46 ms·

Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

• sschueller 7y ago
  Good to see that at least some manufactures have a sense for safety. I miss the days I could reach for a button blindly to adjust my aircon or work the radio.
• vedtopkar 7y ago
  This is absolutely the right way to go. I'm on the market for a new car for the first time in a long time and the terrible UX decisions car makers are implementing is quite shocking.
• iknak 7y ago
  Tesla should really take some notes here.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
    Like making the car self-drive?
  • Doubleslash 7y ago
    I wonder what some analysis on driver focus, concentration and eye movement would reveal when comparing Tesla, especially Model 3, drivers vs. drivers of cars with physical buttons and blind operations.
• petepete 7y ago
  It's a case of picking the right tool for the job, touchscreens aren't entirely awful. But if I'm driving and I want to switch to Radio, the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think. My car has buttons for all these operations and it's great. What is bad for is browsing the map when I'm parked; say I'm looking for a car park near my destination, by the time I've zoomed out with a scroll wheel, browsed around and zoomed back in a few times I could've done the same thing on my phone and set off.
  • Arbalest 7y ago
    > the button should always be in the exact same place so I don't need to think. I don't think that thinking is the problem, the problem is looking to locate.
    • petepete 7y ago
      It is, because if you look at your touch screen controls and it's in another mode, you need to think about how you get out and back to radio. When there's a button that says 'Radio' on it that never moves, you don't need to look _or_ think.
• rado 7y ago
  Common sense is back.
  • jaclaz 7y ago
    Hopefully, but not all over, only in spots.
• karavelov 7y ago
  Finally we are back to Citroen CX design putting controls on the center console: https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/86-Citroen-DX-Prestige/i-Cv5pmk5/0/ae557449/X3/109-X3.jpg https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/86-Citroen-DX-Prestige/i-Cv...
  • comboy 7y ago
    I can't imagine reaching those without "applying torque to the steering wheel" (or straight blocking it which is much worse).
    • seszett 7y ago
      They're very easy to reach with you right hand while holding the wheel with your left hand.
  • masklinn 7y ago
    Aren't most of the controls on your picture not on the center console? The bloody hazards button is behind the driving wheel and inaccessible to the passenger. For what it's worth I've pretty much always known the controls to be over the center console. And the instruments being there as well has been happening for some time, at least for some vehicle classes e.g. on the C3 picasso anything but the purely driving-related controls is on the center console: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/c3-picasso/61746/used-buyers-guide-citroen-c3-picasso-pictures https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/citroen/c3-picasso/61746/used-...
    • karavelov 7y ago
      Look at the controls behind the gear shift stick - not much but still similar to what Mazda does with the audio controls. BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly.
      • masklinn 7y ago
        > Look at the controls behind the gear shift stick - not much but still similar to what Mazda does with the audio controls. I don't think I've ever seen a car where these weren't on the center console. > BTW, I have never used the hazard button while the car is in motion or at least driving very slowly. 'round here it's common to use the hazards when in sight of or at the tail of a highway / freeway traffic jam.
• the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  Does carplay support non touch usage?
  • batbomb 7y ago
    I have a 2017 GTI and it has a dial you can use to cycle through things but it’s not ideal. Certain things are useless though, like the keyboard for maps, but you can use voice control there. I do like the VW implementation. There’s still lots of buttons and steering wheel control, and the screen is small enough and UI actions defined enough that I don’t have to look at the screen much to interact.
• diggan 7y ago
  Recently switched from a Renault Captur (with touchscreen) to an Audi A3 (without touchscreen) and the amount of focus the touchscreen requires compared to a non-touchscreen with a radial button is amazingly scary. How did anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place? Can't imagine going back to having a touchscreen now, and hope they slowly disappear from everything cars.
  • Ninn 7y ago
    The only reason the A3 still has a non-touchscreen is due to the fact that it's still running a rather old platform, which is outdated compared to the Golf, Leon -- the new A3 landing this year won't have dials.
    • m_mueller 7y ago
      I have recently bought a 1 year old Seat Leon with their newer touch screen setup. I find it pretty well made - you still have all the dials and buttons you need for climate control and audio volume, but if you want to set up navigation you have the touch screen in a well reachable location, which is much more convenient than a dial. Best of both worlds IMO. The only thing I do on touch screen while driving is to play/pause bluetooth audio and zooming in/out of navigation.
  • rapht 7y ago
    Exactly ; I had a similar experience sometime back when I was lent a 2010 Audi A4 for a few months, there was a quite natural control knob placed much like in the article's pics. It really is night and day compared to my brand new Peugeot where you have to look at the screen -and wait for the interface to update on each action- to do basically anything that is not taking a call / moving the volume / changing the track or station which you can do from the wheel.
    • usrusr 7y ago
      And yet the article cites Audi to be giving in to pressure from the fearless (and from Tesla?), moving from the established rotary to touchscreens in future models. I guess that when you already had touchscreens, it's much easier to sell haptic interfaces as an improvement than when you avoided touchscreen from the beginning. "Still no touchscreens" vs "already beyond touchscreens", even when they have the exact same controls.
• sametmax 7y ago
  Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster. That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
  • checker659 7y ago
    > why you don't program on a tablet I dare you to go tell that to /r/apple :)
    • czechdeveloper 7y ago
      All "how to use tablet as development machines" I saw were just "how to connect keyboard to tablet and connect to remote computer".
      • zaarn 7y ago
        "how to use a table as development machine" has the unsurprising answer: "have a real computer do it".
    • Causality1 7y ago
      Well the choice is less obvious when your two options are an iPad or a throttlebook with jam-happy butterfly switches. In all seriousness, too many of my Mac-loving friends and coworkers are using laptops that're 4+ years old because Apple decided shaving a millimeter off the thickness was worth cutting key travel by 60% and having display hinges crack off the frame. Considering how long most of them have been buying Apple they deserve better treatment.
      • torgian 7y ago
        Heh, a throttle book with jam-happy switches.I'm stealing that the next time someone asks me why I haven't upgraded from my 5 year old MacBook pro.
• qertoip 7y ago
  Unintended side effect could be drivers using their connected smartphone which is far more dangerous. This is already the case with Mazda's touch-disabled-while-driving screens. Not sure at all about the net effect on safety.
  • izacus 7y ago
    Why would you use a connected smartphone for HVAC controls and switching songs? The controls on steering wheel and near gear shifter are way more convenient.
    • msh 7y ago
      changing to a different album would be easier to a touchscreen.
      • izacus 7y ago
        What are you basing that on? It's pretty easy using Android Auto or Mazda CMU using the rotary controller. Easier than grabbing the phone while driving.
        • msh 7y ago
          I have not tried on a mazda but on other cars I have found the rotary controllers very cumbersome.
  • torgian 7y ago
    At that point, it's more the fault of the user rather than the manufacturer. The manufacturer is trying to make driving safer by removing touch screens (which is great, IMO). If the user is sooo inconvenienced by this move, enough to reach for their cellphone while driving, then that's their own fault. Hopefully they don't crash into someone.
• jbverschoor 7y ago
  Finally.. sanity
• pushpop 7y ago
  Yes thank you. I’ve been saying this for a long time My VW has an amazing UI where the centre console is a small touch screen but it has a bunch of tactile buttons around the edge that also interact with the console. So the only time you need to use the actual console as a touch screen is when entering precise details like an address into the sat nav or phone number to ring. Which, in both scenarios, I am more than happy to do at the start of the journey or pull over to do. Everything else, from the radio to the air con, is controlled via tactile buttons. More over, any important announcements that come up on the centre console can also be displayed on the dashboard as well. Including sat nav. So it means I don’t even need to look at the centre console to glance at stuff if I don’t want want to. VW have gotten a lot of bad press in recent years but when it comes to in car UIs, I’ve driven few vehicles that compare equally well.
  • izacus 7y ago
    All the new high-trim VWs I've seen have pretty much touch-only controls with some capacitive non-tactile buttons though.
• m3at 7y ago
  Touchscreen are so common because they're cheaper. They also look great when you're buying the car, and using the screen while parked in the store. It's simply not optimised for usability but for attractiveness (both cost and aesthetic wise)
  • hkai 7y ago
    Same as the glossy monitors that look nice in the store but ruin your eyes and productivity.
    • Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
      I hate glossy monitors with a fiery passion and don't understand why anybody thinks glossy is a feature and not a bug. I suppose having smooth glass can make the screen look slightly more crisp, but having a bright reflection of everything in the room erases any gains in clarity.
• kristianp 7y ago
  The description of the jog controls sound a lot like those in my 2006 Honda. The description of the torque "“Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,", doesn't make any sense. I doesn't matter whether you reach for a touchscreen, button, or bugle, it would produce the same effect.
  • marapuru 7y ago
    I can imagine it's the combination of looking at the touch screen and reaching out. A button can be reached with sense of touch alone. A touch screen must be looked (or at least glanced) at.
• p1necone 7y ago
  My touch controlled stovetop is a nightmare, I can't imagine dealing with a touchscreen in my car.
• synaesthesisx 7y ago
  I think the big issue is in a majority of vehicles, UI/UX is nothing short of atrocious. Navigating menus can often be totally unintuitive, even for techie users - now imagine older folks attempting to operate these while driving. In this case, if you can't do it right, it's better to not do it at all.
• robbrown451 7y ago
  Seems like the future is voice control. I'm pretty used to talking to my phone to do navigation and similar things while driving, but it can be frustrating because it gets confused a lot and often makes me push a button. (vanilla Android) But you have to imagine it will get better. People are used to being able to do sophisticated things that go beyond the sort of controls you can operate by feel. You used to get by if you could adjusting the volume with a knob and pushing one of 5 preset radio stations, and maybe being able to operate most the heater/AC controls without looking. That's not good enough anymore. Voice seems to be the only real option. Maybe by the time it they work out all the kinks the cars will all be driving themselves.
• yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  I am absolutely stunned that it's taken people so long to realise this. How the bloody hell could anyone have been so stupid to not realise that we need buttons with tactile feedback so we can keep our eyes on the road. It's extraordinary.
• izacus 7y ago
  Sensible interior design with hardware buttons is one of the main reasons why I opted to get a Mazda over other competition. Most infotainment systems were horribly janky and laggy and some companies even forced me to use them for things like HVAC controls (I'm looking at you Peugeot). Wasn't a great experience. Having said that - I still like the fact that my Mazda has a touchscreen active while stopped. Entering Nav directions is way faster than with the commander knob.
• cjtrowbridge 7y ago
  Tom Paris is somewhere squealing with glee.
• fbn79 7y ago
  I have a Mazda 3 (2016). There is a touch screen but the touch mode is active only when the car is not mooving.
  • shifto 7y ago
    Yes, same for my 2018 model. They turned it off with the new 2019 model.
    • izacus 7y ago
      It's probably worth mentioning that screen on 2019 model isn't really within comfortable arm reach anymore and it's now way higher on the dashboard.
• bscphil 7y ago
  This news provides me with the tiniest bit of hope I'll ever be able to buy a car again. (Currently driving a 2002 model with no screens and no seatbelt warning bell. Things are great back here in sanity-world.) Edit: the car doesn't squawk loudly at me when I hit the lock button when I get home at night, either.
