14 ms·

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who wants a dumb car. Unfortunately, the idea of electric cars has become bound up with the notion of software-driven cars. I

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who wants a dumb car. Unfortunately, the idea of electric cars has become bound up with the notion of software-driven cars. I want an electric car with analog controls, no touch screens or over-the-air updates, and minimal software. A car that I feel like I own, rather than one I'm getting a click-through license to use.

zippergz 5y ago
1000% agree. I do not want a car that is a smartphone on wheels and I have no idea why so many people find this attractive.
- arpyzo 5y ago
  I own a 2014 Subaru Impreza and my brother in-law a 2017. I've driven both extensively. Sometime during those years, Subaru switched from knobs and levers to a touchscreen and the controls are so much worse! 1. The controls on the 2014 are obvious, easy to find, and my choices are readily apparent. In the 2017 I have to search for them and often guess their meanings. If I'm actively driving, I just give up because it's too distracting. 2. The controls are not as responsive. Sometimes there's a lag. Sometimes they don't respond at all. 3. There are bugs with the digital controls that simply don't exist in the analog versions. As an example in the 2017 the radio turns on every time the car gets started regardless of if it was on when the car was turned off.
  - patpending 5y ago
    I have a similar problem with my 2017 Pacifica that replaced my 2005 Voyager. Using the touch screen to control the heat and air-conditioning is extremely slow in the Pacifica, and you can't do it without looking at the screen which can't be used with gloves. There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible. IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
    - organsnyder 5y ago
      I also have a 2017 Pacifica, and for the most part I don't mind the controls (the physical buttons are responsive enough that it doesn't bother me), but there are definitely a few functions (heated/cooled seats, mainly) that I wish I didn't have to dig through menus to find. Such a contrast from my 2009 Civic (albeit no heated/cooled seats on that vehicle).
    - toast0 5y ago
      It might depend on the trim of the Pacifica? But for the hvac controls that have buttons (fan speed, driver/passenger temps, mode) the physical controls seem responsive enough and I don't use the touchscreen ones, except maybe sometimes for defrost if I can't find the button; cycling through the modes can be painful. You can't get the different zones back in sync without the screen though, which is annoying. And going from lo to hi takes forever, too. At least the fan speed knob seems good enough. The touch screen in general is decidedly not great; it's better than my C-max (sync2) in many ways, but I really like how the sync2 was designed --- they clearly considered how to make it useful, but then implemented it in the slowest environment possible.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Worse, in the 2015 Toyota and 2019 Honda that we now have - if one of us listened to heavy metal on volume 30; and the other one is more of a mellow pop on volume15; they'll have to wait until the car turns on, boots, and timeouts the warning/license messages, before car will accept the volume down / turn radio off input and kill the cacophone. UNacceptable. And yet now the norm. I'll do you one better - I'm hanging on to my 2004 Subaru WRX for these and similar reasons too :). I go through dealerships every year or two looking for replacement... and keep my WRX with happiness in my heart.
    - Chris_Newton 5y ago
      I also hang on to an older car for much the same reasons. Every now and then I’ve had a courtesy car from a garage while mine was in for a service, typically something very recent. I almost invariably dislike them. You could argue that’s because of familiarity. Obviously I like a lot about my car or I wouldn’t have kept it for this long! But truly, it’s not that I don’t think there’s room for improvement on my old car. There have been plenty of advances since its time that I would welcome if I bought a new vehicle: improved efficiency, safety features, practicalities like better external lighting, and so on.¹ For me, those benefits always seem to be outweighed by the horrible state of controls and displays and “infotainment” systems in new cars. They’re cluttered and intrusive and distracting. I’m not sure which is worse, touchscreens that take your eyes off the road, or cluttering the steering wheel with controls for a phone that it is almost never appropriate to be using while driving anyway in my country. Meanwhile, apparently I still have to take a hand off the wheel for a second or two to change gear or switch on various external safety lights. This should have been some sort of meme punchline, not real life. Between poorly designed controls, the security and privacy problems that seem to be rampant in modern cars, and the sense that EVs might be the future but there are still some big unanswered questions, I expect it will be a few more years before I change to a new vehicle unless some practical consideration forces the issue first. ¹ I’m still waiting for the windscreen that automatically enhances the driver’s full view in low light or poor weather conditions and subtly highlights the required driving line through junctions as directed by the navigation system, but I reckon we’ll have that too before the self-driving flying cars are here.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    Huh. My 2020 Impreza has lots of knobs and levers. About the only time I interact with the touch screen is to control the apps I use (mostly maps and podcasts). Even the podcasts app rarely requires me to touch the touch screen; there are volume and back/forward switches right on the steering wheel. (And also on the console below the touch screen.) Maybe that's switching back after 2017, or perhaps you use more of the controls than I do.
    - gizmo385 5y ago
      I've got a 2017 impreza and my experience is similar to your's. Everything I'd want to be a nob or switch is and the touch screen is almost entirely controllable quite easily from the steering wheel.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Re (3): It's still an issue in the 2018 Impreza. I've gotten used to it now, but it's still frustrating. Especially if I ended the drive with a phone call. On phone calls I have to really crank up the volume (nearly max) whereas for music and other things I have it very low (10-15? The numbers mean nothing to me, not loud). So when I turn it on after a call I get blasted by NPR for about 5-10 seconds before the audio volume dial actually responds (sometimes it takes the early attempted dialing down but delayed, other times I have to try and dial it down again). Other than audio controls, though, everything else is responsive, I don't notice any lag. It really seems to be an issue with their stereo system. Either it's not fully booted (and can't respond to controls yet) or there's some mediating system that transmits the controls which isn't booted up as quickly.
