I would love to see some EU legislation about car dashboards. As an occasional driver of many different brands and types of vehicles, I continue to be amazed at the usability crimes being committed in the name of 'looking cool' (stated reason) as well as 'cost savings' (most likely the real reason).
Any function that needs to be invoked or setting that needs to be changed by a reasonable person while driving should have dedicated hardware in a predictable position. So, that's direction indicators, outside lights (incl. high beams and fog lights), windshield wipers, cruise control, window defrost/defog, interior temperature/fan, media volume (am I forgetting anything?).
There is nothing more utterly annoying and outright dangerous than having to navigate some crappy touchscreen when your windows start fogging up or you need to turn off the radio in order to talk to that nice cop that just pulled you over.
Offenders here do not only include the T-brand, but also the B-brand, which has seen it fit to replace most of the controls in some of its cars with a single multi-function stalk (iDrive, I think?) that isn't good for anything, except as a reason to return your car for a refund...
In the Tesla FSD video[0] the driver spent a lot of time swiping back and forth on the map. If that touchscreen were an iPad, that behaviour would be illegal in the UK. I don't know what the road law is in the US, and if they sell the same Tesla model in the UK.
As with most things in the US, it varies by state. For the past five years or so, it has been illegal in Georgia for a driver to use a phone or tablet that is not set in a mount attached to the vehicle. Other states have adopted similar laws but not every state has and the details vary between states that do have such laws.
The most worrying increase I see around here is the use of a vehicle as an assault weapon. I think it was popularized by ISIS terrorists (Nice and Berlin IIRC), but over the past year we've had multiple incidents of people driving into crowds or cops over a previous altercation. I cannot fathom why such an offense does not lead to a lifelong driving ban.
But that's not really on-topic when discussing driving controls: luckily, most vehicle crashes are still accidents, not attempted homicides. And for these cases, whether the car has buttons or a touch screen does matter.
> people driving into crowds or cops over a previous altercation. I cannot fathom why such an offense does not lead to a lifelong driving ban.
I'd hope that someone who consciously drives a car into another person would spend the rest of their life in prison (which effectively includes a driving ban)
Legality is relevant because the law would apply to cars being sold, which is a lot easier to enforce than preventing drivers from using what’s already in the car.
Here in SoCal Tesla’s are second only to Nissans on the aggressively dangerous driver scale in my experience.
In the past few years no other brand demographic comes close with the possible exception of lifted full size trucks and Chargers, but they are a ways back.
What's the proper control to use for interacting with a navigation aid in the UK? Or are you saying that UK law forbids in-car maps?
These arguments always end up in this kind of hyper-specific realm where they seem to apply only to Tesla's particular design choices. But, in car maps are everywhere now (and, yes, Tesla's implementation is by far the best), and the natural way you use them is with touch. They absolutely make finding your way around easier and safer.
Back in the day I did a long cross country trip with a Garmin 60CSx hiking GPS, held in my right hand, which I was also shifting with. I didn't use it for turn by turn navigation (not a fan, especially for road trips), but rather a detailed map with a live "you are here" indicator. To look at it, I held the unit halfway up and glanced down when I could naturally spare the attention. For input, I pushed the buttons without looking, since I could predict the unit's states (push button X to zoom out, push button Y 3 times to get from map screen to statistics screen, etc). It even had text input, in the form you'd probably grimace at (alphabetically-ordered grid of letters, move using arrow buttons, select using enter button), which I believe I did while driving with no problem (it took quite a while to enter anything, of course). Due to the predictable input states and physical buttons that I never had to consciously locate (same position in my hand), it never felt like it affected my OODA loop or otherwise stole my attention.
That is probably true these days, unfortunately. The held-in-hand aspect was key to the device being easy to use safely. If the GPS had been mounted to the dash/vent instead (per current customs), then each button press would have taken more effort to visually register where the button was and verify that I was hitting it, similar to a touchscreen. Also, I suspect focusing on a more vertical screen would have required my eyes adjusting to cancel the ambient backlight, greatly slowly my ability to change focus.
I also did most of the driving barefoot, which it turns out actually is not actually illegal as many urban legends would have you believe. That too gave me much better control modulating the clutch, handy for things like rough dirt roads.
My Audi has a knob which I can rotate in order to navigate through the menus without taking my eyes off the street. It also has a touch screen, but I only use it when standing still.
Mazda has something similar. I realized that "do __ without taking your eyes off the road" isn't really true, for the same reason that it's hard to read your phone and listen to someone at the same time. Most of the time you can strike a balance, but every once and a while your mind will completely blank and take a few moments to realize you stopped processing what you were hearing. Not a risk worth taking while driving.
I try to avoid using the knob while in motion as well.
There's also a difference between taking your eyes off the road momentarily to look at a simple predictable display in a fixed location, like a light or a needle or a fixed text display, and taking your eyes off the road indefinitely to look at a screen that displays something unpredictable, complex and arbitrary as part of an interactive session, usually with animations.
Do you refuse to ride in Ubers, or avoid Amazon delivery vehicles? I have to admit that the level of tech-denial in this thread seems to be getting out of hand. Everyone uses in-vehicles maps. Everyone deploys them on touch screens. They're pervasive and everywhere, and none of the arguments change when you bolt them to the dash.
Why is "Tesla" being held to a different standard than UPS/FedEx/Amazon/Uber/Doordash/etc...?
I would say because Tesla is doing something similar to this (well, not the ditching, but the bad part that comes before the eventual ditching) and basically what the study found:
Navy ditches touchscreens for knobs and dials after fatal crash
Things did get diverted on a maps drove tangent but that usually on our pose to enable the same argument you're making now.
The argument started by asking why windshield wipers, environment controls or basic radio functions need to be buried in a touch screen.
Also most vehicles limit what's allowed in navigation screens while the vehicle is moving. Which is annoying when it prevents a passenger get from using it but sensible when there is a single driver.
The only navigation thing I can do that feels safe while driving is “Hey Siri, take me to XYX.” Any non-verbal way to interact will take your eyes and hands away from driving far too much.
Many places forbid driving while distracted, and this often applies regardless of the source of distraction. Just because something is connected to the vehicle doesn’t mean that any use of that equipment is necessary legal.
That's... no, I think that's just objectively wrong. Have you actually used all these systems? Display latency in the device-remote schemes is really pretty awful, where the Tesla screen scrolls like butter. Obviously no one is an expert on all these things, but I watch friends' vehicles and the occasional rental, and it's really not close.
I went quickly to youtube to check, and pulled up this comparatively recent Mach-E video showing carplay. It's... janky and clumsy. Buttons take 300ms+ to actuate. See the sequence starting around 3:15. No wonder it feels unsafe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ongr-sptxto
Now watch this one, which is actually two years old (not showing the current UI, and running on what is now one-generation-old MCU hardware):
There are likely better examples, these are just ones that popped up first for me. But yeah, that's the state of in-car navigation UIs. And Tesla is absolutely the best.
You touch on one of the key problems here. "Not showing the current UI". Allowing cars to follow the same ui refresh cycle as cell phones undermines the predictability of operating the vehicle.
There has to be a balance between the "always new" and "never updated" approaches here.
I'd say a car's core ui, everything from how to wipers work, to brake pedal sensitivity(changed in a few tesla updates?!), should require a manual update, a discussion with a car tech, and a sign off by the customer.
None of this stuff should ever, ever change in an update, without blaring, in your face, clear walkthroughs on the change.
And none of them should be forced, or preclude other updates. EG, by no means, should the control system of a car you paid tens of thousands for, suddenly change post sale.
Consumers first, safety first, cost savings and "cool factor" complete last.
Getting lost and staring at a map is vaguely dangerous. Having a map that gets you a clear answer faster is safer. This really doesn't seem controversial to me, it only seems so in this thread because "Tesla".
If you frame it in other ways, it seems more obvious. Is anyone demanding that FedEx drivers or Doordashers use paper maps? Should your Uber driver pull over every time the route changes?
I feel like the paper map comparison is a red herring. Most people who are in favour of the UK’s rule against ‘interacting with a device while driving’ would probably also say you should pull over before messing with a paper map too; it’s probably just much harder to legislate for that (or maybe less necessary because people do that so rarely). No one is arguing that using a paper map while driving is safer.
Not that I necessarily support the legislation, I lean pretty libertarian, I just don’t take your argument that it’s ‘obviously’ safer to let people use phones in their cars because otherwise they’ll use paper maps. That’s just not what happens. What actually happens is either they interact with their phone more briefly and surreptitiously to avoid detection by police, or they just pull over and interact with their phone at the side of the road before getting going again. Either way I suspect the law has the desired effect of reducing the amount people are distracted while driving.
I agree that GPS makes finding where you are easier but it's a fallacy to pretend maps are hard to use. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature should be able to locate themselves on a map. It's only when you become so oblivious to your surroundings because you only know how ot listen to the GPS that this seems difficult...
Locating yourself on a map while stationary and locating yourself on a map while operating a 3 ton vehicle at speed and looking for a particular turn are quite different things.
Why would that be banned? The wording talks about holding the device in the hand. I'm only talking about the recent UK phone law. Previously you could hand hold a phone as long as you weren't using it as a phone. It's now broader in terms of what the devices are, but still only applies to holding something in the hand.
When we bought our last car we specifically avoided touchscreen-heavy interfaces. Worst we looked at was Peugeot, which not only had framerate stuttering _on the actual digital dashboard_, the radio turned on loud for us and although the digital volume button was large, you couldn’t just hold it down - you needed to repeatedly tap/lift/tap/lift/… to move it more than just one volume notch.
We bought a (non-peugeot) car with a physical dial in the end.
Oh, thank you for mentioning digital dashboards, I completely forgot about those! So, in addition to mandatory physical controls for common functions, my imaginary EU legislation would also prescribe that all essential vehicle information (speed, outside light status, fuel level) has a physical representation (lights, dials, etc., in the sense that there is nothing that could be described as 'software' driving these).
The last 'owned' car that I drove was my wife's quite-high-end Audi. It had a digital dashboard, which was OK and looked extremely cool... until those moments when it froze mid-drive, requiring an engine off/on cycle to recover. Which was really lovely on the highway, cruising along at an unknown speed... (Another charming feature of this car was that the AC would sometimes decide that going into full-blast, no-you-can't-turn-this-off, full-heat mode was a really great idea. This only took, like, five software updates and 18 months to be resolved. The issue where you couldn't cancel the keyfob-based seat personalization was never fixed, so whenever I (6'5") grabbed my wife's (5'2" on a warm day) car keys by mistake, there was lots of grinding of seat motors, trying to drive my knees and head into the car interior, while ignoring my desperate inputs to the 'move the seat back and down please' controls. Comfort feature indeed!)
> So, in addition to mandatory physical controls for common functions, my imaginary EU legislation would also prescribe that all essential vehicle information (speed, outside light status, fuel level) has a physical representation (lights, dials, etc., in the sense that there is nothing that could be described as 'software' driving these).
We're way past that. All (to a rounding error) modern analogue dials are also controlled by software via the ECU. This has been true for decades now.
Few cars even have a mechanical throttle linkage anymore.