• karmakaze 7y ago
  It wouldn't take much hardware added to the screen to make it better. Just add a couple pushable rotary dials, few raised buttons with edges, and some audio feedback (even just clicks/beeps). Trimming down the software will take more work as it seems to be designed on desktop computers running tablet emulators without testing the UX while driving.
• ygra 7y ago
  I wonder, is it really the touchscreen that is the problem, or the amount of things a driver is expected to do on it while driving? With the buttons on the steering wheel I never have the need to even reach for the center console and the screen. The only thing that really needs it would be navigation, but that's set once at the start of the trip and then isn't touched again usually. I'm sure I'm missing something here (or I'm a weird driver), or is it just that without having a multi-function steering wheel touchscreens are more of a hazard than a radio with buttons? (Ok, reading a few more comments here, it seems that some cars use the touchscreen to also control temperature and other things that are still buttons and dials in our car (the touchscreen is pretty much only media, navigation, phone, and a few other functions I'm forgetting now because I never used them).)
• marapuru 7y ago
  Praise to Mazda for making this decision. As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch. > Audi, for instance has said that part of the reason it’s discontinuing its rotary controller is that a touchscreen better supports Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. This decision is 100% business driven and has nothing to do with the end user. It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car. > phones and tablets are familiar, so too should in-vehicle touchscreens. This too is so weird to me. I get that you want users to recognize an interface. And that it should mimic how you use other things. But at least put them in context. I hope other brands start following Mazda again for this choice.
  • cm2187 7y ago
    Agree, except when you need to type a name.
    • gambiting 7y ago
      Then MB/BMW approach of having a touchpad near your wrist is perfect - you can draw letters with your finger without having to worry about hitting miniscule letters on the screen.
      • majewsky 7y ago
        Do they have a second touchpad for us lefties?
        • gambiting 7y ago
          Well, I'm in the UK so I have to use it with my left hand even though I am right handed - it works fine. Because the letter recognition is based on a single letter at a time it works fine even if I make an absolute mess of it with my left hand.
• TuringTest 7y ago
  That's a sign of an industry with heavy user research and iteration. In a more conservative industry, interaction practices researched and adopted at the beginning of the discipline would be maintained for decades without questioning -cough programming cough-, and profound changes would require a thorough adjustment of the tools used by the industry and the mentality of the practitioners.
• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  I rent cars often, so I see these systems with fresh eyes and I'm basically shocked at the complexity of it all. I tremble a little bit when I want to play something with my iphone, nervously moving through the screens. I think a couple of knobs, a few buttons, and a very simple screen, hopefully HUD of some reasonable kind - or even info displayed behind the wheel would be suitable. I always wonder how many accidents all that technology causes.
• michaelbrooks 7y ago
  I'm a Mazda driver and I liked how you can use a touchscreen before you drive and then it switches off the touchscreen as you're driving to make travelling safer. At first, I was confused, because I've been so used to using touchscreens during journies before, but I applauded them for making such a useful safety feature and I applaud them again for taking it one step further.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  Finally a car company that gets it. Touchscreens and cars should be mutually exclusive, anything that takes your eyes off the road in a car is simply dangerous. Feedback could be visual and in extreme cases audible. Input should be tactile, so buttons rather than surfaces. And screens should display only a little bit of information, in a font large enough that you don't end up straining your eyes when you switch from the road to the screen and back.
• twelve40 7y ago
  I don't know what the problem is or how to fix it, but every car UI/UX I've ever tried, from Audi to Toyota was an absolute repulsive nightmare. Even while not driving it takes forever to find a way to any basic function - while in regular life the phones, and most other electronics are sub-second mostly intuitive. Major car makers always feel like they are two decades behind! And everyone insists on their own separate rat-hole of an experience. We shall see if Mazda's does any better, but the touchscreens I've interacted with in cars were completely maddening, an ugly pixelated blast from a very slow past even in brand new cars.
• rkagerer 7y ago
  This is a great sign. I was worried when it came time to buy my next vehicle I'd have trouble finding something with real knobs.
• netsharc 7y ago
  It's a bit insane that cars (as far as I understand it) have to go through a lot of certification, e.g. that their airbags work, or that the controls work properly (e.g. that the brake-by-wire doesn't have bugs), but that only now have they done research if touch screen usage is safe or not...
• antocv 7y ago
  I assumed since 2001, that soon a car will be made, where all the functions can be accessed with eyes still on the road. Just from the wheel, like the paddles, and buttons for thumbs on the wheel. Anything extra, just place your hand slightly from the wheel and immediately feel what you are about to switch and adjust. Imagine to access any function of the car in complete darkness just by the feel. None of this bullshit, where buttons are far from each other, moving hands up and down left and right to change temperature, turn air-conditioning on/off. Where driver needs to glance down to steer hand into damn buttons. Where "infotainment" needs to show you anything at all about what you are listening to - as if you dont hear it. Keep information to a minimum, ffs. Then we got touchscreens instead - now you cant even drive in full darkness and feel some buttons with your hand to adjust. There is not even a Night Mode. Are car manufacturers really this bad? Yep. Tesla included.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    Tesla indeed has a night mode. Color pallet of the whole UI changes. Day: https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/10/screen-shot-2017-10-18-at-4-13-42-pm-e1508357703211.jpg?resize=1500%2C0&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201... Night: https://cdn-vox--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VHMvRHBqyev8wF_7jGJxsBIRDQU=/0x0:2040x1360/1400x933/filters:focal(857x517:1183x843):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55955575/9U3A2261__1_.0.jpg https://cdn-vox--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.vox-cdn....
    • antocv 7y ago
      That is not "automotive level" night mode. The touchscreen is still brighting up the interior and shows too much useless information. The Saab 9-3 had a "Night" button, which when pressed, turned off _every_ light-source except for speed-odometer. There should be no information visible, no glow on anything, other than speedometer, and even it lowers its brightness. Why though? Try it, if you get the chance, the fatigue I feel after driving with night mode in a Saab vs shitty cars, is exceptionally low. Eye-strain, whats that?
• Yizahi 7y ago
  Speaking about tactile controls - once I got Audi in rental, it had tilt controls near the central knob and they were very good (and stylish enough for general adoption). I could find them without much searching blindly and trigger any of their positions the first try, zero errors. Very nice and intuitive (after you remember what they do of course). See picture here, two silver fins between navigation knob and gearbox, they tilt to front and back: https://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/2016/06/a3-fd-092.jpg https://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/201...
• markmm 7y ago
  This is like Nokia sticking to keyboard in their phones. Worst decision ever made. Their interface will be out of date 5 mins after its made with no way of updating
• kchoudhu 7y ago
  Thank fuck, and I hope the rest of the automotive industry follows suit: I have never felt less safe operating a vehicle than when I have had to adjust some car setting fifteen nested menu items deep while rolling down the highway in an unfamiliar rental at 65 miles per hour.
• haberman 7y ago
  I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
  • chaostheory 7y ago
    I can say the same for Apple CarPlay. Having tactile controls is nice but completely removing the touch screen is not a good thing. If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality. The only reason GM’s is best is because they’ve finally acquiesced and admitted that Apple and Google do it better and their UX reflects that
    • izacus 7y ago
      As mentioned, Apple CarPlay works just fine on Mazdas without touchscreen so I'm not sure why do you think these two are exclusive. There are even pictures of CarPlay running on new Mazda 2019 in the article you're commenting on.
      • chaostheory 7y ago
        My thinking was that if you have CarPlay you will still have to look at the screen regardless of whether or not you have tactile controls. I missed reading this part of the article: "The head-up display that top trims of the Mazda 3 get is now projected onto the windshield. The amount of time it takes the eyes to focus on the head-up display is greatly reduced because it’s now focused on a point 7.5 feet ahead of the driver."
    • BeetleB 7y ago
      >If there's one thing that most car manufacturers aren't great at, it's with their car infotainment system UX UI and functionality Funny thing. I have a newer car with a touch screen interface. I also had an older Civic which someone recently destroyed. So with the insurance money, I bought an early 2000's Accord. The previous owner had installed a new Bluetooth radio. No touch screen. Lots of buttons. At least for entertainment, it's way better than any touch screen interface I've used. It has buttons for FM presets - the thing I missed most with the touchscreen interfaces. And no, I don't want to scroll like crazy to get to the right preset using a knob or steering wheel. I know what station I want to go to, and it's so much better if I simply have to press a button without looking. Random access FTW. Every Bluetooth interface I've seen in touchscreen cars has this flaw: Say I was listening to a podcast or some music. I decide I don't want to listen to it so I hit pause (there is no "stop" icon). I also have Waze running, and its volume is too low (very often the case that Waze's volume and the podcast's differ too much, so you can't use both simultaneously). I increase the volume so I can listen to Waze, and the music/podcast resumes playing! Why? Why on Earth would anyone want this feature where adjusting the volume means "Play"? My 3rd party Bluetooth radio doesn't do stupid things like that. And then the time to connect to Bluetooth. It takes too long in every touchscreen entertainment system. With the 3rd party radio, it's blazingly fast. Lots of other cool things about the 3rd party tactile Bluetooth/radio. I rarely drive my newer 2015 car. It has nothing going for it over my old Accord (well, except possibly safety - but that touchscreen is making things unsafe...)
• torgian 7y ago
  I haven't used a car in years, but I do use taxies or DiDi, or Uber, depending on which country I'm in. With Uber or Didi especially, you get picked up in cars that have these touchscreens. I've never seen a driver use them for anything other than radio operation. They use their phones for GPS navigation. And in the nicer cars (BMWs, Mercs, etc) the touchscreens just destroy the aesthetics of the car's interior. Horrible looking.
• atoav 7y ago
  I don't even think you have to be defensive about it. Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane. But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons. The things with buttons, levers and knobs is that they are expensive and very few designers/engineers are good at designing interfaces with them – either because they are not creative enough to get the optimal solution or because they are not pragmatic enough to test their creative solution to the core.
  • romwell 7y ago
    The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago. Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music. The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now. The synths thrived as virtual instruments, where adding knobs and sliders was cheap. Fast forward to 2010's. Arturia, a big virtual synth maker, said: you know what? People love knobs, let's give them knobs. They made Minubrute and Microbute - and it was a smash hit. Today, there are a plethora of synths out there, and you can program them all with knobs and sliders. For some (like Mini/Microbrute), there is no screen; for others (like Korg Mini/Monologue) it's non-essential, and you do everything with knobs and sliders anyway. Modern professional gear no only does away with touchscreens, it pretty much does away with screens to a large extent. And where the screens are used, the menu-diving with minimal. Because when you make things done, you want to interface in your muscle memory. And you don't want to be looking at things - screens in particular - to interact with them. So if the maker of my $300 can figure this out and put over a dozen knobs on the device to control every single thing it does, I hope that the maker of a $30,000 car can do the same thing as well.
    • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive. And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive. A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily afford one - which suggests that the market for programmability really wasn't there, even with knobs. People don't care about knobs. What they care about is simplicity. Synths like the Microbrute require virtually no mental effort. The sound design model is so simple virtually anyone of average intelligence can learn it in an afternoon. Within a few days they'll know most of what there is to know - which is how to make the same few stock sounds that analog synthesizers have been making since the 1970s. This is fine for beginners but experts find it very limiting. Brian Eno loves his DX7, and the fact that you can set up the envelopes to make quasi-generative noises is a big part of the appeal. Most people don't get that far with it, but those that do aren't going to be happy with the very obvious limitations of a Microbrute. Touch screens in cars are more complex. Having a map in a car is a useful thing, and there's no muscle memory. It's hard to see how you can replace drag/touch to set a destination with buttons that are less annoying and more intuitive. But IME the big problem with touch screens is that they don't work. The screen in my car is resistive, so I have to keep poking at it to get a touch to register. The hybrid design - two rows of soft buttons, one knob, one screen - would be fine if the touch part actually worked.
