As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.
This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.
I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation.
The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and buttons and basic displays, is likely cheaper from an overall BOM perspective than the set of knobs and buttons and basic displays (and supporting material (mechanical and wiring) for those knobs/buttons/displays).
And, if two (or more) different car models use the same size rectangular screen, then one single "screen" can be used for plural models (with only software differences) vs. the need for unique moldings/buttons/etc. when providing the physical knobs and buttons on different models.
The touch screen also enables different "accessory classes" even within the same model by a software change vs. a different piece of hardware. Think basic hot/cold/manual blower speed climate control vs. higher end climate control where you set a specific temp and the system picks heat/cool/blower speed. The same single touch screen can provide both the 'basic' and the 'luxury' interface via a software change vs. two different physical control units inserted into the dash.
> The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
Whilst I think this is part of it's about more than just reducing the BOM. There's a trend to move all interfaces from knobs and switches to touch screens even when money isn't the problem. For example the SpaceX Dragon capsule also takes this approach which you can see from the images below:
A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
> I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
Exactly. Touch screens are pure tech fad in about 50% of use cases at least, with the decision to use them not based on any kind of practical considerations.
However, I'm a little skeptical that the average buyer is going to regret using one. A lot of people seem to get hung up on newer tech == better tech, so they never really seem to look at the newer technology with a critical eye. I often prefer older tech in some cases (e.g. buttons and knows), but my fiancee often doesn't get it and advises me to stop fighting it and go with the trend.
> A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made with these touchscreens.
> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.
I would be very surprised if Dragon did not include the 21st century equivalent of the Apollo 8-ball, manual translation controller and stick.
NASA is a very conservative organization and if there is a lesson to be learned from past near disasters, is how limited is the foresight of mission planners and how infinitely adaptable are the human astronauts.
It has a stick and a couple buttons for most of the functionality that can be useful to the pilots in case the craft misbehaves. It seems to have rotary input so it can manage rotation and translation.
A lot of the controls in an Apollo were to be used in normal manual operations that are automated (or have no counterpart) in Dragons.
There are a few physical buttons for the few critical functions you might want to trigger in the boost/reentry phase. The rest is either 1 g or microgravity and a touchscreen should not be a problem.
BTW, not surre if they implemented it in the end, but they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time. A rather clever idea IMHO. :)
> they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time
IIRC, Orion does that by timing the screen backlight.
If I had a choice between Orion, Starliner or Dragon, I'd go with the Dragon. The spacesuits are much nicer and if I have to die, I'd rather go with style.
Perhaps I'm missing something but how could the Dragon capsule automation handle something like the emergency that occurred during the Gemini 8 mission? Without manual control by the astronauts it could have turned into a real disaster.
Computing and testing has come a long way since the Gemini days. We now have aircraft (particularly military fighters) that are literally uncontrollable without the computers.
Those control systems only work within certain preprogrammed constraints. They are generally incapable of handling unexpected situations outside of the design limits.
Computerized fly by wire systems still depend on a pilot in the loop, especially in the case of a mechanical failure.
So let’s say the airplane gets damaged, and one of the flight controls is no longer available. A legacy airplane would still try to use that surface because it doesn’t know any better. The F-35 digital flight control systems will say, “That surface isn’t doing much for me anymore, so I’m going to have to compensate by using some other things. Maybe I’ll have to move them a little bit more to get the same effect because the pilot still wants to turn left.”
This argument doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems like an inconsistent comparison to compare a single touchscreen to many customized knobs/buttons/etc., when you could also compare a single set of knobs/buttons/etc. to different screen sizes across models.
Car companies don't tend to custom-design knobs/buttons/etc. for each model. They tend to reuse the same ones across many models to save on development and manufacturing costs. They also already modularize these knobs and buttons across different "accessory classes". You can probably see this in your own car even, if you see anywhere on your car's center console or dashboard which has plastic caps where it seems like more buttons or knobs belong. Those are likely buttons/knobs for additional functions in optional feature packages.
Also, even for the same screen size across models, you'd still likely need custom bezels since most models are differently sized and thus have different dashboard shapes/sizes within which the screen is mounted.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
My guess is that it's exactly what they said. It's probably harder from a software perspective to adapt touch-screen-based interfaces like Android Auto and Apple Car Play to physical controls, and those difficulties probably come up over and over as the versions of these interfaces on the phones are constantly being updated, and the car must continue supporting more and more versions at one time.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
Every modern car is going to have an infotainment system with a screen. A better question would be whether it is cheaper to have a touch version of that screen or to have buttons for the interface. I suspect that touch would be cheaper than buttons.
Especially now the US and Canada requires reversing cameras in all new cars, there has to be a screen in the car; the question then becomes whether it's worthwhile designing a second infotainment system that doesn't require that (somewhat costly) large colour screen for lower end trims in markets where reversing cameras aren't mandatory, and it seems to be that manufacturers think that isn't worth the cost.
As somebody who doesn't own a car anymore but somewhat regularly rents very different kinds of cars, I have to say that reverse parking is massively easier with a camera.
Back when I always used to drive the same car I got used to its dimensions of course, but that just doesn't happen when you merely occasionally drive very different cars.
The sensors are nice, but sensors+camera improve on that by an order of magnitude - you do not see behind your car, no matter how much you think you do. Especially small people aka children are completely hidden from the driver's point of view by the rear of the car - which is exactly in the camera's center of field.
I got a shocking example of this recently. I was towing a trailer behind my vehicle for a 14' boat (the trailer was quite a bit longer than that). I was really surprised that I could not see it AT ALL in my rear view mirror when the boat was not on it. Meaning there is at least 16' behind my vehicle where I cannot see something about 2' tall or shorter.
I LOVE mine... with the guide lines for reversing, I always center into the space as desired... it's easier than pulling in forward even. For times when the neighboring spaces are wonky, it's easier to short shrift the passenger side, aligned with the other car's passenger side, so worst case you have to pull out to let a passenger in.
Also, if every other car parked forward/reverse then the more cramped spaces wouldn't be as difficult. Note, I live in AZ, USA where more than half the cars are full sized or larger vehicles. So parking lots designed for cities with smaller vehicles are particularly difficult.
That's what I thought, but I've rented a couple with camears and they are really useful - the overlays which shows where your wheels will go with your current steering position etc.
The last car I rented had a 360 degree camera which showed a top down picture of the car and surroundings!
Yeah, that's a good point. The question here isn't whether or not to have an infotainment system that integrates with Android Auto and Apple Car Play, it's whether to interface with it via a touch screen or physical input (or both).
I think that's only half true. There are standardized controls but the dash configurations and wiring harnesses are specific to each model and then even for only a few years. So I'm in agreement with the BOM arguement generally. Also it's a marketing selling point. Consumer wants the shiny new thing.
I totally understand the business case for touchscreens in cars. It's all about reducing cost to the business, but this usually comes at the expense of safety, which is a totally unacceptable tradeoff.
* If the design of your car makes you a less safe driver, you are more likely to crash into me.
* The US as a society has committed (surprisingly recently) to providing emergency care to anyone who shows up at a hospital before asking whether they can pay. Car accidents are a sadly common reason for people requiring emergency care. That means that reducing car accidents is a public benefit.
* Modern societies have made the choice in general to require some baseline level of safety from all sorts of products in order to make commerce more efficient. If consumers feel confident that they can (e.g.) buy a random toy off the shelf for their kid without needing to do a bunch of research on whether it contains lead paint or dangerous parts, that reduces friction and increases sales. The same reasoning can apply to car safety features: it's easier to get people to just buy a car if they have a baseline level of confidence that any car they buy is safe to drive.
That's just a few reasons that first came to mind. I've already thought of one or two more that would take a little longer and a little more care to put into words, but I encourage you to think about these questions yourself when they come to mind, too.
I wouldn't consider 1986 particularly recent, regarding the COBRA/Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act particularly recent. Considering that civil rights was still a large issue well into the early 80's. Not that there aren't civil rights issues today, it's mostly that the outrage is much larger than any actual issues persisting.
Consumer protection on the other hand, is quite a bit longer in the tooth. Though did really start after the 50's. I know the original erector sets were particularly bad, as were earlier die cast models, etc.
C. Especially in this case, the safety issue affects everyone else on the road, too. If someone crashes into you while playing with their Apple Play, congrats on enjoying the unregulated free market.
If your kid takes a ride in a friend's dirt cheap car they bought because they're 17 and they get in a wreck, congrats.
If manufacturers can make and sell unsafe cars, they will, and it will drive up the cost of safe cars.
When products as critical as cars unsafe, it costs everyone, even those who don't buy them.
Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.
Consider that for every item you need to:
* secure supply for the next 10 years or so
* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain
* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it
* design and implement testing procedures
* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed
* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years
* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems
* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.
Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
> Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.
I enjoy driving a manual ("stick") and distrust auto-braking/lane assist/etc. My car has airbags, ABS and traction control so I'm happy with the safety features.
No way will I buy a car where essential functions are touchscreen operated, or with any phone-home "features".
While I tend to agree that the past decade has seen some arguably unnecessary increases in complexity, the latest safety technology is significantly more advanced than even 10 years ago.
Your list includes "Air Bags, ABS and Traction Control" - this list was fine in the early 90s, but you've missed one of the most life saving innovations in recent modern car history - Electronic/Dynamic Stability Control.
Multiple studies have shown ESC has potential to reduce fatal accidents by a third - this is largely why it was made mandatory on all cars sold in the EU and US since 2011/12. If you own a powerful vehicle, especially a rear wheel drive one, the kind of driver input mess (accidental or intentional) ESC systems can clean up that otherwise has you spinning off the road is pretty amazing.
Mazda just moved to the top of my "I would buy an electric car from this manufacturer if I could" list, but they don't seem to be in a hurry to release a product.
There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.
No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.
Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure.
I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
Do tell us all about the huge labor savings Tesla is running away with[1].
It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated.
I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this:
> Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced.
I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible.
The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash.
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this [...]
That link is to a toy touchscreen. Are we counting every strand of metal as its own wire now? I think the power and the data cables are each bundles of lots of such strands, and no car manufacturers worry about the individual strands because each cable plugs into the circuit board as a cohesive unit, like: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Customized-odm-15-6-i...
(First Google result for "touchscreen alibaba", it's not like this is an obscure, rarely used configuration.)
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Those sound like good points to me, but I don't know anything about this stuff.
I do know about this stuff (currently work for one OEM and have worked for 2 others) and you're exactly right.
Something that hasn't even been mentioned is all the meetings, documentation, coordination between people that work on the components that have to interface with each other. That labor is significantly reduced when you offload most of that to the touch screen because some of that interface can now be done by the same person without any meetings. That's not just cost savings, it's also time savings, which is part of why Tesla was able to bring the model 3 to market so fast (fast at least in the car world).
That said, I much prefer tactile controls. I recently moved from a BMW to a Volvo had the BMW had physical controls for most common functions while the Volvo only has a handful of buttons and one knob for volume. It's a pretty good balance, but I do miss a few buttons and more could be done on the touchscreen to ease that longing (such as customizable shortcuts).
Cadillac is starting to go back to more tactile controls because they've learned how terrible it is without any (my wife has a CTS so I completely understand why they're doing it -- it is awful). I hope Audi changes course too.
And every single application loaded and installed, software library, SDK and license has to be rolled up into the BOM for every headunit sold/installed.
It seems obvious to me that one team of software engineers doing testing and diagnostics on a piece of software is way cheaper than training and then paying entire factories to do testing and diagnostics on each button and knob. (Not to mention we're talking about like, volume controls. Not exactly the most complicated and expensive kind of software to engineer.)
Not to mention if you screw up the software an update is generally cheap and easy. If your button is messed up you have to pay for a mechanic to tear apart the entire dash.
Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons...
For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production.
Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.
They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive.
It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.
I'd like to see a compromise on this. If there's a passenger, they should be able to use a touchscreen. For someone not used to the car, a scroll wheel is going to feel very weird. And obviously safety isn't much of an issue if the passenger is controlling it.
Cars already know whether a passenger is present of course.
Touch screens are awful for operating while you focus elsewhere.
I miss touch typing and I sure like adjusting car controls without looking away.
What's that, trust driverless cars you say? Never, and the basilisk be damned.
Not to mention that touchscreens rated for passenger vehicles and the extreme environmental changes their interiors go through are not cheap. Look at how many screens Tesla has had to replace in their cars.
my old mustang had 10 old fashioned buttons under the screen that i could use to dial a phone number. new jeep has a rectangular thingy that could swallow up everything, but somehow it didn't swallow 10 buttons, so i have to pull up the phone to dial a number while driving.
>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject.
After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay.
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. In the meantime, Apple and Google (?) have done it for them, at least as far as the phone goes.
(I assume the Android equivalent is equally good; no reason it shouldn't be.)
>This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric.
I think it really IS, though.
CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
But the phone interface is distinct from that, and needs to be a touchscreen. When it's not, or when it's not present, people just pick up their phones and use them, which is worse.
As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ...").
I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase.
Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
>One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it
Is it possible your friends are dumb? Because my 79 year old mother doesn't have an issue with CarPlay. The only potentially confusing thing is that it becomes your phone screen, and things you do on the phone influence what's on the CP screen.
The possible confusing-one-time scenario would be, say, driver using AppleMaps to navigate somewhere, and passenger using phone to look up the capital of Nebraska or whatever. When passenger pushes the home button to go to the browser, CarPlay will exit navigation and show ITS home screen, too.
Nav is still happening; you just have to switch back to it, just as you would on the phone.
And, again, this should really only be surprising once.
>Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
CarPlay makes no effort to provide anything other than phone integration, so your climate control knob is safe.
Throwing shade on CarPlay by saying the problem was solved with an aux cable is pretty laughable, honestly. Sure, you could fiddle with your phone and play music, but there's no access to nav, no access to voice controls, and you have to grabble with your phone to change anything. CarPlay provides a large screen in a static location that simplifies the music approach, plus gives you access to other functions.
Carplay would just be for music, navigation, and phone calls. It is only replacing the infotainment system. You should still have buttons or knobs or sliders for the AC/heat, cruise control, defrost, window heaters, seat heat, seat A/C, traction control, and anything else.
I just had my first experience with CarPlay this weekend and it was not positive.
What I want? An empty shelf just to the right of the steering wheel where I can charge my phone and connect it to car audio. I don't want to hand-off my navigation or music selection to the vehicle, just allow me to put my phone in a prominent visible location.
I'm a huge fan of Carplay. Instead of having to listen to FM radio or fiddle with a phone screen on a silly dashboard sticker things, I get a massive screen with my phone on it. I can listen to podcasts and Spotify, follow Waze, dictate messages, all without fiddling
Maybe I don't switch back and forth between stuff while I'm driving as much as you do? I set everything up before I need to focus on the road, and then I just drive. If I need to change to a different playlist, or switch from music to the news, I pull over, make the switch, then start driving again.
If CarPlay makes it more tempting or productive for me to do non-driving things while I am driving, then it is not a good driving UX.
If you have a smartphone, it can be tempting or "productive" (the air quotes are probably reasonable!) to do non-driving things while you're driving, if you're the sort of person who's tempted to do that when you have a smartphone available. I think this is largely orthogonal to whether or not you have CarPlay.
I'm guilty of being that sort of person occasionally. I've found that having CarPlay in my new car reduces the temptation to do "non-driving things," because the things that I do that are related to driving -- navigation apps, streaming music, and for me, playing podcasts -- become easier to do with CarPlay's UX than with just using the phone in a holder like I did in my last car. The screen in my car is much bigger, the touch targets are bigger, the UI is simplified, the design encourages me to use voice input. (In your example of changing to a different playlist, I can just press the Siri button -- which perhaps amusingly in this discussion, is a physical button on my Insight's steering wheel! -- and say "Play [name of playlist].")
It's generally illegal to pull over on an interstate highway unless you have a true emergency. Pulling over in traffic, and then accelerating and merging again (in the absence of an actual acceleration lane as with on/off ramps) is dangerous.
Yes. In this case, if changing my audio source right at that time is that important, I'll get off on an exit. But I don't think that has ever happened to me.
I would like it if all cars had some kind of standard phone mount connector. Then you buy a holder for your particular phone and there's already power/audio/whatever/wired in.
Are you sure you are talking about CarPlay? I could understand Android Auto to an extant -- it can be slightly confusing to the uninitiated, but CarPlay is just about as simple as you get -- at least in my experience.
(Please do not start a iOS vs Android battle over this comment -- this is simply my experience -- I use both on a daily basis -- your mileage may vary)
So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app, so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road. Without it, people would just be looking at their phones anyways.
Guess we should go back to paper maps and listening to AM radio.
The whole point is that you are neither reading or writing them, they are read _to_ you, and you dictate messages if you feel the need to reply while driving, but both can be done with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suppose it is up for debate whether just the act of listening or speaking is distracting enough to be considered a bad thing.
It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous. The NHTSA says:
"The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free."
Though it doesn't link to any studies and I'm too lazy to go searching, so if you want a primary source you'll have to find it yourself...
>It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous.
Just like talking to other people in the car or doing anything else other than driving. I know that I will take a driver getting their messages read out to them over a driver who takes their eyes off the road and glances at the phone. Good is the enemy of the perfect, and I would rather take an attainable good over an unattainable perfect.
Thanks for correcting, I actually appreciate it, no sarcasm. I mentioned it before in one of my HN comments on a thread about language learning, but as a non-native english speaker, it helps me a lot when people correct my mistakes. No matter how small or insignificant the mistakes are, because little by little, they add up.
Exactly. If I am in the passenger seat talking to the driver, I know when to shut up and let them drive. If I am on the phone talking to a driver, there is no indication of them, say, approaching a difficult merge.
It is. Car conversations are a serious issue with respect to distracted driving. I personally can't handle thinking about driving safely and thinking about a conversation. Humans are famously bad at multi-tasking and I don't see how being in a car gives us magical powers.
I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being drunk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16884056/
If I'm speaking with someone in the car and I detect a potentially dangerous situation, I immediately stop talking to focus.
It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.
In fact the passenger will also detect the potentially dangerous situation and stop taking focus from you. The person in the phone will not, and may continue to distract you involuntarily.
A coworker once told me that that is what makes the difference, based on some study. I immediately believed it because it seemed so reasonable, so not citation...
I've never had a problem with it, but I also don't look at them while driving, and so forth. Maybe I'm the drunk driver who thinks he can totally drive better when he's drunk, but I've been driving 20+ years and never had an issue.
OTOH, I also evaluate and will not talk if I don't feel comfortable (poor road conditions, etc).
This will probably not endear me to the general readerhip, but if it would be up to me.
People caught while texting during driving:
First time offense: Massive fine and three month licence revocation
Second offense: Permanent license revocation. Because you just have proven beyond a doubt that you're either too dumb or too reckless to be allowed to operate deadly machinery.
Phoning while driving is dangerous. Texting while driving is just outrageously stupid and grossly negligent
> So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app,
Get a dock for your phone and use bluetooth for the audio. (Or line-in, except headphone jacks keep disappearing...)
> so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road.
Holy fuck no. Don't encourage this. Taking your eyes off the road is only one symptom of the problem. The problem is splitting your attention.
There's a TV show where they demonstrate this most years, Canada's Worst Driver. The challenge is to drive in a circle on a track. Talking on the phone - not ever looking away from the road - is enough to start veering off the track.
Knowing where you’re going before you take off is generally a good idea. A paper map may not be the solution—pulling up an online map and figuring out your route before getting in your vehicle is one way and what I tend to do.
I routinely see locals plug local destinations into their navigator-of-choice, though, so expecting people to know the lay of the land these days may be a bridge too far. God forbid there is construction or an accident and you have to improvise!
I mean you said app twice in it. Ten years ago, nothing was mediated via an app, somehow we managed to survive.
Now almost everyone has been turned into a phone zombie. You're wasting your lives people!
FOMO is entirely backwards, you shouldn't be afraid of missing out on something in your phone, you should be afraid of missing out on your entire life.
The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization. I'll give you credit for avoiding the temptation to break out the ol' "wake up, sheeple!", though.
> The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization.
Yeah, but on the directions front, it does represent a big loss in self efficacy. I don't rely on GPS, even when travelling to foreign countries.
I know people who don't even know the cities they live in. They are living in the phone's world itself, you could say.
On the other hand, the security of a smartphone with maps that cover the world have opened up self-guided international travel to people that may have otherwise limited themselves to guided tours.
I just took a sibling on her first non-guided international trip a couple years ago -- her fear was always getting lost in a strange city, but when she found out how easily her cell phone would help her navigate the city streets and transit systems, she's been on two trips on her own since then and enjoys the freedom of being able to explore on her own with much less worry of getting lost.
Of course, she could lose or break her phone, but then she's no worse off them if she lost a paper map, she'd have to ask for directions, take a cab, or find a new map, but the cell phone gives her the freedom to explore at her own pace.
I remember driving before GPS: there was tons of time and gasoline wasted driving in circles looking for things, getting lost, pulling over and trying to make sense of a paper map that doesn't have that much resolution, asking people for directions and getting useless and wrong directions, etc. It was a total pain in the ass.
I also remember life before cellphones. You couldn't communicate with people when you were en-route, so you didn't find out until you got there that something was canceled, or you needed to get something on the way, or were meeting somewhere else, etc. So again, lots of wasted time and gas.
I'm surprised people with this luddite mentality don't tell us that we should all just go back to writing letters, because things were so great back before we could have real-time conversations over a long distance...
Yeah that's me quoted above, and yes arguing against smartphones.
I believe smartphones are a net loss to people's happiness.
All of these liberating technologies are fun for the early adopters, but then become oppressive once you are expected to have them. We are quickly reaching that point.
What they really are are surveillance transponders that we carry around voluntarily.
The privacy issues are real, but you're only a slave to the device if you want to be (or you let others force you to be).
Where you see oppression, I see convenience.
If I'm on vacation and forgot to turn the thermostat down before leaving, I can use an app on my phone to do so remotely.
If there's a cold spell and the furnace fails, that same app will notify me when the house gets too cold so I can find someone to go check on it.
My wife can add (or remove) items to the shopping list while I'm already at the store.
When I'm at the doctor and want to confirm what drug I'm taking, I can bring up my online account from the pharmacy.
When I'm on the bus home and watch to finish reading the book I was reading at home on my eReader, I can bring up that book on the app on my phone -- and it will start up on the page where I stopped reading last night.
I do have my work email delivered to my phone, but I turned notifications off -- I only see a work email if I intentionally look for it.
I do have a notification app from work installed on my phone that can notify me 24 hours a day when I'm on call, but even that is more convenient from when I carried a pager and only got a numeric page so I couldn't tell whether or not it was something that had to be dealt with immediately or could wait until I got home later -- I'd have to dial-in to find out (and I had to literally dial-in on a physical phone line since in those days my phone wasn't a hotspot that can give me internet access anywhere, or I can just check on the service with my smartphone instead of having to get out my laptop)
There are lots of ways the phone makes my life more convenient.
I had to take time to check email instead of simply looking when I get the message on my phone.
I had to take a magazine to the toilet instead of reading on my phone.
I wore watches. They never lasted as long as the phone. I used to have alarm clocks too. The phones actually do better to wake me since a lot of alarm ringtones vary in sounds.
Gameboys and other portable gaming devices have been a thing for some time.
I actually carried around pen and paper when I went to the grocery store! When I was poor, I also took a calculator.
I used to have a portable television. It was black and white and possibly had a smaller screen than current phones. It definitely had poorer definition and one was lucky to pick up channels with the antennae.
Instead of arguing about who is correct about something, we can look it up in a restaurant. It is cool, and makes the conversation less about who is right and wrong and more about what is and could be.
Do you remember landlines? Wasn't it just wonderful that one couldn't have a private conversation at home? Would you seriously trade texting and/or having a private phone number for a house phone of old?
My niece carries my sister's phone around the house on video to talk to me. It dosn't matter that they are in Seattle and me in Norway.
I have a camera with me all the time and picture processing costs nothing! Do you have any clue how much I wanted that as a kid? I loved taking pictures, but couldn't afford film developing. As a bonus, my phone takes better pictures than many of the old cameras I've used. I happen to take pictures of manhole covers when I'm out, at least when I can make them interesting.
I share my artwork, that I make on paper, on the internet using my phone.
I have access to so many things. Lots of people can teach themselves "adulting" now, especially cooking. On their phone. Before I had my tablet, I used my phone in the kitchen.
Wasting life? No. You just aren't seeing the joy these piece of technology bring to others and disregarding the things the phone has replaced.
Ten years ago was 2009, dude. I definitely had an Android phone and used apps for navigation and music back then. In my car, even! Just via an aux cable instead of Bluetooth and Android Auto. (Of course, now I have a Mazda 3 and an iPhone and I use CarPlay...)
Why? because the automaker interface is AWFUL. Also, why should I pay a car dealer upwards of $2500 to gain GPS? My phone has GPS, it also has Siri so I can talk to it.
Maps and audio (music/podcasts) are the two main reasons I use carplay. Built in options in all vehicles I've used since carplay has been available are horrible in comparison.
It's a thing when many car manufacturers want you to pay a monthly subscription just get simple map updates for their already very crappy maps application.
It's a thing when when all your music is already on your phone.
Maps. Podcasts. Apple Music: “Hey Siri, play <whatever you could imagine>” Having your next appointment automatically show up in Maps ready to simply click “go.” Or “Hey Siri, where is the nearest In and Out?”
> "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want"
Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
The Lightning to analog headphone adapter is $10, and IIRC, I had a USB port in my 2002 Acura RSX in a $200 third-party head unit anyway. But, pretending everything Apple makes is a kajillion billion dollars and incompatible with everything is sure a lot more fun!
With the 3.5mm jack, you need to handle your phone for the uses the parent mentioned. This is much more dangerous than using phone integration in the vehicle and illegal in many jurisdictions.
Tiny bluetooth to aux adapters cost $10–20 on Amazon and work amazingly well.
Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.
Bluetooth is slow to change tracks, slow to pause, slow to connect, has annoying pairing issues, has lower sound quality, and is just generally subpar.
>Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet
So it's wireless, but with wires.
I rarely use either though, my car has usb and I have a 32Gb stick of music that stays in there.
I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me.
All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
This is changing in CarPlay in iOS 13, as are a fair number of other things (generally for the better; I have a bit of hands-on experience thanks to a brave/foolhardy friend who's already installed the developer beta).
This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find.
At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
With touchscreens, there's always the balance of putting the screen in line-of-sight while driving while keeping it close enough to be touchable. I like the touchpad system in the new Acura RDX the most as a compromise, has most of the accuracy of a touchscreen (still lets you draw letters and stuff) while retaining the haptic nature of the knob/buttons (position on the touchpad is absolute -- tapping the top left corner of the touchpad means you're tapping the top left corner of the screen). Plus it has the advantage of not having your hand block the screen when you're trying to touch it.
Otherwise, the Mazda knob works well enough. I think most of the power user complaints could be addressed by better default behavior or customization on what a scroll/click does on certain screens.
Android Auto/CarPlay is easily the most distracting system I've used. The only benefit is if I choose to be distracted while driving, it's less distracting than using my phone. Being distracted while driving is a _choice_ and sadly one that many drivers want to have.
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
>At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone.
Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.
Personally I don’t mind using a remote to navigate menus; dedicated, physical buttons can in many cases make things easier. What I absolutely despise, however, is the latency between said button presses and the actual acknowledgment on-screen.
In my experience, the latency on cable TV boxes, Smart TVs, and in-flight entertainment systems has progressively gotten worse, not better over the years.
This latency, when coupled with a car’s touch screen is even worse.
Android Auto actually works quite well with Audi's jog wheel thing. The 2018 Q5 I rented last year had no touch screen, just this knob. Worked totally fine and required no touching a screen.
This really saddens me. My 2010 Acura has controls that I really like, almost everything is a physical button/knob that I can hit without taking my eyes off the road.
I don't know about CarPlay but Android Auto works good enough with knob controls.
I have a 2014 Mazda3, which Mazda offered Android Auto/CarPlay upgrade for a fee earlier this year and I upgraded. My car has a touchscreen, but disables all touch features above a certain speed (5 or 10 mph I think). I don't think I'm really missing anything on Android Auto without touch.
> I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
Same here.
That being said, I never felt it was difficult to switch on off the AC since if you just press the fan for about a second, it shuts it down. This is the sort of stuff I would have liked to be voice activated.
> The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Terrible idea? It's the best thing since sliced iPhone. Keep in mind that the "car" is usually driving itself; that's a much higher level of solving the "silly human takes eyes and hands off road" problem, which makes what Mazda is doing seem, frankly, short-sighted (disclosure: although a Honda/BMW/Tesla fan, I've always secretly cheered for Mazda because I like their driving "DNA," and if I ever buy another non-EV again it might just be an MX-5 NA or NB for autox/track use). Now, of course, they're _currently_ not in the same league, but this stuff is getting cheaper (technology! heck yeah!) and these changes should be a look toward the future. All of that said, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with the move they're making, just, again, doesn't seem terribly forward-looking -- other than that, it's perfectly fine.
> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it.
I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony.
When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync.
I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.
But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
Good point. That made me realize my preference is a bit more nuanced. For anything where navigating menus or anything displayed on a screen is required, I'm all for touchscreens.
For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.
I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.
>CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving.
Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface.
Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
> Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find.
Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain.
If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface, but almost everything about the nav system on Android Auto is better than the builtin one.
AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.
The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode.
My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.
On the flip side, the Nissan Leaf with premium audio is an example of physical controls done wrong. Everything is buttons with no tactile way to home your hand, you have to take your eyes off the road to fine the right button.
My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.
I'm not sure it cleanly falls on either category. I agree with him that an all-touchscreen UI would be terrible, but I am correcting the misconception that Tesla has an all-touchscreen UI, because it doesn't.
The Tesla touchscreen interface is really good, partly I think because Tesla is just as much a software company as they are a car company.
The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back.
The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
> What you're alluding to here is personal preference.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion.
> If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.
People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else.
> you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense.
And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.
I'm not the person you responded to, but are people buying them?
I'd actually be curious how many people are buying them - it wasn't enough to save RIM. I think not as popular as the iPhone is a pretty big understatement and thinking that's mostly about Apple's marketing comes across as pretty clueless to me.
Some people still prefer horses to cars, but it'd be a generally bad idea for someone getting into the transportation business to focus on horse drawn carriages.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean better, but when you're an extreme outlier compared to what's dominant in the market and what's dominant in the market directly out-competed your preference when it had dominant market advantage, there's probably a reason.
FYI, BlackBerry hasn't been called RIM since 2012, and BlackBerry doesn't make the hardware. They just licence the brand to other manufacturers like TCL, which makes most of the current devices.
That's a false analogy. A horse-drawn carriage is a fundamentally different mode of transportation than a car, but a BlackBerry is identical to any other smartphone except for the small keyboard on the front.
The reason BlackBerries are not popular is because early touch screen smartphones were simply so much better than the BlackBerries of the day, and that set the precedent in consumers' minds that smartphones are slabs and smartphones with keyboards are bad (as evidenced by the people in this thread). But modern BlackBerries are just slabs with keyboards. If BlackBerry didn't aim their company at the ground at full throttle, the present phone landscape might look a lot different.
Also, most people simply don't need a smartphone with a keyboard, because all they use it for is SnapChat and FaceBook. It's like saying mechanical keyboards are inferior to rubber membrane keyboards because only a relatively tiny portion of the population uses them.
And yes, people are buying them. Not many, but it's apparently enough to be profitable, because TCL keeps releasing new models. Not on the levels of Samsung's S or Apple's iPhone devices obviously, but that's not what matters. (Close to a million KeyOne models were sold in 2017, but I don't know what the current numbers are like.)
> And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better.
How can you do this when the device has already been shipped with the keyboard? Unless you're suggesting that Blackberry offers an unrealistic replacement program to change the keys and their function. Also tactile keyboard takes away a significant screen real estate. The market has also proven that people want bigger screens. There is no disputing that.
I don't know if you've ever used a BlackBerry, but it's not like the buttons on a car radio, which are fixed in function. The keyboard is merely an input method, like the keyboard on a desktop or laptop computer. And those don't seem to have a problem with changing user interfaces.
Furthermore, the keyboard does not significantly impact the size of the screen (it's only about an inch tall)[1], and it means the software keyboard doesn't pop-up and change the size of the screen, which is always disruptive. Also, the keyboard is touch sensitive, so the behaviour of the gestures can be changed in software (like swipe left to delete a word).
[1] The screen is too large for my preferences anyway.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect.
Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
I use Android Auto in my car, and the only complaint I have thus far is the occasional misinterpreted input.
Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces.
Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.
CarPlay might be good, never tried it, but Android Auto isn't all that impressive, whether there is touch screen or not. I did not find it any more impressive with a touchscreen, though.
But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.
I bought a 2016 Golf with CarPlay and only used it about twice. I hated how it was locked into only the functions it supported, didn't let me use the in-car nav or other functions while it took over my screen, and it also took over my phone.
If you thought CarPlay was going to let you control aspects of your car, not aspects of your phone, then you misunderstood it entirely.
It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
I'm not sure what you thought I thought. I was absolutely not expecting CarPlay itself to let me "control aspects of my car". I don't even know what this means.
Here are the problems:
* When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display.
* It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps.
* Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking
It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.
>What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk.
First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy.
Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone."
I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.
>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.
And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?
It is interesting that Tesla fans can't even imagine for a moment that someone might have actually tried it and did not like it...
In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
The one piece of feedback I gave Toyota in their post-purchase survey is: please replace the hot mess that is Entune with CarPlay.
They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, for what it's worth, that analog controls are superior to touch controls while driving. I hate that Toyota replaced an audio dial with a touch up/down control. But the value of CarPlay is just way too high.
> They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, but I think the people building these systems are working under basically impossible conditions.
I am just speculating here, but in a car company I would think the people are mostly going to be passionate about "car stuff" (engine, driving experience, aesthetics, drive train, etc), and so the infotainment system considerations are going to take a back seat to all the things car enthusiasts care more about. This doesn't necessarily mean the people in the infotainment team themselves, but would definitely be whoever they report to, up the chain to whatever the 'product owner' equivalent is for the entire car (eg: responsible for allocating the budget). I would expect to find an attitude less like "let's make sure people buy this car because of the infotainment system" than "infotainment is tolerated as a necessary feature to sell the car to the masses".
On top of that, they have to build software that is going to be around for a couple decades with (ideally) no updates, and that basically doesn't ever crash. This means extensive testing -- maybe for over a year. For sake of discussion let's say it takes only another year to build the software: this means by the time the car is released, the platform (both hardware and any underlying software/frameworks) it's built on is basically already two years old -- and there's a good chance when the platform was picked it already wasn't cutting-edge.
This isn't meant to be a defense of bad infotainment software -- it's still bad. Give up, and focus your time on making a great CarPlay/Android Auto experience (at probably a fraction of the time currently spent). Make the FM radio and maybe bluetooth audio work standalone, then just rely on the phone integration for everything else (maps, text messages, phone dialing, contacts, etc).
Isn't CarPlay exclusive to iOS devices? If so, what you're describing might be viable with Lexus. It'd be somewhat pointless with the Toyota brand, where iOS users are a rather small minority.
Seriously? People will have the newest iPhone before they shell out for a car with a working air conditioner. The car is gone as a status symbol, the phone is now arrived.
We know that iPhone enjoys a minority of smartphone market share, and we know that Lexus is the luxury brand and Toyota is the everyday brand. One assumes iPhone will be overrepresented among Lexus buyers and underrepresented among Toyota buyers. Therefore it would make very little sense for the Toyota brand to abandon Android users in favor of iOS users in the design of its dashboard systems.
I wasn't suggesting they ditch android auto, but literally everyone but Mazda and Toyota have carplay as an option. Even Kia and Hyundai. Chevy,GMC,ford,Dodge, Chrysler,jeep,Fiat,Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi. All have carplay. Mazda is going simple, which I respect. I drive a Miata pre touchscreen and I use a $50 Android phone. But to have a touchscreen an not have android auto and carplay? Why?
I think that the proportion of iphone owners who use toyotas is similar to that of the general population, so leaving out android is unlikely to happen.
Everyone wanted to be Star Trek The Next Generation and/or Minority Report. That is the reality of it. Shiny futurist magic finger-wavy interfaces. Which were designed to look as cool as possible in movies and not on the basis of practical affordance.
As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly prefer familiarity. Standardizing cars across a couple of different interfaces vs each car having a brand new layout of analog switches, knobs, and doo-hickeys is a much better rider experience.
Much like how a “phone” went from “a device to call someone on” to what an iPhone does today, a “car” is going from “something you drive” to just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally.
I still hate typing with on-screen keyboards, I just grudgingly accept that for a given small phone size, I'd prefer more of it to be screen than keyboard. That doesn't at all mean I want my car to turn into an Android tablet because I prefer a touchscreen in the constraints of a pocket size device.
If people really do vastly prefer touch screens, I would expect to see different control mechanisms moving in this direction (steering, shifting, etc.)
The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.
I was thinking the other day that there isn't really a good reason why I couldn't control my car with a PS4 controller. I wouldn't advocate for that as an industry wide change, but I'm willing to move beyond huge steering wheels and gear shifts
I think we take for granted that the modern car layout has always been the same way, but it's interesting to learn how it evolved. Some of the original designs were using tillers instead of steering wheels, for example.
Sure, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
The actual point was that when it comes to safety/critical functions, we still prefer those mechanical mechanisms. Unless you're flying or driving with your iPhone, I think the point still stands.
I think the fact that safety critical fly-by-wire systems could operate without the mechanical interface yet designers choose to do so anyway underscores this point.
I truly wish for a current phone designed even half as well as the Palm Pre and Treo were a decade ago. (Slide-out keyboard, "Just Type", non-sucking contacts and calendar, etc.) Really, I just want an updated Pre with a state-of-the-art browser and radios...
"Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. "
And Teslas ALMOST never kill their driver or innocent bystanders when the driver is negligently ignoring -- or bored and not paying attention to -- the road. There have been low speed accidents where the operator is tasked with taking over for the vehicle and they couldn't respond in time. Real life is neither a video game nor a perfect simulation. Limitations of the technology and the human operator as well as conditions of the road, lighting, and weather will always be a problem.
I wasn't commenting on the current state of self-driving car's safety...we can debate that endlessly so I won't. But the direction we're currently heading in is pretty darn clear.
Alright, but that's not how I read your comment. Regardless, until we as a society are so confident in autonomous vehicles that we eliminate manual control systems as outmoded and unnecessary, those systems should be designed to minimize cognitive load on the operator of the vehicle.
I don't necessarily disagree...that's just not what's happening in the real world. Car manufacturers are moving forward, quickly, with self-driving tech.
The point was you comparing a car to a phone does not make any sense right now. That elusive future where a car just becomes a device is not going to be here in the next few years, we can talk about it when it comes but right now cars kill people if you dont pay attention.
I think you're vastly underestimating how quickly car manufacturers are moving..or at least trying to move.
Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars. And they are, of course, designing their current fleet of cars for that future. There's already a Games section in the dashboard.
We can talk about the safety aspects all day until we're blue in the face. But this is the reality.
You've got to be kidding? Yes, the touchscreens on many/most of the cars out there are a horrible user experience. I've shared in that frustration. But just look to how Tesla has handled this to see what can be possible. It isn't perfect by any means but it is such an improvement to the user experience (being able to add buttons via the UI to enable new features, maps that respond quickly, etc). They still have analog controls for volume and other things. Touchscreens are here to stay. The user experience just needs to improve.
I've never driven a car with a touchscreen. And I wouldn't want one for basic controls. Once I become familiar with old-school control locations, I don't need to look away from the road to make adjustments.
And damn, I got pulled over once for suspicion of drunk driving, in my wife's car. In the process of finding some knob, I had drifted out of the lane.
Anyway, heads-up is a great alternative. I look forward to lots of cool AR.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
For me there is two different scenarii for controlling the car:
- while driving quick adjustments: volume up/volume down, temperature control, play/stop/skip music, start/stop navigation.
All of those should be via easy to understand, direct access physical controls.
- while parked (or by a passanger): navigation setting, app switching, playlist adjustments, peripherals setup, air control strategies, anything finicky really.
I see a case for these operations to be done by a touchscreen with no physical equivalent. Physical controls for those are juste hell most of the time.
In that sense, I feel Mazda is just throwing the towel when a more sensible and best of both world approach could be taken.
In the 2015 Mazda I drive, they allow touch under 5 mph (I think?) But I installed Android Auto using third-party/open source software (and touch is always-on.)
By default on your phone, plugged into the car, you have to swipe/unlock Android Auto, but if you're parked, you can do that, and access your apps, including Google Maps. You can set your destination, and it immediately opens on the car screen. I'm completely fine with this model of interface - when parked, use your phone.
However, having said all that, if you still want to use a wheel, it's important they hit the right UI. In a BMW I rented, the way it only showed relevant letters while searching for an address (using the wheel) was pretty good and I was able to type in an address surprisingly quickly, even on my first time of using the software. Probably still not quite as quick as using a touch screen, but close enough.
I suspect that when you allow touchscreen as your fallback, it's harder to be "really good" about making a good wheel + button UI. It's too easy to lean on your crutch.
From a user experience perspective, it seems strange to me that one would only consider the driver experience and not include the passenger. I 100% agree with you about the need for tactile non distracting controls for the driver. At the same time carplay controlled by the passengers phone has a lot of value in terms of value add to passengers.
Touch screens in cars are the equivalent of shiny phones. They persuade people to buy and some of them might love them.
Nearly every phone I see has a protector around it, destroying the nice looking design because one drop and it breaks. But you still need to have shiny designed phones or you won't sell them.
So cudos to Mazda. I wonder if they can keep this policy up when everyone else has shiny large touchscreens.
I have used Audi’s version of CarPlay without a touchscreen and I hated it. Circling through icons that were designed for a touch interface made no sense. Tesla’s interface is not perfect but interacting with the map is so much better with its large touchscreen.
Yep. I recently spent a day driving an S5 and S6, and the non-touchscreen carplay was terrible. I have a touchscreen version in my 2017 CR-V, and it is a joy to use. I read the comments in this thread, and it makes me laugh. So much "TOUCHSCREENS ARE THE DEVIL, NOBS AND BUTTONS ONLY." It just doesn't jive with my experience at all. Maybe it's a generation gap thing? I'm 30 FWIW.
Possibly. If the only thing you're used to and expect is a touchscreen, you will long for a touchscreen even when it is objectively a worse experience.
Seriously... I've seen people right here on HN claiming that "look, navigate to a touch menu, navigate to another menu, select an item, press and hold" is superior to "press one button on the door".
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars
The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
If we extend this idea, why not do it for airplanes? It seems like a bad idea to be changing the layout of mission-critical systems. I'm sure it'd wreak havoc if the cockpit of a 787 was all touch screens, with UI changes pushed at the whim of developers.
I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job done; it doesn't need iteration, and messing with it would reduce safety. I don't have to look at the controls, because the buttons are of various shapes/sizes that I know. Tactile feedback is value in keeping eyes on the road.
An A380 is already full of screens where touch input could be introduced. All major airplane manufacturers are definitely experimenting with touch screens in the cockpit [1]. I guess not for flight critical systems for different reasons, because of missing tactile feedback and limited usage during turbulent flights [2]. But maybe that's just a question of time...
I know from people inside SpaceX that they have covers for the essential switch panels which they put on when Musk is around, because he objects to them for confused silly reasons (like tesla cross-marketing). The astronauts and capsule engineers know better, of course, so this is the compromise.
I hope you're arguing in favour of the space shuttle there. It has no contextual buttons. I'll always argue that contextual controls do not belong in critical systems. Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it. A touch screen looks nice but isn't safe. Mission control is telling you to press X button, but X button isn't actually on your display right now?? That's a big problem.
The crew dragon is designed to be completely autonomous. 99% of the time, the astronaut is just a passenger, so there is less requirement for physical controls.
In terms of mission control telling you to press X button, it is almost certain that mission control would have a simulation of the cockpit running that would show them exactly what the astronaut is seeing on their display. So they will always be able to direct the astronaut correctly.
I definitely think a touch screen in this situation can be safer, because it can display information in a way that makes it quicker for the astronaut to understand the situation. It in theory requires less training because there is less requirement to remember the position and function of every single switch.
Space missions need to account for the times when things really hit the fan, that's when design really matters. If shit goes haywire why should I assume my touchscreen is now displaying the same thing as mission controls? If it's not then instructions go out the window. If shit goes haywire in the shuttle, mission control can safely assume they're looking at the EXACT control scheme the pilot is, and can read out controls accordingly. I get that automation is intended, but for emergencies a touch screen really doesn't cut it.
>Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it.
I agree with you in spirit, but would disagree with this particular point. Apollo had an erroneous "Abort" signal because a particular switch didn't do what it was supposed to, because it had some interesting failure modes in zero-gravity.
I think is dangerous to assume that one design is flawless over the other; both touch-screens and mechanical systems have their own unique failure modes. Maybe one is more reliable than the other, which I think is currently the case here.
Ok perhaps I could change that to "every working button on the shuttle will do the same thing every time I press it".
Your mention of zero gravity has brought up another consideration for me. Assuming it's a capacitive touchscreen you need to ensure no conductive material ever floats into contact with it by mistake. Switches and buttons have covers and rails to prevent accidental pressing but how do you manage that with touchscreens? Apple manages it on your phone because a false negative is ok in that case, I don't think you can allow that on a spacecraft. How is a floating glove finger differentiated from a glove actually attached to hand?
I don't think the "every working button" buys you much here because is could just as easily be stated as "every working touchscreen does the same thing every time I press it". The point from reliability engineering is that everything works until it doesn't. The difficulty with software systems is that they often have complexity that is tough to understand all the paths let alone test/mitigate them (see Boeing 737 Max as a recent example).
You bring up really good points on the zero gravity considerations. It would be interesting to see SpaceX's FMEA on this system to see what all they've considered.
?? Touchscreen interfaces almost always have contextual displays. So no touching it doesn't always do the same thing every time I press it. The space where a spacebar is on your phone is the same space that is sometimes the camera button. I think contextual design does not suit important interfaces.
I meant it in terms of pressing a working contextual display. I think we're saying the same thing. Software introduces many more failure pathways so it's often not suitable for primary hazard mitigation.
Elon Musk's fascination with touchscreens is absurd and dangerous.
Even in the future world where everything is autonomous, knobs and buttons will always be needed for mission-critical interactions, whether it be driving in dangerous conditions or having to perform emergency maneuvers on your "autonomous" aircraft.
I like Dynon's systems a bit more, as they have a few physical buttons to allow one to go to certain top-level / important parts of the menu system in a jiffy:
This has far more to do with customer expectations than it does with safety. It would be much harder to sell a car with a different kind of steering mechanism than a wheel. The wheel is a leftover design element. Just because it's what we have doesn't mean it's good.
And, sensibly, stuff you would use while dogfighting or landing are switches and buttons. That, and things that have to always work like the radio and artificial horizon.
Climate is not ternary, it's definitely important for driving in cold climates. To the point that if you can't see ahead, you need to stop on the expressway in order to adjust the airflow to windscreen, so that you don't collide into the other guy who has stopped to adjust the airflow in his car.
Think I have seen flight attendants use a touch screen on the intercom and the cabin lights / infotainment. I’d assume everything on the cockpit is life of death for ~300 people, so different rules apply. Imagine what a sick joke it would be if the recent Boeing crashes were caused by pilots fiddling with a touchscreen while the plane went into a dive. It’s difficult enough to work all the controls accessible without tabbing or scrolling.
> having a flexible interface makes a lot more sense
For business, not the user.
And honestly I expect the answer is simpler: this enables them to subcontract out the UI part and run it in parallel with the development of the rest of the car, because the UI can no longer affect anything else in the car design.
Which allows them to have the UI for controlling the car be done by a team without strong communication links with the team designing the rest of the car's UX.
Is that a genuine benefit, or one that shows up more early in planning and who's downsides show up late?
It's a benefit to the business. There are way more variables of interest to consumers in a car than just UI; few if any will take a crappy touch UI as a dealbreaker (especially if everyone does crappy touch UIs). So it's a pure win for business - the downsides never reach them, they only materialize on the user end, large enough to frustrate people and maybe even cause accidents, but small enough to not cause a purchasing decision change the next time one is in a market for a car.
(I need a term for those cases. Psychological externality?)
I prefer to think of cars as cars. A dock for a smartphone takes care of entertainment and for everything else discrete knobs switches and levers. Preferably clicking with a loud click.
I agree on the flexibility part. Interesting thought. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a touch screen. There are many non-functional buttons in my car right now, which might be wired but just don't perform an action. The car manufacturer could make it more easy to reprogram these.
You can see it a bit as a Playstation controller (or whatever platform you like), it has multiple programmable buttons. A car could basically have the same. A touch screen is not required.
It gets tricky as soon as you need labels and/or more complicated visual feedback attached to "dumb" buttons.
The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.
On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.
The stakes are much lower, but the same complaints apply to media center remote controls.
Recently my Logitech Harmony ONE died, and I replaced it with their current high-end device. I HATE it. I want to be looking at the TV when using it, not shifting attention to the remote's touch screen. Worse, the remote wants to support lots of controls, which it implements by allowing a swipe between pages. But it's way too easy to accidentally change pages, and the pages are all different kinds of things, so it's not clear how to swipe back to the one you want.
So I took the $100+ device and threw it in the closet. I bought their 665 model, which is a big "peanut" form factor. It has all physical buttons, except four are located on the edge of an LCD screen. But that's not a touch screen, it's just for labeling purposes. All the buttons on the device are physical. This $50 device is so much easier to use than it's big brother.
Related to my other comment on this article here, I bought the new device which came with the Harmony Hub. Once I connected it to my Google Assistant, I haven't looked back.
I too am glad Mazda did this, now I have to decide if I want to trade in my 2018 Mazda 3 for a 2019 one :-).
Touch screens are cheap, mechanical switches are expensive. Mechanicals are expensive from an acquisition cost, tooling/manufacturing cost, maintenance cost, and replacement cost. So automakers were happy to move everything into the touch screen and reduce these costs and boost their margin.
I hope Mazda will be able to hold this line with their accountants.
Depends, are they custom or off the shelf? Are they environmentally sealed or open? How many cycles do they need to last for? What sort of conditioning circuitry do they need?
There will always be the cost of additional wiring harness and copper wire at some cost per foot. Some additional testing time when the consoles are assembled to verify the switches are all working Etc. Time has a cost associated with it during assembly as well.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I have no problem with touch screens in cars. My problem with is with the horrible UI those touch screens provide. They're slow to respond and don't seem well reasoned for the functions it has.
It's why I love Carplay. It expands the function of the car in a needed way. Maybe analog controls are better, but interface matters less to me than function.
I understand your reasoning, but for me after having used Car Play in my wife's vehicle...it was a major factor in my car shopping experience.
I spend a lot more time getting things set "just right" on my phone than I ever will on my car. Being able to hop in and have Waze, Google Maps, Pandora "just work" and be easily accessible rather than some built in system within the car that's going to just "check a box"...it's night and day. Car Play was so far above anything I've seen in a vehicle before that I actually miss it when it's not there.
I can understand the preference for analog controls though. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
That statement isn't true, Car Play support for me was a non-negotiable for the car I purchased two years ago. Another friend made Android Auto support a big factor in his decision and said he wouldn't buy another vehicle that didn't support it. From other conversations we don't seem to be outliers, that feature support is incredibly user(buyer) centric.
Yes. At least with CarPlay you can use the knob thing on our Mazda and not use the touchscreen at all (which is disabled when the vehicle is in motion).
Mazda and other automakers build TRULY AWFUL UIs in their cars. Carplay is a godsend in this case. You can direct Siri to send texts, read texts and you have a superior GPS application. CHeck out the abomination that it Mercedes-Benz carousel for showing/selecting radio stations on their cars.
What you are really advocating is tactile feedback for digital displays--with some method of shaped feedback on by the screen itself. As a touch screen's in cars don't offer haptic feedback, that is an issue. That said some aspects like moving up and down stations or songs in a playlist can be controlled by steering wheel paddles or buttons on the wheel.
The 2019 mazda 3 without the touchscreen still has carplay and android auto. You can still do all of that. You control it with the "commmander switch" instead of a touch screen, and more often with the volume knob or buttons on the wheel for the most common tasks.
Hopefully this is a trend that catches on; I was resolved to never buy a vehicle that had touch screen controls in it, after seeing what a mess Ford had made with the UX in my wife's 2019 Edge, compared to what I have in my 2010 F150.
I think touchscreens are dangerous as hell to have in vehicles, because you cannot operate them by feel alone, like you can with a buttons and knobs interface. People are distracted enough playing on their phones while they drive, so selfishly for my own safety, I don't really want them futzing around with the janky touchscreen display to change the radio or mess with the air conditioning too.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The baffling thing about that is that Audi's MMI system was actually pretty darned good. And a few of the cars support controlling Apple Carplay with the rotary dial.
