We need to condemn any design that puts aesthetics, minimalism, "look" or "coolness" in front of pragmatism, safety, functionality, practicality, usability and accessibility.
This whole problem is actually to do with what the public wants. Designers are delivering exactly what they want. And customers are ruined by conditioning from marketing that "touchscreens are better! who wants those stupid buttons and dials", bean counters are getting their bonuses because they just replaced expensive buttons/dials (with automotive reliability ratings) with a $13 touchscreen a bunch of software to control stuff. So, we're never going to get out of this.
The market for utilitarian design is vanishingly small. The public is depressingly gullible and moronic.
I've got one of the Tesla Model 3 cars, which is afaik. the model which Tesla has gone farthest with the touch screen, and before I had that I drove a lot of different cars.
After driving Model 3 for a couple of years, I have to say that the touch screen is not a usability problem. The controls I need to have quick access to are not on the touch screen, and the ones that are on that screen, are controls I would have to take my eyes of the road and look for anyway.
I will have to grant that they have gone a bit overboard with putting controls in the touch interface, and I still don't get why the glove box opening button is in the touch UI, but that isn't a problem by any means.
I was a bit skeptical of the Model 3 UI, before I got it. But for me it is clearly a step up in usability from the "a million little buttons with weird symbols that who knows does what", and while that view of traditional car interfaces might be a bit unfair. So is all the "any touch screen UI in a car is bad", sentiment going around.
Touch interfaces can work well in a car, as long as you don't need to use it for the drive task, but only for auxiliary tasks that don't need, and shouldn't be split seconds tasks.
How do you turn on defog if the windshield becomes obscured?
these are the kinds of things I think about.
The model S is a little better but it isn't perfect either, it has the same problem: defog and changing the temperature on climate control has to be done carefully by looking over and down. Now it will get more of these issues heaped on like turn signals windshield wipers and more.
If you're flashing your lights as someone, why wouldn't you use the high beam? In particular, with daytime running lights on most cars, high beam flashing is the most practical tool for the job.
On my Model Y, it is a simple pull of the left steering wheel stalk to do that, the same on all other cars I've previously owned. On my prior car, flashing the non-bright lights would've required turning an awkwardly positioned dial that also controls fog lights and running lights. That is easier than the touchscreen method but still poor UX while driving.
Flashing high/low/high/low from behind here in Austria at least means “you are annoying me but not in a way that immediately threatens my safety” (beeps are reserved for slow starters at lights or near-collisions). If going in the other direction it means cops ahead.
To be fair, I have to look over and down to do the same on my 2018 Audi A4 even though it has (far too many) buttons and dials to control that.
My main complaint on our Model 3 is the windshield wiper control. The Auto setting is terrible at actually detecting rain so I can't use it. The manual adjustments require multiple taps and it hides itself again after a few seconds.
This sounds a lot like you live in a sunny climate.
A Model 3 in Europe works like this:
- Three presses for fog light control, where you might need it immediately due to weather and altitude changes
- Utterly rubbish rain/drizzle sensing and wipers that can only be switched on for one motion via stalks. Only way to get them constantly going manually is A SWIPE and button press in a moving car when visibility has already dropped.
That's just two of the worst, I won't go into the problem with their new UI (last big update) which has completely ruining the minimal ergonomics that existed for figuring out your speed/regen/etc.
> This whole problem is actually to do with what the public wants. Designers are delivering exactly what they want. And customers are ruined by conditioning from marketing that "touchscreens are better! who wants those stupid buttons and dials", bean counters are getting their bonuses because they just replaced expensive buttons/dials (with automotive reliability ratings) with a $13 touchscreen a bunch of software to control stuff. So, we're never going to get out of this.
The problem is that it's one of those things where it's best to be a thief among honest people. People want to drive cool cars, regardless of safety. However, they do not want other people driving unsafe things to crash into them.