• cyxxon 7y ago
  I was actually pondering buying a Mazda, but now I am not so sure. Generally I get the idea - please give me hardware buttons for radio/music volume, temperature control, or to toggle suspension modes or whatever. But I want to use e.g. the Spotify on my phone, and Google Maps. Someone further down commented that it seemed to him that car makers have given up on their own branded version if car software, and ohmygod yes, thanks. It was always an afterthought and poorly thought out, buggy and much less functional. So please, maybe find a middle ground, as I said - car functionality with hardware knobs, and a touchscreen for stuff like navigation (where you need the sreen anyway), and music control. Otherwise it will get worse - then I can use the hardware button to select my BT input an dhave to fiddle around on my much smaller phone screen. No one can actually want that, if the alternative is to use a condensed version of that interface on a bigger screen...
  • m_mueller 7y ago
    That middle ground exists pretty much exactly the way you describe in recent VW group cars.
  • hiisukun 7y ago
    I have driven a 2018 Mazda 3 quite a lot. The touchscreen is disabled while the car is moving. For complicated things while driving - that you wish you had a touchscreen to accomplish - I wish you wouldn't do them while driving. I say this after more than a decade working responding to road accidents. However, the Mazda interface has been great for all the Android Auto functions (including Google maps and Spotify) simply using the physical buttons. They clearly went to some effort to make it work well. And if you prefer, you can use voice controls fairly effectively via Android Auto or Apple carplay. Please keep your eyes on the road.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• alexchamberlain 7y ago
  This is great. I grew up watching the Simpsons and always dreamt of sitting in front of a nuclear control panel like Homer's, but instead, I sit in front of soft control panels (and many more text editors, but that's besides the point). I think we should invest more in bespoke, more usable interfaces and break away from everything being a touch screen, keyboard and/or mouse.
• moviuro 7y ago
  See this 2014 article about a good car UI with touchscreens [0]; though it may take some getting used to. Switching back to analog controls and buttons is a sane move in that respect. [0] https://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui https://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui ; and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261003
  • kalleboo 7y ago
    I that guy suggesting multitouch on a car touchscreen? That seems terrible. I find just swipe scrolling extremely awkward at arm's length (and this is with CarPlay so it's not just due to weird car UI acceleration curves)
    • moviuro 7y ago
      Multitouch is easier to do blind, instead of having to focus on the screen though.
• anbop 7y ago
  There are three reasons to use a touchscreen for a UI: 1) minimal cost for a device that already has a display, e.g. e-book reader 2) reconfigurable UI for device that performs different tasks, e.g. smartphone 3) paging UI for vastly complex products that can’t accommodate thousands of different knobs, e.g. control panel for a non-professional audio generator. A car doesn’t fit any of these.
• sn41 7y ago
  Great move. Enough of frozen screens and unresponsive interfaces right in the middle of driving. Who ever thought this was a good idea?
• msh 7y ago
  I hope they are right but I still think it depends on design. My current citroen is mostly touch controlled, but I find it requires less attention to operate than the button/dial controls on my old nissan which were horrible. But I think the real future is voice control.
• Angostura 7y ago
  I'm a heavy Apple CarPlay user and I am delighted that my car (a 2016 Seat) has analogue controls that work with it. I know that when I'm required to use the on screen controls for certain functions, I am a less safe driver.
  • Ambroos 7y ago
    Yeah, my daily driver was an Audi with a rotary dial for about a year (no touchscreen at all), and Android Auto was great on it. You get to know the structure of all menus and can take actions blindly after a while. It's been almost a year since I've driven that car and I still know exactly what to press to show alternative routes in Google Maps, for example. Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto. I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.
    • andyrew 7y ago
      Completely agree with you. I drive an Audi A4 with rotary control for CarPlay and it works perfectly fine. Moving to touchscreens is purely an exercise in cost-cutting.
    • _Turk_ 7y ago
      Yeah the rotary dial for Android auto is very intuitive, shame they are not keeping it around, touch screen just seems much more dangerous
• rswail 7y ago
  Years ago I had a friend that was an embedded HW/SW guy working for our local Ford manufacturing (AU). He was very proud of an antenna switch that had options for "fully up/halfway/fully down" and explained all the complexities of counting revs on the motor that was doing the moves and remembering the count and working out whether it had reached the top etc. When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank. The idea that the people building these UIs are actually interested in actual safe UX is misguided. UX is irrelevant, UI has to be sexy in the showroom. Neither Apple or Google want the manufacturers to put in knobs and switches, because then they'll have to adapt their partially neutered existing iOS/Android UIs to support things like CANbus etc. Plus the integration costs will go up and nobody got time for that.
  • javajosh 7y ago
    >When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank. In fairness, there's a lot to be said about limited options. The benefit of the 3 position switch is simply that the user doesn't have to think about what the "optimal" position is. Moving the antenna up and down goes from selecting one of 3 numbers, to hitting a button to make a floating point number increase, and then hit another button to stop it on the right position. I personally don't think that's a good UX for the majority of people. (Heck, I'm not even sure what the point of a 3 position antenna is!)
• kragen 7y ago
  Thank goodness! At least Mazda is opting out of the Pictures Under Glass insanity: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
• isacikgoz 7y ago
  I use CarPlay for 2 years on a daily basis on my VW (w/ touch screen). The head unit is placed in the middle of the cockpit. In time you build up muscle memory so it can be a similar experience with hard buttons. The only catching point is if your phone is slow, features like CarPlay behaves nondeterministic. Thus, it becomes very distracting. Also, to reduce distraction I suggest using Siri with CarPlay. It works like a charm and you don't even need to look to the screen.
• mhandley 7y ago
  Like many people my age (early 50s), I now need reading glasses. My distance vision is fine, but my phone held at arms length is slightly out of focus unless I put on my reading glasses. This is the case for many (most?) people my age. I hate any display on a car that I can actually reach. No touchscreens for me.
• itchynosedev 7y ago
  How it made through ] production in the first place is really baffling. There are supposedly thousands and thousands of engineers, industrial designers, QC and other product people working in the automotive industry. And yet between 2010 and 2019 you'd be hard pressed to find a model coming without a touch screen. This is insane. This seems like a basic usability and safety issue.
• dzhiurgis 7y ago
  Tesla is probably only company with proper software engineering team that managed to create smart car platform. Others trying to imitate its screens are shooting themselves into foot. If you are not able to implement continuous delivery, you should stick to hardware toggles. It's that simple. The problem of screen being screen still stands in Tesla's cars, but much bigger problem is shipping crappy screens.
  • romwell 7y ago
    I like what you're saying, but I think I can improve the message a bit by shortening it: >you should stick to hardware toggles There we go, nothing to add now :)
• whizzkid 7y ago
  Touch screen is almost essential for navigation functionality. It makes life easier in car while not driving as well. I think what manufacturers should focus on is to implement touch screen functions on the driver side as physical controls. This way driver does not need to reach for the screen.
• Guthur 7y ago
  Thank God for this, anytime I've had to use a touch screen while driving I've felt it's stolen so much of my visual attention that it's amazing I don't hit something. In contrast a physical knob can be used purely by touch without ever having to take my eyes off the road.
• Lewton 7y ago
  Whatever happened to all the companies working on providing tactile feedback on touchscreens many years ago?
• ivanhoe 7y ago
  Good, IMHO if using phones while driving is dangerous, then it makes zero sense to use touchscreens all over the place in cars. However some features could still benefit from it, like navigation and settings screens - all those things that can't be handled by a single button or rotary selector, so you'd still have to look down at it to use it.
• numlock86 7y ago
  From a consumer perspective as someone driving the new released Mazda 3 2019 (the one in the article) and previously owning a VW Tiguan with touchscreen in the center, I can say I am super happy with that decision, both from a practical standpoint (cleaning/wiping, yuck ...) and from a functional standpoint: It's just so much easier and less distracting to use the center dial. It takes a bit longer in some cases (navigating Android Auto for example) but it's worth it. And most things can be handled by 'OK Google' these days anyways.
• kgwgk 7y ago
  If I had to buy a car now it may be a Mazda 3 because of this. I may be getting old but I prefer having physical buttons and needles. The dashboard in the new Mercedes for example may look neat and futuristic but I can imagine it going wrong in many ways. I just want a car, not a space ship.
• laythea 7y ago
  Yes. This is what we want. Touch controls that involve the sensation of touch! :)
• pulsarflash 7y ago
  touch screens requires diverting your eyes from the road than reaching over to a dial or button. it's extremely dangerous
• marvin 7y ago
  When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality. I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen. Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification. The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • mxfh 7y ago
    Since autonomous in most cases also means car on demand, I think the car ceases to exist as seperate entity to configure, what's more import that there is a seamless transferable configuration based on your preferences once you rent any car, so that it becomes a nearly natural augmentation of your smartphone or whatever device you'll cary around with you sometime in the next 2 decades. Meaning low friction in getting your audio/calls out over the speaker system and syncing of navigation with your other devices. And having car notifaction and interior lighting, audio EQ preferences synced too. Any screens left in the car might be there purely for diagnostic or entertainment (think inflight entertainment and hopefully better) purposes, that need only minimal direct interaction.
• Shivetya 7y ago
  Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that) First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works. I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun. Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks. So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use! edit: grammar/typos
  • Phillipharryt 7y ago
    Do you often get into new and different cars and drive them? Your last paragraph is an odd argument. The buttons in my car stay in the same place and don't change with context. If I want to turn the radio down I reach over and rotate the knob to the left, muscle memory and tactile response. That knob will never do anything except the radio volume. Far safer because I don't even need to glance at it. Edit. Your top paragraph about user settings, that applies to any car that maintains a user profile, that's not a benefit of touch screens.
    • Shivetya 7y ago
      Okay, so how does any of this conflict with what I stated. Most vehicles with screens, touch or not, usually have audio controls copied to the steering wheel. How many buttons it takes is dependent on brand and even model. Plus you will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not. Let alone a good driver is always looking around which includes glances left and right so as long as the task you are trying to do, buttons or touch screen, is simple you are fine. I did not declare that settings were the property of touch screens, I simply stated that the vast majority of settings that exist are never modified. This goes for cars with buttons too. The discussion is that touch screens are bad. My point is for those touch screens which are not placed correctly or have a bad UI, then yes they can be bad. There are some atrocious implementations out there however the Tesla is certainly not one of them.
• Aardwolf 7y ago
  I love tactile feedback and love that for all controls like heating, volume, windows, .... Except for GPS destination input (except if they provide a nice mechanical keyboard ;)) and map zooming. Imho they should allow touchscreen for GPS input and map zooming, and disable the touch for the driver when driving (except when it knows a passenger is sitting next to it and sees the passenger is touching it, should be possible to detect)
• loxs 7y ago
  OK, time to buy a Mazda
• sizzle 7y ago
  I thought the touch screen was disabled at any speed above being stationary? I don't see why they removed it if it was only usable at standstill?