Audi and BMW used to sell their dial interfaces as a unique advantage over touchscreen only infotainment systems. It blows my mind that they're (Audi at least) going in the opposite direction now.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Sturdy rotary controls which really are knobs are much better for a car. If you're on a bumpy road, the axis of the control will stabilize your hand. The controlling motion (twisting) can be more easily controlled, even if the bumps are trying to move your hand up and down. (I never see cars on the highway rapidly rotate about their roll axis more than 10 degrees. This only happens in Fast and Furious movies.) Furthermore, the feedback necessary to get from the control is all tactile. Contrast this with a slider control. An up/down slider is bad, because the control movement is in line with the direction of the bumps. Even a left/right slider has some problems with this, if your arm isn't perpendicular with the control.
Contrast all of the above with controls on a touchscreen. Almost all of the feedback is visual. Simply registering your hand on the control requires visual feedback. There is almost no physical stabilization of your hand in bumpy conditions. Instead, you have to compensate with a hand/eye feedback loop, which requires even more visual attention.
It makes prefect sense: the whole automotive industry has a terrible track record for ui/ux in the non-driving parts of the cars because they don't care about it enough to put the effort in.
So they outsource to Apple and Google that made a, frankly, even with touchscreens, better system then what car manifacturers would have ever produced.
Now the problem is that Apple and Google had a hammer and treated the problem like it was a nail when it was not...
Care to elaborate on your studies? Not many cars have gone full touchscreen. I grant you that it took a bit of getting used to on my Tesla, but now I'd never want to go back. Curious how you controller for familiarity in your studies.
I totally agree. I recall the Blackberry with jog-wheel (non-touch screen), worked great, could scroll at a speed I liked, easy, one handed navigation of email, joy. Then they dropped that for the mini trackball, which they introduced with the pearl (a break into a consumer market). This was a mistake IMHO, and from a business users perspective, they sacrificed business users reaching for a consumer market that the likes of Apple did better.
Their again, many examples of not the best design happening as the consensus of public know how to use it. QWERTY keyboard layouts being classic example.
Then consoles and the mouse+keyboard combo over a game-controller pad. For FPS, mouse wins for ease of control still for me.
But the big takeaway for me about physical buttons over virtual touch-screen ones is the ability to leverage muscle memory. With physical buttons, you know were they are, how they feel and can do that without looking. Bit like sending a text from a nokia phone whilst it's in your coat pocket. Try doing that with a touch-screen based phone. Whilst not an everyday use, it does highlight the advantages of buttons in some uses.
Now, there is work ongoing in haptic feedback and some impressive work in the field of using ultrasound to create virtual surfaces you can feel. Which for many I'm sure will be great, but then the whole KISS design philosophy has somewhat taken a backseat in the name of features. But then, features are what sells many tech items today as they are still evolving. But there will always be people who prefer actual buttons. More so if you have ever been in a lift with a touch screen instead of buttons, which is something not to be sneezed at, literally unless you want to visit extra floors.
Here is a counter anecdote. Recently I moved from BMW (buttons and dials) to Tesla Model 3 (basically a big iPad bolted on to the dash). Both me, my wife, bunch of friends with Model 3, all vastly prefer the touch screen experience.
Good thing Tesla has both of those on the steering wheel so that the driver can find them without taking their eyes off the road or their hands off the wheel.
In my Mazda, above 5MPH the touchscreen doesn't respond to touch any more and you need to use the rotary controller (which is good as muscle memory allows you to use it effectively)
Have you ever used iDrive? I've been using it in cars occasionally for at least 10 years and it still confuses me.
I just bought my first vehicle with it yesterday, so maybe I'll get better at it. Touchscreens are not great in cars but if you can perform the action quickly, it beats fiddling with a knob for 15 seconds.
You didn't answer the iDrive question. I can find and fiddle with the knob/control, but I still need to look at the screen to figure out what actually happened. It's not like a simple volume knob which I can do without looking.
IOW a well-designed touchscreen UI can be better than a poorly designed non-touchscreen UI. And, unfortunately, most car infotainment systems are poorly-designed.
I have an older Sebring from 2010 with only 25k miles on it I was able to snag up for a good deal. Was a nicer 'limited' one so it still had a newer touch screen console.
It is annoying as you touch it once to 'activate' it and then have to tap the screen a second time to register the press on whatever button/input you were trying to touch.
No tactile feedback and having to press it twice and visually check to make sure the input you wanted worked.
It is much more time consuming/distracting than an older vehicle in my personal experience.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
This is really wrong. People were begging Mazda to add Android Auto and Apple CarPlay for years and they have only just recently added them. Adding these features has everything to do with what people want. Android Auto is pretty amazing, and is steadily getting better as well.
I've been using touch car interface for the last 5 years (Chevy). I basically do two things:
- Bluetooth connect
- listen to spotify _from_ my phone / listen to map directions _from_ my phone.
I rarely use the touch interface - I am switching tracks either using the buttons on the wheel (most of the time), or using the phone.
Also, I do not want another yet another "kind of familiar but different" interface like most of the car touch control systems. I want the interface on my phone, that's it.
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
I assumed this was widely known (because of COURSE we do), but the digital touch screens were CHEAPER than dedicated physical controls for all desired functions. To design as well as to mass produce.
I was renting a 2018 car on vacation with apple car play and was very pleasantly surprised how good experience is.
For comparison, I own the same maxed-out but 2017 car without a carplay. Apple Carplay is so much better then car manufacturers system in every respect I tried (disclaimer: I did work for Apple but several years ago and on unrelated projects)
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Or, people actually like CarPlay and Android Auto and audi would have to spend a lot of money to keep up. Newer audis already support CarPlay. They're only switching from a rotary controller to a touch screen.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
I absolutely hate user interface of my Audio (with rotary knob and without touch screen), so I use CarPlay pretty much exclusively.
I would love to be able to use a touch screen on that for some of the interactions.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
You can't expect that all car markers will develop a good branded interface, just like most Android phone makers have a UI that's worse than the standard Android one.
With CarPlay, I get to use a UI from a company that's an expert a making good apps.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
...or figured out that you aren't as good at software as you are at building cars.
Honestly, CarPlay/Auto have been a godsend for me. The navigation software works better than anything I get from car manufacturers and just keeping me from mucking with my phone is fantastic. That said... I'm not sure the touchscreen part of that is the real winner there for me.
Of course it's not user centric. It's about capturing more revenue while limited the parts in the car. Back in the day, you had modular radio mounts. Ford broke the mold with the Ford Taurus and the integrated controls that you couldn't replace.
Now, if you care about a nice radio in your car, you need to upgrade your entire car for $5k.
I have an otherwise awesome Honda Pilot with a built in, unsupported android tablet that doesn't support carplay or android auto, and is hard to replace without heavy hackery because core controls of the car are built into the tablet.
I've hated touch screens in cars... I generally rely on bluetooth, only because the controls are so bad, at least with BT I can pick up my phone and bring it into view if needed, but the steering controls handle next navigation, which along with volume are about 95% of interactivity. The other 5% being maps.
If the Mazda navigation/interaction/entertainment experience is better, I'm definitely in favor. I miss the in-between period, where I could just insert a USB drive with sorted directories of mp3s and use that easily.
Private reason: we want total voice controlled system so we can listen to everything you say & do in car, log it and get into the ad and analytics business. One step at a time well be here.
Mazda (at least my Mazda6 from a few years ago) can do this because they have a great interface to the entertainment/info system. They have a joystick with a few mouse-like buttons on the center console just behind the gear shift. It's very easy to do common tasks like change volume, change station, skip to next in playlist without taking eyes off the road.
My wife actually didn't realize for more than a year that the screen was a touch screen. She had never had to use it.
Yup, agree 100%. We bought a 2014 Mazda 6, and while it has a touch screen, I find myself only using the control knob 99% of the time. It's vastly superior to any touchscreen interface I've ever used, and also far better than some of the mouse-like joysticks in some cars (think later 201X Lexus vehicles and such).
I'm not buying a car with no touch screen. I like to have physical buttons for AC, and quick switching between media, radio, a dial for volume, things like that. But I also need a touch screen for Google Maps, and my music apps. Often times, my passenger might navigate these.
Edit: Also, in all fairness, where the screen is relative to the dash matters, and the size of it as well. From the photos on the post, those Mazda touch screens looked pretty small and awkwardly positioned for touch controls.
Not insane but highly cynical. They are increasing risk to my - their user's - life in order to save some bucks on R&D and integration investment. Does it make you wonder where else did the make the same tradeoff? It should.
> I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
Same here. When I buy my next car, I would ensure it doesn't have controls that require me to be distracted from driving to operate even the most basic functions.
I think supporting Android Auto and CarPlay is pretty user centric. Those are the only half decent in-car interfaces I've ever used. Nothing else is close.
Mazda's touch screen is far away up on the dashboard while other brands like Citroen or Tesla place it between the driver and passenger, so it's easily operated by both. I like both Audi's rotary controller and touch screens. Both are a distraction to the driver because you have to navigate menus, not particulary because of the interface. Seat also has a touchscreen and it's a VW brand.
I vastly prefer my touchscreen to analog controls - how the heck would I control my map and nav and radio without an interface that can change at need?
Having used both, I vastly prefer the touchscreen. The rotary input takes way longer to navigate to the next letter, and it's easier to make mistakes (e.g. accidentally switching modes) and it's harder to fix them (need to cycle all the way to the end to hit backspace, sometimes having to start from scratch if your mistake was "jump out of input mode")
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, quick glance that you're on the right screen, click clock- or counterclock-wise to select what you need. Much safer and easier, and you're not going to hit a wrong thing because you drove over a bump.
For entering addresses a large touch screen is nicer, but then a keyboard is even better, but since you're only supposed to do that while parked, so hitting a wrong button shouldn't be a big problem.
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, q
There's a big difference between what is safe and convenient when you are sitting at your desk, lazily poking at the screen, and what is acceptable when you are barrelling down the highway, with the screen you need to stretch your arm to reach.
Interacting w/ a car touchscreen when you're on the highway isn't the brightest of ideas... Every car - even those w/ touchscreen - has physical buttons for top level commands (e.g. play the radio) that one could use via muscle memory or, at worst, a quick glance. Doing anything more involved that requires attention _while the car is in motion_ is just asking for trouble.
Exactly the point. But on some cars pretty much everything requires you to interact with a touch screen (cough, Tesdla, cough), and even if it does not, there's usually not enough buttons.
On my wife's Sonata, e.g., sure, you can switch the screen between map, nav. entry, radio, etc. with physical buttons. But after that it's all touch screen.Thank God they at least left alone knobs for the climate control...
Sat in the eTron lately while waiting for service. Two Nice, bright screens with haptic feedback. Very much fun, as long as I was playing with it on a showroom floor. But I shudder to think of actually trying to use on the road.
I own a Mazda that has this touchscreen and I use it to set nav destinations, but otherwise I rely totally on the analog controls. Typing with analog dials can be a nightmare though so I hope they sort this out -- my mother's Audi makes you type with analog controls and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Good luck setting a destination when you're in a hurry.
I have a newer subaru with a touchscreen and an older audi with the MMI rotary wheel. The rotary wheel is a superior interface, it has a slight learning curve, but then you do most operations by feel without needing to spend much time looking at the screen. the touch screen is finicky, and by definition requires you to take your eyes off the road to use it.
Agree with this for now, but what about when we're no longer driving the car?
When that happens a touchscreen and the ability to play games/etc makes a lot of sense. I think what Tesla and others are doing is designing and preparing for the future. Although not ideal right now, they'll be far ahead of Mazda when we transition to self-driving cars.
In order to do that, we're also going to need tens of thousands of dollars worth of additional hardware - high-end weatherproof sensors, and full-range actuators for all controls with enough authority to use all of the power the car has. Not to mention whatever pile of computers and software is needed. Changing out the UI so you can play games a little better seems like a sidenote beside that.
Then MB/BMW approach of having a touchpad near your wrist is perfect - you can draw letters with your finger without having to worry about hitting miniscule letters on the screen.
Well, I'm in the UK so I have to use it with my left hand even though I am right handed - it works fine. Because the letter recognition is based on a single letter at a time it works fine even if I make an absolute mess of it with my left hand.
When you need to type a full name. Having a keyboard present could give a huge advantage. This is not equal to having a touch screen.
Next to that, my car has a system where you choose 1 letter and only the next possibility pops up. It decreases the need of a full keyboard. It's quite likely you only need to choose the first 3 to 4 letters.
I would actually like a stronger integration with the phone for cases like this. If you need directions, just load it up on google maps and send it to your car. If you need to pull up a playlist, same thing. Of course if you are driving this should be done by the passenger.
I wonder if you’ve used Tesla’s touchscreen or even Apple CarPlay with a touchscreen and Google Maps. You only seem to mention these old UIs. The rotary control on a virtual keyboard is atrocious to type addresses and points of interest.
> It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Tactile feedback is also a huge security benefit. This is what really doesn't make sense to me about the desire for touchscreens in cars - they're inherently dangerous.
I will say that navigation to an address is much much better with an on-screen keyboard. It is a uniformly HORRIBLE experience with buttons and knobs. Maybe the endgame should be voice, but that can be hit or miss too.
Makes me tempted to buy a Mazda. I like the AWD and reliability of a Suburu, but their touch screens are absolute garbage and going from my analog 6-disc changing Honda Accord to driving the much newer Subaru is painful.
I recently bought a new Subaru. It has regular buttons and dials on the dashboard and steering wheel for all the important stuff. The touch screen works fine with Android Auto.
Hah. My car is a 2008, older than most in-car technologies, but when I've thought about replacing it, a big click-knob was going to be a #1 requirement. It just seemed like a mousewheel for car: an instant classic.
Same reason I hate the MacBook TouchBar. It distracts, requires looking at it, does not give good feedback and is context dependent (buttons move around).
I like my touch screen. There is a lot I can do on it without much distraction. If something is in a sub menu that takes more than a fraction of a second to get to then I wait until I'm on a straight away that autopilot can handle and do it while I'm on autopilot.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps).
How does this relate to Apple Magic Trackpad with Force Touch?
Sorry, I badly quoted there. Was meant to quote this:
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Given that Force Touch give a form of feedback (haptic though), isn't that good enough? How many people believe that the Force Touch gives tactile feedback instead of haptic?
Still a massive limitation to be expected to use the device eyes on and high attention. I get that this is the trend but it's still not a good qualitative point.
A year or two ago I considered buying another car after I had a fedex semi hit me (turning left from a stop, not dangerous). I drive a 2004 corolla and love toyota, but the guy looked at me like I had grown frog legs when I asked if they had any models without the touchscreen.
It was actually a major decision in me keeping my vehicle. I do NOT like the touchscreen, to me it's a complete no-brainer that it's more dangerous. I sure as shit don't want to be clicking through crap while driving.
When I was in HS I had a friend whose family had a couple of toyota vehicles. One of them was a small orange truck from the 70's I think. That thing looked like absolute crap, but ran beautifully. The only thing that finally killed that vehicle was their son going around a curve too quickly in the rain and rolling it. It's why I decided to buy toyota and I'm 100% happy with it.
But this touchscreen issue is a big enough issue in my mind that I may start researching Mazda. I seriously do not want a damned touchscreen in my car.
The giant but not very useful 11in touchscreen in my 2017 Toyota Prius Prime can just be turned off. No really vital functions live in there, it's mostly the (iffy) GPS and settings like the audio source, which I don't need to change much. Almost all the normal things, like temp, lights, cruise etc. are still accessible via physical controls.
I think the big one for me would be radio and temp. I assume no one in their right mind would put lights or cruise control behind a touch screen, but I could be wrong there.
And maybe part of it is me being set in my old man ways, but I don't want a touch screen for any of that. Probably the only 2 things I can see being useful on that screen are the reverse camera and GPS that talks to you and you can glance at it occasionally.
Just brought the 2019 RAV 4 Hybrid a few months ago, but also test drove the Corolla. The US models differ, but I'm pretty sure the UX is pretty consistent.
The A/C on both vehicles is 100% physical controls, no touch screen required, in fact I've yet to see an A/C option on any of the touch screen menus.
Yes, the radio is mostly configured via the touch screen, but skipping stations / tracks and volume are controllable via controls on the steering wheel and a physical volume knob on the dash. We don't have carplay yet, but I think it is in the US, this might make my moot, but my main complaint is that it can be quite delayed in starting to play my itunes. I suspect this is because my phone is the secondary audio device (I usually let my wife pick/control the music), but thats a minor annoyance at most.
Edit: 6.3l/100km 37.3mpg on Hilly -> Urban commute in an SUV :)
I'm a "millennial" (25) and I don't want a touch screen either. Car companies just can't make a phone as well as phone companies do. It's not about if the touch screen can be ignored, I specifically want to not have one, like how I don't want RGB lights on a computer or a Windows key on a keyboard, even if I can just ignore them.
You can use the screen as described, but it is much quicker to roll the right steering wheel button up/down to adjust TACC speed. You can also push it left/right to adjust follow distance.
I rarely touch the screen while driving my Model 3 (or while my Model 3 is driving me).
Just something to consider is that Toyota panels do have external controls that allow you to use the panel without the touchscreen.
I have a 2016 Toyota Corolla, and the entertainment system is a touchscreen, but I haven't touched it in years. There are several knobs and buttons located around the screen and on the steering wheel that provide full control over the functions, without needing to physically touch the screen.
Maybe they have changes this in the last 3 years, but at least the 2016 models do have physical controls that are duplicated both on the entertainment panel and the steering wheel.
While there is a touchscreen, you don't need to touch it.
> That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Genuinely curious: what does the interface being "branded" have to to with the user? To me, focusing on whether their interface is branded would be more business-driven rather than user-centric.
Last time I was in a cab it had controls in the back for the AC, a light, the windows etc. - just because I'm not driving doesn't mean I don't want to interact with the car at all.
It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching the radio off has you reaching for a button somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls:
I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk.
I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinct buttons. The only knob is for temperature. Any time I need to change air position or speed, I need to take my eyes off the road and find the button, and then tap it multiple times to get to the right position.
I also drove a friend's 201x Civic for a couple months, and the air controls were actually worse: tiny buttons, tiny display showing what settings are current.
The whole air system in the Yaris is great. I recently left my car sitting for a while, and a chipmunk made a nest with the cabin air filter material. I looked under the glove box, unscrewed three Phillips head screws to drop the blower, cleaned it all out and screwed it back in. No messing around with body panels or other parts that were in the way, no custom or odd-size connectors. A mechanically simple system, easy to access and maintain.
The 2017 Subaru I have has freewheeling software knobs for most functions and all of the info is displayed in the near-windshield display. Even when I have to take over from full auto control, it's pretty quick and close to my sight-line.
Renault have had controls on the steering wheel for at least 20 years now and it's still one of the best interfaces I've ever tried.
The first car I bought with my own money was a Clio and the ability to control the integrated radio system without looking at it or having to take away the hands from the wheel made that car my favourite place to listen to music.
As a matter of fact I miss it so much that nowadays I almost don't listen to music while driving anymore.
EDIT
for reference the whole music controlling part was like [1], the source button switched from FM radio/AM radio/CD player and it had a wheel on the back that skipped CD tracks or radio stations, according to the current source.
If I remember correctly the lower button ejected a CD in CD mode or changed from saved station to manual tuning in radio mode.
If you pulled both the volume buttons at the same time, it muted the radio and paused the CD player.
One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen.
If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen either on your phone or in the car and it's always a pain. Controlling other things in the car is fine - there are physical buttons.
> One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
True.
Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.
The steering wheel is where most of this stuff should be all the time. The second you force me to reposition my hand, security levels drop off a cliff, since you get involuntary movement on the other side (as proven by this post) and likely take your eyes off the road, which is bad even for a split second. I know this for a fact, having crashed a car on a motorway as I was turning down the fan (controlled by an analog button, btw).
The best car interface, imho, is something like a rotary device or arrows buttons on the steering wheel (or back thereof) which can be used to manipulate an overlay projected on (or just below) the windshield. My current VW gets close, but the screen is in the lower half of the dashboard (way too far from actual view of the road), and the system can only be partially controlled by on-wheel buttons (the main control is a touchscreen in the middle of the car).
That's a single control that's located in a highly ergonomical position - you take your hand off the wheel, and the stick is just right there. Contrast to radio/AC with inadequate/zero tactile feedback. "Stop looking at the stick, it's not going anywhere" is literally one of the first things I had drilled into me when learning to drive. (The involuntary movement comes from looking away from the road: you drop out of the feedback loop for a moment.)
I drive manual normally - I don't think ive looked at the stick in probably 10 years. For the first week or two maybe, but since then I haven't needed to.
On the other hand, I still don't know whete my A/C knob is without looking.
I'm European, I didn't even know automatic transmission existed before I was 30 :)
The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.
What about physical buttons for the more-used stuff (radio, AC, cruise control) and use voice control (along with physical buttons) for everything else?
Obviously, the voice control would need to havr some way to ignore the kids in the backseat, or can ask the driver / parent for permission for this to be a good idea.
It's a bit difficult for people who can't speak: temporarily or permanently; have significant speech impediments; don't speak the language the car is (currently) programmed for, are already talking to a passenger, etc.
The "obvious" problem is harder than it looks. Even searching in the navigation app gets confused by voice prompts from the same app...so you get things like "find closest gas speed station check ahead". And that's before you get various people involved, never mind any impediments.
And speach is not as easy as a button / knobb for muscle memory. In my old car I didn't have to think, just do. A touchscreen just can't compete in a car.
I am 99% sure my Clio had it attached to the steering column, so the controls were always in the same place regardless of the steering wheel angle.
I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.
(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)
You can buy little bluetooth remote controls that strap onto your steering wheel. They don't look great and you have to charge them. The charge thing is really annoying now that many cars turn off the power outlets when the car is off. I remember never really having a dead battery in my devices because they could just charge while I was parked either at work or running errands.
In many cars that's easy to fix. Just replace one relay with a jumper. Standard wire terminals fit in the relay sockets so it's not a permanent modification.
The market already exists: car improvement stuff on taobao is sold by tonnes: from the same independent DC-DC, and ECU interfaces to projection huds, and complete dashboard revamps
I still think the bash car dashboard was that of Honda Beat or Suzuki Cara — no dashboard, with just a motorcycle style gauge, and non-driving related controls almost wholely on steering wheel levers.
IIRC, that dates back to when Hughes was still part of GM. A good HUD uses collimation to project data out in the distance. A crappy HUD throws it up at the same distance as your windshield, forcing you to refocus.
My wife recently had the chance to use 3 different car UIs.
Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.
Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.
Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.
My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress bar† or VTEC led depending on engine)), secondary behind the wheel (RPM dial, fuel, cooling liquid temp), tertiary left/right hand side (depending if you're brit/jap or the rest of the world; clock, head unit AC) of the driver, all angled properly towards the driver and minimising glare, all knobs and buttons can be actioned upon either without leaving the hands off the wheel or only leaving them for the shorter amount of time, Fitt's law everywhere, with big knobs/buttons for big things, small ones for small things. No gorilla arm effect anywhere, even the window controls on door armrests fall naturally under the hand and "dangerous" things are purposely made easy-but-difficult to reach (VSA switch, dashboard backlight). Oh, and the UI of that little screen is so well thought out, well-laid-out information and navigation across various more detailed info, with a notification system that pops an (i) in the critical area and actual info front and center (low fuel, low oil pressure, freezing conditions...). Even the various beeps have sensible meaning conveyed.
It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that.
(The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones)
But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit.
I am a designer, have a degree even... Yet you used lots of jargon I never saw before. Can you point me some books and reading? I really need to fix my sorry education...
Nice! Honda have always put some great effort into their designs. I had an Accord Euro Luxury '05 some 14 years ago, and it was such a pleasure to drive around. Still regret selling it. It was the first semi affordable car on the Australian market to offer stability control and full set of airbags (as long as you got the luxury model).
I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.
I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.
Not in the CR-V they didn't. The entertainment system is an underpowered Android tablet.
Lots of questionable decisions like the keyless lock system not locking if the tailgate was closing as you walk away, there being no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on, and the engine cutting out as you try to drive off if you started it via remote start.
Your "no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on" complaint doesn't make sense to me, as the AC compressor is powered by the engine's accessory drive belt, which won't turn if the engine's off.
Otherwise, those sound like fair complaints. I'd add that Honda tried to go to a touch-based volume control in 2015/2016 and it was universally panned for its poor responsiveness and requirement that users take their eyes off the road to adjust radio volume. Can't win'em all I guess.
The volume control is fairly good in the 2018 model. There's a dial on the head unit, and a strange-but-fairly-effective touch sensitive volume control on the steering wheel.
That interior makes me think of a Cirrus airplane. Very cool. Cirrus has done some pretty amazing things with the button layout and overall UX for glass panel small aircraft.
I have one! I love the interior desing and the rpm is like floating! And the AC control is just stupid easy because the auto works very well not like on a BMW were you need to set the speed of fan for auto?!? If is auto whay i need to do anything? That's why Civic was "red dot: best of the best".
Unfortunately, I bought the cheapest wrangler I could (no power windows) and it still came with a touch screen. It is the biggest piece of crap. It won't default to Bluetooth. It will default to the radio, loudly, with an undismissable safety agreement that blocks all interaction for 5 seconds. The only loophole I've found is an aux cable, which it will default to. I would much prefer a radio.
The older/cheaper interface is WAY easier to control. Changing vent operation or fan speed on the new interface always takes way more button pushes and time until it's in the state I want.
I have a 2013 Leaf and would rather swap the battery somehow than upgrade because the newer ones all have less tactile controls and more worthless, brittle, privacy invading fad driven bullshit.
Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.
i bought a VW Golf Alltrack (vw golf sportwagon). instead of an Audi Allroad because of this. the audi controls were more clumsy and less useful despite the car being an extra $20k. the audi was also not available with a manual transmission and the hatch opened slowly, insisting on an always-on electronic assist. quite disappointing.
> somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
This makes me crazy. I used to drive a '99 Mazda b2500 (basically a Ford Ranger). I could reach any of the controls without even leaning forward. In a newer f150 that I used to drive for work the reach for the volume knob seems to be about the same distance as the reach to the passenger window crank in my old truck.
Real low-end cars don’t have a thermostat at all, so you’re constantly fiddling with the HVAC controls to maintain comfort. It’s the mid-range cars that get it right :)
Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011:
> There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.
> Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
> What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
> Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
> Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere.
Rant is the right way to describe this.
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember that first experience was a total rush and extremely stimulating.
Feeling like
the digital map was connected to my fingertip as you pan with that point stuck under your finger — absolute magic.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Denying a touchscreen entirely is to make huge compromises in the overall experience when configuring something as fully featured as a modern vehicle.
I remember the first time I used a map on a capacitive screen (iPod Touch 1st gen) and yes, it was pretty special. But I also remember many hours around that era (and many following, adding more often) working with 3D models by touching and middle-mouse-dragging around. Then I got a 3D Connection SpaceMouse 6-axis joystick, which is hugely superior to the smoothest touchscreen.
Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and modern games produce astonishing graphics and realism that feel really immediate; my eyes tell me I'm in the plane, and when I'm coming in too low and too fast I want to will the plane upwards. But I can't feel it. Pulling the stick back on my ancient force-feedback joystick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (wow, the graphics on that feel dated now) gave a tangible control surface load. The buzz of 'haptic feedback' just isn't the same.
I think this is a perfect example. For gross motor skills panning a map without having to think about it, nothing beats pointing your finger at it and dragging.
You don’t want the navigation interface in your car to be immersive, or particularly precise. You want it to be super responsive, and to spend as little mental and physical energy manipulating it as possible.
1) The target area is massive — nearly the entire screen. You just need to leave space to move your finger in the direction you want the screen to go.
2) Perfectly intuitive. Versus moving a cursor on the screen where you actually press the left arrow to move the cursor left until it goes off screen so that the screen will pan right
3) Instantaneous access to any point on the screen. Tap a POI anywhere and it’s info can be displayed. Go ahead and try to select POIs in an arbitrary map location with a scroll wheel. I’ll wait. It’s “haptic”, but are you doing that without looking? Something which took milliseconds now takes a full minute of frustration.
4) Instant access to menu items. Similar to #3 - a touch interface can present multiple choices and requires only a single user input to select. One touch and you’re off. A haptic interface requires scrolling through menus to highlight an item before you can select it, which most people will glance at while they do it, and requires more mental focus than a single tap. Or worse, an array of buttons next to the screen which you’re supposed to choose from to make a selection on the screen.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant:
> [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now!
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen?
He goes on:
> In 1900, Eastman's new Kodak camera was good! The film was black-and-white, but everyone loved it anyway. It was genuinely revolutionary! But it was also obvious that something was missing, and research continued. Practical color film was released thirty years later, and gradually took over.
> [...]
> Today, iPad good. It's flat and glassy and everyone loves it anyway. It's genuinely revolutionary. But if all we have in twenty years is an iPad with a few haptic gimmicks, that'll be bad.
The first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen, it was genuinely revolutionary—hopefully, you'll be similarly impressed the first time you use a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.
Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.
Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.
Yes, I love the computing device because all that it presents is a solid slab of glossy glass. If it tried to present any other affordance it would be all the lesser for it.
If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
But obviously the point of the rhetoric which I originally took issue with is stronger than simply “this is super awesome and amazing but we will eventually do better”.
Rhetoric like “permanent numbness” or claiming the experience has “no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing” is inaccurate aside from being hyperbolic.
In fact I’m comfortable stating that I’ve never felt more connected with or immersed in a map than on a sleek multi-touch display. Additional controls around the screen which I would have to move my hand to manipulate, or an attempt to shoehorn a haptic interface into that — honestly I believe it would only serve to mediate and therefore dampen the connection between user and map.
A globe is haptic. But a globe lacks the affordances of multi-touch zooming. A digital globe that allowed zooming and panning, maybe even with a dynamic physical structure to represent topography, that would be fucking cool, but hardly portable. And so single purpose as to be a novelty.
The beauty of picture behind glass is how adaptable it is to any arbitrary task and how easily it can be reshaped and reformed, and new interaction modalities invented on the glass surface which are joyful and useful and efficient.
Haptic interfaces lock you in, they dictate function based on their form, they provide fixed manipulation points which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand. As such, haptic interfaces given our current constraints on material science are often inferior and frustrating. Particularly for tasks which require dynamically adaptive coarseness and dynamic range of inputs, such as navigation.
Haptics are particularly difficult to allow users to manipulate interfaces through varying levels of acceleration and jerk, whereas the glass surface excels at this. Faster swipes, slower swipes, flicks, jabs, back and forth movements, and that’s all just one finger.
A click button is a one dimensional interaction point. Rarely is there a “click” affordance which measures harder or softer, except on “glass” type touchpoints.
The scroll wheels in the TM3 steering wheel is a great example of haptics striving to achieve this. The scrollwheel is awesome for fine grain incrementing and decrementing. But it’s also awesome because it has a “flick” mode where if you flick it fast the behavior changes in an interesting way!
For the right hand wheel, single clicks up and down increase and decrease cruise speed in 1 mph or kph increments. But a fast flick up or down (which may actually rotate the wheel 3 or 4 or 5 click points — who knows?) will move the cruise speed up to the next closest 5mph/kph increment (not up by exactly 5mph unless you were already divisible by 5).
This is a very neat HCI trick to provide a more usable scroll wheel. First, the fact that the wheel has click-points at approximately every 15 degrees (and the exact number of clicks per rotation is crucial based on the particular task!) rather than a smooth flowing wheel, translates naturally to integer changes in state.
Second, that it does have some concept of coarse vs fine-grained adjustments through the altered behavior when you flick it (likely triggered by at least 3 rapid clicks). But this all had to be very carefully designed into the hardware and firmware to make it all work for this particular task.
Third, because the particular task at hand doesn’t have a large dynamic range in the scale of the adjustments that need to be made. Rarely am I cruising at 20mph and then quickly find I want to be cruising at 80mph, or else the wheel would be terribly frustrating!
This is why trying to use the wheel (or really any haptic control) to pan or zoom a map is an exercise in total frustration. I know because that’s how my wife’s Mercedes tries to do it. Because sometimes I want to zoom out from a scale of 1mi on screen to 100mi on screen for a trip overview, and sometimes I just want to zoom from 1mi to 1.3mi to see the next turn. There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to, and the GPS interfaces which impose them tend to suck. The fact that I can’t directly address any arbitrary XY coordinate on the screen instantly compounds the frustration.
I'm genuinely disappointed you haven't responded, because you clearly think deeply about interaction design, as evidenced by your analysis of this click-wheel map interface. You just don't seem to have tried to understand the rant or my replies to you at all—you definitely haven't read the links in my first reply to you.
fixed manipulation points ... haptic interfaces [are often] inferior and frustrating ... There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to
This is exactly the kind of thing that the author of the rant called "haptic gimmicks", and is nothing like what the author favors over touchscreens. The author is talking about a dynamic physical interface, like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
For a map, not only is there an arbitrary XY coordinate that you want, but you can literally put your finger on it, so it lets you just place the selector there. Zooming should be continuous, so the dial has no click-points. "Flying" "down" or "up" (aka zooming in or out) feels like physical motion, with momentum, so the dial has a slight physical heft, and spins with some momentum.
But of course you wouldn't want to use this dial for everything, just like you've explained with such clarity as to why you wouldn't want to use a click-wheel for everything. That's why this interface is literally made of paper—building a different interface for a different application is as easy as literally cutting and pasting.
The 6 screenshots at the beginning are from an actual vision of the future articulated by Microsoft in a video that they clearly spent real money on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
He's not disparaging the present, as he tried to make clear by having the word "future" in the title and then another 16 times in the post. He's disparaging a vision of the future that is disappointingly widespread.
Haptic interfaces ... provide fixed manipulation points
which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand.
What about an interface that is dynamic rather than fixed, and can be rearranged to best suit the task at hand, but is also physical?
You know, like I mentioned in my very first reply to you?
> ... a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
Besides, what else did "pictures under glass" give us? Ultimate generalizability. That's a major reason why the touch screen won.
Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?
Nanobots sound hard to program. What if it was as easy as shaping knobs from clay and cutting paper with scissors? That's what the author works on now: https://dynamicland.org/
At CES a decade ago, I got to play with a touchscreen prototype that offered tactile feedback. Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz (it's been a while, hard to remember). What I do know is that it _felt_ like I was pushing on something, not just glass.
At the time, it required a big area around it. Think ATM sized. For an ATM, it'd be awesome. I'd hope Moore's law would get the tech down to phone size by now, but here we are with more apps and no tactile feedback.
There's Apple's 3D Touch, which I think is pretty great but it seems like they're trying to phase it out. It'd be nice to have an iOS keyboard with some slight amount of tactile feedback - moving the cursor around with feedback feels pretty nice and makes navigation much easier than without it.
> Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz
What do you mean by "press"?
"Pressing" a button (ie. pressing down on it) requires a bit more force than just touching it, so this seems like bad UX to me.
Even if you only were to have the device buzz as you touch any interactive control, I feel like that would start to feel real gimmicky real fast. There's probably a reason that technology didn't make it past CES.
You miss the point entirely: he acknowledges that touchscreens work. But he points out that they work by visual feedback only, and that this denies an enormous part of our tactile senses. In an ideal world, we would not have to choose between tactile and visual.
The responsiveness of properly done interactive multi-touch screens are undeniably tactile. They are, however, not haptic.
Haptic feedback in a touch interface is not always a feature. And the lack of haptic feedback does not, ipso facto, make an interface numb or non-immersive. Some older touch screens would vibrate in response to every touch as you typed — it made typing less accurate.
I take issue with the overly zealous defense of a haptic interface to the point where the overall experience is degraded in order to provide haptics.
Four arrow keys (or worse, a wheel-like joystick) are indeed haptic, but they are not a better way to pan a map, which is not generally done without looking anyway.
Your example is essentially an instance of of "touch screens can replace the <tactile input device> in contexts where one does not benefit from extra feedback from touch", which is true but not exactly surprising.
I would say that in a car, being able to navigate an interface without ever taking eyes of the road is a very clear example of a context where tactile feedback adds a lot
now that I think of it, this might be the reason I actually decided to go for a blackberry key 2. I knew the keyboard was better for me somehow, just couldn't really pinpoint why.
My current phone is a Key2. Before that, I had 3 Privs, a handful of Curves, and several Palms.
For me, it has always been about tactile feedback: I habitually text and drive, so a physical keyboard that allows for high accuracy without looking at the screen is an absolute imperative...everything else is a secondary consideration.
Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that)
First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.
Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.
So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
> First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I promise that if you never need to adjust a UI consisting of buttons and knobs that it will do nothing just as well as a touchscreen. UI should be made for people who adjust their settings, though.
> Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
I promise you both work just fine it designed properly and placed properly.
Example, 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Center stack UI was nice to look at it but many options required multi level drill downs to change. HVAC controls were at the bottom of the center stack. Forty plus buttons between steering wheel and center console and this does not count all functions on stalks. Z4 I had had three stalks and forty plus buttons with heated seats at bottom of center stack and under.
Touch screens like anything else in the car that a user interact with can be bad or good.I found Apple Car Play when used on the Volt to be obnoxious and far more requiring me to take my eyes off the road.
I keep emphasizing one thing that people keep ignoring. You rarely if ever have to use the touchscreen at all. Almost every setting is set and forget. You catch glimpses of the navigation and such from normal eye movement. let alone, lets get real silly here, the TM3 can drive itself in traffic just fine if I wanted to get stupid and take my eyes off the road.
Well since you bring up heated seats, the TM3 does not turn on the heated seats automatically based on temperature / butt-in-seat and changing it requires 3 touchscreen taps, two of them high-precision taps, where as the Volt has simple tactile controls. Though I will say the Volt has some of the worst climate control UI I've ever seen.
Similarly the defrost is not automatic and the button requires a precision tap.
There are a couple of reasons you might need to actually use the controls in a car with some regularity.
I don't have automatic lights. So lights on/dip around corners etc. Indicators every drive. Regularly switch airflow. Turn on reflow when allergy season. Turn knob for hotter/colder air. Emergency blinkers if traffic looks to be stopping suddenly. Wipers/speedcc, screenwash etc all manual. Heated read window in the cold etc.
That's before we get onto the whole music thing, where I concede my cassette tape player is less fancy than your phone integrated whatever - but hey I can do volume without needing to look at anything. Similarly picking one of my 6 preset radio stations is trivial by touch with a glance for orientation.
Now, as you say Tesla has automated away a lot of the above. Some of that is a legitimate improvement, and truly effortless voice control seems like a proper upgrade. Touch screens? I suspect I'd only be convinced by trying, my prior is that they're terrible idea for the same reason typing on my touch screen is practically impossble without looking in a way that wasn't true back in the Nokia 3210 days. I could write whole texts without needing to look because I knew by feel what I was touching.
Much of the stuff you mentioned is either automated or has physical controls in a Tesla. Also, by law, emergency blinkers need to be a physical button.
I do think that there's a lot of stuff wrong with touch screen for everything, but right now, I think Tesla has the best balance and also adds the most value. For example, the Audis that have everything touch screen, still have 3 buttons for driver seat memory. In the Model 3, you store this in a 'profile', which stores much more information, like ventilation preferences and you can store many of them.
If it's something you're reasonably expected to do while driving (so with the car in motion) then you should be able to do it without ever having to take your eyes off the road. Physical buttons let you do that. Between the ones on the steering wheel to control 99% of multimedia, the ones behind the wheel for lights&stuff, and the ones on the center console to control car functions like A/C and whatnot, you mostly hit that target.
Touchscreens force you to take your eyes off the road. You can't fumble around and guess if you pressed the right thing or some random function. This means they are only appropriate for things that would normally be done while the car is not moving. Before someone mentions "but GPS", you should NOT be typing in GPS addresses while driving unless you're using voice. Touchscreen or not you still have to look at that screen for a pretty long time.
And I will also mention the obvious: with everything bundled on the touchscreen God forbid that one single part breaks (due to design choice [0] or simple accident). It renders a good part of the car unusable.
So yeah, I'm good with having a big cool touchscreen but this doesn't mean the basic functions have to be moved there.
Do you often get into new and different cars and drive them? Your last paragraph is an odd argument. The buttons in my car stay in the same place and don't change with context. If I want to turn the radio down I reach over and rotate the knob to the left, muscle memory and tactile response. That knob will never do anything except the radio volume. Far safer because I don't even need to glance at it.
Edit. Your top paragraph about user settings, that applies to any car that maintains a user profile, that's not a benefit of touch screens.
Okay, so how does any of this conflict with what I stated. Most vehicles with screens, touch or not, usually have audio controls copied to the steering wheel. How many buttons it takes is dependent on brand and even model. Plus you will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not. Let alone a good driver is always looking around which includes glances left and right so as long as the task you are trying to do, buttons or touch screen, is simple you are fine.
I did not declare that settings were the property of touch screens, I simply stated that the vast majority of settings that exist are never modified. This goes for cars with buttons too.
The discussion is that touch screens are bad. My point is for those touch screens which are not placed correctly or have a bad UI, then yes they can be bad. There are some atrocious implementations out there however the Tesla is certainly not one of them.
How many cars have you driven? The whole point here is to design the UI thoughtfully. Yes, there are cars with confusing buttons and knobs, but a touch screen is worse, not better. There is no way to develop muscle memory for pushing spots on a touch screen especially when there might be a modal dialog or if a software update has “improved” the layout of functions.
Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.
There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.
> You will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not.
The whole point of muscle memory is that it doesn't require you to focus on it. By the same logic, you would take your focus off driving whenever you have to breathe.
Well I got the impression you thought cars had too many buttons and that was confusing. I think because the buttons in my car don't move, I always know what they do when I touch them, so it's not really confusing. As another user pointed out muscle memory means I DON'T need to take my focus off driving.
I just don't think there's the same level of muscle memory when it comes to a contextual touch screen. One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button, which brings up a modal display, which you slide according to the speed of wiping, all while presumably it's raining outside, a time you should be focusing on the road!
>One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button
That's just one method. There's also a dedicated physical button right on one of the stalks at the steering wheel. Why spread such information without pointing out there is a physical button?
And you're wrong about having to slide something on the screen to change the speed. That's not how it works. Why are you sharing opinions on things you are ignorant about?
Well I did say one method, I'm allowed to criticise that method even if there's another one, they included it so they've got to assume people will use it.
Your opinion doesn't trump 70+ years of Human Factors, guy. Touch screens are dangerous to yourself and other drivers because they don't provide tactile feedback or physical presence.
The knobs are great - one for temperature, one for fan speed, one for outlet (crank to the right to defrost), a fourth for volume, and the fifth scrolls through a list which is less important but still better than buttons.
The toggles with twisty ends are great too. Intuitive control of lights, wipers, and cruise control, and standardized over almost every manufacturer. Window toggles, also great, I assume Tesla has them to raise and lower windows.
Buttons have a bit of a breakdown. 15 of them are for the stereo, and mostly rarely used. Each of the knobs has a button in the middle, they're very handy (turn AC/Recirculate/etc on and off). And the mirror adjust is the remaining buttons, sure it could be on a screen with the rarity with which I use it - but I prefer physical buttons.
So overall, you could cut out 15ish buttons on the media console and replace with a touch screen, and I would be quite happy. But if you took my knobs for adjusting temperature, volume, etc I would be quite unhappy. This means that most modern non-entry-level cars make me unhappy.
You don't listen to music at the same volume in all situations.
I often set a volume level that feels right just before parking my car after getting home at the same time everybody else does. The same volume feels incredible loud when getting back to the car early in the morning.
The same goes with climate control. I can get to my car after a long run in that case I'll likely need a colder temperature than what I need after coming back to the cinema.
I find myself adjusting volume and climate often in different situations. I have an old car and use mecanical switches. Going to a touchscreen to me would be a step backwards.
This Tesla argument is completely irrelevant. One company's managing to design a good touchscreen interface doesn't mean any other touchscreen is well-designed.
Rich people who can afford Teslas may have a safe driving experience in isolation but the vast majority (who can't afford a Tesla) are stuck with a poorly designed touch interface, making road conditions less safe for everyone (even Tesla drivers with their perfect touch interfaces), through no fault of their own.
What happens when the wiper sensor malfunctions - now you're scrambling to find the manual controls to shut the damn thing off (if you even can!) Maybe it wipes faster or slower than you prefer. Same thing goes for headlamps.
For every "automatic" system you add to a vehicle, that is just one more thing that can malfunction and I find car repairs to be the most gigantic waste of time and money.
Look, we've proved out the whole "button" concept, and it just works. It's super easy and cheap to replace when it breaks. My car is not a toy, it is a utility. I want the features from the expensive "toy" cars to stay the hell away from my vehicle.
While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer, causing moderate damage to the front right bumper of his 2017 Suburban. It cost $5000 to repair due to all the sensors and technology. It would have been $1000 or less in a 1997 Suburban.
But when one of those sensors saves him from having a crash, or even saves his life, that $4k difference isn't worth even thinking about. Even a minor crash involving another car can cost well over $4k, after you consider how much your insurance rates are going to increase.
The vast majority of increasing complexity I see in vehicles in the last decade has nothing to do with life saving sensors, and more to do with gimmicky features.
But I agree, with driving being so hazardous to health I would certainly be willing to pay more for a vehicle that has a significantly improved accident survivability.
> While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer
So, uh, he ran into a deer even with the sensors.
We could give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the sensors slammed the brakes when the deer was on the road and did so before he could ever react but I doubt it.
You can control climate through steering wheel controls as well. I can and do control most things - music, temperature, calls, headlights, cruise control - with either voice or using steering wheel controls. Tesla UX is pretty amazing. Compared to that when I’m in my 328i from 2011 it feels outdated.
You can control AC though the touch screen, which is mostly convenient for the passenger. The driver can also control the AC with a scroll wheel on the steering wheel.
Recently switched from a Renault Captur (with touchscreen) to an Audi A3 (without touchscreen) and the amount of focus the touchscreen requires compared to a non-touchscreen with a radial button is amazingly scary. How did anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place? Can't imagine going back to having a touchscreen now, and hope they slowly disappear from everything cars.
It must be said that the Captur on board software is hilariously bad. (I have a 2018 captur) it's not that it's entirely dysfunctional, it's kludgey and painful.
It's not only the superiority of physical buttons, carmakers seem to be bad at simple, distraction-free UI.
- A single UI task (cancel navigation, switch radio station) takes 4-6 screen presses through some dialogs/menus that have only one option
- the thing responds too slow, there are some superfluous animations and in general there's long delays between presses and feedback on the screen that you touched something.
- Random crashes when not doing anything besides driving
- Random crashes (more frequently) when using android auto or making phone calls
- Updating the software takes 30 minutes, during which no information is shown besides a randomly resetting progress bar.
Exactly ; I had a similar experience sometime back when I was lent a 2010 Audi A4 for a few months, there was a quite natural control knob placed much like in the article's pics. It really is night and day compared to my brand new Peugeot where you have to look at the screen -and wait for the interface to update on each action- to do basically anything that is not taking a call / moving the volume / changing the track or station which you can do from the wheel.
And yet the article cites Audi to be giving in to pressure from the fearless (and from Tesla?), moving from the established rotary to touchscreens in future models.
I guess that when you already had touchscreens, it's much easier to sell haptic interfaces as an improvement than when you avoided touchscreen from the beginning. "Still no touchscreens" vs "already beyond touchscreens", even when they have the exact same controls.
The only reason the A3 still has a non-touchscreen is due to the fact that it's still running a rather old platform, which is outdated compared to the Golf, Leon -- the new A3 landing this year won't have dials.
I have recently bought a 1 year old Seat Leon with their newer touch screen setup. I find it pretty well made - you still have all the dials and buttons you need for climate control and audio volume, but if you want to set up navigation you have the touch screen in a well reachable location, which is much more convenient than a dial. Best of both worlds IMO. The only thing I do on touch screen while driving is to play/pause bluetooth audio and zooming in/out of navigation.
Can you expand on this? I really don't get it... I understand why people would prefer "fixed-function" buttons like temperature up or lock doors, but I don't understand how radial button (which is just switching focus on the display) is any better than touchscreen... To me, it looks strictly worse, you need to focus on the button and the screen (to see what's selected), instead of just focusing on the screen and touching what you want directly.
You don't need to look at the button to use it. I forgot exactly how the Audi one works but once you're used to it, it's like: Press, Turn right twice: Map. Press turn left once: Audio player. Press: Play. You don't need to look at the controller and, when you're used to it, you don't even need to look at the screen. With touch screen, you'll never get used to it to the point of doing anything without looking at it.
This is a key point. With physical controls, you learn their location and use them without looking. This leads to better focus on driving. With a touch screen, you're distracted every time you need to use it.
I've had the Audi for around 1.5 weeks now, and I've already learned how to navigate the system without looking. Can easily go from navigation to Spotify in Android Auto without paying attention to where the radial is or what's showing on the screen.
Compare with the Renault Captur which I could never learn to use without having to look at where I have to tap on the screen.
Edit: while driving, I'm not doing things in the onboard system that I haven't done before, like browsing through settings and other things. I'm only interested in doing modifications to already running things or turning on/off certain systems while driving, and those were much easier to get learned under muscle control when having a radial than using touch controls (which with touch I never managed to actually learn).
I guess an easy way to compare them would be to say, going from navigation to Spotify would require me to:
(radial): drag radial down, three clicks to the right, and click
(touchscreen): find button about 10cms from the left without looking or any tactic feedback
Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster.
That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit.
But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision.
If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy.
But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to:
- leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)
- find where is a navi (by turning the wheel and pressing it, still looking at the screen)
- choose, again with the wheel, to start typing your destination
- and what most: again with wheel (turning it and pressing) type the address simultaneously looking on an onscreen keyboard.
All that while not looking on the road and holding your steering wheel with one hand and another on navigation wheel on central canal.
You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces.
There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical.
It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.
It doesn’t matter what you “shouldn’t” do when it comes to mass-market consumer devices. It only matters what people will do, especially when you share a road with them. And when it comes to vehicle interfaces, you should assume 80% of drivers will adjust them during a drive, no matter how inconvenient and dangerous is. Any system that doesn’t recognize this reality — and try to minimize the harm if it — is just going to get people killed.
They can make most things non responsive while the car is in motion. This would inconvenience the shotgun passenger but typically the driver calls the shots on the radio (in-car entertainment system) anyhow.
Unless a law is passed restricting manufacturers from allowing responsive interfaces while driving then any disabling of them will be a significant market disadvantage. No sane car company would do it.
Some manufacturers have had restricted interfaces in cars for a while now. On Ford's SYNC system I have not been able to type in an address if the car is moving. Android Auto similarly limits inputs to voice inputs on any kind of text entry while the car is in motion.
Well that's not really designing for those users then. Your original comment said there's no way to interface with a screen safely while driving, but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users. I was wondering how you could do that in a safe manner (I don't think you can personally, and agree with the no-control-while-moving idea).
> but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users.
The other user said you had to design for what people will do; disabling all access and removing the choice to interact is exactly doing that. Disabling hands-on interaction above a certain speed but allowing voice controls might be another option.
The best I can come up with is transparently overlaying small information cues on the glass of the windshield, and using sound cues. I think in general the systems available to a cars HUD should be pretty limited and the controls should be on the wheel.
I totally agree, which is why I think any screen is a bad idea. That ship has sailed though and we have millions of cars with screens, so it's still worthwhile to keep repeating that it's ridiculous to use the screen in motion, even if that's what it was designed for.
I understand the thought, but in the real world this is counterproductive and dangerous.
Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.
Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.
Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.
So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.
Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.
Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.
I think we have pretty similar views while talking about the tech and usability itself. It is just that I fundamentally disagree that you need to touch or look at anything while driving.
You say people need to interact with navigation while driving, which is simply not true. People want to interact with navigation while driving. They could cope without it. We didn't even have navigation all that long ago, to say we need it is a stretch let alone to touch it while driving. If it's causing accidents, and it is, it should be considered dangerous. Perhaps the Model 3 is better at it, but it is still a danger to look away from the road even for a second or two.
That means screens are out, and we need better ways to display and interact with information while driving. HUDs, sounds or feel is all I will agree is safe.
I said people need to navigate while driving, which is almost a tautology. That is to say, while I’m driving I need to know where I’m going. Sometimes I already know from memory, sometimes I’m consulting an external source.
Whether that external source is a sticky note on the steering wheel, a phone, audible prompts, or a big touchscreen in the center of the vehicle (TM3), the driver is going to decide which to use based on the options available to them at the time.
What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
The absolutist stance does not actually increase safety. In the absolutist stance, well people don’t need to drive at all. To design safe systems in the real world that save lives you need to provide an alternative that is both safer and as easy to use. Because a safer alternative that drivers don’t use by choice because it’s too annoying or inconvenient doesn’t actually improve overall fleet safety.
