Is anyone even a little bit surprised by this? I _hate_ touchscreen controls in a car. At their very best, they're an annoying cost savings measure; in many circumstances, they're actively dangerous.
Honestly I hate touch controls just about anywhere. On a smartphone they make sense. But for example I bought a set of BT earbuds with a physical button and it is so much superior (that said, didn't try the Apple earpods yet, maybe that would make me change my mind, they just seem so expensive and I'm not in the iPhone ecosystem anyways).
Also just got an M1 MacBook Pro and definitely. don't miss the touch bar!
Never thought I'd see keyboard flip phones come back at a $1000+ price point.
That said, I still don't think touch phones have reached the ergonomics of typing an email on a BlackBerry. Like a PC, you could write long sentences (including shit that isn't in autocorrect), without even looking at the screen.
Still waiting for my fxtec to ship after 2 years and a redesign after the fact to use an even older soc than what I signed up for. If I ever get the thing it will have a 4 or 5 year old soc the day I get it. And a keyboard.
Same for me wrt Rivian. Well that and the reality of charging stations. But I really wanted the suv until I saw the first video of one's cabin. It takes the idea to an utterly obnoxious level.
I'm glad this testing is happening, even if my (like apparently a lot of people's) initial reaction was along the lines of "duh, no shit sherlock, way to state the obvious".
Tests that confirm in general what people were suspecting, or knowing to be true for themselves, are a great stepping stone in hopefully helping manufacturing to stop doing this terribleness.
Not only it feels obvious, but it has already been studied many times, with always the same conclusion. But more studies are needed at least until people start caring.
Still, aviation is a domain where they care, and they are starting to put in touchscreens in the cockpit, but doing so reasonably. That is: the touchscreens are not necessary to fly the plane and they mostly comes in addition to physical buttons, not to replace them. It is especially important in turbulant conditions.
I'm afraid of asking, does that actually exist like that?
I'm so used to quickly hitting the shiny centered hazard lights button in my car when e.g. the freeway situation suddenly changes, e.g. as a signal that I had too slow down a lot, so people behind me better do as well.
A SAAB (It's SAAB, Svenska Aeroplan/Automobile AB) 95 wouldn't be too different from a car of today though, with superb ride quality, turbocharger, proper deformation zones, extra reinforced A-pillars (moose protection), automatic angle adjustment of front lights (when loading heavy in the trunk), FWD. These are things on top of my head that no "regular" car (that'd be Volvo, I'm Swedish) had at that time (many cheaper cars still don't) that "most" cars has today.
My father rides one, and the only different things I'd say are where the key and the window buttons are located, the rest is just like any car you'd buy today, except it's 15-20 years old. "It's a human right to feel safe"!
EDIT: What I'm saying is, back then people couldn't afford luxury cars, but that market has boomed since SAAB went out. Volvo used to be "the workers car" in Sweden (still is I guess), but they went from being "cheap and reliable" to expensive and like everything else.
I have the means to buy a much newer car, but I love my old GX470 specifically because it's the last generation of SUV that has a clear gauge cluster, physical dials for everything, a nice sound system + 6 disc changer without the associated garbage infotainment system, and great driver visibility.[1]
Almost every new car I've been in recently feels worse - much worse visibility, weird distracting visual elements on the dash/cluster, touchscreens, etc.
I feel like I'm going to just try and keep my GX running forever. Already have 260K miles and still runs like new.
Yeah...and this is what I can't understand: Such a huge majority of people don't give a steaming shit about their privacy, I don't understand why the manufacturers don't just have a real privacy/op-out/ignore-me button (or whatever) because so few people, relatively, would actually click it. And they would be able to say with a straight face "we care".
This is how i feel about my xterra. I can work all the audio controls without looking. Contrast with my wife's crv: changing the "fader" requires clicking through 3 different touch menus.
The 2.1 generation CR-V (2005-2006) was the best car Honda ever made. Physical buttons, switches and levers for everything. Bulletproof engine and manual gearbox. Dead simple to work on, aside from unfortunate oil filter placement. Reasonable fuel economy. Side swing hatch door. Built in picnic table. 6 disc changer with a tape deck.
I understand the nostalgia for physical buttons, but tape decks and cd changers should go the way of the dodo, and it's baffling to even see them mentioned as an advantage?
My car had a CD player that constantly damaged discs that were playing when hitting road bumps, which rendered most CDs unusable within a year.
Couldn't have been happier to get a car with a USB port and a bluetooth connection to let me play a library 1000x as what would fit on 6 cds.