• sizzle 7y ago
  I can't wait for the day of Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant voic-level speech integration for controlling air conditioner, calling, asking questions, rerouting gps etc all hands free with emphasis on actually being usable, unlike the crap automakers have been torturing us with (half-assed navigation that needs to be updated at dealership, voice input system that barely understands commands unless you say them in some very specific order, etc).
• blattimwind 7y ago
  It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching the radio off has you reaching for a button somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.
  • lloeki 7y ago
    My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress bar† or VTEC led depending on engine)), secondary behind the wheel (RPM dial, fuel, cooling liquid temp), tertiary left/right hand side (depending if you're brit/jap or the rest of the world; clock, head unit AC) of the driver, all angled properly towards the driver and minimising glare, all knobs and buttons can be actioned upon either without leaving the hands off the wheel or only leaving them for the shorter amount of time, Fitt's law everywhere, with big knobs/buttons for big things, small ones for small things. No gorilla arm effect anywhere, even the window controls on door armrests fall naturally under the hand and "dangerous" things are purposely made easy-but-difficult to reach (VSA switch, dashboard backlight). Oh, and the UI of that little screen is so well thought out, well-laid-out information and navigation across various more detailed info, with a notification system that pops an (i) in the critical area and actual info front and center (low fuel, low oil pressure, freezing conditions...). Even the various beeps have sensible meaning conveyed. It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that. (The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones) But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit. https://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Honda_Civic_Type-R_005.jpg https://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Honda... (if you get the GPS option the screen takes place of the clock/head unit display) † not a gamified tally like they did with the Insight and CR-Z, but a real-time thing. †† not a ridiculously small heads-up air fighter thing like Peugeot does that gets unreadable depending on light conditions
• shrimpx 7y ago
  Pretty much 100% of interactions with my car are either android auto voice controls or physical knobs (mostly the knobs on my steering wheel). There's basically no reason to fudge around with either a touch screen or a rotary dial while driving.
• dash2 7y ago
  Car manufacturers' touchscreen UI is hilariously bad, like a website from 1998. Interfacing with phones is equally unreliable. They really don't know what they're doing.
• wycy 7y ago
  I liked the use of the Mazda touch screen for the purpose of entering an address (while stopped) into the Nav system--so much easier than using a wheel to scroll across a keyboard--but otherwise it wasn't necessary. They could obviate the need for a touch screen for this function by allowing you to send an address to the car via your phone.
• techer 7y ago
  Please remove them from the back of the headrests on long plane trips. Being stabbed in the head repeatedly is trying.
• arthurfm 7y ago
  Couldn't Mazda have simply disabled the touchscreen controls when the car reaches a certain speed?
  • SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    It’s better to have one interface than two.
• jmalkin 7y ago
  Concerned about his this will impact their sales. We are easily seduced by pretty screens, and overestimate our driving ability with gadgets on hand
• jclardy 7y ago
  Makes sense for Mazda - they already disable the touchscreen while the car is in motion, so might as well save a few bucks and get rid of it entirely.
• josteink 7y ago
  I have a 2014 Toyota Auris, and while on service I got to try the new 2019 model. All interior controls were touchscreen and impossible to use while driving. Worthless gimmickry. Definitely didn’t tempt me to get a newer model. I’ll keep my 2014 with its buttons and dials until auto-designers regain there senses again.
• microcolonel 7y ago
  Another way Mazda is leading the way with design. I have been really impressed overall with Mazda's approach to design, especially lately, all the way from the powertrain to the controls (or the other way around, if their marketing is to be believed).
• jasonsync 7y ago
  The worst is the touchscreens on some Honda models (eg. 2016 Fit EX). 1. They removed the volume knob in favour of a volume slider on the touch screen. Very difficult to use, and even after a couple of years I have not been able to get used to it, and keep reaching for a physical input. 2. There's many UI quirks (bugs and ill conceived design flows) that make menu navigation, managing saved stations, switching from AM to FM, connecting a Bluetooth device etc. extremely difficult. RDS is even disabled by default, which defeats the purpose of having all the extra real estate of the touch screen. Lots of complaints from users, taking them years to acknowledge it sucks.
  • jasonsync 7y ago
    3. The answer and ignore touch screen buttons are so close together, it's easy to accidentally tap ignore when trying to answer a call ...
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• achenatx 7y ago
  I listen to XM radio. My toyota interface is a dial for volume, a dial for tuning, and 6 preset buttons (and 6 pages of presets). I can easily tune through all 150+ stations very easily to find a particular station. I can switch up 20 stations with a single twist, without looking. Also since stations are grouped, I can set a preset for each type of station, then easily tune up or down to listen to other related stations. My wife's XM is a honda touch screen. The presets work ok, except they are touch screen so you have to look at the screen to change presets. But if you want to manually go to another station, you have to hit 2 touch buttons to get to a tuning screen. Then you have to hit the up/down tuning button each time you want to go up or down a single station. It is pretty much impossible to try to find a station if you don't already know the number because it could be 100's of touches.
  • hrktb 7y ago
    I appreciate your point, and think it comes down to what use case most users will benefit from optimising. My wife switches between Spotify, the Music app and a separated radio app. She does it on her phone's screen when at stop, she could do it on CarPlay or the android version, but I can't just imagine how it would work without a generic touch interface. You use case (listening to radio) is in line with the current UI paradigm, other use cases (using apps) just won't work with it. That's where we could find a tradeoff I think.
• dirktheman 7y ago
  Some of the higher end luxury cars have little touchscreens that look like buttons on the same place where you'd expect the button, with tactile feedback to mimic a physical button. Good luck with that in 20 years or so...
  • iamtheworstdev 7y ago
    no one owns a car for 20 years anymore so it's probably not a concern.
    • Tade0 7y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure about that - both my father and his sister independently of each other bought their cars new over 20 years ago - I'm planning on keeping my 2017 Toyota as long as possible, because the savings are immense. Maybe it's something specific to my country overall my parents' generation keeps their vehicles as long as possible.
      • iamtheworstdev 7y ago
        obviously I shouldn't have said "no one" and made such a blanket statement. But the average age of a vehicle on the road in the USA is 11.6 years and the average length of ownership is 79 months (so 6.6ish years), according to the IHS. https://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973/average-age-of-vehicles-on-road-hits-11-6-years https://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973...
• coleca 7y ago
  Not ready to give Mazda any praise for their infotainment systems. I leased a 2019 CX-5 Grand Touring Reserve a couple months ago. Had I known how bad Mazda’s UX was I would have leased something else. First off their system takes an eternity to cold boot. If I’m making a quick run to the store or dropping the kids off at a friends house the system isn’t available for most of the ride. While it’s booting, the radio remembers what it last did but all the controls including volume are locked. So if I was listening to one of the comedy channels on Sirius I have no way to mute it or turn down the volume of the often inappropriate content for a few minutes if my kids get in the car. Second the system remembers very little of the settings between drives. For example the heated/ vented seats or the auto-hold braking feature have to be set every drive. I just drove a brand new Ford Fusion rental this week and their system while much clunkier did boot up almost immediately upon starting the car. Of course nothings perfect and while Ford did include hard buttons for most of the HVAC controls you still had to go though the touchscreen menus to find the setting to change the vent control to head and feet.
  • MH15 7y ago
    My Vizio "smart" TV does this... turn it on during the day and mildly inappropriate content is still playing, volume locked for up to a minute.
  • Operyl 7y ago
    It sounds like something is funky with your infotainment system. I have the same year, the trim below but with CarPlay support. It boots within 15 seconds generally, but volume is available instantly. I test drove a car without CarPlay and the boot time was comparable.
  • TheHypnotist 7y ago
    I agree with a lot of your points, especially the one where the system picks up playing from where it left off and there is little you can do to stop it aside from mashing the volume or quickly choosing your audio source. However, sounds like you have a problem specific to your vehicle's computer, mine boots before I even leave the driveway.
  • jonheller 7y ago
• b_tterc_p 7y ago
  What functionality do you regularly need on the dashboard besides map and Spotify? I have none. And as a result the touch screen seems reasonable. I get that’s its bad if you’re constantly interacting with it while driving, but... are you?
• gerbilly 7y ago
  Touchscreens in cars are all about reducing cost for the manufacturer. They are less safe, less convenient to use than physical controls. The manufacturers know this, but they don't care. I believe most customers also currently like them because touchscreens are a relatively new technology, and they are a fad.
• aerophilic 7y ago
  I am reminded of a quote I read lately referring to now Ford CEO’s Jim Hackett’s research in understanding the automotive industry (he came from outside the industry). Specifically: when it comes to cars, people LOVE their cars. Someone’s relationship with their car is very intimate and personal, in many ways more so then a house. Much of the discussion I am seeing in this thread is very passionate, which confirms the above observation.
  • ImaCake 7y ago
    Just to offer a counter anecdote, I am passionate about this topic because it involves life and death. I care about my car in so far as it gets me places. If I didn't need it in my car centric city I wouldn't have one. But, as other people drive, and I walk or cycle, I want those people to have car GUIs that do not distract them.
    • aerophilic 7y ago
      Completely agree, not everyone is as passionate as others (I am much like you). But there is a large community that IS very much passionate. I still recall a fellow classmate at school who if given half the chance will talk about cars till the next morning. But as they always say, to each their own. But especially in non-utility cars, there very much a level of passion associated with owning a car.
• Gelob 7y ago
  Those dials in BMWs are from the fucking devil
• CelestialTeapot 7y ago
  Good! They may make the interior look cleaner and save the manufacturer having to stock various small parts and not having to install buttons and dials depending on the trim level, but from a safety perspective tactile feedback is key to minimizing distractions while driving, and touchscreens just don't have that.
• swalsh 7y ago
  My ideal state would be Alexa for the driver, and a touch screen for my "copilots" (one in front-seat, one in backseat)
• Yhippa 7y ago
  If you think about, anything that 100% requires a driver to remove their eyes off the road for extended periods of time is a bad thing waiting to happen. I guess a lot of cars don't have touchscreens though and you don't see a lot of news or analysis on how these touchscreens are killing people. I still see people driving 70 MPH on major Interstates with their heads literally down staring at their phones. At any rate I still think this is a great idea. Mazda came close with the generation of their infotainment systems before their current ones. You could mostly use the rotary dial and do things if you memorized how many clicks of rotation of the wheel it took and which button to press in the gutter on top of the transmission. I think the next best thing is a voice UI to control HVAC and entertainment. The one on my 2015 Mazda 6 is pretty bad but this might force them to invest in that which would give them a competitive edge.
• vanderZwan 7y ago
  Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011: > There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years. > Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. > What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade. > Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat. > Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... (that second-to-last paragraph is surprisingly on the nose with the car metaphor)
  • zaroth 7y ago
    And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere. Rant is the right way to describe this. Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember that first experience was a total rush and extremely stimulating. Feeling like the digital map was connected to my fingertip as you pan with that point stuck under your finger — absolute magic. There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass. Denying a touchscreen entirely is to make huge compromises in the overall experience when configuring something as fully featured as a modern vehicle.
    • 7y ago
• zaroth 7y ago
  The real reason Mazda is purging touchscreens from their vehicles is because their screens are terrible, laggy, hard to use junk and they have no way to fix it because they lack the vertical integration and expertise to bring it in house. I would guess this is a technical failure wrapped in PR messaging.