Obviously when you operate a vehicle you don’t always just look straight out in front of you. You check your mirrors. You check your blind spots. You maintain situational awareness and do that safely by planning where you focus your attention from one moment to the next. Screens are obviously not “out”, nor is it correct to say that looking at a screen while driving is unsafe. Instruments, whether for navigation or simply indicating current vehicle status such as fuel, speed, lights, etc. are an integral part of driving and digital instruments are not necessarily less safe than analog, and can potentially be more safe.
And so returning to my original point, in my personal experience, the large touchscreen in the TM3 is ideally suited for safe navigation, and improves safety when navigating particularly on an unknown route, by presenting crucial information in extremely visible and usable form, and allowing me to configure and interact with the system naturally and efficiently while I proceed along my route.
> What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
Funny you should say that, its exactly what people did not too long ago.
You'd look up where you were going in a key map or more broadly a road atlas, write down your instructions (and keep it open to the final destination in case of road closures, etc)
I really don't see the appeal of getting in a car and beginning to drive without knowing where you're going. "I'll look it up on the road" just seems like an intersection of anxiety (deliberately increasing your chance of crashing), annoyance (deliberately making your navigational search harder to perform), and apprehension (increasing the chance you'll miss a crucial turn early in the trip due to lack of navigation).
The hope is that they have entered their navigation correctly before they left and from the time they leave 'til the time they arrive they don't need to look at the screen at all, it's all voice and smaller visual cues. I guess I just don't feel like it's a stretch to have the responsibility to figure these things out before embarking, instead of doing it on the fly which is more dangerous.
The absolutist stance could absolutely increase safety. If we ditched all screens cars could only be safer. Less convenient, but safer. I'm not saying ditch navigation or music though, but ditching off to the side navigation/media screens could only be a plus to safety. Implement navigation and media in a way that's more sympathetic to the need of remaining attentive. Any lapse in attention we can get rid of is a good one.
You haven't argued for how having screens could be safer than not having screens, only for how to improve the safety and convenience of screens we have. Your advice is probably going to be more useful, because in all likelihood we'll keep screens. But I wouldn't care if it took someone 45 minutes longer to get somewhere because they got lost, and had to pull over and ask a man sitting on a bench for directions. Driving is a privilege and we shouldn't trade safety for convenience. I think media/navigation screens could be replaced by better solutions that don't require a screen. Who says you need a full visual map at all? Who says you need to type in the address? These are problems that could be addressed, and I feel as though the screen is the lowest effort solution not the right one.
> We didn't even have navigation all that long ago
Yes we did, even if it wasn't an electronic system built into the car, and it wasn't unheard of for people to pull out physical maps and reference them while driving, or pull over and stop in unsafe locations to reference maps. N
Electronic navigation systems are what make people less likely to do those things. There's a difference between introducing a digital tool and introducing the activity it supports.
I meant digital navigation, but fair point. Trying to interact with a digital map while underway is still dangerous, like trying to use a physical map was. Listening to a GPS is great, and I'm not advocating against digital navigation completely, just devices that require you to shift your attention away from driving.
You seem to be equating touchscreens with safety and quality. These do not go hand in hand - the underlying system can be absolute crap with a touchscreen (remember old dedicated GPS units?), or they could be Tesla-equivalent but with a weird physical button input system.
> Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out.
You shouldn't be fiddling with the navigation system while driving - you should do that while you're still in park. Even when I look down at my phone to see what lane I need to be in for a second, it's amazing how much distance passes when going at highway speeds. Unless you are using autopilot, it's dangerous to mess around with the map, and it's not that hard to pull over to do it, either.
Oh I definitely understand that the vast majority of touch screens are utter trash! But that's not to say that all are.
Understanding what lane I need to be in, and what the traffic conditions are up ahead around the bend; these things add to situational awareness that makes driving safer. But I'm just not going to use a shit GPS that I need to program an address by spinning a scroll wheel and individually selecting letters.
If you had a large touchscreen in your car, you wouldn't have to look down at a tiny phone screen to see these things. They would be in your peripheral vision and easily checked without losing track of the road.
Now I regularly move to the right and slow down long before approaching a traffic jam on the highway, versus the typical hard-brake when the traffic comes into view.
At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection. That's totally possible on the TM3 because it's instant, smooth, and fluid (and it's really great at automatically zooming back out to the right level as you start driving again).
And to give another anecdote, today on my drive home navigation was set to take me 'Home' (by the way that's two taps on the screen, and takes less than 1 second to activate as soon as you sit down in the car). I was on the highway in stop-and-go traffic with AutoPilot. My wife called and asks me to pickup takeout. I know it's too early to order, and traffic is terrible. I need to know how long to wait to order, so I tap the steering wheel control and use voice control to change the destination. Because it's internet connected, I can just speak the restaurant name and the town. It tells me the traffic-aware arrival ETA so I know when to place the order, and adjusts the route (taking an earlier exit). Unfortunately there's no single tap on screen to make the call - POIs don't have the phone numbers listed (yet)!
So I find that there are plenty of perfectly appropriate reasons to adjust navigation while driving, I just think very few people have experienced how a proper large touch-screen implementation can supplement and enhance your situational awareness and allow you to complete tasks safely and efficiently while underway. The is strictly better than the real-world alternative which is for people to try to complete these tasks using a phone-in-hand while they are also attempting to drive.
>At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection.
Seems like a usability problem. Google Maps displays what lanes go in what directions so you don't have to zoom in on the map and will speak it to you so you don't even have to look at your phone/Android Auto/etc.
It does show an icon representation of the intersection and which lane to be in. I just prefer zooming in, sometimes Boston intersections are quite complex.
You can tap on the bubble in the search results to display information about the place and it will have a call button there. Don't remember if it still has that bubble once you start navigating.
It is also supposed to give you POI info including the phone and working hours if you tap on any POI bubble on the screen, but it doesn't work for some reason.
This entire article, arugment and comment thread is about how Mazda is removing touch screens to improve saftey while driving. I agree the Mazda solution isn't much better though.
The person that I quoted was responding to someone who talked about keying in directions and the limitations that Mazda's limitation will cause for that. That functionality is not available while driving even with a touchscreen.
To me, its a situation of throwing out the good with the bad.
navigation was just an example. Angdthere is no place here for muscle memory. Do you want to switch radio station? (I hope I can do such thing during driving?). Look at screen where is focus now and rotate the wheel by some angle which depends on what you see on screen. Press the wheel, rotate the wheel again to select another radio station, press it again.
Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.
I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.
Well I do agree, it's definitely not a great solution either. I am not sure there is one that involves the screen at all.
Media buttons on the steering wheel were peak car usability. What is there really to be looking at other than the road while you drive? A map at best, but we can do better there too. A HUD of upcoming turns projected onto the glass for example. We had HUDs in cars in 1989 (Nissan Silvia) and some modern cars are bringing it back. I think that's the perfect blend of usability without compromising safety.
This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?
I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
If that's what it takes, then so be it. The yearly road toll is embarassing. It wouldn't bother me one bit if all device input turned off as soon as the car started moving. Passengers can play Eye Spy to pass the time.
Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location.
The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish.
As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.
>it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too.
Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me.
Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
There were green-and-black text UIs that allowed receptionist at hotel check you in blazingly fast, keeping an eye contact with you. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts.
Yup. These are a source of a frequent disagreement between myself and some UI/UX folks. I believe interfaces like these were/are superior to modern ones, precisely because they allow one to work efficiently.
People do, because they can. It doesn't matter whether they should or not.
When you design something, you don't design for ideal use, you design to eliminate risky misuse. This is a core axiom of user interface design. It's not good enough to just slap a warning disclaimer on it, as the designer, you're still liable.
I would have my engineering licence revoked if I ignored possible avenues of misuse, could design them out but didn't, and then ended up in court because they misused it and someone died. This isn't a hypothetical, this is how it works in the non-software world where engineering decisions can routinely kill people.
I think it's an easy cop out to say, "Doing literally anything other than focusing exclusively on the task of driving is not worth talking about."
The reality is, people will be adjusting their radios while they drive. They will be looking for open restaurants, changing their destination, and a number of other things while driving, and pretending like they're not worth accommodating ignores some very fundamental principles on the topic of economics.
Maybe, the point is not to make it easy. Maybe the point is to make you think "Hey, there's no safe way for me to navigate through 10 different screens to get to my GPS while I'm driving. Maybe I should pull over and do that instead?"
Most touchscreen varients are actually worse than this, and it's nessecary for their displays to be within arm's reach, increasing refocus time too.
I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.
> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)
Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose.
Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.
Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy.
I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.
To be fair, navigating with carplay is also highly distracting because the voice controls are so basic and it forces you to pull over and deal with one of the two touchscreens to deal with route changes, adding a stop, evaluating express lanes, dismissing modals, looking at upcoming directions, etc etc. Navigation is highly distracting period.
Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.
Guess you could call me trilingual (swedish, english and spanish) and I'm having no issues with Android Auto understanding destinations even when my spanish/english is broken as hell, with music playing in the background or engine noises coming from outside.
Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
I just drove 14 hours this weekend and I can confirm the voice controls are almost entirely useless. If you’re lucky it interprets you correctly and you have a menu to sift through on a screen to pick the right option. If you’re unlucky it just does something without any confirmation. The only success I’ve really had is “direct me to <large city here>” and “direct me home”. All other efforts lead me to swear and pull over.
Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
It can be done properly. The BMW Mini has a pretty good voice input for the navigation, it relies on spelling out the names of cities and streets, there is a button based back-up but I find that the voice recognition works more than well enough for almost all destinations.
Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
Just because the technology sucks right now does not mean it's a bad idea. I can EASILY see voice commands in cars being commonplace and far superior to anything that exists right now.
Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.
Note that plans are a less apt comparison as the cockpit of a plane under most circumstances safely permits looking away from the windscreen for 5-10 seconds at a time (or more) while under no circumstances can cars tolerate more than 1-2 seconds without risk of catastrophe (crash, loss of life and limb, etc).
If recent business jets are an indication, it's all touch based at the high end already. Also, Ipads are getting pretty popular for pilots. My understanding is that most pilots would bring one by default (two plus extra batteries typically) and that especially for GA, there is a lot of equipment and software that integrates with them. One odd thing is that some pilots use ipads to control equipment in the plane because of UI and UX issues. E.g. you can control a garmin 530 with an ipad and it seems like pilots prefer doing that because it is just easier.
I think both in cars and in the aviation industry there is the notion that the companies manufacturing UIs there are not necessarily that good at it because historically their focus was more hardware oriented. The UX of especially older equipment can be kind of clunky. E.g. many planes have an fms (flight management system) with a non qwerty keyboard that looks like it was designed in the nineteen sixties and just never updated. You still find the same design in relatively new planes like the A319.
I agree that it is nice to have physical controls for some thing. E.g. I love volume dials. But overall, touch is great when hardware designs result in very complex UX.
So, I suspect that Mazda getting rid of touchscreens is more their own inability to do good UI than any inherent problems with touch screens. The rest of the industry seems to be trying to catch up to Tesla. I recently sat in a very new Renault with Android Car and a big touch screen. It's a very nice upgrade from the previous generation which was very clunky to use and had lots of annoying bugs. Renault outsourcing the UI to a company that has a clue was a big improvement for them they were just hopelessly out of their depth.
I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is it is quite different to driving in terms of attention — a cruising pilot can easily look at a screen for 5 or 10 seconds (?) entirely safely, whereas a driver might struggle to even stay in lane looking at a screen for 10 seconds. So a touch screen is fine for a pilot but probably not good for a driver.
I am a pilot and you are exactly right. With an airplane autopilot coupled to a modern GPS, once you're cruising, you can pretty much crawl into the back seat and take a nap until it's time to land. (That's a little bit of an exaggeration but not much.)
The solution is a combination of tablet screens and accessible controls on the steering wheel or on the centre console.
I absolutely love my touch screen in my Honda and never felt unsafe because of it. All the controls for changing songs, volume, voice, etc are on the steering wheel via touch dials or a few buttons.
It’s not like the car (or airplane) companies aren’t aware of this.
I think this conflict in ideas is very well captured by the differences in flight control instrument panels in the Orion Spacecraft as compared to SpaceX's Dragon v2.
The Orion control panel looks like it would be much easier to use in a heavily vibrating, high-G rocket. It's a lot harder to fat-finger a tactile, physical button/switch than a touchscreen. Notice that the switches even have cages so that they can't get accidentally toggled.
Note also the use of colour on the Orion schematics that immediately directly the eyes to areas of alert or risk.
Whereas on the SpaceX consoles even the message 'All systems nominal' is rendered in a pale blue colour that merges in with the muted pastel palette. I challenge readers to find it quickly.
We already have popular IDEs guiding text input onto one of the few plausible symbols at a cursor; how long before a touchscreen app that gives your suggestions and snippets as touch targets, instead of a keyboard?
Well the choice is less obvious when your two options are an iPad or a throttlebook with jam-happy butterfly switches.
In all seriousness, too many of my Mac-loving friends and coworkers are using laptops that're 4+ years old because Apple decided shaving a millimeter off the thickness was worth cutting key travel by 60% and having display hinges crack off the frame. Considering how long most of them have been buying Apple they deserve better treatment.
The 2019 model actually made some progress with the throttle problem by undervolting the CPU, but it still has the broken keyboard and flawed display flex cable that's prone to breaking from repeated openings of the lid.
In air planes you have touch buttons and physical rotational dials on sides of the screen. Cars might eventually evolve into a voice controlled system to complement the dials.
It is interesting that you may in certain countries not operate a cell phone while driving, yet you can operate a car touch screen.
Once something has been sold to nearly half the population of the planet for a decade or more, you can't sensibly call it a "fashion".
Apple were the first people to deploy high quality capacitive multi touch screens to the general public, with a gesture UI underneath for things like pinch zoom. This was an amazing improvement over previous handheld systems.
One username here ends with 1998, which is presumably the year they were born, so a 21-year-old. The original iPhone was released in 2007, when that person was ten. These kids grew up with touchscreens, of course they think it's normal to have them everywhere.
Smartphones obviously aren't just a fashion, touchscreen all the things is a fashion.
IT fashions usually work that way - there is an actually useful killer application and suddenly the technologies used by the killer application must be applied to everything. Peer to peer (Napster), Ruby / "static typing sucks, testing is better" (Ruby on Rails), touchscreens (iPhone), JavaScript (one language for client and server), blockchain (bitcoin / getting rich through speculation), deep learning (great solution to SOME problems) - it's a fairly simple pattern.
Also, the car industry has looong product cycles, so what you see now is what was hot 5-ish years ago.
> Once something has been sold to nearly half the population of the planet for a decade or more, you can't sensibly call it a "fashion".
While I don't disagree with your main point, I have to say that this is wrong.
That's what fashion literally is. Everybody wears clothes and so clothes are sold to the entire population of the planet. Yet we don't dress like in the 60's anymore. Maybe some do, but you definitely can't find big masses of people dressing like in the early 1800's, for example.
I'm a tech guy, and a car guy. I love cars. Keep the "features" the hell away from my cars. I don't want to sit about in a mobile cinema. I want a car I can drive.
The big touch-screen is a reason why I would not buy a Tesla. The reasons to buy one are economy and performance. Hell, the Prius might have actually been a decent car if it didn't look like a shoe, sound like an overburdened vacuum cleaner, and handle like a beluga whale.
No, i hate large modern touch screens in cars and prefer proper buttons, and controls that I can memorize, like the controller in my BMW. I can do most things with minimal eyes off road.
I would argue its not a best in class feature, its a liability.
Not ready to give Mazda any praise for their infotainment systems. I leased a 2019 CX-5 Grand Touring Reserve a couple months ago. Had I known how bad Mazda’s UX was I would have leased something else.
First off their system takes an eternity to cold boot. If I’m making a quick run to the store or dropping the kids off at a friends house the system isn’t available for most of the ride. While it’s booting, the radio remembers what it last did but all the controls including volume are locked. So if I was listening to one of the comedy channels on Sirius I have no way to mute it or turn down the volume of the often inappropriate content for a few minutes if my kids get in the car.
Second the system remembers very little of the settings between drives. For example the heated/ vented seats or the auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive.
I just drove a brand new Ford Fusion rental this week and their system while much clunkier did boot up almost immediately upon starting the car. Of course nothings perfect and while Ford did include hard buttons for most of the HVAC controls you still had to go though the touchscreen menus to find the setting to change the vent control to head and feet.
I would suggest taking it to the dealer, what you're describing sounds abnormal. Mine boots in about 10 seconds.
I do definitely find it annoying that it defaults to playing whatever audio source you last used when you start up your car. Whenever I have a passenger, I have a slight moment of panic as I try to remember what's about to play through the speakers, and whether it's appropriate for them to hear.
The infotainment system in my 2017 CX-5 often freezes on cold startup. There is no way to dismiss the "Warning" screen (which takes up the whole screen), even by pressing the "Dismiss" button. Just have to wait for it to go away on its own. I've had the backup camera freeze fully, which seems like a safety hazard. A few times, the whole system failed to initialize too, which forced me to pull over at the next gas station, and "power cycle" it by fully turning my car off and starting it back up again.
Mazda punches far above its price in terms of driving dynamics and interior quality, but I think their infotainment system is plain garbage and they should be absolutely ashamed of such poor quality.
I agree with a lot of your points, especially the one where the system picks up playing from where it left off and there is little you can do to stop it aside from mashing the volume or quickly choosing your audio source. However, sounds like you have a problem specific to your vehicle's computer, mine boots before I even leave the driveway.
I'm car shopping. I like most things about the CX-5 except the terrible infotainment system. Slow to boot up, the camera quality is just rage inducing. They went so far with soft touch materials inside but skimped on a better camera.
I'm probably going to buy a santa fe because hyundai did a great job with infotainment and there is physical buttons everywhere. Plus, the ergonomics are great.
It sounds like something is funky with your infotainment system. I have the same year, the trim below but with CarPlay support. It boots within 15 seconds generally, but volume is available instantly. I test drove a car without CarPlay and the boot time was comparable.
Yeah I bought a CX-5 recently and could write a case study on how to infuriate your users in every way possible. I like the car in general, but their infotainment would have been a dealbreaker if they didn't have Android Auto support. Even then it's pretty bad. Can't even get to your phone's voice assistant via their system, even though my $18 bluetooth handsfree in my old car could.
> auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive
Every car I drove with auto-hold requires you to enable it after each startup of the car. Pretty sure it's a safety thing, as this makes most basic thing (depressing break) behave differently than it did for all automatic cars for the last 50 years.
I don't even think you have to be defensive about it.
Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane.
But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons.
The things with buttons, levers and knobs is that they are expensive and very few designers/engineers are good at designing interfaces with them – either because they are not creative enough to get the optimal solution or because they are not pragmatic enough to test their creative solution to the core.
The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago.
Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music.
The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now.
The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap.
Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit.
Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway.
Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal.
Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them.
So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.
The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive.
And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive.
A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs.
People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s.
This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute.
Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive.
But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.
While there's no doubt many find FM synthesis hard, I disagree that the interface didn't make it way harder than it needs to be.
I am absolutely in love with the Yamaha Reface DX that I have, and greatly enjoy editing and the real-time controls over the parameters that it offers with its mere 4 touch sliders.
I think the direct control boxes didn't sell well because not enough keyboardists grokked FM well enough to mess with the sound live (and didn't expect to learn) -- and also because nobody loves add-on boxes. A better UI, I think would change things. Again, that's a lot of what makes the Reface DX fun.
In any case, perhaps the DX is not the best example here. A better example would be the many 90-s and early 2000-s synths, which were all about menus and you couldn't do anything immediately.
(Microkorg would also fall into that category, its knobs are deceptive: what each knob does depends on the value of two or so others knobs. It's menus but without screens. And it's a VA synth - no reason it couldn't be more like Roland Gaia which is one-knob-per-parameter).
Thanks for introducing me to the Microbrute!! Just watched a ton of videos and I like how simple the design is. Looks like it’s a great starter kit (in the video I watched, they recorded a simple piece then spent a bunch of time tweaking sounds to figure out what each one does).
I learned synths back in the 80s with wall-sized panels of knobs, switches, and patch cords. I loved it. It was Direct Manipulation. I could do anything to anything directly and instantly.
I hated synths in the 90s. All interaction was funneled through a tiny screen. I called it "building a ship in a bottle."
Now several manufacturers have brought back knobs (and even patch cords!) and it's a much better situation.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but the revival of synths with lots of single purpose knobs and sliders started much earlier than the 2010s. Clavia Nordlead and Roland jp 8000 are two examples of mid-'90 synths. I would say I that the demand started with the birth of house and other electronic dance music.
I've tried to imagine a touchscreen instead of knobs and toggles in a guitar... Should be !!fun!! experience switching up settings on stage in the darkness.
Totally agree: touch screens represent a compromise on usability when it's needed for flexibility, but are almost universally worse than a purpose-built tactile control.
Perfect example: I have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones which let you change volume and switch tracks by swiping on a touch-sensitive earpiece. It's mind-boggling to me that this was chosen over knobs and buttons: first of all it's really easy to accidentally trigger the controls when adjusting the headset. Also, since it's situated in such a way that you can't see it while you're operating it, it's exactly the type of interface which would benefit most from tactile feedback.
I assumed since 2001, that soon a car will be made, where all the functions can be accessed with eyes still on the road. Just from the wheel, like the paddles, and buttons for thumbs on the wheel. Anything extra, just place your hand slightly from the wheel and immediately feel what you are about to switch and adjust. Imagine to access any function of the car in complete darkness just by the feel.
None of this bullshit, where buttons are far from each other, moving hands up and down left and right to change temperature, turn air-conditioning on/off. Where driver needs to glance down to steer hand into damn buttons. Where "infotainment" needs to show you anything at all about what you are listening to - as if you dont hear it. Keep information to a minimum, ffs.
Then we got touchscreens instead - now you cant even drive in full darkness and feel some buttons with your hand to adjust. There is not even a Night Mode.
Are car manufacturers really this bad? Yep. Tesla included.
In my opinion, this screen still looks excessively bright, distracting, and the night-time photo really showcases the screen's inability to accurately display dark colors (black still looks washed-out or gray).
Thanks for the updated link. Copying and pasting on mobile over here.
The screen is quite high quality in my opinion, and not washed out at all. You’re seeing the effect from the camera washing out from the street lights.
See how dark the steering wheel is? No screen behind the wheel makes for sublime night time driving. It’s just you and the road, and silence.
That is not "automotive level" night mode. The touchscreen is still brighting up the interior and shows too much useless information.
The Saab 9-3 had a "Night" button, which when pressed, turned off _every_ light-source except for speed-odometer. There should be no information visible, no glow on anything, other than speedometer, and even it lowers its brightness.
Why though? Try it, if you get the chance, the fatigue I feel after driving with night mode in a Saab vs shitty cars, is exceptionally low. Eye-strain, whats that?
That’s the camera effect, not the real life experience.
Sorry, I just picked the first image I found on Google images.
To be sure, driving the TM3 at night is sheer joy. There’s no screen at all in front of your face. Just the road and a dark steering wheel. I find night vision much improved without having any indicators behind the steering wheel at night.
I'm a heavy Apple CarPlay user and I am delighted that my car (a 2016 Seat) has analogue controls that work with it. I know that when I'm required to use the on screen controls for certain functions, I am a less safe driver.
Yeah, my daily driver was an Audi with a rotary dial for about a year (no touchscreen at all), and Android Auto was great on it. You get to know the structure of all menus and can take actions blindly after a while. It's been almost a year since I've driven that car and I still know exactly what to press to show alternative routes in Google Maps, for example.
Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto.
I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.
Completely agree with you. I drive an Audi A4 with rotary control for CarPlay and it works perfectly fine. Moving to touchscreens is purely an exercise in cost-cutting.
I hate glossy monitors with a fiery passion and don't understand why anybody thinks glossy is a feature and not a bug.
I suppose having smooth glass can make the screen look slightly more crisp, but having a bright reflection of everything in the room erases any gains in clarity.
I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
For music and navigation, touchscreens are OK, as these are things you don't suddenly need to adjust if something happens. But for instance the defrost function on the AC can be something that you need to immediately control while driving 60 mph, e.g. if you enter a tunnel with moist microclimate (we have one of those nearby, it fogs up your windscreen in ~10sec at some conditions). Such things need to have physical buttons with logical placement.
Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC:
the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:
> the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air
I was driving a friend's newer car down the freeway once, and had to call him to find out how to turn on the godam defroster. There were so many knobs, switches, and dials that influence this, all labelled with icons so I had no idea what they did. Turns out that you had to push two buttons, toggle a toggle, and turn two knobs. Madness.
My car has a selector that you move to "defrost". Then it defrosts, like magic.
I want to speak to the car with my hands on the steering wheel and tell it to defrost the windows like I'm talking to an Alexa device. I can't wait for this day to come...
Why wouldn't you want it to defrost automatically without a spyware microphone and neural network and a ton of problems with accents and background noise?
> Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:
It's nice, but it still a major issue: you need to look at it while pressing it to know state.
If, instead, it's three stacked buttons top to bottom, you don't have to do that.
My car (and many older cars) simple has two knobs. One for temperature, one for location. If you entered a tunnel, you just crank the right hand knob all the way over to defrost. Better than buttons.
But it does not. None of my trips are in calendar. None of my music is in Google Play or any stock music player. And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.
I do not use a phone mount. It's that _last_ thing I want when I'm riding.
I _used_ to wear a smart watch (all of the first 3 iterations of the Pebble) because I thought it would be useful to know who's calling when I can feel my phone buzzing in my pocket while riding so I can decide whether to pull over and answer it or not. Turns out the answer is alway "no". Either I'm jus commuting and I can choose to call back (or not) when I get to my destination, or I'm on the road and I don't care that I won't get to it for several hours or more.
I'm pretty good at navigating - so I don't want/miss the gps/mapping thing. On trips I'd _much_ rather just turn down roads I've never been on that look like they're headed kinda the right way, and see where I end up. If I need to, I'll check in on the phone when I fuel up every 2-3 hours - but it's pretty rare for me to end up somewhere with no idea of which direction and at least a rough guess of how far away the place I'm headed to is.
I do sometimes listen to music - using in ear headphones that fit under my helmet. I'll _occasionally_ use that for turn-by-turn navigation to if I'm trying to get somewhere in town I've never been before in a place I'm not familiar enough to dead-reckon myself close enough that I can get to a place where I'll get by on remembered landmarks and street names.
many large touring motorcycles have built in navigation and music, Harley and Honda even support Apple car play now. Harley had good voice control as well. Indian has a large panel on their bikes with navigation and split screen.
It all comes down to being a responsible rider/driver
Luxury car makers seem to keep putting more and more not-directly-related-to-the-act-of-driving features in cars every new model, so that leads me towards, "Yes."
Sometimes I wonder what the endgame is. When all things (and people) have had as many iPads as can possibly fit shoved into every opening, and I need only mutter a desire for an Amazon drone[0] to appear to satiate it... what will I actually /do/?
I can say the same for Apple CarPlay. Having tactile controls is nice but completely removing the touch screen is not a good thing. If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality.
The only reason GM’s is best is because they’ve finally acquiesced and admitted that Apple and Google do it better and their UX reflects that
As mentioned, Apple CarPlay works just fine on Mazdas without touchscreen so I'm not sure why do you think these two are exclusive. There are even pictures of CarPlay running on new Mazda 2019 in the article you're commenting on.
My thinking was that if you have CarPlay you will still have to look at the screen regardless of whether or not you have tactile controls.
I missed reading this part of the article:
"The head-up display that top trims of the Mazda 3 get is now projected onto the windshield. The amount of time it takes the eyes to focus on the head-up display is greatly reduced because it’s now focused on a point 7.5 feet ahead of the driver."
>If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality
Funny thing. I have a newer car with a touch screen interface. I also had an older Civic which someone recently destroyed. So with the insurance money, I bought an early 2000's Accord. The previous owner had installed a new Bluetooth radio. No touch screen. Lots of buttons.
At least for entertainment, it's way better than any touch screen interface I've used.
It has buttons for FM presets - the thing I missed most with the touchscreen interfaces. And no, I don't want to scroll like crazy to get to the right preset using a knob or steering wheel. I know what station I want to go to, and it's so much better if I simply have to press a button without looking. Random access FTW.
Every Bluetooth interface I've seen in touchscreen cars has this flaw: Say I was listening to a podcast or some music. I decide I don't want to listen to it so I hit pause (there is no "stop" icon). I also have Waze running, and its volume is too low (very often the case that Waze's volume and the podcast's differ too much, so you can't use both simultaneously). I increase the volume so I can listen to Waze, and the music/podcast resumes playing! Why? Why on Earth would anyone want this feature where adjusting the volume means "Play"?
My 3rd party Bluetooth radio doesn't do stupid things like that.
And then the time to connect to Bluetooth. It takes too long in every touchscreen entertainment system. With the 3rd party radio, it's blazingly fast.
Lots of other cool things about the 3rd party tactile Bluetooth/radio. I rarely drive my newer 2015 car. It has nothing going for it over my old Accord (well, except possibly safety - but that touchscreen is making things unsafe...)
That's great when I'm going somewhere for work. It's not so good when I've not put the "appointment" in my calendar. If the voice interface were 100% perfect it would be OK, but it's not (especially with weird road names).
The key issue for me is, if I'm driving, I have to look at a touch-screen to hit the right button. With physical controls, I can use muscle memory and keep my eyes on the road.
On the contrary I recently plugged my phone into the USB port of a hired Peugeot 207. All I wanted to do was charge it. But every few seconds the phone and in-car functions were interrupted by native pop-ups stating "No Android Auto compatible apps found". Constantly for the whole journey when I was trying to use my phone for navigation.
Yeah, I have used Android Auto. It worked fairly well for me. It was very pleasant to have some apps accessible on the screen of my car. But it didn't integrate with all the buttons in my car. Also the connection wasn't always working that well.
I stopped using it after a while. I don't mind listening to the radio. And although Android Car has a nice modern user interface, the default user interface in my car works just as fine. I want to look at it as little as possible.
> not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Branded interface was not the right wording here. I was looking for a word that describes a car company building a good and fitting experience that suits the car you are driving.
Years ago I had a friend that was an embedded HW/SW guy working for our local Ford manufacturing (AU). He was very proud of an antenna switch that had options for "fully up/halfway/fully down" and explained all the complexities of counting revs on the motor that was doing the moves and remembering the count and working out whether it had reached the top etc.
When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
The idea that the people building these UIs are actually interested in actual safe UX is misguided. UX is irrelevant, UI has to be sexy in the showroom.
Neither Apple or Google want the manufacturers to put in knobs and switches, because then they'll have to adapt their partially neutered existing iOS/Android UIs to support things like CANbus etc. Plus the integration costs will go up and nobody got time for that.
>When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
In fairness, there's a lot to be said about limited options. The benefit of the 3 position switch is simply that the user doesn't have to think about what the "optimal" position is. Moving the antenna up and down goes from selecting one of 3 numbers, to hitting a button to make a floating point number increase, and then hit another button to stop it on the right position. I personally don't think that's a good UX for the majority of people. (Heck, I'm not even sure what the point of a 3 position antenna is!)
This is absolutely the right way to go. I'm on the market for a new car for the first time in a long time and the terrible UX decisions car makers are implementing is quite shocking.
Finally a car company that gets it. Touchscreens and cars should be mutually exclusive, anything that takes your eyes off the road in a car is simply dangerous.
Feedback could be visual and in extreme cases audible. Input should be tactile, so buttons rather than surfaces.
And screens should display only a little bit of information, in a font large enough that you don't end up straining your eyes when you switch from the road to the screen and back.
I probably own the final Mazda that has a "touch screen"... If you could ever really call Mazda's touch screen a touch screen.
A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison.
I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying.
And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow.
I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.
When my iPod Classic died it really stung especially since they discontinued them. I hate playing music on my phone. I cant skip songs or pause without looking properly if I am on an aux cable.
Sure Bluetooth is a thing but you dont always drive your own car and every car has their own convoluted way to do Bluetooth.
I wish Android or iPhones had multimedia related buttons somewhere on them (dont miss that lock button / slider thing Apple used to add in so you dont butt skip a song). It is much safer for me to feel out specific buttons while driving than looking down on my phone screen.
Not to mention that the on-the-go playlist feature worked great on iPods (just hold the button down) but Apple still hasn't figured that out on iPhones.
Agree that Bluetooth is a nightmare. Every Bluetooth radio wants to dig into my phone and download my contacts (and who knows what else) but all I want to do is play music. If I do this in a rental car I have to remember to figure out how to wipe the radio when I'm returning the car and already rushing to catch a plane, so I don't even bother with Bluetooth any more. It's maddening.
I don't know what the problem is or how to fix it, but every car UI/UX I've ever tried, from Audi to Toyota was an absolute repulsive nightmare. Even while not driving it takes forever to find a way to any basic function - while in regular life the phones, and most other electronics are sub-second mostly intuitive. Major car makers always feel like they are two decades behind! And everyone insists on their own separate rat-hole of an experience. We shall see if Mazda's does any better, but the touchscreens I've interacted with in cars were completely maddening, an ugly pixelated blast from a very slow past even in brand new cars.
Sensible interior design with hardware buttons is one of the main reasons why I opted to get a Mazda over other competition. Most infotainment systems were horribly janky and laggy and some companies even forced me to use them for things like HVAC controls (I'm looking at you Peugeot). Wasn't a great experience.
Having said that - I still like the fact that my Mazda has a touchscreen active while stopped. Entering Nav directions is way faster than with the commander knob.
Thank fuck, and I hope the rest of the automotive industry follows suit: I have never felt less safe operating a vehicle than when I have had to adjust some car setting fifteen nested menu items deep while rolling down the highway in an unfamiliar rental at 65 miles per hour.
It's been mentioned a few times but I believe haptic feedback is absolutely necessary to the future of the touch screen.
How many times have you handed your phone to someone to show them and in the process both you and the person receiving accidentally made a multitude of gestures, resulting in your phone freaking out and opening all kinds of random apps/windows..
I love how the new iPhones have the "press" ability on apps to open more options. Personally I wish all interactions required a little bit more force (besides, say, scrolling). When almost half the device is responsive, it makes it all too easy to accidentally perform actions.
Does anyone know where the technology is with this? I remember seeing articles a long time ago about potential for brail via haptics in screens
I feel like I'm in the perfect position to comment on this. I drive a 2019 Tesla Model 3 and my girlfriend drives a 2018 Mazda CX-3. The display on the Model 3 is perfectly positioned so I don't have to lean forward and do not apply any torque to my steering wheel whatsoever to adjust the settings on the huge 15" capacitive touch screen. I also don't have to migrate my eyes any further from the road than I would to find a physical button on a dashboard due to the close, raised position of the Model 3's display and I can see perfectly fine out the windshield while adjusting everything on the display. The buttons are also larger with a 15" display compared to the tiny 7" display which is located very far away on the dashboard of the CX-3. The position and size of the display on the Mazda has the side effect of me rarely even attempting to use the touch features of the display, but when I do I have to lean forward which may cause me to apply slight torque to the wheel.
Based on my experience, Mazda needs a larger display located closer to the driver if they want to make use of touch controls without the side effects they mention. The wheel method is horribly clunky and takes more thinking to get to the control you want to adjust. It's much faster and safer I believe being able to access the control quickly and in a position that doesn't require you to take your eyes far away from the road. You still have to look at the display and process your control movements when using the dial control on the Mazda and it takes longer. Tesla has a better UI by far. If you haven't driven a Model 3 yet, I recommend doing so before commenting against touch screen UX.
I've owned six Mazda vehicles over the past 30 years. Current owner of a 2016 CX-9. The stock behaviour was that the touchscreen doesn't accept touches unless the vehicle is stopped -- though it doesn't require you to put the vehicle in park.
Also, the vehicle has a heads-up-display projected on the windshield. The original HUD included a graphical tachometer so you could see the revs which has limited value except it looked cool and gave you some indication on when you were in boost. In a future update Mazda removed the graphical tach in the HUD citing safety as they felt the constant animating tach in the driver's field of view was a distraction. But, the tach remains displayed if you had it turned on before the update.
The voice command functionality is okay, including for the mediocre built-in navigation, once you learn the specific phrases and commands.
Last fall I upgraded to Apple CarPlay and the behaviour is the same. Touch input only works when the vehicle is stopped. There was a rumour that one of the reasons why CarPlay took so long to come to Mazda vehicles was because Mazda wanted integration with it's rotary command nob, back button, and other function buttons around the knob and on the steering wheel. Not sure if it's true, but I will say that navigating CarPlay with the knob is just fine when driving, and the physical back button allows me to navigate to the previous screen regardless of whether the previous screen is a CarPlay screen or one of the Mazda screens, which is really great.
I know some Mazda owners were upset with these limitations, complaining that it prevented the passenger from operating the screen, but that seems like a corner case.
If you think about, anything that 100% requires a driver to remove their eyes off the road for extended periods of time is a bad thing waiting to happen. I guess a lot of cars don't have touchscreens though and you don't see a lot of news or analysis on how these touchscreens are killing people. I still see people driving 70 MPH on major Interstates with their heads literally down staring at their phones.
At any rate I still think this is a great idea. Mazda came close with the generation of their infotainment systems before their current ones. You could mostly use the rotary dial and do things if you memorized how many clicks of rotation of the wheel it took and which button to press in the gutter on top of the transmission.
I think the next best thing is a voice UI to control HVAC and entertainment. The one on my 2015 Mazda 6 is pretty bad but this might force them to invest in that which would give them a competitive edge.
Touch screens in vehicles drive me nuts! Requiring the driver to divert their attention from the road makes all tablet-style interfaces a degradation of UX. In all the cars I learned to drive in, I could adjust every thermostat control as well as every audio interface completely by touch, without taking my eyes off the road.
Not to mention the software issues! In one vehicle, you literally could not turn off the radio. Your options were to press the mute button (which would only hold until you restarted your car - at which point you'd get blaring music or static) or to just turn the volume as low as you could.
And every car is now different and unpredictable! My dashboard should be a utility, not a visually stimulating video game where I need to learn every menu and submenu just to fade the audio to the rear.
All I can say is THANK GOD, Mazda. I hope all other manufacturers follow your lead.
I think the big issue is in a majority of vehicles, UI/UX is nothing short of atrocious. Navigating menus can often be totally unintuitive, even for techie users - now imagine older folks attempting to operate these while driving. In this case, if you can't do it right, it's better to not do it at all.
I am reminded of a quote I read lately referring to now Ford CEO’s Jim Hackett’s research in understanding the automotive industry (he came from outside the industry). Specifically: when it comes to cars, people LOVE their cars.
Someone’s relationship with their car is very intimate and personal, in many ways more so then a house.
Much of the discussion I am seeing in this thread is very passionate, which confirms the above observation.
Just to offer a counter anecdote, I am passionate about this topic because it involves life and death. I care about my car in so far as it gets me places. If I didn't need it in my car centric city I wouldn't have one. But, as other people drive, and I walk or cycle, I want those people to have car GUIs that do not distract them.
Completely agree, not everyone is as passionate as others (I am much like you). But there is a large community that IS very much passionate. I still recall a fellow classmate at school who if given half the chance will talk about cars till the next morning.
But as they always say, to each their own. But especially in non-utility cars, there very much a level of passion associated with owning a car.
The worst is the touchscreens on some Honda models (eg. 2016 Fit EX).
1. They removed the volume knob in favour of a volume slider on the touch screen. Very difficult to use, and even after a couple of years I have not been able to get used to it, and keep reaching for a physical input.
2. There's many UI quirks (bugs and ill conceived design flows) that make menu navigation, managing saved stations, switching from AM to FM, connecting a Bluetooth device etc. extremely difficult. RDS is even disabled by default, which defeats the purpose of having all the extra real estate of the touch screen.
Lots of complaints from users, taking them years to acknowledge it sucks.
Kudos! Glad to see this swing back to tactile controls.
At the CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem. We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.
You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).
While I applaud the human factors engineering of removing touch-sensitive screens, it only applies to vehicles in which there is a driver. We are clearly in the final days of "driving", before the driver becomes just another passenger in the autonomous vehicle. Once fully autonomous, won't the touch-screen interface be the ideal user interface inside a vehicle - familiar, ubiquitous and simple? Wouldn't Mazda be better served in spending their design budget on accumulating the exponential real world autonomous driving data that is giving brands like Tesla an advantage?
I’m surprised I had to go so far down to find this comment. Most complaints about cabin UI here are that they require taking eyes off the road. Tesla is clearly designing a car for a time when the driver never needs to look at the road at all.
Aren't most of the controls on your picture not on the center console? The bloody hazards button is behind the driving wheel and inaccessible to the passenger.
For what it's worth I've pretty much always known the controls to be over the center console.
And the instruments being there as well has been happening for some time, at least for some vehicle classes e.g. on the C3 picasso anything but the purely driving-related controls is on the center console: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/c3-picasso/61746/used-...
The controls there are definitely not in the same place as most cars. Here they are to the right of the driver, between the gear shift stick and the handbrake.
Apart from some modern cars with a single dial and maybe a couple buttons there, most only have storage space there and the controls are in the front, not between the driver and passenger.
Oh I see, you're talking about the entertainment system of the DX having its controls in the center isle, next to the handbrake.
I was looking at the car system controls below the air vents, hence my wondering what the difference was.
FWIW BMW's idrive and Audi's MMI physical control are in roughly the same spot (idrive's been both below and besides the gear selector, MMI's usually been above or below though both have basically surrounded the stick: https://www.picclickimg.com/00/s/MTE1MFgxNjAw/z/xvEAAOSwll1W...).
Some great thoughts in this thread, most of them I already agree with. Some thoughts I haven't seen discussed.....
Cars go out of style. They last a lot longer than a phone or tablet. Look at any 00's era GM product. The radio/climate buttons are straight out of a Cozy Coupe. It's gross, but in 2001 they were stylin'! Look at the 1992 Subaru Legacy, or the 1990 Ford Tempo, or the 1991 Nissan Sentra. Electric seatbelts, enormous speedometers, oddly shaped steering wheels... They were cool! Now they're eye-catchingly gaudy. Lets not even get into the "digital dash" (yeah, I'm talking to Jethro in the Pontiac).
What if you could have a car with a touchscreen but it only included Android Gingerbread (2.3) and that was it?
Other than that I am always amazed that modern cars have back up cameras and drive-by-wire steering/throttle/brakes but they still have a simple "check engine" light. They don't even print out their own trouble codes let alone tell you "Cylinder 5 misfire!" Such a feature would be trivial and add real value, especially in the truck market. Perhaps when right-to-repair takes over there will be no more incentive to keep the workings of cars magical and mysterious to the layman.
They don't have a good visual display of the check engine light, but you can get a lot of information from that light, with the cross manufacturer standard ODBII/EOBD (on board diagnostics 2 / enhanced onboard diagnostics). Progress is going slow in adding features, but a $35 tool like this can give you detailed information. One of the best car related purchases I have made:
Maybe I'm just a luddite but I can't stand any of these features in new cars. Feels more like misfeatures to me.
I rent cars fairly often for work and so I see a lot of touchscreens, a lot of bluetooth, whatnot. My car at home has a simple radio, a CD player that rarely gets used, and cruise control. I prefer that to any of this new integrated tech. The only thing about new cars that I really miss is a backup camera.
95% of everyone would agree with you. It's the car manufacturers and the business people behind the terrible tech in the car industry that disagree and want us to have touchscreens.
I remember when microwaves had one dial and no buttons, no digital touchscreens. You set the dial to the desired cook time in minutes/seconds, and it automatically started (as long as the door was closed).
Same with an oven. Turn the dial to 350 and the oven was on and set to 350. It took a fraction of a second vs a touch screen.
These new interfaces are often a terrible use of "technology" and are actually a step (or more) backward.
I remember those days - I liked our microwave with just a time knob and a start knob.
But it had its drawbacks. My young children couldn't set the time to heat their oatmeal. "Turn it to 1 minute". They'd twist the knob and say "Is that enough?" Without knowing enough about time they couldn't (yet) figure out to turn right or left to get to the right number.
With a digital one, they'd just poke 1,0,0 and hit start.
Young children behavior is interesting, I remember a friend whose 3 year old boy can’t read but fully capable of using his parents phone to watch Youtube. The boy constantly use Voice Recognition instead of keyboard input in such a fluid manner. After the search shows up, the boy simply pick the cartoon he liked.
Tap and swipe is first nature to him. What fascinates me is, this boy cant figure out how to turn on the tv because he keeps tapping amd swiping the remote control. I once saw him trying to swipe on the light switch as well.
By the time I had kids, the dial interface was long gone...but if I could teach my kids to push 1,0,0, start, I'd bet I could teach them what 1:00 looked like on the dial pretty quickly.
I am absolutely stunned that it's taken people so long to realise this. How the bloody hell could anyone have been so stupid to not realise that we need buttons with tactile feedback so we can keep our eyes on the road.
Removing touch screens from the driver is a good one but there are so many distracting UI patterns for drivers. The scary thing is that I would bet people have died because of poor patterns that exist. These are some that I have:
1. Using Apple iPhone for navigation. Phone rings. I pick it up using car controls. The navigation screen is now gone and is replaced with the phone screen. [scramble to swipe bottom of phone to get back to nav]
2. Audio routing. The car winds up acting like a Home theater receiver that I have to debug while driving. Why can’t I hear my music? Am I on AM/FM/IPhone USB/iPhone Bluetooth/Wife’s Bluetooth. So many options.
3. Every time I start driving my car, Christmas music starts automatically playing from my iPhone through the car speakers. It’s in my music library and for some reason it auto plays (Why apple?). I always have to do some mid-driving swipeage to get this to stop.
These are horrible patterns. I’d love to spend the rest of my life designing UI for simplifying the driving experience. If anyone wants to hire me, please do.
Count me in, too. I'm an embedded systems developer/electrical engineer with considerable automotive experience. Contorting myself under dashboards isn't as much fun as it used to be, but I'll do it if I can make a difference.
I'll gladly be a co-pilot on that project. I feel the same way. There's so many edge cases that can become show-stoppers (accidents) in driving interfaces.
Tesla is probably only company with proper software engineering team that managed to create smart car platform.
Others trying to imitate its screens are shooting themselves into foot. If you are not able to implement continuous delivery, you should stick to hardware toggles. It's that simple.
The problem of screen being screen still stands in Tesla's cars, but much bigger problem is shipping crappy screens.
That is a really good idea. Touch controls are nearly useless on a moving vehicle. It would be a lot better if Apple/Google came up with a standard tactile interface for their in-car offerings.
Don't get me wrong -- CarPlay/Android Auto are leagues ahead of what individual car makers have to offer. Having a standard system across all car makers is a good idea too. They just need to come up with a more tactile interface.
The touch screen doesn't necessarily have to go, though -- it could simply be disabled when the vehicle is moving.
Volkswagen, for example, have a rotary dial which lets you flip through all the items on the screen to select the one you like. It still requires the driver to glance at the screen, but at least it doesn't require them to touch the precise spot on the screen -- which IMO is more distracting. That said, even the rotary dial is not perfect as it can't be operated by touch only -- w/o taking your eyes off the road -- not unless you know the position of every single icon/control by heart.
My Alfa Romeo (and all recent Alfa Romeos in the US) don't have touchscreens. The screens are in touch range and they have CarPlay and Android Auto, but you have to use the wheel with them.
I got used to it pretty quickly and after a week or two I don't really have to look at the screen to do 99% of things I need to do. It seems much safer to me, though it was annoying at first.
My Rolls doesn't have a touch screen, which is nice because it helps from distracting my driver during trips to the yacht club or the occasional polo match.
I was actually pondering buying a Mazda, but now I am not so sure. Generally I get the idea - please give me hardware buttons for radio/music volume, temperature control, or to toggle suspension modes or whatever. But I want to use e.g. the Spotify on my phone, and Google Maps. Someone further down commented that it seemed to him that car makers have given up on their own branded version if car software, and ohmygod yes, thanks. It was always an afterthought and poorly thought out, buggy and much less functional.
So please, maybe find a middle ground, as I said - car functionality with hardware knobs, and a touchscreen for stuff like navigation (where you need the sreen anyway), and music control. Otherwise it will get worse - then I can use the hardware button to select my BT input an dhave to fiddle around on my much smaller phone screen. No one can actually want that, if the alternative is to use a condensed version of that interface on a bigger screen...
I have driven a 2018 Mazda 3 quite a lot. The touchscreen is disabled while the car is moving.
For complicated things while driving - that you wish you had a touchscreen to accomplish - I wish you wouldn't do them while driving. I say this after more than a decade working responding to road accidents.
However, the Mazda interface has been great for all the Android Auto functions (including Google maps and Spotify) simply using the physical buttons. They clearly went to some effort to make it work well.
And if you prefer, you can use voice controls fairly effectively via Android Auto or Apple carplay.
I'm a huge fan of physical/tactile input (and output) devices. I use foot pedals hooked up to an Arduino for my CTRL/SHIFT/META keys both at work and home, which helps my RSI enormously. I also designed a wearable bluetooth device for adding physical buttons to phones[0] for a school project. I think there's a huge potential for such products, and I'd love to get back to exploring that space at some point.
If you want to get excited about this type of stuff, I highly recommend this TED talk[1].
I listen to XM radio. My toyota interface is a dial for volume, a dial for tuning, and 6 preset buttons (and 6 pages of presets).
I can easily tune through all 150+ stations very easily to find a particular station. I can switch up 20 stations with a single twist, without looking. Also since stations are grouped, I can set a preset for each type of station, then easily tune up or down to listen to other related stations.
My wife's XM is a honda touch screen. The presets work ok, except they are touch screen so you have to look at the screen to change presets. But if you want to manually go to another station, you have to hit 2 touch buttons to get to a tuning screen. Then you have to hit the up/down tuning button each time you want to go up or down a single station. It is pretty much impossible to try to find a station if you don't already know the number because it could be 100's of touches.
I appreciate your point, and think it comes down to what use case most users will benefit from optimising.
My wife switches between Spotify, the Music app and a separated radio app. She does it on her phone's screen when at stop, she could do it on CarPlay or the android version, but I can't just imagine how it would work without a generic touch interface.
You use case (listening to radio) is in line with the current UI paradigm, other use cases (using apps) just won't work with it. That's where we could find a tradeoff I think.
One thing I really dislike about everything being integrated into a single touch-screen is that you've now created a single failure point for all those integrated systems. At least with tactile controls, if my radio knob breaks I can still adjust my HVAC.
Also, when the touch-screens break they tend to be much more expensive to fix. I listened to one person say they were quoted $7k to fix one. They were of a conspiratorial mindset, so they thought it was a planned obsolescence feature to help convince someone to buy a new car instead. I don't know if that's true but the idea of a that type of reliability cost is enough to keep me from returning to the same manufacturer.
I own a 2014 Mazda 3, brilliant car. The touchscreen firmware is a pain to update every year while servicing it. When I bought the car it came it the GPS hardware pre-installed however I was supposed to buy the maps separately for about $500. I didn't see the point in this as for that money I could have bought a new iPhone at that time and have various navigation apps. I also praise Mazda for the decision. In the 5 years since I own the car I probably actually used the touchscreen 20 times as usually I change songs or radio channels from the steering wheel button. Buy a Mazda, you won't regret it :)
They introduce other problems than just distracted drivers.
I took in my Mazda3 to have the screen replaced. There was an issue with the sensors that mistakenly thought someone was touching the screen. At low speeds, when the toch screen re-activates, it would start navigating on its own; from changing music stations to calling people and changing GPS waypoints. Drivers trying to stop this will be more distracted than they otherwise would be. This happens at stop signs, red lights and slow-moving traffic.
Hey! This happened on Sunday in my wife's CRV! We were going to lunch, and the touchscreen went apeshit, flipping between menus at the speed of light, beeping madly.
And, as you said, she immediately began fooling with it, trying to get it to stop. I had to tell her "Let me do this! You just drive!" Its very, very distracting.
Go to your dealer. I wasnt notified but they had a type of limited warranty where they knew about it. The sensors were not installed correctly in some units. They replaced it for free.
Excellent decision for Mazda. They've been optimizing everything for years, tho a bit lagging with their electronics UI. The touchscreen was already disabled when rolling (faster than ~5mph), so losing it entirely is a step forward.
The touchscreen UI when driving is also a very bad design. Touchscreens have no tactile feedback, so require focused visual attention to operate, taking not only the mental focus away from the road environment, but also moving the eyes well away from the road so losing much of the peripheral vision that can 'save' the driver by noticing unexpected motion.
Even as a racer with training on shifting attention between road, traffic, mirrors, surround, & instruments, I've found that any attempt to put a complex phone UI in a car significantly degrades my driving performance. Don't take me wrong, I love having the Android Auto maps up on the screen of my new CX-5.
