21 ms·

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,00

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally regulated to not fail response time tests, and if they do, they should be deemed unlawful to be equipped by either the manufacturer or the owner. It's absolutely ridiculous that this still happens today, and it doesn't have to. So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem.

gumballindie 4y ago
> these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms Oh my sweet summer child. If only it was the developer's fault and not their managers pushing ridiculous deadlines.
husamia 4y ago
it's going to require a completely new type of hardware and software system from scratch. I don't think Tesla did that but they could have.
sizzle 4y ago
Developers or cost optimizing MBAs? What developer would advocate for slower touchscreen response time at the expense of having a good UX if money was of no issue?
- tekla 4y ago
  Developers. Engineers seemed to have no issue with making interfaces and systems that work in cars before the touchscreen fad.
  - rdez6173 4y ago
    Nope. Greed. It costs way more to build out physical ergonomic interior controls when they are permanent fixtures for several model years and any changes require new physical elements to be created and fit (and designed for mass production). Software can be updated over the air, so there's less pressure on engineers to get it perfect. The solution is not to point fingers and guess, but instead measure and revise. Study the amount of time drivers' eyes are off the road for routine tasks, develop acceptable limits and enforce them. Software engineers of any ilk are just as capable of following sensible guidelines if everyone else in the company is obliged to as well.
hcknwscommenter 4y ago
I disagree. With a physical button, you know you pushed it because you feel it give and then stop giving. After the first couple of uses you can get used to any response time. With a touchscreen, there is no tactile feedback difference between a button press and a miss. So when you press it and it doesn't do anything, or behaves unexpectedly, you don't know if it is lagging or you missed. Touchscreens are much worse for drivers.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  the apple Macbook trackpad proves that this tactile feedback could be done for touch screens also. touchscreens are worse but they don't have to be. manufacturers just don't care enough to make them better. they're too busy charging more for touchscreens while saving tons of money on buttons, which are expensive in comparison.
  - anamexis 4y ago
    You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      > You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well. that's not a given at all. maybe for computer keyboards I guess, but not for cars. car makers always seem to want buttons to be flush with their surroundings and have no bumps or dips on them to help you find the button you're after. I always have to look for the button if it isn't on my steering wheel, and I usually have to look when it's there as well. the only control in my car I don't ever need my eyes to find and use is the volume knob for the entertainment system. maybe the hazard button, too, but I haven't needed to push it yet.
      - jojobas 4y ago
        I just checked and I could reach and operate aircon knobs (3x), radio volume and phone answer/hangup buttons without looking, fast. Granted most of these are on the wheel, but even aircon controls would be a no go on a touchscreen.
mtrpcic 4y ago
The benefit of buttons isn't in the response time, it's in the tactile feedback that makes it so you don't need 16ms response time. I heard it click, I felt it click, it clicked. If the thing I wanted to happen doesn't, it's because it's broken and not because I can't tell if I clicked the right spot on my iPad. Not having to take your eyes off the road in these cases is the benefit of buttons, and no improvement to response time in touch screens will fully solve that.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  This isn't how tactile buttons in modern cars work. You're doing the same thing as pushing keys on a keyboard. The software can still be slow. Turn the physical volume dial on a car with a slow Apple CarPlay interface and tell me how that works out for you. Oh, it's too loud? But it takes 2 seconds for the software to respond due to lag and now you're fiddling with the volume button trying to not make it worse? A physical button didn't fix that.
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    You turn the physical dial, and regardless of the outcome, you know that your input was received by the HCI, so you don't need to wonder if you should try again. If it worked, great; if not, oh well; no need to look at it and try again though. That's the benefit.
    - colanderman 4y ago
      The issue is, how far to turn it? My Android phone has a similar issue while operating over Bluetooth. While holding "volume up", it takes several seconds for the volume change to register. So I have no feedback for how long I need to hold "volume up". If I wait until the volume is loud enough -- it keeps going up for another two seconds, to the point that it is painful and possibly damaging my hearing.
      - throwaheyy 4y ago
        There’s tactile feedback for that too. You learn how many “clicks” of the knob you need.
nmz 4y ago
Most of my time looking at the screen is because I need to look to know where the button is. That's a huge thing, I should NEVER have to take my eyes of the road. Big woop? it absolutely is. Things are still mediocre, and I do admit the lag time should be criminal. but yes, this is a win that could possibly be saving a few lives.
- jquery 4y ago
  Indeed. Touchscreens are extremely flexible interfaces, but they are not superior in certain use cases, especially where eyes must be kept elsewhere.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    From my experience touchscreens are only superior in terms of customization and sometimes size. In everything else they're inferior to a hardware interface.
epgui 4y ago
Touch screens arguably make development and feature iteration easier, but they are clearly and obviously a net negative for safety and ease of use. Cars are safety-intensive machines.
misssocrates 4y ago
They should be faster, but don't they support voice commands while driving? That's the idea so you don't have to touch it much or at all while driving.
wkat4242 4y ago
> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem. Major accidents are almost always a cascade of errors. It may not be perfect, but not having to take eyes off the road can really break the chain of a big accident in progress. A touchscreen UI probably won't cause an accident on its own, but it will be a link in the chain of a driver already tired and lost in the area, trying to find the button to press to turn on the headlights. Because yes recently there was one car manufacturer that moved that function to touch also, and proudly claimed their software was 100% bug-free. I'm sure the audience here knows how ridiculous such a statement is.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Though all in all it is a minor nuisance, my car navigation system has this safety feature of randomly displaying over the map a popup (that you have to touch/click OK to have it go away) about how you shouldn't be interacting with it when driving. For some reasons it tends to pop up every time I am approaching or already inside a roundabout, preferrably one of those where if you miss the right exit and take the wrong one it will take you 20 minutes in the traffic to get back to where you were.