    - drivers99 5y ago
      I have the same problems with my 2019 Impreza. It responds sooner if I'm not in reverse, but I am usually in reverse first because I need to back out of my garage. It usually doesn't respond to the volume knob messages until a second after shifting into forward. I say "messages" because the turns of the knob appear to be queued up somewhere, but it doesn't have as much time to process those while it's displaying the rear-view camera on the screen.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      I have a problem like this in my 2018 Dodge! The bluetooth takes a wildly variable amount of time to connect when starting the car, and the bluetooth doesn't have an input gain option, like aux input does. This means I need to turn the volume up a ways to hear anything over bluetooth. This also means that between starting the car and bluetooth connecting I'm getting blasted by some random radio station at increased volume.
  - gilbetron 5y ago
    I have a 2016 Outback and love nearly everything about the car, except the stupid console. Just horrible in the ways you describe. Laggy, unintuitive, and just irritating to use. I only ever use the actual buttons on the steering wheel. Not only is the console touch screen bad, but the actual buttons for the HVAC system are weird and unintuitive. 4 years of owning it and I still push the wrong buttons.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    OT but since there seems to be multiple Subaru owners — if you are experiencing an issue with the clock on MFD(the small display on top of the dashboard) being too fast, probably depends on models but the causes are, 1) that there’s no CAN bus messages in Subaru cars that offer GPS time, and 2) that at least older models of MFD counts time by dividing 125kHz CAN bus crystal, where a sane choice would be to use 32.768kHz one. It’s not just your car, the issue is in design. To hypothetically fix it a firmware hack would need to be built. I learned this when a friend of mine told his is always way too fast and often makes him upset for a moment that he might be late to work — don’t know he meant it justify flooring it but sounded like he was genuinely annoyed.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I have a 2015 Crosstrek. It is a great car. The console is awful. Truly awful. Push the volume button within a few seconds of turning the car on to turn the radio off? Doesn't even register. Even if you give it a minute to warm up, it is half a second of lag on a physical switch. The touch screen has a half second of lag and requires several presses to do something as simple as switch from the radio to bluetooth.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  I drive a 2002 Focus MK-I, and I can use all controls rather blindly, just by feeling them. I hope to buy a similarly ergonomic vehicle when this one becomes unmaintainable.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    2009-2016 Citroen c3 is a winner. Not sure about newer ones. Only computation it has is Bluetooth.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Controls you can feel for seems to be a lost art. (Looking at you, Touch Bar.)
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Isn't touch bar is at the edge of vision, so theoretically isn't that distracting? Neither of my Macs have one of these. This is why I'm asking.
      - lazide 5y ago
        Kinda not really - yes you can kinda see it - but you need to look at it most of the time to hit a button correctly. Which you didn’t always/usually have to do with physical buttons. It also switches any time there is a context switch, which depending on what is going on can be insanely distracting (especially when it is using it to display autocomplete, autocorrect suggestions as you type fast)
      - jonplackett 5y ago
        It's not that it's visually distracting that's the problem - it's that you can't feel where the buttons are without looking. And if you aren't looking you'll accidentally do things you didn't mean to, like press escape, or turn your mac off when trying to hit back space.
        judge2020 5y ago
- Minor49er 5y ago
  The only smart aspect that I might want in a car is a GPS so I can leave my phone at home. But I'm not sure I would even want that since the car could be tracked at any time.
- randcraw 5y ago
  I understand why buyers like digital novelties in cars: they're flashy and sexy, and they make your 4 year old car look old by comparison. I also understand why car makers like digital flash: your 4 year old car doesn't support your latest iPhone, network, or peripherals, so you're motivated to buy a new one every few years. (And of course, old car tech distracts your driving LESS, however that fits into the picture.) I think we will never see cars with modular digital tech that can be updated. A car with replaceable digital hardware and software won't rapidly go out-of-date the way current cars do. They would cost far less to update than replace. So nobody wants it... except perhaps grownups.
jonpurdy 5y ago
I recently bought a used 2016 Spark EV (having a baby and needed something other than my motorbike). It does have a touchscreen, but mostly for extraneous information and radio functions. Everything else has dedicated knobs and buttons. (The one dumb thing is that the fan speed updates on the screen, rather than just having ticks above the knob.) It is a California "compliance car", which means it was just a modified petrol Spark, so it didn't have product managers trying to jam in unnecessary touch-based interfaces. I just hope that all companies building electric cars don't move in the all-touch direction of Tesla.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  This is the exact same stupid thing that happened with DSLR cameras. Old SLR cameras had a ring around the lens for f-stop and another dial on top for shutter speed. New DSLR cameras even now hide all that stuff in a menu on the touch screen, as if it isn't something you want to change ALL THE TIME - and develop instant muscle memory for.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    never mind that when I'm taking a photo outdoors on a bright sunny day, there's no way in fuck I'm going to be able read your LCD screen. Never mind us older folks, who often have vision problems with up-close viewing, which is a solved problem when you can spin a shutter or aperture wheel by touch. But not when you need no-glasses to view the objective, but reading glasses to view the fine print on the screen.