> my imaginary EU legislation would also prescribe that all essential vehicle information (speed, outside light status, fuel level) has a physical representation (lights, dials, etc., in the sense that there is nothing that could be described as 'software' driving these).
Even "analog" gauges have been software driven for a long time now. My simracing seat setup has a gauge cluster out of a mid-2000s VW Passat that runs entirely on CAN.
If it does a gauge sweep when you turn it in you can be pretty certain it's software controlled, even if it has physical dials. This obviously hasn't been a major problem, so software control is not the issue here, bad quality software control is.
I like the dashboard in my 2014 Prius. The speedometer is digital numbers, which is great because I have trouble reading dials. Never had an issue with anything freezing up.
Later Toyotas I’ve rented have full color screens. They work okay.
Anecdata and another case against center-dash touch control panels -which are integrated with control units.
Our 2013 Prius just had the center-dash unit crash likely due to the audio sub-system. And it would have burned but for a fuse blowing (replacing the fuse lead to smoking.) This took out the rear camera display along with climate controls, audio, ...
Fortunately someone at the Toyota shop we patronize had just replaced their same model year working unit with an iPad (hence learned that's a thing in the US even if illegal in the UK.) So what was going to be a ~$2,000 USD rebuilt unit (~$5,000 OEM new but a guy in town rebuilds them because there is apparently enough demand) was going to be less expensive.
Unfortunately, our Prius's unit seems to be unique to a particular finish/package for the model. And this particular unit type (a JBL variant) has connectors different from all other Toyota center console units.
Gist of the situation: failure of what is likely the audio section of the integrated center-dash unit took out rear camera, climate controls, audio, etc. with high price tag to repair when simple loss of audio unit would have been ignored.
Oh, I'm fine with digital readouts, as long as there is an analog backup for when you hit that unavoidable software bug. Airplanes get this right: even on the latest Airbus, you still have the basic altitude, air/vertical speed and heading instruments, in a familiar place and configuration, based on boring physical/analog principles, just in case you need them... (and, because they're mandated by FAA [14 CFR 91] and equivalent EASA rules, which probably is for a good reason as well)
Those are included on Airplanes because you need those to make a safe stop (aka Landing)
you DO NOT need a speedometer or any dash display at all to safely pull a car to the side of the road and stop. Therefore they should not be mandated under safety regulation, if you have a car with a digital display and it fails you pull your car to the side of the road, put on your hazards and call for a tow to the mechanic
Just like in a airplane if it has a problem you find the closest safe landing spot, put the plan down, and call for a mechanic.
Given that it's unsafe to drive too fast and "too fast" depends greatly on the specific road you're driving on and weather conditions, speedometers are safety equipment.
In those cases speed dependent on driving condition is a feeling based on the experience of the driver. Speedometer does not help you there.
If you do not have a feeling for the safety under which you are operating, then perhaps you should not be driving in the first place? Which I believe that is the underlying problem here, We are too lax with whom we issue driving licenses too.
Oh but it does! A blind corner will kill drivers going by feel alone, who don't have experience on that particular stretch of road. Feel alone doesn't inform you that you're in a school zone (until catastrophically too late). Remember, the driver isn't just a hazard to themselves, they're a hazard to everybody in their path.
How do you propose to limit licensing to experienced drivers in such a way that inexperienced drivers are capable of gaining the experience necessary to drive?
>> A blind corner will kill drivers going by feel alone, who don't have experience on that particular stretch of road.
What exactly does not have to do with a speedometer? that is about road signs.
Knowing exactly what speed you are going has no bearing on your ability to navigate a blind corner. I am very confused by this statement
Based on visual cues alone you should know with in 10MPH how fast you are going anyway, if you can not tell how fast you are traveling generally with out looking at the speedometer you should not be driving
>How do you propose to limit licensing to experienced drivers in such a way that inexperienced drivers are capable of gaining the experience necessary to drive?
Well it seems to be popular in this thread to make flying a plan an analog for driving so how about simulators like they do for pilots, longer training, more time having to drive with an experienced driver. There are lots of things that could be done
> What exactly does not have to do with a speedometer? that is about road signs.
How do you know your speed without a speedometer?
Your insistence that driving is just like flying and that cars only need to stop is a bit ludicrous. Your endurance on this thread alone is impressive. That's not a good thing, but thanks for all the chuckles.
> you DO NOT need a speedometer or any dash display at all to safely pull a car to the side of the road and stop.
You do if there isn't a good place to stop and you need (or would rather) keep driving for awhile first, say in the middle of an obnoxious construction zone with no shoulder, or on a mountain pass with no shoulder, or in a sketchy area in the middle of the night (summoning a tow truck can literally take hours depending on where you are), etc.
Then you can slow to a reasonable safe speed and proceed on visual cues alone
Still do not need a speedometer, you should be able to judge you speed with in 5-10mph by visual alone, if you can not you probably should not be driving in the first place.
But there are no analog backups in cars. Engines also operate on software. Not sure to what extent, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that steering wheels and brakes too. I know that sounds a bit scary, but somewhat doubt modern traction control is all analog.
Depends on the vehicle, but most vehicles still have directly coupled hydraulic brakes. However, they are boosted (by engine vacuum or some other means). I can still apply the brakes without the boost, but it takes stratospheric amounts of force. Nearly my entire body weight.
Those backup instruments are starting to be replaced with digital systems using a battery backup. And analog gyros have always needed a power source. (Doesn’t have to be electrical.) :)
I cannot imagine how anybody can stand the constantly changing value of a digital speedometer as it flickers around whatever your intended speed is. Give me a needle any day.
I have a digital speedometer with a 7 segment display in my Citroen and it doesn't flicker at all. It updates roughly once a second or so -- quick enough to feel responsive, but slow enough to not annoy me.
My 2 cents: generally the speedometer is always somehow just enough out of "default driving view" that I don't really see it, I have to actively look at it. And when I do, a plain number is easier and faster to parse.
>The last 'owned' car that I drove was my wife's quite-high-end Audi. It had a digital dashboard, which was OK and looked extremely cool... until those moments when.....
So, wtf did you put up with all that (presuming it wasnt a company car)? And, even then, you should have a trail of paperwork a mile/ kilometre long to audi - publish all that.
I’ve had 2 Audis now with the virtual cockpit and literally never had an issue- this seems like something an Audi dealer would replace under warranty as defective right away.
My VAG car (VW/Audi/Skoda/SEAT/etc) has a great digital dash. It's super responsive, it's clear in all sun light, no framerate issues or anything.
I think digital dials and things like that are excellent and aren't a problem. These have been around for around 10 years now. They have clear benefits such as having navigation info up front, music info, customizable dials, speed as a number, etc.
Peugeot has always had shitty technology in their cars, they are a budget brand trying to be a premium brand.
Ford Focus, recent enough to have the Sync3+ software (2018+). Except for the Carplay interface, everything has physical buttons, and even then - the physical media controls (and on-steering-wheel buttons, including a physical "activate siri voice control" button) will do what you expect with the connected device. It has both digital speedometer (as an optional page in the dashboard) and physical speedometer.
However, I haven't looked to see if this is continues with the more recent models/focus line alternatives.
Interesting. Last time I rented a car, I had a choice of multiple SUV brands, and I ended up picking the Ford one because it wasn't too big, had Carplay, and had lots of physical buttons. It was a pleasurable experience.
However, we've owned several Fords in the past 30 years (Sierra, Mondeo, and Fiesta) and they all have had a few reliability issues, mostly electric. I'm not sure I would buy another Ford today. I hope you have better luck. But I must say that in terms of driving comfort and driver experience, they've all been great.
I agree using the touchscreen is annoying on occasion; but more legislation I’m totally opposed. We’d get much worse results over time as bad practices are enforced by the largest of car companies to further prevent new stuff from being tried.
Honestly having the m3 dash clear of the clutter and most features on automatic gives me personally more focus on road and those around me. But yeah hitting the rear defroster is more inconvenient.
As a M3 driver I both love and hate the touchscreen. Everything is easy except when you are driving in traffic, being an older 60+ person with the car bouncing up and down at 100KMH, I find myself not being safely able to use the touchscreen at all in these situations I ask the passenger if there is one or use the voice control, though getting the correct wording for this takes a little bit of training and things like directing the air vents I have no clue how to do.
Maybe a senior mode with big touch buttons and text and less of the bling would work for me or as someone else suggested some sort of USB add on with physical switches which integrated with the bottom of the touchscreen. Im not holding out much hope for either though.
Why does the EU believe every facet of life needs to be ordered and control by government regulation, is there any area of life at all in the EU that should be free from government interference? That is an honest question because every time anything comes up the first response from citizens of the EU is to declare government should be the right and proper resolution to the problem
Generally, it only tends to come up in any area where the market seems to be failing consumers. This is interpreted as an externality that the market doesn't account for (in this case consumer safety, in the case of USB-C charging e-waste), which regulations are then introduced to correct for.
Ironic since safety laws is what put the screens in the cars in the first place, the regulation requiring backup camera's which required large screen to show the picture.
>>in the case of USB-C charging e-waste
lol, yea that is not the reason for USB-C regulation, nor was that needed at all, and that will handicap either the EU or global innovation. What ever comes next to replace USB-C either now will never be made and will be stuck (I hope not, because USB-C is terrible) or the EU will be left behind has the rest of the world moves on to the better thing
> Ironic since safety laws is what put the screens in the cars in the first place
Screens themselves aren't the issue. They didn't mandate touch screens, or the removal of non-touch controls.
(EDIT: in fact, the removal of non-touch controls in place of touch controls is a perfect example of the market resulting in a race-to-the-bottom cost-saving measure that you're in denial of in your other comments).
> lol, yea that is not the reason for USB-C regulation
Care to elaborate on what the reason is then? Because that's the reason I've seen given.
> What ever comes next to replace USB-C either now will never be made and will be stuck
This is misleading. The law is flexible in that regard, and in fact the commission will be required to regularly amend the law.
> or the EU will be left behind has the rest of the world moves on to the better thing
ofcourse... they just mandated a large expensive screen that naturally the automakers and consumers would love to have right up front visible to the driver for about 10secs per use of the vehicle and be used for nothing else ever.
This is the kind of "forethought" that makes for terrible regulation, and unintended consequences, I bet you would make for a great elected official, ever consider running for office?
If you are going to mandate some large and expensive be put in a predominant spot of a product, that thing is going to be used for multiple functions, it is unrealistic, and a denial of reality to expect anything less
>>Care to elaborate on what the reason is then? Because that's the reason I've seen given.
I am sure that is the stated reason, there is no actual data to back that up since converters to and from the various charging standards are easily available there is no reason to believe that a device having or not having USB-C contributes at all to ewaste. No one is toss out their iPhone because it has a lighting cable, and most are not even tossing the chargers as for less than $5 you can get any adapter to any other port...
EU addiction to regulation is a real problem.
>>Fortunately, the EU market is too big to ignore.
For now, the EU economy has been largely stagnant since about 2008, Though this year seems to have has a bump largely due to inflation which means it is still flat.
