10 ms·

Do you have a source about the said "consensus"? It sounds more like resistance to change than an actual rationale. You have always had the need to look at the

by goshx 6y ago

Do you have a source about the said "consensus"? It sounds more like resistance to change than an actual rationale. You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. From my experience, the majority of people who drive a car with touch interfaces don't want to look back to old fashioned buttons.

mlyle 6y ago
> From my experience, the majority of people who drive a car with touch interfaces don't want to look back to old fashioned buttons. Many automakers that had touch-heavy interfaces are moving back towards physical controls, both because of market demand and evolving industry safety considerations. e.g. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-touchscreen-contro-1842564375 https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-to... https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/17/ford-myford-touch-infotainment-sync/2432489/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/17/ford-my... I have no problem with touch controls in general, but replacing a volume knob I can find blindly with a relatively small pair of "Vol+" and "Vol-" touch targets is mildly infuriating. It's OK as the driver because there is an actual tactile control on the steering wheel, but downright unpleasant as a passenger.
- goshx 6y ago
  One of the issues with those automakers is that their interfaces are in general unresponsive and slow. The one in my BMW sucked. The Jaguar I-PACE is very slow as well. Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Your comment has nothing to do with what I stated. As I mentioned already, I do have a tactile steering wheel control for volume. But even the experience for a passenger adjusting volume sucks compared to a knob. And my touch screen, in general, is snappy enough.
    - goshx 6y ago
      I disagree that it "has nothing to do with what [you] stated", as the user experience also influences demand, and I still think Tesla got it right with the touch screen available for passengers to change the volume and the tactile steering wheel control. Do you drive a Tesla?
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        Yeah, I was a touchscreen skeptic until I got my model 3: all the controls I care about while driving have physical controls on the steering wheel and, if I absolutely need to fiddle with the touchscreen, I can enable autopilot, which is safe enough compared to distracted driving.
        anewdirection 6y ago
        I would argue activating autopilot while distracted is not only counter to teslas instruction, but criminally negligent. Please either drive, or take an uber, for the rest of us.
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        So, when the road is well-marked and I’m adjusting the AC, you’d rather have nothing keeping my car in the lane? My hands are on the steering wheel, and I’m paying attention to the road, I just know that I’m going to be spending some amount of time looking at a screen to change a setting. This isn’t “I’m tweeting and using social media and thwarting the attention sensors“ it’s “I know my attention is going to be divided between maintaining my lane and adjusting the temperature/picking a new station so I’m going to take steps to avoid drifting out of my lane into other cars”
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        “Autopilot” here is basically adaptive cruise control + lane assist, which are both technologies available from nearly every manufacturer at this point. I’m not talking about the beta Full Self Driving features.
  - throwaway4220 6y ago
    My 2006 honda civic navigation had a good mix of touch and physical buttons, that is almost no-look. What I find funny though is that since it's a resistive touch and has a beep for every button (after a lag of course), i get "haptic feedback"
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    > One of the issues with those automakers is that their interfaces are in general unresponsive and slow. The one in my BMW sucked. The Jaguar I-PACE is very slow as well. > Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control. Perhaps there's an auto manufacturer or two that got it right. However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. When I used to shop for cars in those days, I never had to consider if those buttons were compatible with me. Now when I buy for a newer car, it's an added headache to consider, and one that I've not seen add any real value. Going on a test drive really will not tell me enough about whether the interface is good. And worst of all, whether it is or isn't affects my safety.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      >Perhaps there's an auto manufacturer or two that got it right. However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. You gotta give it some time, because modern physical control interfaces in cars had over half a decade to evolve to reach this point. With regard to touchscreen interfaces in cars, it simply feels like those are still stuck somewhere in the pre-iPhone era of touchscreen interfaces for phones in terms of usability compared to physical controls.