  • FraaJad 7y ago
    eh.. I had a 2016 mazda that I replaced with a 2015 lexus. The mazda's rotary knob based interface is soo much better than the the "mouse" based lexus one. My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.
    • zaroth 7y ago
      I’m personally glad to see Mazda ceding the high ground on this. IMO they are like RIM sticking to physical keyboards in an new Apple world. There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.
      • Fins 7y ago
        One thing people tend to miss is that all of those "obvious and incredible" benefits of touchscreens are applicable or should ever be applied top operating a moving vehicle. And if there is somebody who does NOT fail at this, I'd like to meet them. They probably have a working perpetual motion engine, too.
• Daddy_Rob 7y ago
  why not just add lane assist like every other company?
• tssva 7y ago
  My girlfriend's 2019 Mazda CX-5 has both a touchscreen and analog controls. Carplay will use both but Android Auto has always just used the analog controls.
• ddingus 7y ago
  I almost always turn the systems off. Great call by Mazda. Maybe a newer car purchase will make sense again.
• nkozyra 7y ago
  Touchscreens are fine, but are for passengers. The real issue is cars that support only touchscreen for some options and then make you go into park to do anything.
• learnstats2 7y ago
  I miss being able to touch-text. Easy with buttons, impossible on a touch-screen which gives you no feedback.
• kevinconroy 7y ago
  Kudos! Glad to see this swing back to tactile controls. At the CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem. We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood. You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).
• bumby 7y ago
  One thing I really dislike about everything being integrated into a single touch-screen is that you've now created a single failure point for all those integrated systems. At least with tactile controls, if my radio knob breaks I can still adjust my HVAC. Also, when the touch-screens break they tend to be much more expensive to fix. I listened to one person say they were quoted $7k to fix one. They were of a conspiratorial mindset, so they thought it was a planned obsolescence feature to help convince someone to buy a new car instead. I don't know if that's true but the idea of a that type of reliability cost is enough to keep me from returning to the same manufacturer.
• sureaboutthis 7y ago
  One thing that really bothers me about the screens in cars nowadays is that, to me, they always look like an iPad that was just screwed into the dashboard at the last minute as an afterthought to look high tech. In the high end Tesla that I drove a few years ago, it was molded into the center console and had the look and feel of forethought and intent.
• m-p-3 7y ago
  Good, that say, I wish Android Wear / WearOS went that path too. I miss physical buttons for navigating interfaces, especially in the cold winters with my gloves, and I hate, HATE using voice commands.
• mszkoda 7y ago
  My Alfa Romeo (and all recent Alfa Romeos in the US) don't have touchscreens. The screens are in touch range and they have CarPlay and Android Auto, but you have to use the wheel with them. I got used to it pretty quickly and after a week or two I don't really have to look at the screen to do 99% of things I need to do. It seems much safer to me, though it was annoying at first.
  • noitsnot 7y ago
    My Rolls doesn't have a touch screen, which is nice because it helps from distracting my driver during trips to the yacht club or the occasional polo match.
    • bradlys 7y ago
      This comment seems so weird - it's just a European brand - not a rich one. Alfa Romeo is nowhere near the price of a Rolls. The most expensive Alfa (their halo car) is a third of the price of the cheapest Rolls without any options. Ford makes a more expensive car than Alfa.
      • noitsnot 7y ago
        Alpha Romeo is an Italian luxury brand in the U.S. Ford in the same sentence is shocking.
• pier25 7y ago
  I hate the touchscreen on my Honda SUV. It's not even Apple/Android but something Honda half baked a couple of years back. I have been working on UIs for a long time and it's just a disgrace of UX, design, and performance. Plus it's pretty useless. Other that Bluetooth pairing it serves no real purpose. 99% of the time we control the music player and volume from the remote on the wheel. That's it.
• alkonaut 7y ago
  There is nothing inherently wrong with touch screens. Just use physical knobs and buttons for anything you want when driving (heat, for example) then use touch screen for everything you use when not driving. Entering a navigation target, setting the clock, doing any car setup etc. Typing in a destination with voice or a knob and button interface is infuriating.
  • acdha 7y ago
    I like that approach for those reasons but it really needs care to prevent abuse – e.g. disabling inputs unless the car is in park. Too many manufacturers do the equivalent of putting a bowl of ice cream in front of a child and saying “we told them not to eat it”.
• perch56 7y ago
  I own a 2014 Mazda 3, brilliant car. The touchscreen firmware is a pain to update every year while servicing it. When I bought the car it came it the GPS hardware pre-installed however I was supposed to buy the maps separately for about $500. I didn't see the point in this as for that money I could have bought a new iPhone at that time and have various navigation apps. I also praise Mazda for the decision. In the 5 years since I own the car I probably actually used the touchscreen 20 times as usually I change songs or radio channels from the steering wheel button. Buy a Mazda, you won't regret it :)
  • asdf21 7y ago
    2016 Mazda 3, completely agree. Also have a 2016 Model S, and the bluetooth works much better on the Mazda, as far connecting and using a cellphone quickly.
• Keverw 7y ago
  Neat. I always wondered why it's legal to use a huge touch screen built into your car but not your phone (Not like you should be texting and driving anyways, just an example). I feel tactile knobs and stuff is better, like if you need to turn up the AC just turn a knob while Tesla makes you fiddle with your touch screen.... Maybe you start to remember where things are, but next software update could change that. I know on one of the Tesla models, you even need to use the touch screen to open your glove box which seems odd. Then with all the news stories of police shooting people on routine traffic stops, reach for the center to open your glove box for your insurance card, who knows maybe you are reaching for a gun in the center console. It's just out of the norm since most people glove boxes just open up with an actual handle. Even though their computer always knows if you had insurance or not even before being stopped, just another way for the city to make revenue if you forgot your paper. But maybe I'm listening to the media too much but it wouldn't surprise me if some innocent person was murdered just because they decided to drive something different and slightly more technical while making a slightly wider turn than a cop thought they should of made. There's a video on YouTube of a guy being stopped in a Tesla because the officer thought the touch screen was a modification instead of being built as part of the car... but after a little back and forth and laughs then realizes it's part of the car and leaves without any further info as a good cop should. while some others might feel bad and still try to find something wrong instead of accepting they were wrong. Maybe in a popular tech-filled San Francisco cops see Tesla's every day but in small towns in like the midwest, they are rare and fancy. Then some places there isn't an official place to even get serviced, but the same could be said about Lamborghinis. I forget who but I was watching some internet marketer guy from some small town in Maine talk about owning a Lamborghini. Apparently every time you stop somewhere even at a traffic light people want to talk to you and get pictures. Even said people would drive and take photos which made him nervous since that's unsafe but people would chase him to get pictures. A BMW i8 would make a interesting super car since already the large BMW network of service centers at dealerships, but if you are the only one in a small town probably will attract people attention too. So I guess you can feel like a celebrity for a bit. Then in New Jersey, they have DMV checkpoints during the morning commute looking for missing emissions inspection stickers waving people into a empty parking lot, while the Tesla is 100% electric and exempt but doesn't mean a cop will detain you for 15 minutes giving you a hard time and make you late for work because no one told him. But the same can be said about no front plates, 19 states don't require them (and July 2020 that will be 20 states as Ohio passed a law getting rid of front plates as a effort to save money but delayed it by a year from being in effect so law enforcement can figure out how to deal with no front plates. I'm not sure why they can't just call up the highway patrol from Kentucky, Tennessee or Florida and ask them since they have years of experience with no front plates and already figured it out.) but there's stories of people on road trips being hassled. Someone went on a road trip from Florida to San Francisco and got a parking ticket for no front plate... Might of been a meter maid though instead of a cop though. Well at least it's winnable but so annoying people paid to enforce the law are so uninformed.
• remote_phone 7y ago
  I just bought a Model 3. There are a lot of great features but I simply hate the touchscreen display. I can’t reliably change the AC, etc without distractingly taking my eyes off the road. I hate it. My other cars I just reach for knobs or buttons but having to find the stupid parts of the touchscreen are really dumb and a terrible design. If the next version doesn’t have a better interface with more knobs and buttons I won’t be buying another one.
  • robbyt 7y ago
    Thats frustrating. Not trying to be snarky, but did you notice this while test driving?
• Blackthorn 7y ago
  Maybe I'm just a luddite but I can't stand any of these features in new cars. Feels more like misfeatures to me. I rent cars fairly often for work and so I see a lot of touchscreens, a lot of bluetooth, whatnot. My car at home has a simple radio, a CD player that rarely gets used, and cruise control. I prefer that to any of this new integrated tech. The only thing about new cars that I really miss is a backup camera.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • degenerate 7y ago
    95% of everyone would agree with you. It's the car manufacturers and the business people behind the terrible tech in the car industry that disagree and want us to have touchscreens.
• toss1 7y ago
  Excellent decision for Mazda. They've been optimizing everything for years, tho a bit lagging with their electronics UI. The touchscreen was already disabled when rolling (faster than ~5mph), so losing it entirely is a step forward. The touchscreen UI when driving is also a very bad design. Touchscreens have no tactile feedback, so require focused visual attention to operate, taking not only the mental focus away from the road environment, but also moving the eyes well away from the road so losing much of the peripheral vision that can 'save' the driver by noticing unexpected motion. Even as a racer with training on shifting attention between road, traffic, mirrors, surround, & instruments, I've found that any attempt to put a complex phone UI in a car significantly degrades my driving performance. Don't take me wrong, I love having the Android Auto maps up on the screen of my new CX-5. But, the usability, even using the knob, is a constant distraction, and I far too often find myself squandering far too many microseconds on the UI trying to adjust the map, when I should have switched focus back to the road. It is a genuine hazard, and I've got training to manage it, and still often fail. The primary, and almost singular goal of any driving or piloting UI must be to reduce the driver's workload. ANY few microseconds squandered on hesitation about the desired operation of the UI or just figuring out it's current state can become deadly. This is an entirely different goal and threat structure from any ordinary computer or mobile device UI/UX design. Anyone doing it must be fully retrained and reoriented towards these goals, and pursue them relentlessly.
• izzydata 7y ago
  I hope this becomes more common. At least in sportier cars. I want some kind of tactile response that I can feel while driving so I can navigate a vehicles controls without ever taking my eyes off the road. I want physical buttons, knobs, dials and switches. If there is a display it should not be a touch display. Hopefully I can find something of this sort to replace the 7" screen in my GT86.
• tolger 7y ago
  I have a 2018 Mazda CX-9 with the touchscreen. I almost never use the touchscreen, because there's a much more convenient scroll-wheel positioned in the center console and within my right hand's reach. There are also controls in the steering wheel for audio, phone and cruise control.
• stevenjgarner 7y ago
  While I applaud the human factors engineering of removing touch-sensitive screens, it only applies to vehicles in which there is a driver. We are clearly in the final days of "driving", before the driver becomes just another passenger in the autonomous vehicle. Once fully autonomous, won't the touch-screen interface be the ideal user interface inside a vehicle - familiar, ubiquitous and simple? Wouldn't Mazda be better served in spending their design budget on accumulating the exponential real world autonomous driving data that is giving brands like Tesla an advantage?
  • plaidfuji 7y ago
    I’m surprised I had to go so far down to find this comment. Most complaints about cabin UI here are that they require taking eyes off the road. Tesla is clearly designing a car for a time when the driver never needs to look at the road at all.