> No one is toss out their iPhone because it has a lighting cable, and most are not even tossing the chargers as for less than $5 you can get any adapter to any other port...
You must have forgotten the days where all chargers had a molded cable instead of the USB-A socket that is standard these days, and the plug was different for each and every brand. So each phone came with both a custom cable and a custom charger.
So you have changed your problem from finding one of N charger to finding one of N(N-1) adapters, assuming someone actually built and sold for example a Samsung-to-LG adapter. Not a great improvement.
nominal gdp went from 11 tril in 2008 to 14.5 tril in 2021, averaging about 1.66% per year. That's not flat. Are you using some different kind of metric?
PS more to the point, the next entity that comes anywhere close to that number is Japan and its several times smaller, so eu will remain relevant for a while even if it completely stops growing.
>ofcourse... they just mandated a large expensive screen that naturally the automakers and consumers would love to have right up front visible to the driver for about 10secs per use of the vehicle and be used for nothing else ever.
Im fine with that and maybe music playlist control
> Ironic since safety laws is what put the screens in the cars in the first place, the regulation requiring backup camera's which required large screen to show the picture.
The ggp post was about EU requirements. A backup camera is not required in the EU, that's a US requirement. EU requires a warning system when going backwards, but that's beeping, not showing a picture (a camera/screen wouldn't satisfy the warning-requirement).
You don't mention purpose or outcomes at all, just "ordered and control by government" and "interference".
Obviously it comes down to government competence but the EU has shown itself to be mostly competent.
Government regulations are a last resort, not the first as you insinuate.
An example is roaming charges. The EU warned phone companies that it would regulate in the absence of reforms. They did nothing and the EU rolled out regulations that have benefited everyone who uses a phone across borders at almost no additional cost. Very inexpensive plans are still available as always (for example I have a 2.65 euro plan that gives me 1GB of data each month, with full EU roaming).
In respect to cars, if there are safety regulations that err on the side of being a bit onerous, then so be it, but there's no evidence they are problematic.
An example is my 2016 Kia Rio. I paid approximately $12,500 (about 11,000 euros at the time). The EU mandates that all new cars must have tire pressure monitoring, anti-lock braking and stability control. Because this is existing, mature technology the added cost to the car is marginal, and very cheap cars are still available, such as my Kia.
Meanwhile, those car features have definitely saved my life on 4 separate occasions.
Free markets are not some panacea for the world's ills. They work well in most cases but since there is no perfect market there will always be market regulation. The extent and the development of smart regulations requires good goverment, and that's where our responsibility to be politically engaged comes in. Government is a tool like any other, imperfect as it is, but we can influence its form.
> Why does the EU believe every facet of life needs to be ordered and control by government regulation
It doesn't, the author is just projecting their authoritarian nanny state fantasies.
The EU regulates the internal market and sets minimal common standards for example for medication, food safety and allowed pesticides and fertilizers etc. These are necessary for the well functioning of the common market and need to be specified to a high degree of detail, otherwise states would try to cheat and flood the common market with products grown with the cheapest most toxic methods, and you wouldn't be able to remove them from your national market without breaking the free trade rules.
This nature of the internal competition needs detailed regulations that states need to negotiate and specify very well (and then try to cheat anyway), and it's unlike a national unified market like the US has. This gives the appearance of over-regulation, but in reality the UE is quite neoliberal and doesn't give a fuck about your car controls.
Like the iPhone for example? Or maybe the Porsche 911 GT3 RS? Markets have a lot of segments. Government should regulate the minimum absolute necessity. Like seatbelts... who were ironically a market invention/idea first.
My personal opinion on this is that the minimum should protect me from others. This doesn't even include seatbelts I gave as example because I can (realistically) only hurt myself. This would include gas emissions, noise limits, headlight angle/strength rules, ... Certainly not the dashboard layout.
You do know that Touch Screen got included in Cars due to government regulations right? The government mandated Backup Camera's and once you had to put in a screen to serve as display for the backup camera then it only makes since to use that screen for more and more things
This is yet another unintended consequence of government regulations, where by now people want to use government regulation to "fix" the problems the regulation caused in the first place, which will cause even more problems as regulation always does
>>"to the market" is always a race to the bottom
Absolutely false, the market more than anything in human society has driven more wealth, and higher standards of living. If it incredibly ignorant to say the market is a "race the to bottom" backed by ZERO data or facts
Nobody ever demanded touch screens. Cars already had navigation built in that had no touch screens nor a need for them. Car companies choosing cheap, substandard designs to save a buck is something the car companies decided on.
The market being a race to the bottom is visible in every single space where only a few companies control an entire industry. From supermarkets to cars, from soft drinks to tech, when competition dies down market regulation is the only way to get the interest or the general population taken care of. I'm 100% certain PepsiCo and Big Tobacco would market to toddlers if we allowed them to. Car companies have started to move to electric not because Tesla's cars were such a good business model but because governments are moving to ban internal combustion engines somewhere within the next decade; regulation is forcing these companies to innovate in ways that don't provide an immediate financial profit.
Obviously a state controlled market will always fail, but a purely free market has proven to only serve the richest of the rich. Balanced regulation is key. In my opinion, cars that put common driving controls on touch screen a should never been allowed on the road.
>>where only a few companies control an entire industry.
I feel like we are now into the absurd... You know what kills competition. REGULATION.
Every industry where you can cite limited competition I can tell you the regulations that killed that competition.
Unregulated industries have LOTS of innovation and competition. Regulated industries have slow innovation and no competition.
Free market work because of competition, no competition no free market.
>>Car companies have started to move to electric not because Tesla's cars were such a good business model but because governments are moving to ban internal combustion engines somewhere within the next decade;
This is a complete revisionist history, and it is very very very very unlikely any nation will actually ban ICE cars in the next decade.
While I will not deny regulation played some role in the speed of transition, it is unlikely that role would be more than moving the needle more 5 years ahead of where it would have naturally gone anyway.
Electric cars where being made long before the Tesla, Tesla simply timed the market correctly at the same time technology got to the point where an BEV was even possible.
To put 100% of the transition to BEV on government is simply false, and in fact I can make a good case that government accelerating the natural progression is in the long run going to be HARMFUL and may even set back the transition in many ways
And every industry where you can cite zero regulation I can tell you the industry killed lots of people or destroyed ecosystems.
Unregulated industries have LOTS of leeway to prioritize profits over their environment. Case in point: look up the article yesterday about Salt Lake being drained for agriculture, risking millions of homes' access to drinking water.
> I feel like we are now into the absurd... You know what kills competition. REGULATION.
That is absurd.
Regulation takes many forms, and if you think that monopolies are only broken by reducing regulation, then there isn't any point in continuing this conversation.
There is no fair market without someone ensuring a fair market. Before the FDA grocers were selling milk to families which "was routinely adulterated with water, rotten eggs, flour, burnt sugar and other adulterants with the finished product then marketed falsely as "pure country milk" or "Orange County Milk".
People like you went on about how regulation would kill the industry and hurt the market, but what was really killed was more than 8,000 infants (ibn one year alone)[0].
Industry does not care about your life or your family or babies because they have no feelings. They exist to compete and win, at any cost.
Without something (democratic government is a good option for this) looking out for consumers, and for the other market players, your Ayn Randian fantasy will come about, and it will not be the utopia of consumer choice and meritocracy, it will be the later 1800s all over again, with most people poor to the point they are feeding their children milk with plaster in it, and a few robber barons controlling entire industries and killing competition before it can compete.
Do not look at 'free markets' with some rose colored glasses, because without ensuring industry deals with externalities and without ensuring that competition can happen by preventing on company from owning entire supply chains or cartels setting prices and preventing innovation, then the market would not be fair a t all, and most people's lives would be exponentially more miserable.
“The milk drawn from the cows was routinely adulterated with water, rotten eggs, flour, burnt sugar and other adulterants with the finished product then marketed falsely as "pure country milk" or "Orange County Milk".”
Yikes. Hard pass on being a poison-tester for every entrepreneur that dreams up a cost-cutting measure to increase their profits selling me food. Looks like it took years for the image of milk to recover.
Are we reading the same page? because what you linked to is an example of Government shielding a bad actor from liability. At multiple points in the wiki entry they talk about how government protected the Swill Milk factories.
I dont know if that is the shining example of government protection, nor the indictment of free markets you think it is.
>>your Ayn Randian fantasy
Nope, not an Objectivist. I am small l libertarian, very different from Objectivism which is Randian philosophy. Rand hated libertarians.
I am also not opposed to all government, or government regulation. I am opposed to extreme amounts of regulations (like regulation what type of interface a car must have be it touch screen or buttons), and I prefer the government to get out of my life. and I believe we have become a massively over regulated and criminalized society that in large part has created many of the problems we have today such as these huge corporations.
Some basic minimalist safety regulations are ok. Regulation numbers in the billions of pages where no one human can ever know and understand them all... Hard pass on that.
> I dont know if that is the shining example of government protection, nor the indictment of free markets you think it is.
Notice I mentioned the FDA -- which has as a mandate to ensure safe food and drink, not the local official who had no such mandate and powered monied interested held more sway than poor dead infants. You use a local official as evidence of a regulatory body in a time when local officials were actors for industry -- and expect me to think you spent more than 3 seconds thinking critically about that?
> I am small l libertarian
And, like most libertarians, (who are not just closet fascists calling themselves libertarians because libertarians don't bother to exclude them), your definition of 'extreme' could be anything from 'driver's licenses' to 'not being able to sell your own children', so who knows what line you stand on. Whatever it is, I would like you to remove yourself from all of the government protections you disagree with and see how long you and your libertarian friends last. Hint -- it has been tried numerous times, and always ends in hilarity and completely predictable outcomes.
>>like most libertarians, (who are not just closet fascists calling themselves libertarians
Facism which is a totalitarian collectivist ideology has nothing in common with libertarianism, your assertion there are closet fascist calling themselves libertarians is plainly false most likely because you misapply the term fascist due your are probably complete ignorance of both. Which is common today where alot of people that seem to have world view closely aligned with classic fascist leaders proclaim themselves to be "anti-fascist" unironically.
>so who knows what line you stand on.
well if you had read my entire comment instead of cherry picking the quote you wanted you find where my line is.
I never applied the term fascist or defined it. I stated an opinion in line with m experiences. I happen to know what a fascist is -- in fact just last week I re-read Umberto Eco's Ur Fascism[0]; it is brilliant and I suggest you check it out.
> well if you had read my entire comment instead of cherry picking the quote you wanted you find where my line is.
I read your comment -- you used the term 'extreme' and then said the government over-regulates, and you want 'minimal safety' regulations. However, your arguments do not line up with this, since I have read your comments and they are quite a bit more on the 'let corporations do what they wish' than 'the government is too damn nanny-state'.
So, forgive me if I don't take you at your word. My experiences with libertarians has led me to just assume that your 'line' is whatever you feel like, that benefits you, until it doesn't anymore, then you are on the other side of it.
> the market more than anything in human society has driven more wealth, and higher standards of living.