But, the usability, even using the knob, is a constant distraction, and I far too often find myself squandering far too many microseconds on the UI trying to adjust the map, when I should have switched focus back to the road. It is a genuine hazard, and I've got training to manage it, and still often fail.
The primary, and almost singular goal of any driving or piloting UI must be to reduce the driver's workload. ANY few microseconds squandered on hesitation about the desired operation of the UI or just figuring out it's current state can become deadly.
This is an entirely different goal and threat structure from any ordinary computer or mobile device UI/UX design. Anyone doing it must be fully retrained and reoriented towards these goals, and pursue them relentlessly.
I think voice is a better interface for setting navigation, music selection. I used it quite often with the google assistant through android auto. Its intergrated into my steering wheel i hold the button and I tell the car what I want. Im not losing focus on the road to find the knob/touchscreen whilst I perform the interaction. It gets but clunky when I forget the order of operations but the feedback is there.
I love tactile feedback and love that for all controls like heating, volume, windows, ....
Except for GPS destination input (except if they provide a nice mechanical keyboard ;)) and map zooming. Imho they should allow touchscreen for GPS input and map zooming, and disable the touch for the driver when driving (except when it knows a passenger is sitting next to it and sees the passenger is touching it, should be possible to detect)
I hate the touchscreen on my Honda SUV. It's not even Apple/Android but something Honda half baked a couple of years back. I have been working on UIs for a long time and it's just a disgrace of UX, design, and performance.
Plus it's pretty useless. Other that Bluetooth pairing it serves no real purpose. 99% of the time we control the music player and volume from the remote on the wheel. That's it.
My 2018 Mazda infotainment and overall "technicality" is just sad. I want to say we are in some weird middle ground where car manufacturers are trying to catch up to modern engineering, or maybe Mazda just doesn't care.
1. It has terrible bluetooth lag. I like to sit in my car at lunch and eat and watch YouTube, Netflix, etc. but I have to disconnect bluetooth because the 2-4 second lag is unbearable. I don't have this problem with my other cars.
2. The keyfob drives me insane. If I get out of the car and leave it running, keyfob in hand, I can't unlock the back doors. I have to open the driver door and do it manually. I also can't lock the car while it's running with the keyfob. I guess Mazda would rather my children have heatstroke while I go in and grab something from the store. I have the keyfob in my hand! And the car knows it.
3. The touchscreen and overall UI is slowwwww. Strangely, the rearview camera boots up and displays superfast, which is the only nice thing I can say about the car's technical features. Switching from radio to bluetooth is an annoyingly long process. The main bootup is excruciatingly long as well. If I'm 5 minutes from home I just don't bother with any sound and mute everything because I'm already on my way and driving by the time it's able to do anything.
4. They charge you to add on Android Auto. Even if I did get this option, you have to get to it thru their already-mentioned slow system, so I don't even know if I'd use it. And you have to plug in the phone. Faster and easier to just put the phone on the magnetic holder and go.
I could go on but this is long enough already. I really like the car otherwise, but I'll be checking my next purchase very carefully when it comes to the technical side.
My knee-jerk reaction was "I'm not going to buy a car if it does not support CarPlay"[1], but Mazda isn't eliminating CarPlay functionality as part of this process.
On-screen selections will involve tactile controls and I find that diable.
Why? CarPlay is a reasonably good UI unlike virtually anything pretty much any car manufacturer can create, Maps, Podcasts/music interface, etc.
How is a heads up display "accessible" for people with limited vision? In the web industry, we kill ourselves to make every color combination fully ADA compliant (in the US) and this involves a limited set of combinations. Not being familiar with the auto industry regulations (does ADA even apply?), I wonder how they (heads up displays) or even touchscreens could be considered accessible. Anyone have insight into how this works? Is the user possessing an active drivers license considered enough to exempt automakers from making their controls accessible to people "with disabilities".
Of course, and some vision disabilities do require exceptions or a special license. However, my experience with making websites accessible has taught me that ADA, and WCAG specifically apply to even people with minor vision disabilities which most likely, do not require a special license to drive. As my edit indicates, ADA only really applies to "the public" and so therefore private vehicles are probably exempt.
What exactly? Have you ever dealt with a designer, or old websites with no concept of ADA/WCAG? Because I do, daily and it's ...difficult (to put it lightly) I don't work for Facebook, or Google, I work for small businesses, many of which are still battling to become PCI compliant, or GDPR compliant, or even getting a privacy policy posted. The pain is real.
There is nothing inherently wrong with touch screens. Just use physical knobs and buttons for anything you want when driving (heat, for example) then use touch screen for everything you use when not driving. Entering a navigation target, setting the clock, doing any car setup etc. Typing in a destination with voice or a knob and button interface is infuriating.
I like that approach for those reasons but it really needs care to prevent abuse – e.g. disabling inputs unless the car is in park. Too many manufacturers do the equivalent of putting a bowl of ice cream in front of a child and saying “we told them not to eat it”.
Good, IMHO if using phones while driving is dangerous, then it makes zero sense to use touchscreens all over the place in cars. However some features could still benefit from it, like navigation and settings screens - all those things that can't be handled by a single button or rotary selector, so you'd still have to look down at it to use it.
Yes thank you. I’ve been saying this for a long time
My VW has an amazing UI where the centre console is a small touch screen but it has a bunch of tactile buttons around the edge that also interact with the console. So the only time you need to use the actual console as a touch screen is when entering precise details like an address into the sat nav or phone number to ring. Which, in both scenarios, I am more than happy to do at the start of the journey or pull over to do. Everything else, from the radio to the air con, is controlled via tactile buttons.
More over, any important announcements that come up on the centre console can also be displayed on the dashboard as well. Including sat nav. So it means I don’t even need to look at the centre console to glance at stuff if I don’t want want to.
VW have gotten a lot of bad press in recent years but when it comes to in car UIs, I’ve driven few vehicles that compare equally well.
I wonder, is it really the touchscreen that is the problem, or the amount of things a driver is expected to do on it while driving? With the buttons on the steering wheel I never have the need to even reach for the center console and the screen. The only thing that really needs it would be navigation, but that's set once at the start of the trip and then isn't touched again usually.
I'm sure I'm missing something here (or I'm a weird driver), or is it just that without having a multi-function steering wheel touchscreens are more of a hazard than a radio with buttons?
(Ok, reading a few more comments here, it seems that some cars use the touchscreen to also control temperature and other things that are still buttons and dials in our car (the touchscreen is pretty much only media, navigation, phone, and a few other functions I'm forgetting now because I never used them).)
This news provides me with the tiniest bit of hope I'll ever be able to buy a car again. (Currently driving a 2002 model with no screens and no seatbelt warning bell. Things are great back here in sanity-world.)
Edit: the car doesn't squawk loudly at me when I hit the lock button when I get home at night, either.
I wonder what some analysis on driver focus, concentration and eye movement would reveal when comparing Tesla, especially Model 3, drivers vs. drivers of cars with physical buttons and blind operations.
The AndroidAuto / Apple carplay in newer Subarus accepts both rotary controls, and I always end up using the rotary controls as often as possible when driving. This is because the touch screen is harder to accurately press when driving, compared the rotary dials.
On that note I also want to mention that Maps on Apple carplay has a terrible UI which could potentially be dangerous. To move around the map, one has to use arrow buttons on the touch screen. We can't move the map by just dragging on the map like on a cellphone.
I believe this is an effort to avoid driver distraction. But people, including me, keep trying to move it anyway while driving since its so instinctive, and when the map fails to move it adds additional distraction by having the driver investigate.
I like a keyboard better than a touchscreen for writing text, and I like a keyboard with mechanical switches better than one with membrane switches. More expensive, yes, but the user experience is very much better.
One of the primary advantages is that I can usually find the key I want without looking down at the labels.
In a car, I want tactile clickiness in mechanical or electromechanical controls. I even want rocker or throw switches, instead of buttons that light up an LED to indicate their state. And that means if the state changes in software, a solenoid or motor is going to have to flip the physical state too.
Touchscreens, despite having "touch" in the name, are strictly inferior for finger-based inputs. They're more "screen" than "touch".
The touchscreen isn't the problem, having a screen at all is the problem.
I have a Mazda and hate their scroll wheel interface, with a touchscreen I can just press the "AM Radio" icon, with a scroll wheel, I need to turn the wheel then keep looking at the screen to see where the cursor is so I can click the right icon so it takes more attention -- both cognitive processing (how many clicks do I need to turn to get down to the button I want), as well as visual (is it on the right one yet?)
Voice recognition is even worse, I often end up having a conversation with the car "Call George" "There is more than one George, which one do you want to call" "George Modaline" "Ok, Calling George Smith - mobile".
Touch screens are so good as UI in cars they decided to put them in the next gen F1 steering wheel.
Oh wait... they actually didn't!
Mazda's decision is very good: Any UI where you need to detour your attention from driving to changing car status is missing the point of its existence.
Speaking about tactile controls - once I got Audi in rental, it had tilt controls near the central knob and they were very good (and stylish enough for general adoption). I could find them without much searching blindly and trigger any of their positions the first try, zero errors. Very nice and intuitive (after you remember what they do of course). See picture here, two silver fins between navigation knob and gearbox, they tilt to front and back: https://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/201...
Having recently driven two model year cars with little change other than one now has a touch screen, the screen made a world of difference. Features I normally never use were quick and easy to access. Yes apple and google car stuff were also easier, but just the entire driving experience was nicer: no knobs to twist and press or shift like a joystick, no sea of buttons with meaningless icon, fewer endless dives of menus.
I see that the data may not agree with my experience but I look to have touch in every car I buy in the future. From a driver looking to leverage technology, while we get automation working, let's make it easy for the driver to get to the car's features.
How many features do you need? I have a 2019 Subaru Forester and if I could have gotten it without a screen I would have. Everything I need while driving is on the steering wheel (cruise control buttons, radio controls), climate is a knob and 2 buttons. Everything else I don't need while driving.
The only thing a screen is good for is a backup camera. In my ideal car the screen just turns off or hides away when I'm not in reverse. Everything else is a distraction when you should just be driving.
Pretty much 100% of interactions with my car are either android auto voice controls or physical knobs (mostly the knobs on my steering wheel). There's basically no reason to fudge around with either a touch screen or a rotary dial while driving.
Android auto in a rental car got me through quite a bit with Google maps without needing a car mount for my phone, but again I still never really touched the screen much outside of initial setup while parked (getting location punched into the map and maybe starting some music).
It's handy while parked, but I don't think I want to be fiddling much with a touch screen while driving.
On the other hand, I don't see why my passenger can't be operating it while I'm driving.
Still against volume and climate controls not being physical buttons or knobs because having to look at a screen while driving for more than half a second is bad news.
What car manufacturers could|should do is focus on making Android and iPhone apps that replace these screens. Apps that would update regularly and allow controlling various functions of the car. And have analog controls and small dash etc. display to access | configure systems that are essential for driving and safety, complete with e.g. voice control.
I agree from personal experience that these LCD screens in cars are distracting, and what’s worse, don’t get updates so that in just a few years UIs will feel sluggish and ugly (if not already the day it rolls out of dealership (I’m looking at you Ford)).
It's a case of picking the right tool for the job, touchscreens aren't entirely awful. But if I'm driving and I want to switch to Radio, the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think.
My car has buttons for all these operations and it's great. What is bad for is browsing the map when I'm parked; say I'm looking for a car park near my destination, by the time I've zoomed out with a scroll wheel, browsed around and zoomed back in a few times I could've done the same thing on my phone and set off.
Kudos to them! They just did their research and acted on it. (At least that's how it appears). That's how it should be.
At many companies, the people doing that kind of research would be people who no one really listens to. They would do the research. Then PHB-type characters would enter the scene. And if research yields recommendations that would steer the company away from the safety of the herd (of automakers, in that case), then the research would be cancelled and the recommendations ignored.
Car manufacturers' touchscreen UI is hilariously bad, like a website from 1998. Interfacing with phones is equally unreliable. They really don't know what they're doing.
Mazdas still have screens. They have a knob and a few buttons between the seats to control the screen. This change doesn't do much for safety or usability.
The knobs are just as distracting as using a touch screen -- you have to look at the screen to see what is being selected, and you have to take a hand off the wheel to use the knob. In many cases it takes several knob movements and button presses to get to something I could have just reached out and touched. How is that any safer?
My point is that using a knob does not add safety, for exactly the reason you mentioned. It is either safe to drive one-handed at a particular moment, or it is not. Whether a knob or a touchscreen is used makes no difference -- one hand is off the wheel and your eyes are on the screen.
See this 2014 article about a good car UI with touchscreens [0]; though it may take some getting used to. Switching back to analog controls and buttons is a sane move in that respect.
I that guy suggesting multitouch on a car touchscreen? That seems terrible. I find just swipe scrolling extremely awkward at arm's length (and this is with CarPlay so it's not just due to weird car UI acceleration curves)
I use CarPlay for 2 years on a daily basis on my VW (w/ touch screen). The head unit is placed in the middle of the cockpit. In time you build up muscle memory so it can be a similar experience with hard buttons. The only catching point is if your phone is slow, features like CarPlay behaves nondeterministic. Thus, it becomes very distracting.
Also, to reduce distraction I suggest using Siri with CarPlay. It works like a charm and you don't even need to look to the screen.
It's good strategy, too. Now the other manufacturers are at a disadvantage because people can claim that the cars are "defective" by having touch screens.
I think a touch screen would be OK if it didn't operate while the car was in Drive, so you can set preferences, etc, with a full keyboard. But you can also do this from a companion app or website, so there's really no need to have it at all.
And I'm really glad to see HUDs come to cars. I wonder why it took so long!
I would love to have one single, continuous touch screen instead of what the car is providing me.
I only care about the speed and fuel level. And a big STOP when something is wrong.and style feedback on things Iwill have to change soon.
Then radio and possibly two buttons.
All of this automatically provided when it is me who "logs in".
But I get some weird philosophical view of some designer go though I am interested in the engine rate (I do not even know the name of this rpm big dial), the oil temperature and whatnot.
I can't wait for the day of Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant voic-level speech integration for controlling air conditioner, calling, asking questions, rerouting gps etc all hands free with emphasis on actually being usable, unlike the crap automakers have been torturing us with (half-assed navigation that needs to be updated at dealership, voice input system that barely understands commands unless you say them in some very specific order, etc).
Touchscreens are fine, but are for passengers. The real issue is cars that support only touchscreen for some options and then make you go into park to do anything.
My girlfriend's 2019 Mazda CX-5 has both a touchscreen and analog controls. Carplay will use both but Android Auto has always just used the analog controls.
I haven't used a car in years, but I do use taxies or DiDi, or Uber, depending on which country I'm in.
With Uber or Didi especially, you get picked up in cars that have these touchscreens. I've never seen a driver use them for anything other than radio operation. They use their phones for GPS navigation.
And in the nicer cars (BMWs, Mercs, etc) the touchscreens just destroy the aesthetics of the car's interior. Horrible looking.
I wish everyone would follow suit. There is nothing I hate more in a modern vehicle than a touchscreen.
Automatic headlights come close, but my hate for those is mostly from drivers that fail to turn them on when the sensors fail or aren't sensitive enough to come on. So many heavy downpours / fog in our area and I see plenty of new cars without their tail lights on and just low beam/running lights.
I'm a Mazda driver and I liked how you can use a touchscreen before you drive and then it switches off the touchscreen as you're driving to make travelling safer. At first, I was confused, because I've been so used to using touchscreens during journies before, but I applauded them for making such a useful safety feature and I applaud them again for taking it one step further.
This is great. I grew up watching the Simpsons and always dreamt of sitting in front of a nuclear control panel like Homer's, but instead, I sit in front of soft control panels (and many more text editors, but that's besides the point). I think we should invest more in bespoke, more usable interfaces and break away from everything being a touch screen, keyboard and/or mouse.
That's a sign of an industry with heavy user research and iteration.
In a more conservative industry, interaction practices researched and adopted at the beginning of the discipline would be maintained for decades without questioning -cough programming cough-, and profound changes would require a thorough adjustment of the tools used by the industry and the mentality of the practitioners.
How it made through ] production in the first place is really baffling. There are supposedly thousands and thousands of engineers, industrial designers, QC and other product people working in the automotive industry. And yet between 2010 and 2019 you'd be hard pressed to find a model coming without a touch screen. This is insane. This seems like a basic usability and safety issue.
Can’t they just simplify touch screen UI. I understand the distraction factor but that can also happen with too many hard controls as well. In Tesla, the hard button on steering wheel can be modified by the touch panel control. They both work together.
IMO this is a wrong move for mazda. Eventually if these cars become smart cars then you will not be interacting with controls as much. Touch an go.
I hope this becomes more common. At least in sportier cars. I want some kind of tactile response that I can feel while driving so I can navigate a vehicles controls without ever taking my eyes off the road. I want physical buttons, knobs, dials and switches. If there is a display it should not be a touch display.
Hopefully I can find something of this sort to replace the 7" screen in my GT86.
A big reason I still love my 12 year old car (a Mazda, by chance) is that it doesn't have a touch screen. I've borrowed a number of cars over the years that have touch screens and I hate them; they're distracting, they're not intuitive, and you can't use them without taking your eyes off the road. I'll say this for Mazda; they're practical.
It wouldn't take much hardware added to the screen to make it better. Just add a couple pushable rotary dials, few raised buttons with edges, and some audio feedback (even just clicks/beeps). Trimming down the software will take more work as it seems to be designed on desktop computers running tablet emulators without testing the UX while driving.
I liked the use of the Mazda touch screen for the purpose of entering an address (while stopped) into the Nav system--so much easier than using a wheel to scroll across a keyboard--but otherwise it wasn't necessary. They could obviate the need for a touch screen for this function by allowing you to send an address to the car via your phone.
In general I am against this move. Buttons can only do one or two things, and you have to learn it. Touch screens can do infinite things, and can display unique indicators based on state. Still, if the choice is between and infotainment system that won’t get updates or a just buttons, give me a spot for my phone on the dash and call it a day.
Just a thought but I wonder if this whole touch UI craze was due in part to the legislation that require backup cameras in America and forced all cars to come with a lcd screen. I get this feeling companies then just all jumped on the touch UI bandwagon because now they were forced to have a screen for the backup camera.
Like many people my age (early 50s), I now need reading glasses. My distance vision is fine, but my phone held at arms length is slightly out of focus unless I put on my reading glasses. This is the case for many (most?) people my age. I hate any display on a car that I can actually reach. No touchscreens for me.
It's a bit insane that cars (as far as I understand it) have to go through a lot of certification, e.g. that their airbags work, or that the controls work properly (e.g. that the brake-by-wire doesn't have bugs), but that only now have they done research if touch screen usage is safe or not...
It's Tesla started this design, iphonized car industry.
Screen navigation should be banned in the car no matter what type of screen it is.
When driving or piloting, what's the last time you heard the display has several levels of menu/screen to move around. Just display everything, let the eyes choose where to look.
Thank God for this, anytime I've had to use a touch screen while driving I've felt it's stolen so much of my visual attention that it's amazing I don't hit something. In contrast a physical knob can be used purely by touch without ever having to take my eyes off the road.
Touch screen is almost essential for navigation functionality. It makes life easier in car while not driving as well. I think what manufacturers should focus on is to implement touch screen functions on the driver side as physical controls. This way driver does not need to reach for the screen.
I have a 2018 Mazda CX-9 with the touchscreen. I almost never use the touchscreen, because there's a much more convenient scroll-wheel positioned in the center console and within my right hand's reach. There are also controls in the steering wheel for audio, phone and cruise control.
If I had to buy a car now it may be a Mazda 3 because of this. I may be getting old but I prefer having physical buttons and needles. The dashboard in the new Mercedes for example may look neat and futuristic but I can imagine it going wrong in many ways. I just want a car, not a space ship.
I never tried the Mazda system, but as an experienced UX designer, I agree that touchscreen in a car is one of the worst idea ever in term of UX. It's far, it requires aim, there is no tactile feedback, some gestures (like scroll) are really hard and require constant attention.
If you are stationary and can dedicate your attention to looking at the screen, sure. In a moving car, not at all. Using touch is a spectacular failure to apply even the basic common sense.
Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.
I didn’t mean to imply scrolling should be done with two fingers :-)
But rather if you offer touch scrolling you’ll also want pinch to zoom.
“Spectacular failure to apply even the most basic common sense” is a pretty strong position. In my experience with actually using a fantastic touch interface for navigation, and having tried and hated using nav systems in expensive cars in the past, where I’ve had to resort to using my phone for nav, I am equally strongly of the position that proper multi-touch nav on a large screen (Tesla Model 3) is safer and easier than any kind of button based nav system.
I think it would be a reasonable argument that if you need to fiddle with navigation while driving, your nav system failed. And honestly, whether I am using Waze on the phone, or built-in nav, short of "crap, I've put a wrong destination in" I've never had any particular need to do anything to the nav system once I start going.
Now, sure, I can see how a large touch screen might make a better interface for navigation only, as long as you are stopped and can use it without having to look at the road. But I know of an even better interface -- give me keyboard and mouse, and even with desktop Google Maps I'll get routes faster than with any touchscreen system out there.
But of course 1) mouse/keyboard in a car isn't very feasible, and 2) that touch screen, since it's already there, is being used for controlling other systems in the car, too. And that is a problem. Anything that may need a quick adjustment while you're driving (and in real world, of course, that includes things you shouldn't really be doing while driving...) should be doable with muscle memory and at most a quick glance. Touchscreen doesn't do that, so I think it clearly does fail the common sense test.
Good, non tactile buttons in an automobile is THE worst idea ever. I know where every single adjustment in my car is by feel alone, without the need for some dumb screen distracting me. Amazing that these screens don't have the negativity surrounding them that smart phones do.
Kudos to Mazda for saying no to this insanity. Not only is it unsafe, it's a horrible user interface. I'm not able to drive and hold my outstretched arm steady enough to select an item with a finger. For next car purchase I'll definitely test drive a Mazda.
They're right but their solution is cumbersome and counter intuitive.
What we need is to put all the controls both within sign and within reach of the driver, that means in and around the steering wheel, just like it was done in sport cars where driver focus is essential.
As somebody who rents cars on the regular I love having a consistent modern interface across every vehicle I use with Android Auto. To me this consistency is much safer than trying to learn a new "cockpit" with every vehicle I drive.
I hope they are right but I still think it depends on design.
My current citroen is mostly touch controlled, but I find it requires less attention to operate than the button/dial controls on my old nissan which were horrible.
... well i hope this'll ripple to other domains. The renaissance of modular synthesizers is highly noticeable in today's music making, and especially live performances, well a car is very similar to a sonic vehicle in that sense.
After driving a Tesla for a couple months, I now wish all cars had a UI like it does, with one large touch screen. Other manufacturer’s touch screens feel ancient by comparison. And so do tens of switches and knobs.
I bought my Mazda 6 the last year it offered no screen. The salesman wanted be to buy the next year which had a god awful touch screen on top of the dash, I hated it. I am glad I didn't get a touch screen!
Some of the higher end luxury cars have little touchscreens that look like buttons on the same place where you'd expect the button, with tactile feedback to mimic a physical button.
I wouldn't be so sure about that - both my father and his sister independently of each other bought their cars new over 20 years ago - I'm planning on keeping my 2017 Toyota as long as possible, because the savings are immense.
Maybe it's something specific to my country overall my parents' generation keeps their vehicles as long as possible.
obviously I shouldn't have said "no one" and made such a blanket statement. But the average age of a vehicle on the road in the USA is 11.6 years and the average length of ownership is 79 months (so 6.6ish years), according to the IHS.
Good, that say, I wish Android Wear / WearOS went that path too. I miss physical buttons for navigating interfaces, especially in the cold winters with my gloves, and I hate, HATE using voice commands.
When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality.
I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.
Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.
The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.
Since autonomous in most cases also means car on demand, I think the car ceases to exist as seperate entity to configure, what's more import that there is a seamless transferable configuration based on your preferences once you rent any car, so that it becomes a nearly natural augmentation of your smartphone or whatever device you'll cary around with you sometime in the next 2 decades.
Meaning low friction in getting your audio/calls out over the speaker system and syncing of navigation with your other devices. And having car notifaction and interior lighting, audio EQ preferences synced too.
Any screens left in the car might be there purely for diagnostic or entertainment (think inflight entertainment and hopefully better) purposes, that need only minimal direct interaction.
That seems fairly irrelevant to _current_ cars, tho. If self-driving cars are a thing in a couple of decades (I'm somewhat skeptical, but whatever), then I'm sure that'll factor into the design of cars then. It shouldn't factor into the design of cars now.
My current Mazda with CarPlay enforces this already. When you are moving, the touch functionality is disabled and you must use the physical buttons (dpad / rotating wheel combination) to navigate.
Seems to me that onscreen displays and Alexa-style voice control would be the ultimate killer app for cars. How often do we have to divert our attention from the road just to check the speedometer?
Seems like the future is voice control. I'm pretty used to talking to my phone to do navigation and similar things while driving, but it can be frustrating because it gets confused a lot and often makes me push a button. (vanilla Android) But you have to imagine it will get better.
People are used to being able to do sophisticated things that go beyond the sort of controls you can operate by feel. You used to get by if you could adjusting the volume with a knob and pushing one of 5 preset radio stations, and maybe being able to operate most the heater/AC controls without looking. That's not good enough anymore.
Voice seems to be the only real option. Maybe by the time it they work out all the kinks the cars will all be driving themselves.
I rented an Audi a4 that had Carplay but only allowed buttons to navigate. It was really frustrating. Trying to move the map around ended up being more dangerous than just swiping the damn screen.
Why would you use a connected smartphone for HVAC controls and switching songs? The controls on steering wheel and near gear shifter are way more convenient.
What are you basing that on? It's pretty easy using Android Auto or Mazda CMU using the rotary controller. Easier than grabbing the phone while driving.
At that point, it's more the fault of the user rather than the manufacturer.
The manufacturer is trying to make driving safer by removing touch screens (which is great, IMO). If the user is sooo inconvenienced by this move, enough to reach for their cellphone while driving, then that's their own fault. Hopefully they don't crash into someone.
Is there a good site or db that let's your compare cars without or with minimal LCD screens? I vastly prefer analog gagues and minimal b/w digital displaces for things like radio.
Interesting strategy at Mazda. No plans for electric vehicles and no more touch screens. Brilliant or insane plan I'm not sure, it might make a nice niche for them.
Yay, I guess. Mine's touchscreen and rarely think to poke at it. Also it doesn't respond to poking if the car is moving. The console controls are terrific.
When is someone going to come up with a tactile touchscreen, with buttons that indent or protrude out of a flat touchscreen, depending on audio or tactile usage.
From a consumer perspective as someone driving the new released Mazda 3 2019 (the one in the article) and previously owning a VW Tiguan with touchscreen in the center, I can say I am super happy with that decision, both from a practical standpoint (cleaning/wiping, yuck ...) and from a functional standpoint: It's just so much easier and less distracting to use the center dial. It takes a bit longer in some cases (navigating Android Auto for example) but it's worth it. And most things can be handled by 'OK Google' these days anyways.
This whole thing honestly reminds of the pushback against touch-screen only smartphones, along with the infamous "mixing the input and output on the same surface" quote (I cannot recall the exact quote, but my bastardized version provides a pretty good gist of it). People will scream, people will kick, but it will eventually happen.
sidenote: I was initially in the "bring the keyboards on smartphones back" camp as well, but given how well it all worked out 10 years later, I foresee the same happening with touchscreens in cars.
Oh, I realize that, not trying to draw a direct analogy. Just expressing my feeling that the whole debate over touch screens in cars will end up the same way.
The description of the jog controls sound a lot like those in my 2006 Honda.
The description of the torque "“Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,", doesn't make any sense. I doesn't matter whether you reach for a touchscreen, button, or bugle, it would produce the same effect.
I just bought a Model 3. There are a lot of great features but I simply hate the touchscreen display. I can’t reliably change the AC, etc without distractingly taking my eyes off the road. I hate it. My other cars I just reach for knobs or buttons but having to find the stupid parts of the touchscreen are really dumb and a terrible design. If the next version doesn’t have a better interface with more knobs and buttons I won’t be buying another one.
I have a 2017 GTI and it has a dial you can use to cycle through things but it’s not ideal. Certain things are useless though, like the keyboard for maps, but you can use voice control there.
I do like the VW implementation. There’s still lots of buttons and steering wheel control, and the screen is small enough and UI actions defined enough that I don’t have to look at the screen much to interact.
Good! They may make the interior look cleaner and save the manufacturer having to stock various small parts and not having to install buttons and dials depending on the trim level, but from a safety perspective tactile feedback is key to minimizing distractions while driving, and touchscreens just don't have that.
The real reason Mazda is purging touchscreens from their vehicles is because their screens are terrible, laggy, hard to use junk and they have no way to fix it because they lack the vertical integration and expertise to bring it in house.
I would guess this is a technical failure wrapped in PR messaging.
eh.. I had a 2016 mazda that I replaced with a 2015 lexus. The mazda's rotary knob based interface is soo much better than the the "mouse" based lexus one.
My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.
I’m personally glad to see Mazda ceding the high ground on this. IMO they are like RIM sticking to physical keyboards in an new Apple world.
There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.
One thing people tend to miss is that all of those "obvious and incredible" benefits of touchscreens are applicable or should ever be applied top operating a moving vehicle.
And if there is somebody who does NOT fail at this, I'd like to meet them. They probably have a working perpetual motion engine, too.
Neat. I always wondered why it's legal to use a huge touch screen built into your car but not your phone (Not like you should be texting and driving anyways, just an example). I feel tactile knobs and stuff is better, like if you need to turn up the AC just turn a knob while Tesla makes you fiddle with your touch screen.... Maybe you start to remember where things are, but next software update could change that.
I know on one of the Tesla models, you even need to use the touch screen to open your glove box which seems odd. Then with all the news stories of police shooting people on routine traffic stops, reach for the center to open your glove box for your insurance card, who knows maybe you are reaching for a gun in the center console. It's just out of the norm since most people glove boxes just open up with an actual handle. Even though their computer always knows if you had insurance or not even before being stopped, just another way for the city to make revenue if you forgot your paper. But maybe I'm listening to the media too much but it wouldn't surprise me if some innocent person was murdered just because they decided to drive something different and slightly more technical while making a slightly wider turn than a cop thought they should of made.
There's a video on YouTube of a guy being stopped in a Tesla because the officer thought the touch screen was a modification instead of being built as part of the car... but after a little back and forth and laughs then realizes it's part of the car and leaves without any further info as a good cop should. while some others might feel bad and still try to find something wrong instead of accepting they were wrong.
Maybe in a popular tech-filled San Francisco cops see Tesla's every day but in small towns in like the midwest, they are rare and fancy. Then some places there isn't an official place to even get serviced, but the same could be said about Lamborghinis. I forget who but I was watching some internet marketer guy from some small town in Maine talk about owning a Lamborghini. Apparently every time you stop somewhere even at a traffic light people want to talk to you and get pictures. Even said people would drive and take photos which made him nervous since that's unsafe but people would chase him to get pictures. A BMW i8 would make a interesting super car since already the large BMW network of service centers at dealerships, but if you are the only one in a small town probably will attract people attention too. So I guess you can feel like a celebrity for a bit.
Then in New Jersey, they have DMV checkpoints during the morning commute looking for missing emissions inspection stickers waving people into a empty parking lot, while the Tesla is 100% electric and exempt but doesn't mean a cop will detain you for 15 minutes giving you a hard time and make you late for work because no one told him. But the same can be said about no front plates, 19 states don't require them (and July 2020 that will be 20 states as Ohio passed a law getting rid of front plates as a effort to save money but delayed it by a year from being in effect so law enforcement can figure out how to deal with no front plates. I'm not sure why they can't just call up the highway patrol from Kentucky, Tennessee or Florida and ask them since they have years of experience with no front plates and already figured it out.) but there's stories of people on road trips being hassled. Someone went on a road trip from Florida to San Francisco and got a parking ticket for no front plate... Might of been a meter maid though instead of a cop though. Well at least it's winnable but so annoying people paid to enforce the law are so uninformed.
I rent cars often, so I see these systems with fresh eyes and I'm basically shocked at the complexity of it all.
I tremble a little bit when I want to play something with my iphone, nervously moving through the screens.
I think a couple of knobs, a few buttons, and a very simple screen, hopefully HUD of some reasonable kind - or even info displayed behind the wheel would be suitable.
I always wonder how many accidents all that technology causes.
There are three reasons to use a touchscreen for a UI:
1) minimal cost for a device that already has a display, e.g. e-book reader 2) reconfigurable UI for device that performs different tasks, e.g. smartphone 3) paging UI for vastly complex products that can’t accommodate thousands of different knobs, e.g. control panel for a non-professional audio generator.
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One thing that really bothers me about the screens in cars nowadays is that, to me, they always look like an iPad that was just screwed into the dashboard at the last minute as an afterthought to look high tech. In the high end Tesla that I drove a few years ago, it was molded into the center console and had the look and feel of forethought and intent.
One of the major drawbacks of touchscreens is the amount of controls that are being integrated with them. Most folks mash the screens harder than they need to, and they wear out too fast. Once the screen it kaput, half you car is useless. I can deal with rolling the windows down, but taking my tunes away...no bueno.
Another way Mazda is leading the way with design. I have been really impressed overall with Mazda's approach to design, especially lately, all the way from the powertrain to the controls (or the other way around, if their marketing is to be believed).
What i nerver got- is why you cant make a non plane touchscreen? Why not just add Knobs, Dials and Buttons - with touchscreen on them? Give the surface the option to be tactile and fall back to a default UI, that can be used blindly?
This is like Nokia sticking to keyboard in their phones. Worst decision ever made. Their interface will be out of date 5 mins after its made with no way of updating
Praise to Mazda for making this decision.
As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
> phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens.
This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context.
I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation.
The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and buttons and basic displays, is likely cheaper from an overall BOM perspective than the set of knobs and buttons and basic displays (and supporting material (mechanical and wiring) for those knobs/buttons/displays).
And, if two (or more) different car models use the same size rectangular screen, then one single "screen" can be used for plural models (with only software differences) vs. the need for unique moldings/buttons/etc. when providing the physical knobs and buttons on different models.
The touch screen also enables different "accessory classes" even within the same model by a software change vs. a different piece of hardware. Think basic hot/cold/manual blower speed climate control vs. higher end climate control where you set a specific temp and the system picks heat/cool/blower speed. The same single touch screen can provide both the 'basic' and the 'luxury' interface via a software change vs. two different physical control units inserted into the dash.
> The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs.
Whilst I think this is part of it's about more than just reducing the BOM. There's a trend to move all interfaces from knobs and switches to touch screens even when money isn't the problem. For example the SpaceX Dragon capsule also takes this approach which you can see from the images below:
https://www.spacex.com/crew-dragon
A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
> I think current fashions are very much to blame in a lot of cases. A sleek touchscreen operated car in the showroom is a sexier buy than your more traditional button festooned dashboard. Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
Exactly. Touch screens are pure tech fad in about 50% of use cases at least, with the decision to use them not based on any kind of practical considerations.
However, I'm a little skeptical that the average buyer is going to regret using one. A lot of people seem to get hung up on newer tech == better tech, so they never really seem to look at the newer technology with a critical eye. I often prefer older tech in some cases (e.g. buttons and knows), but my fiancee often doesn't get it and advises me to stop fighting it and go with the trend.
I've been driving my most recent car for 3 years now. I want to go back to analog controls. It sucks. I'm used to it but it still sucks.
Touch screens are not as mature as a button or knob. We know that using a small knob to control a radio works, it is tried and true again and again.
But we also know that replacing the steering wheel with a small knob is a bad idea.
This is because this is a mature technology has that has as many bad implications as good ones.
I guess I’m a way tough screens need to be everywhere since that is how the technology matured and we know where they should not be used.
> A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.
In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made with these touchscreens.
To quote the page linked earlier...
> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.
I would be very surprised if Dragon did not include the 21st century equivalent of the Apollo 8-ball, manual translation controller and stick.
NASA is a very conservative organization and if there is a lesson to be learned from past near disasters, is how limited is the foresight of mission planners and how infinitely adaptable are the human astronauts.
It has a stick and a couple buttons for most of the functionality that can be useful to the pilots in case the craft misbehaves. It seems to have rotary input so it can manage rotation and translation.
A lot of the controls in an Apollo were to be used in normal manual operations that are automated (or have no counterpart) in Dragons.
There are a few physical buttons for the few critical functions you might want to trigger in the boost/reentry phase. The rest is either 1 g or microgravity and a touchscreen should not be a problem.
BTW, not surre if they implemented it in the end, but they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time. A rather clever idea IMHO. :)
> they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time
IIRC, Orion does that by timing the screen backlight.
If I had a choice between Orion, Starliner or Dragon, I'd go with the Dragon. The spacesuits are much nicer and if I have to die, I'd rather go with style.
Perhaps I'm missing something but how could the Dragon capsule automation handle something like the emergency that occurred during the Gemini 8 mission? Without manual control by the astronauts it could have turned into a real disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency
Computing and testing has come a long way since the Gemini days. We now have aircraft (particularly military fighters) that are literally uncontrollable without the computers.
Those control systems only work within certain preprogrammed constraints. They are generally incapable of handling unexpected situations outside of the design limits.
Computerized fly by wire systems still depend on a pilot in the loop, especially in the case of a mechanical failure.
So let’s say the airplane gets damaged, and one of the flight controls is no longer available. A legacy airplane would still try to use that surface because it doesn’t know any better. The F-35 digital flight control systems will say, “That surface isn’t doing much for me anymore, so I’m going to have to compensate by using some other things. Maybe I’ll have to move them a little bit more to get the same effect because the pilot still wants to turn left.”
https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos...
Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
Several years ago, probably. Now, when their previous car already has a similar touchscreen?
"Oh, I'm sure touchscreens have gotten better"
They likelly had forgotten how it was before
This argument doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems like an inconsistent comparison to compare a single touchscreen to many customized knobs/buttons/etc., when you could also compare a single set of knobs/buttons/etc. to different screen sizes across models.
Car companies don't tend to custom-design knobs/buttons/etc. for each model. They tend to reuse the same ones across many models to save on development and manufacturing costs. They also already modularize these knobs and buttons across different "accessory classes". You can probably see this in your own car even, if you see anywhere on your car's center console or dashboard which has plastic caps where it seems like more buttons or knobs belong. Those are likely buttons/knobs for additional functions in optional feature packages.
Also, even for the same screen size across models, you'd still likely need custom bezels since most models are differently sized and thus have different dashboard shapes/sizes within which the screen is mounted.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
My guess is that it's exactly what they said. It's probably harder from a software perspective to adapt touch-screen-based interfaces like Android Auto and Apple Car Play to physical controls, and those difficulties probably come up over and over as the versions of these interfaces on the phones are constantly being updated, and the car must continue supporting more and more versions at one time.
Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.
Every modern car is going to have an infotainment system with a screen. A better question would be whether it is cheaper to have a touch version of that screen or to have buttons for the interface. I suspect that touch would be cheaper than buttons.
Especially now the US and Canada requires reversing cameras in all new cars, there has to be a screen in the car; the question then becomes whether it's worthwhile designing a second infotainment system that doesn't require that (somewhat costly) large colour screen for lower end trims in markets where reversing cameras aren't mandatory, and it seems to be that manufacturers think that isn't worth the cost.
I wish they did that in the EU. Reversing cameras are massively useful, especially in vehicles with low visibility such as the Toyota CH-R.
Wouldn't it be better just to make cars with good visibility?
Yes it would. That's why I'd never buy the Toyota CH-R. We have a Civic with bad enough visibility already, thank you.
Really? As much as I like the comfort of the rear radars for big vehicles, I’ve always found the camera a bit useless
As somebody who doesn't own a car anymore but somewhat regularly rents very different kinds of cars, I have to say that reverse parking is massively easier with a camera.
Back when I always used to drive the same car I got used to its dimensions of course, but that just doesn't happen when you merely occasionally drive very different cars.
The sensors are nice, but sensors+camera improve on that by an order of magnitude - you do not see behind your car, no matter how much you think you do. Especially small people aka children are completely hidden from the driver's point of view by the rear of the car - which is exactly in the camera's center of field.
I got a shocking example of this recently. I was towing a trailer behind my vehicle for a 14' boat (the trailer was quite a bit longer than that). I was really surprised that I could not see it AT ALL in my rear view mirror when the boat was not on it. Meaning there is at least 16' behind my vehicle where I cannot see something about 2' tall or shorter.
I LOVE mine... with the guide lines for reversing, I always center into the space as desired... it's easier than pulling in forward even. For times when the neighboring spaces are wonky, it's easier to short shrift the passenger side, aligned with the other car's passenger side, so worst case you have to pull out to let a passenger in.
Also, if every other car parked forward/reverse then the more cramped spaces wouldn't be as difficult. Note, I live in AZ, USA where more than half the cars are full sized or larger vehicles. So parking lots designed for cities with smaller vehicles are particularly difficult.
That's what I thought, but I've rented a couple with camears and they are really useful - the overlays which shows where your wheels will go with your current steering position etc.
The last car I rented had a 360 degree camera which showed a top down picture of the car and surroundings!
Yeah, that's a good point. The question here isn't whether or not to have an infotainment system that integrates with Android Auto and Apple Car Play, it's whether to interface with it via a touch screen or physical input (or both).
I think that's only half true. There are standardized controls but the dash configurations and wiring harnesses are specific to each model and then even for only a few years. So I'm in agreement with the BOM arguement generally. Also it's a marketing selling point. Consumer wants the shiny new thing.
I totally understand the business case for touchscreens in cars. It's all about reducing cost to the business, but this usually comes at the expense of safety, which is a totally unacceptable tradeoff.
That's a rather communist view. The free market allows people to buy cheaper cars at the expense of their safety, what's wrong with that?
Off the top of my head:
* If the design of your car makes you a less safe driver, you are more likely to crash into me.
* The US as a society has committed (surprisingly recently) to providing emergency care to anyone who shows up at a hospital before asking whether they can pay. Car accidents are a sadly common reason for people requiring emergency care. That means that reducing car accidents is a public benefit.
* Modern societies have made the choice in general to require some baseline level of safety from all sorts of products in order to make commerce more efficient. If consumers feel confident that they can (e.g.) buy a random toy off the shelf for their kid without needing to do a bunch of research on whether it contains lead paint or dangerous parts, that reduces friction and increases sales. The same reasoning can apply to car safety features: it's easier to get people to just buy a car if they have a baseline level of confidence that any car they buy is safe to drive.
That's just a few reasons that first came to mind. I've already thought of one or two more that would take a little longer and a little more care to put into words, but I encourage you to think about these questions yourself when they come to mind, too.
I wouldn't consider 1986 particularly recent, regarding the COBRA/Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act particularly recent. Considering that civil rights was still a large issue well into the early 80's. Not that there aren't civil rights issues today, it's mostly that the outrage is much larger than any actual issues persisting.
Consumer protection on the other hand, is quite a bit longer in the tooth. Though did really start after the 50's. I know the original erector sets were particularly bad, as were earlier die cast models, etc.
Poe's Law claims another victim.
A. Please be sarcasm..
B. That's.. not communism.
C. Especially in this case, the safety issue affects everyone else on the road, too. If someone crashes into you while playing with their Apple Play, congrats on enjoying the unregulated free market.
If your kid takes a ride in a friend's dirt cheap car they bought because they're 17 and they get in a wreck, congrats.
If manufacturers can make and sell unsafe cars, they will, and it will drive up the cost of safe cars.
When products as critical as cars unsafe, it costs everyone, even those who don't buy them.
I do indulge in sarcasm on occasion yes ;)
Phew
Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.
Consider that for every item you need to:
* secure supply for the next 10 years or so
* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain
* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it
* design and implement testing procedures
* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed
* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years
* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems
* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.
Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
> Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.
I’m with you. Im not that old but new cars really have no appeal to me. Will be interesting to see how it goes hanging onto a 2010 for 50 years
Me too.
I enjoy driving a manual ("stick") and distrust auto-braking/lane assist/etc. My car has airbags, ABS and traction control so I'm happy with the safety features.
No way will I buy a car where essential functions are touchscreen operated, or with any phone-home "features".
While I tend to agree that the past decade has seen some arguably unnecessary increases in complexity, the latest safety technology is significantly more advanced than even 10 years ago.
Your list includes "Air Bags, ABS and Traction Control" - this list was fine in the early 90s, but you've missed one of the most life saving innovations in recent modern car history - Electronic/Dynamic Stability Control.
Multiple studies have shown ESC has potential to reduce fatal accidents by a third - this is largely why it was made mandatory on all cars sold in the EU and US since 2011/12. If you own a powerful vehicle, especially a rear wheel drive one, the kind of driver input mess (accidental or intentional) ESC systems can clean up that otherwise has you spinning off the road is pretty amazing.
It has "ESP", I assume that's the same as ESC?
Maybe a new Mazda will be up your alley!
Mazda just moved to the top of my "I would buy an electric car from this manufacturer if I could" list, but they don't seem to be in a hurry to release a product.
There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.
No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.
None of this is untrue with touchscreens. They also have wires and connectors and must be certified.
Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure.
I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
Do tell us all about the huge labor savings Tesla is running away with[1].
It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
They have 2. One for power and one for data. Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
> They have 2. One for power and one for data.
I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscree...
> Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced.
I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible.
The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash.
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this [...]
That link is to a toy touchscreen. Are we counting every strand of metal as its own wire now? I think the power and the data cables are each bundles of lots of such strands, and no car manufacturers worry about the individual strands because each cable plugs into the circuit board as a cohesive unit, like: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Customized-odm-15-6-i...
(First Google result for "touchscreen alibaba", it's not like this is an obscure, rarely used configuration.)
Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Those sound like good points to me, but I don't know anything about this stuff.
I do know about this stuff (currently work for one OEM and have worked for 2 others) and you're exactly right.
Something that hasn't even been mentioned is all the meetings, documentation, coordination between people that work on the components that have to interface with each other. That labor is significantly reduced when you offload most of that to the touch screen because some of that interface can now be done by the same person without any meetings. That's not just cost savings, it's also time savings, which is part of why Tesla was able to bring the model 3 to market so fast (fast at least in the car world).
That said, I much prefer tactile controls. I recently moved from a BMW to a Volvo had the BMW had physical controls for most common functions while the Volvo only has a handful of buttons and one knob for volume. It's a pretty good balance, but I do miss a few buttons and more could be done on the touchscreen to ease that longing (such as customizable shortcuts).
Cadillac is starting to go back to more tactile controls because they've learned how terrible it is without any (my wife has a CTS so I completely understand why they're doing it -- it is awful). I hope Audi changes course too.
For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one
The chasis is your second cable.
You still need a wire from the touchscreen to the chassis.
And every single application loaded and installed, software library, SDK and license has to be rolled up into the BOM for every headunit sold/installed.
It seems obvious to me that one team of software engineers doing testing and diagnostics on a piece of software is way cheaper than training and then paying entire factories to do testing and diagnostics on each button and knob. (Not to mention we're talking about like, volume controls. Not exactly the most complicated and expensive kind of software to engineer.)
Not to mention if you screw up the software an update is generally cheap and easy. If your button is messed up you have to pay for a mechanic to tear apart the entire dash.
Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons...
For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production.
Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.
They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive.
It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.
It's not just the up front cost. They can roll out updates and patches to change the functionality too.
Maybe throw in some cheeky DLC to unlock certain features too ;)
I'd like to see a compromise on this. If there's a passenger, they should be able to use a touchscreen. For someone not used to the car, a scroll wheel is going to feel very weird. And obviously safety isn't much of an issue if the passenger is controlling it.
Cars already know whether a passenger is present of course.
Touch screens are awful for operating while you focus elsewhere. I miss touch typing and I sure like adjusting car controls without looking away. What's that, trust driverless cars you say? Never, and the basilisk be damned.
Not to mention that touchscreens rated for passenger vehicles and the extreme environmental changes their interiors go through are not cheap. Look at how many screens Tesla has had to replace in their cars.
It's not that hard to make programmable / re-assignable physical dials and switches to interface in a tactile way with changing software applications.
my old mustang had 10 old fashioned buttons under the screen that i could use to dial a phone number. new jeep has a rectangular thingy that could swallow up everything, but somehow it didn't swallow 10 buttons, so i have to pull up the phone to dial a number while driving.
>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject.
After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay.
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. In the meantime, Apple and Google (?) have done it for them, at least as far as the phone goes.
(I assume the Android equivalent is equally good; no reason it shouldn't be.)
>This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric.
I think it really IS, though.
CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen.
At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
But the phone interface is distinct from that, and needs to be a touchscreen. When it's not, or when it's not present, people just pick up their phones and use them, which is worse.
> CarPlay is amazingly good
As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ...").
I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase.
Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
>One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it
Is it possible your friends are dumb? Because my 79 year old mother doesn't have an issue with CarPlay. The only potentially confusing thing is that it becomes your phone screen, and things you do on the phone influence what's on the CP screen.
The possible confusing-one-time scenario would be, say, driver using AppleMaps to navigate somewhere, and passenger using phone to look up the capital of Nebraska or whatever. When passenger pushes the home button to go to the browser, CarPlay will exit navigation and show ITS home screen, too.
Nav is still happening; you just have to switch back to it, just as you would on the phone.
And, again, this should really only be surprising once.
>Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
CarPlay makes no effort to provide anything other than phone integration, so your climate control knob is safe.
Throwing shade on CarPlay by saying the problem was solved with an aux cable is pretty laughable, honestly. Sure, you could fiddle with your phone and play music, but there's no access to nav, no access to voice controls, and you have to grabble with your phone to change anything. CarPlay provides a large screen in a static location that simplifies the music approach, plus gives you access to other functions.
This is materially better than an aux cable.
Carplay would just be for music, navigation, and phone calls. It is only replacing the infotainment system. You should still have buttons or knobs or sliders for the AC/heat, cruise control, defrost, window heaters, seat heat, seat A/C, traction control, and anything else.
I just had my first experience with CarPlay this weekend and it was not positive.
What I want? An empty shelf just to the right of the steering wheel where I can charge my phone and connect it to car audio. I don't want to hand-off my navigation or music selection to the vehicle, just allow me to put my phone in a prominent visible location.
I'm a huge fan of Carplay. Instead of having to listen to FM radio or fiddle with a phone screen on a silly dashboard sticker things, I get a massive screen with my phone on it. I can listen to podcasts and Spotify, follow Waze, dictate messages, all without fiddling
Maybe I don't switch back and forth between stuff while I'm driving as much as you do? I set everything up before I need to focus on the road, and then I just drive. If I need to change to a different playlist, or switch from music to the news, I pull over, make the switch, then start driving again.
If CarPlay makes it more tempting or productive for me to do non-driving things while I am driving, then it is not a good driving UX.
If you have a smartphone, it can be tempting or "productive" (the air quotes are probably reasonable!) to do non-driving things while you're driving, if you're the sort of person who's tempted to do that when you have a smartphone available. I think this is largely orthogonal to whether or not you have CarPlay.
I'm guilty of being that sort of person occasionally. I've found that having CarPlay in my new car reduces the temptation to do "non-driving things," because the things that I do that are related to driving -- navigation apps, streaming music, and for me, playing podcasts -- become easier to do with CarPlay's UX than with just using the phone in a holder like I did in my last car. The screen in my car is much bigger, the touch targets are bigger, the UI is simplified, the design encourages me to use voice input. (In your example of changing to a different playlist, I can just press the Siri button -- which perhaps amusingly in this discussion, is a physical button on my Insight's steering wheel! -- and say "Play [name of playlist].")
>If I need to change to a different playlist, or switch from music to the news, I pull over, make the switch, then start driving again.
I'm pretty sure that puts you somewhere near the top 0.0000001% of cautious drivers.
It's generally illegal to pull over on an interstate highway unless you have a true emergency. Pulling over in traffic, and then accelerating and merging again (in the absence of an actual acceleration lane as with on/off ramps) is dangerous.
Yes. In this case, if changing my audio source right at that time is that important, I'll get off on an exit. But I don't think that has ever happened to me.
Once you get used to Waze on the big screen, you'd never want anything else.
I would like it if all cars had some kind of standard phone mount connector. Then you buy a holder for your particular phone and there's already power/audio/whatever/wired in.
Are you sure you are talking about CarPlay? I could understand Android Auto to an extant -- it can be slightly confusing to the uninitiated, but CarPlay is just about as simple as you get -- at least in my experience.
(Please do not start a iOS vs Android battle over this comment -- this is simply my experience -- I use both on a daily basis -- your mileage may vary)
Why is carplay even a thing?
Geez, can't people stop fiddling with their phones?
They've become like a kind of soother, a techno nanny that people can't do without.
