When I worked in the auto industry at Buick/Oldsmobile/Cadillac Engineering , I got to see one of these while it was in prototype stage.
One reason this didn't take hold is that they found that this interface forced a driver to take their eyes off the road to do basic functions like changing the climate settings.
When I got to ride in this, there was a maintenance screen you could pull up by pressing three of the buttons. This screen had functions like displaying and modifying the throttle angle, fuel-air mixture, etc. While driving around, we were able to change the fuel air mixture such that the car started running badly and we could smell gas.
>One reason this didn't take hold is that they found that this interface forced a driver to take their eyes off the road to do basic functions like changing the climate settings.
...which still applies today just as well as it did back then.
I am a big fan of the approach Mazda has taken. There is a nice sized cetralized screen with no touch controls. All climate and car controls are physical. All infotainment controls are physical and driven by a console dial and shortcuts.
This sounds like the interface in a slightly older (late 00's, I think?) Audi I once drove. The infotainment system was controlled from a scroll wheel akin to an ipod's, it also functioned as a directional pad for panning around the map. It was just about perfect.
Common sense in tech went out the window with touchscreens on phones. They even make the cases out of glass now. So not only do they break immediately, they slip out of your hands easier.
Basically, case required. I gave up, and went for a battery back case. Once I got used to the size, it's all good and I pretty much do not care what they make the phones out of.
That said, man... I sure miss my Note 4. Plastic back, plastic all over the place. Great phone, removable battery, fast, the works! Cat peed on it. Total loss.
Some cats are just like that. They know it's yours and they're irked with you for some reason, and this is how they make their point.
An ex years back had a cat with that kind of attitude. I had this really nice surround receiver that I'd rescued off a curb and recapped, getting a $600+ unit back into service for about twenty bucks in parts and a few hours' work, and while I wasn't really getting the most out of it, it made a splendid headphone and speaker amp for my office. This cat took a liking to sleeping on top of it, for the warmth of the ventilation slots.
No problem - until she got in a mood one evening, looked me dead in the eyes, and proceeded to throw up into the thing. It went bang and sent up a sad little wisp of smoke, and that was all she wrote - cats may not laugh, but they sure as hell smirk.
She was probably pissed because my cat had beat her up again, but it wasn't as if she or anyone else could blame him for that; she'd made his kittenhood a living hell, and he carried the grudge all the way into adulthood and twenty pounds of muscle. She couldn't take it out on him any more, but everyone in that house knew I was his person, so she took it out on me.
Dogs are a bit smarter, I think, most times - some dogs, anyway. But cats in my experience are considerably more subtle.
I had come back from a trip. Wife had put a mattress in a spare room, on the floor due to a project to upgrade our room. Me, and the phone were low to the ground, and I believe the cat was pissed at the change and expressed it on my phone.
Still pissed about it. That was a great phone, and I did lose some data I value.
Nothing prevents an integrating plastic protection around the edges of a glass front. We could get most of the protection of a case in terms of dropping in concrete without the bulk. Ex: Ulefone Armor 10 5G granted the branding is ugly but that’s on the manufacture.
IMO at that point you might as well make the phone as wide as these new camera lenses and for some extra battery life.
Assuming the back and edges are made out of aluminum or something you don’t need to protect it. You only need to protect a tiny lip around the front glass to get equivalent shatter protection which would be vastly less bulky than even an ultra thin case.
In other words I want ~90% of the protection with only ~1-5% of the added volume.
The glass back of a phone needs to be thicker than an aluminum back for equivalent strength. It wouldn’t be much width, but modern cellphone batteries are thin.
Going beyond that for the camera on the other hand would add more bulk.
Yes, but — we now have far richer, more colorful, displays with skeumorphic design. They can be more distracting, but it also can mean that it's much easier to figure out how to do what out of the corner of one's eye.
Android Auto and Apple CarPlay generates worse reaction times then driving drunk. [0]
The large touchscreen trend in automotive is a unnecessary risk for everyone on the road and needs to be reverted.