The bit about the tape deck was intended as a bit of a joke. Tape decks were almost unheard of in new vehicles in 2006, and MP3 cd players were fairly common already. It was super strange to mash together a 6 disc changer with a tape deck.
Both the deck and changer have been flawless in 16 years and 350,000KM of gravel roads, and adding an aux input wasn't too hard.
The hidden picnic table more than makes up for the weird av decisions, imo
Really? I love the CD player in my car. I don't have Bluetooth but a $2 aux cable lets me use my phone if I really want to. Of course you have to have a headphone jack on your phone, another obsolete feature.
This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly about it.
I can feel physical buttons without taking my eyes off the road. With a touch screen if I want to do the same, I'm forced to reference my fingers off the bezel of the screen, if my hand can even span it, hoping the button is the same place it was before and hoping the software running the display is even in the right mode so the button is there at all. It's a no brainer that physical buttons are easier to use.
> is even in the right mode so the button is there at all.
This is actually really important, and it's something that even physical button-based systems can get wrong. Modal interfaces require careful thought because they change things out from under the user, making them unpredictable. Obviously, not all modal interfaces are bad (nobody would suggest that forward and reverse shouldn't use the same accelerator pedal), but in cars, most of them are terrible.
It's why those old radios with 15 buttons and 7 dials are a cinch to use, but the newer radios that hide everything behind menus are terrible. Even something as simple as bass/mid/treble/balance/fader/volume/tuner are an absolute pain to use when you have to click a button to switch between modes, and those features might as well not exist due to how hard they are to operate. I've tried tweaking them while driving in some newer cars and it's always a terrible experience, but my current 20-year-old car has 7 separate dials for those functions, and I twiddle them all the time without even thinking about it.
> This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly about it.
When it comes to UI things that seem obvious sometimes turn out wrong so it is a good idea to do the research.
Two examples, both from research I read of long before everything was on the internet so have no chance of tracking down citations.
First involved a system with a command line interface. It was found that adding delay to some of the faster commands to slow them down made users perceive the overall system as being faster!?
Apparently we aren't all that good at actually telling how long things take without actually measuring them. We instead judge fastness and slowness by how things compare to each other. We seem to notice slowness a lot more than fastness. If most commands are about the same time but a few are noticeably faster then we think of most commands as slow and that bothers us. If all the commands take about the same time, we don't perceive any as fast or slow. It just all seems normal and doesn't bother us.
The second involved menus vs. keyboard shortcuts. Pretty much everyone feels that using a keyboard shortcut is faster than using a mouse to select a command from a menu. But in the system and users they tested they found it was around the same speed. Everyone tested was sure they were much slower with the mouse.
Apparently what was going on here was that to do a command you have to first remember what you have to do to actually invoke the command and then you have to do that. With the menu those two tasks are (1) remember where the menu is you need and where the command is within that menu, and then (2) the moves and clicks to actually get the mouse to that menu item and click it. With the keyboard shortcut those two tasks are (1) remember what key combination invokes the commands, and then (2) pressing those keys.
The second part was faster for the keyboard shortcut, but the first part was faster for the menu (my speculation is that because the menus are at specific locations that you have to move the mouse to we remember them spatially but keyboard shortcuts have to be remembered like a list of words, and humans are really good at the spatial memory stuff).
The subjects still perceived the keyboard as way faster because the first part, recalling what you need to physically do, is mostly subconscious. They only really consciously perceived the part where they are actually doing the mouse stuff or doing the key pressing and since that part was faster for the keyboard they perceived the keyboard as faster.
Note that these results might not generalize beyond the system and users they tested. I remember doing my own test and I found for the commands I tested with I was definitely faster both by the clock and by perception on the keyboard, but I was testing with commands that I used a lot. (I used cut/copy/paste). I can believe the result might have been different with more rarely used commands especially in a system with a large number of commands.
I'd love for car companies to actually respond to this and the frustration that e.g. Tesla owners express about touchscreens to do everything.
I don't mind the infotainment being touchscreen, but climate control and driving operations (Tesla Yoke!!) should have a physical feedback (haptic/etc) loop - all of which is solved problem using physical controls. It's not like they're going to suddenly add a new turn direction so need to make that part dynamic.
I love the clean look of a touchscreen but man the physical buttons in the Mazda are so well designed that they're quick to use, look elegant, and don't give off a cluttered feel at all.
I want a nice big clear infotainment display for Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, this can be touch screen. But that's it, that's where it ends. Navigating Google Maps, inputting destinations, selecting Spotify tracks, etc. all work fine on a touch screen. And once I'm driving, I rarely need to touch them.
