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>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. Before phone integration, I might've agreed with

>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject. After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay. >It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car. Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. In the meantime, Apple and Google (?) have done it for them, at least as far as the phone goes. (I assume the Android equivalent is equally good; no reason it shouldn't be.) >This to me is insane reasoning. That is no way user centric. I think it really IS, though. CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. But the phone interface is distinct from that, and needs to be a touchscreen. When it's not, or when it's not present, people just pick up their phones and use them, which is worse.

fatnoah 7y ago
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.
- xx_alpha_xx 7y ago
  But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
  - fatnoah 7y ago
    Good point. That made me realize my preference is a bit more nuanced. For anything where navigating menus or anything displayed on a screen is required, I'm all for touchscreens. For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.
alistairSH 7y ago
I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me. All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).
- mstade 7y ago
  This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find. At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    I usually rent cars It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
- ConceptJunkie 7y ago
  If you want choice and flexibility, don't live in a walled garden.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    But it's such a well-manicured, aromatic walled garden!
joking 7y ago
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. >At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone. Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.
- basch 7y ago
  Acura is introducing a touchpad, with absolute, not relative, cursor positioning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8 It reminds me of the PSP/PSV having a touchpad on the back of the screen.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    They have physical controls for climate control and opted for nondescript buttons instead of knobs. Truly brilliant...
  - dman 7y ago
    This really saddens me. My 2010 Acura has controls that I really like, almost everything is a physical button/knob that I can hit without taking my eyes off the road.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Android Auto actually works quite well with Audi's jog wheel thing. The 2018 Q5 I rented last year had no touch screen, just this knob. Worked totally fine and required no touching a screen.
- ihuman 7y ago
  > those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs Is this a joke? I find navigating my TV's menus with a remote to be the most infuriating part of using a TV.
CrazyStat 7y ago
>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. My Tesla allows me to adjust the AC without looking, using the scroll wheels built into the steering wheel.
- BanazirGalbasi 7y ago
  Not sure if you're trying to support his point or refute it, but those scroll wheels are a great example of physical controls done right.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    I'm not sure it cleanly falls on either category. I agree with him that an all-touchscreen UI would be terrible, but I am correcting the misconception that Tesla has an all-touchscreen UI, because it doesn't. I also agree that those scroll wheels are great.
  - amluto 7y ago
    The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode. My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    On the flip side, the Nissan Leaf with premium audio is an example of physical controls done wrong. Everything is buttons with no tactile way to home your hand, you have to take your eyes off the road to fine the right button. My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.
Devon64327 7y ago
I use Android Auto in my car, and the only complaint I have thus far is the occasional misinterpreted input. Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces. Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.
mstade 7y ago
I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them? Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface. Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
  - mstade 7y ago
    > Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them? I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find. Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain. If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
  - jsight 7y ago
    I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface, but almost everything about the nav system on Android Auto is better than the builtin one. AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.
navigatesol 7y ago
>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software. >Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  >What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software. Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk. First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy. Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone." I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.
ken 7y ago
> CarPlay is amazingly good As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ..."). I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase. Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want" Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
  - tjoff 7y ago
    The solution is to not buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack.
    - alex_anglin 7y ago
      With the 3.5mm jack, you need to handle your phone for the uses the parent mentioned. This is much more dangerous than using phone integration in the vehicle and illegal in many jurisdictions.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Tiny bluetooth to aux adapters cost $10–20 on Amazon and work amazingly well. Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.
natch 7y ago
>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.
- Fins 7y ago
  And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?
  - natch 7y ago
    Try to help make a better one I suppose, if that’s really what you think. But not from a position of ignorance.
    - Fins 7y ago
      It is interesting that Tesla fans can't even imagine for a moment that someone might have actually tried it and did not like it... In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.
fossuser 7y ago
The Tesla touchscreen interface is really good, partly I think because Tesla is just as much a software company as they are a car company. The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back. The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  > It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones. Is there something wrong with that? The BlackBerry form factor is the best one, in my opinion. This reply was written from one.
  - xedeon 7y ago
    What you're alluding to here is personal preference. If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today. One of Steve Jobs's famous argument on this is that you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
    - slfnflctd 7y ago
      [most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases]
      - xedeon 7y ago
        > [most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases] I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect. Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      > What you're alluding to here is personal preference. I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion. > If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today. People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else. > you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones. My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense. And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.
xedeon 7y ago
> I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.
- epistasis 7y ago
  > You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. I'm doing web searches for this right now and not finding anything, either for Model 3 or Model S, or just Tesla in general. Where do they hide this information?
  - cevn 7y ago
    I have a model 3 and I'd like to know myself. AFAIK it's not possible..
    - xedeon 7y ago
      I know the S/X have the functionality. I haven't been in a Model 3 so I can't say for sure.
  - xedeon 7y ago
    The user manual would be a start. It's built-in on the interface and you can even search for keywords.
- steelframe 7y ago
  > You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
Fins 7y ago
CarPlay might be good, never tried it, but Android Auto isn't all that impressive, whether there is touch screen or not. I did not find it any more impressive with a touchscreen, though. But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.
Gibbon1 7y ago
> phone phone phone phone phone phone Either you should be driving or on your phone not both.
_wk3u 7y ago
> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony. When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync. I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.
rconti 7y ago
I bought a 2016 Golf with CarPlay and only used it about twice. I hated how it was locked into only the functions it supported, didn't let me use the in-car nav or other functions while it took over my screen, and it also took over my phone.
- ubermonkey 7y ago
  If you thought CarPlay was going to let you control aspects of your car, not aspects of your phone, then you misunderstood it entirely. It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
  - rconti 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you thought I thought. I was absolutely not expecting CarPlay itself to let me "control aspects of my car". I don't even know what this means. Here are the problems: * When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display. * It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps. * Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.

