Technology

Touch screens should not be used for any controls needed to operate a car. You can't use them without taking your eyes off the road.

Touch screen, Vibration feedback/Color change or not, means that you have to look at what your hand is doing and not on the road.

A physical button means you can keep your eyes on the road and find the right button with easy.

So let's be honest. At this point, touch screens are chosen by car makers because cost and not design. So essentially, safety is less important than cost for the car makers.

It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.

But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.

Touch screens are so dumb.

• AC controls, control surface heating heating/cooling (steering wheel, seat etc)
• Volume controls
• Turns, wipers, lights
• Fog lights

Basically everything you might touch during the drive should be physical.

The main reason why I didn't want high end packages for our last car was, that I am a cheap bastard. The second reason is, that I think touchscreens in cars are one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.

Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.

And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.

I'd rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.

I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.

Tesla’s on-wheel turn signal buttons are criminally bad.

BuT tHeRe Is VoIcE cOnTrOl!!!

Yes but if I have two friends on board that are talking I won't say

"SILENCE EVERYONE! I WILL NOW ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE NAVIGATIOM DESTINATION THREE TIMES WHICH WILL ALL FAIL!"

And zooming the map on skodas with touch screens is just THE WORST.

Great news. I wish they would also deduct stars if the heating/cooling controls are not physical too.

So one time someone broke into my car and tried to crowbar the radio out. They destroyed the whole dashboard, but failed to get the radio (it was nice of them to still take the face tho).

What this resulted in all of the controls hanging out by their wires. Everything still worked, I just had to sift through the exposed wires, pick up the proper control and twist the dial or push the button. It was ridiculous but still miles better than touch screen for these things.

For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.

iirc. He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.

2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.

I only have old vehicles and I'm actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff...

If their cheap-asses had actually done something other than cheapest possible implementation for the majority of input devices it might have been ok. Having driven several cars with touch input for various features the complaints I have are all the same:

1. too many menus with unintuitive directories that put what should be top-level systems several layers deep. IOW, I want to turn on the AC. I shouldn’t have to climb out of the Sirius menu then down 2-3 layers to turn on the AC and choose the ventilation configuration and temperature.

2. Horrible UI design. Things that need to be tapped/touched are either too small and/or too close together. You shouldn’t need to divert your attention to focus on a 1/4” square “OK” touch element when this should have a touch area minimum of a square inch so you can hit it without too much concentration. UI’s are too cluttered.

3. closely related to #2 - awful sensitivity of the screen. Small buttons that are hard to accurately hit are worsened by touch screens that don’t register input. Now you’re trying to accurately hit a patch of screen that is refusing to accept the tap, so now you’re further distracted and frustrated trying to get you music stream to play or whatever.

I don’t hate touchscreens, they can be useful, but manufacturers have implemented them at the expense of actually driving the car.

Thank you Europe!

Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.

The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.

Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.

Well duh. Even when they were introduced, touchscreens in cars got a lot of pushback. I’d much rather flip a switch or turn a knob for things I do daily, rather than futz three levels deep in a car maker’s software. They put things in there that really should be simple pushbuttons.

We want buttons

I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.