But just give me physical climate controls, physical stalks, physical gear selector and all that. There's absolutely no reason to make any of this controlled through a touch screen. It's literally dangerous in my eyes, you use this stuff all the time.
I had to pick between the Tesla Model Y and the Ioniq 5, and the user experience of having real physical controls was a major factor in why I decided against the Model Y. It's a fun car, but it felt like I wasn't able to do anything.
At the end of the test drive, it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to turn the car off. I just sat there in the parking spot searching through the controls before finally giving up and opening the door- which turned the car off.
The preorder wait is three times longer for the Ioniq 5, but I think it's worth the wait.
Had an emergency situation where I had to drive a friend to the hospital. It took like 45 seconds to figure out how to turn the car on and get it in drive... yikes
It would be nice if controls were required by law to be the same "UI" in all cars. e.g. shifter is the same in all cars, turn signals, wipers, etc all the things that distract us when driving.
Another pet peeve is microwaves. It takes me a minute to figure out everyone's microwave since none have the same UI. Every microwave designer thinks they know better!
The most fun cars are the early ones. Nobody had any idea what to do so there were many many different approaches. Gas pedals? Ridiculous when you could have a knob!
> It’s no longer acceptable for engineers to invent a wholly novel user interface for every new product, as they did in the case of the automobile, partly because it’s too expensive and partly because ordinary people can only learn so much. If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumbwheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse and a big cast-iron handle to load or to eject the cassettes.
Also: Long term UX studies know this since even before the touch scree was invented making the designers behind Tesla touchscreen UX look like fools. (even through they probably are not).
EDIT: Digital displays can be nice for rarely used, non safety relevant, never used during driving features. Especially if combined with a menu search.
> Vi Bilägare gathered eleven modern cars from different manufacturers at an airfield och measured the time needed for a driver to perform different simple tasks, such as changing the radio station or adjusting the climate control.
Not sure about your car but mine has physical buttons for the actions they're talking about. In fact I can increase/decrease my radio volume and seek via buttons on the back of my steering wheel so I never have to take my hands off the wheel.
The touchscreen is useful for things like switching between apps, entering things into the GPS, etc. The alternative to that isn't buttons, it's looking at my phone.
My biggest complaint, at least about Android Auto is that it tries to force voice commands. The voice interface is horrendous, just let me or my passenger use the touchscreen.
> The alternative to [x] [is] looking at my phone.
This is the biggest failure I see in a lot of car apps. Spotify and VLC both limit what I can scroll through when scrolling through my libraries on my media screen. Being alphabetical I could scroll through a lot without looking, but they truncate it. All this does is cause me to disconnect my phone, open the app, search, and plug it back in. When the failure mode is significantly more dangerous than the "safety feature" being created, your app is dangerous.
There are so many good intentions that do not consider the failure modes. Yes, there is voice alternatives, but people still don't like using those. I know there are app designers here, PLEASE PLEASE think about how your apps fail! Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Good ideas and clever designs can still fail in spectacular ways. You cannot ignore your failure analysis. Dogfood your apps. Make your friends eat it too and be honest. Figure out what they do when things fail. Driving apps aren't your run of the mill smartphone app where you can "move fast and break things," they are apps where failures can lead to people crashing and getting injured or worse. You have to come from an (physical) engineering perspective rather than a software perspective. I'm amazed that even big names frequently get these designs wrong (e.g. the above Android Auto complaint).
You're probably right, but who's going to actually do that? Especially for a 5 second task. Plus, are we going to do that when there is a passenger who can control the phone without endangering anyone?
The notion of pulling over is sane from a logical point of view but absurd from a human point of view.
You can be right and wrong at the same time, this is one of those times. We have to consider how humans will actually act, not what they should do. Make the right decisions easy to do and make the wrong decisions as safe as possible.
> You're probably right, but who's going to actually do that?
I do, every single time. I place my phone screen-side down in the space in front of my gear shift, under the dash, and I don't even touch it if the car isn't in park. I never look at the screen for GPS or anything when I'm driving. I rely on memorizing the route before I drive, and TTS announcements for upcoming turns. If the phone notifies me of an incoming call or text, I pull over before checking it.
I don't think this is unreasonable. If you've been driving for 20 years or so already, then surely you know what it's like to drive like this. What it's like to drive without interacting with a screen, without GPS at all in fact. We had these things called road atlases, big books containing maps for every road in the state, and using one while actively driving was tantamount to suicide. Somehow we all still got where we wanted to go.