- byyll 4y ago
  Is there a reason not to have auto start and auto stop headlights?
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Yes there are reasons why people want to override them sometimes and this needs to be reverted. My dad used to sleep in his car for an hour before work, with the engine on to provide heating in winter. Because traffic was too bad an hour later. Just one of the many examples.
sircastor 4y ago
> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits. Your brand new 2024 car’s system has been in development for 4 years. Product people have been picking at the design and asking for changes way too late, and someone in accounting has asked the hardware contractor to cut more cost off the BOM. My colleagues were tremendously talented. Some of the brightest engineers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. The developers aren’t lazy or inexperienced, they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  That still just sounds like people not knowing what they're doing. In no world would automakers say, "Hey you know, we just did all of this tire engineering with this rubber, but let's change the composition at the last minute and not retest all of its physical properties." So, why should it be any different with software? Because some sucker PM didn't have the brains to say, "We can't actually do that."?
  - teeray 4y ago
    It feels like there’s some derision towards the infotainment software engineering since it’s perceived as not safety critical. It’s in the name, “infotainment”! Fun and optional! It’s not like you’re working on the PFD/MFD/EICAS on an Airbus. “So what, the seat heater button lags sometimes. Not gonna kill someone like the tires. Ship it” says some MBA higher-up. But then the seats kick on automatically when the car starts and the driver tucks in with her morning coffee for a commute down the highway. The coffee kicks in, the cabin heats up, and suddenly that warm seat is like sitting on a griddle. She taps on the menu to bring up the seat controls, then lag, then has to hit the seat heat button twice to go from “high” to “low” to “off”, lagging each time. Oh, she hit it three times, now it’s on high again. Tap, tap, tap, tap… Meanwhile she has crossed three lanes of traffic and is staring down a jersey barrier at 70+ mph.
jkarneges 4y ago
> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. My Volt's physical mute button seems to be software controlled. Normally it is very responsive, except when the car is starting up. It kills me whenever I start the car and the volume happened to be cranked up from earlier, music blasts, and the mute button is ineffective. Fortunately the volume knob seems to be hardware controlled and can be used to lower the volume when the car is starting. It's really unintuitive since both controls are physical.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  Yeah, it's just poorly thought out engineering. There's really no excuse. I owned a B7 Audi A4 which simply limited the volume level to a user-defined setting when you turned on the car. That concept is roughly 20 years old.
  - avereveard 4y ago
    And it's not something limited to premium car either, my first generation 500x has three different radio startup behaviour to choose: always on, always off, as it was when you turned the car off
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- hinkley 4y ago
  Going from audiobook on one trip to radio on the next sure wakes me up, and not in a good way. At least I have a physical volume dial with a power button in it.
adrr 4y ago
I don’t know that would be helpful. I hate digging through my Tesla’s menus to control the wipers even though it is very responsive.
- gonehome 4y ago
  You can put the wipers icon at the bottom bar now, that makes it much better.
  - nixass 4y ago
    That's us solving a problem that hasn't existed until few years ago nor should exist in first place. Tesla is really trying to reinvent the wheel here
  - ascorbic 4y ago
    I'm not sure how they got the idea that it's ever acceptable to need to press a button to open a menu in order to turn wipers on. Particularly when the rain sensor is so bad that auto is basically useless.
    - davnn 4y ago
      The problem is that there is no rain sensor :)
      - ascorbic 4y ago
        Well, something is trying to make the wipers work automatically. It's just not very good at it.
        gonehome 4y ago
        It’s vision from the forward facing camera behind the rear view mirror (iirc)
- tomashm 4y ago
  In newer software versions, you should be able to control the wipers with the left scrolling wheel, right after you have activated them with the push button on the left arm. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3D-E41D-4671-ADE5-C2FB73203323.html#:~:text=Roll%20the%20left%20scroll%20button,or%20not%20it%20is%20raining https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....
HWR_14 4y ago
> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. It doesn't matter if it takes 1 second for the radio to change stations. The problem with delays is me spending 500 ms trying to get the buttons to react. When I touch a physical button, I instantly know I did.
- hinkley 4y ago
  You have confirmation affordances. "We have received your request and will get back to you shortly" Of course, if the button is sometimes ignored, that undermines the affordance and people learn not to trust it.
14 4y ago
That would require a device with the power of an iPad. I’m sure it could be done but again adds another $500-$1000 to the final price of the car. A physical button costs a couple bucks. If we are going to get people on board with electric cars we need to get an economy version and any cost cutting they can do will make the difference.
- cypress66 4y ago
  First of all, an SoC comparable to an iPad isn't $1000 more expensive than what they're using. More so, the current hardware they use is quite faster than the original 2010 iPad, yet the og iPad is dramatically more responsive than all these laggy cars.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Comparing Apples to oranges. The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense in optimizing the SW to perfection using budgets of millions and devs with wages in the six figures plus. Meanwhile automotive software is developed by the lowest paid and most crunched people in the industry, in line with the gaming industry, in bottom of the barrel, race to the bottom of cost cutting. Especially that in Automotive you often have tons of legacy code that gets carried over because nobody wants to touch the old codebase, so all the crust keeps getting carried over, with new layers added on top because the device can't exist in a vacuum or in a tightly controlled ecosystem of the same manufacturer like the iPad, bust must be compatible to all the the other ECUs in the car developed by other companies and still be backwards compatible with the old platform. Imagine having the iPad team operate at 10% of their budget and write their SW on top of Symbian OS, and be compatible with the Android ecosystem. Good luck getting a smooth experience there.