• runjake 7y ago
  My knee-jerk reaction was "I'm not going to buy a car if it does not support CarPlay"[1], but Mazda isn't eliminating CarPlay functionality as part of this process. On-screen selections will involve tactile controls and I find that diable. Why? CarPlay is a reasonably good UI unlike virtually anything pretty much any car manufacturer can create, Maps, Podcasts/music interface, etc.
• coryfklein 7y ago
  Cue the angel choir. Touch screens in vehicles drive me nuts! Requiring the driver to divert their attention from the road makes all tablet-style interfaces a degradation of UX. In all the cars I learned to drive in, I could adjust every thermostat control as well as every audio interface completely by touch, without taking my eyes off the road. Not to mention the software issues! In one vehicle, you literally could not turn off the radio. Your options were to press the mute button (which would only hold until you restarted your car - at which point you'd get blaring music or static) or to just turn the volume as low as you could. And every car is now different and unpredictable! My dashboard should be a utility, not a visually stimulating video game where I need to learn every menu and submenu just to fade the audio to the rear. All I can say is THANK GOD, Mazda. I hope all other manufacturers follow your lead.
• kuon 7y ago
  I never tried the Mazda system, but as an experienced UX designer, I agree that touchscreen in a car is one of the worst idea ever in term of UX. It's far, it requires aim, there is no tactile feedback, some gestures (like scroll) are really hard and require constant attention.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    If scrolling is hard on your car’s touch screen, then the manufacturer failed spectacularly. Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.
    • Fins 7y ago
      If you are stationary and can dedicate your attention to looking at the screen, sure. In a moving car, not at all. Using touch is a spectacular failure to apply even the basic common sense. Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.
      • zaroth 7y ago
        I didn’t mean to imply scrolling should be done with two fingers :-) But rather if you offer touch scrolling you’ll also want pinch to zoom. “Spectacular failure to apply even the most basic common sense” is a pretty strong position. In my experience with actually using a fantastic touch interface for navigation, and having tried and hated using nav systems in expensive cars in the past, where I’ve had to resort to using my phone for nav, I am equally strongly of the position that proper multi-touch nav on a large screen (Tesla Model 3) is safer and easier than any kind of button based nav system.
        • Fins 7y ago
          I think it would be a reasonable argument that if you need to fiddle with navigation while driving, your nav system failed. And honestly, whether I am using Waze on the phone, or built-in nav, short of "crap, I've put a wrong destination in" I've never had any particular need to do anything to the nav system once I start going. Now, sure, I can see how a large touch screen might make a better interface for navigation only, as long as you are stopped and can use it without having to look at the road. But I know of an even better interface -- give me keyboard and mouse, and even with desktop Google Maps I'll get routes faster than with any touchscreen system out there. But of course 1) mouse/keyboard in a car isn't very feasible, and 2) that touch screen, since it's already there, is being used for controlling other systems in the car, too. And that is a problem. Anything that may need a quick adjustment while you're driving (and in real world, of course, that includes things you shouldn't really be doing while driving...) should be doable with muscle memory and at most a quick glance. Touchscreen doesn't do that, so I think it clearly does fail the common sense test.
• cryptozeus 7y ago
  Can’t they just simplify touch screen UI. I understand the distraction factor but that can also happen with too many hard controls as well. In Tesla, the hard button on steering wheel can be modified by the touch panel control. They both work together. IMO this is a wrong move for mazda. Eventually if these cars become smart cars then you will not be interacting with controls as much. Touch an go.
• cabinguy 7y ago
  I remember when microwaves had one dial and no buttons, no digital touchscreens. You set the dial to the desired cook time in minutes/seconds, and it automatically started (as long as the door was closed). Same with an oven. Turn the dial to 350 and the oven was on and set to 350. It took a fraction of a second vs a touch screen. These new interfaces are often a terrible use of "technology" and are actually a step (or more) backward.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    I remember those days - I liked our microwave with just a time knob and a start knob. But it had its drawbacks. My young children couldn't set the time to heat their oatmeal. "Turn it to 1 minute". They'd twist the knob and say "Is that enough?" Without knowing enough about time they couldn't (yet) figure out to turn right or left to get to the right number. With a digital one, they'd just poke 1,0,0 and hit start.
    • cabinguy 7y ago
      By the time I had kids, the dial interface was long gone...but if I could teach my kids to push 1,0,0, start, I'd bet I could teach them what 1:00 looked like on the dial pretty quickly.
      • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Not really. They have to be able to understand math, not just memorize digits.
    • lawrencegs 7y ago
      Young children behavior is interesting, I remember a friend whose 3 year old boy can’t read but fully capable of using his parents phone to watch Youtube. The boy constantly use Voice Recognition instead of keyboard input in such a fluid manner. After the search shows up, the boy simply pick the cartoon he liked. Tap and swipe is first nature to him. What fascinates me is, this boy cant figure out how to turn on the tv because he keeps tapping amd swiping the remote control. I once saw him trying to swipe on the light switch as well.
• ed312 7y ago
  Is there a good site or db that let's your compare cars without or with minimal LCD screens? I vastly prefer analog gagues and minimal b/w digital displaces for things like radio.
• MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  Seems to me that onscreen displays and Alexa-style voice control would be the ultimate killer app for cars. How often do we have to divert our attention from the road just to check the speedometer?
• hsnewman 7y ago
  I bought my Mazda 6 the last year it offered no screen. The salesman wanted be to buy the next year which had a god awful touch screen on top of the dash, I hated it. I am glad I didn't get a touch screen!
• ryeguy_24 7y ago
  Removing touch screens from the driver is a good one but there are so many distracting UI patterns for drivers. The scary thing is that I would bet people have died because of poor patterns that exist. These are some that I have: 1. Using Apple iPhone for navigation. Phone rings. I pick it up using car controls. The navigation screen is now gone and is replaced with the phone screen. [scramble to swipe bottom of phone to get back to nav] 2. Audio routing. The car winds up acting like a Home theater receiver that I have to debug while driving. Why can’t I hear my music? Am I on AM/FM/IPhone USB/iPhone Bluetooth/Wife’s Bluetooth. So many options. 3. Every time I start driving my car, Christmas music starts automatically playing from my iPhone through the car speakers. It’s in my music library and for some reason it auto plays (Why apple?). I always have to do some mid-driving swipeage to get this to stop. These are horrible patterns. I’d love to spend the rest of my life designing UI for simplifying the driving experience. If anyone wants to hire me, please do.
  • RankingMember 7y ago
    I'll gladly be a co-pilot on that project. I feel the same way. There's so many edge cases that can become show-stoppers (accidents) in driving interfaces.
  • jpindar 7y ago
    Count me in, too. I'm an embedded systems developer/electrical engineer with considerable automotive experience. Contorting myself under dashboards isn't as much fun as it used to be, but I'll do it if I can make a difference.
• charliesharding 7y ago
  It's been mentioned a few times but I believe haptic feedback is absolutely necessary to the future of the touch screen. How many times have you handed your phone to someone to show them and in the process both you and the person receiving accidentally made a multitude of gestures, resulting in your phone freaking out and opening all kinds of random apps/windows.. I love how the new iPhones have the "press" ability on apps to open more options. Personally I wish all interactions required a little bit more force (besides, say, scrolling). When almost half the device is responsive, it makes it all too easy to accidentally perform actions. Does anyone know where the technology is with this? I remember seeing articles a long time ago about potential for brail via haptics in screens
• g00s3_caLL_x2 7y ago
  One of the major drawbacks of touchscreens is the amount of controls that are being integrated with them. Most folks mash the screens harder than they need to, and they wear out too fast. Once the screen it kaput, half you car is useless. I can deal with rolling the windows down, but taking my tunes away...no bueno.
• CodeTheInternet 7y ago
  They introduce other problems than just distracted drivers. I took in my Mazda3 to have the screen replaced. There was an issue with the sensors that mistakenly thought someone was touching the screen. At low speeds, when the toch screen re-activates, it would start navigating on its own; from changing music stations to calling people and changing GPS waypoints. Drivers trying to stop this will be more distracted than they otherwise would be. This happens at stop signs, red lights and slow-moving traffic.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Hey! This happened on Sunday in my wife's CRV! We were going to lunch, and the touchscreen went apeshit, flipping between menus at the speed of light, beeping madly. And, as you said, she immediately began fooling with it, trying to get it to stop. I had to tell her "Let me do this! You just drive!" Its very, very distracting.
    • CodeTheInternet 7y ago
      Go to your dealer. I wasnt notified but they had a type of limited warranty where they knew about it. The sensors were not installed correctly in some units. They replaced it for free.
• josefresco 7y ago
  How is a heads up display "accessible" for people with limited vision? In the web industry, we kill ourselves to make every color combination fully ADA compliant (in the US) and this involves a limited set of combinations. Not being familiar with the auto industry regulations (does ADA even apply?), I wonder how they (heads up displays) or even touchscreens could be considered accessible. Anyone have insight into how this works? Is the user possessing an active drivers license considered enough to exempt automakers from making their controls accessible to people "with disabilities". Edit: May have found my own answers. ADA guidlines only apply to buses and other vehicles of that type: https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/transportation/vehicles/adaag-for-transportation-vehicles https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/transp... And most likely, not the operators.
  • wvenable 7y ago
    > How is a heads up display "accessible" for people with limited vision? Perhaps people with limited vision shouldn't be driving.
    • josefresco 7y ago
      Of course, and some vision disabilities do require exceptions or a special license. However, my experience with making websites accessible has taught me that ADA, and WCAG specifically apply to even people with minor vision disabilities which most likely, do not require a special license to drive. As my edit indicates, ADA only really applies to "the public" and so therefore private vehicles are probably exempt.
  • ronsor 7y ago
    >In the web industry, we kill ourselves to make every color combination fully ADA compliant (in the US) I've never found that to be true.
    • josefresco 7y ago
      What exactly? Have you ever dealt with a designer, or old websites with no concept of ADA/WCAG? Because I do, daily and it's ...difficult (to put it lightly) I don't work for Facebook, or Google, I work for small businesses, many of which are still battling to become PCI compliant, or GDPR compliant, or even getting a privacy policy posted. The pain is real.
• gavinmckenzie 7y ago
  I've owned six Mazda vehicles over the past 30 years. Current owner of a 2016 CX-9. The stock behaviour was that the touchscreen doesn't accept touches unless the vehicle is stopped -- though it doesn't require you to put the vehicle in park. Also, the vehicle has a heads-up-display projected on the windshield. The original HUD included a graphical tachometer so you could see the revs which has limited value except it looked cool and gave you some indication on when you were in boost. In a future update Mazda removed the graphical tach in the HUD citing safety as they felt the constant animating tach in the driver's field of view was a distraction. But, the tach remains displayed if you had it turned on before the update. The voice command functionality is okay, including for the mediocre built-in navigation, once you learn the specific phrases and commands. Last fall I upgraded to Apple CarPlay and the behaviour is the same. Touch input only works when the vehicle is stopped. There was a rumour that one of the reasons why CarPlay took so long to come to Mazda vehicles was because Mazda wanted integration with it's rotary command nob, back button, and other function buttons around the knob and on the steering wheel. Not sure if it's true, but I will say that navigating CarPlay with the knob is just fine when driving, and the physical back button allows me to navigate to the previous screen regardless of whether the previous screen is a CarPlay screen or one of the Mazda screens, which is really great. I know some Mazda owners were upset with these limitations, complaining that it prevented the passenger from operating the screen, but that seems like a corner case.