But are you an outlier or a median sample? That's the point I'm trying to make here. I'm not even trying to suggest that people shouldn't follow your example (they should). But I'm trying to be realistic in recognizing that the majority of people do not do this and likely are not going to.
Pulling over is often not very practical or especially safe itself. One of my frustrations that voice assistants in cars are still not often that great.
Here in BC there are very strict distracted driving laws. You can get a ticket even if you are sitting stopped at a stop light and you do something on your phone. I fail to see how this is _any_ different than interacting with screens on so many of these newer cars.
They could've noticed that with the GM/Chevy Volt aka. Opel/Vauxhall Ampera already. That thing has lots of identical touch-sensitive buttons with small text labels (no symbols, no colour coding) arranged in a grid.
I hope this trend will die off soon. Touchscreens have are neat and have a place, but nothing beats a nice feeling button in just the right spot for common use cases.
Car reviewers have been complaining about this for years so it seem like either I/we are crazy and _most_ people actually like screens for everything, or that the pipeline for implementation of controls is sooo long in duration that manufacturers haven't caught up to the feedback from like-minded users.
I wish the European makes did not go the Tesla route.
BMW iDrive 8 is a noticeable UX downgrade compared to iDrive 7 (which is honestly the nicest infotainment system so far), despite the bigger display. I have no words for Mercedes-Benz's abomination in the EQS and the new S-class. Audi MMI is nice, but touch controls for HVAC is a bad idea.
My dream is that some day, some government mandates knobs and sliders for all HVAC controls for safety reasons. These are far more intuitive and safer to operate than buttons because once you know where they are, you don't have to take your eyes off the road.
My Prius has nothing but a grid a buttons for all the HVAC controls and I hate it.
One of my favorite parts from pg's What You Can't Say is The Conformist Test:
> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Here's one of my answers if I think of HN readers as peers: Tesla made the right decision by making most of their controls touchscreen-only.
HN guidelines suggest comments should get more thoughtful and substantive as a topic gets more divisive. If you disagree with me but acknowledge thought or substance in my comment I'd love to hear why instead of garnering a downvote.
The reason I believe Tesla made the right decision is that the physical buttons on the steering wheel and stalks cover the common cases. They've made many things automatic: lights, wipers, garage door, seat heaters (edit: lights and wipers also have physical buttons). Things that aren't buttons and aren't automatic voice handles well (e.g. "set climate to 72").
And finally, and I realize most controversially, while it's still important to monitor Autopilot the technology is already to the point where it's safe in the right conditions to take your eyes off the road for some number of seconds at at time.
The tactile interaction that a physical button gives means I don't have to wait for an opportune time when I can take my eyes off the road. I can operate any function in my 32yo car without ever taking my eyes off the road. Obviously it doesn't have any self driving features, but being able to activate the wipers in less than a seconds because my windscreen is suddenly completely obscured by the car coming the other way that splashed a puddle up, or lower the volume because something has happened that needs my undivided attention, or just adjust the heating/cooling without having to think or look away is always going to be superior.
I think this is one place where this debate goes off the rails. People don't switch cars frequently and haven't experienced or studied deeply both sets of interfaces. I completely understand why because I was the same.
I only recently switched from a 20 year old car. Wipers was one of my main concerns.
Tesla, contrary to popular belief, actually has a physical button for activating the wipers. It's one I rarely use because the automatic functionality for this works so well. There's a physical control to mute sound too.
Would you acknowledge that touchscreen controls have some benefits, such as adaptability?
Yes, being able to dynamically update and contextually change what is displayed is a benefit of a touchscreen.
I don't believe that should be relevant to mechanical features of a 2 ton weapon though. Entertainment/Nav system that aren't key features for operating the vehicle, sure, have at it.
The hardware isn't being updated remotely to add new features or functionality, so I don't see why the interface for controlling those things should need the benefit of being able to be changed.
"Keep It Simple, Stupid" has been an adage for a long time for a reason.
I don't own a car. I rent one when I need one, which isn't often. So I'm not used to any particular method or interface.
I absolutely hate touch screen controls in cars. They are unsafe to use when driving, and they control things like air con you need to operate. They are also really poorly designed in most cases. I've often given up trying to figure out how to how to change something. Pretty much never have a problem with physical controls.
> Autopilot the technology is already to the point where it's safe in the right conditions to take your eyes off the road for some number of seconds at at time.
How do you determine which seconds are actually safe to take your eyes off the road? If this can't be answered definitively, the answer is you should never have your eyes off the road. And if your answer is, 'I've done it heaps and I was fine', that's simply survival bias.
