5 ms·

Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the selle

by TheGRS 7y ago

Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.

smackay 7y ago
There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.
- JangoSteve 7y ago
  None of this is untrue with touchscreens. They also have wires and connectors and must be certified.
  - ThePirateofOz 7y ago
    And every single application loaded and installed, software library, SDK and license has to be rolled up into the BOM for every headunit sold/installed.
    - laughinghan 7y ago
      It seems obvious to me that one team of software engineers doing testing and diagnostics on a piece of software is way cheaper than training and then paying entire factories to do testing and diagnostics on each button and knob. (Not to mention we're talking about like, volume controls. Not exactly the most complicated and expensive kind of software to engineer.)
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Not to mention if you screw up the software an update is generally cheap and easy. If your button is messed up you have to pay for a mechanic to tear apart the entire dash. Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons... For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
  - laughinghan 7y ago
    They have 2. One for power and one for data. Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
    - JangoSteve 7y ago
      > They have 2. One for power and one for data. I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input. Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscreen-breakout/resistive-touchscreen https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscree... > Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs. Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced. I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible. The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash. Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure. I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
    - metaphor 7y ago
      Do tell us all about the huge labor savings Tesla is running away with[1]. It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows-why-automotive-grade-matters https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
- dublin 7y ago
  No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.
giobox 7y ago
I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production. Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.
jwr 7y ago
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction. Consider that for every item you need to: * secure supply for the next 10 years or so * organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain * design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it * design and implement testing procedures * design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed * maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years * deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems * also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times. Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software. But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
- elihu 7y ago
  > Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software. I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
  - dublin 7y ago
    That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.
    - patrick5415 7y ago
      I’m with you. Im not that old but new cars really have no appeal to me. Will be interesting to see how it goes hanging onto a 2010 for 50 years
pugworthy 7y ago
They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive. It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.
jammi 7y ago
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.
hnick 7y ago
It's not just the up front cost. They can roll out updates and patches to change the functionality too. Maybe throw in some cheeky DLC to unlock certain features too ;)

by TheGRS 7y ago

smackay 7y ago

There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.

JangoSteve 7y ago
None of this is untrue with touchscreens. They also have wires and connectors and must be certified.
- ThePirateofOz 7y ago
  And every single application loaded and installed, software library, SDK and license has to be rolled up into the BOM for every headunit sold/installed.
  - laughinghan 7y ago
    It seems obvious to me that one team of software engineers doing testing and diagnostics on a piece of software is way cheaper than training and then paying entire factories to do testing and diagnostics on each button and knob. (Not to mention we're talking about like, volume controls. Not exactly the most complicated and expensive kind of software to engineer.)
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Not to mention if you screw up the software an update is generally cheap and easy. If your button is messed up you have to pay for a mechanic to tear apart the entire dash. Of course you need to get the touch screen reliable. A touch screen is more complex than a button, but if we call it the cost of 10 buttons, a touch screen replaces more than 10 buttons... For common functions separate buttons are better for UX. However the touch screen is cheaper.
- laughinghan 7y ago
  They have 2. One for power and one for data. Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs.
  - JangoSteve 7y ago
    > They have 2. One for power and one for data. I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input. Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscreen-breakout/resistive-touchscreen https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-4-color-tft-touchscree... > Usually they're replacing a lot more than 2 buttons/knobs. Not usually. Other than the Tesla, most cars retain almost all of their knobs/buttons in addition to the touch screen. In fact, the linked article in the OP says they're basically replacing the touch screen input with a single volume knob that lets you additional tilt and push it. Other cars, like BMW with the iDrive, usually have a single knob that lets you rotate and scroll through menus and push to select. Granted, it's not a simple knob, since it requires multiple degrees of input, but even a plastic knob that allows rotating, tilting, and pushing is probably cheaper than a touch screen when shared across models and mass produced. I still think the bigger savings is probably the software updates required to constantly support and make your vehicle's physical input compatible with every new update of Android Auto and Apple Car Play, which the auto-makers have no control over and can only ever play catch-up. At least with a touch screen, they know that's where the Android and Apple engineers spend their own time making compatible. The other place it probably saves is designing and laying out the interior, since it's easier to design an interior with fewer purpose-focused inputs. I'm not sure though if the touch screen would actually be easier though, since it can't be broken up across different small areas, and the entire thing has to be within both reach and active field of view. Especially the screens on top of the dash, since those often are designed to retract, which means the space they retract into needs to be designed around the HVAC and electrical systems between the firewall and dash. Either way, both of these savings though would be on the design and engineering side, not the bill of materials.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure. I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.
  - metaphor 7y ago
    Do tell us all about the huge labor savings Tesla is running away with[1]. It blows my mind away how you can even begin to compare the predicted reliability of a complex touchscreen interface stuffed with active electronics to dumb buttons and wires with a straight face, let alone what fielded production units only a few years in have clearly demonstrated. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows-why-automotive-grade-matters https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
dublin 7y ago
No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.

giobox 7y ago

I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production. Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.

jwr 7y ago

> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction. Consider that for every item you need to: * secure supply for the next 10 years or so * organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain * design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it * design and implement testing procedures * design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed * maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years * deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems * also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times. Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software. But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.

elihu 7y ago
> Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software. I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.
- dublin 7y ago
  That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.
  - patrick5415 7y ago
    I’m with you. Im not that old but new cars really have no appeal to me. Will be interesting to see how it goes hanging onto a 2010 for 50 years

pugworthy 7y ago

They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive. It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.

jammi 7y ago

> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? Yeah, the molding for any typical single component is tens of thousands of dollars per iteration. A car has a lot of those components, so the fewer the better.

hnick 7y ago

It's not just the up front cost. They can roll out updates and patches to change the functionality too. Maybe throw in some cheeky DLC to unlock certain features too ;)