[0] R Ramnath, N Kinnear, S Chowdhury, T Hyatt, (2020) 'Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving', TRL, Transport Research Foundation, UK
Not defending automotive touchsceeens, but there’s a fairly sizeable difference between being “worse than drunk” for a few seconds and being actually drunk for the entire journey.
Most people are not terrible at judging risk and generally limit use of touchscreens in moments of elevated risk (e.g. intersections).
If it really is a problem we should be able to see it in real world crash statistics.
This is perhaps something you self-perceive that you can do well so others must also be able. It reminds me of those studies of how sleep deprived people do poorly in cognitive tests but still self-assess as having performed well.
> world crash statistics
Until we start seeing police and investigators actually requesting for manufacturer's infotainment logs, I would question the statistics on this matter.
Arguably very few people would admit to have crashed because of infotainment screens unless there was video footage to prove it.
I chose my words carefully. I didn't say that people are good at perceiving risk, I said they were not terrible at it. In the context of this discussion, being the relative levels of risk within different moments of a single driving journey. Most people aren't navigating a touch screen while steering a complex intersection.
People are famously bad at assessing disparate risks. The unit micromort is useful for clarifying mortality risk of various behaviours.
With respect to crash statistics, obviously we're not going to ask people why they crashed. I would have thought this is so self-evidently flawed as a methodology that it didn't warrant pointing out. It's probably safer to assume that most people will lie about why they crashed.
Fortunately, the statistical question is much simpler than it might seem: are people crashing newer cars more than older cars? Where answering this question becomes complex to answer accurately is when isolating this from both environmental change and vehicle age, because you can't isolate both variables at the same time.
I have a shopping list of wishes for new cars: physical controls that are shaped/textured/otherwise laid out in ways that make them recognizable by feel or distance from the steering wheel. Don't make me have to try to figure out which rocker switch in an identical row of them performs the task I desire. Likewise, a set of steering wheel mini-paddles similar to those on new Subarus would be appreciated, but especially if they are reassignable by the driver. As for radios, go back to the old paradigm of a left volume knob and a right tuning knob, with concentric controls for reassignable features like balance, fade, bass, treble, etc. that can be easily achieved without scrolling through all of them first.
Basically, if one can drive at night, no cab illumination beyond a dim dash, the controls make sense. They make better sense when fewer of them are not modal.
In state terms, a flat model is best. Store as little state in our heads as possible, so the driving, things we don't control have the grey matter resources and capacity necessary to travel safely.
Frankly, I like it when my cars don't do much. Some things, like ABS, traction controls are good. They are just on, and with a test or two, I know what they will do, and when they won't do it, I am notified clearly so I can fall back to more manual mode, no automation driving mode gracefully.
I feel like we could do way better with tactile interfaces for infotainment control. There's got to be some better way than a massive array of single-purpose buttons.
I drove a 1997 Riviera for about a decade (I know I know down vote me because it wasn't a 1986 Riviera). But it had some very interesting interface elements for the time that were less advanced than this but also ahead of the 1999 Camaro I had driven previously. I would have kept that car, it only had about 100,000 miles on it, but one of the neighborhood CHUDs rammed it and no one wanted to repair the door that was destroyed by the ramming because no one knew where to find parts for it. Bay area by the way and it's a real shame because I really loved the car in all its gas guzzling glory.
When I was a teenager, they had a '86 Rivera parked right in the middle of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. So I was able to climb in and play with the touchscreen, and it was one of those "the future is here" moments. I would ideate whether it would be possible to hack something like this with an Apple IIc or something.
The car itself was not sexy at all, and was later named as the first of all the GM Deadly Sins.[0] The Reatta was only slightly better.
Good winter tires (Nokian Hakkapeliitta in my case, but there are plenty of good winter tires to choose form) plus traction control and ABS will help a lot, but you also need to modify your driving behaviour as the car can only do so much.
Give yourself more time, apply all inputs (gas, brake, steering) slowly and deliberately - sudden movements are more likely to give you a bad time. Understand how your car behaves in various conditions, empty mall parking lots are good for this. Leave more distance between you and the car ahead of you. Know what do to when you lose traction. Keep your car maintained - properly inflated tires, functional wiper blades and keeping the washer fluid topped up are important. Keep your gas tank at least half-full, which helps during unexpected delays and the additional weight helps with handling. Know what spots are bad in your city and avoid them. Know how to get your car free when it's stuck in snow - if you're going to rock it out, you'll probably need to disable traction control to do it successfully.