    - spopejoy 6y ago
      > However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. I sure have, the climate control in 2001 VW GTIs is a fiddly mess of small buttons with feedback from a tiny screen almost as low as the gearstick. It's the "high end" system but the lower-end knobs are so much better and safer.
- cityofdelusion 6y ago
  It is fascinating just how poorly modern touch interfaces do compared to older vehicles. As an example, with older cars with vacuum controlled HVAC, the sliders and such were very, very "notchy" and you could change all the settings without taking an eye off the road. In the 80s/90s the buttons change to electrical instead of mechanical and you start needing to glance, due to the lack of haptic feedback. Fast forward to the modern era, and you generally have no way to control anything (other than the volume) without a full look at the touch screen, plus a longer look to make sure your finger hits the touch target. I will admit that the touch screen in my new VW is fashionable and I love all the data screens -- but I have had near-misses due to having to stare at the screen to do stuff like hit touch targets for changing my spotify playlist. It has nothing to do with responsiveness either -- the screen has no perceptible lag, its all to do with lack of haptics / feel. edit: I drive both an early 90s truck and a late 2010s car. I don't miss the touch screen when I drive the truck, I only miss Spotify / Google Maps.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I can't figure out how to turn the HVAC system on in a newish car. My old one has a slider labeled "Heat" and "Defrost". Never had problems with that.
- moduspol 6y ago
  Those automakers did not have competitive touch interfaces. And there's still room on the steering wheel for knobs for the most common controls, and voice control is often available.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I strongly dislike voice control. Speech is a high-latency, low-bandwidth, error-prone medium. A button is a button. One bit, clear unambiguous. Tactile controls can become so thoroughly integrated in muscle memory that well-designed tools and machines (including cars) feel like an extension of thought. Think "volume up", it just happens automatically from thought to fingers to buttons. Compare that to a multi-word speech command that requires perfect diction and phrasing over a span of five seconds. That's five seconds of distraction, longer if the command has to be repeated, vs milliseconds for the button.
    - moduspol 6y ago
      I agree, and the voice control implementations I've seen leave a lot to be desired. But they do work without taking your eyes off the road, or hands off the steering wheel. I think the most common commands can all be mapped to buttons on the steering wheel, which similarly is as close to possible as "negligible reduced driving capacity to use" without the tediousness of voice control. But I do think the theoretical safety benefits of physical buttons that are not on the steering wheel as compared to touchscreens for features beyond the ones commonly used while driving are probably overstated.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Part of pilot training in the old days in the Air Force was the pilot was blindfolded, and the instructor would call out a control's name, and the pilot had to put his hands on the control. Or he wouldn't be rated to fly the airplane. In an airliner, the critical controls are all uniquely shaped, so the pilot knows by the feel which is which.
    - oska 6y ago
      I share your dislike for voice control. But using it for some non-essential controls (like the air conditioning) while driving a car is the one place I've thought of where I would be comfortable using it.
stronglikedan 6y ago
> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. When the controls are in fixed positions, you only need to look at them a few times, before you memorize their positions. It also helps if they're shaped differently, like knobs and dials in addition to buttons. Using the example of a radio, I used to be able to do just about everything without looking, with the exception of direct tuning (but that's what presets are for), in my older cars with traditional head units. Now that I have a touchscreen head unit, there's almost nothing I can do without looking. Basically, I can control the volume from my steering wheel, and that's about it.
- goshx 6y ago
  Yes. The buttons on the touch interface don't change positions either, but I understand your point. Anecdotally, I've been driving a Model 3 for two years now and I have zero problems with the touch interface.
  - jen20 6y ago
    The touch-screen buttons in many cars often do change meaning, even if they don't change position within a given context. I first experienced this on a Prius back in the mid-2000s, where the touch-screen was in one of several modes (climate, radio, navigation etc) and even if one can remember where the controls are, it's necessary to look before touching. That car had more physical buttons than is generally the case now and was still difficult to operate.
  - bob1029 6y ago