Competition occurs because it is promoted through regulations. Contracts, private property, stock markets, etc. all exist due to regulations. If competition tends to stop (e.g. a company cornering a market), then regulators can step in to change things so that competition is once more possible. If your goal is to increase wealth and standards of living, you should support regulations making that possible.
> Absolutely false, the market more than anything in human society has driven more wealth, and higher standards of living. If it incredibly ignorant to say the market is a "race the to bottom" backed by ZERO data or facts
A rational actor tries to maximize profits, and that involves either cost-cutting while minimally passing on cost savings; or disruption.
Disruption is what has driven wealth, but an unregulated market is terrible at encouraging risk taking.
The easier path is to make things cheaper (to
make), and the evidence is every off-shored manufacturing and industry over decades.
Now you’ll say that this cost increase is due to regulations; but the argument against that is even Chinese labor has become expensive and that’s simply due to a rising middle class. The market.
But like the US once had, they have the manufacturing knowledge and scale that we’ve foolishly given up a long time ago so US businesses can’t simply lift and shift.
To the point where I doubt our ability to wage a long-term war.
> You do know that Touch Screen got included in Cars due to government regulations right? The government mandated Backup Camera's and once you had to put in a screen to serve as display for the backup camera then it only makes since to use that screen for more and more things
Backup cameras were mandated in the US in 2018. Almost every vehicle on the market had a touchscreen years before that. The few vehicles I can think of that didn't yet have a screen as standard by that point got in-mirror camera displays to comply.
A government regulation that was announced in 2014 and took effect in 2018 had nothing to do with my 2015 Fiesta, which does not have a backup camera, having the same touch screen a 2010 model had.
Ford introduced MyFordTouch in 2010. Chrysler's Uconnect system came out in 2011, GM's various systems (CUE, MyLink, etc) in 2012, and of course the big daddy of stupid touch-focused designs the Tesla Model S came out in 2013. All of these were well established across entire lineups by the time backup camera regulations were being discussed.
The primary reason for the current state of automotive touch interfaces is entirely capitalism doing what it does. Touch interfaces are more expensive than a few buttons, but they can replace hundreds of individual controls and components that all have their own design, testing, and production requirements with one where almost everything about it can be changed on the fly. A model that offers options for heated seats as well as heated/cooled seats means you have three different sets of buttons for whatever panel those go in, three different sets of control boards, etc. With touch controls, as bad as they are to use those three variants are now effectively free to the manufacturer. They "cost" a few if()s in software.
Regulation is in fact the only reason this nonsense hasn't gotten even stupider. Tesla's new models have a set of hidden controls for drive mode selection and hazard lights, which are primarily intended to be controlled via the touch screen, because they are legally required to have something that would work without the screen.
Let me repeat that, Tesla does not want to have these controls, the only reason they have them is because regulation forces them to. Tell me again how the big bad government is ruining Tesla's freedom to do the stupidest things...
>>Tesla does not want to have these controls, the only reason they have them is because regulation forces them to. Tell me again how the big bad government is ruining Tesla's freedom to do the stupidest things
You think the stupidest thing, I am not anti-touch screen like most here are. In-fact I replaced alot of the factory buttons in my older car with a Aftermarket Large display that is basically a huge android tablet that controls alot of the car functions (including HVAC)
I prefer touch controls.
Why the government preventing me from choosing the control I like the best, and then you can feel free to not buy a car that does not have physical controls.
I am sure you are not going to agree or like my response to this argument then.
It should be incumbent upon the driver to learn how to operate their car safely. If our ultimate goals are to maximize highway safety, we should be punishing reckless driving. It shouldn't matter if it's caused by alcohol, sleep deprivation, prescription medication, text messaging, or Touch Screens. If lawmakers want to stick it to dangerous drivers who threaten everyone else on the road, they can dial up the civil and criminal liability for reckless driving, especially in cases that result in injury or property damage.
The punishable act should be violating road rules or causing an accident, not the factors that led to those offenses.
I'm not even convinced you're arguing in good faith any more, because frankly I can't imagine how a rational and empathetic individual could have reasoned themselves into these opinions.
I'm not going to argue with you any more, because you're either a troll, or someone to who can't be reasoned out of their opinions simply because they didn't reason themselves into them.
Empathy and rationality are often in conflict, you seem to side more on the empathetic side where I do not. I am purely on the logical / rational side and freely admit to having very low Empathy.
>>someone to who can't be reasoned out of their opinions simply because they didn't reason themselves
I literally linked to a site called Reason.com.... It provides a very reasoned case for the abolishment of Drunk driving laws, and the unintended consequences to civil liberties those laws have created. (similar to the consequence to civil liberties the war on drugs has caused)
I think I have very reasoned and logical positions that are not based at all in empathy or emotion, which IMO is where all government regulation and law should be, devoid of emotion. Laws created because of emotional response are almost universally bad laws.
For a site called reason the article surely is dumb AF.
First the author argues back and forth about BAC levels. Maybe it should be .05? Or .08? Or something else? Well how about 0.00 as is in many other countries??
Then he somehow misses the fact that BAC levels can be deduced from blood samples taken hours after the actual police stop.
No wonder they let him go in 2011.
Logic and rationality are not inherently opposed to empathy.
That being said, one does not need to be empath to value not causing accidents to other people. "This will lead to more accidents" is both logical and rational claim.
The ideological investment into idea that one must be selfish to max to look "logical" is irrational.
Now where do I, nor the link, advocate for ignoring accidents to other people. In fact the goal is to actually lessen them which I and others advocate is not the actual goal of people pursing some of these regulations. Control and power seems to be the control. In the case of DUI laws in the US it seems to be primary born out of the desire to get around 4th amendment search provisions not about safety
I fail to see how advocating for very harsh punishment for people that cause accidents to other people, including prison and revocation of driving license has been twisted here to be something that is illogical and disregarding to others.
I also fail to understand why a person should not have the responsibility upon buying a vehicle to understand how to operate it safely, no matter if the interface is a Button or Touch screen. Do we give a pass to someone if they were fumbling with buttons? It is insanity to me how much society has drifted away from personal responsibility to everything being everyone else's fault
I did not said that you advocated "ignoring accidents". You was against regulation against making it safer, with argument that punishing those who make mistakes or cause accidents harder is better option.
Then you created dichotomy between "empathy" and rationality, while responding to person accusing you of missing both.
Then you literally made strawman arguing I wrote something else then I wrote.
Legislation like this would 'protect persons' as making the wise decision not to buy a car with the offending UI won't stop you from being t-boned by someone who did.
Consumers need protection from people who make selfish decisions.
That's not what you said. You said "why does the EU believe that every part of life needs government regulation."
And it's because, as Milton Friedman once said, "a corporation's responsibility is to make as much money for the stockholders as possible."
Without a counter balance you wouldn't have seat belts, crumple zones, fuel efficiency standards, the list goes on and on. Safety is not the responsibility of the corporation. Their only priority is profit.
>>as Milton Friedman once said, "a corporation's responsibility is to make as much money for the stockholders as possible."
That is an over simplification of his Position, and often misused as you have here, just like people that misuse Poppers paradox of tolerance to justify censorship of people they dislike, you misuse Friedman to criticize a economic system you dislike
>>Safety is not the responsibility of the corporation.
Yes and no. They still face liability if not protected by the government. Which often time government regulation come with liability shields protecting said corporations that is why large corporations like regulation; as it often prevents competition while at the same time protecting them from liability
Further they face competition based on safety, automotive companies compete widely on the safety records of their vehicles with many marketing the features and safety testing results that exceed government requirements, this means there is a MARKET driver to increase safety and it is not just government regulations that drive safety.
Infact some automakers are at odds over the government because technology in the area of safety (lighting is the big one) is changing faster than regulations can keep up and many manufacturers would like to make changes to their cars that would make them safer but are prohibited because of regulations.
UI in a car that makes drivers potentially more distracted.
I don't care about how comfortable or uncomfortable this makes people with touch screens driving, there's large evidence for them being more dangerous.
Because “Best Practices“ and “Interface Ergonomics“ guidelines provide excellent parameters for legislation. Why would we want anything other than the best functional design/interface for something as important as our vehicle controls?
Because it is a socialist construct, despite what they may tell you. I mean that in the purely theoretical sense: the government “knows better, know everything, and solves better, and everything”, which just means “everything needs to be legislated.
The last car I rented had the lane assist mode on a physical button. That was surprisingly convenient as lane assist is nice on highway but a lot less so on small rural roads with more spotty markings.
Only issue is the lane assist switch 1. is not a physical toggle (it's a change mode button which doesn't change position) and 2. it's the same shape and around the buttons for quick beam adjustment and dash lighting level
Though none of the three is utterly critical, and all three are rather well notified through the dashboard (a little icon is displayed for dipped beams) so even if you get it wrong by sole touch it's not really critical.
The somewhat sadder part is as a rental (and thus entry level) only like 5 of the 8 possible buttons under the touchscreen have a function associated. Seems a bit of a shame to not put some more minor function on the last 3.
The designers also put the "mute" function on pressing both "volume up" and "volume down" at the same time, which is easy to mistakenly do (they're at the end of the same stalk, the position is convenient but it's very easy to hit both when trying to increase or decrease volume).
> also the B-brand, which has seen it fit to replace most of the controls in some of its cars with a single multi-function stalk (iDrive, I think?) that isn't good for anything, except as a reason to return your car for a refund
This is exaggerated and inaccurate. I have a recent BMW and it has numerous physical controls for climate, radio and various settings like auto-hold or disable engine auto-stop/start.
The multifunction puck in BMWs is fantastic, it even allows for text entry while looking at the road. I have trained myself to not use the touchscreen as much as possible and now feel very comfortable even navigating Apple Carplay with it.
I also have a recent model Audi, which is far more egregious with the touch screen. Disabling auto-stop/start cannot be done persistently and it is a touch screen button, along with hill descent. Climate controls have their own dedicated touch panel, and there is no real alternative to touching anything like iDrive. The exception is that it does have an actual volume knob with on/off and next-prev functionality.
It’s also worth noting that both cars also have audio controls on the steering wheel itself.
It is definitely worse, but there are also dedicated buttons for next/prev, max defrost and max rear defrost as well as the driving mode, parking guidance.
Ok, but don't you agree that touchscreen controls look very cheap compared to real knobs? Shouldn't that be a factor too, especially in higher end cars?
The luxury automakers’ most modern glass cockpits were first incubated in their highest end models and are only now percolating down to the entry/mid levels, so no unfortunately I don’t think they read as cheap, they read as “oh awesome! just like an S class now!”
Particular in the context of car sharing (ShareNow, Miles, WeShare, etc.). Because you need to do the crappy touchscreen thingy every time you enter a vehicle.
You drive different models from different vendors all the time. Everything is slightly different. The IVI system has commonly incomprehensible UX with deep menus.
It mostly feels designed by committee (which it is, I worked on one such system for the flagship modes of one of the top German car makers a few years ago and good deep insight into the process).
Physical, standardized buttons would go a long way.
If you buy a car you'll have an initial learniung curve and while it sucks you can cope.
As a occasional user, you're in a world of pain. I don't understand why vendors do not do IVI firmware that is tailored for the car sharing/car renting market.
