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> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new

> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) - find where is a navi (by turning the wheel and pressing it, still looking at the screen) - choose, again with the wheel, to start typing your destination - and what most: again with wheel (turning it and pressing) type the address simultaneously looking on an onscreen keyboard. All that while not looking on the road and holding your steering wheel with one hand and another on navigation wheel on central canal. How come this is safer by tapping on the screen?!

jacquesm 7y ago
The proper way to do this is by voice input.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It can be done properly. The BMW Mini has a pretty good voice input for the navigation, it relies on spelling out the names of cities and streets, there is a button based back-up but I find that the voice recognition works more than well enough for almost all destinations. Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
  - littleboi1998 7y ago
    Just because the technology sucks right now does not mean it's a bad idea. I can EASILY see voice commands in cars being commonplace and far superior to anything that exists right now.
    - dsego 7y ago
      So why not wait until it works instead of pretending? They sell it as if it is perfect right now, the future has come, except it's not.
  - diggan 7y ago
    Guess you could call me trilingual (swedish, english and spanish) and I'm having no issues with Android Auto understanding destinations even when my spanish/english is broken as hell, with music playing in the background or engine noises coming from outside. Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      I just drove 14 hours this weekend and I can confirm the voice controls are almost entirely useless. If you’re lucky it interprets you correctly and you have a menu to sift through on a screen to pick the right option. If you’re unlucky it just does something without any confirmation. The only success I’ve really had is “direct me to <large city here>” and “direct me home”. All other efforts lead me to swear and pull over. Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
- Manfred 7y ago
  Which doesn’t really work when you have screaming children (or adults) in the car.
- m_mueller 7y ago
  Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Pronunciation of the names is the problem, spelling them should resolve that issue completely.
    - m_mueller 7y ago
      do these systems automatically pick up if I spell rather than pronounce, or do they need a special mode? I've never tried that...
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        I never tried the pronunciation, I'll give it a shot and see what it does. At a guess the results will be terrible :)
lobotryas 7y ago
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish. As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.
  - theon144 7y ago
    >it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me. Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
  - snaky 7y ago
    There were green-and-black text UIs that allowed receptionist at hotel check you in blazingly fast, keeping an eye contact with you. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Yup. These are a source of a frequent disagreement between myself and some UI/UX folks. I believe interfaces like these were/are superior to modern ones, precisely because they allow one to work efficiently.
akadruid1 7y ago
Most touchscreen varients are actually worse than this, and it's nessecary for their displays to be within arm's reach, increasing refocus time too. I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.
vbsteven 7y ago
Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location. The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
- bgarbiak 7y ago
  Mazda has shortcut buttons as well. See: third image in the article. Their UI is very similar to BMW.
zelos 7y ago
Doing that with a touchscreen or physical controls while driving would be illegal in most jurisdictions, no?
ehnto 7y ago
You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces. There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical. It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s
  - inertiatic 7y ago
    Or, you know, stop to re-adjust your course without endangering everyone sharing the road with you. Your sarcasm looks a lot less smart once you examine the actual options.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Set your destination before you set off? Or if you really need to do it after that point just pull over to the side of the road for a minute.
  - rland 7y ago
    Pull over to adjust the map. Does anyone really believe that adjusting GPS while in a moving vehicle is safe?
    - _carl_jung 7y ago
      This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS? I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.
odshoifsdhfs 7y ago
Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy. I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.
- bgarbiak 7y ago
  No, they didn't change it. Buttons are slightly re-arranged, but they're still there. See the 3rd pic in the article.
TheGrumpyBrit 7y ago
Maybe, the point is not to make it easy. Maybe the point is to make you think "Hey, there's no safe way for me to navigate through 10 different screens to get to my GPS while I'm driving. Maybe I should pull over and do that instead?"
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
To be fair, navigating with carplay is also highly distracting because the voice controls are so basic and it forces you to pull over and deal with one of the two touchscreens to deal with route changes, adding a stop, evaluating express lanes, dismissing modals, looking at upcoming directions, etc etc. Navigation is highly distracting period.
neogodless 7y ago
If you want GPS navigation, you press the "road" button: https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_l.jpg https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_... You don't even need to look down to do it, because after 10 minutes of driving in your car, you've memorized the buttons.
sangnoir 7y ago
> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose. Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.
- 8note 7y ago
  I don't think that solves the issue. whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    Reading the article is always strongly recommended. The research conclusions are in there.

jacquesm 7y ago

The proper way to do this is by voice input.