    - moogly 4y ago
      > The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense I think you should specify which iPad here because the 1st gen iPad ran like a crippled sloth
kaba0 4y ago
That’s only one part of the problem (somewhat mitigated by solutions like Apple/Android auto), but the very fact that you are expected to touch a small area on the screen when you are on a somewhat bumpy road should have never left the engineering desk.
jjav 4y ago
> So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot. Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems. If the actual action has a perceptible delay, that's annoying but not dangerous. Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control, you know the control has been activated even if the effect is delayed. With a touch screen, if there is a delay, you'll have to keep taking your eyes off the road again and again, triple checking if you pressed on the right spot or not.
- bradgessler 4y ago
  > Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems > Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it. If a touch screen interface were properly designed with large enough touch affordances and the correct levels of responsiveness, I'd be just as happy with that as I would a big dashboard full of buttons. For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.
  - throwaheyy 4y ago
    How many buttons does your car have that you actually have to look?! Mine has lots and I can find the one I want by feel.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster. Ideally it'll be somewhere you can see easily (like on the steering wheel), and most importantly of all it isn't dependent on context. In my car I can easily turn on the aircon, or change the music volume, or answer the phone without looking away from the road because I know where the button is and one press always does that thing. On a touchscreen you always need to give it attention because the screen area changes what it does depending on what you've pressed before pressing that area. That is a huge disadvantage. Your point about pressing a button not doing what it's supposed to is right, but I have to admit I can't remember the last time that happened in any car I've owned. Buttons not working isn't a common issue as far as I know.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rekoil 4y ago
> It's absolutely ridiculous that this still happens today, and it doesn't have to. But then how will the suits save 5¢ per car by buying antiquated hardware instead of something appropriate that can perform the tasks requested of it efficiently?
hilbert42 4y ago
"That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous" No it's not. With mechanical buttons you have tactile feedback, that is you don't have to look except in the broadest sense to get the general direction. Tactile feedback not only tells you that you have the correct position but also lets you know when the job is complete. That's why rotary potentiometers with knobs make much better volume controls and so on. Can you imagine trying to play a piano with a glass keyboard? It'd be damn near impossible even for the most skilled pianist as nearby keys wouldn't provide tactile positioning. Same goes for a typewriter or computer keyboard. If you've ever used a flat panel keyboard you'll understand the problem.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I have a memory from the 90's of sitting in someone's car and fiddling with the ventilation system. The blower would take seconds to respond to changes of the fan speed dial. I don't know if that was electronic or if the fan blade was made out of depleted uranium. I know it was distracting, which is not something you want in a cabin control system. Luckily I was just the passenger. If I'd have been driving that car my distraction level would be higher until I got used to it. You don't want people crashing in general, but crashing their brand new cars is ugly.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    That's a totally different problem and it can apply to analog or digital systems and those with and without tactile feedback. I had a car radio with volume, tone, balance controls etc. that used rotary knobs for adjustment. The trouble was that instead of the knob being connected to a rotary potentiometer which adjusted an analog circuit that responded instantly to rotation, it was connected to a digital rotary shaft encoder which converted the rotation of one's hand—an analog function—into digital which then changed the level of the analog audio. So what you may ask. When I rotated the knob a finite and very annoying delay occurred, one's hand could be already off the knob before the volume altered. This is not a slur on digital systems but on bad shoddy design. First, one questions why bother with such digital complexity in an otherwise analog radio, the second why put a complex digital system in place of about the simplest adjustable system around—a variable resistor. Third, if one designs a digital replacement for an analog system then one would expect it to be better or at least as good as the system it is replacing. In this case the digital system was far substandard to an equivalent analog one. We see shitty design like this everywhere and it's very annoying. I could spend considerable time outlining why but that's a whole topic of itself. I'll just say this, if enough customers complain then it wouldn't happen. This story shows that consumers can get bad design problems fixed if enough complain, however garbage design would be rectified much faster if many more did so. Unfortunately, many people have high tolerance, it takes a lot to make them complain (manufacturers know this and use the fact and there's essentially no laws to stop them getting away with building crap products).
Poppys 4y ago
I find that the in-built systems are all horrendous and designers create lots of inefficient designs so they look good in the marketing video but are a pain to use. I have a Toyota and when I want to change the audio source I have to press 'Source' and then it displays a carousel of inputs that I have to scroll through. Or I can press the 'All' button and it displays a neat grid with the options laid out, why not just show me the grid? That's quick and efficient, the current setup is not. I agree about buttons, if we try and control computers with a button, we will end up with lots of buttons a la 90s ICE system, or a simple interface with mystery button syndrome where you are looking at a screen to see what your button is going to do next.
tester756 4y ago
Which button took more than 0.5s to respond?
neuronic 4y ago