It needs two buttons after booting up (and they can be on a touch screen even):
1. Connect phone (Android Auto/Apple CarPlay)
2. Connect Bluetooth
That's it. Many cars still do not offer the former at all. Either way, the latter or both options are commonly hidden deep in nested menus in the IVI's preferences.
Early on, there were attempts. For example, car2go (now ShareNow) which was owned by Daimler, had a function, ca. 2014/2015, where it would remember the radio statio based on who was using the car.
I.e. the IVI firmware of the Smart car (they only had Smarts then) was somehow integrated with the car sharing app/user profile. And it was location based. Driving car2go in Milan, Italy the cars recalled my fav. radio station there but when I was coming back to Berlin, the station I had set using a car there was automatically on.
And then the next generation of Smarts was rolled out and the feature was not only gone, the firmware the cars had was just stock standard. I.e. they didn't add something like the bluetooth shortcut I mentioned above which I had expected and deprecated the feature the previous model had.
It's almost a decade later and nothing has improved -- rather the opposite.
I use voice commands in situations where I feel that touching the screen would be dangerous. But I can also use the steering wheel scroll wheels for many functions like answering the phone, changing cabin temperature, adjusting media volume, etc. Cruise control, gear selection, wipers are all on stalks that are just a few centimetres from the steering wheel. No need for an array of buttons that I would have to move my hands from the steering wheel to use.
The very last thing I want is some authority forcing the car makers to fill the dashboard with buttons or require some ghastly centre console.
I think the EU should really just force any cars display to communicate with an openly documented protocol (maybe it should be standardized too but at least open) with readily available connectors. And I mean all information that is displayed on the touch screen and all input that is sent back. That way third-party products could potentially replace or enhance the screens.
Given their plans seem to be headed towards making every feature a subscription plan, the only "logical" (from a business perspective) way to do that is an interface that can be updated for minimal cost at any time.
There shouldn't need to be any law. Solid design principles should dictate how cars are built. Instead we get trendy styling dictating what is built. No concern for human factors or basic control theory.
If your car doesn't have any internet connected software, then there is no mechanism to make a feature artificially scarce, requiring you to pay money on an on-going basis to remove the artificial limit.
People may have sold subscription services for cars before 2010, but they were luxuries and without "teeth". This is different.
> If your car doesn't have any internet connected software, then there is no mechanism to make a feature artificially scarce
Here are things which were actually shipped for decades prior to internet restrictions:
* charging for updates to mapping, and later GPS, software
* restricting features based on physical dongles
* restricting features based on dates (don’t forget that times can be set passively using radio so you can’t just easily roll the clock back)
* restricting features based on use counts (anyone think some MBA isn’t dreaming of “pay $1000 for 200 crush-it™ acceleration boosts!”)
* having some indicator of feature use (burnt out fuse, EEPROM, etc.) so using something you haven’t licensed means you can’t get any official service or warranty claims
Beyond that, we’re talking about controls. Touchscreens are not internet access and there’s no reason to think the two would be linked here when they aren’t in any other area.
It’s especially sad because you can have both - a touchscreen that is only active when the vehicle is in park - and buttons for the other things needed whilst driving.
There was that story about the U.S. Navy removing touch screens from their destroyers after their horrible usability was implicated in some very embarrassing collisions. That was in 2019. If that doesn't change anything, it's not a question of car manufacturers just not being aware touch screens are more error prone.
As I think most people know, the main reason they use touch screens is because it's cheaper to develop than physical buttons: you don't have to redesign the dashboard and wiring in order to change the UI. That's important to them.
Secondary to that, there are still some people who see a big colorful touchscreen on the dashboard and think "golly, this car's fancy", and might be more likely to buy a car with a shiny (greasy, coffee-splattered, fingerprint-laden) touchscreen on it. When you upgrade the trim level on a car, a lot of times they just give you a bigger touch screen, as though it were a status symbol for some people. I think the internal term for these people is 'rubes', but I'd need to check that.
> a lot of times they just give you a bigger touch screen, as though it were a status symbol for some people.
The big screen in the Tesla is very useful for the map. In the olden times, I used pretty large map books, and the screens are about the page size of those books. I use it to search for locations, get a list of results, select one, choose a navigation path, etc. When the car isn't moving, it is quite useful as a configurator UI for the various settings available in the vehicle itself. I certainly wouldn't want those pages of options to be all represented as buttons.
> As I think most people know, the main reason they use touch screens is because it's cheaper to develop than physical buttons: you don't have to redesign the dashboard and wiring in order to change the UI.
It allows for new features to be delivered quite easily in an existing car as the software improves. It also allows for more buttons as cars have more capabilities than could fit on a single physical panel.
All that said, I vastly prefer physical buttons, and mostly use the buttons on the steering wheel to control things when driving. I think a better design for the instrument panel would feature small screens on physical buttons, so that you could program the switches or dials to control different functions and display their purpose. This could allow for the most frequently adjusted features to retain physical controls.
If we take the steering wheel as an inspiration, that small set of physical controls can be applied to many functions, but it uses the screen behind the steering wheel as a mode indicator.
The other modality is voice, but it suffers from a bit of the command line problem, in that it isn't immediately obvious to the user what commands are allowed.
The steering wheel should be the primary interface for the driver. Controls volume, cruise control, etc. The only dashboard options are A/C, which you could technically get on a steering wheel too. The hazard lights could be a single button as well, doesn't need to be on the dashboard either.
Otherwise everything else can be on a big touch screen. You could also have an Alexa style system for when you're driving and can't look ("Alexa, turn down the "AC").
How about a touch screen with additional buttons to the side of it, like those you see in fighter cockpits? Buttons are laid out on the screen to match their physical counterparts. In a pinch you can use the physical button and get tactile feedback. Stationary you can mess around with the touch screen.
Now that it's 2023 I can say this without reprisal: no shit Sherlock! /s
This is the automotive analog to the removal of headphone jack on smartphones. Except I was never all that bothered with the removal. I've been using BT headphones almost exclusively before AirPods. I guess I'm not sure what my point is; maybe that even if it's objectively worse other factors dominate in consumer purchase decisions.
Thankfully, some automakers are beginning to dial back a bit on all-touch interfaces. I'm cautiously optimistic that within the decade most will find the right balance.
> This is the automotive analog to the removal of headphone jack on smartphones
The big issue with cars removing buttons is that buttons are useful tactile affordances - they are operational controls that tend to have a single, clear and discoverable purpose, and can be located and operated by touch/feel without having to look at them, which is particularly advantageous when operating a vehicle.
This is really understated. The primary interface to most of a car is tactile.
Consider a vehicle, which had touchscreens instead of pedals. It required bare feet to operate. Advertised as totally ground-breaking, users could adjust the width between pedals, and switch between automatic and manual modes of transmission. The pedals have beautiful typography displaying the text "gas", "brake", and "clutch" on their icons.
Wrong for the all same reasons as blinkers, wipers, defrost, audio power on/off being on a touch screen.
At home we have both traditional vehicles with lots of knobs, and vehicles (Tesla) with mainly touchscreen buttons and voice commands. My personal experience:
* It takes at least a few weeks to become familiar enough with the touchscreen buttons and voice commands that they become second-nature.
* Commonly used functions are accessed by pushing a physical button on the steering wheel or on one of the stalks, or by pressing a touchscreen button that is always where you expect it to be.
* Once your body memorizes a small subset of commonly used functions, you use them without even thinking about them.
* Less common functions are hard to find in all vehicles, and are often nested in obscure sub-menus.
I'm OK with going "all-in" on touchscreen buttons and voice commands, complemented by a small number of physical buttons for commonly used functions.
Your dismissal of the study reads defensively - it’s not invalid because it shows that the vehicle you own is less efficient to operate.
> by pressing a touchscreen button that is always where you expect it to be.
That last part is key to understanding why this is a concern: Tesla has moved safety-critical controls unexpectedly[1], which never happens with physical buttons, and using those controls is always harder because a touchscreen doesn’t have tactile feedback. Try using even a familiar one with your eyes closed and you’ll realize how much harder it is to maintain attention on something else.
How do you, say, check tire pressure? Setup a new garage-door opener? View your calendar for today? Do you have physical buttons for those things?
A car that does everything (or "almost anything") via physical buttons would be insanely hard to use. It would look like, and be about as easy to use as, a jet cockpit.
The best approach is clearly not all-physical-buttons, nor all-touchscreen-buttons, nor all-voice-commands, but a sensible mix of all three, depending on context (e.g., whether you're driving or the car is parked).
My perception is that all car manufacturers, including Tesla, are trying to figure out the best possible combination of the three -- at least until self-driving renders human attention unnecessary.
Those are not things you need to do while driving. There’s no reason why, say, garage door pairing can’t use a button like my 2006 Subaru does for the one time most people will do it in the life of the vehicle. Checking a calendar is distracted driving and should be illegal.
> Checking a calendar is distracted driving and should be illegal.
Tesla vehicles, as well as iOS and Android car UIs, have functionality for navigating to the next appointment in your calendar, if the appointment has a physical address. For a lot of folks, e.g., salespeople and service crews, this is a godsend.
And you can do that, parked on the side or the road, with a tiny LCD panel and buttons on the steering wheel. No need to add a screen for that.
Alternatively, you can use the app on your phone that you probably need as a backup key anyway to queue up your navigation for you while you're safely parked. You shouldn't do this while actively driving, especially if it needs a screen to work.
Obviously a car doesn't need to do any of these things, especially in the age of the smartphone. A good tradeoff might be:
1. Physical controls for everything
2. A separate mini tablet screen for an advanced CarPlay-like dock that connects to your phone.
Ideally the physical controls would do everything on the screen as well, so the advanced functions can be accessible while driving (if you absolutely need something there).
My car, born from jets, has no tire pressure checker, no garage door opener, no touchscreen, no automatic transmission, and smack-you-in-the-back-of-the-head turbo lag. I honestly can’t think of a new car I’d trade it for (unless selling that new car to buy more old cars isn’t cheating).
My understanding is that a 2005 or earlier (pre-Dame Edna) 9-5 still had oversight from the Swedish engineering and manufacturing team. For example, an austere Saab dashboard rather than a blingy Buick one. Not sure when that switch happened for the 9-3, but it would have been for whatever facelift happened around the same time.
2003 Aero is the sweet spot. GM sales “engineers” tried selling with all-options-standard that year, so they are all very well equipped. Any still running had the sump issue fixed long ago. Hard to imagine you couldn’t get a fettisdagsbulle for $5k.
They make tire pressure gauges without touchscreens; even then, dashboards have indicators light up when pressure is too low. Garage door openers have buttons, and long-pressing often does magical things, like entering setup mode. And presumably, you have a calendar in a handheld device you carry with you everywhere; it's much more convenient then trying to carry a car in your pocket.
If you want a computer to check the tire pressure, then use a computer to poll the tire pressure indicator and report a fix error when it's too low. My 2006 Passat did that, and it didn't have a touch screen (or a backup camera). Cars have had sensors that report errors for a very long time, and this doesn't require any touchscreens.