    The buttons on a touch interface absolutely can change positions. What button is currently in scope? Everything is contextual in my experience. With physical interfaces, I don't have to worry that my radio's volume knob is going to wind up on the ceiling after I had just turned on the AC. Even if you design the logical interface such that all 2-d screen mappings are consistent regardless of context, there is still the problem of tactile feedback. Physical affordances can provide varying shapes, materials and actuation methods which can immediately distinguish them from each other without the need for visual confirmation.
Geezus_42 6y ago
I drove a Prius where EVERYTHING was controlled a non-tactile touch panel. It was one of the most infuriating experiences with a car in my life and far more distracting. In comparison my car has physical buttons and dials. If I want to adjust the temperature while driving I don't need to look away from the road, I just grab the dial and turn it a few clicks, same with sterio volume. I know approximately where the dials are so I can reach in the general area and know what I'm doing with out looking because there is something physical to grab.
irrational 6y ago
Both of my cars are old enough that they don't have a screen. I don't need to look at the buttons to use the radio, turn on defrost, adjust the A/C, etc. It is all muscle memory. I can do it all blindfolded. But on those occasions when I rent a car that has a touchscreen it drives me crazy. There is literally no way to use it without taking my eyes off the road and looking at the screen. It seems like a huge safety issue. It has convinced me to never buy a car with a touch screen. If there are no newer cars without a touch screen, I will just buy older used cars.
CydeWeys 6y ago
> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. Definitely not true. My last car had all physical buttons, and I could easily, by feel, use all of them with one hand while keeping my eyes on the road and the other hand on the wheel. When you've been driving a vehicle for years you get very used to its controls. Plus, on a lot of these cars some of the most common radio controls (like volume and change frequency) are right on the wheel beneath your thumbs.
mikestew 6y ago
You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. That is definitely not true. Volume on the left, tuner on the right, and of the five preset buttons, WFBQ is the one in the middle. You could feel for all of that without your eyes leaving the road. What might have happened is that you came of age after utilitarian radios. For example, I had to give some serious looking in order to find a DIN2 radio that had CarPlay and a physical on/off/volume control. Or just a physical on/off button, not some software button buried five menu levels deep. Such jackassery used to be the exception, not the new rule. Climate control? Heat control on left, blower the middle, and position (where it blows) on the right. Or some combination thereof. Our utilitarian Mercedes Sprinter RV has it right. Other, less utilitarian vehicles: meh, not so much. I could go on. But I've never been required to let my eyes leave the road for functionality until the last ten years or so. $DEITY help you if you need to switch Bluetooth devices while driving our Leaf: seven screen touches to pull that off, with plenty of opportunity along the way to make a wrong choice. No wonder it won't allow you to do it while moving.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  "I had to give some serious looking in order to find a DIN2 radio that had CarPlay and a physical on/off/volume control" Share.. Please! I still haven't found any. I have 2004 wrx with 2din slot but haven't found anything with ergonomics of the manufacturer old setup. I have so much room, yet all I can find is huge screens with tiny or no buttons... :(
  - mikestew 6y ago
    Jensen VX4024: https://www.crutchfield.com/S-ygHtVbHJ59g/p_110VX4024/Jensen-VX4024.html https://www.crutchfield.com/S-ygHtVbHJ59g/p_110VX4024/Jensen... See that big honkin' knob on the left? Volume and on/off. It's glorious, especially when driving a 5400Kg vehicle. Bought it last year, or year before, so there might be an updated model. EDIT: check out Crutchfield's other radios, too. There's a brand they sell call "Boss" (never heard of them, either), and every model of theirs has a big knob for 1/0/Volume.
karatestomp 6y ago
> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. Aside from others' comments that one needn't look at buttons & knobs one has memorized, also: 1) one does not need to look as long at buttons and knobs as a screen to locate the desired control, because they do not change position. One also never needs to navigate a menu to perform a basic task. The closest most come is having a button that cycles AM/FM and channel presets. 