Personally, I also avoid driving the first day or two after the first big snowfall. This gives the city time to deal with the snow and gives other drivers time to re-learn winter driving.
Source: I've daily-driven a RWD car for years in Edmonton, AB.
Compared to 4WD, AWD, or FWD; its the worst setup for winter driving.
Good winter tires (Nokian Hakkapeliitta in my case, but there are plenty of good winter tires to choose form) plus traction control and ABS will help a lot, but you also need to modify your driving behaviour as the car can only do so much.
That and the paragraph that follows applies equally to any other drive setup. Traction control is a mixed bag depending on manufacture. If you are stuck in the snow, you probably want to disable it for a bit to help you get unstuck. Its amazing how some manufactures (looking at you Chevy) goofed that up.
Personally, I also avoid driving the first day or two after the first big snowfall. This gives the city time to deal with the snow and gives other drivers time to re-learn winter driving.
Most folks cannot take the time off and need to get to work.
Source: North Dakota rural driver.
As a side note, keep a survival kit in the car. Some tire chains and a tow rope are not out of line. Know where to attach a tow rope to your car is a good idea, you don't want to end up on YouTube.
>Compared to 4WD, AWD, or FWD; its the worst setup for winter driving.
I don't think the person was comparing them, just stating that RWD, when handled properly, is indeed fine for winter. Having driven extensively in Canada and Scandinavia I agree with that, although 4WD, AWD, and FWD are superior.
My previous car was FWD without any assistance mechanisms (ABS, traction control), but with winter tires, and it was definitely easier to drive it in winter.
So long as you can get moving it is the best setup as everything you do reminds you how bad the roads are. If you can't get there in rwd than 4WD is better, but you have to remember to keep the speeds way down.
Most people just use 4wd to push then farther in the ditch.
Whether RWD is fine in the winter depends on where your engine is :). It is mostly about weight distribution. With front engines, FWD cars have much better traction on a slippery surface. The classic Beetle on the other side did have a rear engine and thus had good traction. This is also the reason, RWD has a huge come-back with electric cars. They don't have heavy engines, their weight distribution mostly comes from the battery which results in a perfect 50:50 between the axes.
I drive my 350Z (RWD and low-slung) through Minnesota winters. Winter tires FTW! I've easily driven up hills that FWD "SUV's" and minivans couldn't make it up.
"Vacuum phosphor display" is an accurate, if unusual, description of a CRT.
There was a trend in the 80s, tailing off in the early 90s, of using accurate but unusual descriptions like this to suggest that fairly mundane technology was in fact exotic and special. You saw it a lot on stereo equipment in particular, but American carmakers weren't shy in participating. If I had to guess at an origin, I'd say it probably had something to do with the "Japanese economic miracle" that was much in the zeitgeist then, and maybe not nothing with the fear of obsolescence and inability to compete that beset much of the US technology and industrial sector (excluding software, but not electronics) at the time.
I had an 86 Riv in the early 90s while at college. It was an old person's luxury coupe and rode like a boat with big, fluffy velour couches for seats. The touch screen was actually very good. Climate control (with two zones), music (including a 6 disc changer in the trunk) and some pretty geeky charts about engine performance. The touchscreen was a good 25 years ahead of its time.
For those not "in the know", the parent comment is likely referring to Doug Demuro, known for ranting and raving about the buttons and surfaces inside cars, or in his words, "quirks and features."
demuro has a much better review of all the quirks and features of the touchscreen plus how it interacts with the main gauge cluster and how it can even be used to eject the tape deck! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq2PSLdc8rA
One reason this didn't take hold is that they found that this interface forced a driver to take their eyes off the road to do basic functions like changing the climate settings.
When I got to ride in this, there was a maintenance screen you could pull up by pressing three of the buttons. This screen had functions like displaying and modifying the throttle angle, fuel-air mixture, etc. While driving around, we were able to change the fuel air mixture such that the car started running badly and we could smell gas.