gambiting 7y ago
Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It can be done properly. The BMW Mini has a pretty good voice input for the navigation, it relies on spelling out the names of cities and streets, there is a button based back-up but I find that the voice recognition works more than well enough for almost all destinations. Voice output that spells is silly (as is Google's navigation, which overwhelms you with information you do not need).
- littleboi1998 7y ago
  Just because the technology sucks right now does not mean it's a bad idea. I can EASILY see voice commands in cars being commonplace and far superior to anything that exists right now.
  - dsego 7y ago
    So why not wait until it works instead of pretending? They sell it as if it is perfect right now, the future has come, except it's not.
- diggan 7y ago
  Guess you could call me trilingual (swedish, english and spanish) and I'm having no issues with Android Auto understanding destinations even when my spanish/english is broken as hell, with music playing in the background or engine noises coming from outside. Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    I just drove 14 hours this weekend and I can confirm the voice controls are almost entirely useless. If you’re lucky it interprets you correctly and you have a menu to sift through on a screen to pick the right option. If you’re unlucky it just does something without any confirmation. The only success I’ve really had is “direct me to <large city here>” and “direct me home”. All other efforts lead me to swear and pull over. Granted, I was a child map reader and navigator for my parents, this isn’t easy for humans either.
Manfred 7y ago
Which doesn’t really work when you have screaming children (or adults) in the car.
m_mueller 7y ago
Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Pronunciation of the names is the problem, spelling them should resolve that issue completely.
  - m_mueller 7y ago
    do these systems automatically pick up if I spell rather than pronounce, or do they need a special mode? I've never tried that...
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      I never tried the pronunciation, I'll give it a shot and see what it does. At a guess the results will be terrible :)

lobotryas 7y ago

Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish. As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.
- theon144 7y ago
  >it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Wow, well put! This is definitely something that we lost with the current gen of interfaces, and this articulation didn't occur to me. Losing keypresses or clicks/touches at random, unpredictable freezes and/or delays on interactions, all this contributes to a general sense of unreliability and not being able to infer the state of the device. Consistency is actually a much more important metric than just plain latency.
- snaky 7y ago
  There were green-and-black text UIs that allowed receptionist at hotel check you in blazingly fast, keeping an eye contact with you. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yup. These are a source of a frequent disagreement between myself and some UI/UX folks. I believe interfaces like these were/are superior to modern ones, precisely because they allow one to work efficiently.

akadruid1 7y ago

Most touchscreen varients are actually worse than this, and it's nessecary for their displays to be within arm's reach, increasing refocus time too. I think this just proves there are no safe manual interfaces for setting a navigation destination. Drivers should use a voice interface or stop the vehicle in a safe location.

vbsteven 7y ago

Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location. The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.

bgarbiak 7y ago
Mazda has shortcut buttons as well. See: third image in the article. Their UI is very similar to BMW.

zelos 7y ago

Doing that with a touchscreen or physical controls while driving would be illegal in most jurisdictions, no?

ehnto 7y ago

You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces. There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no screens. It's the only reason I would never get a Tesla. If it's mission critical it needs to be physical. It's different in a plane, because you can safely take your eyes off the sky. In fact flying by instruments only is routinely the only choice; night time, weather. So a glass cockpit/touch screen controls make sense there. But even then the key controls are still physical.

kkarakk 7y ago
Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s
- inertiatic 7y ago
  Or, you know, stop to re-adjust your course without endangering everyone sharing the road with you. Your sarcasm looks a lot less smart once you examine the actual options.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Set your destination before you set off? Or if you really need to do it after that point just pull over to the side of the road for a minute.
- rland 7y ago
  Pull over to adjust the map. Does anyone really believe that adjusting GPS while in a moving vehicle is safe?
  - _carl_jung 7y ago
    This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS? I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.

odshoifsdhfs 7y ago

Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy. I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.

bgarbiak 7y ago
No, they didn't change it. Buttons are slightly re-arranged, but they're still there. See the 3rd pic in the article.

TheGrumpyBrit 7y ago

Maybe, the point is not to make it easy. Maybe the point is to make you think "Hey, there's no safe way for me to navigate through 10 different screens to get to my GPS while I'm driving. Maybe I should pull over and do that instead?"

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

To be fair, navigating with carplay is also highly distracting because the voice controls are so basic and it forces you to pull over and deal with one of the two touchscreens to deal with route changes, adding a stop, evaluating express lanes, dismissing modals, looking at upcoming directions, etc etc. Navigation is highly distracting period.

neogodless 7y ago

If you want GPS navigation, you press the "road" button: https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_l.jpg https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_... You don't even need to look down to do it, because after 10 minutes of driving in your car, you've memorized the buttons.

sangnoir 7y ago

> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose. Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.

8note 7y ago
I don't think that solves the issue. whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Reading the article is always strongly recommended. The research conclusions are in there.