The sooner people put those things down, the better off we'll be.
So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app, so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road. Without it, people would just be looking at their phones anyways.
Guess we should go back to paper maps and listening to AM radio.
> so you can send and receive text messages
How about not reading messages while you're driving? And why do you have to write messages while in traffic? Can't this wait?
The whole point is that you are neither reading or writing them, they are read _to_ you, and you dictate messages if you feel the need to reply while driving, but both can be done with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suppose it is up for debate whether just the act of listening or speaking is distracting enough to be considered a bad thing.
It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous. The NHTSA says:
"The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free."
Though it doesn't link to any studies and I'm too lazy to go searching, so if you want a primary source you'll have to find it yourself...
https://one.nhtsa.gov/Driving-Safety/Distracted/Policy-State...
>It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous.
Just like talking to other people in the car or doing anything else other than driving. I know that I will take a driver getting their messages read out to them over a driver who takes their eyes off the road and glances at the phone. Good is the enemy of the perfect, and I would rather take an attainable good over an unattainable perfect.
... perfect is the enemy of good
Thanks for correcting, I actually appreciate it, no sarcasm. I mentioned it before in one of my HN comments on a thread about language learning, but as a non-native english speaker, it helps me a lot when people correct my mistakes. No matter how small or insignificant the mistakes are, because little by little, they add up.
> Just like talking to other people in the car
No that's not true, talking to other people int he car is not associated with reduced safety.
Probably because the other people in the car are also partially watching the road.
Apparent yes, it is. https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2018/03/10/Talking-while-dri...
Exactly. If I am in the passenger seat talking to the driver, I know when to shut up and let them drive. If I am on the phone talking to a driver, there is no indication of them, say, approaching a difficult merge.
Too bad. People are going to do it anyway, and yes, they want touchscreens to make it happen, not just voice.
Mazda will walk this decision back as soon as they realize how much money it will cost them... which is a lot.
It is. Car conversations are a serious issue with respect to distracted driving. I personally can't handle thinking about driving safely and thinking about a conversation. Humans are famously bad at multi-tasking and I don't see how being in a car gives us magical powers.
I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being drunk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16884056/
If I'm speaking with someone in the car and I detect a potentially dangerous situation, I immediately stop talking to focus.
It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.
In fact the passenger will also detect the potentially dangerous situation and stop taking focus from you. The person in the phone will not, and may continue to distract you involuntarily.
A coworker once told me that that is what makes the difference, based on some study. I immediately believed it because it seemed so reasonable, so not citation...
Part of the whole problem with distracted driving is that danger is difficult to predict.
I've never had a problem with it, but I also don't look at them while driving, and so forth. Maybe I'm the drunk driver who thinks he can totally drive better when he's drunk, but I've been driving 20+ years and never had an issue.
OTOH, I also evaluate and will not talk if I don't feel comfortable (poor road conditions, etc).
You're not reading them with CarPlay or Android Auto. The car reads them to you. Also, speech to text writes them. There's no keyboard.
This will probably not endear me to the general readerhip, but if it would be up to me.
People caught while texting during driving:
First time offense: Massive fine and three month licence revocation
Second offense: Permanent license revocation. Because you just have proven beyond a doubt that you're either too dumb or too reckless to be allowed to operate deadly machinery.
Phoning while driving is dangerous. Texting while driving is just outrageously stupid and grossly negligent
He didn't use the words reading and writing...
you don't read them -- they're read to you.
> So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app,
Get a dock for your phone and use bluetooth for the audio. (Or line-in, except headphone jacks keep disappearing...)
> so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road.
Holy fuck no. Don't encourage this. Taking your eyes off the road is only one symptom of the problem. The problem is splitting your attention.
There's a TV show where they demonstrate this most years, Canada's Worst Driver. The challenge is to drive in a circle on a track. Talking on the phone - not ever looking away from the road - is enough to start veering off the track.
> Guess we should go back to paper maps
Knowing where you’re going before you take off is generally a good idea. A paper map may not be the solution—pulling up an online map and figuring out your route before getting in your vehicle is one way and what I tend to do.
I routinely see locals plug local destinations into their navigator-of-choice, though, so expecting people to know the lay of the land these days may be a bridge too far. God forbid there is construction or an accident and you have to improvise!
Thanks, you're just making my point for me.
I mean you said app twice in it. Ten years ago, nothing was mediated via an app, somehow we managed to survive.
Now almost everyone has been turned into a phone zombie. You're wasting your lives people!
FOMO is entirely backwards, you shouldn't be afraid of missing out on something in your phone, you should be afraid of missing out on your entire life.
You're wasting your lives people!
The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization. I'll give you credit for avoiding the temptation to break out the ol' "wake up, sheeple!", though.
> The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization.
Yeah, but on the directions front, it does represent a big loss in self efficacy. I don't rely on GPS, even when travelling to foreign countries.
I know people who don't even know the cities they live in. They are living in the phone's world itself, you could say.
On the other hand, the security of a smartphone with maps that cover the world have opened up self-guided international travel to people that may have otherwise limited themselves to guided tours.
I just took a sibling on her first non-guided international trip a couple years ago -- her fear was always getting lost in a strange city, but when she found out how easily her cell phone would help her navigate the city streets and transit systems, she's been on two trips on her own since then and enjoys the freedom of being able to explore on her own with much less worry of getting lost.
Of course, she could lose or break her phone, but then she's no worse off them if she lost a paper map, she'd have to ask for directions, take a cab, or find a new map, but the cell phone gives her the freedom to explore at her own pace.
10 years ago we still had in-car GPS's, but instead of being an app it was a standalone device, I don't see how that makes anything better.
Having my car read a SMS from my wife reminding me to pick up eggs from the store on the way home hardly seems like being a zombie.
We survived without a lot of things we have now that we didn't have 10, or even 100 years ago, but that doesn't mean we were better off without them.
I remember driving before GPS: there was tons of time and gasoline wasted driving in circles looking for things, getting lost, pulling over and trying to make sense of a paper map that doesn't have that much resolution, asking people for directions and getting useless and wrong directions, etc. It was a total pain in the ass.
I also remember life before cellphones. You couldn't communicate with people when you were en-route, so you didn't find out until you got there that something was canceled, or you needed to get something on the way, or were meeting somewhere else, etc. So again, lots of wasted time and gas.
I'm surprised people with this luddite mentality don't tell us that we should all just go back to writing letters, because things were so great back before we could have real-time conversations over a long distance...
I don't think people are arguing that cell phones and technology is bad, just cautioning for moderation.
I don't think people are arguing that cell phones and technology is bad, just cautioning for moderation.
Some people are:
I'd argue that life is worse since smartphones were invented, on many axes.
and:
Now almost everyone has been turned into a phone zombie. You're wasting your lives people!
Yeah that's me quoted above, and yes arguing against smartphones.
I believe smartphones are a net loss to people's happiness.
All of these liberating technologies are fun for the early adopters, but then become oppressive once you are expected to have them. We are quickly reaching that point.
What they really are are surveillance transponders that we carry around voluntarily.
The privacy issues are real, but you're only a slave to the device if you want to be (or you let others force you to be).
Where you see oppression, I see convenience.
If I'm on vacation and forgot to turn the thermostat down before leaving, I can use an app on my phone to do so remotely.
If there's a cold spell and the furnace fails, that same app will notify me when the house gets too cold so I can find someone to go check on it.
My wife can add (or remove) items to the shopping list while I'm already at the store.
When I'm at the doctor and want to confirm what drug I'm taking, I can bring up my online account from the pharmacy.
When I'm on the bus home and watch to finish reading the book I was reading at home on my eReader, I can bring up that book on the app on my phone -- and it will start up on the page where I stopped reading last night.
I do have my work email delivered to my phone, but I turned notifications off -- I only see a work email if I intentionally look for it.
I do have a notification app from work installed on my phone that can notify me 24 hours a day when I'm on call, but even that is more convenient from when I carried a pager and only got a numeric page so I couldn't tell whether or not it was something that had to be dealt with immediately or could wait until I got home later -- I'd have to dial-in to find out (and I had to literally dial-in on a physical phone line since in those days my phone wasn't a hotspot that can give me internet access anywhere, or I can just check on the service with my smartphone instead of having to get out my laptop)
There are lots of ways the phone makes my life more convenient.
It doesn't immediately mean we're better off with them either.
I'd argue that life is worse since smartphones were invented, on many axes.
The privacy implications alone far outweigh the benefits.
Years ago I had to carry a bunch of crap with me.
I had to take time to check email instead of simply looking when I get the message on my phone. I had to take a magazine to the toilet instead of reading on my phone.
I wore watches. They never lasted as long as the phone. I used to have alarm clocks too. The phones actually do better to wake me since a lot of alarm ringtones vary in sounds.
Gameboys and other portable gaming devices have been a thing for some time.
I actually carried around pen and paper when I went to the grocery store! When I was poor, I also took a calculator.
I used to have a portable television. It was black and white and possibly had a smaller screen than current phones. It definitely had poorer definition and one was lucky to pick up channels with the antennae.
Instead of arguing about who is correct about something, we can look it up in a restaurant. It is cool, and makes the conversation less about who is right and wrong and more about what is and could be.
Do you remember landlines? Wasn't it just wonderful that one couldn't have a private conversation at home? Would you seriously trade texting and/or having a private phone number for a house phone of old?
My niece carries my sister's phone around the house on video to talk to me. It dosn't matter that they are in Seattle and me in Norway.
I have a camera with me all the time and picture processing costs nothing! Do you have any clue how much I wanted that as a kid? I loved taking pictures, but couldn't afford film developing. As a bonus, my phone takes better pictures than many of the old cameras I've used. I happen to take pictures of manhole covers when I'm out, at least when I can make them interesting.
I share my artwork, that I make on paper, on the internet using my phone.
I have access to so many things. Lots of people can teach themselves "adulting" now, especially cooking. On their phone. Before I had my tablet, I used my phone in the kitchen.
Wasting life? No. You just aren't seeing the joy these piece of technology bring to others and disregarding the things the phone has replaced.
Ten years ago was 2009, dude. I definitely had an Android phone and used apps for navigation and music back then. In my car, even! Just via an aux cable instead of Bluetooth and Android Auto. (Of course, now I have a Mazda 3 and an iPhone and I use CarPlay...)
Thanks, you're just making my point for me.
Thirty years ago, nothing was on the internet, somehow we managed to survive.
One hundred years ago, nobody took antibiotics, somehow we managed to survive.
Five hundred years ago, nobody read books, somehow we managed to survive.
Ten thousand years ago, nobody farmed grains, somehow we managed to survive.
Why? because the automaker interface is AWFUL. Also, why should I pay a car dealer upwards of $2500 to gain GPS? My phone has GPS, it also has Siri so I can talk to it.
Well, it's a thing specifically to stop people from fiddling with their phones.
Maps and audio (music/podcasts) are the two main reasons I use carplay. Built in options in all vehicles I've used since carplay has been available are horrible in comparison.
It's a thing when many car manufacturers want you to pay a monthly subscription just get simple map updates for their already very crappy maps application.
It's a thing when when all your music is already on your phone.
Maps. Podcasts. Apple Music: “Hey Siri, play <whatever you could imagine>” Having your next appointment automatically show up in Maps ready to simply click “go.” Or “Hey Siri, where is the nearest In and Out?”
It’s amazing.
> "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want"
Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
The Lightning to analog headphone adapter is $10, and IIRC, I had a USB port in my 2002 Acura RSX in a $200 third-party head unit anyway. But, pretending everything Apple makes is a kajillion billion dollars and incompatible with everything is sure a lot more fun!
The solution is to not buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack.
With the 3.5mm jack, you need to handle your phone for the uses the parent mentioned. This is much more dangerous than using phone integration in the vehicle and illegal in many jurisdictions.
Tiny bluetooth to aux adapters cost $10–20 on Amazon and work amazingly well.
Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.
>bluetooth... work amazingly well.
No.
Bluetooth is slow to change tracks, slow to pause, slow to connect, has annoying pairing issues, has lower sound quality, and is just generally subpar.
>Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet
So it's wireless, but with wires.
I rarely use either though, my car has usb and I have a 32Gb stick of music that stays in there.
I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me.
All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
This is changing in CarPlay in iOS 13, as are a fair number of other things (generally for the better; I have a bit of hands-on experience thanks to a brave/foolhardy friend who's already installed the developer beta).
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/3/18650923/apple-carplay-ios...
You can use Siri Shortcuts to access non-Apple apps. I'm pretty sure this has been a thing since iOS 12.
Source: I do it
This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find.
At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
I usually rent cars
It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
With touchscreens, there's always the balance of putting the screen in line-of-sight while driving while keeping it close enough to be touchable. I like the touchpad system in the new Acura RDX the most as a compromise, has most of the accuracy of a touchscreen (still lets you draw letters and stuff) while retaining the haptic nature of the knob/buttons (position on the touchpad is absolute -- tapping the top left corner of the touchpad means you're tapping the top left corner of the screen). Plus it has the advantage of not having your hand block the screen when you're trying to touch it.
Otherwise, the Mazda knob works well enough. I think most of the power user complaints could be addressed by better default behavior or customization on what a scroll/click does on certain screens.
Android Auto/CarPlay is easily the most distracting system I've used. The only benefit is if I choose to be distracted while driving, it's less distracting than using my phone. Being distracted while driving is a _choice_ and sadly one that many drivers want to have.
If you want choice and flexibility, don't live in a walled garden.
But it's such a well-manicured, aromatic walled garden!
And the fence is machined out of a single piece of aluminium!
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. >At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone.
Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.
> those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs
Is this a joke? I find navigating my TV's menus with a remote to be the most infuriating part of using a TV.
Personally I don’t mind using a remote to navigate menus; dedicated, physical buttons can in many cases make things easier. What I absolutely despise, however, is the latency between said button presses and the actual acknowledgment on-screen.
In my experience, the latency on cable TV boxes, Smart TVs, and in-flight entertainment systems has progressively gotten worse, not better over the years.
This latency, when coupled with a car’s touch screen is even worse.
Android Auto actually works quite well with Audi's jog wheel thing. The 2018 Q5 I rented last year had no touch screen, just this knob. Worked totally fine and required no touching a screen.
Acura is introducing a touchpad, with absolute, not relative, cursor positioning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8
It reminds me of the PSP/PSV having a touchpad on the back of the screen.
They have physical controls for climate control and opted for nondescript buttons instead of knobs. Truly brilliant...
This really saddens me. My 2010 Acura has controls that I really like, almost everything is a physical button/knob that I can hit without taking my eyes off the road.
I don't know about CarPlay but Android Auto works good enough with knob controls.
I have a 2014 Mazda3, which Mazda offered Android Auto/CarPlay upgrade for a fee earlier this year and I upgraded. My car has a touchscreen, but disables all touch features above a certain speed (5 or 10 mph I think). I don't think I'm really missing anything on Android Auto without touch.
I hate that kind of nanny stuff, what if you have a passenger and they can control it?
Does it also have a stupid screen that pops up every time you start the car saying, "don't use this while driving", or some such nonsense?
CarPlay works with physical controls; it doesn't require a touch screen. (As another commenter noted, the same is true of Android Auto.)
True. It's just generally better with one.
>the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving
LOLNO. Not everyone is driving alone.
> I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
Same here. That being said, I never felt it was difficult to switch on off the AC since if you just press the fan for about a second, it shuts it down. This is the sort of stuff I would have liked to be voice activated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLIBYlgsHis&feature=youtu.be...
That video tutorial is now outdated since there has been many UI improvements, but the steps should still be the same.
> The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Terrible idea? It's the best thing since sliced iPhone. Keep in mind that the "car" is usually driving itself; that's a much higher level of solving the "silly human takes eyes and hands off road" problem, which makes what Mazda is doing seem, frankly, short-sighted (disclosure: although a Honda/BMW/Tesla fan, I've always secretly cheered for Mazda because I like their driving "DNA," and if I ever buy another non-EV again it might just be an MX-5 NA or NB for autox/track use). Now, of course, they're _currently_ not in the same league, but this stuff is getting cheaper (technology! heck yeah!) and these changes should be a look toward the future. All of that said, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with the move they're making, just, again, doesn't seem terribly forward-looking -- other than that, it's perfectly fine.
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.
I'm doing web searches for this right now and not finding anything, either for Model 3 or Model S, or just Tesla in general.
Where do they hide this information?
The user manual would be a start. It's built-in on the interface and you can even search for keywords.
I have a model 3 and I'd like to know myself. AFAIK it's not possible..
I know the S/X have the functionality. I haven't been in a Model 3 so I can't say for sure.
> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it.
I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony.
When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync.
I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.
But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
Good point. That made me realize my preference is a bit more nuanced. For anything where navigating menus or anything displayed on a screen is required, I'm all for touchscreens.
For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.
I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.
>CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving.
Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface.
Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
> Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?
I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find.
Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain.
If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface, but almost everything about the nav system on Android Auto is better than the builtin one.
AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.
>I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface
Google must have about 100Gb of recordings of me saying, "OK Google, no, fuck, OK beep, OK Google... fuck, what was I doing again?"
Yeah, its crazy how mediocre it can be and still better than the stock interface.
If Nissan kept recordings, they'd have several even worse recordings. Long sequences that fail on the last step are really common.
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel.
My Tesla allows me to adjust the AC without looking, using the scroll wheels built into the steering wheel.
Not sure if you're trying to support his point or refute it, but those scroll wheels are a great example of physical controls done right.
The person being replied to claimed falsely that it's an "all-touchscreen" UI so I would see it as a refutation. The Tesla UI is fantastic.
If there were an all-touchscreen UI (but there is not) yeah that would not be ideal as long as full self driving is not yet here.
The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode.
My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.
On the flip side, the Nissan Leaf with premium audio is an example of physical controls done wrong. Everything is buttons with no tactile way to home your hand, you have to take your eyes off the road to fine the right button.
My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.
I'm not sure it cleanly falls on either category. I agree with him that an all-touchscreen UI would be terrible, but I am correcting the misconception that Tesla has an all-touchscreen UI, because it doesn't.
I also agree that those scroll wheels are great.
The Tesla touchscreen interface is really good, partly I think because Tesla is just as much a software company as they are a car company.
The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back.
The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
> It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
Is there something wrong with that? The BlackBerry form factor is the best one, in my opinion. This reply was written from one.
What you're alluding to here is personal preference. If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.
One of Steve Jobs's famous argument on this is that you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
> What you're alluding to here is personal preference.
I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion.
> If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.
People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else.
> you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense.
And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.
I'm not the person you responded to, but are people buying them?
I'd actually be curious how many people are buying them - it wasn't enough to save RIM. I think not as popular as the iPhone is a pretty big understatement and thinking that's mostly about Apple's marketing comes across as pretty clueless to me.
Some people still prefer horses to cars, but it'd be a generally bad idea for someone getting into the transportation business to focus on horse drawn carriages.
Popular doesn't necessarily mean better, but when you're an extreme outlier compared to what's dominant in the market and what's dominant in the market directly out-competed your preference when it had dominant market advantage, there's probably a reason.
FYI, BlackBerry hasn't been called RIM since 2012, and BlackBerry doesn't make the hardware. They just licence the brand to other manufacturers like TCL, which makes most of the current devices.
That's a false analogy. A horse-drawn carriage is a fundamentally different mode of transportation than a car, but a BlackBerry is identical to any other smartphone except for the small keyboard on the front.
The reason BlackBerries are not popular is because early touch screen smartphones were simply so much better than the BlackBerries of the day, and that set the precedent in consumers' minds that smartphones are slabs and smartphones with keyboards are bad (as evidenced by the people in this thread). But modern BlackBerries are just slabs with keyboards. If BlackBerry didn't aim their company at the ground at full throttle, the present phone landscape might look a lot different.
Also, most people simply don't need a smartphone with a keyboard, because all they use it for is SnapChat and FaceBook. It's like saying mechanical keyboards are inferior to rubber membrane keyboards because only a relatively tiny portion of the population uses them.
And yes, people are buying them. Not many, but it's apparently enough to be profitable, because TCL keeps releasing new models. Not on the levels of Samsung's S or Apple's iPhone devices obviously, but that's not what matters. (Close to a million KeyOne models were sold in 2017, but I don't know what the current numbers are like.)
> And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better.
How can you do this when the device has already been shipped with the keyboard? Unless you're suggesting that Blackberry offers an unrealistic replacement program to change the keys and their function. Also tactile keyboard takes away a significant screen real estate. The market has also proven that people want bigger screens. There is no disputing that.
I don't know if you've ever used a BlackBerry, but it's not like the buttons on a car radio, which are fixed in function. The keyboard is merely an input method, like the keyboard on a desktop or laptop computer. And those don't seem to have a problem with changing user interfaces.
Furthermore, the keyboard does not significantly impact the size of the screen (it's only about an inch tall)[1], and it means the software keyboard doesn't pop-up and change the size of the screen, which is always disruptive. Also, the keyboard is touch sensitive, so the behaviour of the gestures can be changed in software (like swipe left to delete a word).
[1] The screen is too large for my preferences anyway.
[most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases]
> [most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases]
I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect.
Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
I use Android Auto in my car, and the only complaint I have thus far is the occasional misinterpreted input.
Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces.
Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.
CarPlay might be good, never tried it, but Android Auto isn't all that impressive, whether there is touch screen or not. I did not find it any more impressive with a touchscreen, though.
But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.
I bought a 2016 Golf with CarPlay and only used it about twice. I hated how it was locked into only the functions it supported, didn't let me use the in-car nav or other functions while it took over my screen, and it also took over my phone.
If you thought CarPlay was going to let you control aspects of your car, not aspects of your phone, then you misunderstood it entirely.
It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
I'm not sure what you thought I thought. I was absolutely not expecting CarPlay itself to let me "control aspects of my car". I don't even know what this means.
Here are the problems:
* When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display.
* It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps.
* Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful.
What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking
It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.
>What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software.
Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk.
First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy.
Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone."
I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.
> phone phone phone phone phone phone
Either you should be driving or on your phone not both.
>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.
And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?
Try to help make a better one I suppose, if that’s really what you think. But not from a position of ignorance.
It is interesting that Tesla fans can't even imagine for a moment that someone might have actually tried it and did not like it...
In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
The one piece of feedback I gave Toyota in their post-purchase survey is: please replace the hot mess that is Entune with CarPlay.
They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, for what it's worth, that analog controls are superior to touch controls while driving. I hate that Toyota replaced an audio dial with a touch up/down control. But the value of CarPlay is just way too high.
> They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.
I agree, but I think the people building these systems are working under basically impossible conditions.
I am just speculating here, but in a car company I would think the people are mostly going to be passionate about "car stuff" (engine, driving experience, aesthetics, drive train, etc), and so the infotainment system considerations are going to take a back seat to all the things car enthusiasts care more about. This doesn't necessarily mean the people in the infotainment team themselves, but would definitely be whoever they report to, up the chain to whatever the 'product owner' equivalent is for the entire car (eg: responsible for allocating the budget). I would expect to find an attitude less like "let's make sure people buy this car because of the infotainment system" than "infotainment is tolerated as a necessary feature to sell the car to the masses".
On top of that, they have to build software that is going to be around for a couple decades with (ideally) no updates, and that basically doesn't ever crash. This means extensive testing -- maybe for over a year. For sake of discussion let's say it takes only another year to build the software: this means by the time the car is released, the platform (both hardware and any underlying software/frameworks) it's built on is basically already two years old -- and there's a good chance when the platform was picked it already wasn't cutting-edge.
This isn't meant to be a defense of bad infotainment software -- it's still bad. Give up, and focus your time on making a great CarPlay/Android Auto experience (at probably a fraction of the time currently spent). Make the FM radio and maybe bluetooth audio work standalone, then just rely on the phone integration for everything else (maps, text messages, phone dialing, contacts, etc).
Isn't CarPlay exclusive to iOS devices? If so, what you're describing might be viable with Lexus. It'd be somewhat pointless with the Toyota brand, where iOS users are a rather small minority.
There's also Android Auto, which is the near-exact equivalent for Android phones. A head unit can run both.
Seriously? People will have the newest iPhone before they shell out for a car with a working air conditioner. The car is gone as a status symbol, the phone is now arrived.
We know that iPhone enjoys a minority of smartphone market share, and we know that Lexus is the luxury brand and Toyota is the everyday brand. One assumes iPhone will be overrepresented among Lexus buyers and underrepresented among Toyota buyers. Therefore it would make very little sense for the Toyota brand to abandon Android users in favor of iOS users in the design of its dashboard systems.
I wasn't suggesting they ditch android auto, but literally everyone but Mazda and Toyota have carplay as an option. Even Kia and Hyundai. Chevy,GMC,ford,Dodge, Chrysler,jeep,Fiat,Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi. All have carplay. Mazda is going simple, which I respect. I drive a Miata pre touchscreen and I use a $50 Android phone. But to have a touchscreen an not have android auto and carplay? Why?
Current Mazdas have CarPlay and Android Auto.
Current Subaru models also have both included. Hopefully that's the norm, rather than a manufacturer choosing only CarPlay or only Android Auto.
I think that the proportion of iphone owners who use toyotas is similar to that of the general population, so leaving out android is unlikely to happen.
Agreed, it would be crazy to leave out android auto.
They have given up, they’re starting to roll out CarPlay across Lexus and Toyota
Everyone wanted to be Star Trek The Next Generation and/or Minority Report. That is the reality of it. Shiny futurist magic finger-wavy interfaces. Which were designed to look as cool as possible in movies and not on the basis of practical affordance.
At least in TNG the voice recognition software (more-or-less) reliably understood what the user was saying.
As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly prefer familiarity. Standardizing cars across a couple of different interfaces vs each car having a brand new layout of analog switches, knobs, and doo-hickeys is a much better rider experience.
Much like how a “phone” went from “a device to call someone on” to what an iPhone does today, a “car” is going from “something you drive” to just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
people vastly prefer touch screens
Do they?
A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally.
I still hate typing with on-screen keyboards, I just grudgingly accept that for a given small phone size, I'd prefer more of it to be screen than keyboard. That doesn't at all mean I want my car to turn into an Android tablet because I prefer a touchscreen in the constraints of a pocket size device.
If people really do vastly prefer touch screens, I would expect to see different control mechanisms moving in this direction (steering, shifting, etc.)
The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.
I was thinking the other day that there isn't really a good reason why I couldn't control my car with a PS4 controller. I wouldn't advocate for that as an industry wide change, but I'm willing to move beyond huge steering wheels and gear shifts
I think we take for granted that the modern car layout has always been the same way, but it's interesting to learn how it evolved. Some of the original designs were using tillers instead of steering wheels, for example.
Come on. My iPhone still has some tactile mechanisms also. But 99% of my interactions with it are via touch screen. That's what you're describing.
Yeah, and that sucks, but we live with it because that's the only way for it to fit in our pocket.
Why would we port one of the compromises of the smartphone interface over to our car interface?
And yes, I know, dynamic is a trump card. It still sucks. Have you ever read Bret Victor's rant on it? http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
Sure, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
The actual point was that when it comes to safety/critical functions, we still prefer those mechanical mechanisms. Unless you're flying or driving with your iPhone, I think the point still stands.
I think the fact that safety critical fly-by-wire systems could operate without the mechanical interface yet designers choose to do so anyway underscores this point.
Sure, safety and precision critical mechanisms are still served better by controls with tactile feedback. I happily recognize that.
I truly wish for a current phone designed even half as well as the Palm Pre and Treo were a decade ago. (Slide-out keyboard, "Just Type", non-sucking contacts and calendar, etc.) Really, I just want an updated Pre with a state-of-the-art browser and radios...
"Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. "
And Teslas ALMOST never kill their driver or innocent bystanders when the driver is negligently ignoring -- or bored and not paying attention to -- the road. There have been low speed accidents where the operator is tasked with taking over for the vehicle and they couldn't respond in time. Real life is neither a video game nor a perfect simulation. Limitations of the technology and the human operator as well as conditions of the road, lighting, and weather will always be a problem.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/01/business/insi...
2. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/behind-the-ub...
I wasn't commenting on the current state of self-driving car's safety...we can debate that endlessly so I won't. But the direction we're currently heading in is pretty darn clear.
Alright, but that's not how I read your comment. Regardless, until we as a society are so confident in autonomous vehicles that we eliminate manual control systems as outmoded and unnecessary, those systems should be designed to minimize cognitive load on the operator of the vehicle.
I don't necessarily disagree...that's just not what's happening in the real world. Car manufacturers are moving forward, quickly, with self-driving tech.
> just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
just another device which can kill you and others in a split second if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
yes. what's your point
The point was you comparing a car to a phone does not make any sense right now. That elusive future where a car just becomes a device is not going to be here in the next few years, we can talk about it when it comes but right now cars kill people if you dont pay attention.
I think you're vastly underestimating how quickly car manufacturers are moving..or at least trying to move.
Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars. And they are, of course, designing their current fleet of cars for that future. There's already a Games section in the dashboard.
We can talk about the safety aspects all day until we're blue in the face. But this is the reality.
I think you're vastly overestimating how quickly car manufacturers are moving
> Tesla is already pre-selling, for money, full self-driving capability in their existing cars.
Has Tesla enabled FSD with no driver supervision?
That is the actual reality.
You've got to be kidding? Yes, the touchscreens on many/most of the cars out there are a horrible user experience. I've shared in that frustration. But just look to how Tesla has handled this to see what can be possible. It isn't perfect by any means but it is such an improvement to the user experience (being able to add buttons via the UI to enable new features, maps that respond quickly, etc). They still have analog controls for volume and other things. Touchscreens are here to stay. The user experience just needs to improve.
I've never driven a car with a touchscreen. And I wouldn't want one for basic controls. Once I become familiar with old-school control locations, I don't need to look away from the road to make adjustments.
And damn, I got pulled over once for suspicion of drunk driving, in my wife's car. In the process of finding some knob, I had drifted out of the lane.
Anyway, heads-up is a great alternative. I look forward to lots of cool AR.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars.
For me there is two different scenarii for controlling the car:
- while driving quick adjustments: volume up/volume down, temperature control, play/stop/skip music, start/stop navigation.
All of those should be via easy to understand, direct access physical controls.
- while parked (or by a passanger): navigation setting, app switching, playlist adjustments, peripherals setup, air control strategies, anything finicky really.
I see a case for these operations to be done by a touchscreen with no physical equivalent. Physical controls for those are juste hell most of the time.
In that sense, I feel Mazda is just throwing the towel when a more sensible and best of both world approach could be taken.
In the 2015 Mazda I drive, they allow touch under 5 mph (I think?) But I installed Android Auto using third-party/open source software (and touch is always-on.)
By default on your phone, plugged into the car, you have to swipe/unlock Android Auto, but if you're parked, you can do that, and access your apps, including Google Maps. You can set your destination, and it immediately opens on the car screen. I'm completely fine with this model of interface - when parked, use your phone.
However, having said all that, if you still want to use a wheel, it's important they hit the right UI. In a BMW I rented, the way it only showed relevant letters while searching for an address (using the wheel) was pretty good and I was able to type in an address surprisingly quickly, even on my first time of using the software. Probably still not quite as quick as using a touch screen, but close enough.
I suspect that when you allow touchscreen as your fallback, it's harder to be "really good" about making a good wheel + button UI. It's too easy to lean on your crutch.
From a user experience perspective, it seems strange to me that one would only consider the driver experience and not include the passenger. I 100% agree with you about the need for tactile non distracting controls for the driver. At the same time carplay controlled by the passengers phone has a lot of value in terms of value add to passengers.
This may be true, but in terms of priority, I'd estimate that a car carries multiple people only 5-10% of the time it's used.
In the case of being driven by the passenger's phone, there's no need for a touchscreen in the car itself.
Touch screens in cars are the equivalent of shiny phones. They persuade people to buy and some of them might love them.
Nearly every phone I see has a protector around it, destroying the nice looking design because one drop and it breaks. But you still need to have shiny designed phones or you won't sell them.
So cudos to Mazda. I wonder if they can keep this policy up when everyone else has shiny large touchscreens.
I have used Audi’s version of CarPlay without a touchscreen and I hated it. Circling through icons that were designed for a touch interface made no sense. Tesla’s interface is not perfect but interacting with the map is so much better with its large touchscreen.
Yep. I recently spent a day driving an S5 and S6, and the non-touchscreen carplay was terrible. I have a touchscreen version in my 2017 CR-V, and it is a joy to use. I read the comments in this thread, and it makes me laugh. So much "TOUCHSCREENS ARE THE DEVIL, NOBS AND BUTTONS ONLY." It just doesn't jive with my experience at all. Maybe it's a generation gap thing? I'm 30 FWIW.
Possibly. If the only thing you're used to and expect is a touchscreen, you will long for a touchscreen even when it is objectively a worse experience.
Seriously... I've seen people right here on HN claiming that "look, navigate to a touch menu, navigate to another menu, select an item, press and hold" is superior to "press one button on the door".
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars
The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
If we extend this idea, why not do it for airplanes? It seems like a bad idea to be changing the layout of mission-critical systems. I'm sure it'd wreak havoc if the cockpit of a 787 was all touch screens, with UI changes pushed at the whim of developers.
I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job done; it doesn't need iteration, and messing with it would reduce safety. I don't have to look at the controls, because the buttons are of various shapes/sizes that I know. Tactile feedback is value in keeping eyes on the road.
An A380 is already full of screens where touch input could be introduced. All major airplane manufacturers are definitely experimenting with touch screens in the cockpit [1]. I guess not for flight critical systems for different reasons, because of missing tactile feedback and limited usage during turbulent flights [2]. But maybe that's just a question of time...
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/airbus-aims-for-a... [2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/22729/why-are-t...
How about spacecraft with touchscreens: https://www.spacex.com/crew-dragon ?
Compare to the cockpit of Space Shuttle: https://i.redd.it/9mj5bcbnzsx21.jpg
I know from people inside SpaceX that they have covers for the essential switch panels which they put on when Musk is around, because he objects to them for confused silly reasons (like tesla cross-marketing). The astronauts and capsule engineers know better, of course, so this is the compromise.
I hope you're arguing in favour of the space shuttle there. It has no contextual buttons. I'll always argue that contextual controls do not belong in critical systems. Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it. A touch screen looks nice but isn't safe. Mission control is telling you to press X button, but X button isn't actually on your display right now?? That's a big problem.
The crew dragon is designed to be completely autonomous. 99% of the time, the astronaut is just a passenger, so there is less requirement for physical controls.
In terms of mission control telling you to press X button, it is almost certain that mission control would have a simulation of the cockpit running that would show them exactly what the astronaut is seeing on their display. So they will always be able to direct the astronaut correctly.
I definitely think a touch screen in this situation can be safer, because it can display information in a way that makes it quicker for the astronaut to understand the situation. It in theory requires less training because there is less requirement to remember the position and function of every single switch.
Space missions need to account for the times when things really hit the fan, that's when design really matters. If shit goes haywire why should I assume my touchscreen is now displaying the same thing as mission controls? If it's not then instructions go out the window. If shit goes haywire in the shuttle, mission control can safely assume they're looking at the EXACT control scheme the pilot is, and can read out controls accordingly. I get that automation is intended, but for emergencies a touch screen really doesn't cut it.
>Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it.
I agree with you in spirit, but would disagree with this particular point. Apollo had an erroneous "Abort" signal because a particular switch didn't do what it was supposed to, because it had some interesting failure modes in zero-gravity.
I think is dangerous to assume that one design is flawless over the other; both touch-screens and mechanical systems have their own unique failure modes. Maybe one is more reliable than the other, which I think is currently the case here.
Ok perhaps I could change that to "every working button on the shuttle will do the same thing every time I press it".
Your mention of zero gravity has brought up another consideration for me. Assuming it's a capacitive touchscreen you need to ensure no conductive material ever floats into contact with it by mistake. Switches and buttons have covers and rails to prevent accidental pressing but how do you manage that with touchscreens? Apple manages it on your phone because a false negative is ok in that case, I don't think you can allow that on a spacecraft. How is a floating glove finger differentiated from a glove actually attached to hand?
I don't think the "every working button" buys you much here because is could just as easily be stated as "every working touchscreen does the same thing every time I press it". The point from reliability engineering is that everything works until it doesn't. The difficulty with software systems is that they often have complexity that is tough to understand all the paths let alone test/mitigate them (see Boeing 737 Max as a recent example).
You bring up really good points on the zero gravity considerations. It would be interesting to see SpaceX's FMEA on this system to see what all they've considered.
?? Touchscreen interfaces almost always have contextual displays. So no touching it doesn't always do the same thing every time I press it. The space where a spacebar is on your phone is the same space that is sometimes the camera button. I think contextual design does not suit important interfaces.
I meant it in terms of pressing a working contextual display. I think we're saying the same thing. Software introduces many more failure pathways so it's often not suitable for primary hazard mitigation.
Elon Musk's fascination with touchscreens is absurd and dangerous.
Even in the future world where everything is autonomous, knobs and buttons will always be needed for mission-critical interactions, whether it be driving in dangerous conditions or having to perform emergency maneuvers on your "autonomous" aircraft.
> on your "autonomous" aircraft.
It seems that the FAA (and Garmin) does not agree with you:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8o0Nk8E0S4 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnuRFAAKdfg
I like Dynon's systems a bit more, as they have a few physical buttons to allow one to go to certain top-level / important parts of the menu system in a jiffy:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjADTgwCtUU
Just because there is a design moving forward does not mean there is not a considerable amount of discussion/dissent/disagreement on the approach.
This has far more to do with customer expectations than it does with safety. It would be much harder to sell a car with a different kind of steering mechanism than a wheel. The wheel is a leftover design element. Just because it's what we have doesn't mean it's good.
They are.
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/cInTheAir-cAvionics-cMFDs-p1...
Have you seen the F-35 cockpit? It's just one giant touchscreen.
It has a large screen, but it's definitely not "just a giant touchscreen"
Some things are controlled by the helmet movements.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e6311865f9688fdb18cb69...
And, sensibly, stuff you would use while dogfighting or landing are switches and buttons. That, and things that have to always work like the radio and artificial horizon.
You drive car with pedals and steering wheel. Everything else that is ternary (music, climate, nav) is on touch screen.
So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.
Climate is not ternary, it's definitely important for driving in cold climates. To the point that if you can't see ahead, you need to stop on the expressway in order to adjust the airflow to windscreen, so that you don't collide into the other guy who has stopped to adjust the airflow in his car.
Climate can be controlled by steering wheel too.
Of course. The point is that you need to have those dedicated controls with ergonomics that support driving, not touch screen.
Think I have seen flight attendants use a touch screen on the intercom and the cabin lights / infotainment. I’d assume everything on the cockpit is life of death for ~300 people, so different rules apply. Imagine what a sick joke it would be if the recent Boeing crashes were caused by pilots fiddling with a touchscreen while the plane went into a dive. It’s difficult enough to work all the controls accessible without tabbing or scrolling.
> So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.
Which means, annoyingly, that you can be locked out of those controls during crew announcements.
> having a flexible interface makes a lot more sense
For business, not the user.
And honestly I expect the answer is simpler: this enables them to subcontract out the UI part and run it in parallel with the development of the rest of the car, because the UI can no longer affect anything else in the car design.
Which allows them to have the UI for controlling the car be done by a team without strong communication links with the team designing the rest of the car's UX.
Is that a genuine benefit, or one that shows up more early in planning and who's downsides show up late?
It's a benefit to the business. There are way more variables of interest to consumers in a car than just UI; few if any will take a crappy touch UI as a dealbreaker (especially if everyone does crappy touch UIs). So it's a pure win for business - the downsides never reach them, they only materialize on the user end, large enough to frustrate people and maybe even cause accidents, but small enough to not cause a purchasing decision change the next time one is in a market for a car.
(I need a term for those cases. Psychological externality?)
Vested disinterest?
That sounds awfully like Boeing's 737-MAX MCAS debacle.
Because who know when the volume control might get iterated out of existence
I prefer to think of cars as cars. A dock for a smartphone takes care of entertainment and for everything else discrete knobs switches and levers. Preferably clicking with a loud click.
I agree on the flexibility part. Interesting thought. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a touch screen. There are many non-functional buttons in my car right now, which might be wired but just don't perform an action. The car manufacturer could make it more easy to reprogram these.
You can see it a bit as a Playstation controller (or whatever platform you like), it has multiple programmable buttons. A car could basically have the same. A touch screen is not required.
It gets tricky as soon as you need labels and/or more complicated visual feedback attached to "dumb" buttons.
The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.
On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.
The stakes are much lower, but the same complaints apply to media center remote controls.
Recently my Logitech Harmony ONE died, and I replaced it with their current high-end device. I HATE it. I want to be looking at the TV when using it, not shifting attention to the remote's touch screen. Worse, the remote wants to support lots of controls, which it implements by allowing a swipe between pages. But it's way too easy to accidentally change pages, and the pages are all different kinds of things, so it's not clear how to swipe back to the one you want.
So I took the $100+ device and threw it in the closet. I bought their 665 model, which is a big "peanut" form factor. It has all physical buttons, except four are located on the edge of an LCD screen. But that's not a touch screen, it's just for labeling purposes. All the buttons on the device are physical. This $50 device is so much easier to use than it's big brother.
Related to my other comment on this article here, I bought the new device which came with the Harmony Hub. Once I connected it to my Google Assistant, I haven't looked back.
I too am glad Mazda did this, now I have to decide if I want to trade in my 2018 Mazda 3 for a 2019 one :-).
Touch screens are cheap, mechanical switches are expensive. Mechanicals are expensive from an acquisition cost, tooling/manufacturing cost, maintenance cost, and replacement cost. So automakers were happy to move everything into the touch screen and reduce these costs and boost their margin.
I hope Mazda will be able to hold this line with their accountants.
How much do mechanical switches cost?
Depends, are they custom or off the shelf? Are they environmentally sealed or open? How many cycles do they need to last for? What sort of conditioning circuitry do they need?
There will always be the cost of additional wiring harness and copper wire at some cost per foot. Some additional testing time when the consoles are assembled to verify the switches are all working Etc. Time has a cost associated with it during assembly as well.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I have no problem with touch screens in cars. My problem with is with the horrible UI those touch screens provide. They're slow to respond and don't seem well reasoned for the functions it has.
It's why I love Carplay. It expands the function of the car in a needed way. Maybe analog controls are better, but interface matters less to me than function.
I understand your reasoning, but for me after having used Car Play in my wife's vehicle...it was a major factor in my car shopping experience.
I spend a lot more time getting things set "just right" on my phone than I ever will on my car. Being able to hop in and have Waze, Google Maps, Pandora "just work" and be easily accessible rather than some built in system within the car that's going to just "check a box"...it's night and day. Car Play was so far above anything I've seen in a vehicle before that I actually miss it when it's not there.
I can understand the preference for analog controls though. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
That statement isn't true, Car Play support for me was a non-negotiable for the car I purchased two years ago. Another friend made Android Auto support a big factor in his decision and said he wouldn't buy another vehicle that didn't support it. From other conversations we don't seem to be outliers, that feature support is incredibly user(buyer) centric.
> Car Play support for me was a non-negotiable for the car I purchased two years ago.
It's a big point in my car buying decision just for the navigation experience alone.
But you can do CarPlay/AAuto without the touchscreen idiocy.
Yes. At least with CarPlay you can use the knob thing on our Mazda and not use the touchscreen at all (which is disabled when the vehicle is in motion).
Mazda and other automakers build TRULY AWFUL UIs in their cars. Carplay is a godsend in this case. You can direct Siri to send texts, read texts and you have a superior GPS application. CHeck out the abomination that it Mercedes-Benz carousel for showing/selecting radio stations on their cars.
What you are really advocating is tactile feedback for digital displays--with some method of shaped feedback on by the screen itself. As a touch screen's in cars don't offer haptic feedback, that is an issue. That said some aspects like moving up and down stations or songs in a playlist can be controlled by steering wheel paddles or buttons on the wheel.
The 2019 mazda 3 without the touchscreen still has carplay and android auto. You can still do all of that. You control it with the "commmander switch" instead of a touch screen, and more often with the volume knob or buttons on the wheel for the most common tasks.
Hopefully this is a trend that catches on; I was resolved to never buy a vehicle that had touch screen controls in it, after seeing what a mess Ford had made with the UX in my wife's 2019 Edge, compared to what I have in my 2010 F150.
I think touchscreens are dangerous as hell to have in vehicles, because you cannot operate them by feel alone, like you can with a buttons and knobs interface. People are distracted enough playing on their phones while they drive, so selfishly for my own safety, I don't really want them futzing around with the janky touchscreen display to change the radio or mess with the air conditioning too.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
The baffling thing about that is that Audi's MMI system was actually pretty darned good. And a few of the cars support controlling Apple Carplay with the rotary dial.
Audi and BMW used to sell their dial interfaces as a unique advantage over touchscreen only infotainment systems. It blows my mind that they're (Audi at least) going in the opposite direction now.
> Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Sturdy rotary controls which really are knobs are much better for a car. If you're on a bumpy road, the axis of the control will stabilize your hand. The controlling motion (twisting) can be more easily controlled, even if the bumps are trying to move your hand up and down. (I never see cars on the highway rapidly rotate about their roll axis more than 10 degrees. This only happens in Fast and Furious movies.) Furthermore, the feedback necessary to get from the control is all tactile. Contrast this with a slider control. An up/down slider is bad, because the control movement is in line with the direction of the bumps. Even a left/right slider has some problems with this, if your arm isn't perpendicular with the control.
Contrast all of the above with controls on a touchscreen. Almost all of the feedback is visual. Simply registering your hand on the control requires visual feedback. There is almost no physical stabilization of your hand in bumpy conditions. Instead, you have to compensate with a hand/eye feedback loop, which requires even more visual attention.
It makes prefect sense: the whole automotive industry has a terrible track record for ui/ux in the non-driving parts of the cars because they don't care about it enough to put the effort in.
So they outsource to Apple and Google that made a, frankly, even with touchscreens, better system then what car manifacturers would have ever produced.
Now the problem is that Apple and Google had a hammer and treated the problem like it was a nail when it was not...
Care to elaborate on your studies? Not many cars have gone full touchscreen. I grant you that it took a bit of getting used to on my Tesla, but now I'd never want to go back. Curious how you controller for familiarity in your studies.
I totally agree. I recall the Blackberry with jog-wheel (non-touch screen), worked great, could scroll at a speed I liked, easy, one handed navigation of email, joy. Then they dropped that for the mini trackball, which they introduced with the pearl (a break into a consumer market). This was a mistake IMHO, and from a business users perspective, they sacrificed business users reaching for a consumer market that the likes of Apple did better.
Their again, many examples of not the best design happening as the consensus of public know how to use it. QWERTY keyboard layouts being classic example.
Then consoles and the mouse+keyboard combo over a game-controller pad. For FPS, mouse wins for ease of control still for me.
But the big takeaway for me about physical buttons over virtual touch-screen ones is the ability to leverage muscle memory. With physical buttons, you know were they are, how they feel and can do that without looking. Bit like sending a text from a nokia phone whilst it's in your coat pocket. Try doing that with a touch-screen based phone. Whilst not an everyday use, it does highlight the advantages of buttons in some uses.
Now, there is work ongoing in haptic feedback and some impressive work in the field of using ultrasound to create virtual surfaces you can feel. Which for many I'm sure will be great, but then the whole KISS design philosophy has somewhat taken a backseat in the name of features. But then, features are what sells many tech items today as they are still evolving. But there will always be people who prefer actual buttons. More so if you have ever been in a lift with a touch screen instead of buttons, which is something not to be sneezed at, literally unless you want to visit extra floors.
Here is a counter anecdote. Recently I moved from BMW (buttons and dials) to Tesla Model 3 (basically a big iPad bolted on to the dash). Both me, my wife, bunch of friends with Model 3, all vastly prefer the touch screen experience.
Counter-counter point: I much prefer the BMW interface because I can find the volume and AC controls without taking my eyes off the road.
Good thing Tesla has both of those on the steering wheel so that the driver can find them without taking their eyes off the road or their hands off the wheel.
Meantime the passenger can enjoy the touchscreen.
You would reconsider your point of view if you have seen some truly evil UIs using rotary controls.
Worst thing is when you need a manual to understand how the thing works, and manual DOES NOT specify all the options.
I, as user, would prefer a large touch screen for changing settings and navigating, and several programmable analog buttons for when I'm driving.
Rotary controllers are evil.
My mazda's rotary controller is heaven on earth thank you very much.
In my Mazda, above 5MPH the touchscreen doesn't respond to touch any more and you need to use the rotary controller (which is good as muscle memory allows you to use it effectively)
Have you ever used iDrive? I've been using it in cars occasionally for at least 10 years and it still confuses me.
I just bought my first vehicle with it yesterday, so maybe I'll get better at it. Touchscreens are not great in cars but if you can perform the action quickly, it beats fiddling with a knob for 15 seconds.
Does it? I can locate and adjust a knob without ever taking my eyes off the road. The same can't be said for a touchscreen.
You didn't answer the iDrive question. I can find and fiddle with the knob/control, but I still need to look at the screen to figure out what actually happened. It's not like a simple volume knob which I can do without looking.
IOW a well-designed touchscreen UI can be better than a poorly designed non-touchscreen UI. And, unfortunately, most car infotainment systems are poorly-designed.
This is exactly what got me into modding Mechanical Keyboards.
There is no reason that I NEED to launch Spotify from an actual switch controller...
https://www.alliedelec.com/product/electroswitch-inc-/6600/7...
But it feels so much better to control inputs with hardware. And rotary dials for volume, and many tasks in photoshop are infinitely superior.
Also fun to use an Arduino Leonardo to create custom input devices that are understood to be USB keyboards/mice!
I have an older Sebring from 2010 with only 25k miles on it I was able to snag up for a good deal. Was a nicer 'limited' one so it still had a newer touch screen console.
It is annoying as you touch it once to 'activate' it and then have to tap the screen a second time to register the press on whatever button/input you were trying to touch.
No tactile feedback and having to press it twice and visually check to make sure the input you wanted worked.
It is much more time consuming/distracting than an older vehicle in my personal experience.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
This is really wrong. People were begging Mazda to add Android Auto and Apple CarPlay for years and they have only just recently added them. Adding these features has everything to do with what people want. Android Auto is pretty amazing, and is steadily getting better as well.
Agreed.
I've been using touch car interface for the last 5 years (Chevy). I basically do two things: - Bluetooth connect - listen to spotify _from_ my phone / listen to map directions _from_ my phone.
I rarely use the touch interface - I am switching tracks either using the buttons on the wheel (most of the time), or using the phone.
Also, I do not want another yet another "kind of familiar but different" interface like most of the car touch control systems. I want the interface on my phone, that's it.
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
I assumed this was widely known (because of COURSE we do), but the digital touch screens were CHEAPER than dedicated physical controls for all desired functions. To design as well as to mass produce.
I was renting a 2018 car on vacation with apple car play and was very pleasantly surprised how good experience is. For comparison, I own the same maxed-out but 2017 car without a carplay. Apple Carplay is so much better then car manufacturers system in every respect I tried (disclaimer: I did work for Apple but several years ago and on unrelated projects)
>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Or, people actually like CarPlay and Android Auto and audi would have to spend a lot of money to keep up. Newer audis already support CarPlay. They're only switching from a rotary controller to a touch screen.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user.
I absolutely hate user interface of my Audio (with rotary knob and without touch screen), so I use CarPlay pretty much exclusively.
I would love to be able to use a touch screen on that for some of the interactions.
> It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
You can't expect that all car markers will develop a good branded interface, just like most Android phone makers have a UI that's worse than the standard Android one.
With CarPlay, I get to use a UI from a company that's an expert a making good apps.
> This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
...or figured out that you aren't as good at software as you are at building cars.
Honestly, CarPlay/Auto have been a godsend for me. The navigation software works better than anything I get from car manufacturers and just keeping me from mucking with my phone is fantastic. That said... I'm not sure the touchscreen part of that is the real winner there for me.
Of course it's not user centric. It's about capturing more revenue while limited the parts in the car. Back in the day, you had modular radio mounts. Ford broke the mold with the Ford Taurus and the integrated controls that you couldn't replace.
Now, if you care about a nice radio in your car, you need to upgrade your entire car for $5k.
I have an otherwise awesome Honda Pilot with a built in, unsupported android tablet that doesn't support carplay or android auto, and is hard to replace without heavy hackery because core controls of the car are built into the tablet.
I've hated touch screens in cars... I generally rely on bluetooth, only because the controls are so bad, at least with BT I can pick up my phone and bring it into view if needed, but the steering controls handle next navigation, which along with volume are about 95% of interactivity. The other 5% being maps.
If the Mazda navigation/interaction/entertainment experience is better, I'm definitely in favor. I miss the in-between period, where I could just insert a USB drive with sorted directories of mp3s and use that easily.
public reason: safety.