So.... what happens when someone decides it's a smart idea to replace all of those commonly used functions that had physical buttons on the steering wheel with more touch buttons? Let's even say, capacitive touch zones? :D
I do agree that a good physical button arrangement on the steering wheel is quite useful.
On my car, the layout is quite good, IMO.
* All of the audio is controlled through a D-pad on the left side.
* All phone/voice handled through three physically different buttons on the lower left, accessible without changing how my hand grips the wheel.
* All car-computer/cruise-control through a D-pad on the right.
* As a result, any "type" of command is specifically associated with one hand, and one area of the steering wheel in particular.
As I've learned through a number of long term rental cars, the physical button layout can be bad.
* Many have the audio spread across both hands.
* Many require one to break grip to even do simple audio adjustments (my car doesn't).
* They often overload each area with too many buttons and controls.
* The car GUI can also have many slow, confusing layers that one navigates to get commonly used functions, like digital speedometer, estimated range, etc.
This isn't even getting to strange things, such as having the older generation UI completely present under the veneer of a newer, slower UI.
The car brand I have isn't faultless either - all of their newer cars exhibit the same bad habits. Some bad habits have been slowly walked back a bit in the latest 2022/2023 cars, but the damage is still present.
Sort of like bad ideas in Windows. The worst UI elements (IMO) in Win 8 were walked back a bit in 8.1, then successively more rollbacks via a number of Win10 updates. But the baseline is still worse in some ways vs 7 and before (e.g, start menu is less meaningfully customizable than 7, which is still less than XP, IMO). We see tiny hints of that with Win11 updates. I expect 11.1 or 12 to mostly remove the worst offenders.
I will add one more thing, touchscreens have the ability to allow you to customise location of "knobs and dials", according to your own idea of "what makes sense".
However, having one car with both, I cannot understate the fact that you can touch physical buttons and correct yourself without activating them or looking.
Haptic feedback on touchscreens, while allowing you to sense without activating those buttons, is possible. And I wonder why nobody is doing it.
My guess: that's because even with haptic feedback you only get a binary response to inform you that something was indeed touched. But with a physical button, you can feel the texture of material, its edges, its geometry, when is fully pressed, when is up again, etc.
When you have several touchscreen buttons/controls (or whatever) near enough haptic feedback is kind of confusing without looking at the screen.
IMO, this can be easily checked in any mobile game with haptic feedback, the feeling is subpar to a physical controller.
Maybe the technology for a haptic feedback that can accurately give different stimuli to different parts of a touchscreen already exist, but never seen it before.
I don't see familiarity being with the touchscreen buttons being the issue. The issue is that actually touching a certain amount of pixels on a disembodied screen, while driving, while the car is in motion, is actually annoyingly difficult. No matter how attuned you are with them. I owned a Tesla for several years, and it never got better. It distracts the driver considerably. Unless they drastically increased the size of the interaction points on the screen and/or improved the gestures used to interact, I just don't see touchscreens being a good primary point of interaction between the driver and the car (at least until the driver really isn't regularly "driving" anymore).
The thing is: Tesla made essentially the first successful electric car, that is, an electric car people want to buy because they like it as a car, not just because it is electric.
In addition to being electric, Tesla also brought a lot of ideas that have nothing to do with the drivetrain, like big touchscreens, connectivity and "smart" features. Other manufacturers, seeing Tesla success, got the message: if you want to make a successful electric car, copy Tesla.
I think that's why we tend to associate touchscreens with electric cars: because it worked for Tesla. Also I think it gave manufacturers an excuse. It is a new market, they don't have to worry as much about making breaking changes.
We ditched our Tesla in favor of an e-tron because the Tesla controls were just not good. you should never need a touch screen for safety critical features like wipers. Also the whole touch screen can and did crash intermittently. The car will still works (e: when the touchscreen is down) but it is unsafe IMO. e-tron has traditional controls everywhere.
I am OK with voice commands, though a common vocabulary for the important ones would be good (kind of like the way the main steering-column stalk controls are kind-of standardized), but the few weeks of familiarization with the touchscreen buttons is problematic, especially for anyone who frequently rents cars.
Physical buttons that cannot be located by touch are no better than touchscreen buttons, though the flexibility of touchscreen buttons probably opens up the scope for implementing them badly.
I've had three incidents with touch controls that would not have happened with physical controls. The fact is, it's much harder to keep your eyes on the road and be certain you've pressed a button when you have nothing to touch but a cold piece of screen. How do you know for sure you touched the right part of the screen and performed an action, without looking at the touchscreen and taking your eyes of the road?
Thank you for this. There is a very vocal minority on HN that cries bloody murder about touchscreens in cars. Anything that argues against the hivemind is often downvoted and dismissed without much thought or self-reflection.
It’s interesting that you say that because the people arguing against touchscreens are writing long thoughtful comments aligned with decades of human factors research, quite notably contrasting with proponents.
Which thoughtful comments? “Well duh”? Are there any comments looking critically at the original study or are they all just using the headline to confirm their biases?
The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind. Note that there is no nuanced discussion on this topic, everybody has already arrived at their conclusion. Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case.
> The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind
By this logic isn't everyone who is pro-touchscreens also a hivemind?
> Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case.
Many people are demonstrably bad drivers who are over-confident in their ability and down-play the risk of distractions. When drunk driving was made illegal, people were furious and insisted they were fine to drive drunk and that it was perfectly safe: https://youtu.be/W_tqQYmgMQg
Touchscreens, while convenient and extensible, are demonstrably inferior to static physical controls for saftey-critical contexts.
As folks noted in the other thread on this topic: This is self-evident to most of the HN audience, but the more studies and more awareness is brought to this topic the likelier things are to improve.
Awareness in my view is useless because touchscreens in auto infotainment are far more visually impressive so they will always be preferred from a buyer's perspective.
What we need is to build a body of scientific evidence to support regulating Auto infotainment within some form of safety-critical guard rails.
It is obvious that touch without mechanical/haptic feedback is dangerous both in terms of decreasing eyes-on-the-road and increasing cognitive load. Mazda had it right first time around the industry needs to catch up.
See, I disagree. I think they look drab, uninspired, and by merely looking at them I can experience some of the emotional pain I know I'm going to feel as frustration while attempting to use it.
I find properly-designed buttons far more impressive.
I am obviously not the target demographic. I've hated touchscreen phones since inception.
> Awareness in my view is useless because touchscreens in auto infotainment are far more visually impressive so they will always be preferred from a buyer's perspective.
Except that the HN audience also buys cars, and prefers something else. And we aren't that unique or exceptional.
All ordinary televisions are now advertising-filled garbage, technical people I know just don't buy televisions. If they need a display they buy either the panel or a projector. But if my mother or sister buy a television it will be advertising-filled garbage.
There is a tiny niche of people who care, and for some reason insist on buying a TV, as a result on a very small scale it is technically possible to buy a TV without built-in advertising - but it's a small enough niche that ordinary people aren't even really aware it's an option. Think medium format landscape camera in say the 1980s. Your parents (or grandparents if you're old enough) probably owned something that used standard cartridge film, they knew vaguely what an SLR was (even if not what "SLR" stands for) but they had no idea medium format landscape cameras even existed. If the local camera shop doesn't have them, they'd never notice.
there’s certainly people on HN that are quite unique and exceptional (the only question is to what extent)
People who don’t use smartphones, people who only pay with cash, people who have smart phones without data plans, people who turn off notifications on their phone for a large percentage of their day, people who own Android devices and strip out everything Google related, list goes on
There are certainly people in almost all audiences that are quite unique and exceptional, but the HN audience as a collective doesn't stand out as much as some of us would like to believe.
It's the product quality equivalent of the Overton Window. People are impressed by their appliances lasting 5 years, or other mediocre accomplishments, because that's increasingly the norm.
Who is impressed by appliances lasting 5 years. If I buy a new Stove or Fridge and is craps out before 15 years I never buying that brand again.
Smaller table top appliances lasting 5 years is ok I guess, something like an Air Fyer or even a Microwave, but larger ones no that should be 15 years.
> Who is impressed by appliances lasting 5 years. If I buy a new Stove or Fridge and is craps out before 15 years I never buying that brand again.
I agree. I was recently shopping for a new fridge and, after reading countless reviews online, I realized that people's notion of quality has dramatically shifted. Even some luxury brands have either been acquired or started licensing Chinese companies to produce inferior-quality products with their name.
Regulating is how we got here. They put the screens in to serve backup cameras. Once you need to have a screen somewhere why not make it replace all the stuff?
Engineers love it because less moving parts, fewer parts. Software loves it because ship garbage now fix with updated version later. Designers love it because "clean lines and crap". Marketing loves it because high tech. Bean counters love it for all the above reasons.
The only thing (touch)screens aren't is cheaper and better but once everyone is mandated to have them that all goes out the window.
> Regulating is how we got here. They put the screens in to serve backup cameras.
And for good reason, they make reversing your vehicle significantly safer. But saying "you must have a backup camera" is in no way an endorsement for massive info-tainment screens.
> Once you need to have a screen somewhere why not make it replace all the stuff?
Because touchscreens don't help serve any purpose of the car, they are merely cool flashy tech that actually makes things less safe. The fact this stuff made it out of prototyping is baffling.
>And for good reason, they make reversing your vehicle significantly safer.
They're significantly safer than the 2005 suburban that had a massive blind spot if your worried about backing over their kid (which wasn't really that common to begin with and was mostly a moral panic).
For your average crossover, sedan or other "typical car" they are no better than the car designs we had 20yr ago that you could actually get decent rear visibility out of. Many would argue that they are worse because they have enabled bad design trends (touchscreens and lack of any useful amount of rear visibility). Backup cameras make full sending it into cross traffic or swinging the front of your car into something way more likely which is why most of the OEMs have systems to detect that and prevent it now.
Basically we've regulated a local minimum because some people couldn't handle not backing over their kids and that failure mode hit real close to home for the "I know exactly what everyone else needs" crowd who then expended political capital getting it legislated.
> The fact this stuff made it out of prototyping is baffling.
Reality never got in the way of a good old fashioned industry circle jerk.
Worth pointing out that the regulation is US only because of the amount of kids dying while backing up oversized trucks with zero visibility.
It is absolutely bewildering how they have let this 'bigger is better' arms race run wild in US roads. Sure lets fit cameras rather than stop designing armoured vehicles.
I like having those studies more so ~~I can feel selfrighteous~~ my intuitive feeling actually gets data supporting it. I try to have 'this is my opinion, not fact' as the default mode when possible.
This isn't a study. It's a "test" run by a Swedish car magazine, analogous to Car & Driver or Motor Trend, and similarly captured by its advertising base. Auto industry rags have always hated Tesla, for fairly obvious reasons, and it's sort of a running joke within the Tesla community.
Does that mean it's wrong? No. But it does mean you need to apply some salt. This isn't first principles science being reported, as you seem to have been led to believe.
Really? Many have occurred and easily discovered with a quick Google. In my grad school CS human computer interaction we reviewed a lot of prior work and individually did our own.