2) it's possible to combine the fixed-location advantage of buttons and knobs with visual and tactile differentiation that reduces or eliminates the need to look at the controls even further. Some cars do this, but a really great example is the Nintendo Gamecube controller, which was clearly designed by someone who'd watched a young child try to remember what all the buttons on earlier consoles (SNES, N64, Playstation, perhaps) were used for. Size differentiation, most-used buttons in the most-accessible positions, larger, and highlighted by color, less-used ones smaller with diminishing vividness of color the less-important they were. A clear hierarchy of importance differentiated by color, size, shape, and feel. Auto makers don't ever fully embrace this because it results in a UI that doesn't look they way they want it to, but for maximum safety, they should. A very, very consistent touchscreen UI could use some of this to great effect to reduce the harm that they cause, but they'd have to almost never screw with placement, appearance, or behavior of UI elements, all of which would need to be perfectly consistent and just about never change, which in practice probably means never receiving updates because there aren't a lot of teams that can resist fiddling with looks & behavior (this is a problem that plagues all web and frequently-updated software, and if you don't think it's a big one or causing some serious irritation and reduced-utility in computing in the wild then try watching someone who's not extremely "computer savvy" use their computer or phone for a while). They'd also need to radically simplify their UIs and work very hard on reducing latency and improving interaction accuracy (touch, then nothing happens for a second or two, is extremely confusing to non-computer-nerds, and it's 100x worse if it's not consistently precisely that unresponsive—sometimes instant, sometimes 1s delay, sometimes 5s delay, is the absolute worst way a UI can behave)
afterburner 6y ago
With physical controls, you can verify using touch (ie without sight) that you are touching the correct control, and then activate it. With touch controls, as soon as you've touched it, you've activated it. And touch screens have very few ways to verify your position by touch, since it's a large flat screen. Controls with a plethora of knobs and sliders have all kinds of terrain that you can use by touch to verify your position.
BeetleB 6y ago
> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. I never look at those buttons, and I switch stations all the time. In fact, the radio is my standard example of where touch screens fail and are hazardous. Just like with a phone that has physical buttons - I would dial numbers without looking at the phone. In the car I have that doesn't have a touch screen, I don't think I ever look for any button - be it climate control, emergency lights, etc.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
A study from the UK's Transport Research Laboratory showed that all drivers in the study had a critical reaction time degradation when interacting with Android Auto and Apple Car play. > "The increase in reaction time when interacting with either system using touch was higher than previously measured forms of impairment, including texting and hand-held calls". It's a small sample size N=20 but their conclusion was that interacting with these touch infotainment systems created a reaction time degradation that was 4x worse than the reaction time of a drunk driver (80mg of alcohol per 100ml). They followed up this study with a call for urgent shifting in the auto industry to voice controlled infotainment systems. [0] "Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving", R Ramnath, N Kinnear, S Chowdhury, T Hyatt, March 2020. https://trl.co.uk/reports/interacting-android-auto-and-apple-carplay-when-driving https://trl.co.uk/reports/interacting-android-auto-and-apple...
- cryptonector 6y ago
  High-quality comment right here ^^^^. Thanks for the link!
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    I find it extremely concerning that we allow for this marketing pull from consumers. All the evidence so far points to the dangers of touch interface when performed by the driver. If auto marketing/product managers are not responsible enough to correct this than it clearly is up to Road Safety authorities to regulate. Mazda did the right thing, other auto manufacturers should know better. We are truly risking drivers' and pedestrians' lives here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cryptonector 6y ago
> Do you have a source about the said "consensus"? https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-of-touchscreens-cars/ https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-... https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/08/a-lesson-for-automakers-navy-abandons-touchscreen-controls-over-safety-concerns/ https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/08/a-lesson-for-autom... https://www.automobilemag.com/news/touchscreen-needs-go/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/touchscreen-needs-go/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/should-gestures-and-speech-take-over-from-touchscreens-in-our-cars/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/should-gestures-and-spe... https://jalopnik.com/touchscreens-in-cars-have-been-a-failure-1833553621 https://jalopnik.com/touchscreens-in-cars-have-been-a-failur... I've seen so many of these go by that I had to do the very same search that you could have made instead of asking for sources. Asking for sources when a trivial search at your fingertips will yield them can come across as rude and lazy. Please make a better effort in the future.