    - mike00632 5y ago
      I think backlit E-ink screens would be great for cars. I too want something I can see well in the day.
      - smolder 5y ago
        E-ink is slow/inefficient to react, so probably not suitable for speedometer and tachometer type gauges. Apart from that, I agree.
Buttons840 5y ago
You know the dark pattern of presenting a license agreement over and over until it's accepted? I predict one day someone will make the argument in court that they always declined the EULA (perhaps the one in their car) hundreds of times, but one day accidentally brushed "accept" with their finger, and that doesn't constitute legal acceptance, especially since they've demonstrated an effort to decline the EULA, but because of dark patterns, they never can permanently reject the license.
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  Fun fact - if you buy the car new, you may have the "option" of being presented with these choices before purchase. And you can actually refuse! The dealer will be confused as hell, but they are hell-bent on selling a new car, and will actually void it if possible. I know because I've done it. You don't want the weird spyware (OnStar, Carnet, etcetera)? After agreeing to buy the car, refuse to accept the terms (they legally require your signature for this), and they'll find a way to get around it. If they refuse then go buy a different car, because fuck those guys. Obviously this will vary by manufacturer and feature, and it's getting harder as time goes on to remove this shit from your vehicle.
  - at-fates-hands 5y ago
    I thought I remember seeing some article on dashboard design and how distracting everything is now to driver. I thought I saw a quip in the article about how Honda was going to put out several 2021-2022 models that went back to some kind of really stripped down dashboard?
- duped 5y ago
  If I'm the dark pattern developer I'm not logging when the EULA is accepted or how many times they declined it.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    You mean you'll only log that it has been accepted and nothing more? I guess it becomes their word against... well, nothing, you don't know what they did or didn't do. For those who care enough to reject EULAs, they should take a few videos of rejecting the license and hopefully that would be enough to shift the onus to the manufacturer, who, as you said, has next to nothing.
rootusrootus 5y ago
There are compliance cars that are just electric versions of the normal ICE cars that preceded them. That's probably as close as you can get. I currently dive a Bolt and it's a bog standard car, just electric. Yes, it has a touchscreen, but that's for infotainment.
myshoesareblue 5y ago
You might like the VW e-up!/Skoda Citigo-e. Bare bones electric cars -- even the battery meter is an analog needle! Just has a plastic mount for your smartphone above the center console and a USB port. No giant touchscreens! Real knobs!
- yurishimo 5y ago
  Sounds like something that will never come to the USA unfortunately. All new cars are required to have backup cameras as a standard safety feature, so at that point, the car company will ship the whole CarOS anyway.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    I've driven rentals in Europe with reversing cameras, in fact my current car had it as an option (I didn't bother). They still had physical controls. Sure the screen is a touch screen too (so when the phone rings you can press green or red on the screen), but the button to select radio, or bluetooth, or whatever is physical, the volume (and off key) is physical, the radio selection is physical (both centre console and on the steering wheel). The dashboard is multiple different guages - there's an LED screen with selectable stats like 'time driving, average fuel consumption, current speed', but there's an nice analog speedo, fuel needle and temperature needle, and several warning lights. I think the only car I've driven without physical volume controls was a Ford, and that was nearly a decade ago, I get the feeling there's been a bit of a push back, at least in the UK.
    - JulianMorrison 5y ago
      Physical controls are vastly more useful - when the control you want available can be planned ahead of time. You get touch feedback when you're operating it, of where it is and what state it's in. You don't have to look. Missing it with your finger is obvious. Glass controls are optimal for precisely only one scenario, and that is when you don't know ahead of time what will need to be on the screen. That's why smartphones use them.
- worik 5y ago
neilpanchal 5y ago
Check out Bollinger motors [1]. Electric chassis, all analog, no screens. Here is a shot of the interior: https://bollingermotors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CLOSEUP-DASH-SMALL.jpg https://bollingermotors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CLOSE... [1] https://bollingermotors.com/ https://bollingermotors.com/
- Animats 5y ago
  On the other hand, a row of 15 or so identical toggle switches isn't the right answer either.
henrikschroder 5y ago
Audi's 2022 e-tron GT moved back to more physical buttons, and only has one infotainment touch-screen, unlike a bunch of their 2021 models where there's at least two different infotainment screens.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I really miss "real buttons", meaning not just something tactile. Things like a power button that actually opens a circuit. Or a volume dial that doesn't lag because it's actually a potentiometer and not a rotary encoder. Too late for all that, I suppose.
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    Though there's nothing preventing electronically controlled buttons working with imperceptible delay except crap software.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Well, and sometimes "deliberately crap". Like power buttons. I don't want to have to count to 10 while holding a button to "really turn it off".
  - saltcured 5y ago
    Ha, as much as I want simplicity, I don't miss switches and potentiometers with burned contacts that cause intermittent failure. I'd be happy with reliable optical encoders and properly embedded digital systems. The kind that can hum along for decades without maintenance...
crooked-v 5y ago
Mazda has been actively removing touch screens in new models. The screens are still there, but the touch part is replaced with physical controls for cabin features/radio and a puck controller for other stuff.
- pleb_nz 5y ago
  A few manufacturers, expensive ones included, are reverting to screens and physical controls. I think there is proof your eyes spend more time off the road when using a touch screen compared to physical controls
