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To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function- > Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets
by Eji1700 4y ago
To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function-
> Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets and it's pin in the arse. Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it. (10)
This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. And while in normal cars they move units because features over functionality is acceptable, trucks aren't status symbols first. They do, at the end of the day, have to do the job they're designed for efficiently, and things like this are clearly just "trendy" not practical.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- powvans 4y agoNot just efficiently, safely.
- andrepd 4y agoCars kill 1,500,000 people per year (= a 787 full of passangers every couple hours). What's the big deal about safety? /s
- Alupis 4y agoIn the US that number is usually below 30,000, and majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.
- hoppyhoppy2 4y ago>majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related. What's your source for this? Most sources I'm finding say alcohol-impaired driving is involved in about 30% of US traffic deaths.
- rascul 4y agoI didn't make the claim but I thought to look it up. From NHTSA's report, if I'm reading it correctly, 2021 had 42,915 traffic fatalities, of which 8,174 were related to alcohol. I think those numbers are estimated. I'm not aware if there's better data. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813298 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
- Alupis 4y agoMy information appears to be a few years out of date - probably from the last time I had this debate here on HN. 2021 does appear to have been a particularly bad year... Regardless, the numbers are very good for the US, compared to the rest of the world. iihs.org[1] indicates the US is averaging somewhere around 1.5 fatalities per 100 Million miles traveled. Compared to the rest of the world... that's pretty decent. Most of the places with significantly high fatality rates are not the places that will be purchasing self driving electric vehicles anytime soon... [1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
- davidgay 4y agoYou are deluding yourself if you think the US is doing well on traffic fatalities. From the graph at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest... we can see that US car deaths/capita have dropped slightly (10-20%?) since 1995. Meanwhile, in France where the rate about matched in 1995 they have dropped by 3x, leaving the US rate at about 2.5x the French rate.
- brianwawok 4y agoBut at least we aren’t French.
- joshmaker 4y agoRecent US Traffic fatalities: 2021: 42,915 2020: 38,824 2019: 36,355 2018: 36,835 2017: 37,473 According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... the last time the US had fewer than 30,000 traffic fatalities was 1945
- Brian_K_White 4y agoAlcohol is 100% orthoganal. If every single driver were legally drunk at all times, poorly designed vehicles will still result in more and worse accidents then well-designed.
- 8note 4y agoIf every driver were drunk at all times, roads would be designed with that in mind. It's much harder to dangerous things in a car with better designed roads
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 4y agoSure, but irrellevant. The point is that the design of the vehicle, or anything, needs to be as good as possible regardless of anything else, and there is no overriding excuse not to. It's not like the poorly designed controls are necessary for some other even more important reason. If both roads and drivers were all excellent, the vehicle still needs to be as excellent as possible. If all other factors are so good that only 10 people die each year from car accidents, there is still no excuse for making vehicles less safe and make that become 20. Alcohol, lack of alcohol, good roads, bad roads, speed limits, none of that matters.
- ultrarunner 4y agoCar crashes are the leading cause of death of children under age 18. The number of deaths has risen in the US even as it's fallen across the rest of the world. I have begun to wonder if phones are just a convenient scapegoat, even if the criticism is in the right direction.
- c-cube 4y agoI wonder if it's a combination of phones, car centric city design with wide stroads, and automatic transmissions. The latter two make driving very easy and boring, with long waiting periods at red lights, high speed between the lights, and you can keep your phone in one hand all along because there's no stick to shift. No wonder people are not looking at the road.
- 8note 4y agoWide stroads definitely don't make driving easy and boring -- stroads make for high speeds and constant opportunities for crashes
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThey absolutely reduce the number of variables requiring attention, except the problem and the source of danger is they only appear to. They make the way appear to be free of things to look out for, and so appear to require less attention. That's the "boring". In reality of course, all the same kinds of unexpected events can still happen at any time. A baby can suddenly appear anywhere along one of those roads. But that doesn't mean the road does not encourage inattention.
- TheCondor 4y agoIs there any real data on this? It comes up periodically here and it makes some logical sense but I don't know of any regulatory efforts or push back and I'm certain someone would blame in-car screens if it was the cause of more accidents. Screens seem to keep getting bigger and incorporating more function. The other factor that counters it is there is also a lot more automation. I have a 10 year old car and the lights are automatic, the climate control is automatic (I think my wife or I adjust it about twice a year) Things like hazard lights are used fairly rarely and I've never needed muscle memory for it.
- Retric 4y agoSeveral studies have shown touch screen are less safe. Having tactile controls doesn’t prevent automatic wipers etc, it’s a pure UI choice as your generally run everything through the CAN bus either way. The initial idea for the CAN bus was simply to save copper by having fewer wires inside the car, it was only much later that touch screens leveraged that system. Basically if you want a truck release from a key fob and a trunk release from a door you might as well have both talk to a computer which only runs connection to the trunk. At which point you can redesign the controls more or less independently because they don’t change how everything is wired up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus
- Noumenon72 4y agoHazard lights need to be accessible with zero thought so you can warn people the instant a hazard arises, without taking your eyes off the road during hazardous conditions. My car has them on a big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and that's the way it should be.
- crooked-v 4y agoThe reason for the touchscreens is simple... compared to all the design and manufacturing needed for a good console of buttons, it's cheap just to slap in an identical tablet unit in every car model. From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching.