Hard disagree. Point 1: I think the failure to respond in time is, while annoying, a minor problem. The real issue is that you HAVE to look to navigate 3 different incosistent submenus instead of just turning a knob using haptics only (unless you own the car < 1 week when you are still getting to know it). I drive a lot of VW ID.3 and Audi A6. The ID.3 is hot garbage when it comes to its interface. It regurlarly crashes and freezes as well. Winter and freezing temps outside? Too bad the software for climate control just crashed. Have fun with your frozen windows and mirrors. The Audi lets me turn all knobs without looking just by feeling their surface and clicks. No eyes off the road at any point once you know the car. Point 2: it's much less the software than some assume although the engineers aren't entirely blameless. The CPUs used for these systems are the absolute ass low end crap you can find on the market to drop manufacturing costs by another $200 on your $50,000 car. Also management of the engineers is TERRIBLE from what I heard from colleagues at 2 different car makers (one being VW).
iSnow 4y ago
Please, which physical button needs half a second to activate?
krsdcbl 4y ago
I'd like to strongly disagree! When I'm barreling down the road with 2 metric tons of steel under my ass I'll prefer the shittiest tactile UI that let's me FEEL by touch alone if a) the command I'm about to issue is the desired one and b) if i actually issued the command! I'll take a physical button or dial for my AC over a touch screen submenu slider any day in a car, even if the touchscreen was <18ms and button had a second or two of delay. In this scenario the responsiveness of UI is completely irrelevant if it requires me to take my eyes off the street to find it and to validate my input in the first place. When i operate a secondary control in a car i technically already have to shortly compromise ideal safety by taking one hand off the steering wheel and thinking about an additional process. That might be brief, but things happen FAST at 100 km/h. If __on top of that__ I have to stop observing what my car and other cars around me are actually doing, hence interrupting the control mechanism that would let me interrupt the current action and react in the case of imminent danger, I'll be compounding the risk of the whole operation (driving) by orders of magnitude. "Waiting for response" might feel annoying, but it's nowhere near the safety concern "looking at a screen on the center console to hit the right thing on a glass pane while moving and experiencing inertia" will always present. And that's even without additional complications like "hitting the wrong thing because I didn't look and having to visually debug what i just did on the fly, all still while driving". Touchscreens aren't an issue because their software is bad, but because they're the wrong interface in the first place. If the UX is bad, the best UI won't fix it. And this goes x1000 for tools that can literally kill me and others.
astral303 4y ago
"What do you get when you cross a computer with a car?" "A computer!" It's a "Riddle for the Information Age" that in Alan Cooper wrote in 1999 [1] in "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". One of the riddles is: "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane?" but things have gotten much much worse since then, it needs an update with the contents of this article. He writes: "That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car... Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines..." We have seen this coming for 20 years now easily. iDrive happened and excuses were made. Nobody cares about response times or human-oriented design, it seems, which is incredibly baffling in a car! Where the rest of the controls are supposed to be designed with humans in mind. My 2022 Subaru's Harman Kardon-built head-unit will block out my entire navigation view for 3 seconds if I dare to brush the volume control with my hand. I've learned to not adjust it after that because doing so only prolongs the time that I can't see where I'm supposed to be going. Also, if I am so unlucky as to lower the volume while the navigation speaks, I end up adjusting the "voiceover volume" and not the "radio/media volume." So when I wonder: "hey why did the navigation stop talking?" I have to remember that I hit the unlucky time to use the invisbily-modal volume knob. Of course, nobody cares and they let this travesty out the door because it's just the "entertainment system." 1 - https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp/0672326140 https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...
sublinear 4y ago
I agree, but blaming the devs is completely incorrect. In any nontrivial piece of sotware most of the latency is added by synchronous network requests. I'll leave it to your imagination what those are for and whether it was the devs who wanted it or the PMs and execs.
bitcharmer 4y ago
This is hilariously wrong on so many levels : - )
Aeolun 4y ago
The thing is that with physical buttons you’re suddenly back with electrotechnical engineers, whom, on the whole need to be a whole lot more competent than software engineers to do their jobs.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Yep. And they’ve pretty much got the track record to prove that they can.
practice9 4y ago
And if that physical button is for clicking through 4+ states, I would rather take a touchscreen with well designed main screen widgets.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
Amen. Pushing a mechanical button (with no CPU middle man) has zero latency.
ricardobayes 4y ago
Believe me it's not about the developers. Even just a few years ago premium, even luxury makes used a 333 MHz processor in the head unit to power their onboard entertainment. Again, it's no such much about software - in safety critical automotive ECUs load must never reach above 33% or so. The hardware is ridiculously underpowered in most cases due to cost cutting. Remember most car makers operate on razor thin margins, often (much) less than 1k USD per car sold.
chillbill 4y ago
I think it’s ridiculous that this of all things is what has riled you up this much.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Your constant blaming of bad engineers is s clear invitation to point out that you’re incredibly incredibly naive to think that software people are sitting unencumbered by wider business realities and are just deciding to do a Bad Job. You are no better.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
In my state in the US, it's illegal to operate a cellphone while driving. I would appreciate if the law were extended to cover cheap tablets mounted to the spot in cars where our physical buttons belong.
barrysteve 4y ago
The complexity of functionality, that you can never really get familiar with, is a problem too. Two US Navy crashes (17 sailors dead, unfortunately) are attributed to touchscreen complexity and unfamiliarity with the controls. [0] The Navy is ditching touchscreens too, and going with mechanical switches and wheels. Maybe cars and ships make a larger trend away from touchscreens? [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450
gcatalfamo 4y ago
Physical buttons allow you to press them without looking away from the road. This is the only real topic about buttons and driving.
blarghyblarg 4y ago
I worked on an infotainment system some years back. Trust me: we hated the response times more than you do, and I'm sure you hate them a lot. There were, and are, layers and layers of issues leading to it.
garyrob 4y ago