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    This seems obvious, really. When you're using a touchscreen you cannot "see" with your hand the same way you can with physical analog controls. Touchscreens force us to look at them with our eyes to use them.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Note that backup cameras are now a mandate for US cars: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-backup-camera-rule-cameras-will-be-mandatory-by-2018-223739 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-backup-camera-rule-c...
  - randcraw 5y ago
    My 2019 pickup has a backup camera and it's dumb as a post, even though the rest of the truck fairly bristles with sensors. The camera's view appears when I shift into reverse and goes away when I exit reverse. I think nobody who prefers simplicity objects to that kind of tech. It's overcomplicated interfaces to basic services that we despise, like a volume slider that requires you to look away from the road and that's too easy to mishandle.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  I know HN loves to hate on touchscreens in cars but I don't really get it. Both cars I own and almost every car I've rented in the last few years (that's quite a few) has had a touchscreen. This is pretty much always how it works: 1) The most used functions have physical buttons and knobs, often on both the steering wheel and the center console 2) Touchscreen is used for uncommonly done things, like adding new Bluetooth connections and adjusting radio settings 3) If the vehicle is moving there are limits on touchscreen use (like the touchscreen will refuse to work after X clicks, or disallow some functions, or both.) This seems ... fine.
GuB-42 5y ago
So you want a mechanical door lock, manual windows, no car stereo, no power steering, no thermostat, no cruise control, etc... The problem with that dumb car is that it is missing that very convenient feature. So you want a dumb car but with feature X, because feature X is really great. But the other guy will not care about X and will think it is bloat, but Y is really important, while for someone else, it will be all about Z. In the end, to satisfy everyone, you will need X+Y+Z, everyone will think it is bloated but you can't remove a single feature without someone complaining... As in, I want things light but don't remove my feature. Unless it is custom made bloat is almost inevitable.
- Jill_the_Pill 5y ago
  Electric windows and power steering are unlikely to be tracking your location.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ok123456 5y ago
  It's not inevitable. At one point we made a 6th gen Honda Civic.
  - 1970-01-01 5y ago
    This was literally the pinnacle of dumb cars. Everything could be manual or automatic, but you still got OBDII, warning lights, and of course ABS and air bags. Adding a new DIN head unit, you could have HD radio and Bluetooth completely disconnected from the ECU. I think the automotive industry forgot how to engineer. All the features, all we ever needed in a car, was right there in the late 90s.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  > So you want a mechanical door lock, manual windows, no car stereo, no power steering, no thermostat, no cruise control, etc... I think an extremely small minority of people who want a "dumb" car don't want those features. I feel like you're just making up a strawman here. It's pretty clear (at least to me), that the people who want a dumb car are talking about things integrating with your phone or being displayed on a touch screen. I think anything that existed 20 years ago is not regarded as dumb by basically anybody.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Especially when the most famous electric car maker is marketing so heavily on self-driving, it's just going to get more and more software.
judge2020 5y ago
The 'commercial-oriented' F150 Electric is slated to have a smaller 8 inch touch screen on the base model with dials underneath it, probably similar to the current gen models: https://www.wheelsjoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2021-ford-f-150-infotainment-screen-3.jpg https://www.wheelsjoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2021-...
atweiden 5y ago
I drove an Electra Meccanica Solo in Victoria BC a few years ago, and it was exactly this. The founder of the company wanted to design the air cooled Porsche of EVs. All analog, minimal electronics, incredibly nimble. One of my favourite aspects of it was the sound it made under acceleration, think: Star Wars Landspeeder. (You can faintly hear it over annoying background music in this video [1].) It felt better to drive than a Tesla, even though it was orders of magnitude slower. Unfortunately, last I heard they were trying to tone down the Landspeeder-esque “cabin noise”. I’m not sure if the current executive team at Electra Meccanica even realizes what they have. [1]: https://youtu.be/0eUlPeXL8wc?t=40 https://youtu.be/0eUlPeXL8wc?t=40
rsj_hn 5y ago
Same here. The automakers are trying to pull a fast one by conflating battery power with tons of licensed software with an attack on independent mechanics and serviceability. But I suspect that there is a huge market for low end EVs that can be easily serviced and don't have a lot of software.
pcarolan 5y ago
This feels like a pretty large business opportunity. Completely agree.
elihu 5y ago
One way to get that is to do an EV conversion. Unfortunately, it tends to be expensive and time consuming, but in the end you get something that's just a car and not somebody's notion of an ideal consumer electronics experience. That's not to say there'll be no software, or even that it won't be proprietary. But at least it's a lot nicer to buy a motor controller, a charger, a battery management system and whatever else you need from companies that know the parts have to be easy to configure and interoperate with other components from other companies, because if they aren't people won't buy them. Modularity is a wonderful thing. (I just ordered the charger and BMS for a project I'm working on yesterday. I ended up opting for more expensive components because they're configurable by the end user, whereas the popular cheap option you have to send it to someone to reprogram if you change your battery pack configuration.)
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I want a smart car. I just don't want the smarts determined by the manufacturer. I really want a car that can more or less run arbitrary software/features I want. I understand why companies do not want to provide that, because people can go the very wrong direction with it. But I'd like both my house and my car to be smart, and neither beholden to Apple or Google to do it.
grappler 5y ago
I think this way of thinking should lead people to take another look at bikes, perhaps power-assisted electric bikes. Cheap, simple and efficient in comparison to cars. Not to mention all the benefits of cities made for bikes vs cities made for cars.