fatnoah 7y ago

>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. I have this. I never use it. Instead, I mount my phone next to the screen and use Android Auto on my phone. Using the rotary dial and other buttons is a) far more difficult and b) far more distracting while driving. An action that takes 1 second with a touch requires several seconds of fumbling with a knob and buttons w/out touch.

xx_alpha_xx 7y ago
But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
- fatnoah 7y ago
  Good point. That made me realize my preference is a bit more nuanced. For anything where navigating menus or anything displayed on a screen is required, I'm all for touchscreens. For other things, like volume adjustments, climate control, seat position, etc. I agree that physical controls that can be operated w/out visual interaction are best.

alistairSH 7y ago

I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me. All that said, I try to use voice control whenever possible. But, that's not yet a complete solution, as Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).

mstade 7y ago
This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find. At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  I usually rent cars It always make my day when a rental car has CarPlay. And a little sad when it doesn't. Mostly because cheap rentals rarely have their own sat-nav installed and being able to use the phone on an integrated screen/audio system is really nice.
ConceptJunkie 7y ago
If you want choice and flexibility, don't live in a walled garden.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  But it's such a well-manicured, aromatic walled garden!

joking 7y ago

>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. >At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs, and a car system is more similar to that than to a phone. Actually the system works well, and it's designed for that, And as the test confirm, using the touchscreen while driving is dangerous. The same that you can't use a video app while driving, the touchscreen should be disables while the car is moving.

basch 7y ago
Acura is introducing a touchpad, with absolute, not relative, cursor positioning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8 It reminds me of the PSP/PSV having a touchpad on the back of the screen.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  They have physical controls for climate control and opted for nondescript buttons instead of knobs. Truly brilliant...
- dman 7y ago
  This really saddens me. My 2010 Acura has controls that I really like, almost everything is a physical button/knob that I can hit without taking my eyes off the road.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Android Auto actually works quite well with Audi's jog wheel thing. The 2018 Q5 I rented last year had no touch screen, just this knob. Worked totally fine and required no touching a screen.
ihuman 7y ago
> those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs Is this a joke? I find navigating my TV's menus with a remote to be the most infuriating part of using a TV.

CrazyStat 7y ago

>Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. My Tesla allows me to adjust the AC without looking, using the scroll wheels built into the steering wheel.