"So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem. " At least for me, response time isn't the issue. It's being able to reach without looking, feel the position of the button I want in relationship to other buttons, and then press it and get the desired results. That is something that can't be duplicated with a touch screen, particularly one on which the button I want isn't on the very top level.
bick_nyers 4y ago
Let me see if I am understanding what you are saying correctly. Docker microservices running a python backend and a JS frontend with 1000 dependencies for a web-based UI for basic car control systems? Edit: Fuck it, let's put some AI in there too. Volume adjustments should pass through a 100M parameter model first to determine if we should change the volume and by how much.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
This isn't about response time, but about what you can do *without looking*. Everything I generally need to do while driving I can do without using the touch screen. Being experienced with my car I can do it purely by touch, no looking *at all*. We make a big issue about hands-free use of phones while driving--other than for a new driver I do not believe that matters. I learned on stick, that most certainly isn't hands-free but nobody says it's unsafe. What's actually important is that driver tasks be eyes-free and concentration-free. (And, yes, once you've learned stick is concentration-free.) And hands-free doesn't eliminate the problem of people taking phone calls that require thought--that's what is actually dangerous. I don't give the slightest hoot about the response time of the controls so long as they count activations independent of the response time. (I click a control 5 times, I care that it actually moved the relevant value 5 but if it takes a second per click to acknowledge that's irrelevant. I'm unlikely to even look at the result.)
lisasays 4y ago
I'd be curious as to where the magical 16ms figure comes from. Yeah, a single monitor refresh. But is that really needed for most UIs? these imbecile developers ... under-experienced software "engineers." Yes, I know we've all been conditioned by the relentless pecking order of this industry to direct our ire downwards and sideways, rather than where it belongs. But in my experience, at least 80 percent of the time the developers (whatever their caliber) are perfectly aware of when stuff is inadequate, and how to do stuff better. Ultimately it's managers and executives who make the call on what to create, and when to release.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I spent a lot of time in my career directing it upward, but it's not wrong to blame your peers either. Boundary setting is a two way street. There's a certain ratio of 'no' in your responses and if you don't hit it then you don't have a healthy relationship. And as the member of a group dynamic, you're letting down your peers. But the real shocker was when I caught developers agreeing with me in philosophical discussions and then sitting around doing nothing when slack occurred in the schedule. It didn't occur to me that developers would agree with engineering philosophy only to appear high minded, and then defect when the cameras weren't rolling. Boy was that a hard (and angry) week.
  - lisasays 4y ago
    Oh sure - there are definitely morale and trust issues. Even (and sometimes especially) among otherwise smart and capable people. Vastly more common (and destructive) than simple incompetence, I have sadly come to find.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      "Groomed for failure" is one of the oldest engineering terms I stole from someone else. There's a definite "drive it like you stole it" mentality among managers about how to get work out of devs. I've never had much luck with Burnout and Replace. Building momentum by getting better at writing code (not better at taking shortcuts) has a lot going for it but seems hippy dippy to some people. I was just thinking this morning that Ted Lasso may make it easier for some of us to try again to reintroduce some of these concepts.
hinkley 4y ago
Signing off on interactions has usually been an iterative process and so on most projects there's a bit of frog boiling going on. The logarithmic increase in set/insert times as your user base swells by orders of magnitude, for instance. This was all fine when we had 100 test users in our database. Response time is not so great with 100k. The first app I ever did performance tuning on essentially had time series data and (when I got there) quadratic search time with 2 criteria. Nobody before me had bothered putting a year's worth of data into the sample data, let alone 5. They also hadn't dreamed of 3 search criteria (surprise, cubic time!) Of course before me the app was too slow to care - literally could watch the UI paint it was so slow. When you have two buttons on the interface everything is snappy. Each new button should reasonably expect logarithmic overhead, decent designs often add square root overhead (memory costs on real hardware are n^0.5), and bad designs add constant or quadratic overhead, and either nobody checks or is so focused on the deadline that they can't see the project burning down around them. Every day that click takes a few milliseconds longer.
winternett 4y ago
I've got a volvo XC90... The "ipad-like" touch screen looks cool, but it's very uncool as software updates have slowed it down over time... When I shift into reverse, the camera often doesn't come on for what seems like ages... The car also does not turn completely off when I turn it off, completely bewildering to me, as the battery can go dead easily in a crisis because of this issue, especially when the car is connected to Android Auto, the car never wants to turn itself off. The volume control on the car turns up every time I switch the radio to a new station or input, even when the stereo is on mute, which is verrrrry jarring. The car beeps constantly for no reason as well, reverse sensor noises and a lot more unhelpful options need to be turned off every time the car is started, almost feels as if they want to frustrate drivers. I am really beginning to hate advanced technology in cars, because the software in them is geared towards people that constantly want to be distracted and entertained by the tech, whereas I like to stay focused on the road. Mobile phones also drive the tech and stimulation obsession for many, whereas old cars just serve a common and simple purpose, and with an audio jack and car-native GPS (which phone/car makers got rid of) life was so much more simple and enjoyable while driving from what I can recall. Software driven cars create tons of distractions that translate into real world accidents that could be preventable, especially with developing hands free commands (they work very poorly still in most cars to this day).
dreamcompiler 4y ago
This is basic soft realtime programming 101, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be taught in schools much. Nor do many managers seem to understand that it's even a thing, much less a desirable thing, much less a dealbreaker if it's not done. I also suspect many of these in-vehicle infotainment systems are using a non-realtime OS like plain-vanilla Linux without PREEMPT_RT.
mldqj 4y ago
Most of the time, the unresponsiveness is due to the touchscreen itself not the software. They usually use inexpensive touchscreens. It's expensive to use something like the iPhone's touchscreen on large screens in cars.