by goshx 6y ago

mlyle 6y ago

> From my experience, the majority of people who drive a car with touch interfaces don't want to look back to old fashioned buttons. Many automakers that had touch-heavy interfaces are moving back towards physical controls, both because of market demand and evolving industry safety considerations. e.g. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-touchscreen-contro-1842564375 https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-to... https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/17/ford-myford-touch-infotainment-sync/2432489/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/17/ford-my... I have no problem with touch controls in general, but replacing a volume knob I can find blindly with a relatively small pair of "Vol+" and "Vol-" touch targets is mildly infuriating. It's OK as the driver because there is an actual tactile control on the steering wheel, but downright unpleasant as a passenger.

goshx 6y ago
One of the issues with those automakers is that their interfaces are in general unresponsive and slow. The one in my BMW sucked. The Jaguar I-PACE is very slow as well. Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Your comment has nothing to do with what I stated. As I mentioned already, I do have a tactile steering wheel control for volume. But even the experience for a passenger adjusting volume sucks compared to a knob. And my touch screen, in general, is snappy enough.
  - goshx 6y ago
    I disagree that it "has nothing to do with what [you] stated", as the user experience also influences demand, and I still think Tesla got it right with the touch screen available for passengers to change the volume and the tactile steering wheel control. Do you drive a Tesla?
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      Yeah, I was a touchscreen skeptic until I got my model 3: all the controls I care about while driving have physical controls on the steering wheel and, if I absolutely need to fiddle with the touchscreen, I can enable autopilot, which is safe enough compared to distracted driving.
      - anewdirection 6y ago
        I would argue activating autopilot while distracted is not only counter to teslas instruction, but criminally negligent. Please either drive, or take an uber, for the rest of us.
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        So, when the road is well-marked and I’m adjusting the AC, you’d rather have nothing keeping my car in the lane? My hands are on the steering wheel, and I’m paying attention to the road, I just know that I’m going to be spending some amount of time looking at a screen to change a setting. This isn’t “I’m tweeting and using social media and thwarting the attention sensors“ it’s “I know my attention is going to be divided between maintaining my lane and adjusting the temperature/picking a new station so I’m going to take steps to avoid drifting out of my lane into other cars”
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        “Autopilot” here is basically adaptive cruise control + lane assist, which are both technologies available from nearly every manufacturer at this point. I’m not talking about the beta Full Self Driving features.
- throwaway4220 6y ago
  My 2006 honda civic navigation had a good mix of touch and physical buttons, that is almost no-look. What I find funny though is that since it's a resistive touch and has a beep for every button (after a lag of course), i get "haptic feedback"
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > One of the issues with those automakers is that their interfaces are in general unresponsive and slow. The one in my BMW sucked. The Jaguar I-PACE is very slow as well. > Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control. Perhaps there's an auto manufacturer or two that got it right. However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. When I used to shop for cars in those days, I never had to consider if those buttons were compatible with me. Now when I buy for a newer car, it's an added headache to consider, and one that I've not seen add any real value. Going on a test drive really will not tell me enough about whether the interface is good. And worst of all, whether it is or isn't affects my safety.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    >Perhaps there's an auto manufacturer or two that got it right. However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. You gotta give it some time, because modern physical control interfaces in cars had over half a decade to evolve to reach this point. With regard to touchscreen interfaces in cars, it simply feels like those are still stuck somewhere in the pre-iPhone era of touchscreen interfaces for phones in terms of usability compared to physical controls.
  - spopejoy 6y ago
    > However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. I sure have, the climate control in 2001 VW GTIs is a fiddly mess of small buttons with feedback from a tiny screen almost as low as the gearstick. It's the "high end" system but the lower-end knobs are so much better and safer.
cityofdelusion 6y ago
It is fascinating just how poorly modern touch interfaces do compared to older vehicles. As an example, with older cars with vacuum controlled HVAC, the sliders and such were very, very "notchy" and you could change all the settings without taking an eye off the road. In the 80s/90s the buttons change to electrical instead of mechanical and you start needing to glance, due to the lack of haptic feedback. Fast forward to the modern era, and you generally have no way to control anything (other than the volume) without a full look at the touch screen, plus a longer look to make sure your finger hits the touch target. I will admit that the touch screen in my new VW is fashionable and I love all the data screens -- but I have had near-misses due to having to stare at the screen to do stuff like hit touch targets for changing my spotify playlist. It has nothing to do with responsiveness either -- the screen has no perceptible lag, its all to do with lack of haptics / feel. edit: I drive both an early 90s truck and a late 2010s car. I don't miss the touch screen when I drive the truck, I only miss Spotify / Google Maps.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I can't figure out how to turn the HVAC system on in a newish car. My old one has a slider labeled "Heat" and "Defrost". Never had problems with that.
moduspol 6y ago
Those automakers did not have competitive touch interfaces. And there's still room on the steering wheel for knobs for the most common controls, and voice control is often available.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I strongly dislike voice control. Speech is a high-latency, low-bandwidth, error-prone medium. A button is a button. One bit, clear unambiguous. Tactile controls can become so thoroughly integrated in muscle memory that well-designed tools and machines (including cars) feel like an extension of thought. Think "volume up", it just happens automatically from thought to fingers to buttons. Compare that to a multi-word speech command that requires perfect diction and phrasing over a span of five seconds. That's five seconds of distraction, longer if the command has to be repeated, vs milliseconds for the button.
  - moduspol 6y ago
    I agree, and the voice control implementations I've seen leave a lot to be desired. But they do work without taking your eyes off the road, or hands off the steering wheel. I think the most common commands can all be mapped to buttons on the steering wheel, which similarly is as close to possible as "negligible reduced driving capacity to use" without the tediousness of voice control. But I do think the theoretical safety benefits of physical buttons that are not on the steering wheel as compared to touchscreens for features beyond the ones commonly used while driving are probably overstated.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Part of pilot training in the old days in the Air Force was the pilot was blindfolded, and the instructor would call out a control's name, and the pilot had to put his hands on the control. Or he wouldn't be rated to fly the airplane. In an airliner, the critical controls are all uniquely shaped, so the pilot knows by the feel which is which.
  - oska 6y ago
    I share your dislike for voice control. But using it for some non-essential controls (like the air conditioning) while driving a car is the one place I've thought of where I would be comfortable using it.