zippergz 5y ago

1000% agree. I do not want a car that is a smartphone on wheels and I have no idea why so many people find this attractive.

arpyzo 5y ago
I own a 2014 Subaru Impreza and my brother in-law a 2017. I've driven both extensively. Sometime during those years, Subaru switched from knobs and levers to a touchscreen and the controls are so much worse! 1. The controls on the 2014 are obvious, easy to find, and my choices are readily apparent. In the 2017 I have to search for them and often guess their meanings. If I'm actively driving, I just give up because it's too distracting. 2. The controls are not as responsive. Sometimes there's a lag. Sometimes they don't respond at all. 3. There are bugs with the digital controls that simply don't exist in the analog versions. As an example in the 2017 the radio turns on every time the car gets started regardless of if it was on when the car was turned off.
- patpending 5y ago
  I have a similar problem with my 2017 Pacifica that replaced my 2005 Voyager. Using the touch screen to control the heat and air-conditioning is extremely slow in the Pacifica, and you can't do it without looking at the screen which can't be used with gloves. There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible. IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
  - organsnyder 5y ago
    I also have a 2017 Pacifica, and for the most part I don't mind the controls (the physical buttons are responsive enough that it doesn't bother me), but there are definitely a few functions (heated/cooled seats, mainly) that I wish I didn't have to dig through menus to find. Such a contrast from my 2009 Civic (albeit no heated/cooled seats on that vehicle).
  - toast0 5y ago
    It might depend on the trim of the Pacifica? But for the hvac controls that have buttons (fan speed, driver/passenger temps, mode) the physical controls seem responsive enough and I don't use the touchscreen ones, except maybe sometimes for defrost if I can't find the button; cycling through the modes can be painful. You can't get the different zones back in sync without the screen though, which is annoying. And going from lo to hi takes forever, too. At least the fan speed knob seems good enough. The touch screen in general is decidedly not great; it's better than my C-max (sync2) in many ways, but I really like how the sync2 was designed --- they clearly considered how to make it useful, but then implemented it in the slowest environment possible.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Worse, in the 2015 Toyota and 2019 Honda that we now have - if one of us listened to heavy metal on volume 30; and the other one is more of a mellow pop on volume15; they'll have to wait until the car turns on, boots, and timeouts the warning/license messages, before car will accept the volume down / turn radio off input and kill the cacophone. UNacceptable. And yet now the norm. I'll do you one better - I'm hanging on to my 2004 Subaru WRX for these and similar reasons too :). I go through dealerships every year or two looking for replacement... and keep my WRX with happiness in my heart.
  - Chris_Newton 5y ago
    I also hang on to an older car for much the same reasons. Every now and then I’ve had a courtesy car from a garage while mine was in for a service, typically something very recent. I almost invariably dislike them. You could argue that’s because of familiarity. Obviously I like a lot about my car or I wouldn’t have kept it for this long! But truly, it’s not that I don’t think there’s room for improvement on my old car. There have been plenty of advances since its time that I would welcome if I bought a new vehicle: improved efficiency, safety features, practicalities like better external lighting, and so on.¹ For me, those benefits always seem to be outweighed by the horrible state of controls and displays and “infotainment” systems in new cars. They’re cluttered and intrusive and distracting. I’m not sure which is worse, touchscreens that take your eyes off the road, or cluttering the steering wheel with controls for a phone that it is almost never appropriate to be using while driving anyway in my country. Meanwhile, apparently I still have to take a hand off the wheel for a second or two to change gear or switch on various external safety lights. This should have been some sort of meme punchline, not real life. Between poorly designed controls, the security and privacy problems that seem to be rampant in modern cars, and the sense that EVs might be the future but there are still some big unanswered questions, I expect it will be a few more years before I change to a new vehicle unless some practical consideration forces the issue first. ¹ I’m still waiting for the windscreen that automatically enhances the driver’s full view in low light or poor weather conditions and subtly highlights the required driving line through junctions as directed by the navigation system, but I reckon we’ll have that too before the self-driving flying cars are here.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Huh. My 2020 Impreza has lots of knobs and levers. About the only time I interact with the touch screen is to control the apps I use (mostly maps and podcasts). Even the podcasts app rarely requires me to touch the touch screen; there are volume and back/forward switches right on the steering wheel. (And also on the console below the touch screen.) Maybe that's switching back after 2017, or perhaps you use more of the controls than I do.
  - gizmo385 5y ago
    I've got a 2017 impreza and my experience is similar to your's. Everything I'd want to be a nob or switch is and the touch screen is almost entirely controllable quite easily from the steering wheel.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Re (3): It's still an issue in the 2018 Impreza. I've gotten used to it now, but it's still frustrating. Especially if I ended the drive with a phone call. On phone calls I have to really crank up the volume (nearly max) whereas for music and other things I have it very low (10-15? The numbers mean nothing to me, not loud). So when I turn it on after a call I get blasted by NPR for about 5-10 seconds before the audio volume dial actually responds (sometimes it takes the early attempted dialing down but delayed, other times I have to try and dial it down again). Other than audio controls, though, everything else is responsive, I don't notice any lag. It really seems to be an issue with their stereo system. Either it's not fully booted (and can't respond to controls yet) or there's some mediating system that transmits the controls which isn't booted up as quickly.
  - drivers99 5y ago
    I have the same problems with my 2019 Impreza. It responds sooner if I'm not in reverse, but I am usually in reverse first because I need to back out of my garage. It usually doesn't respond to the volume knob messages until a second after shifting into forward. I say "messages" because the turns of the knob appear to be queued up somewhere, but it doesn't have as much time to process those while it's displaying the rear-view camera on the screen.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    I have a problem like this in my 2018 Dodge! The bluetooth takes a wildly variable amount of time to connect when starting the car, and the bluetooth doesn't have an input gain option, like aux input does. This means I need to turn the volume up a ways to hear anything over bluetooth. This also means that between starting the car and bluetooth connecting I'm getting blasted by some random radio station at increased volume.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  I have a 2016 Outback and love nearly everything about the car, except the stupid console. Just horrible in the ways you describe. Laggy, unintuitive, and just irritating to use. I only ever use the actual buttons on the steering wheel. Not only is the console touch screen bad, but the actual buttons for the HVAC system are weird and unintuitive. 4 years of owning it and I still push the wrong buttons.
- numpad0 5y ago
  OT but since there seems to be multiple Subaru owners — if you are experiencing an issue with the clock on MFD(the small display on top of the dashboard) being too fast, probably depends on models but the causes are, 1) that there’s no CAN bus messages in Subaru cars that offer GPS time, and 2) that at least older models of MFD counts time by dividing 125kHz CAN bus crystal, where a sane choice would be to use 32.768kHz one. It’s not just your car, the issue is in design. To hypothetically fix it a firmware hack would need to be built. I learned this when a friend of mine told his is always way too fast and often makes him upset for a moment that he might be late to work — don’t know he meant it justify flooring it but sounded like he was genuinely annoyed.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I have a 2015 Crosstrek. It is a great car. The console is awful. Truly awful. Push the volume button within a few seconds of turning the car on to turn the radio off? Doesn't even register. Even if you give it a minute to warm up, it is half a second of lag on a physical switch. The touch screen has a half second of lag and requires several presses to do something as simple as switch from the radio to bluetooth.
bayindirh 5y ago
I drive a 2002 Focus MK-I, and I can use all controls rather blindly, just by feeling them. I hope to buy a similarly ergonomic vehicle when this one becomes unmaintainable.
- hughrr 5y ago
  2009-2016 Citroen c3 is a winner. Not sure about newer ones. Only computation it has is Bluetooth.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Controls you can feel for seems to be a lost art. (Looking at you, Touch Bar.)
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Isn't touch bar is at the edge of vision, so theoretically isn't that distracting? Neither of my Macs have one of these. This is why I'm asking.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Kinda not really - yes you can kinda see it - but you need to look at it most of the time to hit a button correctly. Which you didn’t always/usually have to do with physical buttons. It also switches any time there is a context switch, which depending on what is going on can be insanely distracting (especially when it is using it to display autocomplete, autocorrect suggestions as you type fast)
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      It's not that it's visually distracting that's the problem - it's that you can't feel where the buttons are without looking. And if you aren't looking you'll accidentally do things you didn't mean to, like press escape, or turn your mac off when trying to hit back space.
      - judge2020 5y ago
Minor49er 5y ago
The only smart aspect that I might want in a car is a GPS so I can leave my phone at home. But I'm not sure I would even want that since the car could be tracked at any time.
randcraw 5y ago
I understand why buyers like digital novelties in cars: they're flashy and sexy, and they make your 4 year old car look old by comparison. I also understand why car makers like digital flash: your 4 year old car doesn't support your latest iPhone, network, or peripherals, so you're motivated to buy a new one every few years. (And of course, old car tech distracts your driving LESS, however that fits into the picture.) I think we will never see cars with modular digital tech that can be updated. A car with replaceable digital hardware and software won't rapidly go out-of-date the way current cars do. They would cost far less to update than replace. So nobody wants it... except perhaps grownups.