gumballindie 4y ago

> these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms Oh my sweet summer child. If only it was the developer's fault and not their managers pushing ridiculous deadlines.

husamia 4y ago

it's going to require a completely new type of hardware and software system from scratch. I don't think Tesla did that but they could have.

sizzle 4y ago

Developers or cost optimizing MBAs? What developer would advocate for slower touchscreen response time at the expense of having a good UX if money was of no issue?

tekla 4y ago
Developers. Engineers seemed to have no issue with making interfaces and systems that work in cars before the touchscreen fad.
- rdez6173 4y ago
  Nope. Greed. It costs way more to build out physical ergonomic interior controls when they are permanent fixtures for several model years and any changes require new physical elements to be created and fit (and designed for mass production). Software can be updated over the air, so there's less pressure on engineers to get it perfect. The solution is not to point fingers and guess, but instead measure and revise. Study the amount of time drivers' eyes are off the road for routine tasks, develop acceptable limits and enforce them. Software engineers of any ilk are just as capable of following sensible guidelines if everyone else in the company is obliged to as well.

hcknwscommenter 4y ago

I disagree. With a physical button, you know you pushed it because you feel it give and then stop giving. After the first couple of uses you can get used to any response time. With a touchscreen, there is no tactile feedback difference between a button press and a miss. So when you press it and it doesn't do anything, or behaves unexpectedly, you don't know if it is lagging or you missed. Touchscreens are much worse for drivers.

naikrovek 4y ago
the apple Macbook trackpad proves that this tactile feedback could be done for touch screens also. touchscreens are worse but they don't have to be. manufacturers just don't care enough to make them better. they're too busy charging more for touchscreens while saving tons of money on buttons, which are expensive in comparison.
- anamexis 4y ago
  You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    > You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well. that's not a given at all. maybe for computer keyboards I guess, but not for cars. car makers always seem to want buttons to be flush with their surroundings and have no bumps or dips on them to help you find the button you're after. I always have to look for the button if it isn't on my steering wheel, and I usually have to look when it's there as well. the only control in my car I don't ever need my eyes to find and use is the volume knob for the entertainment system. maybe the hazard button, too, but I haven't needed to push it yet.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      I just checked and I could reach and operate aircon knobs (3x), radio volume and phone answer/hangup buttons without looking, fast. Granted most of these are on the wheel, but even aircon controls would be a no go on a touchscreen.

mtrpcic 4y ago

The benefit of buttons isn't in the response time, it's in the tactile feedback that makes it so you don't need 16ms response time. I heard it click, I felt it click, it clicked. If the thing I wanted to happen doesn't, it's because it's broken and not because I can't tell if I clicked the right spot on my iPad. Not having to take your eyes off the road in these cases is the benefit of buttons, and no improvement to response time in touch screens will fully solve that.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
This isn't how tactile buttons in modern cars work. You're doing the same thing as pushing keys on a keyboard. The software can still be slow. Turn the physical volume dial on a car with a slow Apple CarPlay interface and tell me how that works out for you. Oh, it's too loud? But it takes 2 seconds for the software to respond due to lag and now you're fiddling with the volume button trying to not make it worse? A physical button didn't fix that.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  You turn the physical dial, and regardless of the outcome, you know that your input was received by the HCI, so you don't need to wonder if you should try again. If it worked, great; if not, oh well; no need to look at it and try again though. That's the benefit.
  - colanderman 4y ago
    The issue is, how far to turn it? My Android phone has a similar issue while operating over Bluetooth. While holding "volume up", it takes several seconds for the volume change to register. So I have no feedback for how long I need to hold "volume up". If I wait until the volume is loud enough -- it keeps going up for another two seconds, to the point that it is painful and possibly damaging my hearing.
    - throwaheyy 4y ago
      There’s tactile feedback for that too. You learn how many “clicks” of the knob you need.

nmz 4y ago

Most of my time looking at the screen is because I need to look to know where the button is. That's a huge thing, I should NEVER have to take my eyes of the road. Big woop? it absolutely is. Things are still mediocre, and I do admit the lag time should be criminal. but yes, this is a win that could possibly be saving a few lives.

jquery 4y ago
Indeed. Touchscreens are extremely flexible interfaces, but they are not superior in certain use cases, especially where eyes must be kept elsewhere.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  From my experience touchscreens are only superior in terms of customization and sometimes size. In everything else they're inferior to a hardware interface.

epgui 4y ago

Touch screens arguably make development and feature iteration easier, but they are clearly and obviously a net negative for safety and ease of use. Cars are safety-intensive machines.

misssocrates 4y ago

They should be faster, but don't they support voice commands while driving? That's the idea so you don't have to touch it much or at all while driving.

wkat4242 4y ago

> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem. Major accidents are almost always a cascade of errors. It may not be perfect, but not having to take eyes off the road can really break the chain of a big accident in progress. A touchscreen UI probably won't cause an accident on its own, but it will be a link in the chain of a driver already tired and lost in the area, trying to find the button to press to turn on the headlights. Because yes recently there was one car manufacturer that moved that function to touch also, and proudly claimed their software was 100% bug-free. I'm sure the audience here knows how ridiculous such a statement is.

jaclaz 4y ago
Though all in all it is a minor nuisance, my car navigation system has this safety feature of randomly displaying over the map a popup (that you have to touch/click OK to have it go away) about how you shouldn't be interacting with it when driving. For some reasons it tends to pop up every time I am approaching or already inside a roundabout, preferrably one of those where if you miss the right exit and take the wrong one it will take you 20 minutes in the traffic to get back to where you were.
byyll 4y ago
Is there a reason not to have auto start and auto stop headlights?
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Yes there are reasons why people want to override them sometimes and this needs to be reverted. My dad used to sleep in his car for an hour before work, with the engine on to provide heating in winter. Because traffic was too bad an hour later. Just one of the many examples.