Uh... your third link is coverage of the same non-study being discussed, your second is an auto-generated link farm page that puts "study" in the title but doesn't even talk about one, and the first is a real study that absolutely does not substantiate what you're claiming.
As a junior systems engineer, I thought touchscreens and iPhone-like animations would be really neat, and give pilots more context, for helicopter GUIs. My senior human factors engineer told me no way. I begrudgingly agreed.
Then I tried riding in a helicopter. Oh my gosh my eyes were opened. Real buttons. No animation. Everything else is vibrating and busy enough already.
Human factors engineers working on airplanes and helicopters have known touchscreens aren’t good for this for decades.
Apple TV tactile remote that ships with it, vs the simulated one you can use on an iPhone.
One requires no looking, one totally requires it.
I hope for tactile screens in the future, something I tried designing into a hardware prototype over 10 years ago for an Android phablet prototype to be used in scenarios to enable not looking at the touchscreen. I’m honestly still amazed tactile affordances in some way haven’t made it to the mass market yet.
I am starting to wonder if the definition of a ‘luxury car’ in 2030 will be ‘no touchscreens’ and if economy cars will be chock full of cheap android devices just to shame the people who buy them into spending more to get a car with buttons and mechanical indicators.
The Bugatti Chiron has no touchscreen, in fact it made a point to look like it has no screen at all. It is a deliberate choice, they didn't want people to look at the window and see a lifeless black screen, and one that will look outdated a few years from now.
No need to wait for 2030, look at the top end luxury cars, while they don't all have as strong a stance as Bugatti, you will see a lot of physical buttons and not too many screens there. Personally, I have already associated touchscreens with cheapness.
Seems to happen often in business. Replace a feature people love, with something people don't want. Then later, return with that feature people used to love for extra profit.
I have a car with many buttons[0] and a car with few buttons[1]. I'd take the few button one every time.
While my few button car doesn't have many buttons, all to the critical to driving inputs have physical controls. Lights, wipers, defrosters, volume, etc is all on or immediately around the wheel.
Meanwhile, on my many button car, sure there's a button for most things this car can do. But almost all those buttons in the middle never get pressed. They're essentially a waste of space. And most of them, even if I were to press them I wouldn't be doing so while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be messing with the navigation system while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be flipping through folders on the mp3 CD or flash drive. I shouldn't be messing with the phone functions, I shouldn't be messing with the Blue link stuff, etc.
Having all those buttons aren't a positive while driving, they're a negative. They make the map I do use while driving much smaller. And when stopped, they make the Android Auto interface I interact with much smaller and overall worse.
Don't get me wrong, some manufacturers have gone way overboard and put things like glove compartments and AC vents and shifters on a screen or eliminated the stalks. There should be a balance for sure, but having a screen in a car is nice.
I don't think any person that wants physical interfaces (buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, ...) doesn't also think (touch-)screens can be nice for certain tasks.
Being an electrical engineer there is one thing that I can tell you about electromechanical parts: They are expensive — especially in the good and reliable variant.
That means car manufacturers have a real incentive to make you believe you don't need them and put everything on a touch screen instead.
That's something Mazda studied a few years back. There's no active touchscreens in their cars once they start moving since ~ 2015 I think. While everyone else is still learning this lesson.
Will regulators act on this? I really want them to, but I feel like they won't and we'll continue to see a trend of car makers taking the cheap route and doing touch screens. At least it feels that way wherever I look into an evening l exciting EV. What do the choices look like in the new car market these days?
If they do, it will happen in the EU. I doubt anyone in the USA would have the courage to touch this subject. It's very clear for everyone involved: touchscreens look more shiny to the user and at the same time let the manufacturer make significant cost savings - hardware switches don't seem like a big cost until you realize how many of them you need and how reliable they need to be over a number of years, and that the part you switch is just a small element of the whole system.
I'd argue that 3rd world cars don't have screens because they're cheaper to maintain, not cheaper to build. Buttons are dead simple and reliable, and can be fixed by any mechanic, computers cannot.
On commercial aircraft, which have more of a safety culture than cars, they go so far as to have different knobs and buttons with different shapes so that a pilot can tell by feel that they have right one. For example, the knob to change speed is a different shape than the knob to change heading.
Exactly the kind of systems I worked on. The human factors engineering that goes into these is typically fantastic, with most aspects of interaction very thoughtfully crafted.
Why would one need a study for this? It's obvious. I always have to look at the touchscreen to press a button on it, not so for buttons. The touchscreen doesn't always "take" it, either, and I have to try several times.
This gets said a lot, but I'd like to see a study that suggests that people use buttons in their car without looking. It's reasonable to say it's easier to hit the button, and might require less looking, but I'd bet almost everyone looks at the button before pressing it.
You are mostly right. I do glance to find a physical button, but I have to look to find the touchscreen button and keep looking to verify my finger is on it.
It's a large difference in time.
Properly designed buttons should also have various shapes and textures so your fingers learn which ones are which by feel. Airplanes do this - for example, the knob to lower the landing gear is a little tire. The knob to lower the flaps has a knob shaped like a wing on it.
I come from the aircraft industry where this is a big deal, but the auto people go for a "cool" look rather than a "safe and reliable" look.
Remember old phones with buttons? I bet everyone over 30 could have texted a someone with their phone under the table or in their pocket. I’m sure there’s some people who could do that with a touchscreen, but not everyone
I patented a phone user interface that used a rocker switch for dot and dash. You could morse code under the table or in your pocket with nobody noticing! It doesn't take long to use morse and it can be very fast and accurate.
With haptic feedback you could even receive morse with nobody the wiser.
I might actually agree with you, because if anyone did a study on icons in cars that are "obviously" better, they'd find they are much worse than using language.
For example, the fuel icon is a picture of a fuel pump with an arrow on one side of it, say on the right side pointing to the right.
Does this mean:
1. The fuel pump goes on the left side of the car and one inserts the pump to the right
2. The fuel pump goes on the right side of the car and one inserts the pump to the left
Both are quite reasonable interpretations. I always have to stop and think which one it is. If it said "cap on right" then there's no ambiguity.
Which is why physical controls are critical for anything you need to do fast. I recently switched from a classic Model S to a recent Model 3, and I think the 3 is about as button-light as I could go. The driver's controls are all manual, and work very well. Anything non-critical is on the screen. The Plaid would be too much. I require a physical shifter, horn, and turn signals.
To me this feels like station the obvious. A touchscreen gives no tangible feedback. Also having buttons “move” or at least be at unexpected places means you need to look at a screen.
I am happy with my old car wherein I can manage the heating, the lighting, and my radio without taking my eyes off the road.
I am a proud car enthusiast and I daily drive one of the latest Volkswagen models with the latest infotainment, they have removed all the physical buttons from the car.
VW's have always had reliability issues with their radio buttons for some reason. It was common for Mk6 or Mk7 GTIs radio power buttons to suddenly not work after a year or two. I am sure this is what caused the edict from on high to transition to their new disastrous infotainment. The thing is, nearly every company who went all in on touch, always had to backtrack at some point. (Like Honda in 2015)
Friend of mine who used to work as a SWE in an automotive company mentioned that one of the pesky issues when it came to developing a new car was the long pole of waiting on your vendor to give you test units of your interior hardware. I assume the push there is primarily coming from that issue as well as the cost savings they get.
The touch issues don't bother me insofar as how slow nearly all the units and interactions are within the car. Delays of 500ms after interaction are frankly unacceptable when it comes to operating anything at high speeds.
I would hate for the automotive industry to just completely focusing on iPadifing your commute rather than focusing on driver/passenger experience, but I assume thats the direction where we are headed regardless.
The last car I rented wouldn't permit navigation destinations to be set or amended by touchscreen while in motion. It was infuriating as it was the passenger who was safely trying to adjust the destination and we were having to pull over on busy roads to re-route away from closures. Eventually, we found the driver while in motion could use a physical "joystick" in the center console to work the UI. It felt far more dangerous than a few taps of a touchscreen.
I feel the same way when I see these vehicles. All I can think about is how dated it will look in five years. However, it seems that the leasing crowd prefers to get rid of their cars in three years tops anyway which is a huge chunk of this market.
Eh, this test is timing how long it took to complete a defined set of tasks in a certain way as fast as possible. While taking longer to do a secondary task indirectly may indicate safety concerns, I’m a little skeptical that it is necessarily so, or that safety was what the test was actually testing
The test did require the drivers to be moving at the same time. I often change things when I want to at natural stopping points anyway.
The Mercedes Benz from 2019 has a screen that spans from one end to the other to make up the driver's display and the radio display but it does not have a touch screen. It instead has a dial and touch based device to navigate the touch screen. The Nissan Rogue has a touch screen and small display. IMO, the Nissan Rogue touch screen is better, especially for carplay and android auto. The comparisons between both are futile, because they are both touch based and do not give feedback when the function of the touch successfully works. I wish the Rogue also did have a dial/hard button device to navigate the touch screen from the steering wheel.
I think we got steered in the wrong direction when car-mounted GPS devices were touch (albeit infrared). And the car industry was more copycat than innovative. It is the reason why I cringe at the tesla's big giant screen.
We need a Steve Jobs to take the messup of these industry players and fix it. Start off with incredibly limited, but perfect functions, and then grow from there once people's heads are rewired to understand how it should work.
A diesel locomotive has my ideal user interface[1].
(a) For non critical operations, it has smart displays similar to an airplane cockpits. Physical function keys perform different things depending on the screen the smart display is presenting.
(b) For critical operations, physical switches and levers are clearly labelled to show what they do,.
I would say the best UI is one where you can talk someone through an emergency over the phone. e.g., "Mayday. Help. The locomotive engineer just passed out and I don't know how to stop this thing." "Are you sitting on the right seat? The operator's seat? Look to your left, you will see two blue levers marked throttle and dynamic braking etc."
I recently had to rent a car, and oh boy. I knew I need to set up mirrors etc for safety. But I did not foresee the need to familiarize myself with a radio. And when it started blasting a little too loud, finding a volume option on the touchscreen was an adventure when driving on a road i couldn't immediately stop on.
My friends called me a Luddite when I list this as a reason I bought a Nissan Leaf over Tesla. I’m very happy with it as it’s perfect for around town, was a lot cheaper, and for my teenage children a lot safer for learning to drive as it’s basically a traditional car.
I have a VW Id.3. it's not just touchscreen interfaces. It's the haptic less buttons as well. Ridiculous design choices. They at least backtraced on the steering wheel buttons which in fact were haptic feedback, but it was a god awful implementations
I admit, I’m having a hard time holding back a sarcastic reply to this article. Was there really any doubt ever that a button, which one can usually push without looking is superior to touchscreen, which for an average human requires both hands and eyes?
Many people including me will say that this is obvious, but even if it took a study, why wasn't this study done at some point _before_ incorporating this major design change into nearly every new car on the market?
* Most people will never voluntarily measure things. Instead people form intuitive assumptions and extrapolate performance and potential from that. This happens all the time for almost everybody.
* Business people need corporate promotions and incentive pay. The best way to achieve such is to pitch a popular idea full of shine and glitter. As an example have you ever participated in a "hack day" event? It does not matter what your final product is (or isn't). What matters is the 2 minute pitch at the end.