jonpurdy 5y ago

I recently bought a used 2016 Spark EV (having a baby and needed something other than my motorbike). It does have a touchscreen, but mostly for extraneous information and radio functions. Everything else has dedicated knobs and buttons. (The one dumb thing is that the fan speed updates on the screen, rather than just having ticks above the knob.) It is a California "compliance car", which means it was just a modified petrol Spark, so it didn't have product managers trying to jam in unnecessary touch-based interfaces. I just hope that all companies building electric cars don't move in the all-touch direction of Tesla.

jonplackett 5y ago
This is the exact same stupid thing that happened with DSLR cameras. Old SLR cameras had a ring around the lens for f-stop and another dial on top for shutter speed. New DSLR cameras even now hide all that stuff in a menu on the touch screen, as if it isn't something you want to change ALL THE TIME - and develop instant muscle memory for.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  never mind that when I'm taking a photo outdoors on a bright sunny day, there's no way in fuck I'm going to be able read your LCD screen. Never mind us older folks, who often have vision problems with up-close viewing, which is a solved problem when you can spin a shutter or aperture wheel by touch. But not when you need no-glasses to view the objective, but reading glasses to view the fine print on the screen.
  - mike00632 5y ago
    I think backlit E-ink screens would be great for cars. I too want something I can see well in the day.
    - smolder 5y ago
      E-ink is slow/inefficient to react, so probably not suitable for speedometer and tachometer type gauges. Apart from that, I agree.