Private reason: we want total voice controlled system so we can listen to everything you say & do in car, log it and get into the ad and analytics business. One step at a time well be here.
Mazda (at least my Mazda6 from a few years ago) can do this because they have a great interface to the entertainment/info system. They have a joystick with a few mouse-like buttons on the center console just behind the gear shift. It's very easy to do common tasks like change volume, change station, skip to next in playlist without taking eyes off the road. My wife actually didn't realize for more than a year that the screen was a touch screen. She had never had to use it.
Yup, agree 100%. We bought a 2014 Mazda 6, and while it has a touch screen, I find myself only using the control knob 99% of the time. It's vastly superior to any touchscreen interface I've ever used, and also far better than some of the mouse-like joysticks in some cars (think later 201X Lexus vehicles and such).
I'm not buying a car with no touch screen. I like to have physical buttons for AC, and quick switching between media, radio, a dial for volume, things like that. But I also need a touch screen for Google Maps, and my music apps. Often times, my passenger might navigate these.
Edit: Also, in all fairness, where the screen is relative to the dash matters, and the size of it as well. From the photos on the post, those Mazda touch screens looked pretty small and awkwardly positioned for touch controls.
> This to me is insane reasoning.
Not insane but highly cynical. They are increasing risk to my - their user's - life in order to save some bucks on R&D and integration investment. Does it make you wonder where else did the make the same tradeoff? It should.
> I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
Same here. When I buy my next car, I would ensure it doesn't have controls that require me to be distracted from driving to operate even the most basic functions.
I think supporting Android Auto and CarPlay is pretty user centric. Those are the only half decent in-car interfaces I've ever used. Nothing else is close.
Mazda's touch screen is far away up on the dashboard while other brands like Citroen or Tesla place it between the driver and passenger, so it's easily operated by both. I like both Audi's rotary controller and touch screens. Both are a distraction to the driver because you have to navigate menus, not particulary because of the interface. Seat also has a touchscreen and it's a VW brand.
I vastly prefer my touchscreen to analog controls - how the heck would I control my map and nav and radio without an interface that can change at need?
Have you tried inputting directions into a car GPS using rotary controls? It's reminiscent of old rotary phones and IMHO a terrible UX
Better than touchscreen, though, especially when moving (only doing it as a passenger, of course!)
Having used both, I vastly prefer the touchscreen. The rotary input takes way longer to navigate to the next letter, and it's easier to make mistakes (e.g. accidentally switching modes) and it's harder to fix them (need to cycle all the way to the end to hit backspace, sometimes having to start from scratch if your mistake was "jump out of input mode")
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, quick glance that you're on the right screen, click clock- or counterclock-wise to select what you need. Much safer and easier, and you're not going to hit a wrong thing because you drove over a bump.
For entering addresses a large touch screen is nicer, but then a keyboard is even better, but since you're only supposed to do that while parked, so hitting a wrong button shouldn't be a big problem.
I've tried Android Auto in a Sonata with touch screen, and Passat and a Q5 with rotary controller. The latter were far easier to use, once you've spent 5 minutes making sure you understand how it works.
Maybe if the touch screen were Tesla-sized it would have been easier to use, but on a regular sized screen, even switching modes takes much more attention with a touch screen, because you need to look at it, move your hand to it, make sure you're hitting the correct location, wait until it registers,m make sure you've actually hit the right spot. With a rotary it was "slide down, no need to look because it clicks, click or two clockwise (still no need to look), push down, q
You must have used some really terrible touchscreen GPSes.
Pretty much top of the line.
There's a big difference between what is safe and convenient when you are sitting at your desk, lazily poking at the screen, and what is acceptable when you are barrelling down the highway, with the screen you need to stretch your arm to reach.
Interacting w/ a car touchscreen when you're on the highway isn't the brightest of ideas... Every car - even those w/ touchscreen - has physical buttons for top level commands (e.g. play the radio) that one could use via muscle memory or, at worst, a quick glance. Doing anything more involved that requires attention _while the car is in motion_ is just asking for trouble.
Exactly the point. But on some cars pretty much everything requires you to interact with a touch screen (cough, Tesdla, cough), and even if it does not, there's usually not enough buttons.
On my wife's Sonata, e.g., sure, you can switch the screen between map, nav. entry, radio, etc. with physical buttons. But after that it's all touch screen.Thank God they at least left alone knobs for the climate control...
Sat in the eTron lately while waiting for service. Two Nice, bright screens with haptic feedback. Very much fun, as long as I was playing with it on a showroom floor. But I shudder to think of actually trying to use on the road.
I own a Mazda that has this touchscreen and I use it to set nav destinations, but otherwise I rely totally on the analog controls. Typing with analog dials can be a nightmare though so I hope they sort this out -- my mother's Audi makes you type with analog controls and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Good luck setting a destination when you're in a hurry.
I have a newer subaru with a touchscreen and an older audi with the MMI rotary wheel. The rotary wheel is a superior interface, it has a slight learning curve, but then you do most operations by feel without needing to spend much time looking at the screen. the touch screen is finicky, and by definition requires you to take your eyes off the road to use it.
Agree with this for now, but what about when we're no longer driving the car?
When that happens a touchscreen and the ability to play games/etc makes a lot of sense. I think what Tesla and others are doing is designing and preparing for the future. Although not ideal right now, they'll be far ahead of Mazda when we transition to self-driving cars.
In order to do that, we're also going to need tens of thousands of dollars worth of additional hardware - high-end weatherproof sensors, and full-range actuators for all controls with enough authority to use all of the power the car has. Not to mention whatever pile of computers and software is needed. Changing out the UI so you can play games a little better seems like a sidenote beside that.
Agree, except when you need to type a name.
Then MB/BMW approach of having a touchpad near your wrist is perfect - you can draw letters with your finger without having to worry about hitting miniscule letters on the screen.
Do they have a second touchpad for us lefties?
Well, I'm in the UK so I have to use it with my left hand even though I am right handed - it works fine. Because the letter recognition is based on a single letter at a time it works fine even if I make an absolute mess of it with my left hand.
When you need to type a full name. Having a keyboard present could give a huge advantage. This is not equal to having a touch screen.
Next to that, my car has a system where you choose 1 letter and only the next possibility pops up. It decreases the need of a full keyboard. It's quite likely you only need to choose the first 3 to 4 letters.
I would actually like a stronger integration with the phone for cases like this. If you need directions, just load it up on google maps and send it to your car. If you need to pull up a playlist, same thing. Of course if you are driving this should be done by the passenger.
I wonder if you’ve used Tesla’s touchscreen or even Apple CarPlay with a touchscreen and Google Maps. You only seem to mention these old UIs. The rotary control on a virtual keyboard is atrocious to type addresses and points of interest.
Stage 2: Well, given that we've got this touchscreen, we might as well use it for.....
A screen with effectively infinite "soft buttons" is a hell of a lot cheaper than an equivalent amount of automotive grade pushbuttons.
Initially this was done to save cost, but lately it's removed a severe and justified roadblock to the addition of useless features, IMO.
> It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Tactile feedback is also a huge security benefit. This is what really doesn't make sense to me about the desire for touchscreens in cars - they're inherently dangerous.
I will say that navigation to an address is much much better with an on-screen keyboard. It is a uniformly HORRIBLE experience with buttons and knobs. Maybe the endgame should be voice, but that can be hit or miss too.
Makes me tempted to buy a Mazda. I like the AWD and reliability of a Suburu, but their touch screens are absolute garbage and going from my analog 6-disc changing Honda Accord to driving the much newer Subaru is painful.
I recently bought a new Subaru. It has regular buttons and dials on the dashboard and steering wheel for all the important stuff. The touch screen works fine with Android Auto.
That sounds like a nice setup.
Hah. My car is a 2008, older than most in-car technologies, but when I've thought about replacing it, a big click-knob was going to be a #1 requirement. It just seemed like a mousewheel for car: an instant classic.
Same reason I hate the MacBook TouchBar. It distracts, requires looking at it, does not give good feedback and is context dependent (buttons move around).
> As a User Experience Professional
May I politely ask - what exactly do you learn to be a UEP (pardon the abbreviation)?
Hopefully you were able to grasp the need for touch screens on mobile devices. Same for cars.
I like my touch screen. There is a lot I can do on it without much distraction. If something is in a sub menu that takes more than a fraction of a second to get to then I wait until I'm on a straight away that autopilot can handle and do it while I'm on autopilot.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps).
How does this relate to Apple Magic Trackpad with Force Touch?
Sorry, I badly quoted there. Was meant to quote this:
> Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch.
Given that Force Touch give a form of feedback (haptic though), isn't that good enough? How many people believe that the Force Touch gives tactile feedback instead of haptic?
They should put screen tactile screen feedback into seat...
Can't wait for pocket computers to follow too.
nope! touch sscreen UI has safety implications inside a motor vehicle.
pocket computer's usage scope is way broader than inside a car, and you REQUIRE the infinite UI possibility provided by a pure touch interface
Still a massive limitation to be expected to use the device eyes on and high attention. I get that this is the trend but it's still not a good qualitative point.
in the context of an automotive interface, I agree with you touch UI is not the best.
I was responding to general purpose computing (smartphone) that the OP was referring to.
> This decision is 100% business driven
It's 100% fad driven. Expect block chain in a car at some point because the future.
Exactly! there's no place for a touchscreen in the car, although many drivers don't know it:/
a thousand times this.
A year or two ago I considered buying another car after I had a fedex semi hit me (turning left from a stop, not dangerous). I drive a 2004 corolla and love toyota, but the guy looked at me like I had grown frog legs when I asked if they had any models without the touchscreen.
It was actually a major decision in me keeping my vehicle. I do NOT like the touchscreen, to me it's a complete no-brainer that it's more dangerous. I sure as shit don't want to be clicking through crap while driving.
When I was in HS I had a friend whose family had a couple of toyota vehicles. One of them was a small orange truck from the 70's I think. That thing looked like absolute crap, but ran beautifully. The only thing that finally killed that vehicle was their son going around a curve too quickly in the rain and rolling it. It's why I decided to buy toyota and I'm 100% happy with it.
But this touchscreen issue is a big enough issue in my mind that I may start researching Mazda. I seriously do not want a damned touchscreen in my car.
The giant but not very useful 11in touchscreen in my 2017 Toyota Prius Prime can just be turned off. No really vital functions live in there, it's mostly the (iffy) GPS and settings like the audio source, which I don't need to change much. Almost all the normal things, like temp, lights, cruise etc. are still accessible via physical controls.
I think the big one for me would be radio and temp. I assume no one in their right mind would put lights or cruise control behind a touch screen, but I could be wrong there.
And maybe part of it is me being set in my old man ways, but I don't want a touch screen for any of that. Probably the only 2 things I can see being useful on that screen are the reverse camera and GPS that talks to you and you can glance at it occasionally.
Anything else should have real controls.
Just brought the 2019 RAV 4 Hybrid a few months ago, but also test drove the Corolla. The US models differ, but I'm pretty sure the UX is pretty consistent.
The A/C on both vehicles is 100% physical controls, no touch screen required, in fact I've yet to see an A/C option on any of the touch screen menus.
Yes, the radio is mostly configured via the touch screen, but skipping stations / tracks and volume are controllable via controls on the steering wheel and a physical volume knob on the dash. We don't have carplay yet, but I think it is in the US, this might make my moot, but my main complaint is that it can be quite delayed in starting to play my itunes. I suspect this is because my phone is the secondary audio device (I usually let my wife pick/control the music), but thats a minor annoyance at most.
Edit: 6.3l/100km 37.3mpg on Hilly -> Urban commute in an SUV :)
I'm a "millennial" (25) and I don't want a touch screen either. Car companies just can't make a phone as well as phone companies do. It's not about if the touch screen can be ignored, I specifically want to not have one, like how I don't want RGB lights on a computer or a Windows key on a keyboard, even if I can just ignore them.
I think Teslas make you use the touchscreen for adjusting the cruise control speed
This is incorrect. In fact you cannot adjust the cruise speed via the touch screen at all.
Apparently this was actually changed in an early software update to the TM3, and cruise initially was engaged via the screen though!
https://interestingengineering.com/tesla-moves-autopilot-con...
You can still adjust the cruise speed via touchscreen. There is a plus/minus on either side of the displayed cruise speed.
Well shit, I never noticed that!
Not on the Model 3, it's a physical knob on the steering wheel.
Is this forum post not accurate? https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-3-traffic-awar...
It is outdated.
You can use the screen as described, but it is much quicker to roll the right steering wheel button up/down to adjust TACC speed. You can also push it left/right to adjust follow distance.
I rarely touch the screen while driving my Model 3 (or while my Model 3 is driving me).
Just something to consider is that Toyota panels do have external controls that allow you to use the panel without the touchscreen.
I have a 2016 Toyota Corolla, and the entertainment system is a touchscreen, but I haven't touched it in years. There are several knobs and buttons located around the screen and on the steering wheel that provide full control over the functions, without needing to physically touch the screen.
Maybe they have changes this in the last 3 years, but at least the 2016 models do have physical controls that are duplicated both on the entertainment panel and the steering wheel.
While there is a touchscreen, you don't need to touch it.
that's good to know
Whole windshield should a screen and we should be able to just wave at it to perform operation or simply talk to it.
You cant wave at it, two hands on the wheel:)
yes i agree! i love bmw's wheel knob.
> That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.
Genuinely curious: what does the interface being "branded" have to to with the user? To me, focusing on whether their interface is branded would be more business-driven rather than user-centric.
All these tactile controls are going to be deleted in the next decade as self driving cars go mainstream.
This is a foolish move.
Last time I was in a cab it had controls in the back for the AC, a light, the windows etc. - just because I'm not driving doesn't mean I don't want to interact with the car at all.
But you don't need to interact with the car without looking, that's only for those driving, so tactile interfaces don't give much/any gain.
Decade? Psh... Elon says 6-18 months!
Elon Musk is, as usual, right but with the wrong timing.
Should there be an /s tag in there somewhere? I can't tell.
It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching the radio off has you reaching for a button somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls:
I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk.
I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinct buttons. The only knob is for temperature. Any time I need to change air position or speed, I need to take my eyes off the road and find the button, and then tap it multiple times to get to the right position.
I also drove a friend's 201x Civic for a couple months, and the air controls were actually worse: tiny buttons, tiny display showing what settings are current.
Bring back Fisher Price knobs, please.
I don't get why we have buttons for climate. It's asinine.
Are you hot? Go ahead and press the down arrow 20 times to go from 80 to 60. Maybe it's not so bad if you switch your car to Celsius.
Or, with 50-year-old tech, turn a knob a quarter turn or a slider by 4 inches.
I have a 08 Yaris Hatchback...best controls ever. And yes those knobs make the clunk feel and noise....I love it.
The whole air system in the Yaris is great. I recently left my car sitting for a while, and a chipmunk made a nest with the cabin air filter material. I looked under the glove box, unscrewed three Phillips head screws to drop the blower, cleaned it all out and screwed it back in. No messing around with body panels or other parts that were in the way, no custom or odd-size connectors. A mechanically simple system, easy to access and maintain.
The 2017 Subaru I have has freewheeling software knobs for most functions and all of the info is displayed in the near-windshield display. Even when I have to take over from full auto control, it's pretty quick and close to my sight-line.
Thanks, now I can appreciate my 2013 VW Jetta TDI with its three fisher-price knobs for air control, which work just as you describe.
Renault have had controls on the steering wheel for at least 20 years now and it's still one of the best interfaces I've ever tried.
The first car I bought with my own money was a Clio and the ability to control the integrated radio system without looking at it or having to take away the hands from the wheel made that car my favourite place to listen to music.
As a matter of fact I miss it so much that nowadays I almost don't listen to music while driving anymore.
EDIT
for reference the whole music controlling part was like [1], the source button switched from FM radio/AM radio/CD player and it had a wheel on the back that skipped CD tracks or radio stations, according to the current source.
If I remember correctly the lower button ejected a CD in CD mode or changed from saved station to manual tuning in radio mode.
If you pulled both the volume buttons at the same time, it muted the radio and paused the CD player.
[1] https://www.proxyparts.com/car-parts-stock/information/part-...
One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen.
If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen either on your phone or in the car and it's always a pain. Controlling other things in the car is fine - there are physical buttons.
> One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.
True.
Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.
The steering wheel is where most of this stuff should be all the time. The second you force me to reposition my hand, security levels drop off a cliff, since you get involuntary movement on the other side (as proven by this post) and likely take your eyes off the road, which is bad even for a split second. I know this for a fact, having crashed a car on a motorway as I was turning down the fan (controlled by an analog button, btw).
The best car interface, imho, is something like a rotary device or arrows buttons on the steering wheel (or back thereof) which can be used to manipulate an overlay projected on (or just below) the windshield. My current VW gets close, but the screen is in the lower half of the dashboard (way too far from actual view of the road), and the system can only be partially controlled by on-wheel buttons (the main control is a touchscreen in the middle of the car).
Have you ever driven a stick shift?
That's a single control that's located in a highly ergonomical position - you take your hand off the wheel, and the stick is just right there. Contrast to radio/AC with inadequate/zero tactile feedback. "Stop looking at the stick, it's not going anywhere" is literally one of the first things I had drilled into me when learning to drive. (The involuntary movement comes from looking away from the road: you drop out of the feedback loop for a moment.)
I drive manual normally - I don't think ive looked at the stick in probably 10 years. For the first week or two maybe, but since then I haven't needed to.
On the other hand, I still don't know whete my A/C knob is without looking.
I'm European, I didn't even know automatic transmission existed before I was 30 :)
The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.
There are plenty of racing cars with stick shifts in them. Or are you thinking of a specific type of racing?
Wherever the car is built only for racing, like LeMans or Formula*, it typically doesn’t feature a stick.
No one looks at the shifter.
What about physical buttons for the more-used stuff (radio, AC, cruise control) and use voice control (along with physical buttons) for everything else?
Obviously, the voice control would need to havr some way to ignore the kids in the backseat, or can ask the driver / parent for permission for this to be a good idea.
It's a bit difficult for people who can't speak: temporarily or permanently; have significant speech impediments; don't speak the language the car is (currently) programmed for, are already talking to a passenger, etc.
The "obvious" problem is harder than it looks. Even searching in the navigation app gets confused by voice prompts from the same app...so you get things like "find closest gas speed station check ahead". And that's before you get various people involved, never mind any impediments.
And speach is not as easy as a button / knobb for muscle memory. In my old car I didn't have to think, just do. A touchscreen just can't compete in a car.
I am 99% sure my Clio had it attached to the steering column, so the controls were always in the same place regardless of the steering wheel angle.
I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.
(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)
You're completely right, I remembered wrong, in my first Clio they were below the steering wheel, just like in this picture
http://www.burdigala-encheres.com/upload/biens/7186/191833.j...
> The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point
Yes, that was the Renault trademark :)
> Good quality stereo, too.
Probably one of the best for the price tag.
There should be a company selling ergonomics improvement kits for cars.
You can buy little bluetooth remote controls that strap onto your steering wheel. They don't look great and you have to charge them. The charge thing is really annoying now that many cars turn off the power outlets when the car is off. I remember never really having a dead battery in my devices because they could just charge while I was parked either at work or running errands.
In many cars that's easy to fix. Just replace one relay with a jumper. Standard wire terminals fit in the relay sockets so it's not a permanent modification.
solar powered bluetooth remote
The market already exists: car improvement stuff on taobao is sold by tonnes: from the same independent DC-DC, and ECU interfaces to projection huds, and complete dashboard revamps
I still think the bash car dashboard was that of Honda Beat or Suzuki Cara — no dashboard, with just a motorcycle style gauge, and non-driving related controls almost wholely on steering wheel levers.
Any good links for projections HUDs?
My cousin had a Pontiac in the late 90s that would project the speed on the windshield.
【车萝卜 HUD 抬头显示器 汽车通用 车载多功能显示 速度转速时间】https://m.tb.cn/h.efAuVoU?sm=8ee47b 点击链接，再选择浏览器咑閞；或復·制这段描述￥XAN5YfMKXp2￥后到淘寳
【车萝卜2代 汽车抬头显示器hud 汽车通用 无线导航 车载机器人】https://m.tb.cn/h.eU77dAA?sm=d1a047 点击链接，再选择浏览器咑閞；或復·制这段描述￥QASsYfMqMWi￥后到淘寳.
Carrobot is an actual projector, thus there are no questions about focus adjustments.
Other are usually just segment led or el screens, some with collimator, some without
IIRC, that dates back to when Hughes was still part of GM. A good HUD uses collimation to project data out in the distance. A crappy HUD throws it up at the same distance as your windshield, forcing you to refocus.
I bought a stupid semi reflective sheet to put google maps on my smartphone under.. not good enough of course.
new bmw 540i has a beautiful hud integrate into the nav system ( rented one in the EU )
My wife recently had the chance to use 3 different car UIs.
Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.
Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.
Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.
My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress bar† or VTEC led depending on engine)), secondary behind the wheel (RPM dial, fuel, cooling liquid temp), tertiary left/right hand side (depending if you're brit/jap or the rest of the world; clock, head unit AC) of the driver, all angled properly towards the driver and minimising glare, all knobs and buttons can be actioned upon either without leaving the hands off the wheel or only leaving them for the shorter amount of time, Fitt's law everywhere, with big knobs/buttons for big things, small ones for small things. No gorilla arm effect anywhere, even the window controls on door armrests fall naturally under the hand and "dangerous" things are purposely made easy-but-difficult to reach (VSA switch, dashboard backlight). Oh, and the UI of that little screen is so well thought out, well-laid-out information and navigation across various more detailed info, with a notification system that pops an (i) in the critical area and actual info front and center (low fuel, low oil pressure, freezing conditions...). Even the various beeps have sensible meaning conveyed.
It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that.
(The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones)
But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit.
https://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Honda...
(if you get the GPS option the screen takes place of the clock/head unit display)
† not a gamified tally like they did with the Insight and CR-Z, but a real-time thing.
†† not a ridiculously small heads-up air fighter thing like Peugeot does that gets unreadable depending on light conditions
I am a designer, have a degree even... Yet you used lots of jargon I never saw before. Can you point me some books and reading? I really need to fix my sorry education...
Not a designer by a long shot but I admit to be very interested in the matter. Here are a few books I found quite fascinating.
Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis
Design for Hackers by David Kadavy
Nice! Honda have always put some great effort into their designs. I had an Accord Euro Luxury '05 some 14 years ago, and it was such a pleasure to drive around. Still regret selling it. It was the first semi affordable car on the Australian market to offer stability control and full set of airbags (as long as you got the luxury model).
I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.
I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.
Not in the CR-V they didn't. The entertainment system is an underpowered Android tablet.
Lots of questionable decisions like the keyless lock system not locking if the tailgate was closing as you walk away, there being no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on, and the engine cutting out as you try to drive off if you started it via remote start.
Your "no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on" complaint doesn't make sense to me, as the AC compressor is powered by the engine's accessory drive belt, which won't turn if the engine's off.
Otherwise, those sound like fair complaints. I'd add that Honda tried to go to a touch-based volume control in 2015/2016 and it was universally panned for its poor responsiveness and requirement that users take their eyes off the road to adjust radio volume. Can't win'em all I guess.
Yeah, I wasn't sure about the AC. My actual use case is it leave music playing over Bluetooth or Android Auto.
The volume control is fairly good in the 2018 model. There's a dial on the head unit, and a strange-but-fairly-effective touch sensitive volume control on the steering wheel.
I imagine the fan could still work?
Yep, the fan will work, but you won't get cold air.
That interior makes me think of a Cirrus airplane. Very cool. Cirrus has done some pretty amazing things with the button layout and overall UX for glass panel small aircraft.
I have one! I love the interior desing and the rpm is like floating! And the AC control is just stupid easy because the auto works very well not like on a BMW were you need to set the speed of fan for auto?!? If is auto whay i need to do anything? That's why Civic was "red dot: best of the best".
Unfortunately, I bought the cheapest wrangler I could (no power windows) and it still came with a touch screen. It is the biggest piece of crap. It won't default to Bluetooth. It will default to the radio, loudly, with an undismissable safety agreement that blocks all interaction for 5 seconds. The only loophole I've found is an aux cable, which it will default to. I would much prefer a radio.
Mazda is guilty of this, too.
Compare the HVAC control on the base model Mazda3: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xqIAAOSwlv9aU8Hh/s-l1600.jpg
With the HVAC control on the higher trim lines: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Xdav_EsJ3bQ/maxresdefault.jpg
The older/cheaper interface is WAY easier to control. Changing vent operation or fan speed on the new interface always takes way more button pushes and time until it's in the state I want.
I have a 2013 Leaf and would rather swap the battery somehow than upgrade because the newer ones all have less tactile controls and more worthless, brittle, privacy invading fad driven bullshit.
Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.
i bought a VW Golf Alltrack (vw golf sportwagon). instead of an Audi Allroad because of this. the audi controls were more clumsy and less useful despite the car being an extra $20k. the audi was also not available with a manual transmission and the hatch opened slowly, insisting on an always-on electronic assist. quite disappointing.
I HATE that always on electric assist. It is both expensive and annoying. Gas springs cost $20.
IMO, only pickup trucks really know how to get this stuff right now, and that's mostly because there's so much space that the buttons can be giant.
> somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
This makes me crazy. I used to drive a '99 Mazda b2500 (basically a Ford Ranger). I could reach any of the controls without even leaning forward. In a newer f150 that I used to drive for work the reach for the volume knob seems to be about the same distance as the reach to the passenger window crank in my old truck.
Real low-end cars don’t have a thermostat at all, so you’re constantly fiddling with the HVAC controls to maintain comfort. It’s the mid-range cars that get it right :)
Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011:
> There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.
> Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
> What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
> Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
> Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
(that second-to-last paragraph is surprisingly on the nose with the car metaphor)
And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere.
Rant is the right way to describe this.
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember that first experience was a total rush and extremely stimulating.
Feeling like the digital map was connected to my fingertip as you pan with that point stuck under your finger — absolute magic.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Denying a touchscreen entirely is to make huge compromises in the overall experience when configuring something as fully featured as a modern vehicle.
I remember the first time I used a map on a capacitive screen (iPod Touch 1st gen) and yes, it was pretty special. But I also remember many hours around that era (and many following, adding more often) working with 3D models by touching and middle-mouse-dragging around. Then I got a 3D Connection SpaceMouse 6-axis joystick, which is hugely superior to the smoothest touchscreen.
Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and modern games produce astonishing graphics and realism that feel really immediate; my eyes tell me I'm in the plane, and when I'm coming in too low and too fast I want to will the plane upwards. But I can't feel it. Pulling the stick back on my ancient force-feedback joystick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (wow, the graphics on that feel dated now) gave a tangible control surface load. The buzz of 'haptic feedback' just isn't the same.
I think this is a perfect example. For gross motor skills panning a map without having to think about it, nothing beats pointing your finger at it and dragging.
You don’t want the navigation interface in your car to be immersive, or particularly precise. You want it to be super responsive, and to spend as little mental and physical energy manipulating it as possible.
1) The target area is massive — nearly the entire screen. You just need to leave space to move your finger in the direction you want the screen to go.
2) Perfectly intuitive. Versus moving a cursor on the screen where you actually press the left arrow to move the cursor left until it goes off screen so that the screen will pan right
3) Instantaneous access to any point on the screen. Tap a POI anywhere and it’s info can be displayed. Go ahead and try to select POIs in an arbitrary map location with a scroll wheel. I’ll wait. It’s “haptic”, but are you doing that without looking? Something which took milliseconds now takes a full minute of frustration.
4) Instant access to menu items. Similar to #3 - a touch interface can present multiple choices and requires only a single user input to select. One touch and you’re off. A haptic interface requires scrolling through menus to highlight an item before you can select it, which most people will glance at while they do it, and requires more mental focus than a single tap. Or worse, an array of buttons next to the screen which you’re supposed to choose from to make a selection on the screen.
You're misunderstanding the rant.
There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant:
> [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now!
Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen?
He goes on:
> In 1900, Eastman's new Kodak camera was good! The film was black-and-white, but everyone loved it anyway. It was genuinely revolutionary! But it was also obvious that something was missing, and research continued. Practical color film was released thirty years later, and gradually took over.
> [...]
> Today, iPad good. It's flat and glassy and everyone loves it anyway. It's genuinely revolutionary. But if all we have in twenty years is an iPad with a few haptic gimmicks, that'll be bad.
The first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen, it was genuinely revolutionary—hopefully, you'll be similarly impressed the first time you use a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
[1]: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
> Superior to what?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
It is the ultimate user interface to ever be developed? Surely I hope not.
But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.
But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.
Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.
Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.
Yes, I love the computing device because all that it presents is a solid slab of glossy glass. If it tried to present any other affordance it would be all the lesser for it.
If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
But obviously the point of the rhetoric which I originally took issue with is stronger than simply “this is super awesome and amazing but we will eventually do better”.
Rhetoric like “permanent numbness” or claiming the experience has “no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing” is inaccurate aside from being hyperbolic.
In fact I’m comfortable stating that I’ve never felt more connected with or immersed in a map than on a sleek multi-touch display. Additional controls around the screen which I would have to move my hand to manipulate, or an attempt to shoehorn a haptic interface into that — honestly I believe it would only serve to mediate and therefore dampen the connection between user and map.
A globe is haptic. But a globe lacks the affordances of multi-touch zooming. A digital globe that allowed zooming and panning, maybe even with a dynamic physical structure to represent topography, that would be fucking cool, but hardly portable. And so single purpose as to be a novelty.
The beauty of picture behind glass is how adaptable it is to any arbitrary task and how easily it can be reshaped and reformed, and new interaction modalities invented on the glass surface which are joyful and useful and efficient.
Haptic interfaces lock you in, they dictate function based on their form, they provide fixed manipulation points which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand. As such, haptic interfaces given our current constraints on material science are often inferior and frustrating. Particularly for tasks which require dynamically adaptive coarseness and dynamic range of inputs, such as navigation.
Haptics are particularly difficult to allow users to manipulate interfaces through varying levels of acceleration and jerk, whereas the glass surface excels at this. Faster swipes, slower swipes, flicks, jabs, back and forth movements, and that’s all just one finger.
A click button is a one dimensional interaction point. Rarely is there a “click” affordance which measures harder or softer, except on “glass” type touchpoints.
The scroll wheels in the TM3 steering wheel is a great example of haptics striving to achieve this. The scrollwheel is awesome for fine grain incrementing and decrementing. But it’s also awesome because it has a “flick” mode where if you flick it fast the behavior changes in an interesting way!
For the right hand wheel, single clicks up and down increase and decrease cruise speed in 1 mph or kph increments. But a fast flick up or down (which may actually rotate the wheel 3 or 4 or 5 click points — who knows?) will move the cruise speed up to the next closest 5mph/kph increment (not up by exactly 5mph unless you were already divisible by 5).
This is a very neat HCI trick to provide a more usable scroll wheel. First, the fact that the wheel has click-points at approximately every 15 degrees (and the exact number of clicks per rotation is crucial based on the particular task!) rather than a smooth flowing wheel, translates naturally to integer changes in state.
Second, that it does have some concept of coarse vs fine-grained adjustments through the altered behavior when you flick it (likely triggered by at least 3 rapid clicks). But this all had to be very carefully designed into the hardware and firmware to make it all work for this particular task.
Third, because the particular task at hand doesn’t have a large dynamic range in the scale of the adjustments that need to be made. Rarely am I cruising at 20mph and then quickly find I want to be cruising at 80mph, or else the wheel would be terribly frustrating!
This is why trying to use the wheel (or really any haptic control) to pan or zoom a map is an exercise in total frustration. I know because that’s how my wife’s Mercedes tries to do it. Because sometimes I want to zoom out from a scale of 1mi on screen to 100mi on screen for a trip overview, and sometimes I just want to zoom from 1mi to 1.3mi to see the next turn. There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to, and the GPS interfaces which impose them tend to suck. The fact that I can’t directly address any arbitrary XY coordinate on the screen instantly compounds the frustration.
I'm genuinely disappointed you haven't responded, because you clearly think deeply about interaction design, as evidenced by your analysis of this click-wheel map interface. You just don't seem to have tried to understand the rant or my replies to you at all—you definitely haven't read the links in my first reply to you.
fixed manipulation points ... haptic interfaces [are often] inferior and frustrating ... There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to
This is exactly the kind of thing that the author of the rant called "haptic gimmicks", and is nothing like what the author favors over touchscreens. The author is talking about a dynamic physical interface, like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
For a map, not only is there an arbitrary XY coordinate that you want, but you can literally put your finger on it, so it lets you just place the selector there. Zooming should be continuous, so the dial has no click-points. "Flying" "down" or "up" (aka zooming in or out) feels like physical motion, with momentum, so the dial has a slight physical heft, and spins with some momentum.
But of course you wouldn't want to use this dial for everything, just like you've explained with such clarity as to why you wouldn't want to use a click-wheel for everything. That's why this interface is literally made of paper—building a different interface for a different application is as easy as literally cutting and pasting.
Here's a similar one by LG, with a similarly high production value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIRjytgNuhM
Here are more that appear to be by random designers/artists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myB1L_NMLGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SIhlWFAJWk
He's not disparaging the present, as he tried to make clear by having the word "future" in the title and then another 16 times in the post. He's disparaging a vision of the future that is disappointingly widespread.
What about an interface that is dynamic rather than fixed, and can be rearranged to best suit the task at hand, but is also physical?You know, like I mentioned in my very first reply to you?
> ... a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
Besides, what else did "pictures under glass" give us? Ultimate generalizability. That's a major reason why the touch screen won.
Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?
Nanobots sound hard to program. What if it was as easy as shaping knobs from clay and cutting paper with scissors? That's what the author works on now: https://dynamicland.org/
Even if it's a rant, it doesn't mean it's wrong.
At CES a decade ago, I got to play with a touchscreen prototype that offered tactile feedback. Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz (it's been a while, hard to remember). What I do know is that it _felt_ like I was pushing on something, not just glass.
At the time, it required a big area around it. Think ATM sized. For an ATM, it'd be awesome. I'd hope Moore's law would get the tech down to phone size by now, but here we are with more apps and no tactile feedback.
There's Apple's 3D Touch, which I think is pretty great but it seems like they're trying to phase it out. It'd be nice to have an iOS keyboard with some slight amount of tactile feedback - moving the cursor around with feedback feels pretty nice and makes navigation much easier than without it.
Audi has this kind of feedback on their newer touchscreens
> Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz
What do you mean by "press"?
"Pressing" a button (ie. pressing down on it) requires a bit more force than just touching it, so this seems like bad UX to me.
Even if you only were to have the device buzz as you touch any interactive control, I feel like that would start to feel real gimmicky real fast. There's probably a reason that technology didn't make it past CES.
You miss the point entirely: he acknowledges that touchscreens work. But he points out that they work by visual feedback only, and that this denies an enormous part of our tactile senses. In an ideal world, we would not have to choose between tactile and visual.
The responsiveness of properly done interactive multi-touch screens are undeniably tactile. They are, however, not haptic.
Haptic feedback in a touch interface is not always a feature. And the lack of haptic feedback does not, ipso facto, make an interface numb or non-immersive. Some older touch screens would vibrate in response to every touch as you typed — it made typing less accurate.
I take issue with the overly zealous defense of a haptic interface to the point where the overall experience is degraded in order to provide haptics.
Four arrow keys (or worse, a wheel-like joystick) are indeed haptic, but they are not a better way to pan a map, which is not generally done without looking anyway.
> There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass.
But it's scientifically proven that the response time from touch to brain is significantly faster than eye to brain. So, let's not discount that.
Normally a BlackBerry fanboy chimes in at this point, so I'm happy to be that guy.
He has a point in some contexts.
Touchscreens will never replace real keyboards for people who make their living typing but can easily replace a scroll wheel for mindless browsing.
Your example is essentially an instance of of "touch screens can replace the <tactile input device> in contexts where one does not benefit from extra feedback from touch", which is true but not exactly surprising.
I would say that in a car, being able to navigate an interface without ever taking eyes of the road is a very clear example of a context where tactile feedback adds a lot
now that I think of it, this might be the reason I actually decided to go for a blackberry key 2. I knew the keyboard was better for me somehow, just couldn't really pinpoint why.
My current phone is a Key2. Before that, I had 3 Privs, a handful of Curves, and several Palms.
For me, it has always been about tactile feedback: I habitually text and drive, so a physical keyboard that allows for high accuracy without looking at the screen is an absolute imperative...everything else is a secondary consideration.
Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that)
First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.
Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.
So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
edit: grammar/typos
> First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.
I promise that if you never need to adjust a UI consisting of buttons and knobs that it will do nothing just as well as a touchscreen. UI should be made for people who adjust their settings, though.
> Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!
They won't bite.
I promise you both work just fine it designed properly and placed properly.
Example, 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Center stack UI was nice to look at it but many options required multi level drill downs to change. HVAC controls were at the bottom of the center stack. Forty plus buttons between steering wheel and center console and this does not count all functions on stalks. Z4 I had had three stalks and forty plus buttons with heated seats at bottom of center stack and under.
Touch screens like anything else in the car that a user interact with can be bad or good.I found Apple Car Play when used on the Volt to be obnoxious and far more requiring me to take my eyes off the road.
I keep emphasizing one thing that people keep ignoring. You rarely if ever have to use the touchscreen at all. Almost every setting is set and forget. You catch glimpses of the navigation and such from normal eye movement. let alone, lets get real silly here, the TM3 can drive itself in traffic just fine if I wanted to get stupid and take my eyes off the road.
Well since you bring up heated seats, the TM3 does not turn on the heated seats automatically based on temperature / butt-in-seat and changing it requires 3 touchscreen taps, two of them high-precision taps, where as the Volt has simple tactile controls. Though I will say the Volt has some of the worst climate control UI I've ever seen.
Similarly the defrost is not automatic and the button requires a precision tap.
There are a couple of reasons you might need to actually use the controls in a car with some regularity.
I just tap the seat icon on the bottom row of the display. One tap to a persistent top-level button.
> UI should be made for people who adjust their settings, though.
I would rephrase to "UI should be made for users who interface with them", and I could not agree more with your response.
I don't have automatic lights. So lights on/dip around corners etc. Indicators every drive. Regularly switch airflow. Turn on reflow when allergy season. Turn knob for hotter/colder air. Emergency blinkers if traffic looks to be stopping suddenly. Wipers/speedcc, screenwash etc all manual. Heated read window in the cold etc.
That's before we get onto the whole music thing, where I concede my cassette tape player is less fancy than your phone integrated whatever - but hey I can do volume without needing to look at anything. Similarly picking one of my 6 preset radio stations is trivial by touch with a glance for orientation.
Now, as you say Tesla has automated away a lot of the above. Some of that is a legitimate improvement, and truly effortless voice control seems like a proper upgrade. Touch screens? I suspect I'd only be convinced by trying, my prior is that they're terrible idea for the same reason typing on my touch screen is practically impossble without looking in a way that wasn't true back in the Nokia 3210 days. I could write whole texts without needing to look because I knew by feel what I was touching.
Much of the stuff you mentioned is either automated or has physical controls in a Tesla. Also, by law, emergency blinkers need to be a physical button.
I do think that there's a lot of stuff wrong with touch screen for everything, but right now, I think Tesla has the best balance and also adds the most value. For example, the Audis that have everything touch screen, still have 3 buttons for driver seat memory. In the Model 3, you store this in a 'profile', which stores much more information, like ventilation preferences and you can store many of them.
If it's something you're reasonably expected to do while driving (so with the car in motion) then you should be able to do it without ever having to take your eyes off the road. Physical buttons let you do that. Between the ones on the steering wheel to control 99% of multimedia, the ones behind the wheel for lights&stuff, and the ones on the center console to control car functions like A/C and whatnot, you mostly hit that target.
Touchscreens force you to take your eyes off the road. You can't fumble around and guess if you pressed the right thing or some random function. This means they are only appropriate for things that would normally be done while the car is not moving. Before someone mentions "but GPS", you should NOT be typing in GPS addresses while driving unless you're using voice. Touchscreen or not you still have to look at that screen for a pretty long time.
And I will also mention the obvious: with everything bundled on the touchscreen God forbid that one single part breaks (due to design choice [0] or simple accident). It renders a good part of the car unusable.
So yeah, I'm good with having a big cool touchscreen but this doesn't mean the basic functions have to be moved there.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
Do you often get into new and different cars and drive them? Your last paragraph is an odd argument. The buttons in my car stay in the same place and don't change with context. If I want to turn the radio down I reach over and rotate the knob to the left, muscle memory and tactile response. That knob will never do anything except the radio volume. Far safer because I don't even need to glance at it.
Edit. Your top paragraph about user settings, that applies to any car that maintains a user profile, that's not a benefit of touch screens.
Okay, so how does any of this conflict with what I stated. Most vehicles with screens, touch or not, usually have audio controls copied to the steering wheel. How many buttons it takes is dependent on brand and even model. Plus you will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not. Let alone a good driver is always looking around which includes glances left and right so as long as the task you are trying to do, buttons or touch screen, is simple you are fine.
I did not declare that settings were the property of touch screens, I simply stated that the vast majority of settings that exist are never modified. This goes for cars with buttons too.
The discussion is that touch screens are bad. My point is for those touch screens which are not placed correctly or have a bad UI, then yes they can be bad. There are some atrocious implementations out there however the Tesla is certainly not one of them.
How many cars have you driven? The whole point here is to design the UI thoughtfully. Yes, there are cars with confusing buttons and knobs, but a touch screen is worse, not better. There is no way to develop muscle memory for pushing spots on a touch screen especially when there might be a modal dialog or if a software update has “improved” the layout of functions.
Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.
There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.
> You will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not.
The whole point of muscle memory is that it doesn't require you to focus on it. By the same logic, you would take your focus off driving whenever you have to breathe.
Well I got the impression you thought cars had too many buttons and that was confusing. I think because the buttons in my car don't move, I always know what they do when I touch them, so it's not really confusing. As another user pointed out muscle memory means I DON'T need to take my focus off driving.
I just don't think there's the same level of muscle memory when it comes to a contextual touch screen. One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button, which brings up a modal display, which you slide according to the speed of wiping, all while presumably it's raining outside, a time you should be focusing on the road!
>One method of turning on the wipers in a tesla involves pressing an on-screen button
That's just one method. There's also a dedicated physical button right on one of the stalks at the steering wheel. Why spread such information without pointing out there is a physical button?
And you're wrong about having to slide something on the screen to change the speed. That's not how it works. Why are you sharing opinions on things you are ignorant about?
Well I did say one method, I'm allowed to criticise that method even if there's another one, they included it so they've got to assume people will use it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rr_XzzJ6gc it's not precisely a slide, but it's buttons placed in a sequence with a sliding animation.
Your opinion doesn't trump 70+ years of Human Factors, guy. Touch screens are dangerous to yourself and other drivers because they don't provide tactile feedback or physical presence.
30ish buttons, 3 toggles, 2 twisty ends, 7 window toggles, and 5 knobs
The knobs are great - one for temperature, one for fan speed, one for outlet (crank to the right to defrost), a fourth for volume, and the fifth scrolls through a list which is less important but still better than buttons.
The toggles with twisty ends are great too. Intuitive control of lights, wipers, and cruise control, and standardized over almost every manufacturer. Window toggles, also great, I assume Tesla has them to raise and lower windows.
Buttons have a bit of a breakdown. 15 of them are for the stereo, and mostly rarely used. Each of the knobs has a button in the middle, they're very handy (turn AC/Recirculate/etc on and off). And the mirror adjust is the remaining buttons, sure it could be on a screen with the rarity with which I use it - but I prefer physical buttons.
So overall, you could cut out 15ish buttons on the media console and replace with a touch screen, and I would be quite happy. But if you took my knobs for adjusting temperature, volume, etc I would be quite unhappy. This means that most modern non-entry-level cars make me unhappy.
You don't listen to music at the same volume in all situations.
I often set a volume level that feels right just before parking my car after getting home at the same time everybody else does. The same volume feels incredible loud when getting back to the car early in the morning.
The same goes with climate control. I can get to my car after a long run in that case I'll likely need a colder temperature than what I need after coming back to the cinema.
I find myself adjusting volume and climate often in different situations. I have an old car and use mecanical switches. Going to a touchscreen to me would be a step backwards.
> In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with.
Then why the huge rant about buttons and knobs if I rarely need to actually touch them?
This Tesla argument is completely irrelevant. One company's managing to design a good touchscreen interface doesn't mean any other touchscreen is well-designed.
Rich people who can afford Teslas may have a safe driving experience in isolation but the vast majority (who can't afford a Tesla) are stuck with a poorly designed touch interface, making road conditions less safe for everyone (even Tesla drivers with their perfect touch interfaces), through no fault of their own.
Bring back the knobs.
Rather, let's bring the good touchscreen interface to all cars.
No. Just no.
You can't use a touchscreen without looking at it constantly. Full stop.
Of course you can. It's not like the buttons will be moving around.
No! I don't want everything automatic!
What happens when the wiper sensor malfunctions - now you're scrambling to find the manual controls to shut the damn thing off (if you even can!) Maybe it wipes faster or slower than you prefer. Same thing goes for headlamps.
For every "automatic" system you add to a vehicle, that is just one more thing that can malfunction and I find car repairs to be the most gigantic waste of time and money.
Look, we've proved out the whole "button" concept, and it just works. It's super easy and cheap to replace when it breaks. My car is not a toy, it is a utility. I want the features from the expensive "toy" cars to stay the hell away from my vehicle.
While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer, causing moderate damage to the front right bumper of his 2017 Suburban. It cost $5000 to repair due to all the sensors and technology. It would have been $1000 or less in a 1997 Suburban.
But when one of those sensors saves him from having a crash, or even saves his life, that $4k difference isn't worth even thinking about. Even a minor crash involving another car can cost well over $4k, after you consider how much your insurance rates are going to increase.
The vast majority of increasing complexity I see in vehicles in the last decade has nothing to do with life saving sensors, and more to do with gimmicky features.
But I agree, with driving being so hazardous to health I would certainly be willing to pay more for a vehicle that has a significantly improved accident survivability.
> While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer
So, uh, he ran into a deer even with the sensors.
We could give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the sensors slammed the brakes when the deer was on the road and did so before he could ever react but I doubt it.
The climate control is through the touchscreen?
You can control climate through steering wheel controls as well. I can and do control most things - music, temperature, calls, headlights, cruise control - with either voice or using steering wheel controls. Tesla UX is pretty amazing. Compared to that when I’m in my 328i from 2011 it feels outdated.
Yes
You can control AC though the touch screen, which is mostly convenient for the passenger. The driver can also control the AC with a scroll wheel on the steering wheel.
That is one horrible thing.
Then it's just the mismatch between the schedules of the UI team and the Autopilot team.
but like many cars with automatic climate control you set it and forget it.
plus in some cars HVAC controls are low on the center stack, six of one....
How much were you paid to post this? Serious question.
Recently switched from a Renault Captur (with touchscreen) to an Audi A3 (without touchscreen) and the amount of focus the touchscreen requires compared to a non-touchscreen with a radial button is amazingly scary. How did anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place? Can't imagine going back to having a touchscreen now, and hope they slowly disappear from everything cars.
It must be said that the Captur on board software is hilariously bad. (I have a 2018 captur) it's not that it's entirely dysfunctional, it's kludgey and painful.
It's not only the superiority of physical buttons, carmakers seem to be bad at simple, distraction-free UI.
- A single UI task (cancel navigation, switch radio station) takes 4-6 screen presses through some dialogs/menus that have only one option
- the thing responds too slow, there are some superfluous animations and in general there's long delays between presses and feedback on the screen that you touched something.
- Random crashes when not doing anything besides driving
- Random crashes (more frequently) when using android auto or making phone calls
- Updating the software takes 30 minutes, during which no information is shown besides a randomly resetting progress bar.
Exactly ; I had a similar experience sometime back when I was lent a 2010 Audi A4 for a few months, there was a quite natural control knob placed much like in the article's pics. It really is night and day compared to my brand new Peugeot where you have to look at the screen -and wait for the interface to update on each action- to do basically anything that is not taking a call / moving the volume / changing the track or station which you can do from the wheel.
And yet the article cites Audi to be giving in to pressure from the fearless (and from Tesla?), moving from the established rotary to touchscreens in future models.
I guess that when you already had touchscreens, it's much easier to sell haptic interfaces as an improvement than when you avoided touchscreen from the beginning. "Still no touchscreens" vs "already beyond touchscreens", even when they have the exact same controls.
The only reason the A3 still has a non-touchscreen is due to the fact that it's still running a rather old platform, which is outdated compared to the Golf, Leon -- the new A3 landing this year won't have dials.
I have recently bought a 1 year old Seat Leon with their newer touch screen setup. I find it pretty well made - you still have all the dials and buttons you need for climate control and audio volume, but if you want to set up navigation you have the touch screen in a well reachable location, which is much more convenient than a dial. Best of both worlds IMO. The only thing I do on touch screen while driving is to play/pause bluetooth audio and zooming in/out of navigation.
Can you expand on this? I really don't get it... I understand why people would prefer "fixed-function" buttons like temperature up or lock doors, but I don't understand how radial button (which is just switching focus on the display) is any better than touchscreen... To me, it looks strictly worse, you need to focus on the button and the screen (to see what's selected), instead of just focusing on the screen and touching what you want directly.
You don't need to look at the button to use it. I forgot exactly how the Audi one works but once you're used to it, it's like: Press, Turn right twice: Map. Press turn left once: Audio player. Press: Play. You don't need to look at the controller and, when you're used to it, you don't even need to look at the screen. With touch screen, you'll never get used to it to the point of doing anything without looking at it.
This is a key point. With physical controls, you learn their location and use them without looking. This leads to better focus on driving. With a touch screen, you're distracted every time you need to use it.
I've had the Audi for around 1.5 weeks now, and I've already learned how to navigate the system without looking. Can easily go from navigation to Spotify in Android Auto without paying attention to where the radial is or what's showing on the screen.
Compare with the Renault Captur which I could never learn to use without having to look at where I have to tap on the screen.
Edit: while driving, I'm not doing things in the onboard system that I haven't done before, like browsing through settings and other things. I'm only interested in doing modifications to already running things or turning on/off certain systems while driving, and those were much easier to get learned under muscle control when having a radial than using touch controls (which with touch I never managed to actually learn).
I guess an easy way to compare them would be to say, going from navigation to Spotify would require me to:
(radial): drag radial down, three clicks to the right, and click
(touchscreen): find button about 10cms from the left without looking or any tactic feedback
Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster.
That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit.
But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision.
If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy.
But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) - find where is a navi (by turning the wheel and pressing it, still looking at the screen) - choose, again with the wheel, to start typing your destination - and what most: again with wheel (turning it and pressing) type the address simultaneously looking on an onscreen keyboard.
All that while not looking on the road and holding your steering wheel with one hand and another on navigation wheel on central canal.
How come this is safer by tapping on the screen?!
You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces.
There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical.
It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.
It doesn’t matter what you “shouldn’t” do when it comes to mass-market consumer devices. It only matters what people will do, especially when you share a road with them. And when it comes to vehicle interfaces, you should assume 80% of drivers will adjust them during a drive, no matter how inconvenient and dangerous is. Any system that doesn’t recognize this reality — and try to minimize the harm if it — is just going to get people killed.
They can make most things non responsive while the car is in motion. This would inconvenience the shotgun passenger but typically the driver calls the shots on the radio (in-car entertainment system) anyhow.
Unless a law is passed restricting manufacturers from allowing responsive interfaces while driving then any disabling of them will be a significant market disadvantage. No sane car company would do it.
Some manufacturers have had restricted interfaces in cars for a while now. On Ford's SYNC system I have not been able to type in an address if the car is moving. Android Auto similarly limits inputs to voice inputs on any kind of text entry while the car is in motion.
At least ford and Toyota already do to some extent.
How you do design for this consumer who is controlling while driving without encouraging the activity by making it easier?
Remove the ability to control the screen while driving.
Well that's not really designing for those users then. Your original comment said there's no way to interface with a screen safely while driving, but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users. I was wondering how you could do that in a safe manner (I don't think you can personally, and agree with the no-control-while-moving idea).
> but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users.
The other user said you had to design for what people will do; disabling all access and removing the choice to interact is exactly doing that. Disabling hands-on interaction above a certain speed but allowing voice controls might be another option.
The best I can come up with is transparently overlaying small information cues on the glass of the windshield, and using sound cues. I think in general the systems available to a cars HUD should be pretty limited and the controls should be on the wheel.
I totally agree, which is why I think any screen is a bad idea. That ship has sailed though and we have millions of cars with screens, so it's still worthwhile to keep repeating that it's ridiculous to use the screen in motion, even if that's what it was designed for.
I understand the thought, but in the real world this is counterproductive and dangerous.
Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.
Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.
Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.
So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.
Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.
Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.