BanazirGalbasi 7y ago
Not sure if you're trying to support his point or refute it, but those scroll wheels are a great example of physical controls done right.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  I'm not sure it cleanly falls on either category. I agree with him that an all-touchscreen UI would be terrible, but I am correcting the misconception that Tesla has an all-touchscreen UI, because it doesn't. I also agree that those scroll wheels are great.
- amluto 7y ago
  The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode. My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  On the flip side, the Nissan Leaf with premium audio is an example of physical controls done wrong. Everything is buttons with no tactile way to home your hand, you have to take your eyes off the road to fine the right button. My old Honda had 3 knobs on the console with the center one being larger. There was no ambiguity when you blindly groped for controls.

Devon64327 7y ago

I use Android Auto in my car, and the only complaint I have thus far is the occasional misinterpreted input. Often, what I intend to be a tap will be interpreted as a swipe by the display. I suspect this can be attributed more to the cheap touchscreen hardware in my low trim model, than the software in Android or to the concept of touch screen interfaces. Just as with the older analog controls, there will be good implementations and cheap implementations. It's not productive to compare well engineered, premium, apples to cheap, mass market, oranges.

mstade 7y ago

I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.

navigatesol 7y ago
>CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them? Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface. Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the various interfaces in new cars I purchase every few years.
- mstade 7y ago
  > Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them? I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find. Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain. If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.
- jsight 7y ago
  I own a car with Android Auto and I use it all of the time. The biggest benefit is the voice interface, but almost everything about the nav system on Android Auto is better than the builtin one. AFAIK, one of the main feature requests for Tesla is to add Android Auto. Its one of those things that is annoying to go without, once you've had it available for a while.

navigatesol 7y ago

>I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software. >Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking It's not merely that we are used to it, it's the entire purpose of the tactile interface: allowing you to adjust things while keeping your eyes on the road.

ubermonkey 7y ago
>What, exactly, are you doing with your infotainment system that requires so much use? I mean, I agree, CarPlay and Android Auto are nice, but I'm only playing music and using the navigation, both of which can be done easily without the fancy software. Wow, that's an impressive knee-jerk. First, you cast aspersions on the speaker by suggesting they're somehow using the feature too much if they care about interface efficacy. Then you insist that key functions are done just as easily the old way, by which I presume you mean "by looking at the phone." I'm not sure what your point is, but you're doing an admirable job at hollering at that cloud.

ken 7y ago

> CarPlay is amazingly good As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ..."). I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" implementation at this point. If that's as good as we can do, I'd say we're still in the "research project" phase. Nobody riding in my (ancient) car has ever had trouble finding the big red/blue knob to change the temperature, or understanding "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want". This is a solved problem.

inetknght 7y ago
> "Here's my 2006 iPod if you want music, or unplug it and plug in your phone if you want" Well, your 2006 iPod still uses a 3.5mm analog port. But that newfangled phone over there needs a new $400 Apple USB Thunderlightning Wireless Port. And your car doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
- tjoff 7y ago
  The solution is to not buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack.
  - alex_anglin 7y ago
    With the 3.5mm jack, you need to handle your phone for the uses the parent mentioned. This is much more dangerous than using phone integration in the vehicle and illegal in many jurisdictions.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Tiny bluetooth to aux adapters cost $10–20 on Amazon and work amazingly well. Just get one that has a constant power source (no battery), and try to plug it in to a switched power outlet so it disconnects when you shut the car off.

natch 7y ago

>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.