So we end up in this weird situation where consumers are demanding the exact same things they want safety boards to ban. Some people want these new Knight Rider steering wheels, but they don't want people using drag tires on the road. The people that want to use drag tires on the road don't want people to have the Knight Rider steering wheels. So we end up with demand for both, and safety commissions trying to ban both.
People thought Cybertruck looked ridiculous and Tesla went off the rails with the design... and then pre-orders went off the rails. Most things Tesla does are extremely polarizing and to no ones surprise yoke steering wheel is no exception. Most ridiculous part of the situation is that we have 0 information on how that thing works. All we have to go off are looks. Some people love them and others make a bunch of assumptions so they can criticize it. Given Tesla's track record I will remain cautiously optimistic, but in absolute worst case scenario we are putting racing steering wheels on highest end sport cars... sounds absolutely dreadful doesn't it?
We still don't actually know what the Cybertruck will actually look like when it goes on sale. The concept design that they showed to the public wouldn't have been road legal pretty much anywhere. Some are also saying that the structure would also be too rigid to be legal in Europe.
Concur on not knowing final design, I was trying to convey that the design presented was extremely polarizing.
I am mostly concerned on lack of crumple zones for the vehicle. Given it's planned weight and performance collisions will be deadly for other vehicles.
What if I, the consumer, don't really care about pragmatism? It's legal for me to purchase a motorcycle which has no seatbelts or crash protection whatsoever, but you want to make it illegal for me to buy a car with a novelty steering wheel? What's next – do we ban cars with too many horsepower because it's not 'pragmatic'?
Then you should do what everyone else with non-street-legal cars does: run them on the track with like-minded individuals, instead of putting every goddamn other road user at risk of death or injury. They don't choose to be near someone who can't do overhand tight turns because the geometry of the steering wheel doesn't permit it.
>Should I be arrested, even without having caused any accident ever? In your mind, I'm sure the answer is "yes", if you don't care about results, only about violations.
Should we not bother with drunk drivers before they cause an accident as well? Surely there are safe drunk drivers out there.
Should I be arrested, even without having caused any accident ever? In your mind, I'm sure the answer is "yes", if you don't care about results, only about violations.
Ah, the old paradox of prevention. We don't need no stinking sea dykes, last storm tide we had was in 1962.
Driving a motorcycle does not put others at more risk - the government does licensing to make sure you are a competent operator. Having that stupid steering wheel does.
(The US is fairly unique in that most states will allow you to take an easy written test and then immediately drive a >200hp motorcycle. That's not a common situation in most of the world, so please don't use that as a counterargument. 16 year olds owning 1000+hp ferraris/koenigseggs is also effectively banned by upfront cost and insurance premiums; the edge case of very rich people doing it exists but is, again, an edge case)
I'd love to see what your clothes look like. I assume either none of your clothes has any adaptations for fashion over function OR you're gullible and moronic?
> I'd love to see what your clothes look like. I assume either none of your clothes has any adaptations for fashion over function OR you're gullible and moronic?
There's a reason why we don't wear ties in manufacturing plants.
Airbus moved away from yolks on their planes as part of a move towards greater automation, with great success. Same arguments were made there BTW.
The market for utilitarian design is high. Tesla's for example have some of the LOWEST injury rates per mile driven. The whole package (which is how this all should be judged) is safer than many cars driving on the roads today.
A design that for example allows someone to drive faster than 10MPH (which clearly reduces safety) should be condemned?
I condemn this type of absolutely ridiculous over the top language use and this ridiculous absolutism.
"And indeed Formula One and many other forms of on-road racing feature steering wheels that look like oversized Batarangs. The thing is, those cars offer swift steering ratios, needing as little as 180 degrees of rotation to turn from the left-most steering extent to the right. Your average street car? Try 900 degrees of rotation from full left to right. That's two and a half turns. More rotation means slower turning, yes, but it also means more precision and frankly greater safety. A razor-sharp steering rack is a great thing on the racetrack."