Buttons840 5y ago

You know the dark pattern of presenting a license agreement over and over until it's accepted? I predict one day someone will make the argument in court that they always declined the EULA (perhaps the one in their car) hundreds of times, but one day accidentally brushed "accept" with their finger, and that doesn't constitute legal acceptance, especially since they've demonstrated an effort to decline the EULA, but because of dark patterns, they never can permanently reject the license.

Judgmentality 5y ago
Fun fact - if you buy the car new, you may have the "option" of being presented with these choices before purchase. And you can actually refuse! The dealer will be confused as hell, but they are hell-bent on selling a new car, and will actually void it if possible. I know because I've done it. You don't want the weird spyware (OnStar, Carnet, etcetera)? After agreeing to buy the car, refuse to accept the terms (they legally require your signature for this), and they'll find a way to get around it. If they refuse then go buy a different car, because fuck those guys. Obviously this will vary by manufacturer and feature, and it's getting harder as time goes on to remove this shit from your vehicle.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  I thought I remember seeing some article on dashboard design and how distracting everything is now to driver. I thought I saw a quip in the article about how Honda was going to put out several 2021-2022 models that went back to some kind of really stripped down dashboard?
duped 5y ago
If I'm the dark pattern developer I'm not logging when the EULA is accepted or how many times they declined it.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  You mean you'll only log that it has been accepted and nothing more? I guess it becomes their word against... well, nothing, you don't know what they did or didn't do. For those who care enough to reject EULAs, they should take a few videos of rejecting the license and hopefully that would be enough to shift the onus to the manufacturer, who, as you said, has next to nothing.

rootusrootus 5y ago

There are compliance cars that are just electric versions of the normal ICE cars that preceded them. That's probably as close as you can get. I currently dive a Bolt and it's a bog standard car, just electric. Yes, it has a touchscreen, but that's for infotainment.

myshoesareblue 5y ago

You might like the VW e-up!/Skoda Citigo-e. Bare bones electric cars -- even the battery meter is an analog needle! Just has a plastic mount for your smartphone above the center console and a USB port. No giant touchscreens! Real knobs!

yurishimo 5y ago
Sounds like something that will never come to the USA unfortunately. All new cars are required to have backup cameras as a standard safety feature, so at that point, the car company will ship the whole CarOS anyway.
- iso1210 5y ago
  I've driven rentals in Europe with reversing cameras, in fact my current car had it as an option (I didn't bother). They still had physical controls. Sure the screen is a touch screen too (so when the phone rings you can press green or red on the screen), but the button to select radio, or bluetooth, or whatever is physical, the volume (and off key) is physical, the radio selection is physical (both centre console and on the steering wheel). The dashboard is multiple different guages - there's an LED screen with selectable stats like 'time driving, average fuel consumption, current speed', but there's an nice analog speedo, fuel needle and temperature needle, and several warning lights. I think the only car I've driven without physical volume controls was a Ford, and that was nearly a decade ago, I get the feeling there's been a bit of a push back, at least in the UK.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    Physical controls are vastly more useful - when the control you want available can be planned ahead of time. You get touch feedback when you're operating it, of where it is and what state it's in. You don't have to look. Missing it with your finger is obvious. Glass controls are optimal for precisely only one scenario, and that is when you don't know ahead of time what will need to be on the screen. That's why smartphones use them.
worik 5y ago

neilpanchal 5y ago

Check out Bollinger motors [1]. Electric chassis, all analog, no screens. Here is a shot of the interior: https://bollingermotors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CLOSEUP-DASH-SMALL.jpg https://bollingermotors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CLOSE... [1] https://bollingermotors.com/ https://bollingermotors.com/

Animats 5y ago
On the other hand, a row of 15 or so identical toggle switches isn't the right answer either.

henrikschroder 5y ago

Audi's 2022 e-tron GT moved back to more physical buttons, and only has one infotainment touch-screen, unlike a bunch of their 2021 models where there's at least two different infotainment screens.

tyingq 5y ago
I really miss "real buttons", meaning not just something tactile. Things like a power button that actually opens a circuit. Or a volume dial that doesn't lag because it's actually a potentiometer and not a rotary encoder. Too late for all that, I suppose.
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  Though there's nothing preventing electronically controlled buttons working with imperceptible delay except crap software.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Well, and sometimes "deliberately crap". Like power buttons. I don't want to have to count to 10 while holding a button to "really turn it off".
- saltcured 5y ago
  Ha, as much as I want simplicity, I don't miss switches and potentiometers with burned contacts that cause intermittent failure. I'd be happy with reliable optical encoders and properly embedded digital systems. The kind that can hum along for decades without maintenance...

crooked-v 5y ago

Mazda has been actively removing touch screens in new models. The screens are still there, but the touch part is replaced with physical controls for cabin features/radio and a puck controller for other stuff.