sircastor 4y ago

> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits. Your brand new 2024 car’s system has been in development for 4 years. Product people have been picking at the design and asking for changes way too late, and someone in accounting has asked the hardware contractor to cut more cost off the BOM. My colleagues were tremendously talented. Some of the brightest engineers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. The developers aren’t lazy or inexperienced, they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
That still just sounds like people not knowing what they're doing. In no world would automakers say, "Hey you know, we just did all of this tire engineering with this rubber, but let's change the composition at the last minute and not retest all of its physical properties." So, why should it be any different with software? Because some sucker PM didn't have the brains to say, "We can't actually do that."?
- teeray 4y ago
  It feels like there’s some derision towards the infotainment software engineering since it’s perceived as not safety critical. It’s in the name, “infotainment”! Fun and optional! It’s not like you’re working on the PFD/MFD/EICAS on an Airbus. “So what, the seat heater button lags sometimes. Not gonna kill someone like the tires. Ship it” says some MBA higher-up. But then the seats kick on automatically when the car starts and the driver tucks in with her morning coffee for a commute down the highway. The coffee kicks in, the cabin heats up, and suddenly that warm seat is like sitting on a griddle. She taps on the menu to bring up the seat controls, then lag, then has to hit the seat heat button twice to go from “high” to “low” to “off”, lagging each time. Oh, she hit it three times, now it’s on high again. Tap, tap, tap, tap… Meanwhile she has crossed three lanes of traffic and is staring down a jersey barrier at 70+ mph.

jkarneges 4y ago

> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. My Volt's physical mute button seems to be software controlled. Normally it is very responsive, except when the car is starting up. It kills me whenever I start the car and the volume happened to be cranked up from earlier, music blasts, and the mute button is ineffective. Fortunately the volume knob seems to be hardware controlled and can be used to lower the volume when the car is starting. It's really unintuitive since both controls are physical.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
Yeah, it's just poorly thought out engineering. There's really no excuse. I owned a B7 Audi A4 which simply limited the volume level to a user-defined setting when you turned on the car. That concept is roughly 20 years old.
- avereveard 4y ago
  And it's not something limited to premium car either, my first generation 500x has three different radio startup behaviour to choose: always on, always off, as it was when you turned the car off
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
hinkley 4y ago
Going from audiobook on one trip to radio on the next sure wakes me up, and not in a good way. At least I have a physical volume dial with a power button in it.

adrr 4y ago

I don’t know that would be helpful. I hate digging through my Tesla’s menus to control the wipers even though it is very responsive.

gonehome 4y ago
You can put the wipers icon at the bottom bar now, that makes it much better.
- nixass 4y ago
  That's us solving a problem that hasn't existed until few years ago nor should exist in first place. Tesla is really trying to reinvent the wheel here
- ascorbic 4y ago
  I'm not sure how they got the idea that it's ever acceptable to need to press a button to open a menu in order to turn wipers on. Particularly when the rain sensor is so bad that auto is basically useless.
  - davnn 4y ago
    The problem is that there is no rain sensor :)
    - ascorbic 4y ago
      Well, something is trying to make the wipers work automatically. It's just not very good at it.
      - gonehome 4y ago
        It’s vision from the forward facing camera behind the rear view mirror (iirc)
tomashm 4y ago
In newer software versions, you should be able to control the wipers with the left scrolling wheel, right after you have activated them with the push button on the left arm. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3D-E41D-4671-ADE5-C2FB73203323.html#:~:text=Roll%20the%20left%20scroll%20button,or%20not%20it%20is%20raining https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....

HWR_14 4y ago

> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. It doesn't matter if it takes 1 second for the radio to change stations. The problem with delays is me spending 500 ms trying to get the buttons to react. When I touch a physical button, I instantly know I did.

hinkley 4y ago
You have confirmation affordances. "We have received your request and will get back to you shortly" Of course, if the button is sometimes ignored, that undermines the affordance and people learn not to trust it.

14 4y ago

That would require a device with the power of an iPad. I’m sure it could be done but again adds another $500-$1000 to the final price of the car. A physical button costs a couple bucks. If we are going to get people on board with electric cars we need to get an economy version and any cost cutting they can do will make the difference.

cypress66 4y ago
First of all, an SoC comparable to an iPad isn't $1000 more expensive than what they're using. More so, the current hardware they use is quite faster than the original 2010 iPad, yet the og iPad is dramatically more responsive than all these laggy cars.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Comparing Apples to oranges. The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense in optimizing the SW to perfection using budgets of millions and devs with wages in the six figures plus. Meanwhile automotive software is developed by the lowest paid and most crunched people in the industry, in line with the gaming industry, in bottom of the barrel, race to the bottom of cost cutting. Especially that in Automotive you often have tons of legacy code that gets carried over because nobody wants to touch the old codebase, so all the crust keeps getting carried over, with new layers added on top because the device can't exist in a vacuum or in a tightly controlled ecosystem of the same manufacturer like the iPad, bust must be compatible to all the the other ECUs in the car developed by other companies and still be backwards compatible with the old platform. Imagine having the iPad team operate at 10% of their budget and write their SW on top of Symbian OS, and be compatible with the Android ecosystem. Good luck getting a smooth experience there.
  - moogly 4y ago
    > The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense I think you should specify which iPad here because the 1st gen iPad ran like a crippled sloth

kaba0 4y ago

That’s only one part of the problem (somewhat mitigated by solutions like Apple/Android auto), but the very fact that you are expected to touch a small area on the screen when you are on a somewhat bumpy road should have never left the engineering desk.