stronglikedan 6y ago

> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. When the controls are in fixed positions, you only need to look at them a few times, before you memorize their positions. It also helps if they're shaped differently, like knobs and dials in addition to buttons. Using the example of a radio, I used to be able to do just about everything without looking, with the exception of direct tuning (but that's what presets are for), in my older cars with traditional head units. Now that I have a touchscreen head unit, there's almost nothing I can do without looking. Basically, I can control the volume from my steering wheel, and that's about it.

goshx 6y ago
Yes. The buttons on the touch interface don't change positions either, but I understand your point. Anecdotally, I've been driving a Model 3 for two years now and I have zero problems with the touch interface.
- jen20 6y ago
  The touch-screen buttons in many cars often do change meaning, even if they don't change position within a given context. I first experienced this on a Prius back in the mid-2000s, where the touch-screen was in one of several modes (climate, radio, navigation etc) and even if one can remember where the controls are, it's necessary to look before touching. That car had more physical buttons than is generally the case now and was still difficult to operate.
- bob1029 6y ago
  The buttons on a touch interface absolutely can change positions. What button is currently in scope? Everything is contextual in my experience. With physical interfaces, I don't have to worry that my radio's volume knob is going to wind up on the ceiling after I had just turned on the AC. Even if you design the logical interface such that all 2-d screen mappings are consistent regardless of context, there is still the problem of tactile feedback. Physical affordances can provide varying shapes, materials and actuation methods which can immediately distinguish them from each other without the need for visual confirmation.