I think we have pretty similar views while talking about the tech and usability itself. It is just that I fundamentally disagree that you need to touch or look at anything while driving.
You say people need to interact with navigation while driving, which is simply not true. People want to interact with navigation while driving. They could cope without it. We didn't even have navigation all that long ago, to say we need it is a stretch let alone to touch it while driving. If it's causing accidents, and it is, it should be considered dangerous. Perhaps the Model 3 is better at it, but it is still a danger to look away from the road even for a second or two.
That means screens are out, and we need better ways to display and interact with information while driving. HUDs, sounds or feel is all I will agree is safe.
I said people need to navigate while driving, which is almost a tautology. That is to say, while I’m driving I need to know where I’m going. Sometimes I already know from memory, sometimes I’m consulting an external source.
Whether that external source is a sticky note on the steering wheel, a phone, audible prompts, or a big touchscreen in the center of the vehicle (TM3), the driver is going to decide which to use based on the options available to them at the time.
What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
The absolutist stance does not actually increase safety. In the absolutist stance, well people don’t need to drive at all. To design safe systems in the real world that save lives you need to provide an alternative that is both safer and as easy to use. Because a safer alternative that drivers don’t use by choice because it’s too annoying or inconvenient doesn’t actually improve overall fleet safety.
Obviously when you operate a vehicle you don’t always just look straight out in front of you. You check your mirrors. You check your blind spots. You maintain situational awareness and do that safely by planning where you focus your attention from one moment to the next. Screens are obviously not “out”, nor is it correct to say that looking at a screen while driving is unsafe. Instruments, whether for navigation or simply indicating current vehicle status such as fuel, speed, lights, etc. are an integral part of driving and digital instruments are not necessarily less safe than analog, and can potentially be more safe.
And so returning to my original point, in my personal experience, the large touchscreen in the TM3 is ideally suited for safe navigation, and improves safety when navigating particularly on an unknown route, by presenting crucial information in extremely visible and usable form, and allowing me to configure and interact with the system naturally and efficiently while I proceed along my route.
> What the driver is not going to do is pull over at an exit to stop the car and check if that was the exit they were supposed to take, and then get back on the highway and keep going.
Funny you should say that, its exactly what people did not too long ago.
You'd look up where you were going in a key map or more broadly a road atlas, write down your instructions (and keep it open to the final destination in case of road closures, etc)
I really don't see the appeal of getting in a car and beginning to drive without knowing where you're going. "I'll look it up on the road" just seems like an intersection of anxiety (deliberately increasing your chance of crashing), annoyance (deliberately making your navigational search harder to perform), and apprehension (increasing the chance you'll miss a crucial turn early in the trip due to lack of navigation).
It's like choosing to juggle while taking a test.
The hope is that they have entered their navigation correctly before they left and from the time they leave 'til the time they arrive they don't need to look at the screen at all, it's all voice and smaller visual cues. I guess I just don't feel like it's a stretch to have the responsibility to figure these things out before embarking, instead of doing it on the fly which is more dangerous.
The absolutist stance could absolutely increase safety. If we ditched all screens cars could only be safer. Less convenient, but safer. I'm not saying ditch navigation or music though, but ditching off to the side navigation/media screens could only be a plus to safety. Implement navigation and media in a way that's more sympathetic to the need of remaining attentive. Any lapse in attention we can get rid of is a good one.
You haven't argued for how having screens could be safer than not having screens, only for how to improve the safety and convenience of screens we have. Your advice is probably going to be more useful, because in all likelihood we'll keep screens. But I wouldn't care if it took someone 45 minutes longer to get somewhere because they got lost, and had to pull over and ask a man sitting on a bench for directions. Driving is a privilege and we shouldn't trade safety for convenience. I think media/navigation screens could be replaced by better solutions that don't require a screen. Who says you need a full visual map at all? Who says you need to type in the address? These are problems that could be addressed, and I feel as though the screen is the lowest effort solution not the right one.
> We didn't even have navigation all that long ago
Yes we did, even if it wasn't an electronic system built into the car, and it wasn't unheard of for people to pull out physical maps and reference them while driving, or pull over and stop in unsafe locations to reference maps. N Electronic navigation systems are what make people less likely to do those things. There's a difference between introducing a digital tool and introducing the activity it supports.
I meant digital navigation, but fair point. Trying to interact with a digital map while underway is still dangerous, like trying to use a physical map was. Listening to a GPS is great, and I'm not advocating against digital navigation completely, just devices that require you to shift your attention away from driving.
You seem to be equating touchscreens with safety and quality. These do not go hand in hand - the underlying system can be absolute crap with a touchscreen (remember old dedicated GPS units?), or they could be Tesla-equivalent but with a weird physical button input system.
> Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out.
You shouldn't be fiddling with the navigation system while driving - you should do that while you're still in park. Even when I look down at my phone to see what lane I need to be in for a second, it's amazing how much distance passes when going at highway speeds. Unless you are using autopilot, it's dangerous to mess around with the map, and it's not that hard to pull over to do it, either.
Oh I definitely understand that the vast majority of touch screens are utter trash! But that's not to say that all are.
Understanding what lane I need to be in, and what the traffic conditions are up ahead around the bend; these things add to situational awareness that makes driving safer. But I'm just not going to use a shit GPS that I need to program an address by spinning a scroll wheel and individually selecting letters.
If you had a large touchscreen in your car, you wouldn't have to look down at a tiny phone screen to see these things. They would be in your peripheral vision and easily checked without losing track of the road.
Now I regularly move to the right and slow down long before approaching a traffic jam on the highway, versus the typical hard-brake when the traffic comes into view.
At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection. That's totally possible on the TM3 because it's instant, smooth, and fluid (and it's really great at automatically zooming back out to the right level as you start driving again).
And to give another anecdote, today on my drive home navigation was set to take me 'Home' (by the way that's two taps on the screen, and takes less than 1 second to activate as soon as you sit down in the car). I was on the highway in stop-and-go traffic with AutoPilot. My wife called and asks me to pickup takeout. I know it's too early to order, and traffic is terrible. I need to know how long to wait to order, so I tap the steering wheel control and use voice control to change the destination. Because it's internet connected, I can just speak the restaurant name and the town. It tells me the traffic-aware arrival ETA so I know when to place the order, and adjusts the route (taking an earlier exit). Unfortunately there's no single tap on screen to make the call - POIs don't have the phone numbers listed (yet)!
So I find that there are plenty of perfectly appropriate reasons to adjust navigation while driving, I just think very few people have experienced how a proper large touch-screen implementation can supplement and enhance your situational awareness and allow you to complete tasks safely and efficiently while underway. The is strictly better than the real-world alternative which is for people to try to complete these tasks using a phone-in-hand while they are also attempting to drive.
>At an unfamiliar complex intersection (greater than 4-way), sometimes you can't figure out where the GPS wants you to go. A quick pinch-zoom before the light turns can give you the visual queue you need to avoid having to make a last minute decision as you enter the intersection.
Seems like a usability problem. Google Maps displays what lanes go in what directions so you don't have to zoom in on the map and will speak it to you so you don't even have to look at your phone/Android Auto/etc.
It does show an icon representation of the intersection and which lane to be in. I just prefer zooming in, sometimes Boston intersections are quite complex.
You can tap on the bubble in the search results to display information about the place and it will have a call button there. Don't remember if it still has that bubble once you start navigating.
It is also supposed to give you POI info including the phone and working hours if you tap on any POI bubble on the screen, but it doesn't work for some reason.
> You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving.
What does that have to do with anything? The touchscreen controls for most of that aren't even enabled when driving.
But on the Mazda you can't even do these things with the touchscreen while NOT driving.
This entire article, arugment and comment thread is about how Mazda is removing touch screens to improve saftey while driving. I agree the Mazda solution isn't much better though.
The person that I quoted was responding to someone who talked about keying in directions and the limitations that Mazda's limitation will cause for that. That functionality is not available while driving even with a touchscreen.
To me, its a situation of throwing out the good with the bad.
navigation was just an example. Angdthere is no place here for muscle memory. Do you want to switch radio station? (I hope I can do such thing during driving?). Look at screen where is focus now and rotate the wheel by some angle which depends on what you see on screen. Press the wheel, rotate the wheel again to select another radio station, press it again.
Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.
I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.
Well I do agree, it's definitely not a great solution either. I am not sure there is one that involves the screen at all.
Media buttons on the steering wheel were peak car usability. What is there really to be looking at other than the road while you drive? A map at best, but we can do better there too. A HUD of upcoming turns projected onto the glass for example. We had HUDs in cars in 1989 (Nissan Silvia) and some modern cars are bringing it back. I think that's the perfect blend of usability without compromising safety.
Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s
Or, you know, stop to re-adjust your course without endangering everyone sharing the road with you.
Your sarcasm looks a lot less smart once you examine the actual options.
Pull over to adjust the map. Does anyone really believe that adjusting GPS while in a moving vehicle is safe?
This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?
I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
> How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?
When I'm in the front passenger seat, dealing with the GPS and the A/C becomes my responsibility.
I’ve never been in a moving car where the driver did anything with the gps more than listening or asking a passenger to adjust it.
Set your destination before you set off? Or if you really need to do it after that point just pull over to the side of the road for a minute.
If that's what it takes, then so be it. The yearly road toll is embarassing. It wouldn't bother me one bit if all device input turned off as soon as the car started moving. Passengers can play Eye Spy to pass the time.
Ok Google directions home.
Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location.
The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
Mazda has shortcut buttons as well. See: third image in the article. Their UI is very similar to BMW.
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish.
As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.
>it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too.
Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me.
Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
There were green-and-black text UIs that allowed receptionist at hotel check you in blazingly fast, keeping an eye contact with you. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts.
Yup. These are a source of a frequent disagreement between myself and some UI/UX folks. I believe interfaces like these were/are superior to modern ones, precisely because they allow one to work efficiently.
People do, because they can. It doesn't matter whether they should or not.
When you design something, you don't design for ideal use, you design to eliminate risky misuse. This is a core axiom of user interface design. It's not good enough to just slap a warning disclaimer on it, as the designer, you're still liable.
I would have my engineering licence revoked if I ignored possible avenues of misuse, could design them out but didn't, and then ended up in court because they misused it and someone died. This isn't a hypothetical, this is how it works in the non-software world where engineering decisions can routinely kill people.
I think it's an easy cop out to say, "Doing literally anything other than focusing exclusively on the task of driving is not worth talking about."
The reality is, people will be adjusting their radios while they drive. They will be looking for open restaurants, changing their destination, and a number of other things while driving, and pretending like they're not worth accommodating ignores some very fundamental principles on the topic of economics.
Maybe, the point is not to make it easy. Maybe the point is to make you think "Hey, there's no safe way for me to navigate through 10 different screens to get to my GPS while I'm driving. Maybe I should pull over and do that instead?"
Most touchscreen varients are actually worse than this, and it's nessecary for their displays to be within arm's reach, increasing refocus time too.
I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.
Doing that with a touchscreen or physical controls while driving would be illegal in most jurisdictions, no?
> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)
Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose.
Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.
I don't think that solves the issue.
whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.
Reading the article is always strongly recommended. The research conclusions are in there.
Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy.
I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.
No, they didn't change it. Buttons are slightly re-arranged, but they're still there. See the 3rd pic in the article.
If you want GPS navigation, you press the "road" button:
https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_...
You don't even need to look down to do it, because after 10 minutes of driving in your car, you've memorized the buttons.
To be fair, navigating with carplay is also highly distracting because the voice controls are so basic and it forces you to pull over and deal with one of the two touchscreens to deal with route changes, adding a stop, evaluating express lanes, dismissing modals, looking at upcoming directions, etc etc. Navigation is highly distracting period.
The proper way to do this is by voice input.
Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.
Guess you could call me trilingual (swedish, english and spanish) and I'm having no issues with Android Auto understanding destinations even when my spanish/english is broken as hell, with music playing in the background or engine noises coming from outside.
Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
I just drove 14 hours this weekend and I can confirm the voice controls are almost entirely useless. If you’re lucky it interprets you correctly and you have a menu to sift through on a screen to pick the right option. If you’re unlucky it just does something without any confirmation. The only success I’ve really had is “direct me to <large city here>” and “direct me home”. All other efforts lead me to swear and pull over.
Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
It can be done properly. The BMW Mini has a pretty good voice input for the navigation, it relies on spelling out the names of cities and streets, there is a button based back-up but I find that the voice recognition works more than well enough for almost all destinations.
Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
Just because the technology sucks right now does not mean it's a bad idea. I can EASILY see voice commands in cars being commonplace and far superior to anything that exists right now.
So why not wait until it works instead of pretending? They sell it as if it is perfect right now, the future has come, except it's not.
Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.
Pronunciation of the names is the problem, spelling them should resolve that issue completely.
do these systems automatically pick up if I spell rather than pronounce, or do they need a special mode? I've never tried that...
I never tried the pronunciation, I'll give it a shot and see what it does. At a guess the results will be terrible :)
Which doesn’t really work when you have screaming children (or adults) in the car.
Note that plans are a less apt comparison as the cockpit of a plane under most circumstances safely permits looking away from the windscreen for 5-10 seconds at a time (or more) while under no circumstances can cars tolerate more than 1-2 seconds without risk of catastrophe (crash, loss of life and limb, etc).
> There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit.
Have you seen photos of a 737 Max cockpit...
https://www.google.com/search?q=737+max+cockpit&tbm=isch
Compare it with a
737-200 cockpit:
https://www.google.com/search?q=737-200+cockpit&tbm=isch
I'm pretty sure [1] none of those are touch screens.
However, there are aircraft avionics with touch screens, for example:
https://www.avidyne.com/products/ifd/index.html
[1] I'm a private pilot so I'm pretty familiar with the state of the art in aircraft avionics, but I don't fly a 737.
It takes a while for things to trickle down to certified jets and touchscreens are still relatively new. It will come: https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/airbus-aims-for-a...
If recent business jets are an indication, it's all touch based at the high end already. Also, Ipads are getting pretty popular for pilots. My understanding is that most pilots would bring one by default (two plus extra batteries typically) and that especially for GA, there is a lot of equipment and software that integrates with them. One odd thing is that some pilots use ipads to control equipment in the plane because of UI and UX issues. E.g. you can control a garmin 530 with an ipad and it seems like pilots prefer doing that because it is just easier.
I think both in cars and in the aviation industry there is the notion that the companies manufacturing UIs there are not necessarily that good at it because historically their focus was more hardware oriented. The UX of especially older equipment can be kind of clunky. E.g. many planes have an fms (flight management system) with a non qwerty keyboard that looks like it was designed in the nineteen sixties and just never updated. You still find the same design in relatively new planes like the A319.
I agree that it is nice to have physical controls for some thing. E.g. I love volume dials. But overall, touch is great when hardware designs result in very complex UX.
So, I suspect that Mazda getting rid of touchscreens is more their own inability to do good UI than any inherent problems with touch screens. The rest of the industry seems to be trying to catch up to Tesla. I recently sat in a very new Renault with Android Car and a big touch screen. It's a very nice upgrade from the previous generation which was very clunky to use and had lots of annoying bugs. Renault outsourcing the UI to a company that has a clue was a big improvement for them they were just hopelessly out of their depth.
I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is it is quite different to driving in terms of attention — a cruising pilot can easily look at a screen for 5 or 10 seconds (?) entirely safely, whereas a driver might struggle to even stay in lane looking at a screen for 10 seconds. So a touch screen is fine for a pilot but probably not good for a driver.
I am a pilot and you are exactly right. With an airplane autopilot coupled to a modern GPS, once you're cruising, you can pretty much crawl into the back seat and take a nap until it's time to land. (That's a little bit of an exaggeration but not much.)
The solution is a combination of tablet screens and accessible controls on the steering wheel or on the centre console.
I absolutely love my touch screen in my Honda and never felt unsafe because of it. All the controls for changing songs, volume, voice, etc are on the steering wheel via touch dials or a few buttons.
It’s not like the car (or airplane) companies aren’t aware of this.
I think this conflict in ideas is very well captured by the differences in flight control instrument panels in the Orion Spacecraft as compared to SpaceX's Dragon v2.
Here is an image of what I'm referring to: https://rocketry.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/orion-capsule.j...
The Orion control panel looks like it would be much easier to use in a heavily vibrating, high-G rocket. It's a lot harder to fat-finger a tactile, physical button/switch than a touchscreen. Notice that the switches even have cages so that they can't get accidentally toggled.
Note also the use of colour on the Orion schematics that immediately directly the eyes to areas of alert or risk.
Whereas on the SpaceX consoles even the message 'All systems nominal' is rendered in a pale blue colour that merges in with the muted pastel palette. I challenge readers to find it quickly.
> why you don't program on a tablet
I dare you to go tell that to /r/apple :)
All "how to use tablet as development machines" I saw were just "how to connect keyboard to tablet and connect to remote computer".
"how to use a table as development machine" has the unsurprising answer: "have a real computer do it".
We already have popular IDEs guiding text input onto one of the few plausible symbols at a cursor; how long before a touchscreen app that gives your suggestions and snippets as touch targets, instead of a keyboard?
Well the choice is less obvious when your two options are an iPad or a throttlebook with jam-happy butterfly switches.
In all seriousness, too many of my Mac-loving friends and coworkers are using laptops that're 4+ years old because Apple decided shaving a millimeter off the thickness was worth cutting key travel by 60% and having display hinges crack off the frame. Considering how long most of them have been buying Apple they deserve better treatment.
Heh, a throttle book with jam-happy switches.I'm stealing that the next time someone asks me why I haven't upgraded from my 5 year old MacBook pro.
The 2019 model actually made some progress with the throttle problem by undervolting the CPU, but it still has the broken keyboard and flawed display flex cable that's prone to breaking from repeated openings of the lid.
What's a computer?
> There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit.
Umm, I guess you haven't see the FAA-approved Garmin G3X Touch:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8o0Nk8E0S4
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnuRFAAKdfg
In air planes you have touch buttons and physical rotational dials on sides of the screen. Cars might eventually evolve into a voice controlled system to complement the dials.
It is interesting that you may in certain countries not operate a cell phone while driving, yet you can operate a car touch screen.
Air plane systems are for example Garmin GPS 430
Most of Apple and android auto and Honda built in system is voice and dial controlled while driving in my experience.
I only touch the screen when not driving. It’s not hard.
\dejectedly goes back to coding on termux on a phone with a bluetooth keyboard
Touchscreens became fashionable due to the iPhone and iPad hype. Welcome to IT, have a look at the upcoming fashions in the summer catalog.
Once something has been sold to nearly half the population of the planet for a decade or more, you can't sensibly call it a "fashion".
Apple were the first people to deploy high quality capacitive multi touch screens to the general public, with a gesture UI underneath for things like pinch zoom. This was an amazing improvement over previous handheld systems.
One username here ends with 1998, which is presumably the year they were born, so a 21-year-old. The original iPhone was released in 2007, when that person was ten. These kids grew up with touchscreens, of course they think it's normal to have them everywhere.
Smartphones obviously aren't just a fashion, touchscreen all the things is a fashion.
IT fashions usually work that way - there is an actually useful killer application and suddenly the technologies used by the killer application must be applied to everything. Peer to peer (Napster), Ruby / "static typing sucks, testing is better" (Ruby on Rails), touchscreens (iPhone), JavaScript (one language for client and server), blockchain (bitcoin / getting rich through speculation), deep learning (great solution to SOME problems) - it's a fairly simple pattern.
Also, the car industry has looong product cycles, so what you see now is what was hot 5-ish years ago.
> Once something has been sold to nearly half the population of the planet for a decade or more, you can't sensibly call it a "fashion".
While I don't disagree with your main point, I have to say that this is wrong.
That's what fashion literally is. Everybody wears clothes and so clothes are sold to the entire population of the planet. Yet we don't dress like in the 60's anymore. Maybe some do, but you definitely can't find big masses of people dressing like in the early 1800's, for example.
I find it fascinating to hear tech people hate on touch screens, when this is the best-in-class feature about Tesla. Can HN be consistent?
The reality is that people prefer more features than less, and buttons are not the best way.
What you probably hate are old, unresponsive automotive touch screens.
The future will use more microphones, be faster, use AI to predict what you want to do, etc....
But this seems like a "pop opinion", popular on the internet, but little basis in reality.
I'm a tech guy, and a car guy. I love cars. Keep the "features" the hell away from my cars. I don't want to sit about in a mobile cinema. I want a car I can drive.
The big touch-screen is a reason why I would not buy a Tesla. The reasons to buy one are economy and performance. Hell, the Prius might have actually been a decent car if it didn't look like a shoe, sound like an overburdened vacuum cleaner, and handle like a beluga whale.
Lol, the Prius is an excellent car, and it doesn't look, sound nor handle as you describe.
You must never have driven any kind of decent car.
TL, taurus, model s, mazda 3, p100d, sure bud.
Yeah I don't know. Rent a 911 for a day, and then sit in the Prius again.
No, i hate large modern touch screens in cars and prefer proper buttons, and controls that I can memorize, like the controller in my BMW. I can do most things with minimal eyes off road.
I would argue its not a best in class feature, its a liability.
I mean, Tesla's marketing department claims that the big touchscreen thing is a best in class feature. In reality, that's at best subjective.
Not ready to give Mazda any praise for their infotainment systems. I leased a 2019 CX-5 Grand Touring Reserve a couple months ago. Had I known how bad Mazda’s UX was I would have leased something else.
First off their system takes an eternity to cold boot. If I’m making a quick run to the store or dropping the kids off at a friends house the system isn’t available for most of the ride. While it’s booting, the radio remembers what it last did but all the controls including volume are locked. So if I was listening to one of the comedy channels on Sirius I have no way to mute it or turn down the volume of the often inappropriate content for a few minutes if my kids get in the car.
Second the system remembers very little of the settings between drives. For example the heated/ vented seats or the auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive.
I just drove a brand new Ford Fusion rental this week and their system while much clunkier did boot up almost immediately upon starting the car. Of course nothings perfect and while Ford did include hard buttons for most of the HVAC controls you still had to go though the touchscreen menus to find the setting to change the vent control to head and feet.
I would suggest taking it to the dealer, what you're describing sounds abnormal. Mine boots in about 10 seconds.
I do definitely find it annoying that it defaults to playing whatever audio source you last used when you start up your car. Whenever I have a passenger, I have a slight moment of panic as I try to remember what's about to play through the speakers, and whether it's appropriate for them to hear.
The infotainment system in my 2017 CX-5 often freezes on cold startup. There is no way to dismiss the "Warning" screen (which takes up the whole screen), even by pressing the "Dismiss" button. Just have to wait for it to go away on its own. I've had the backup camera freeze fully, which seems like a safety hazard. A few times, the whole system failed to initialize too, which forced me to pull over at the next gas station, and "power cycle" it by fully turning my car off and starting it back up again.
Mazda punches far above its price in terms of driving dynamics and interior quality, but I think their infotainment system is plain garbage and they should be absolutely ashamed of such poor quality.
>I do definitely find it annoying that it defaults to playing whatever audio source you last used when you start up your car.
As opposed to what? Hasn't that been the default behavior since cars have had radios in them?
I agree with a lot of your points, especially the one where the system picks up playing from where it left off and there is little you can do to stop it aside from mashing the volume or quickly choosing your audio source. However, sounds like you have a problem specific to your vehicle's computer, mine boots before I even leave the driveway.
I'm car shopping. I like most things about the CX-5 except the terrible infotainment system. Slow to boot up, the camera quality is just rage inducing. They went so far with soft touch materials inside but skimped on a better camera.
I'm probably going to buy a santa fe because hyundai did a great job with infotainment and there is physical buttons everywhere. Plus, the ergonomics are great.
Nothing competes with the gas efficiency of Skyactiv tho.
Agreed with your points but if your boot takes longer than fifteen seconds, take the car into your dealer.
My Vizio "smart" TV does this... turn it on during the day and mildly inappropriate content is still playing, volume locked for up to a minute.
It sounds like something is funky with your infotainment system. I have the same year, the trim below but with CarPlay support. It boots within 15 seconds generally, but volume is available instantly. I test drove a car without CarPlay and the boot time was comparable.
Yeah I bought a CX-5 recently and could write a case study on how to infuriate your users in every way possible. I like the car in general, but their infotainment would have been a dealbreaker if they didn't have Android Auto support. Even then it's pretty bad. Can't even get to your phone's voice assistant via their system, even though my $18 bluetooth handsfree in my old car could.
Turn off contacts syncing and it boots up much faster.
> auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive
Every car I drove with auto-hold requires you to enable it after each startup of the car. Pretty sure it's a safety thing, as this makes most basic thing (depressing break) behave differently than it did for all automatic cars for the last 50 years.
I don't even think you have to be defensive about it.
Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane.
But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons.
The things with buttons, levers and knobs is that they are expensive and very few designers/engineers are good at designing interfaces with them – either because they are not creative enough to get the optimal solution or because they are not pragmatic enough to test their creative solution to the core.
The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago.
Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music.
The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now.
The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap.
Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit.
Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway.
Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal.
Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them.
So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.
The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive.
And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive.
A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs.
People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s.
This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute.
Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive.
But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.
While there's no doubt many find FM synthesis hard, I disagree that the interface didn't make it way harder than it needs to be.
I am absolutely in love with the Yamaha Reface DX that I have, and greatly enjoy editing and the real-time controls over the parameters that it offers with its mere 4 touch sliders.
I think the direct control boxes didn't sell well because not enough keyboardists grokked FM well enough to mess with the sound live (and didn't expect to learn) -- and also because nobody loves add-on boxes. A better UI, I think would change things. Again, that's a lot of what makes the Reface DX fun.
In any case, perhaps the DX is not the best example here. A better example would be the many 90-s and early 2000-s synths, which were all about menus and you couldn't do anything immediately.
(Microkorg would also fall into that category, its knobs are deceptive: what each knob does depends on the value of two or so others knobs. It's menus but without screens. And it's a VA synth - no reason it couldn't be more like Roland Gaia which is one-knob-per-parameter).
Thanks for introducing me to the Microbrute!! Just watched a ton of videos and I like how simple the design is. Looks like it’s a great starter kit (in the video I watched, they recorded a simple piece then spent a bunch of time tweaking sounds to figure out what each one does).
I learned synths back in the 80s with wall-sized panels of knobs, switches, and patch cords. I loved it. It was Direct Manipulation. I could do anything to anything directly and instantly.
I hated synths in the 90s. All interaction was funneled through a tiny screen. I called it "building a ship in a bottle."
Now several manufacturers have brought back knobs (and even patch cords!) and it's a much better situation.
>I hated synths in the 90s. All interaction was funneled through a tiny screen. I called it "building a ship in a bottle."
I fully agree with your comment, and just wanted to say thanks for the metaphor :) I'm absolutely stealing it.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but the revival of synths with lots of single purpose knobs and sliders started much earlier than the 2010s. Clavia Nordlead and Roland jp 8000 are two examples of mid-'90 synths. I would say I that the demand started with the birth of house and other electronic dance music.
I agree with your correction, all I can say is that I still don't feel like I can afford a Nord Lead, and the Monologue and Microbrute are $300 :)
I still appreciate that virtual synths makes it much easier for beginners like me to start with making music.
But I wouldn't hold it against advanced users if they want a more tactile experience.
I've tried to imagine a touchscreen instead of knobs and toggles in a guitar... Should be !!fun!! experience switching up settings on stage in the darkness.
I couldn't agree more!
https://modular.blind.guru/images/foobarion.jpg
Totally agree: touch screens represent a compromise on usability when it's needed for flexibility, but are almost universally worse than a purpose-built tactile control.
Perfect example: I have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones which let you change volume and switch tracks by swiping on a touch-sensitive earpiece. It's mind-boggling to me that this was chosen over knobs and buttons: first of all it's really easy to accidentally trigger the controls when adjusting the headset. Also, since it's situated in such a way that you can't see it while you're operating it, it's exactly the type of interface which would benefit most from tactile feedback.
In the 1970's, Citroen put this marvellous piece of UX in a car... https://citroenvie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CX-Prestig...
I assumed since 2001, that soon a car will be made, where all the functions can be accessed with eyes still on the road. Just from the wheel, like the paddles, and buttons for thumbs on the wheel. Anything extra, just place your hand slightly from the wheel and immediately feel what you are about to switch and adjust. Imagine to access any function of the car in complete darkness just by the feel.
None of this bullshit, where buttons are far from each other, moving hands up and down left and right to change temperature, turn air-conditioning on/off. Where driver needs to glance down to steer hand into damn buttons. Where "infotainment" needs to show you anything at all about what you are listening to - as if you dont hear it. Keep information to a minimum, ffs.
Then we got touchscreens instead - now you cant even drive in full darkness and feel some buttons with your hand to adjust. There is not even a Night Mode.
Are car manufacturers really this bad? Yep. Tesla included.
Tesla indeed has a night mode. Color pallet of the whole UI changes.
Day: https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
Night: https://cdn-vox--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.vox-cdn....
The second link doesn't work at all on my computer. It downloads a 56kb .webp file which doesn't open. I tried to extract the non-AMP url here: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55955575/....
In my opinion, this screen still looks excessively bright, distracting, and the night-time photo really showcases the screen's inability to accurately display dark colors (black still looks washed-out or gray).
Thanks for the updated link. Copying and pasting on mobile over here.
The screen is quite high quality in my opinion, and not washed out at all. You’re seeing the effect from the camera washing out from the street lights.
See how dark the steering wheel is? No screen behind the wheel makes for sublime night time driving. It’s just you and the road, and silence.
You're seeing a photograph of the screen anyways. Of course the camera will wash out the screen.
That is not "automotive level" night mode. The touchscreen is still brighting up the interior and shows too much useless information.
The Saab 9-3 had a "Night" button, which when pressed, turned off _every_ light-source except for speed-odometer. There should be no information visible, no glow on anything, other than speedometer, and even it lowers its brightness.
Why though? Try it, if you get the chance, the fatigue I feel after driving with night mode in a Saab vs shitty cars, is exceptionally low. Eye-strain, whats that?
That’s the camera effect, not the real life experience.
Sorry, I just picked the first image I found on Google images.
To be sure, driving the TM3 at night is sheer joy. There’s no screen at all in front of your face. Just the road and a dark steering wheel. I find night vision much improved without having any indicators behind the steering wheel at night.
I'm a heavy Apple CarPlay user and I am delighted that my car (a 2016 Seat) has analogue controls that work with it. I know that when I'm required to use the on screen controls for certain functions, I am a less safe driver.
Yeah, my daily driver was an Audi with a rotary dial for about a year (no touchscreen at all), and Android Auto was great on it. You get to know the structure of all menus and can take actions blindly after a while. It's been almost a year since I've driven that car and I still know exactly what to press to show alternative routes in Google Maps, for example.
Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto.
I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.
Completely agree with you. I drive an Audi A4 with rotary control for CarPlay and it works perfectly fine. Moving to touchscreens is purely an exercise in cost-cutting.
Yeah the rotary dial for Android auto is very intuitive, shame they are not keeping it around, touch screen just seems much more dangerous
Touchscreen are so common because they're cheaper. They also look great when you're buying the car, and using the screen while parked in the store.
It's simply not optimised for usability but for attractiveness (both cost and aesthetic wise)
Same as the glossy monitors that look nice in the store but ruin your eyes and productivity.
I hate glossy monitors with a fiery passion and don't understand why anybody thinks glossy is a feature and not a bug.
I suppose having smooth glass can make the screen look slightly more crisp, but having a bright reflection of everything in the room erases any gains in clarity.
I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
For music and navigation, touchscreens are OK, as these are things you don't suddenly need to adjust if something happens. But for instance the defrost function on the AC can be something that you need to immediately control while driving 60 mph, e.g. if you enter a tunnel with moist microclimate (we have one of those nearby, it fogs up your windscreen in ~10sec at some conditions). Such things need to have physical buttons with logical placement.
Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:
http://www.carkhabri.com/Gallery/volvo/volvo-xc60/interior/l...
> the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air
I was driving a friend's newer car down the freeway once, and had to call him to find out how to turn on the godam defroster. There were so many knobs, switches, and dials that influence this, all labelled with icons so I had no idea what they did. Turns out that you had to push two buttons, toggle a toggle, and turn two knobs. Madness.
My car has a selector that you move to "defrost". Then it defrosts, like magic.
I want to speak to the car with my hands on the steering wheel and tell it to defrost the windows like I'm talking to an Alexa device. I can't wait for this day to come...
An automatic co-pilot would be nice indeed. It should also hand me drinks and snacks and keep me awake with conversation.
ATM it's still a co-pilot job to translate navigation system information into actionable directions in foreign cities..
I mean this could the be itch at the base of a startup, right?
Would be really interesting, especially with cars like Tesla that do OTA updates and can improve your "co-pilot" all the time.
I think Volvo's electric car is going to be doing this with some sort of deeper Android Auto integration
Why wouldn't you want it to defrost automatically without a spyware microphone and neural network and a ton of problems with accents and background noise?
> Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:
It's nice, but it still a major issue: you need to look at it while pressing it to know state.
If, instead, it's three stacked buttons top to bottom, you don't have to do that.
My car (and many older cars) simple has two knobs. One for temperature, one for location. If you entered a tunnel, you just crank the right hand knob all the way over to defrost. Better than buttons.
Oh I agree, not every action is suited to a on/off toggle, that's why there are so many mechanical interfaces.
In a car, the aim should be for logical use without eyes leaving the road much.
I absolutely agree! I just wanted to point out that a knob can be even more intuitive than buttons.
But it does not. None of my trips are in calendar. None of my music is in Google Play or any stock music player. And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.
Let me guess. Motorcycle rider? (_Fellow_ motorcycle rider...)
No, just random guy on KIA RIO. I use my car primarily on weekends, using public transport on work days.
Newish bike rider. Do you have a phone mount? Do you listen to music or have any sorta HUD?
I do not use a phone mount. It's that _last_ thing I want when I'm riding.
I _used_ to wear a smart watch (all of the first 3 iterations of the Pebble) because I thought it would be useful to know who's calling when I can feel my phone buzzing in my pocket while riding so I can decide whether to pull over and answer it or not. Turns out the answer is alway "no". Either I'm jus commuting and I can choose to call back (or not) when I get to my destination, or I'm on the road and I don't care that I won't get to it for several hours or more.
I'm pretty good at navigating - so I don't want/miss the gps/mapping thing. On trips I'd _much_ rather just turn down roads I've never been on that look like they're headed kinda the right way, and see where I end up. If I need to, I'll check in on the phone when I fuel up every 2-3 hours - but it's pretty rare for me to end up somewhere with no idea of which direction and at least a rough guess of how far away the place I'm headed to is.
I do sometimes listen to music - using in ear headphones that fit under my helmet. I'll _occasionally_ use that for turn-by-turn navigation to if I'm trying to get somewhere in town I've never been before in a place I'm not familiar enough to dead-reckon myself close enough that I can get to a place where I'll get by on remembered landmarks and street names.
many large touring motorcycles have built in navigation and music, Harley and Honda even support Apple car play now. Harley had good voice control as well. Indian has a large panel on their bikes with navigation and split screen.
It all comes down to being a responsible rider/driver
You are not the target audience for this feature, but that audience exists and it's gigantic.
Is Audi's target market also a complete subset of that target audience, or is it at least significantly overlapping with that target audience?
Luxury car makers seem to keep putting more and more not-directly-related-to-the-act-of-driving features in cars every new model, so that leads me towards, "Yes."
As touchscreen interfaces and android auto integration creeps almost in EVERY car market, I can't be not target audience.
You seen to care deeply about your privacy, so no you aren't the target audience.
> And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.
Not the target audience for the phone integration features...
> You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar.
We're revealing too much to google and God knows who else.
Apple CarPlay has the same integration but all the data can be kept private on your device
"Give me convenience or give me death"
Sometimes I wonder what the endgame is. When all things (and people) have had as many iPads as can possibly fit shoved into every opening, and I need only mutter a desire for an Amazon drone[0] to appear to satiate it... what will I actually /do/?
[0] Which may or may not be a person...
Complain about it.
>You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar.
Do I need a book a time slot in my calendar for going to the hardware store?
Reminds me of this old dilbert https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-04-26
I can say the same for Apple CarPlay. Having tactile controls is nice but completely removing the touch screen is not a good thing. If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality.
The only reason GM’s is best is because they’ve finally acquiesced and admitted that Apple and Google do it better and their UX reflects that
As mentioned, Apple CarPlay works just fine on Mazdas without touchscreen so I'm not sure why do you think these two are exclusive. There are even pictures of CarPlay running on new Mazda 2019 in the article you're commenting on.
My thinking was that if you have CarPlay you will still have to look at the screen regardless of whether or not you have tactile controls.
I missed reading this part of the article:
"The head-up display that top trims of the Mazda 3 get is now projected onto the windshield. The amount of time it takes the eyes to focus on the head-up display is greatly reduced because it’s now focused on a point 7.5 feet ahead of the driver."
>If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality
Funny thing. I have a newer car with a touch screen interface. I also had an older Civic which someone recently destroyed. So with the insurance money, I bought an early 2000's Accord. The previous owner had installed a new Bluetooth radio. No touch screen. Lots of buttons.
At least for entertainment, it's way better than any touch screen interface I've used.
It has buttons for FM presets - the thing I missed most with the touchscreen interfaces. And no, I don't want to scroll like crazy to get to the right preset using a knob or steering wheel. I know what station I want to go to, and it's so much better if I simply have to press a button without looking. Random access FTW.
Every Bluetooth interface I've seen in touchscreen cars has this flaw: Say I was listening to a podcast or some music. I decide I don't want to listen to it so I hit pause (there is no "stop" icon). I also have Waze running, and its volume is too low (very often the case that Waze's volume and the podcast's differ too much, so you can't use both simultaneously). I increase the volume so I can listen to Waze, and the music/podcast resumes playing! Why? Why on Earth would anyone want this feature where adjusting the volume means "Play"?
My 3rd party Bluetooth radio doesn't do stupid things like that.
And then the time to connect to Bluetooth. It takes too long in every touchscreen entertainment system. With the 3rd party radio, it's blazingly fast.
Lots of other cool things about the 3rd party tactile Bluetooth/radio. I rarely drive my newer 2015 car. It has nothing going for it over my old Accord (well, except possibly safety - but that touchscreen is making things unsafe...)
That's great when I'm going somewhere for work. It's not so good when I've not put the "appointment" in my calendar. If the voice interface were 100% perfect it would be OK, but it's not (especially with weird road names).
The key issue for me is, if I'm driving, I have to look at a touch-screen to hit the right button. With physical controls, I can use muscle memory and keep my eyes on the road.
That's the optimum best-case.
On the contrary I recently plugged my phone into the USB port of a hired Peugeot 207. All I wanted to do was charge it. But every few seconds the phone and in-car functions were interrupted by native pop-ups stating "No Android Auto compatible apps found". Constantly for the whole journey when I was trying to use my phone for navigation.
> On the contrary I recently plugged my phone into the USB port of a hired Peugeot 207.
This can be privacy-violating, as if any kind of syncing happens, a whole bunch of your personal data is now in the car:
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/01/30/car-ren... * https://www.privacy4cars.com/home/default.aspx
If you rent cars somewhat regularly, than a USB car charger may be a worth considering:
* https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-usb-car-charger/
Yeah, I have used Android Auto. It worked fairly well for me. It was very pleasant to have some apps accessible on the screen of my car. But it didn't integrate with all the buttons in my car. Also the connection wasn't always working that well.
I stopped using it after a while. I don't mind listening to the radio. And although Android Car has a nice modern user interface, the default user interface in my car works just as fine. I want to look at it as little as possible.
> not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Branded interface was not the right wording here. I was looking for a word that describes a car company building a good and fitting experience that suits the car you are driving.
"You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar."
Less than 1% of my car trips would have ever been in a calendar...
Android Auto works just fine on Mazdas without touchscreen :)
Indeed, using Android Auto daily i'm happy I have basically nearly nothing to do in VWs UX.
Years ago I had a friend that was an embedded HW/SW guy working for our local Ford manufacturing (AU). He was very proud of an antenna switch that had options for "fully up/halfway/fully down" and explained all the complexities of counting revs on the motor that was doing the moves and remembering the count and working out whether it had reached the top etc.
When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
The idea that the people building these UIs are actually interested in actual safe UX is misguided. UX is irrelevant, UI has to be sexy in the showroom.
Neither Apple or Google want the manufacturers to put in knobs and switches, because then they'll have to adapt their partially neutered existing iOS/Android UIs to support things like CANbus etc. Plus the integration costs will go up and nobody got time for that.
>When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
In fairness, there's a lot to be said about limited options. The benefit of the 3 position switch is simply that the user doesn't have to think about what the "optimal" position is. Moving the antenna up and down goes from selecting one of 3 numbers, to hitting a button to make a floating point number increase, and then hit another button to stop it on the right position. I personally don't think that's a good UX for the majority of people. (Heck, I'm not even sure what the point of a 3 position antenna is!)
This is absolutely the right way to go. I'm on the market for a new car for the first time in a long time and the terrible UX decisions car makers are implementing is quite shocking.
Finally a car company that gets it. Touchscreens and cars should be mutually exclusive, anything that takes your eyes off the road in a car is simply dangerous.
Feedback could be visual and in extreme cases audible. Input should be tactile, so buttons rather than surfaces.
And screens should display only a little bit of information, in a font large enough that you don't end up straining your eyes when you switch from the road to the screen and back.
I probably own the final Mazda that has a "touch screen"... If you could ever really call Mazda's touch screen a touch screen.
A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison.
I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying.
And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow.
I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.
When my iPod Classic died it really stung especially since they discontinued them. I hate playing music on my phone. I cant skip songs or pause without looking properly if I am on an aux cable.
Sure Bluetooth is a thing but you dont always drive your own car and every car has their own convoluted way to do Bluetooth.
I wish Android or iPhones had multimedia related buttons somewhere on them (dont miss that lock button / slider thing Apple used to add in so you dont butt skip a song). It is much safer for me to feel out specific buttons while driving than looking down on my phone screen.
You can skip tracks by long pressing the volume keys if you configure it: https://www.xda-developers.com/skip-music-tracks-android-vol...
This used to be a stock feature in a lot of phones. I haven't had a phone that did this since my HTC Droid Incredible back in 2011.
I tried to figure out how to do this a number of times, but never saw a clear answer. I might try it next time I'm driving around.
Not to mention that the on-the-go playlist feature worked great on iPods (just hold the button down) but Apple still hasn't figured that out on iPhones.
Agree that Bluetooth is a nightmare. Every Bluetooth radio wants to dig into my phone and download my contacts (and who knows what else) but all I want to do is play music. If I do this in a rental car I have to remember to figure out how to wipe the radio when I'm returning the car and already rushing to catch a plane, so I don't even bother with Bluetooth any more. It's maddening.
Good to see that at least some manufactures have a sense for safety.
I miss the days I could reach for a button blindly to adjust my aircon or work the radio.
I don't know what the problem is or how to fix it, but every car UI/UX I've ever tried, from Audi to Toyota was an absolute repulsive nightmare. Even while not driving it takes forever to find a way to any basic function - while in regular life the phones, and most other electronics are sub-second mostly intuitive. Major car makers always feel like they are two decades behind! And everyone insists on their own separate rat-hole of an experience. We shall see if Mazda's does any better, but the touchscreens I've interacted with in cars were completely maddening, an ugly pixelated blast from a very slow past even in brand new cars.
Sensible interior design with hardware buttons is one of the main reasons why I opted to get a Mazda over other competition. Most infotainment systems were horribly janky and laggy and some companies even forced me to use them for things like HVAC controls (I'm looking at you Peugeot). Wasn't a great experience.
Having said that - I still like the fact that my Mazda has a touchscreen active while stopped. Entering Nav directions is way faster than with the commander knob.
Thank fuck, and I hope the rest of the automotive industry follows suit: I have never felt less safe operating a vehicle than when I have had to adjust some car setting fifteen nested menu items deep while rolling down the highway in an unfamiliar rental at 65 miles per hour.
It's been mentioned a few times but I believe haptic feedback is absolutely necessary to the future of the touch screen.
How many times have you handed your phone to someone to show them and in the process both you and the person receiving accidentally made a multitude of gestures, resulting in your phone freaking out and opening all kinds of random apps/windows..
I love how the new iPhones have the "press" ability on apps to open more options. Personally I wish all interactions required a little bit more force (besides, say, scrolling). When almost half the device is responsive, it makes it all too easy to accidentally perform actions.
Does anyone know where the technology is with this? I remember seeing articles a long time ago about potential for brail via haptics in screens
Touchscreens in cars are all about reducing cost for the manufacturer.
They are less safe, less convenient to use than physical controls.
The manufacturers know this, but they don't care.
I believe most customers also currently like them because touchscreens are a relatively new technology, and they are a fad.
I feel like I'm in the perfect position to comment on this. I drive a 2019 Tesla Model 3 and my girlfriend drives a 2018 Mazda CX-3. The display on the Model 3 is perfectly positioned so I don't have to lean forward and do not apply any torque to my steering wheel whatsoever to adjust the settings on the huge 15" capacitive touch screen. I also don't have to migrate my eyes any further from the road than I would to find a physical button on a dashboard due to the close, raised position of the Model 3's display and I can see perfectly fine out the windshield while adjusting everything on the display. The buttons are also larger with a 15" display compared to the tiny 7" display which is located very far away on the dashboard of the CX-3. The position and size of the display on the Mazda has the side effect of me rarely even attempting to use the touch features of the display, but when I do I have to lean forward which may cause me to apply slight torque to the wheel.
Based on my experience, Mazda needs a larger display located closer to the driver if they want to make use of touch controls without the side effects they mention. The wheel method is horribly clunky and takes more thinking to get to the control you want to adjust. It's much faster and safer I believe being able to access the control quickly and in a position that doesn't require you to take your eyes far away from the road. You still have to look at the display and process your control movements when using the dial control on the Mazda and it takes longer. Tesla has a better UI by far. If you haven't driven a Model 3 yet, I recommend doing so before commenting against touch screen UX.
I've owned six Mazda vehicles over the past 30 years. Current owner of a 2016 CX-9. The stock behaviour was that the touchscreen doesn't accept touches unless the vehicle is stopped -- though it doesn't require you to put the vehicle in park.
Also, the vehicle has a heads-up-display projected on the windshield. The original HUD included a graphical tachometer so you could see the revs which has limited value except it looked cool and gave you some indication on when you were in boost. In a future update Mazda removed the graphical tach in the HUD citing safety as they felt the constant animating tach in the driver's field of view was a distraction. But, the tach remains displayed if you had it turned on before the update.
The voice command functionality is okay, including for the mediocre built-in navigation, once you learn the specific phrases and commands.
Last fall I upgraded to Apple CarPlay and the behaviour is the same. Touch input only works when the vehicle is stopped. There was a rumour that one of the reasons why CarPlay took so long to come to Mazda vehicles was because Mazda wanted integration with it's rotary command nob, back button, and other function buttons around the knob and on the steering wheel. Not sure if it's true, but I will say that navigating CarPlay with the knob is just fine when driving, and the physical back button allows me to navigate to the previous screen regardless of whether the previous screen is a CarPlay screen or one of the Mazda screens, which is really great.
I know some Mazda owners were upset with these limitations, complaining that it prevented the passenger from operating the screen, but that seems like a corner case.
If you think about, anything that 100% requires a driver to remove their eyes off the road for extended periods of time is a bad thing waiting to happen. I guess a lot of cars don't have touchscreens though and you don't see a lot of news or analysis on how these touchscreens are killing people. I still see people driving 70 MPH on major Interstates with their heads literally down staring at their phones.
At any rate I still think this is a great idea. Mazda came close with the generation of their infotainment systems before their current ones. You could mostly use the rotary dial and do things if you memorized how many clicks of rotation of the wheel it took and which button to press in the gutter on top of the transmission.
I think the next best thing is a voice UI to control HVAC and entertainment. The one on my 2015 Mazda 6 is pretty bad but this might force them to invest in that which would give them a competitive edge.
Cue the angel choir.
Touch screens in vehicles drive me nuts! Requiring the driver to divert their attention from the road makes all tablet-style interfaces a degradation of UX. In all the cars I learned to drive in, I could adjust every thermostat control as well as every audio interface completely by touch, without taking my eyes off the road.
Not to mention the software issues! In one vehicle, you literally could not turn off the radio. Your options were to press the mute button (which would only hold until you restarted your car - at which point you'd get blaring music or static) or to just turn the volume as low as you could.
And every car is now different and unpredictable! My dashboard should be a utility, not a visually stimulating video game where I need to learn every menu and submenu just to fade the audio to the rear.
All I can say is THANK GOD, Mazda. I hope all other manufacturers follow your lead.
I think the big issue is in a majority of vehicles, UI/UX is nothing short of atrocious. Navigating menus can often be totally unintuitive, even for techie users - now imagine older folks attempting to operate these while driving. In this case, if you can't do it right, it's better to not do it at all.
I am reminded of a quote I read lately referring to now Ford CEO’s Jim Hackett’s research in understanding the automotive industry (he came from outside the industry). Specifically: when it comes to cars, people LOVE their cars.
Someone’s relationship with their car is very intimate and personal, in many ways more so then a house.
Much of the discussion I am seeing in this thread is very passionate, which confirms the above observation.
Just to offer a counter anecdote, I am passionate about this topic because it involves life and death. I care about my car in so far as it gets me places. If I didn't need it in my car centric city I wouldn't have one. But, as other people drive, and I walk or cycle, I want those people to have car GUIs that do not distract them.
Completely agree, not everyone is as passionate as others (I am much like you). But there is a large community that IS very much passionate. I still recall a fellow classmate at school who if given half the chance will talk about cars till the next morning.
But as they always say, to each their own. But especially in non-utility cars, there very much a level of passion associated with owning a car.
The worst is the touchscreens on some Honda models (eg. 2016 Fit EX).
1. They removed the volume knob in favour of a volume slider on the touch screen. Very difficult to use, and even after a couple of years I have not been able to get used to it, and keep reaching for a physical input.
2. There's many UI quirks (bugs and ill conceived design flows) that make menu navigation, managing saved stations, switching from AM to FM, connecting a Bluetooth device etc. extremely difficult. RDS is even disabled by default, which defeats the purpose of having all the extra real estate of the touch screen.
Lots of complaints from users, taking them years to acknowledge it sucks.
3. The answer and ignore touch screen buttons are so close together, it's easy to accidentally tap ignore when trying to answer a call ...
Kudos! Glad to see this swing back to tactile controls.
At the CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem. We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.
You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).
While I applaud the human factors engineering of removing touch-sensitive screens, it only applies to vehicles in which there is a driver. We are clearly in the final days of "driving", before the driver becomes just another passenger in the autonomous vehicle. Once fully autonomous, won't the touch-screen interface be the ideal user interface inside a vehicle - familiar, ubiquitous and simple? Wouldn't Mazda be better served in spending their design budget on accumulating the exponential real world autonomous driving data that is giving brands like Tesla an advantage?
I’m surprised I had to go so far down to find this comment. Most complaints about cabin UI here are that they require taking eyes off the road. Tesla is clearly designing a car for a time when the driver never needs to look at the road at all.
Finally we are back to Citroen CX design putting controls on the center console:
https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/86-Citroen-DX-Prestige/i-Cv...
Aren't most of the controls on your picture not on the center console? The bloody hazards button is behind the driving wheel and inaccessible to the passenger.
For what it's worth I've pretty much always known the controls to be over the center console.
And the instruments being there as well has been happening for some time, at least for some vehicle classes e.g. on the C3 picasso anything but the purely driving-related controls is on the center console: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/c3-picasso/61746/used-...
Look at the controls behind the gear shift stick - not much but still similar to what Mazda does with the audio controls.
BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly.
> Look at the controls behind the gear shift stick - not much but still similar to what Mazda does with the audio controls.
I don't think I've ever seen a car where these weren't on the center console.
> BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly.
'round here it's common to use the hazards when in sight of or at the tail of a highway / freeway traffic jam.
The controls there are definitely not in the same place as most cars. Here they are to the right of the driver, between the gear shift stick and the handbrake.
Apart from some modern cars with a single dial and maybe a couple buttons there, most only have storage space there and the controls are in the front, not between the driver and passenger.
Oh I see, you're talking about the entertainment system of the DX having its controls in the center isle, next to the handbrake.
I was looking at the car system controls below the air vents, hence my wondering what the difference was.
FWIW BMW's idrive and Audi's MMI physical control are in roughly the same spot (idrive's been both below and besides the gear selector, MMI's usually been above or below though both have basically surrounded the stick: https://www.picclickimg.com/00/s/MTE1MFgxNjAw/z/xvEAAOSwll1W...).
And though recent generation MMIs are apparently touchscreen-only, BMW has retained physical controls next to the shifter: https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/BMW-6-Ser...
