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Honestly, I wish the powers-that-be would crack down harder on touchscreens in vehicles. There is no case where manipulating a touchscreen while driving is safe

Honestly, I wish the powers-that-be would crack down harder on touchscreens in vehicles. There is no case where manipulating a touchscreen while driving is safe, for one simple reason: you have to look at the screen to use it because there's no tactile feedback. They are truly, as that one book title went, unsafe at any speed.

jeroenhd 5y ago
There have been some experiments with effective tactile feedback provided by touch screens, but they're complicated to produce and expensive. Most of the research seems to be aimed at providing touch screens to the visually impaired. It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal. A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.
- warning26 5y ago
  > ...safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static Agreed -- this was also why the Apple Touchbar failed, IMO. Typically keyboard use relies on a lot of muscle memory, and so the touchbar's "you get a different set of controls with different shapes and sizes that do different things depending on which app you're using" design ethos didn't really fit with how people actually use keyboards.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Soft buttons aren't terrible. F-keys are an example where the same button could mean different things in different contexts, but they're tactile. Or if you had a Ti-85 (or 86), it had soft f1-5 and was a lot more flexible than the Ti-82 which had hard function keys. You could get muscle memory of entering menus and using the f keys that would be presented. Of course, hopefully a car doesn't have quite so deep of a menu tree. If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.
- pxc 5y ago
  > It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads. It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.
  - DavidPeiffer 5y ago
    I hate touchscreens in cars, but I'll give Tesla the fact that their touchscreen is a modern screen that's not a complete piece of crap to interact with. When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      You phone doesn't have to survive 125C for ten years of continual vibration.
      - DavidPeiffer 5y ago
        It doesn't. If you can't provide an adequate user experience free of large input delays, you should have never installed a touchscreen in the first place. Infotainment systems have gotten less bad, but I haven't seen notable advancement in reducing time spent with eyes off of the road the way a physical button or knob does.
        adamcstephens 5y ago
        They install touchscreens because they think people want them. The cars sell, because the only choice is touchscreens, and their decisions are validated. Rinse and repeat.

jeroenhd 5y ago

There have been some experiments with effective tactile feedback provided by touch screens, but they're complicated to produce and expensive. Most of the research seems to be aimed at providing touch screens to the visually impaired. It's possible to get some kind of tactile response mimicking the edges of buttons well enough. I'd say a good implementation of this technology would be safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static. I'm not sure what you'd get out of a touch screen with those constraints (less parts?), especially with the added cost and research, but that's the only way I can see a touch screen in a car that should ever be legal. A Tesla driver in Germany already got fined for using the touch screen of his car while driving. It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads.

warning26 5y ago
> ...safe IF the position and availability of the controls would be static Agreed -- this was also why the Apple Touchbar failed, IMO. Typically keyboard use relies on a lot of muscle memory, and so the touchbar's "you get a different set of controls with different shapes and sizes that do different things depending on which app you're using" design ethos didn't really fit with how people actually use keyboards.
- toast0 5y ago
  Soft buttons aren't terrible. F-keys are an example where the same button could mean different things in different contexts, but they're tactile. Or if you had a Ti-85 (or 86), it had soft f1-5 and was a lot more flexible than the Ti-82 which had hard function keys. You could get muscle memory of entering menus and using the f keys that would be presented. Of course, hopefully a car doesn't have quite so deep of a menu tree. If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.
pxc 5y ago
> It's strange how this obvious flaw of a car design has ever been allowed onto the roads. It's strange that anyone thinks it's even desirable. Touchscreens aren't even pleasant to use in this context.
- DavidPeiffer 5y ago
  I hate touchscreens in cars, but I'll give Tesla the fact that their touchscreen is a modern screen that's not a complete piece of crap to interact with. When phones can run at 30 fps and have no noticeable lag, it's infuriating to switch to a car which stutters on some ugly, unnecessary graphics and takes 0.25 seconds to respond to a touch input. Not to mention the whole "you're supposed to be driving a car" aspect.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    You phone doesn't have to survive 125C for ten years of continual vibration.
    - DavidPeiffer 5y ago
      It doesn't. If you can't provide an adequate user experience free of large input delays, you should have never installed a touchscreen in the first place. Infotainment systems have gotten less bad, but I haven't seen notable advancement in reducing time spent with eyes off of the road the way a physical button or knob does.
      - adamcstephens 5y ago
        They install touchscreens because they think people want them. The cars sell, because the only choice is touchscreens, and their decisions are validated. Rinse and repeat.