• totalrobe 7y ago
  Now if they would bring that HUD to some of the lower trims..
• legohead 7y ago
  My 2018 Mazda infotainment and overall "technicality" is just sad. I want to say we are in some weird middle ground where car manufacturers are trying to catch up to modern engineering, or maybe Mazda just doesn't care. 1. It has terrible bluetooth lag. I like to sit in my car at lunch and eat and watch YouTube, Netflix, etc. but I have to disconnect bluetooth because the 2-4 second lag is unbearable. I don't have this problem with my other cars. 2. The keyfob drives me insane. If I get out of the car and leave it running, keyfob in hand, I can't unlock the back doors. I have to open the driver door and do it manually. I also can't lock the car while it's running with the keyfob. I guess Mazda would rather my children have heatstroke while I go in and grab something from the store. I have the keyfob in my hand! And the car knows it. 3. The touchscreen and overall UI is slowwwww. Strangely, the rearview camera boots up and displays superfast, which is the only nice thing I can say about the car's technical features. Switching from radio to bluetooth is an annoyingly long process. The main bootup is excruciatingly long as well. If I'm 5 minutes from home I just don't bother with any sound and mute everything because I'm already on my way and driving by the time it's able to do anything. 4. They charge you to add on Android Auto. Even if I did get this option, you have to get to it thru their already-mentioned slow system, so I don't even know if I'd use it. And you have to plug in the phone. Faster and easier to just put the phone on the magnetic holder and go. I could go on but this is long enough already. I really like the car otherwise, but I'll be checking my next purchase very carefully when it comes to the technical side.
• mataug 7y ago
  The AndroidAuto / Apple carplay in newer Subarus accepts both rotary controls, and I always end up using the rotary controls as often as possible when driving. This is because the touch screen is harder to accurately press when driving, compared the rotary dials. On that note I also want to mention that Maps on Apple carplay has a terrible UI which could potentially be dangerous. To move around the map, one has to use arrow buttons on the touch screen. We can't move the map by just dragging on the map like on a cellphone. I believe this is an effort to avoid driver distraction. But people, including me, keep trying to move it anyway while driving since its so instinctive, and when the map fails to move it adds additional distraction by having the driver investigate.
• MagicPropmaker 7y ago
  It's good strategy, too. Now the other manufacturers are at a disadvantage because people can claim that the cars are "defective" by having touch screens. I think a touch screen would be OK if it didn't operate while the car was in Drive, so you can set preferences, etc, with a full keyboard. But you can also do this from a companion app or website, so there's really no need to have it at all. And I'm really glad to see HUDs come to cars. I wonder why it took so long!
• overcast 7y ago
  Good, non tactile buttons in an automobile is THE worst idea ever. I know where every single adjustment in my car is by feel alone, without the need for some dumb screen distracting me. Amazing that these screens don't have the negativity surrounding them that smart phones do.
• infecto 7y ago
  Just a thought but I wonder if this whole touch UI craze was due in part to the legislation that require backup cameras in America and forced all cars to come with a lcd screen. I get this feeling companies then just all jumped on the touch UI bandwagon because now they were forced to have a screen for the backup camera.
• stakhanov 7y ago
  Kudos to them! They just did their research and acted on it. (At least that's how it appears). That's how it should be. At many companies, the people doing that kind of research would be people who no one really listens to. They would do the research. Then PHB-type characters would enter the scene. And if research yields recommendations that would steer the company away from the safety of the herd (of automakers, in that case), then the research would be cancelled and the recommendations ignored.
• unbryan 7y ago
  Yay, I guess. Mine's touchscreen and rarely think to poke at it. Also it doesn't respond to poking if the car is moving. The console controls are terrific.
• caligarn 7y ago
  When is someone going to come up with a tactile touchscreen, with buttons that indent or protrude out of a flat touchscreen, depending on audio or tactile usage.
• crististm 7y ago
  Touch screens are so good as UI in cars they decided to put them in the next gen F1 steering wheel. Oh wait... they actually didn't! Mazda's decision is very good: Any UI where you need to detour your attention from driving to changing car status is missing the point of its existence.
• radium3d 7y ago
  I feel like I'm in the perfect position to comment on this. I drive a 2019 Tesla Model 3 and my girlfriend drives a 2018 Mazda CX-3. The display on the Model 3 is perfectly positioned so I don't have to lean forward and do not apply any torque to my steering wheel whatsoever to adjust the settings on the huge 15" capacitive touch screen. I also don't have to migrate my eyes any further from the road than I would to find a physical button on a dashboard due to the close, raised position of the Model 3's display and I can see perfectly fine out the windshield while adjusting everything on the display. The buttons are also larger with a 15" display compared to the tiny 7" display which is located very far away on the dashboard of the CX-3. The position and size of the display on the Mazda has the side effect of me rarely even attempting to use the touch features of the display, but when I do I have to lean forward which may cause me to apply slight torque to the wheel. Based on my experience, Mazda needs a larger display located closer to the driver if they want to make use of touch controls without the side effects they mention. The wheel method is horribly clunky and takes more thinking to get to the control you want to adjust. It's much faster and safer I believe being able to access the control quickly and in a position that doesn't require you to take your eyes far away from the road. You still have to look at the display and process your control movements when using the dial control on the Mazda and it takes longer. Tesla has a better UI by far. If you haven't driven a Model 3 yet, I recommend doing so before commenting against touch screen UX.
• DonaldDerek 7y ago
  ... well i hope this'll ripple to other domains. The renaissance of modular synthesizers is highly noticeable in today's music making, and especially live performances, well a car is very similar to a sonic vehicle in that sense.
• brettnak 7y ago
  I probably own the final Mazda that has a "touch screen"... If you could ever really call Mazda's touch screen a touch screen. A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison. I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying. And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow. I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.
• colek42 7y ago
  As somebody who rents cars on the regular I love having a consistent modern interface across every vehicle I use with Android Auto. To me this consistency is much safer than trying to learn a new "cockpit" with every vehicle I drive.
• doctorRetro 7y ago
  A big reason I still love my 12 year old car (a Mazda, by chance) is that it doesn't have a touch screen. I've borrowed a number of cars over the years that have touch screens and I hate them; they're distracting, they're not intuitive, and you can't use them without taking your eyes off the road. I'll say this for Mazda; they're practical.
• iotku 7y ago
  Android auto in a rental car got me through quite a bit with Google maps without needing a car mount for my phone, but again I still never really touched the screen much outside of initial setup while parked (getting location punched into the map and maybe starting some music). It's handy while parked, but I don't think I want to be fiddling much with a touch screen while driving. On the other hand, I don't see why my passenger can't be operating it while I'm driving. Still against volume and climate controls not being physical buttons or knobs because having to look at a screen while driving for more than half a second is bad news.
• filoleg 7y ago
  This whole thing honestly reminds of the pushback against touch-screen only smartphones, along with the infamous "mixing the input and output on the same surface" quote (I cannot recall the exact quote, but my bastardized version provides a pretty good gist of it). People will scream, people will kick, but it will eventually happen. sidenote: I was initially in the "bring the keyboards on smartphones back" camp as well, but given how well it all worked out 10 years later, I foresee the same happening with touchscreens in cars.
  • m52go 7y ago
    They are completely different situations. People are intently focused on their smartphones, whereas they're distracted when using car controls.
    • filoleg 7y ago
      Oh, I realize that, not trying to draw a direct analogy. Just expressing my feeling that the whole debate over touch screens in cars will end up the same way.
• jwhiz22 7y ago
  Sensible decision to take based on their research. As a Mazda3 2018 owner, I find the control knob way more enjoyable to use.
• segmondy 7y ago
  I don't know that we can praise this. I think a hybrid approach is nice. I've had a vehicle that had a hybrid approach and that was nice.
• shosko 7y ago
  I still drive a Saab with the night panel option, which turns off all distracting lights and messages at night. Of course there is no screen either. Driving should be an exercise in focus with the tools to help me do so, even in the proliferation of options (climate, entertainment, etc). The 17-inch screen in the Model S is just absurd to me. I dont want it. I dont want screens.
• dawnerd 7y ago
  I rented an Audi a4 that had Carplay but only allowed buttons to navigate. It was really frustrating. Trying to move the map around ended up being more dangerous than just swiping the damn screen.
• anderspitman 7y ago
  I'm a huge fan of physical/tactile input (and output) devices. I use foot pedals hooked up to an Arduino for my CTRL/SHIFT/META keys both at work and home, which helps my RSI enormously. I also designed a wearable bluetooth device for adding physical buttons to phones[0] for a school project. I think there's a huge potential for such products, and I'd love to get back to exploring that space at some point. If you want to get excited about this type of stuff, I highly recommend this TED talk[1]. [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJDonKZ9pliw2NMhQ-8QLw/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJD... [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_s...
• rixrax 7y ago
  What car manufacturers could|should do is focus on making Android and iPhone apps that replace these screens. Apps that would update regularly and allow controlling various functions of the car. And have analog controls and small dash etc. display to access | configure systems that are essential for driving and safety, complete with e.g. voice control. I agree from personal experience that these LCD screens in cars are distracting, and what’s worse, don’t get updates so that in just a few years UIs will feel sluggish and ugly (if not already the day it rolls out of dealership (I’m looking at you Ford)).
• Johnny555 7y ago
  The touchscreen isn't the problem, having a screen at all is the problem. I have a Mazda and hate their scroll wheel interface, with a touchscreen I can just press the "AM Radio" icon, with a scroll wheel, I need to turn the wheel then keep looking at the screen to see where the cursor is so I can click the right icon so it takes more attention -- both cognitive processing (how many clicks do I need to turn to get down to the button I want), as well as visual (is it on the right one yet?) Voice recognition is even worse, I often end up having a conversation with the car "Call George" "There is more than one George, which one do you want to call" "George Modaline" "Ok, Calling George Smith - mobile".
• evidencepi 7y ago
  Looks like a bmw!
• matthewmcg 7y ago
  My current Mazda with CarPlay enforces this already. When you are moving, the touch functionality is disabled and you must use the physical buttons (dpad / rotating wheel combination) to navigate.
• randiantech 7y ago
  Definitely makes sense for me. With physical buttons i can keep watching at the road all time. kudos.
• cloudking 7y ago
  Mercedes solves this with non-touch screens with physical controls within natural reach
• logfromblammo 7y ago
  I like a keyboard better than a touchscreen for writing text, and I like a keyboard with mechanical switches better than one with membrane switches. More expensive, yes, but the user experience is very much better. One of the primary advantages is that I can usually find the key I want without looking down at the labels. In a car, I want tactile clickiness in mechanical or electromechanical controls. I even want rocker or throw switches, instead of buttons that light up an LED to indicate their state. And that means if the state changes in software, a solenoid or motor is going to have to flip the physical state too. Touchscreens, despite having "touch" in the name, are strictly inferior for finger-based inputs. They're more "screen" than "touch".
• bitxbit 7y ago
  I remember when BMW didn’t want to put in cup holders.