Fins 7y ago
And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?
- natch 7y ago
  Try to help make a better one I suppose, if that’s really what you think. But not from a position of ignorance.
  - Fins 7y ago
    It is interesting that Tesla fans can't even imagine for a moment that someone might have actually tried it and did not like it... In this case, though, this has been basically a solved problem for the past 50 years, if not longer. Yeah, there might be an argument whether a radial switch or a touchpad with gesture recognition is better, and you can play with positioning, but you don't just go to an objectively inferior touchscreen system and then try to make it slightly better.

fossuser 7y ago

The Tesla touchscreen interface is really good, partly I think because Tesla is just as much a software company as they are a car company. The other car manufacturers UIs are atrocious and their historical unwillingness to use car play has set them back. The tactile thing is one of those arguments that sounds good, but is just wrong. It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones.

frosted-flakes 7y ago
> It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones. Is there something wrong with that? The BlackBerry form factor is the best one, in my opinion. This reply was written from one.
- xedeon 7y ago
  What you're alluding to here is personal preference. If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today. One of Steve Jobs's famous argument on this is that you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.
  - slfnflctd 7y ago
    [most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases]
    - xedeon 7y ago
      > [most popular] != [best]|[fits all use cases] I know you're trying to be snarky, but there is no product that "fits all use cases" because this implies that it's perfect. Therefore, your pseudo code statement is inherently flawed. A perfect product or service simply does NOT exist. If it does, feel free to prove me wrong otherwise.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    > What you're alluding to here is personal preference. I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion. > If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today. People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else. > you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones. My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense. And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.

xedeon 7y ago

> I do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. In fact, you can this for most of the common controls. The settings on the touch screen are mostly for things that you only really bother with once like saving your seat-position and personal settings to your driver profile.

epistasis 7y ago
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. I'm doing web searches for this right now and not finding anything, either for Model 3 or Model S, or just Tesla in general. Where do they hide this information?
- cevn 7y ago
  I have a model 3 and I'd like to know myself. AFAIK it's not possible..
  - xedeon 7y ago
    I know the S/X have the functionality. I haven't been in a Model 3 so I can't say for sure.
- xedeon 7y ago
  The user manual would be a start. It's built-in on the interface and you can even search for keywords.
steelframe 7y ago
> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive. I've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.

Fins 7y ago

CarPlay might be good, never tried it, but Android Auto isn't all that impressive, whether there is touch screen or not. I did not find it any more impressive with a touchscreen, though. But I think the bigger problem is that even if touchscreen were a better way of integrating with a phone, it's still a completely wrong way of interacting with anything in a moving vehicle. At least with Audi's classic MMI I could control almost everything without looking at buttons or screen (well, can't quite input addresses that way, but you shouldn't do it while driving anyway). Even apart from all the privacy-sucking implications of at least Android Auto, running infotainment through the phone with touchscreen interface sounds like a terrible idea.

Gibbon1 7y ago

> phone phone phone phone phone phone Either you should be driving or on your phone not both.

_wk3u 7y ago

> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it. I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony. When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync. I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.

rconti 7y ago

I bought a 2016 Golf with CarPlay and only used it about twice. I hated how it was locked into only the functions it supported, didn't let me use the in-car nav or other functions while it took over my screen, and it also took over my phone.

ubermonkey 7y ago
If you thought CarPlay was going to let you control aspects of your car, not aspects of your phone, then you misunderstood it entirely. It also doesn't "take over" your phone. You can use your phone normally while it's plugged into CarPlay; I think the only difference is that phone calls will be done through the car's audio system.
- rconti 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you thought I thought. I was absolutely not expecting CarPlay itself to let me "control aspects of my car". I don't even know what this means. Here are the problems: * When my phone is plugged into CarPlay, it completely takes over the entire head unit/nav system/screen of the car. I cannot easily swap in and out between CarPlay and the various control systems on my center screen -- Nav, car settings, etc. I'm STUCK IN CARPLAY. I cannot have the directions from the nav system show up in the MID display between the gauges, either, even though that's a separate display. * It took over my phone. I was unable to do anything using my phone. Perhaps that has changed, but this is the way it was in 2016 which was 2nd gen of CarPlay, where they started adding more apps. * Phone calls done through my car's audio system -- correct. However, this was also the case over bluetooth. That was the main problem with carplay. Bluetooth already solved most of the problems CarPlay purported to solve -- I had phone calls, streaming spotify, etc. The only thing I didn't have without CarPlay was a simplified Spotify (or whatever app) UI on my in-dash screen, hiding everything else I might want to do on said screen.