Also they end up customising how much moving the steering wheel turns the actual wheels for each race. For example at Monaco they end up making the limits of the steering wheel move the actual wheels far more than on a faster circuit.
Did you read the article? F1 racers only use that design of steering wheel because they have ultra tight steering ratios that allow you to lock the wheels in a direction without multiple turns of the wheel; whereas anything used by civilians will have a much less twitchy ratio that needs an actual wheel.
Note this is also why big rigs usually have an additinal rotating handle attached to their wheels, since their ratios are very loose due to their weight and thus may need to turn their wheel 10+ times.
As your speed increases you make smaller adjustments to turn because your traction limited. The kind of hand over hand steering people are concerned about is simply irrelevant at highway speeds let alone F1 speeds. It’s the same reason they need to slow down to corner.
Anyway, big rigs have loose steering because they need precision at highway speeds. The point is to minimize accident risks due to physics rather than any purely mechanical limitation.
Semi’s air suspension seats bounce around quite a bit which prevents them from keeping their hands steady. So, they need to dampen the input from such motions at highway speeds as
race car style steering with would be counter productive in terms of precision. Which is why they have to turn the wheel so much.
It’s also useful for mechanical leverage should power steering go out.
I race cars. I've been on track with Ex-Grand Prix Drivers. Some of the biggest names in racing, and for sure the Worlds Best racing instructors helped teach me how to drive race cars at the limit of adhesion. I have consulted with the same sports psychologist that pioneered the training program for F1 and Indy car racers at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis--The Performance Institute. They actually called me on the phone when my test results were calculated and told me "I wasting my time running a contracting business" because I was a World Class racer as far as their testing was concerned.
Now I'm not saying I have ever driven a car with the insane performance of an F1 car. I did however walk away from an offer for a fully funded season to race a Swift DB6 (2 liter) after I had tested in that year's national championship winning car. What a fucking car, I loved that car! There were two reasons why I walked away from that offer: Mainly because I am Not brilliant at learning new race tracks. And the faster and more expensive the race car--the less time you have to learn a new circuit and get into your racing rhythm (I suspect this is because I did not race as a child. I was in my twenty's when I started going to racing schools and racing). And the second reason is I was 33 years old at that time; I had a wife, a newborn baby, a contracting business, and a mortgage.
However; I was arguably the fastest Formula Ford driver in America on any given day. I beat a National race winner's lap time by .4 of a second a lap using the exact same car race car in back to back sessions.
For years and years.. and YEARS--all I thought about was how to be a better driver. Every sport I played was done to improve either my balance (driving at the limit, is in good part--feel and balance), my concentration and my strength.
My point is I have some idea of what is required to drive
a F1 car. I really don't to put anyone down here: but the fact is a racing driver Would Never Ever buy a self-driving car. And trust me unless you own fire proof underwear and can drive 100 mph on a snow covered road (with winter tires of course. Racers' employ a particular eye technique coupled a steering tactic gives us so much more time to make decisions when we drive. Plus we can drive a car sideways while whistling a happy tune) you would have a hard time imagining just how good GOOD really is.
Launch control, dual clutch transmissions yeah we love that stuff it let's us drive quicker.
Traction control, automatic braking, lane departure systems we hate shit. And No real racer would buy any car where those systems can't be turned off. I turn them off my on car ALWAYS and MOST ESPECIALLY in the Snow, Ice and rain... that shit is off--because I'm FAR better at controlling the car than those systems are.
This whole problem is actually to do with what the public wants. Designers are delivering exactly what they want. And customers are ruined by conditioning from marketing that "touchscreens are better! who wants those stupid buttons and dials", bean counters are getting their bonuses because they just replaced expensive buttons/dials (with automotive reliability ratings) with a $13 touchscreen a bunch of software to control stuff. So, we're never going to get out of this.
The market for utilitarian design is vanishingly small. The public is depressingly gullible and moronic.