I'm not sure I'm understanding you when you say "definitively". Do you mean if I can't be 100% sure about my answer?
The answer to your question is: the same way you determine when it's safe to cross the road on foot. When there are no cars in sight I'm 100% sure it's safe. When there are cars in sight, I'm not 100% sure but I still cross because I've developed judgement about the situation and the risks are acceptable.
I'm not sure, as a road user, how you've not encountered traffic situations that changed from perfectly normal to dangerous very rapidly. Sometimes an obscured vehicle could pull out, or a child, or some other obstacle, can pop out of nowhere even on an otherwise quite suburban street. The examples are too numerous to mention, and certainly many would be capable of confounding an AI.
How do you feel about the lack of a physical latch to open the glove compartment? I just LOVE having to go through a fucking menu tree to accomplish a task that’s been effortless and discoverable for the last N decades.
I can tell we're going to disagree but I love the clean look of the dashboard. As a result of Tesla's product decision I've moved anything I use on a regular basis to the two large consoles. They put the glovebox button at the top of the menu tree and this product decision tradeoff hasn't bothered me.
Since it bothers you, I'm genuinely curious, what do you store in your glovebox other than I'm guessing car registration?
I keep my gloves in the glovebox. Also toothpicks, napkins, tire pressure gauge, books, flashlight, laptop, extra hot sauce, keyed lugbolt socket... anything and everything.
Do you have or have you considered a car where the glovebox opens via touchscreen control? And if so, does this car have alternate storage, i.e in the center console?
Saying "this will be controversial" doesn't make it not wrong and merely a reasonable difference of opinion and any criticism dismissable because it was predicted.
> Things that aren't covered they've made automatic: lights, wipers, garage door, seat heaters. Things that aren't buttons and aren't automatic voice handles well (ex. "set climate to 72").
This is my problem with this argument. I want a good alternative for when voice or automated features go wrong (as they so often do). I don't want the fall back to be a shitty touchscreen. I want the fall back to be something that is safe to use when driving.
Touchscreen designs can be fast. I'd still prefer physical controls because of tactile recognition -- you can find the control without looking, but I ended up choosing a new Volvo over other makes partially because I prefer the simplicity of the interface.
My guess is manufacturers are so drawn towards touchscreens cause they can change things with software updates. From a user POV it's pretty obvious that physical buttons are better.
The easy fix for this would be to regulate that touch screens must be locked while the car is in motion. Advanced functionality which requires a touch screen can be used while the car is stationary.
I would literally not buy a car with this functionality. It is beyond irksome for my passenger to not be able to type on a touch screen while the car is in motion.
This has been the case for some functions for a while. A 2010 car my parents have will not let you enter the settings to do things like pair bluetooth while the car is moving.
It takes quite a bit of hubris to think that just one more regulatory straw will somehow turn the camel into a race horse.
Listening to people when you said you could just add more regulation to solve the problem is how we got here. Cameras were the regulatory easy fix you people put forth when you couldn't stop backing over your kids (was more of a moral panic than a widespread thing but I digress). The OEMs, not being idiots, decided that if they had to have screens to display camera output they might as well make the best of it and use them. Fast forward 10yr and here we are, touchscreens in everything and cars that practically can't be backed without the camera.
In my truck's case, a 2021 Ram 1500 (basic model with a 6 inch screen), you can't change the air position setting without the touchscreen, which is not only a pain, but a little dangerous going down the road. In my wife's Pacifica you can change the positions with a button.
Audi does that at least in 2019 models with some screens that aren't even touch: if in motion, complicated settings are greyed out with some explanation like "not while moving".
Not only that, the disabled features can more easily be hidden. Most cars used to have blanks for all the buttons for features that didn’t make it to your model. Now you’ll never know that you don’t have it - or that you really do have it but it’s behind a pay wall.
I always thought it was because a screen is far fewer parts. Easier to source. Easier to get the fit and feel right. It may be surprising to some just how hard it is to get a console of buttons looking and feeling good and not chintzy.
The capacitive buttons on my Volt are right at the edge of irritating as hell. It’s designed well enough that I don’t completely hate it but it’s borderline. And I refuse to ever have a car that’s all touch screen bullshit.
I don't know how this isn't outwardly obvious. When you are looking at the road, you rely on your sense of touch and physical buttons provide so much more feedback here than a touchscreen.
Can't someone 3d-print a 'mold' that you put over your Tesla's screen to give you limited functionality, but provide a rubber/membrane physical interface
I wonder if the people that end up making decisions about introducing touch controls in cars even drive themselves. Or if they're at all interested in driving a car.