Geezus_42 6y ago

I drove a Prius where EVERYTHING was controlled a non-tactile touch panel. It was one of the most infuriating experiences with a car in my life and far more distracting. In comparison my car has physical buttons and dials. If I want to adjust the temperature while driving I don't need to look away from the road, I just grab the dial and turn it a few clicks, same with sterio volume. I know approximately where the dials are so I can reach in the general area and know what I'm doing with out looking because there is something physical to grab.

irrational 6y ago

Both of my cars are old enough that they don't have a screen. I don't need to look at the buttons to use the radio, turn on defrost, adjust the A/C, etc. It is all muscle memory. I can do it all blindfolded. But on those occasions when I rent a car that has a touchscreen it drives me crazy. There is literally no way to use it without taking my eyes off the road and looking at the screen. It seems like a huge safety issue. It has convinced me to never buy a car with a touch screen. If there are no newer cars without a touch screen, I will just buy older used cars.

CydeWeys 6y ago

> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. Definitely not true. My last car had all physical buttons, and I could easily, by feel, use all of them with one hand while keeping my eyes on the road and the other hand on the wheel. When you've been driving a vehicle for years you get very used to its controls. Plus, on a lot of these cars some of the most common radio controls (like volume and change frequency) are right on the wheel beneath your thumbs.

mikestew 6y ago

You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. That is definitely not true. Volume on the left, tuner on the right, and of the five preset buttons, WFBQ is the one in the middle. You could feel for all of that without your eyes leaving the road. What might have happened is that you came of age after utilitarian radios. For example, I had to give some serious looking in order to find a DIN2 radio that had CarPlay and a physical on/off/volume control. Or just a physical on/off button, not some software button buried five menu levels deep. Such jackassery used to be the exception, not the new rule. Climate control? Heat control on left, blower the middle, and position (where it blows) on the right. Or some combination thereof. Our utilitarian Mercedes Sprinter RV has it right. Other, less utilitarian vehicles: meh, not so much. I could go on. But I've never been required to let my eyes leave the road for functionality until the last ten years or so. $DEITY help you if you need to switch Bluetooth devices while driving our Leaf: seven screen touches to pull that off, with plenty of opportunity along the way to make a wrong choice. No wonder it won't allow you to do it while moving.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
"I had to give some serious looking in order to find a DIN2 radio that had CarPlay and a physical on/off/volume control" Share.. Please! I still haven't found any. I have 2004 wrx with 2din slot but haven't found anything with ergonomics of the manufacturer old setup. I have so much room, yet all I can find is huge screens with tiny or no buttons... :(
- mikestew 6y ago
  Jensen VX4024: https://www.crutchfield.com/S-ygHtVbHJ59g/p_110VX4024/Jensen-VX4024.html https://www.crutchfield.com/S-ygHtVbHJ59g/p_110VX4024/Jensen... See that big honkin' knob on the left? Volume and on/off. It's glorious, especially when driving a 5400Kg vehicle. Bought it last year, or year before, so there might be an updated model. EDIT: check out Crutchfield's other radios, too. There's a brand they sell call "Boss" (never heard of them, either), and every model of theirs has a big knob for 1/0/Volume.