pleb_nz 5y ago
A few manufacturers, expensive ones included, are reverting to screens and physical controls. I think there is proof your eyes spend more time off the road when using a touch screen compared to physical controls
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  This seems obvious, really. When you're using a touchscreen you cannot "see" with your hand the same way you can with physical analog controls. Touchscreens force us to look at them with our eyes to use them.
judge2020 5y ago
Note that backup cameras are now a mandate for US cars: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-backup-camera-rule-cameras-will-be-mandatory-by-2018-223739 https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-backup-camera-rule-c...
- randcraw 5y ago
  My 2019 pickup has a backup camera and it's dumb as a post, even though the rest of the truck fairly bristles with sensors. The camera's view appears when I shift into reverse and goes away when I exit reverse. I think nobody who prefers simplicity objects to that kind of tech. It's overcomplicated interfaces to basic services that we despise, like a volume slider that requires you to look away from the road and that's too easy to mishandle.
grahamburger 5y ago
I know HN loves to hate on touchscreens in cars but I don't really get it. Both cars I own and almost every car I've rented in the last few years (that's quite a few) has had a touchscreen. This is pretty much always how it works: 1) The most used functions have physical buttons and knobs, often on both the steering wheel and the center console 2) Touchscreen is used for uncommonly done things, like adding new Bluetooth connections and adjusting radio settings 3) If the vehicle is moving there are limits on touchscreen use (like the touchscreen will refuse to work after X clicks, or disallow some functions, or both.) This seems ... fine.

GuB-42 5y ago

So you want a mechanical door lock, manual windows, no car stereo, no power steering, no thermostat, no cruise control, etc... The problem with that dumb car is that it is missing that very convenient feature. So you want a dumb car but with feature X, because feature X is really great. But the other guy will not care about X and will think it is bloat, but Y is really important, while for someone else, it will be all about Z. In the end, to satisfy everyone, you will need X+Y+Z, everyone will think it is bloated but you can't remove a single feature without someone complaining... As in, I want things light but don't remove my feature. Unless it is custom made bloat is almost inevitable.

Jill_the_Pill 5y ago
Electric windows and power steering are unlikely to be tracking your location.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ok123456 5y ago
It's not inevitable. At one point we made a 6th gen Honda Civic.
- 1970-01-01 5y ago
  This was literally the pinnacle of dumb cars. Everything could be manual or automatic, but you still got OBDII, warning lights, and of course ABS and air bags. Adding a new DIN head unit, you could have HD radio and Bluetooth completely disconnected from the ECU. I think the automotive industry forgot how to engineer. All the features, all we ever needed in a car, was right there in the late 90s.
CogitoCogito 5y ago
> So you want a mechanical door lock, manual windows, no car stereo, no power steering, no thermostat, no cruise control, etc... I think an extremely small minority of people who want a "dumb" car don't want those features. I feel like you're just making up a strawman here. It's pretty clear (at least to me), that the people who want a dumb car are talking about things integrating with your phone or being displayed on a touch screen. I think anything that existed 20 years ago is not regarded as dumb by basically anybody.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Especially when the most famous electric car maker is marketing so heavily on self-driving, it's just going to get more and more software.

judge2020 5y ago

The 'commercial-oriented' F150 Electric is slated to have a smaller 8 inch touch screen on the base model with dials underneath it, probably similar to the current gen models: https://www.wheelsjoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2021-ford-f-150-infotainment-screen-3.jpg https://www.wheelsjoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2021-...

atweiden 5y ago

I drove an Electra Meccanica Solo in Victoria BC a few years ago, and it was exactly this. The founder of the company wanted to design the air cooled Porsche of EVs. All analog, minimal electronics, incredibly nimble. One of my favourite aspects of it was the sound it made under acceleration, think: Star Wars Landspeeder. (You can faintly hear it over annoying background music in this video [1].) It felt better to drive than a Tesla, even though it was orders of magnitude slower. Unfortunately, last I heard they were trying to tone down the Landspeeder-esque “cabin noise”. I’m not sure if the current executive team at Electra Meccanica even realizes what they have. [1]: https://youtu.be/0eUlPeXL8wc?t=40 https://youtu.be/0eUlPeXL8wc?t=40

rsj_hn 5y ago

Same here. The automakers are trying to pull a fast one by conflating battery power with tons of licensed software with an attack on independent mechanics and serviceability. But I suspect that there is a huge market for low end EVs that can be easily serviced and don't have a lot of software.

pcarolan 5y ago

This feels like a pretty large business opportunity. Completely agree.

elihu 5y ago

One way to get that is to do an EV conversion. Unfortunately, it tends to be expensive and time consuming, but in the end you get something that's just a car and not somebody's notion of an ideal consumer electronics experience. That's not to say there'll be no software, or even that it won't be proprietary. But at least it's a lot nicer to buy a motor controller, a charger, a battery management system and whatever else you need from companies that know the parts have to be easy to configure and interoperate with other components from other companies, because if they aren't people won't buy them. Modularity is a wonderful thing. (I just ordered the charger and BMS for a project I'm working on yesterday. I ended up opting for more expensive components because they're configurable by the end user, whereas the popular cheap option you have to send it to someone to reprogram if you change your battery pack configuration.)

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

I want a smart car. I just don't want the smarts determined by the manufacturer. I really want a car that can more or less run arbitrary software/features I want. I understand why companies do not want to provide that, because people can go the very wrong direction with it. But I'd like both my house and my car to be smart, and neither beholden to Apple or Google to do it.

grappler 5y ago

I think this way of thinking should lead people to take another look at bikes, perhaps power-assisted electric bikes. Cheap, simple and efficient in comparison to cars. Not to mention all the benefits of cities made for bikes vs cities made for cars.