I would love to have an interface where I could choose what I want to see. Obviously the speed meter would be a requirement with a minimal size, and probably the "danger, something is wrong with your car" one. But I would like to change the size and position.
My dream setup would be a large digital speed meter, and the gas level (and how far I can go on that). And that's all.
I have zero use in the engine temperature, or my consumption, or whether I am efficient with the EV mode, or whatnot. These are the only information I ever cared about.
May a two stage pressure confirmation would alleviate the issue somehow. You won't have the exact feedback physical buttons give, but you would be able to touch, adjust your finger, then press a little harder to confirm the action. The problem for me with smartphones is that I commit an action as soon as I touch the screen so more often then not I have to aim well at the UI before touching the screen, which sometimes fails.
I’d like to offer a possibly controversial alternative viewpoint on this. On a longer time horizon than just the past few years, we saw the introduction of touchscreens for drivers way back in the early 2000s. We just called them smartphones. Before that, rush hour commuters could be spotted reading newspapers, shaving, applying makeup, and eating breakfast while driving. All of those pose real dangers to themselves and others.
My point is that the fundamental issue at hand is more significant than the UI / haptics of the car, but the attention paid by the driver. Humans have already cast their vote on this. As drivers, broadly speaking, we do not want to give the action of driving our full attention. There are simply too many other things vying for our focus.
The solution, in my opinion, is not about the controls in the vehicle. Rather, it’s about removing the distracted driver from the equation altogether and finally mastering the immense challenge of truly autonomous vehicles. We are at a point in history where the UI/UX has advanced faster than true self-driving. If the latter can catch up, the UI will become a non-issue, the screens will continue to grow, and the driver will merely be an operator.
Maybe there is a sense in which this is an awkward transition period to fully autonomous vehicles. Because you're right, most of us don't want to pay attention to the road, which is boring.
However, we don't know the risk/reward associated with ceding control over our safety and the safety of others to an internet controlled computer. Over time, human controls (and skills) atrophy, so that when another Carrington event happens humans will not be able to recover. It also makes us even more susceptible to hacking attacks - wide-spread use of autonomous vehicles will mean that a sufficiently skilled hacker can kill you from afar. If not with your car, with someone else's.
So, no, I'm not particularly excited giving computers control over my car, my home, my life, even if it seems like a good idea. The downsides are just too substantial, and honestly humans can and should retain some responsibility for their own well-being, on first principle.
> The solution, in my opinion, is not about the controls in the vehicle. Rather, it’s about removing the distracted driver from the equation altogether and finally mastering the immense challenge of truly autonomous vehicles.
So we can remove the physical buttons when we remove the steering wheel, but not before then.
I recommend Adam Something on YouTube. He speaks about this and truly autonomous vehicles frequently on his channel. If you go watch a few of his videos, you'll see we already have the technology to remove the distracted driver, and in fact the act of driving from the equation altogether.
> The solution, in my opinion, is not about the controls in the vehicle. Rather, it’s about removing the distracted driver from the equation altogether and finally mastering the immense challenge of truly autonomous vehicles.
I agree with your overall premise, but this is a strange conclusion. If human drivers are the problem and they cannot be trusted to drive without distractions, it would be far easier and cheaper to fix that by investing in public transit.
The public transit vs individual car ownership discussion is long running and a bit separate. My conclusion was predicated on the assumption that for all the reasons we still have individual car ownership today, we will see that remain as such through the autonomous transition.
It's an interesting comment, but to take it at face value... cars back in 2000 didn't force good drivers to operate unsafe bullshit for mission critical controls.
This has descended to an argument about maps. It’s actually about touchscreens vs buttons which covers much more ground than just maps. While I consider dedicated buttons safer than a screen for often used functions, a hybrid of a front facing screen and steering wheel controls would fall somewhere inbetween
I have 2022 Kia Telluride that gets a lot of this right, it there is one major issue - Google maps on Car Play starts falling behind where I am on the route. Like you to half a mile. It has put me in some very dangerous situations where I am in an unfamiliar town or area.
“Oh golly gee guys stop using phones while driving! Tell ya what, we will give you a touchscreen for fucking every other function in the car except actual steering so you won’t have enough spare eye time to look at a phone!!”
I bet younger age groups do better with the touch screens though. This is just another generational thing that comes easier to those that grew up with touch screens vs those of us that didn't.
Most of those interfaces are total UI disasters - to the point where I think given a leading cause of death is car accidents, I think they are a material cause of death.
In my Tesla Model S it takes precisely one to raise the cabin temperature by 0.5°C; press again and again to raise it by whatever amount you want, or I can use a voice command "Increase drivers temperature" to raise it by 1.5°C.
On the other hand, doing a study to confirm what we think we know to be true is not always wasted effort. For the simple reason that we are sometimes wrong.
And for the reason that studies can measure magnitude of such an effect. And variation.
And for the reason that for many contexts (e.g. safety legislation or safety standards) a study is proof and a call to act, in ways that "everybody knows that" is not. I don't know if this will result in legislation, but it is a step on that path.
Of course I was being facetious, and I agree that studies needed (and need) to be done in order to “prove” that tactile controls are safer. It has always been extremely hypocritical to me that certain states like Maryland crack down harshly on mobile device usage but basically ignore distracted driving because of engagement with a screen in your vehicle, which can be just as dangerous.
In my opinion, screens per se aren’t bad, however there should be a set of standards (possibly international) for a core set of redundant tactile controls such as audio volume/mute, any and all essential vehicle functions, ALL climate control functions, and obvious preset buttons for major infotainment functions such as audio, climate, navigation, and communication. I drove a vehicle recently that didn’t have an easy way to switch between Waze on CarPlay and the vehicle’s built-in SiriusXM audio. And some makes have moved to a completely screen-based gauge cluster, which is neat in concept but allows for shenanigans such as the possibility of accidentally choosing a “theme” that hides basic information or is confusing with no obvious way to revert. Mercedes is especially guilty of this. There are so many more examples.
Essentially, we need a Vehicle Control Bill of Rights.
I grew up working on cars, repairing them, modifying them, and building them from the ground up, including race cars and advanced driving systems for severely handicapped folks that drove while sitting in their wheelchairs. Did that until I was in my early 30s.
I've worked with and for some fairly famous racers. Tony Nancy, Sonny Easly, Larry Fullerton to name a few. Built custom driving systems for Teddy Pendergrass and Jill Kilmont (and a few 100s of others. I learned a lot very fast doing that.
Safe driving requires the ability to predict what drivers around you will do. Almost everyone of those folks I met who were involve in a crash were at least partially responsible and most often distracted by something.
When those touchscreens first came out I was stunned because there is no way a driver can focus on those and driving at the same time. That's obviously impossible and it only takes a second of driver distraction to get into a crash situation ("accident" is not a valid description for this).
A driver can learn how to change the radio station on those old manual push button/twist knob interfaces while keeping their eyes on the road. But you cannot do that with a touchscreen (even though the original Apple interface used those physical interfaces as a design model for their graphic interface widgets).
And some of those screens are obnoxiously huge and are not very intuitive. So the root of the problem is the driver must focus on the screen to find the option they want to interact with and that is a huge distraction from "driving" the vehicle.
So what's really concerning is their are there a fast growing number folks who think they can safely use them. A quick search on that brought this up: "a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) indicates that distracted driving-related fatalities are on the rise, increasing nearly ten percent from 2018 to 2019." []
Fair to say close to nothing is being done to address that.
I started building my 1st custom car for myself when I was 14 years old and had it street legal and registered shortly after I turned 16 and got my license. It was a "Hot Rod 50 Ford" coupe with a 350 Chevy engine and auto trans. I lived in LA and there was a vibrant "Street Racing" culture there, but I never raced. By then I'd already seen so much death and injury from car crashes that I knew every car on the road with me was dangerous.
I am 63 years old now. I have never been in an accident. Never gotten a moving violation citation, or any kind of "ticket". It's not been difficult but I have had to dodge a few car and truck sized bullets over the years.
Ah - point taken. I have spent too much time dealing with modal consumer goods where usability is sacrificed for the purpose of minimizing the number of buttons.
When the whole transportation system is built to eliminate drivers then yes, it'll be safer. For now though, a driver in control is better than our flawed software.
I disagree. Currently available retail FSD is already driving "in the ballpark" today. Add to that 5 years of continual large-scale data harvest, plus AI in general undergoing widespread research and innovation.
This is obviously subjective. There's much more practice and education with buttons since they have historically been simpler to construct, and touchscreen native individuals arent even driving age yet.
"Study finds that leaning over to adjust the heating while driving is less quick and safe than twisting a button while keeping the eyes on the road ahead."
Sources please. This can't possibly be true, we need studies to back this up.
Only outdone by the geniuses of the car industry and their really (too) close pals of the safety agencies who find it OK to put touch screens in everything short of pedals and a steer mechanism ( some aren't even wheels anymore! really modern advanced stuff.. )
Well phones typically have physical buttons for things you want to do quickly (volume rocker, power, camera shutter, home (sometimes) etc.) when you may not be expected to be looking at the phone. They seem to understand the split.
A driver has only a few things they need to do while driving (beyond paying attention to the road) Menu diving to turn up the AC is just a fundamentally terrible idea, but car makers don't seem to care?
I saw a recent Marques Brownlee review of his $130k Tesla S and Every. Single. Control. in the interior is a capacitive button. Absolutely insane to offer no tactile feedback
The driver only needs to pay attention to the road when the software can't safely handle the situation. Software can already keep the car in the lane and at a distance to the car in front. Over time the situations it can handle will become more and more.
What they were talking about requires FSD. Car manufacturers have been adding various assistive features but none of them are at the level where it’s safe to direct your attention away from the road.
In Germany, Mercedes has a license to sell full self driving cars (the driver can write emails, watch movies, do whatever they like) that are allowed to enable FSD mode while on the highway and driving up to 60 km/h.
They have L3 on the easiest road environment possible and even that’s limited in speed and requires good weather and nothing like tunnels or construction zones. That is a far cry from saying that their cars no longer need good controls for drivers — L3 is predicated on the driver being available to take over at any time.
My position is that cars should be optimized for safe driving until they hit L5 and we’re comfortable saying they don’t need a human driver. It’s one of the most dangerous things we do and should be treated that way.
I watched this in the morning today, and in the 38 minute ride, the guy was mostly doing other things. Recording a video etc. In the whole ride, I think he only did something related to "driving" for a few seconds.
> Should you be doing many more things while having a phone call? Turns out the concept of a phone changed.
Being distracted during a phone call doesn't pose a risk of grievous injuries or death to yourself or others. Unless the nature of cars fundamentally changes, they should not under any circumstances be cool entertainment devices. Your focus should be on your mirrors and the road ahead. Full stop.
It’s an argument for continuing to develop that technology but this discussion is for the cars being built now, not in 2050. Self-driving technology isn’t even functional now and nowhere near the level of safety reliability it’ll need before you can say humans will never operate a particular vehicle and therefore it’s safe to remove the controls.
Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497 - Aug 2022 (953 comments)