karatestomp 6y ago

> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. Aside from others' comments that one needn't look at buttons & knobs one has memorized, also: 1) one does not need to look as long at buttons and knobs as a screen to locate the desired control, because they do not change position. One also never needs to navigate a menu to perform a basic task. The closest most come is having a button that cycles AM/FM and channel presets. 2) it's possible to combine the fixed-location advantage of buttons and knobs with visual and tactile differentiation that reduces or eliminates the need to look at the controls even further. Some cars do this, but a really great example is the Nintendo Gamecube controller, which was clearly designed by someone who'd watched a young child try to remember what all the buttons on earlier consoles (SNES, N64, Playstation, perhaps) were used for. Size differentiation, most-used buttons in the most-accessible positions, larger, and highlighted by color, less-used ones smaller with diminishing vividness of color the less-important they were. A clear hierarchy of importance differentiated by color, size, shape, and feel. Auto makers don't ever fully embrace this because it results in a UI that doesn't look they way they want it to, but for maximum safety, they should. A very, very consistent touchscreen UI could use some of this to great effect to reduce the harm that they cause, but they'd have to almost never screw with placement, appearance, or behavior of UI elements, all of which would need to be perfectly consistent and just about never change, which in practice probably means never receiving updates because there aren't a lot of teams that can resist fiddling with looks & behavior (this is a problem that plagues all web and frequently-updated software, and if you don't think it's a big one or causing some serious irritation and reduced-utility in computing in the wild then try watching someone who's not extremely "computer savvy" use their computer or phone for a while). They'd also need to radically simplify their UIs and work very hard on reducing latency and improving interaction accuracy (touch, then nothing happens for a second or two, is extremely confusing to non-computer-nerds, and it's 100x worse if it's not consistently precisely that unresponsive—sometimes instant, sometimes 1s delay, sometimes 5s delay, is the absolute worst way a UI can behave)

afterburner 6y ago

With physical controls, you can verify using touch (ie without sight) that you are touching the correct control, and then activate it. With touch controls, as soon as you've touched it, you've activated it. And touch screens have very few ways to verify your position by touch, since it's a large flat screen. Controls with a plethora of knobs and sliders have all kinds of terrain that you can use by touch to verify your position.

BeetleB 6y ago

> You have always had the need to look at the buttons, like reaching out to the radio. I never look at those buttons, and I switch stations all the time. In fact, the radio is my standard example of where touch screens fail and are hazardous. Just like with a phone that has physical buttons - I would dial numbers without looking at the phone. In the car I have that doesn't have a touch screen, I don't think I ever look for any button - be it climate control, emergency lights, etc.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

A study from the UK's Transport Research Laboratory showed that all drivers in the study had a critical reaction time degradation when interacting with Android Auto and Apple Car play. > "The increase in reaction time when interacting with either system using touch was higher than previously measured forms of impairment, including texting and hand-held calls". It's a small sample size N=20 but their conclusion was that interacting with these touch infotainment systems created a reaction time degradation that was 4x worse than the reaction time of a drunk driver (80mg of alcohol per 100ml). They followed up this study with a call for urgent shifting in the auto industry to voice controlled infotainment systems. [0] "Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving", R Ramnath, N Kinnear, S Chowdhury, T Hyatt, March 2020. https://trl.co.uk/reports/interacting-android-auto-and-apple-carplay-when-driving https://trl.co.uk/reports/interacting-android-auto-and-apple...

cryptonector 6y ago
High-quality comment right here ^^^^. Thanks for the link!
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  I find it extremely concerning that we allow for this marketing pull from consumers. All the evidence so far points to the dangers of touch interface when performed by the driver. If auto marketing/product managers are not responsible enough to correct this than it clearly is up to Road Safety authorities to regulate. Mazda did the right thing, other auto manufacturers should know better. We are truly risking drivers' and pedestrians' lives here.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

cryptonector 6y ago

> Do you have a source about the said "consensus"? https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-of-touchscreens-cars/ https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-... https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/08/a-lesson-for-automakers-navy-abandons-touchscreen-controls-over-safety-concerns/ https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/08/a-lesson-for-autom... https://www.automobilemag.com/news/touchscreen-needs-go/ https://www.automobilemag.com/news/touchscreen-needs-go/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/should-gestures-and-speech-take-over-from-touchscreens-in-our-cars/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/should-gestures-and-spe... https://jalopnik.com/touchscreens-in-cars-have-been-a-failure-1833553621 https://jalopnik.com/touchscreens-in-cars-have-been-a-failur... I've seen so many of these go by that I had to do the very same search that you could have made instead of asking for sources. Asking for sources when a trivial search at your fingertips will yield them can come across as rude and lazy. Please make a better effort in the future.