the Cayenne's interior is basically just a wall of touch capacitive "buttons"[1] that you can't easily reach down to press with your eyes on the road, you have to look down at it. The other issue is feedback from it. Constant beeping from input on menus, like Toyota, just becomes obnoxious. Buttons provide instant mechanical feedback that does't lave you guessing if you pressed on the right spot. Here's a clip discussing some complaints about VW doing all of this to the Golf [2] and how frustrating it is to use.
[1] https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/2022-porsche-cayenne-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU92h1hez_8&t=159s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_F2dpj5Kas&t=42s
and if you have analog gauges too, there are no screens. (except the tiny one between the gauges which doesn't count imo)
They're also completely piano black free. Best car interior maybe ever. Thread here https://old.reddit.com/r/Audi/comments/w9dkcm/what_models_ha...
https://youtu.be/JZNGniDpJ-s
shame they made the dash shiny black though :P I hate it as much as I hate touchscreens haha shakes walking stick
If I find the dough I really hope to buy one before they're forced to go all EV.
https://youtu.be/f0MC1D3c0m8
Later model years removed the ability to retract the screen on demand, due to backup-camera laws, and the 2021-ish refresh ditched the retractable display for an in-dash display similar to the 10th-gen Honda Civic (which amusingly, ditched the in-dash display in its 11th-gen for the previous A3 style).
This might be cheating but if you want a mostly screen-free recent Audi your best bet is probably the TT (or its big brother the R8 :-), the only screen is the entire gauge cluster and it's certainly not a touch screen.
Just do _not_ get a modern VW with its touch sensitive steering wheel controls...
My 911 has physical buttons for pretty much everything, and the small touch screen can be turned off so it is completely dark. The new models are not interesting to me as they have replaced all the gauges and physical buttons with touch screens and touch sensitive buttons
and dont get me started on the fact that barely any 911s come in manual anymore
I suspect most people in this thread piling onto the hate don't own a recent model Tesla. I know that some owners aren't fans, but most are. There are three things that make the touch screen on Teslas work unlike other cars:
1. The UX - big responsive displays with fast processors and properly designed UIs. They aren't an afterthought like most other vehicles. Every time I drive a car other than my Tesla I too hate the half-ass touch screens.
2. There are indeed still physical controls still on the Tesla for important functions, e.g. drive control, wipers, and audio selection and volume. It's not 100% touch screen.
3. Automation and voice controls handle most of the cases where you'd normally need a knob or button, e.g. wipers and lights are automatic. And voice control seems to be using a state of the art API (Google?) so it works pretty well.
The issue isn't so much with touch screens, it's every other car company being atrocious at software and software design.