- Kaibeezy 4y agoThis is an 80/20 problem if there ever was one, maybe even 95/5. In my car I really want the audio volume, heater fan speed, and wiper control to be tactile. But beyond that, I can probably deal, and even the heater fan speed might be negotiable. In my 2003 car, the fan speed is buttons, oh well. In my 2013 it’s a paddle and I like it a lot better. The newer car also has a knob for navigating the touchscreen, which isn’t perfect but is way better than touching a screen. The older car has no touchscreen and I like that better. I didn’t rtfa because it’s a Twitter thread, and I didn’t see any comments on this in the 250 or so below. What else really needs to be a tactile control on a truck? (Edited for clarification. I said “touch-based” when I should have used “tactile”.)
- reneherse 4y agoCould you please explain more about why you would prefer those specific controls to be touch based? Is it to have the possibility of finer-grained adjustment? For me, wipers and audio volume are controls I want to be able to access immediately and without taking my eyes off the road, as they sometimes need to be used with urgency. (For example, turning down high volume to reduce distraction or activating wipers to clear a sudden downpour.)
- bun_at_work 4y agoIt's so you don't have to look at them to use them while driving. Screens offer no tactile feedback that guides you, you have to look, which is dangerous.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt's true that physical buttons are superior, but the upside of the screen is that the UI can be updated by software.
- avidphantasm 4y agoAnd it is nearly impossible to reliably tap a button on a touchscreen in a moving vehicle on even smooth roads (at least by me).
- Cerium 4y agoOne technique is to dock some of your fingers against known reference points such as the corner of the screen, then you can stabilize the finger pressing the button and rely partially on muscle memory to locate the target button.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYes, that's the downside.
- dlivingston 4y agoWhy don't we have any physical "dynamic" controls yet? A "3D" touchscreen? Something like a ferrofluid [0] layer underneath a flexible display. It seems both technically possible, and a way for us to have our cake & eat it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid#/media/File%3AFerrofluid_Magnet_under_glass_edit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid#/media/File%3AFerro...
- kiratp 4y ago> This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. That’s a very confident statement to make without data to back it up. Strong disagree. I see a huge number of benefits from the touchscreen in my Tesla. Continuous improvements to how the fundamental controls operate. New features that could only have been possible due to the controls not being hardware… And generally speaking my vehicle seems to save me from human lapses in judgement even when I’m paying perfect attention so I’m not convinced about the argument that they purely increase distraction.
- bagels 4y agoYou have to take your eyes off the road for multiple seconds to turn the defogger/defroster on, as one example. Maybe there are studies to back it up too, but intuitively, this seems unsafe compared to turning a knob that you don't have to look at.
- skelpmargyar 4y agoAre you able to perform a good majority of functions without taking your eyes off the road over 95% of the time? In my perfect setup I would have configurable buttons to map critical functions to and then a touch screen for non-important things. I have a very hard time seeing how a touch screen alone would be better than touch screen + a couple buttons.
- kiratp 4y agoYes. Everything you need while driving is on the wheel or at a well defined corner of the screen (which big touch targets). And that too can be avoided if you’re willing to use voice control.
- olyjohn 4y agoI'd love to hear how the car has saved you while you were paying attention.
- kiratp 4y ago
- xedeon 4y agoFrom: December 23, 2021 “Tesla hiring drivers for reliability, performance and homologation testing of Tesla Semi” Source: https://driveteslacanada.ca/semi/tesla-hiring-drivers-for-reliability-performance-and-homologation-testing-of-tesla-semi/ https://driveteslacanada.ca/semi/tesla-hiring-drivers-for-re... It’s a bit silly to assume they didn’t solicit feedback from real truck drivers. While developing a multi-billion product. But “Musk/Spaceman Bad” right?
- markrages 4y agoThe complaints in the linked thread are not about reliability, performance or homologation.
- xedeon 4y agoThat’s just one of the many jobs they posted during the development of semi. They also have “real” drivers that put a ton of hours shuttling Tesla cargo from NV to CA and vise versa. Not to mention the author is from the EU. Trucking in the U.S is vastly different. I drove in both regions during my time in the USAF. In your honest opinion. Do you think they just developed the semi without gathering/soliciting feedback from real truck drivers?
- ahahahahah 4y agoMusk's whims clearly took precedence over any sort of received feedback.
- xedeon 4y agoThat a very opinionated yet empty statement. Please elaborate and share your experience driving long haul semi trucks in U.S. interstates and city streets.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoflight yoke
- v0idzer0 4y agoYou know Elon Musk didn’t design this truck, right?
- orbital-decay 4y agoPerhaps, but SpaceX interfaces share the same issue: focusing on looks at the cost of usability, so I would think that either he's involved in this quite a lot, or he built both companies to have similar cultures. For example, the first mockup of Dragon v2 control panel presented to the public [1] looked all sci-fi, but as someone who actually knows how spacecrafts function I can tell just by the look that this was unusable. They were forced to switch to a much more pragmatic design [2] during the development, probably because folks from NASA shared some real-life experience and had their own requirements written in blood. Still touchscreens, but only where it doesn't matter (hard to have tactile controls in a spacesuit anyway), with a handle to hold onto under acceleration and to provide a basepoint for muscle memory, and buttons under protective caps for critical commands. [1] https://i.imgur.com/sWHPfFR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/sWHPfFR.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/RZ7ucEu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZ7ucEu.jpg
- Cipater 4y agoSo what you're saying is that his company posted a mockup then listened to people with real life experience through the development process and produced a good actual product? Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
- nojvek 4y agoI rented a Jeep today. It has most functions on a touch screen. But above 60mph (I think) the controls all lock so you can’t touch anything. They probably did it for safety but it feels so dumb. I’m on a highway trying to turn off Bluetooth and then FM but I can’t. All screen functionality locked, no workaround.
- halefx 4y agoThat's probably a restriction on the rental that's just an option if you own it. My 2013 Ford allows me to limit several things over 55mph for drivers using my second car key.