I can't imagine reaching those without "applying torque to the steering wheel" (or straight blocking it which is much worse).
They're very easy to reach with you right hand while holding the wheel with your left hand.
Some great thoughts in this thread, most of them I already agree with. Some thoughts I haven't seen discussed.....
Cars go out of style. They last a lot longer than a phone or tablet. Look at any 00's era GM product. The radio/climate buttons are straight out of a Cozy Coupe. It's gross, but in 2001 they were stylin'! Look at the 1992 Subaru Legacy, or the 1990 Ford Tempo, or the 1991 Nissan Sentra. Electric seatbelts, enormous speedometers, oddly shaped steering wheels... They were cool! Now they're eye-catchingly gaudy. Lets not even get into the "digital dash" (yeah, I'm talking to Jethro in the Pontiac).
What if you could have a car with a touchscreen but it only included Android Gingerbread (2.3) and that was it?
Other than that I am always amazed that modern cars have back up cameras and drive-by-wire steering/throttle/brakes but they still have a simple "check engine" light. They don't even print out their own trouble codes let alone tell you "Cylinder 5 misfire!" Such a feature would be trivial and add real value, especially in the truck market. Perhaps when right-to-repair takes over there will be no more incentive to keep the workings of cars magical and mysterious to the layman.
They don't have a good visual display of the check engine light, but you can get a lot of information from that light, with the cross manufacturer standard ODBII/EOBD (on board diagnostics 2 / enhanced onboard diagnostics). Progress is going slow in adding features, but a $35 tool like this can give you detailed information. One of the best car related purchases I have made:
https://www.amazon.com/ANCEL-AD310-Enhanced-Universal-Diagno...
Maybe I'm just a luddite but I can't stand any of these features in new cars. Feels more like misfeatures to me.
I rent cars fairly often for work and so I see a lot of touchscreens, a lot of bluetooth, whatnot. My car at home has a simple radio, a CD player that rarely gets used, and cruise control. I prefer that to any of this new integrated tech. The only thing about new cars that I really miss is a backup camera.
95% of everyone would agree with you. It's the car manufacturers and the business people behind the terrible tech in the car industry that disagree and want us to have touchscreens.
I remember when microwaves had one dial and no buttons, no digital touchscreens. You set the dial to the desired cook time in minutes/seconds, and it automatically started (as long as the door was closed).
Same with an oven. Turn the dial to 350 and the oven was on and set to 350. It took a fraction of a second vs a touch screen.
These new interfaces are often a terrible use of "technology" and are actually a step (or more) backward.
I remember those days - I liked our microwave with just a time knob and a start knob.
But it had its drawbacks. My young children couldn't set the time to heat their oatmeal. "Turn it to 1 minute". They'd twist the knob and say "Is that enough?" Without knowing enough about time they couldn't (yet) figure out to turn right or left to get to the right number.
With a digital one, they'd just poke 1,0,0 and hit start.
Young children behavior is interesting, I remember a friend whose 3 year old boy can’t read but fully capable of using his parents phone to watch Youtube. The boy constantly use Voice Recognition instead of keyboard input in such a fluid manner. After the search shows up, the boy simply pick the cartoon he liked.
Tap and swipe is first nature to him. What fascinates me is, this boy cant figure out how to turn on the tv because he keeps tapping amd swiping the remote control. I once saw him trying to swipe on the light switch as well.
By the time I had kids, the dial interface was long gone...but if I could teach my kids to push 1,0,0, start, I'd bet I could teach them what 1:00 looked like on the dial pretty quickly.
Not really. They have to be able to understand math, not just memorize digits.
I am absolutely stunned that it's taken people so long to realise this. How the bloody hell could anyone have been so stupid to not realise that we need buttons with tactile feedback so we can keep our eyes on the road.
It's extraordinary.
Removing touch screens from the driver is a good one but there are so many distracting UI patterns for drivers. The scary thing is that I would bet people have died because of poor patterns that exist. These are some that I have:
1. Using Apple iPhone for navigation. Phone rings. I pick it up using car controls. The navigation screen is now gone and is replaced with the phone screen. [scramble to swipe bottom of phone to get back to nav] 2. Audio routing. The car winds up acting like a Home theater receiver that I have to debug while driving. Why can’t I hear my music? Am I on AM/FM/IPhone USB/iPhone Bluetooth/Wife’s Bluetooth. So many options. 3. Every time I start driving my car, Christmas music starts automatically playing from my iPhone through the car speakers. It’s in my music library and for some reason it auto plays (Why apple?). I always have to do some mid-driving swipeage to get this to stop.
These are horrible patterns. I’d love to spend the rest of my life designing UI for simplifying the driving experience. If anyone wants to hire me, please do.
Count me in, too. I'm an embedded systems developer/electrical engineer with considerable automotive experience. Contorting myself under dashboards isn't as much fun as it used to be, but I'll do it if I can make a difference.
I'll gladly be a co-pilot on that project. I feel the same way. There's so many edge cases that can become show-stoppers (accidents) in driving interfaces.
Tesla is probably only company with proper software engineering team that managed to create smart car platform.
Others trying to imitate its screens are shooting themselves into foot. If you are not able to implement continuous delivery, you should stick to hardware toggles. It's that simple.
The problem of screen being screen still stands in Tesla's cars, but much bigger problem is shipping crappy screens.
I like what you're saying, but I think I can improve the message a bit by shortening it:
>you should stick to hardware toggles
There we go, nothing to add now :)
That is a really good idea. Touch controls are nearly useless on a moving vehicle. It would be a lot better if Apple/Google came up with a standard tactile interface for their in-car offerings.
Don't get me wrong -- CarPlay/Android Auto are leagues ahead of what individual car makers have to offer. Having a standard system across all car makers is a good idea too. They just need to come up with a more tactile interface.
The touch screen doesn't necessarily have to go, though -- it could simply be disabled when the vehicle is moving.
Volkswagen, for example, have a rotary dial which lets you flip through all the items on the screen to select the one you like. It still requires the driver to glance at the screen, but at least it doesn't require them to touch the precise spot on the screen -- which IMO is more distracting. That said, even the rotary dial is not perfect as it can't be operated by touch only -- w/o taking your eyes off the road -- not unless you know the position of every single icon/control by heart.
My Alfa Romeo (and all recent Alfa Romeos in the US) don't have touchscreens. The screens are in touch range and they have CarPlay and Android Auto, but you have to use the wheel with them.
I got used to it pretty quickly and after a week or two I don't really have to look at the screen to do 99% of things I need to do. It seems much safer to me, though it was annoying at first.
My Rolls doesn't have a touch screen, which is nice because it helps from distracting my driver during trips to the yacht club or the occasional polo match.
This comment seems so weird - it's just a European brand - not a rich one. Alfa Romeo is nowhere near the price of a Rolls.
The most expensive Alfa (their halo car) is a third of the price of the cheapest Rolls without any options. Ford makes a more expensive car than Alfa.
Alpha Romeo is an Italian luxury brand in the U.S. Ford in the same sentence is shocking.
I was actually pondering buying a Mazda, but now I am not so sure. Generally I get the idea - please give me hardware buttons for radio/music volume, temperature control, or to toggle suspension modes or whatever. But I want to use e.g. the Spotify on my phone, and Google Maps. Someone further down commented that it seemed to him that car makers have given up on their own branded version if car software, and ohmygod yes, thanks. It was always an afterthought and poorly thought out, buggy and much less functional.
So please, maybe find a middle ground, as I said - car functionality with hardware knobs, and a touchscreen for stuff like navigation (where you need the sreen anyway), and music control. Otherwise it will get worse - then I can use the hardware button to select my BT input an dhave to fiddle around on my much smaller phone screen. No one can actually want that, if the alternative is to use a condensed version of that interface on a bigger screen...
I have driven a 2018 Mazda 3 quite a lot. The touchscreen is disabled while the car is moving.
For complicated things while driving - that you wish you had a touchscreen to accomplish - I wish you wouldn't do them while driving. I say this after more than a decade working responding to road accidents.
However, the Mazda interface has been great for all the Android Auto functions (including Google maps and Spotify) simply using the physical buttons. They clearly went to some effort to make it work well.
And if you prefer, you can use voice controls fairly effectively via Android Auto or Apple carplay.
Please keep your eyes on the road.
That middle ground exists pretty much exactly the way you describe in recent VW group cars.
I'm a huge fan of physical/tactile input (and output) devices. I use foot pedals hooked up to an Arduino for my CTRL/SHIFT/META keys both at work and home, which helps my RSI enormously. I also designed a wearable bluetooth device for adding physical buttons to phones[0] for a school project. I think there's a huge potential for such products, and I'd love to get back to exploring that space at some point.
If you want to get excited about this type of stuff, I highly recommend this TED talk[1].
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJD...
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_s...
I listen to XM radio. My toyota interface is a dial for volume, a dial for tuning, and 6 preset buttons (and 6 pages of presets).
I can easily tune through all 150+ stations very easily to find a particular station. I can switch up 20 stations with a single twist, without looking. Also since stations are grouped, I can set a preset for each type of station, then easily tune up or down to listen to other related stations.
My wife's XM is a honda touch screen. The presets work ok, except they are touch screen so you have to look at the screen to change presets. But if you want to manually go to another station, you have to hit 2 touch buttons to get to a tuning screen. Then you have to hit the up/down tuning button each time you want to go up or down a single station. It is pretty much impossible to try to find a station if you don't already know the number because it could be 100's of touches.
I appreciate your point, and think it comes down to what use case most users will benefit from optimising.
My wife switches between Spotify, the Music app and a separated radio app. She does it on her phone's screen when at stop, she could do it on CarPlay or the android version, but I can't just imagine how it would work without a generic touch interface.
You use case (listening to radio) is in line with the current UI paradigm, other use cases (using apps) just won't work with it. That's where we could find a tradeoff I think.
My touch controlled stovetop is a nightmare, I can't imagine dealing with a touchscreen in my car.
One thing I really dislike about everything being integrated into a single touch-screen is that you've now created a single failure point for all those integrated systems. At least with tactile controls, if my radio knob breaks I can still adjust my HVAC.
Also, when the touch-screens break they tend to be much more expensive to fix. I listened to one person say they were quoted $7k to fix one. They were of a conspiratorial mindset, so they thought it was a planned obsolescence feature to help convince someone to buy a new car instead. I don't know if that's true but the idea of a that type of reliability cost is enough to keep me from returning to the same manufacturer.
I own a 2014 Mazda 3, brilliant car. The touchscreen firmware is a pain to update every year while servicing it. When I bought the car it came it the GPS hardware pre-installed however I was supposed to buy the maps separately for about $500. I didn't see the point in this as for that money I could have bought a new iPhone at that time and have various navigation apps. I also praise Mazda for the decision. In the 5 years since I own the car I probably actually used the touchscreen 20 times as usually I change songs or radio channels from the steering wheel button. Buy a Mazda, you won't regret it :)
2016 Mazda 3, completely agree.
Also have a 2016 Model S, and the bluetooth works much better on the Mazda, as far connecting and using a cellphone quickly.
They introduce other problems than just distracted drivers.
I took in my Mazda3 to have the screen replaced. There was an issue with the sensors that mistakenly thought someone was touching the screen. At low speeds, when the toch screen re-activates, it would start navigating on its own; from changing music stations to calling people and changing GPS waypoints. Drivers trying to stop this will be more distracted than they otherwise would be. This happens at stop signs, red lights and slow-moving traffic.
Hey! This happened on Sunday in my wife's CRV! We were going to lunch, and the touchscreen went apeshit, flipping between menus at the speed of light, beeping madly.
And, as you said, she immediately began fooling with it, trying to get it to stop. I had to tell her "Let me do this! You just drive!" Its very, very distracting.
Go to your dealer. I wasnt notified but they had a type of limited warranty where they knew about it. The sensors were not installed correctly in some units. They replaced it for free.
Excellent decision for Mazda. They've been optimizing everything for years, tho a bit lagging with their electronics UI. The touchscreen was already disabled when rolling (faster than ~5mph), so losing it entirely is a step forward.
The touchscreen UI when driving is also a very bad design. Touchscreens have no tactile feedback, so require focused visual attention to operate, taking not only the mental focus away from the road environment, but also moving the eyes well away from the road so losing much of the peripheral vision that can 'save' the driver by noticing unexpected motion.
Even as a racer with training on shifting attention between road, traffic, mirrors, surround, & instruments, I've found that any attempt to put a complex phone UI in a car significantly degrades my driving performance. Don't take me wrong, I love having the Android Auto maps up on the screen of my new CX-5.
But, the usability, even using the knob, is a constant distraction, and I far too often find myself squandering far too many microseconds on the UI trying to adjust the map, when I should have switched focus back to the road. It is a genuine hazard, and I've got training to manage it, and still often fail.
The primary, and almost singular goal of any driving or piloting UI must be to reduce the driver's workload. ANY few microseconds squandered on hesitation about the desired operation of the UI or just figuring out it's current state can become deadly.
This is an entirely different goal and threat structure from any ordinary computer or mobile device UI/UX design. Anyone doing it must be fully retrained and reoriented towards these goals, and pursue them relentlessly.
I think voice is a better interface for setting navigation, music selection. I used it quite often with the google assistant through android auto. Its intergrated into my steering wheel i hold the button and I tell the car what I want. Im not losing focus on the road to find the knob/touchscreen whilst I perform the interaction. It gets but clunky when I forget the order of operations but the feedback is there.
I love tactile feedback and love that for all controls like heating, volume, windows, ....
Except for GPS destination input (except if they provide a nice mechanical keyboard ;)) and map zooming. Imho they should allow touchscreen for GPS input and map zooming, and disable the touch for the driver when driving (except when it knows a passenger is sitting next to it and sees the passenger is touching it, should be possible to detect)
I hate the touchscreen on my Honda SUV. It's not even Apple/Android but something Honda half baked a couple of years back. I have been working on UIs for a long time and it's just a disgrace of UX, design, and performance.
Plus it's pretty useless. Other that Bluetooth pairing it serves no real purpose. 99% of the time we control the music player and volume from the remote on the wheel. That's it.
My 2018 Mazda infotainment and overall "technicality" is just sad. I want to say we are in some weird middle ground where car manufacturers are trying to catch up to modern engineering, or maybe Mazda just doesn't care.
1. It has terrible bluetooth lag. I like to sit in my car at lunch and eat and watch YouTube, Netflix, etc. but I have to disconnect bluetooth because the 2-4 second lag is unbearable. I don't have this problem with my other cars.
2. The keyfob drives me insane. If I get out of the car and leave it running, keyfob in hand, I can't unlock the back doors. I have to open the driver door and do it manually. I also can't lock the car while it's running with the keyfob. I guess Mazda would rather my children have heatstroke while I go in and grab something from the store. I have the keyfob in my hand! And the car knows it.
3. The touchscreen and overall UI is slowwwww. Strangely, the rearview camera boots up and displays superfast, which is the only nice thing I can say about the car's technical features. Switching from radio to bluetooth is an annoyingly long process. The main bootup is excruciatingly long as well. If I'm 5 minutes from home I just don't bother with any sound and mute everything because I'm already on my way and driving by the time it's able to do anything.
4. They charge you to add on Android Auto. Even if I did get this option, you have to get to it thru their already-mentioned slow system, so I don't even know if I'd use it. And you have to plug in the phone. Faster and easier to just put the phone on the magnetic holder and go.
I could go on but this is long enough already. I really like the car otherwise, but I'll be checking my next purchase very carefully when it comes to the technical side.
My knee-jerk reaction was "I'm not going to buy a car if it does not support CarPlay"[1], but Mazda isn't eliminating CarPlay functionality as part of this process.
On-screen selections will involve tactile controls and I find that diable.
Why? CarPlay is a reasonably good UI unlike virtually anything pretty much any car manufacturer can create, Maps, Podcasts/music interface, etc.
How is a heads up display "accessible" for people with limited vision? In the web industry, we kill ourselves to make every color combination fully ADA compliant (in the US) and this involves a limited set of combinations. Not being familiar with the auto industry regulations (does ADA even apply?), I wonder how they (heads up displays) or even touchscreens could be considered accessible. Anyone have insight into how this works? Is the user possessing an active drivers license considered enough to exempt automakers from making their controls accessible to people "with disabilities".
Edit: May have found my own answers. ADA guidlines only apply to buses and other vehicles of that type: https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/transp... And most likely, not the operators.
> How is a heads up display "accessible" for people with limited vision?
Perhaps people with limited vision shouldn't be driving.
Of course, and some vision disabilities do require exceptions or a special license. However, my experience with making websites accessible has taught me that ADA, and WCAG specifically apply to even people with minor vision disabilities which most likely, do not require a special license to drive. As my edit indicates, ADA only really applies to "the public" and so therefore private vehicles are probably exempt.
>In the web industry, we kill ourselves to make every color combination fully ADA compliant (in the US)
I've never found that to be true.
What exactly? Have you ever dealt with a designer, or old websites with no concept of ADA/WCAG? Because I do, daily and it's ...difficult (to put it lightly) I don't work for Facebook, or Google, I work for small businesses, many of which are still battling to become PCI compliant, or GDPR compliant, or even getting a privacy policy posted. The pain is real.
What I mean is that the sites don't care and don't bother.
Accurate.
There is nothing inherently wrong with touch screens. Just use physical knobs and buttons for anything you want when driving (heat, for example) then use touch screen for everything you use when not driving. Entering a navigation target, setting the clock, doing any car setup etc. Typing in a destination with voice or a knob and button interface is infuriating.
I like that approach for those reasons but it really needs care to prevent abuse – e.g. disabling inputs unless the car is in park. Too many manufacturers do the equivalent of putting a bowl of ice cream in front of a child and saying “we told them not to eat it”.
Good, IMHO if using phones while driving is dangerous, then it makes zero sense to use touchscreens all over the place in cars. However some features could still benefit from it, like navigation and settings screens - all those things that can't be handled by a single button or rotary selector, so you'd still have to look down at it to use it.
Yes thank you. I’ve been saying this for a long time
My VW has an amazing UI where the centre console is a small touch screen but it has a bunch of tactile buttons around the edge that also interact with the console. So the only time you need to use the actual console as a touch screen is when entering precise details like an address into the sat nav or phone number to ring. Which, in both scenarios, I am more than happy to do at the start of the journey or pull over to do. Everything else, from the radio to the air con, is controlled via tactile buttons.
More over, any important announcements that come up on the centre console can also be displayed on the dashboard as well. Including sat nav. So it means I don’t even need to look at the centre console to glance at stuff if I don’t want want to.
VW have gotten a lot of bad press in recent years but when it comes to in car UIs, I’ve driven few vehicles that compare equally well.
All the new high-trim VWs I've seen have pretty much touch-only controls with some capacitive non-tactile buttons though.
I wonder, is it really the touchscreen that is the problem, or the amount of things a driver is expected to do on it while driving? With the buttons on the steering wheel I never have the need to even reach for the center console and the screen. The only thing that really needs it would be navigation, but that's set once at the start of the trip and then isn't touched again usually.
I'm sure I'm missing something here (or I'm a weird driver), or is it just that without having a multi-function steering wheel touchscreens are more of a hazard than a radio with buttons?
(Ok, reading a few more comments here, it seems that some cars use the touchscreen to also control temperature and other things that are still buttons and dials in our car (the touchscreen is pretty much only media, navigation, phone, and a few other functions I'm forgetting now because I never used them).)
This news provides me with the tiniest bit of hope I'll ever be able to buy a car again. (Currently driving a 2002 model with no screens and no seatbelt warning bell. Things are great back here in sanity-world.)
Edit: the car doesn't squawk loudly at me when I hit the lock button when I get home at night, either.
Tesla should really take some notes here.
I wonder what some analysis on driver focus, concentration and eye movement would reveal when comparing Tesla, especially Model 3, drivers vs. drivers of cars with physical buttons and blind operations.
Like making the car self-drive?
The AndroidAuto / Apple carplay in newer Subarus accepts both rotary controls, and I always end up using the rotary controls as often as possible when driving. This is because the touch screen is harder to accurately press when driving, compared the rotary dials.
On that note I also want to mention that Maps on Apple carplay has a terrible UI which could potentially be dangerous. To move around the map, one has to use arrow buttons on the touch screen. We can't move the map by just dragging on the map like on a cellphone.
I believe this is an effort to avoid driver distraction. But people, including me, keep trying to move it anyway while driving since its so instinctive, and when the map fails to move it adds additional distraction by having the driver investigate.
I like a keyboard better than a touchscreen for writing text, and I like a keyboard with mechanical switches better than one with membrane switches. More expensive, yes, but the user experience is very much better.
One of the primary advantages is that I can usually find the key I want without looking down at the labels.
In a car, I want tactile clickiness in mechanical or electromechanical controls. I even want rocker or throw switches, instead of buttons that light up an LED to indicate their state. And that means if the state changes in software, a solenoid or motor is going to have to flip the physical state too.
Touchscreens, despite having "touch" in the name, are strictly inferior for finger-based inputs. They're more "screen" than "touch".
Thank goodness! At least Mazda is opting out of the Pictures Under Glass insanity: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
The touchscreen isn't the problem, having a screen at all is the problem.
I have a Mazda and hate their scroll wheel interface, with a touchscreen I can just press the "AM Radio" icon, with a scroll wheel, I need to turn the wheel then keep looking at the screen to see where the cursor is so I can click the right icon so it takes more attention -- both cognitive processing (how many clicks do I need to turn to get down to the button I want), as well as visual (is it on the right one yet?)
Voice recognition is even worse, I often end up having a conversation with the car "Call George" "There is more than one George, which one do you want to call" "George Modaline" "Ok, Calling George Smith - mobile".
Touch screens are so good as UI in cars they decided to put them in the next gen F1 steering wheel.
Oh wait... they actually didn't!
Mazda's decision is very good: Any UI where you need to detour your attention from driving to changing car status is missing the point of its existence.
Speaking about tactile controls - once I got Audi in rental, it had tilt controls near the central knob and they were very good (and stylish enough for general adoption). I could find them without much searching blindly and trigger any of their positions the first try, zero errors. Very nice and intuitive (after you remember what they do of course). See picture here, two silver fins between navigation knob and gearbox, they tilt to front and back: https://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/201...
Having recently driven two model year cars with little change other than one now has a touch screen, the screen made a world of difference. Features I normally never use were quick and easy to access. Yes apple and google car stuff were also easier, but just the entire driving experience was nicer: no knobs to twist and press or shift like a joystick, no sea of buttons with meaningless icon, fewer endless dives of menus.
I see that the data may not agree with my experience but I look to have touch in every car I buy in the future. From a driver looking to leverage technology, while we get automation working, let's make it easy for the driver to get to the car's features.
How many features do you need? I have a 2019 Subaru Forester and if I could have gotten it without a screen I would have. Everything I need while driving is on the steering wheel (cruise control buttons, radio controls), climate is a knob and 2 buttons. Everything else I don't need while driving.
The only thing a screen is good for is a backup camera. In my ideal car the screen just turns off or hides away when I'm not in reverse. Everything else is a distraction when you should just be driving.
Pretty much 100% of interactions with my car are either android auto voice controls or physical knobs (mostly the knobs on my steering wheel). There's basically no reason to fudge around with either a touch screen or a rotary dial while driving.
Android auto in a rental car got me through quite a bit with Google maps without needing a car mount for my phone, but again I still never really touched the screen much outside of initial setup while parked (getting location punched into the map and maybe starting some music).
It's handy while parked, but I don't think I want to be fiddling much with a touch screen while driving.
On the other hand, I don't see why my passenger can't be operating it while I'm driving.
Still against volume and climate controls not being physical buttons or knobs because having to look at a screen while driving for more than half a second is bad news.
What car manufacturers could|should do is focus on making Android and iPhone apps that replace these screens. Apps that would update regularly and allow controlling various functions of the car. And have analog controls and small dash etc. display to access | configure systems that are essential for driving and safety, complete with e.g. voice control.
I agree from personal experience that these LCD screens in cars are distracting, and what’s worse, don’t get updates so that in just a few years UIs will feel sluggish and ugly (if not already the day it rolls out of dealership (I’m looking at you Ford)).
It's a case of picking the right tool for the job, touchscreens aren't entirely awful. But if I'm driving and I want to switch to Radio, the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think.
My car has buttons for all these operations and it's great. What is bad for is browsing the map when I'm parked; say I'm looking for a car park near my destination, by the time I've zoomed out with a scroll wheel, browsed around and zoomed back in a few times I could've done the same thing on my phone and set off.
> the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think.
I don't think that thinking is the problem, the problem is looking to locate.
It is, because if you look at your touch screen controls and it's in another mode, you need to think about how you get out and back to radio.
When there's a button that says 'Radio' on it that never moves, you don't need to look _or_ think.
Kudos to them! They just did their research and acted on it. (At least that's how it appears). That's how it should be.
At many companies, the people doing that kind of research would be people who no one really listens to. They would do the research. Then PHB-type characters would enter the scene. And if research yields recommendations that would steer the company away from the safety of the herd (of automakers, in that case), then the research would be cancelled and the recommendations ignored.
Car manufacturers' touchscreen UI is hilariously bad, like a website from 1998. Interfacing with phones is equally unreliable. They really don't know what they're doing.
Mazdas still have screens. They have a knob and a few buttons between the seats to control the screen. This change doesn't do much for safety or usability.
The knobs are just as distracting as using a touch screen -- you have to look at the screen to see what is being selected, and you have to take a hand off the wheel to use the knob. In many cases it takes several knob movements and button presses to get to something I could have just reached out and touched. How is that any safer?
Arguably, if you can't safely operate a vehicle one-handed for your other hand to use the knob, you definitely shouldn't be using a touchscreen.
My point is that using a knob does not add safety, for exactly the reason you mentioned. It is either safe to drive one-handed at a particular moment, or it is not. Whether a knob or a touchscreen is used makes no difference -- one hand is off the wheel and your eyes are on the screen.
See this 2014 article about a good car UI with touchscreens [0]; though it may take some getting used to. Switching back to analog controls and buttons is a sane move in that respect.
[0] https://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui ; and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261003
I that guy suggesting multitouch on a car touchscreen? That seems terrible. I find just swipe scrolling extremely awkward at arm's length (and this is with CarPlay so it's not just due to weird car UI acceleration curves)
Multitouch is easier to do blind, instead of having to focus on the screen though.
I use CarPlay for 2 years on a daily basis on my VW (w/ touch screen). The head unit is placed in the middle of the cockpit. In time you build up muscle memory so it can be a similar experience with hard buttons. The only catching point is if your phone is slow, features like CarPlay behaves nondeterministic. Thus, it becomes very distracting.
Also, to reduce distraction I suggest using Siri with CarPlay. It works like a charm and you don't even need to look to the screen.
It's good strategy, too. Now the other manufacturers are at a disadvantage because people can claim that the cars are "defective" by having touch screens.
I think a touch screen would be OK if it didn't operate while the car was in Drive, so you can set preferences, etc, with a full keyboard. But you can also do this from a companion app or website, so there's really no need to have it at all.
And I'm really glad to see HUDs come to cars. I wonder why it took so long!
I would love to have one single, continuous touch screen instead of what the car is providing me.
I only care about the speed and fuel level. And a big STOP when something is wrong.and style feedback on things Iwill have to change soon.
Then radio and possibly two buttons.
All of this automatically provided when it is me who "logs in".
But I get some weird philosophical view of some designer go though I am interested in the engine rate (I do not even know the name of this rpm big dial), the oil temperature and whatnot.
I can't wait for the day of Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant voic-level speech integration for controlling air conditioner, calling, asking questions, rerouting gps etc all hands free with emphasis on actually being usable, unlike the crap automakers have been torturing us with (half-assed navigation that needs to be updated at dealership, voice input system that barely understands commands unless you say them in some very specific order, etc).
Touchscreens are fine, but are for passengers. The real issue is cars that support only touchscreen for some options and then make you go into park to do anything.
My girlfriend's 2019 Mazda CX-5 has both a touchscreen and analog controls. Carplay will use both but Android Auto has always just used the analog controls.
Finally.. sanity
I haven't used a car in years, but I do use taxies or DiDi, or Uber, depending on which country I'm in.
With Uber or Didi especially, you get picked up in cars that have these touchscreens. I've never seen a driver use them for anything other than radio operation. They use their phones for GPS navigation.
And in the nicer cars (BMWs, Mercs, etc) the touchscreens just destroy the aesthetics of the car's interior. Horrible looking.
I wish everyone would follow suit. There is nothing I hate more in a modern vehicle than a touchscreen.
Automatic headlights come close, but my hate for those is mostly from drivers that fail to turn them on when the sensors fail or aren't sensitive enough to come on. So many heavy downpours / fog in our area and I see plenty of new cars without their tail lights on and just low beam/running lights.
I'm a Mazda driver and I liked how you can use a touchscreen before you drive and then it switches off the touchscreen as you're driving to make travelling safer. At first, I was confused, because I've been so used to using touchscreens during journies before, but I applauded them for making such a useful safety feature and I applaud them again for taking it one step further.
This is great. I grew up watching the Simpsons and always dreamt of sitting in front of a nuclear control panel like Homer's, but instead, I sit in front of soft control panels (and many more text editors, but that's besides the point). I think we should invest more in bespoke, more usable interfaces and break away from everything being a touch screen, keyboard and/or mouse.
That's a sign of an industry with heavy user research and iteration.
In a more conservative industry, interaction practices researched and adopted at the beginning of the discipline would be maintained for decades without questioning -cough programming cough-, and profound changes would require a thorough adjustment of the tools used by the industry and the mentality of the practitioners.
How it made through ] production in the first place is really baffling. There are supposedly thousands and thousands of engineers, industrial designers, QC and other product people working in the automotive industry. And yet between 2010 and 2019 you'd be hard pressed to find a model coming without a touch screen. This is insane. This seems like a basic usability and safety issue.
Can’t they just simplify touch screen UI. I understand the distraction factor but that can also happen with too many hard controls as well. In Tesla, the hard button on steering wheel can be modified by the touch panel control. They both work together.
IMO this is a wrong move for mazda. Eventually if these cars become smart cars then you will not be interacting with controls as much. Touch an go.
I hope this becomes more common. At least in sportier cars. I want some kind of tactile response that I can feel while driving so I can navigate a vehicles controls without ever taking my eyes off the road. I want physical buttons, knobs, dials and switches. If there is a display it should not be a touch display.
Hopefully I can find something of this sort to replace the 7" screen in my GT86.
A big reason I still love my 12 year old car (a Mazda, by chance) is that it doesn't have a touch screen. I've borrowed a number of cars over the years that have touch screens and I hate them; they're distracting, they're not intuitive, and you can't use them without taking your eyes off the road. I'll say this for Mazda; they're practical.
It wouldn't take much hardware added to the screen to make it better. Just add a couple pushable rotary dials, few raised buttons with edges, and some audio feedback (even just clicks/beeps). Trimming down the software will take more work as it seems to be designed on desktop computers running tablet emulators without testing the UX while driving.
I liked the use of the Mazda touch screen for the purpose of entering an address (while stopped) into the Nav system--so much easier than using a wheel to scroll across a keyboard--but otherwise it wasn't necessary. They could obviate the need for a touch screen for this function by allowing you to send an address to the car via your phone.
I still drive a Saab with the night panel option, which turns off all distracting lights and messages at night. Of course there is no screen either.
Driving should be an exercise in focus with the tools to help me do so, even in the proliferation of options (climate, entertainment, etc).
The 17-inch screen in the Model S is just absurd to me. I dont want it. I dont want screens.
In general I am against this move. Buttons can only do one or two things, and you have to learn it. Touch screens can do infinite things, and can display unique indicators based on state. Still, if the choice is between and infotainment system that won’t get updates or a just buttons, give me a spot for my phone on the dash and call it a day.
Just a thought but I wonder if this whole touch UI craze was due in part to the legislation that require backup cameras in America and forced all cars to come with a lcd screen. I get this feeling companies then just all jumped on the touch UI bandwagon because now they were forced to have a screen for the backup camera.
Like many people my age (early 50s), I now need reading glasses. My distance vision is fine, but my phone held at arms length is slightly out of focus unless I put on my reading glasses. This is the case for many (most?) people my age. I hate any display on a car that I can actually reach. No touchscreens for me.
Tom Paris is somewhere squealing with glee.
It's a bit insane that cars (as far as I understand it) have to go through a lot of certification, e.g. that their airbags work, or that the controls work properly (e.g. that the brake-by-wire doesn't have bugs), but that only now have they done research if touch screen usage is safe or not...
I have a Mazda 3 (2016). There is a touch screen but the touch mode is active only when the car is not mooving.
Yes, same for my 2018 model. They turned it off with the new 2019 model.
It's probably worth mentioning that screen on 2019 model isn't really within comfortable arm reach anymore and it's now way higher on the dashboard.
It's Tesla started this design, iphonized car industry.
Screen navigation should be banned in the car no matter what type of screen it is.
When driving or piloting, what's the last time you heard the display has several levels of menu/screen to move around. Just display everything, let the eyes choose where to look.
Thank God for this, anytime I've had to use a touch screen while driving I've felt it's stolen so much of my visual attention that it's amazing I don't hit something. In contrast a physical knob can be used purely by touch without ever having to take my eyes off the road.
Touch screen is almost essential for navigation functionality. It makes life easier in car while not driving as well. I think what manufacturers should focus on is to implement touch screen functions on the driver side as physical controls. This way driver does not need to reach for the screen.
I have a 2018 Mazda CX-9 with the touchscreen. I almost never use the touchscreen, because there's a much more convenient scroll-wheel positioned in the center console and within my right hand's reach. There are also controls in the steering wheel for audio, phone and cruise control.
If I had to buy a car now it may be a Mazda 3 because of this. I may be getting old but I prefer having physical buttons and needles. The dashboard in the new Mercedes for example may look neat and futuristic but I can imagine it going wrong in many ways. I just want a car, not a space ship.
I have a 2014 Toyota Auris, and while on service I got to try the new 2019 model.
All interior controls were touchscreen and impossible to use while driving. Worthless gimmickry.
Definitely didn’t tempt me to get a newer model. I’ll keep my 2014 with its buttons and dials until auto-designers regain there senses again.
I never tried the Mazda system, but as an experienced UX designer, I agree that touchscreen in a car is one of the worst idea ever in term of UX. It's far, it requires aim, there is no tactile feedback, some gestures (like scroll) are really hard and require constant attention.
If scrolling is hard on your car’s touch screen, then the manufacturer failed spectacularly.
Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.
If you are stationary and can dedicate your attention to looking at the screen, sure. In a moving car, not at all. Using touch is a spectacular failure to apply even the basic common sense.
Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.
I didn’t mean to imply scrolling should be done with two fingers :-)
But rather if you offer touch scrolling you’ll also want pinch to zoom.
“Spectacular failure to apply even the most basic common sense” is a pretty strong position. In my experience with actually using a fantastic touch interface for navigation, and having tried and hated using nav systems in expensive cars in the past, where I’ve had to resort to using my phone for nav, I am equally strongly of the position that proper multi-touch nav on a large screen (Tesla Model 3) is safer and easier than any kind of button based nav system.
I think it would be a reasonable argument that if you need to fiddle with navigation while driving, your nav system failed. And honestly, whether I am using Waze on the phone, or built-in nav, short of "crap, I've put a wrong destination in" I've never had any particular need to do anything to the nav system once I start going.
Now, sure, I can see how a large touch screen might make a better interface for navigation only, as long as you are stopped and can use it without having to look at the road. But I know of an even better interface -- give me keyboard and mouse, and even with desktop Google Maps I'll get routes faster than with any touchscreen system out there.
But of course 1) mouse/keyboard in a car isn't very feasible, and 2) that touch screen, since it's already there, is being used for controlling other systems in the car, too. And that is a problem. Anything that may need a quick adjustment while you're driving (and in real world, of course, that includes things you shouldn't really be doing while driving...) should be doable with muscle memory and at most a quick glance. Touchscreen doesn't do that, so I think it clearly does fail the common sense test.
Good, non tactile buttons in an automobile is THE worst idea ever. I know where every single adjustment in my car is by feel alone, without the need for some dumb screen distracting me. Amazing that these screens don't have the negativity surrounding them that smart phones do.
Kudos to Mazda for saying no to this insanity. Not only is it unsafe, it's a horrible user interface. I'm not able to drive and hold my outstretched arm steady enough to select an item with a finger. For next car purchase I'll definitely test drive a Mazda.
Tesla just emailed me about playing games on the center console, driver pictured sitting next to the screen[0]. Surely this can't be a good idea?
0: https://imgur.com/a/kUq06eI
They're right but their solution is cumbersome and counter intuitive.
What we need is to put all the controls both within sign and within reach of the driver, that means in and around the steering wheel, just like it was done in sport cars where driver focus is essential.
As somebody who rents cars on the regular I love having a consistent modern interface across every vehicle I use with Android Auto. To me this consistency is much safer than trying to learn a new "cockpit" with every vehicle I drive.
I hope they are right but I still think it depends on design.
My current citroen is mostly touch controlled, but I find it requires less attention to operate than the button/dial controls on my old nissan which were horrible.
But I think the real future is voice control.
... well i hope this'll ripple to other domains. The renaissance of modular synthesizers is highly noticeable in today's music making, and especially live performances, well a car is very similar to a sonic vehicle in that sense.
What functionality do you regularly need on the dashboard besides map and Spotify? I have none. And as a result the touch screen seems reasonable.
I get that’s its bad if you’re constantly interacting with it while driving, but... are you?
Yes. This is what we want. Touch controls that involve the sensation of touch! :)
After driving a Tesla for a couple months, I now wish all cars had a UI like it does, with one large touch screen. Other manufacturer’s touch screens feel ancient by comparison. And so do tens of switches and knobs.
I bought my Mazda 6 the last year it offered no screen. The salesman wanted be to buy the next year which had a god awful touch screen on top of the dash, I hated it. I am glad I didn't get a touch screen!
Some of the higher end luxury cars have little touchscreens that look like buttons on the same place where you'd expect the button, with tactile feedback to mimic a physical button.
Good luck with that in 20 years or so...
no one owns a car for 20 years anymore so it's probably not a concern.
I wouldn't be so sure about that - both my father and his sister independently of each other bought their cars new over 20 years ago - I'm planning on keeping my 2017 Toyota as long as possible, because the savings are immense.
Maybe it's something specific to my country overall my parents' generation keeps their vehicles as long as possible.
obviously I shouldn't have said "no one" and made such a blanket statement. But the average age of a vehicle on the road in the USA is 11.6 years and the average length of ownership is 79 months (so 6.6ish years), according to the IHS.
https://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973...
How much of this is generational? In 10 years we will have buyers that have only known touch screens as an interface.
The issue is that we have to solve high-speed touch screens that behave well in vehicles that sit outside.
Good, that say, I wish Android Wear / WearOS went that path too. I miss physical buttons for navigating interfaces, especially in the cold winters with my gloves, and I hate, HATE using voice commands.
When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality.
I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.
Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.
The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.
Since autonomous in most cases also means car on demand, I think the car ceases to exist as seperate entity to configure, what's more import that there is a seamless transferable configuration based on your preferences once you rent any car, so that it becomes a nearly natural augmentation of your smartphone or whatever device you'll cary around with you sometime in the next 2 decades.
Meaning low friction in getting your audio/calls out over the speaker system and syncing of navigation with your other devices. And having car notifaction and interior lighting, audio EQ preferences synced too.
Any screens left in the car might be there purely for diagnostic or entertainment (think inflight entertainment and hopefully better) purposes, that need only minimal direct interaction.
That seems fairly irrelevant to _current_ cars, tho. If self-driving cars are a thing in a couple of decades (I'm somewhat skeptical, but whatever), then I'm sure that'll factor into the design of cars then. It shouldn't factor into the design of cars now.
My current Mazda with CarPlay enforces this already. When you are moving, the touch functionality is disabled and you must use the physical buttons (dpad / rotating wheel combination) to navigate.
Seems to me that onscreen displays and Alexa-style voice control would be the ultimate killer app for cars. How often do we have to divert our attention from the road just to check the speedometer?
Seems like the future is voice control. I'm pretty used to talking to my phone to do navigation and similar things while driving, but it can be frustrating because it gets confused a lot and often makes me push a button. (vanilla Android) But you have to imagine it will get better.
People are used to being able to do sophisticated things that go beyond the sort of controls you can operate by feel. You used to get by if you could adjusting the volume with a knob and pushing one of 5 preset radio stations, and maybe being able to operate most the heater/AC controls without looking. That's not good enough anymore.
Voice seems to be the only real option. Maybe by the time it they work out all the kinks the cars will all be driving themselves.
I rented an Audi a4 that had Carplay but only allowed buttons to navigate. It was really frustrating. Trying to move the map around ended up being more dangerous than just swiping the damn screen.
Unintended side effect could be drivers using their connected smartphone which is far more dangerous.
This is already the case with Mazda's touch-disabled-while-driving screens.
Not sure at all about the net effect on safety.
Why would you use a connected smartphone for HVAC controls and switching songs? The controls on steering wheel and near gear shifter are way more convenient.
changing to a different album would be easier to a touchscreen.
What are you basing that on? It's pretty easy using Android Auto or Mazda CMU using the rotary controller. Easier than grabbing the phone while driving.
I have not tried on a mazda but on other cars I have found the rotary controllers very cumbersome.
At that point, it's more the fault of the user rather than the manufacturer.
The manufacturer is trying to make driving safer by removing touch screens (which is great, IMO). If the user is sooo inconvenienced by this move, enough to reach for their cellphone while driving, then that's their own fault. Hopefully they don't crash into someone.
Is there a good site or db that let's your compare cars without or with minimal LCD screens? I vastly prefer analog gagues and minimal b/w digital displaces for things like radio.
Interesting strategy at Mazda. No plans for electric vehicles and no more touch screens. Brilliant or insane plan I'm not sure, it might make a nice niche for them.
Yay, I guess. Mine's touchscreen and rarely think to poke at it. Also it doesn't respond to poking if the car is moving. The console controls are terrific.
When is someone going to come up with a tactile touchscreen, with buttons that indent or protrude out of a flat touchscreen, depending on audio or tactile usage.
Common sense is back.
Hopefully, but not all over, only in spots.
From a consumer perspective as someone driving the new released Mazda 3 2019 (the one in the article) and previously owning a VW Tiguan with touchscreen in the center, I can say I am super happy with that decision, both from a practical standpoint (cleaning/wiping, yuck ...) and from a functional standpoint: It's just so much easier and less distracting to use the center dial. It takes a bit longer in some cases (navigating Android Auto for example) but it's worth it. And most things can be handled by 'OK Google' these days anyways.
I don't know that we can praise this. I think a hybrid approach is nice. I've had a vehicle that had a hybrid approach and that was nice.
Makes sense for Mazda - they already disable the touchscreen while the car is in motion, so might as well save a few bucks and get rid of it entirely.
I thought the touch screen was disabled at any speed above being stationary? I don't see why they removed it if it was only usable at standstill?
I've owned two mazdas and they had the best dashboards and controls compared to all my other vehicles.
Meanwhile Tesla... innovative, but not very driver-centric.
Concerned about his this will impact their sales. We are easily seduced by pretty screens, and overestimate our driving ability with gadgets on hand
Thank you!
Touch screens require you to look at them to use them. Physical knobs and buttons do not. You're supposed to look at the road, not at a touchscreen.
This whole thing honestly reminds of the pushback against touch-screen only smartphones, along with the infamous "mixing the input and output on the same surface" quote (I cannot recall the exact quote, but my bastardized version provides a pretty good gist of it). People will scream, people will kick, but it will eventually happen.
sidenote: I was initially in the "bring the keyboards on smartphones back" camp as well, but given how well it all worked out 10 years later, I foresee the same happening with touchscreens in cars.
They are completely different situations. People are intently focused on their smartphones, whereas they're distracted when using car controls.
Oh, I realize that, not trying to draw a direct analogy. Just expressing my feeling that the whole debate over touch screens in cars will end up the same way.
There is this joke where you greet someone on the street by raising your hand to them in front of your face so that they cant see who you are.
Lack of touchscreen won’t be the reason I buy a Mazda, but over-use of touchscreen is one of the top reasons I won’t even consider a Tesla.
Great move. Enough of frozen screens and unresponsive interfaces right in the middle of driving. Who ever thought this was a good idea?
This is a great sign. I was worried when it came time to buy my next vehicle I'd have trouble finding something with real knobs.
Blame Tesla. Overnight, Tesla has redefined user interface in automobile industry, all are racing to adopt Tesla's philosophy.
My ideal state would be Alexa for the driver, and a touch screen for my "copilots" (one in front-seat, one in backseat)
Sensible decision to take based on their research. As a Mazda3 2018 owner, I find the control knob way more enjoyable to use.
The description of the jog controls sound a lot like those in my 2006 Honda.
The description of the torque "“Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,", doesn't make any sense. I doesn't matter whether you reach for a touchscreen, button, or bugle, it would produce the same effect.
I can imagine it's the combination of looking at the touch screen and reaching out.
A button can be reached with sense of touch alone. A touch screen must be looked (or at least glanced) at.
I just bought a Model 3. There are a lot of great features but I simply hate the touchscreen display. I can’t reliably change the AC, etc without distractingly taking my eyes off the road. I hate it. My other cars I just reach for knobs or buttons but having to find the stupid parts of the touchscreen are really dumb and a terrible design. If the next version doesn’t have a better interface with more knobs and buttons I won’t be buying another one.
Thats frustrating. Not trying to be snarky, but did you notice this while test driving?
If you don’t have a touch screens users will still continue to fiddle but with an even tinier more dangerous phone screen.
I miss being able to touch-text. Easy with buttons, impossible on a touch-screen which gives you no feedback.
This brought a smile to my face. I've hated them since they first showed up. Kudo's Mazada. Kudos.
Whatever happened to all the companies working on providing tactile feedback on touchscreens many years ago?
Couldn't Mazda have simply disabled the touchscreen controls when the car reaches a certain speed?
It’s better to have one interface than two.
Definitely makes sense for me. With physical buttons i can keep watching at the road all time. kudos.
Does carplay support non touch usage?
I have a 2017 GTI and it has a dial you can use to cycle through things but it’s not ideal. Certain things are useless though, like the keyboard for maps, but you can use voice control there.
I do like the VW implementation. There’s still lots of buttons and steering wheel control, and the screen is small enough and UI actions defined enough that I don’t have to look at the screen much to interact.
I almost always turn the systems off.
Great call by Mazda. Maybe a newer car purchase will make sense again.
This was actually one of the many selling points to get one of these. No regrets so far.
Is the outcome of this going to be voice-activated everything (down to the cup-holders)?
Mercedes solves this with non-touch screens with physical controls within natural reach
Good! They may make the interior look cleaner and save the manufacturer having to stock various small parts and not having to install buttons and dials depending on the trim level, but from a safety perspective tactile feedback is key to minimizing distractions while driving, and touchscreens just don't have that.
The real reason Mazda is purging touchscreens from their vehicles is because their screens are terrible, laggy, hard to use junk and they have no way to fix it because they lack the vertical integration and expertise to bring it in house.
I would guess this is a technical failure wrapped in PR messaging.
eh.. I had a 2016 mazda that I replaced with a 2015 lexus. The mazda's rotary knob based interface is soo much better than the the "mouse" based lexus one.
My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.
I’m personally glad to see Mazda ceding the high ground on this. IMO they are like RIM sticking to physical keyboards in an new Apple world.
There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.
One thing people tend to miss is that all of those "obvious and incredible" benefits of touchscreens are applicable or should ever be applied top operating a moving vehicle.
And if there is somebody who does NOT fail at this, I'd like to meet them. They probably have a working perpetual motion engine, too.
Is it touchscreens that are distracting or screens in general?
Now if they would bring that HUD to some of the lower trims..
this is actually the reason i didnt get a tesla! 800 comments in this thread and maybe im not alone. hopefully things change for the better.
This is a PR piece promoting Mazdas new technology.
Cool that i'm working on one right now. :S
touch screens requires diverting your eyes from the road than reaching over to a dial or button. it's extremely dangerous
Those dials in BMWs are from the fucking devil
Please remove them from the back of the headrests on long plane trips. Being stabbed in the head repeatedly is trying.
OK, time to buy a Mazda
why not just add lane assist like every other company?
Looks like a bmw!
Neat. I always wondered why it's legal to use a huge touch screen built into your car but not your phone (Not like you should be texting and driving anyways, just an example). I feel tactile knobs and stuff is better, like if you need to turn up the AC just turn a knob while Tesla makes you fiddle with your touch screen.... Maybe you start to remember where things are, but next software update could change that.
I know on one of the Tesla models, you even need to use the touch screen to open your glove box which seems odd. Then with all the news stories of police shooting people on routine traffic stops, reach for the center to open your glove box for your insurance card, who knows maybe you are reaching for a gun in the center console. It's just out of the norm since most people glove boxes just open up with an actual handle. Even though their computer always knows if you had insurance or not even before being stopped, just another way for the city to make revenue if you forgot your paper. But maybe I'm listening to the media too much but it wouldn't surprise me if some innocent person was murdered just because they decided to drive something different and slightly more technical while making a slightly wider turn than a cop thought they should of made.
There's a video on YouTube of a guy being stopped in a Tesla because the officer thought the touch screen was a modification instead of being built as part of the car... but after a little back and forth and laughs then realizes it's part of the car and leaves without any further info as a good cop should. while some others might feel bad and still try to find something wrong instead of accepting they were wrong.
Maybe in a popular tech-filled San Francisco cops see Tesla's every day but in small towns in like the midwest, they are rare and fancy. Then some places there isn't an official place to even get serviced, but the same could be said about Lamborghinis. I forget who but I was watching some internet marketer guy from some small town in Maine talk about owning a Lamborghini. Apparently every time you stop somewhere even at a traffic light people want to talk to you and get pictures. Even said people would drive and take photos which made him nervous since that's unsafe but people would chase him to get pictures. A BMW i8 would make a interesting super car since already the large BMW network of service centers at dealerships, but if you are the only one in a small town probably will attract people attention too. So I guess you can feel like a celebrity for a bit.
Then in New Jersey, they have DMV checkpoints during the morning commute looking for missing emissions inspection stickers waving people into a empty parking lot, while the Tesla is 100% electric and exempt but doesn't mean a cop will detain you for 15 minutes giving you a hard time and make you late for work because no one told him. But the same can be said about no front plates, 19 states don't require them (and July 2020 that will be 20 states as Ohio passed a law getting rid of front plates as a effort to save money but delayed it by a year from being in effect so law enforcement can figure out how to deal with no front plates. I'm not sure why they can't just call up the highway patrol from Kentucky, Tennessee or Florida and ask them since they have years of experience with no front plates and already figured it out.) but there's stories of people on road trips being hassled. Someone went on a road trip from Florida to San Francisco and got a parking ticket for no front plate... Might of been a meter maid though instead of a cop though. Well at least it's winnable but so annoying people paid to enforce the law are so uninformed.
I rent cars often, so I see these systems with fresh eyes and I'm basically shocked at the complexity of it all.
I tremble a little bit when I want to play something with my iphone, nervously moving through the screens.
I think a couple of knobs, a few buttons, and a very simple screen, hopefully HUD of some reasonable kind - or even info displayed behind the wheel would be suitable.
I always wonder how many accidents all that technology causes.
There are three reasons to use a touchscreen for a UI: 1) minimal cost for a device that already has a display, e.g. e-book reader 2) reconfigurable UI for device that performs different tasks, e.g. smartphone 3) paging UI for vastly complex products that can’t accommodate thousands of different knobs, e.g. control panel for a non-professional audio generator.
A car doesn’t fit any of these.
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One thing that really bothers me about the screens in cars nowadays is that, to me, they always look like an iPad that was just screwed into the dashboard at the last minute as an afterthought to look high tech. In the high end Tesla that I drove a few years ago, it was molded into the center console and had the look and feel of forethought and intent.
One of the major drawbacks of touchscreens is the amount of controls that are being integrated with them. Most folks mash the screens harder than they need to, and they wear out too fast. Once the screen it kaput, half you car is useless. I can deal with rolling the windows down, but taking my tunes away...no bueno.
Another way Mazda is leading the way with design. I have been really impressed overall with Mazda's approach to design, especially lately, all the way from the powertrain to the controls (or the other way around, if their marketing is to be believed).
What i nerver got- is why you cant make a non plane touchscreen? Why not just add Knobs, Dials and Buttons - with touchscreen on them? Give the surface the option to be tactile and fall back to a default UI, that can be used blindly?
Or at least to allow magnetic sliding glasnobs and buttons to be attached to the screen and used.
This is like Nokia sticking to keyboard in their phones. Worst decision ever made. Their interface will be out of date 5 mins after its made with no way of updating
They'll put them back when cars are self-driving. But for now, this is an amazing decision!
I remember when BMW didn’t want to put in cup holders.