• bitcuration 7y ago
  Blame Tesla. Overnight, Tesla has redefined user interface in automobile industry, all are racing to adopt Tesla's philosophy.
• twblalock 7y ago
  Mazdas still have screens. They have a knob and a few buttons between the seats to control the screen. This change doesn't do much for safety or usability. The knobs are just as distracting as using a touch screen -- you have to look at the screen to see what is being selected, and you have to take a hand off the wheel to use the knob. In many cases it takes several knob movements and button presses to get to something I could have just reached out and touched. How is that any safer?
  • kenhwang 7y ago
    Arguably, if you can't safely operate a vehicle one-handed for your other hand to use the knob, you definitely shouldn't be using a touchscreen.
    • twblalock 7y ago
      My point is that using a knob does not add safety, for exactly the reason you mentioned. It is either safe to drive one-handed at a particular moment, or it is not. Whether a knob or a touchscreen is used makes no difference -- one hand is off the wheel and your eyes are on the screen.
• officeplant 7y ago
  I wish everyone would follow suit. There is nothing I hate more in a modern vehicle than a touchscreen. Automatic headlights come close, but my hate for those is mostly from drivers that fail to turn them on when the sensors fail or aren't sensitive enough to come on. So many heavy downpours / fog in our area and I see plenty of new cars without their tail lights on and just low beam/running lights.
• LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  What i nerver got- is why you cant make a non plane touchscreen? Why not just add Knobs, Dials and Buttons - with touchscreen on them? Give the surface the option to be tactile and fall back to a default UI, that can be used blindly?
  • LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
    Or at least to allow magnetic sliding glasnobs and buttons to be attached to the screen and used.
• mensetmanusman 7y ago
  How much of this is generational? In 10 years we will have buyers that have only known touch screens as an interface. The issue is that we have to solve high-speed touch screens that behave well in vehicles that sit outside.
• lucas_membrane 7y ago
  Is the outcome of this going to be voice-activated everything (down to the cup-holders)?
• jerzyt 7y ago
  Kudos to Mazda for saying no to this insanity. Not only is it unsafe, it's a horrible user interface. I'm not able to drive and hold my outstretched arm steady enough to select an item with a finger. For next car purchase I'll definitely test drive a Mazda.
• bluishgreen 7y ago
  If you don’t have a touch screens users will still continue to fiddle but with an even tinier more dangerous phone screen.
• lowlevel 7y ago
  This brought a smile to my face. I've hated them since they first showed up. Kudo's Mazada. Kudos.
• intopieces 7y ago
  In general I am against this move. Buttons can only do one or two things, and you have to learn it. Touch screens can do infinite things, and can display unique indicators based on state. Still, if the choice is between and infotainment system that won’t get updates or a just buttons, give me a spot for my phone on the dash and call it a day.
• jaimex2 7y ago
  Interesting strategy at Mazda. No plans for electric vehicles and no more touch screens. Brilliant or insane plan I'm not sure, it might make a nice niche for them.
• 0xADADA 7y ago
  This is a PR piece promoting Mazdas new technology.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• m463 7y ago
  I've owned two mazdas and they had the best dashboards and controls compared to all my other vehicles. Meanwhile Tesla... innovative, but not very driver-centric.
• zelon88 7y ago
  Some great thoughts in this thread, most of them I already agree with. Some thoughts I haven't seen discussed..... Cars go out of style. They last a lot longer than a phone or tablet. Look at any 00's era GM product. The radio/climate buttons are straight out of a Cozy Coupe. It's gross, but in 2001 they were stylin'! Look at the 1992 Subaru Legacy, or the 1990 Ford Tempo, or the 1991 Nissan Sentra. Electric seatbelts, enormous speedometers, oddly shaped steering wheels... They were cool! Now they're eye-catchingly gaudy. Lets not even get into the "digital dash" (yeah, I'm talking to Jethro in the Pontiac). What if you could have a car with a touchscreen but it only included Android Gingerbread (2.3) and that was it? Other than that I am always amazed that modern cars have back up cameras and drive-by-wire steering/throttle/brakes but they still have a simple "check engine" light. They don't even print out their own trouble codes let alone tell you "Cylinder 5 misfire!" Such a feature would be trivial and add real value, especially in the truck market. Perhaps when right-to-repair takes over there will be no more incentive to keep the workings of cars magical and mysterious to the layman.
  • daveguy 7y ago
    They don't have a good visual display of the check engine light, but you can get a lot of information from that light, with the cross manufacturer standard ODBII/EOBD (on board diagnostics 2 / enhanced onboard diagnostics). Progress is going slow in adding features, but a $35 tool like this can give you detailed information. One of the best car related purchases I have made: https://www.amazon.com/ANCEL-AD310-Enhanced-Universal-Diagnostic/dp/B01G5EA74I/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=obd2&qid=1560828444&s=gateway&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/ANCEL-AD310-Enhanced-Universal-Diagno...
• satyenr 7y ago
  That is a really good idea. Touch controls are nearly useless on a moving vehicle. It would be a lot better if Apple/Google came up with a standard tactile interface for their in-car offerings. Don't get me wrong -- CarPlay/Android Auto are leagues ahead of what individual car makers have to offer. Having a standard system across all car makers is a good idea too. They just need to come up with a more tactile interface. The touch screen doesn't necessarily have to go, though -- it could simply be disabled when the vehicle is moving. Volkswagen, for example, have a rotary dial which lets you flip through all the items on the screen to select the one you like. It still requires the driver to glance at the screen, but at least it doesn't require them to touch the precise spot on the screen -- which IMO is more distracting. That said, even the rotary dial is not perfect as it can't be operated by touch only -- w/o taking your eyes off the road -- not unless you know the position of every single icon/control by heart.
• muzika 7y ago
  After driving a Tesla for a couple months, I now wish all cars had a UI like it does, with one large touch screen. Other manufacturer’s touch screens feel ancient by comparison. And so do tens of switches and knobs.
• santafe 7y ago
  Cool that i'm working on one right now. :S
• numlock86 7y ago
  This was actually one of the many selling points to get one of these. No regrets so far.
• suspectdoubloon 7y ago
  I think voice is a better interface for setting navigation, music selection. I used it quite often with the google assistant through android auto. Its intergrated into my steering wheel i hold the button and I tell the car what I want. Im not losing focus on the road to find the knob/touchscreen whilst I perform the interaction. It gets but clunky when I forget the order of operations but the feedback is there.
• hokus 7y ago
  There is this joke where you greet someone on the street by raising your hand to them in front of your face so that they cant see who you are.
• underdeserver 7y ago
  Thank you! Touch screens require you to look at them to use them. Physical knobs and buttons do not. You're supposed to look at the road, not at a touchscreen.
• plaidfuji 7y ago
  Lack of touchscreen won’t be the reason I buy a Mazda, but over-use of touchscreen is one of the top reasons I won’t even consider a Tesla.
• JVIDEL 7y ago
  They're right but their solution is cumbersome and counter intuitive. What we need is to put all the controls both within sign and within reach of the driver, that means in and around the steering wheel, just like it was done in sport cars where driver focus is essential.
• mwexler 7y ago
  Having recently driven two model year cars with little change other than one now has a touch screen, the screen made a world of difference. Features I normally never use were quick and easy to access. Yes apple and google car stuff were also easier, but just the entire driving experience was nicer: no knobs to twist and press or shift like a joystick, no sea of buttons with meaningless icon, fewer endless dives of menus. I see that the data may not agree with my experience but I look to have touch in every car I buy in the future. From a driver looking to leverage technology, while we get automation working, let's make it easy for the driver to get to the car's features.
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    How many features do you need? I have a 2019 Subaru Forester and if I could have gotten it without a screen I would have. Everything I need while driving is on the steering wheel (cruise control buttons, radio controls), climate is a knob and 2 buttons. Everything else I don't need while driving. The only thing a screen is good for is a backup camera. In my ideal car the screen just turns off or hides away when I'm not in reverse. Everything else is a distraction when you should just be driving.
• modzu 7y ago
  this is actually the reason i didnt get a tesla! 800 comments in this thread and maybe im not alone. hopefully things change for the better.
• WordMixer 7y ago
  They'll put them back when cars are self-driving. But for now, this is an amazing decision!
• afraideye 7y ago
  BUY HIGH QUALITY #COUNTERFEIT MONEY WhatsApp +1(909)334 2306 AND PASSPORT,ID,DL AND VISA EUROS,DOLLARS,POUNDS,AUD,CAD AND NOVELTY DOCUMENTS LIKE PASSPORTS,ID CARDS,GREEN CARDS AND DRIVERS LICENSE.AND S.S.D CHEMICALS. #Buy fake money from all countries Us dollars,canadian dollars,pounds,euros. registered and unregistered #passport of all countries.visas, #biometric passport, degrees, license drivers, I.D cards.Training certificates GCSE M, A-levels, High School Certificate Certificates, GMAT, MCAT, and LSAT Examination Certificates, Novelty Birth, Marriage, Death Certificates, #Novelty Passports and New Identity Packages, Diplomas from most post-secondary, False Degrees institutions from around the world designed to look 100% #unique to the original.Custom Printing We use high quality equipment and materials to produce authentic and #counterfeit documents.All secret features of real passports are carefully duplicated for our Registered and unregistered documents.contact us using the information below #WEBSITE http://makingfakemoney.com/ http://makingfakemoney.com/ Email.....brandonhoman00@gmail.com Whatsapp.....+1(909)334-2306 Why would you buy from us? Our #banknotes contain the following security features that make it to be genius and we have the #best grade counterfeit in the world both Euro and Dollar and any bills of your choice you want. Security features of our bank notes below : Intaglio printing #Watermarks #Security thread See-through register Special foil/special foil elements Iridescent stripe / shifting colors. WHERE CAN YOU SPEND THE MONEY ? MC DONALD'S , SHOPS , RESTAURANTS , SUPERMARKETS , PETROL SHOPS , GAME HALL , ATM, BANKS,SHOPPING MALLS , GAME AND ATTRACTION PARKS , ELECTRONIC SHOPS , TAXI , METRO AND TRAIN STATION , USED TO PAY BUS AND ANY TRANSPORTATION AND CAN BE USED FOR OTHER PERSONAL PURPOSE AND EVERYWHERE ....... Visit our WEBSITE http://makingfakemoney.com/ http://makingfakemoney.com/ #Email.....brandonhoman00@gmail.com Whatsapp.....+1(909)334-2306
• bitcuration 7y ago
  It's Tesla started this design, iphonized car industry. Screen navigation should be banned in the car no matter what type of screen it is. When driving or piloting, what's the last time you heard the display has several levels of menu/screen to move around. Just display everything, let the eyes choose where to look.
• gravy 7y ago
  Is it touchscreens that are distracting or screens in general?
• discordance 7y ago
  Tesla just emailed me about playing games on the center console, driver pictured sitting next to the screen[0]. Surely this can't be a good idea? 0: https://imgur.com/a/kUq06eI https://imgur.com/a/kUq06eI
• BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  I would love to have one single, continuous touch screen instead of what the car is providing me. I only care about the speed and fuel level. And a big STOP when something is wrong.and style feedback on things Iwill have to change soon. Then radio and possibly two buttons. All of this automatically provided when it is me who "logs in". But I get some weird philosophical view of some designer go though I am interested in the engine rate (I do not even know the name of this rpm big dial), the oil temperature and whatnot.