jjav 4y ago

> So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot. Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems. If the actual action has a perceptible delay, that's annoying but not dangerous. Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control, you know the control has been activated even if the effect is delayed. With a touch screen, if there is a delay, you'll have to keep taking your eyes off the road again and again, triple checking if you pressed on the right spot or not.

bradgessler 4y ago
> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems > Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it. If a touch screen interface were properly designed with large enough touch affordances and the correct levels of responsiveness, I'd be just as happy with that as I would a big dashboard full of buttons. For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.
- throwaheyy 4y ago
  How many buttons does your car have that you actually have to look?! Mine has lots and I can find the one I want by feel.
- onion2k 4y ago
  my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster. Ideally it'll be somewhere you can see easily (like on the steering wheel), and most importantly of all it isn't dependent on context. In my car I can easily turn on the aircon, or change the music volume, or answer the phone without looking away from the road because I know where the button is and one press always does that thing. On a touchscreen you always need to give it attention because the screen area changes what it does depending on what you've pressed before pressing that area. That is a huge disadvantage. Your point about pressing a button not doing what it's supposed to is right, but I have to admit I can't remember the last time that happened in any car I've owned. Buttons not working isn't a common issue as far as I know.

deleted 4y ago

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rekoil 4y ago

> It's absolutely ridiculous that this still happens today, and it doesn't have to. But then how will the suits save 5¢ per car by buying antiquated hardware instead of something appropriate that can perform the tasks requested of it efficiently?

hilbert42 4y ago

"That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous" No it's not. With mechanical buttons you have tactile feedback, that is you don't have to look except in the broadest sense to get the general direction. Tactile feedback not only tells you that you have the correct position but also lets you know when the job is complete. That's why rotary potentiometers with knobs make much better volume controls and so on. Can you imagine trying to play a piano with a glass keyboard? It'd be damn near impossible even for the most skilled pianist as nearby keys wouldn't provide tactile positioning. Same goes for a typewriter or computer keyboard. If you've ever used a flat panel keyboard you'll understand the problem.

hinkley 4y ago
I have a memory from the 90's of sitting in someone's car and fiddling with the ventilation system. The blower would take seconds to respond to changes of the fan speed dial. I don't know if that was electronic or if the fan blade was made out of depleted uranium. I know it was distracting, which is not something you want in a cabin control system. Luckily I was just the passenger. If I'd have been driving that car my distraction level would be higher until I got used to it. You don't want people crashing in general, but crashing their brand new cars is ugly.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  That's a totally different problem and it can apply to analog or digital systems and those with and without tactile feedback. I had a car radio with volume, tone, balance controls etc. that used rotary knobs for adjustment. The trouble was that instead of the knob being connected to a rotary potentiometer which adjusted an analog circuit that responded instantly to rotation, it was connected to a digital rotary shaft encoder which converted the rotation of one's hand—an analog function—into digital which then changed the level of the analog audio. So what you may ask. When I rotated the knob a finite and very annoying delay occurred, one's hand could be already off the knob before the volume altered. This is not a slur on digital systems but on bad shoddy design. First, one questions why bother with such digital complexity in an otherwise analog radio, the second why put a complex digital system in place of about the simplest adjustable system around—a variable resistor. Third, if one designs a digital replacement for an analog system then one would expect it to be better or at least as good as the system it is replacing. In this case the digital system was far substandard to an equivalent analog one. We see shitty design like this everywhere and it's very annoying. I could spend considerable time outlining why but that's a whole topic of itself. I'll just say this, if enough customers complain then it wouldn't happen. This story shows that consumers can get bad design problems fixed if enough complain, however garbage design would be rectified much faster if many more did so. Unfortunately, many people have high tolerance, it takes a lot to make them complain (manufacturers know this and use the fact and there's essentially no laws to stop them getting away with building crap products).

Poppys 4y ago

I find that the in-built systems are all horrendous and designers create lots of inefficient designs so they look good in the marketing video but are a pain to use. I have a Toyota and when I want to change the audio source I have to press 'Source' and then it displays a carousel of inputs that I have to scroll through. Or I can press the 'All' button and it displays a neat grid with the options laid out, why not just show me the grid? That's quick and efficient, the current setup is not. I agree about buttons, if we try and control computers with a button, we will end up with lots of buttons a la 90s ICE system, or a simple interface with mystery button syndrome where you are looking at a screen to see what your button is going to do next.

tester756 4y ago

Which button took more than 0.5s to respond?

neuronic 4y ago

Hard disagree. Point 1: I think the failure to respond in time is, while annoying, a minor problem. The real issue is that you HAVE to look to navigate 3 different incosistent submenus instead of just turning a knob using haptics only (unless you own the car < 1 week when you are still getting to know it). I drive a lot of VW ID.3 and Audi A6. The ID.3 is hot garbage when it comes to its interface. It regurlarly crashes and freezes as well. Winter and freezing temps outside? Too bad the software for climate control just crashed. Have fun with your frozen windows and mirrors. The Audi lets me turn all knobs without looking just by feeling their surface and clicks. No eyes off the road at any point once you know the car. Point 2: it's much less the software than some assume although the engineers aren't entirely blameless. The CPUs used for these systems are the absolute ass low end crap you can find on the market to drop manufacturing costs by another $200 on your $50,000 car. Also management of the engineers is TERRIBLE from what I heard from colleagues at 2 different car makers (one being VW).

iSnow 4y ago

Please, which physical button needs half a second to activate?

krsdcbl 4y ago

I'd like to strongly disagree! When I'm barreling down the road with 2 metric tons of steel under my ass I'll prefer the shittiest tactile UI that let's me FEEL by touch alone if a) the command I'm about to issue is the desired one and b) if i actually issued the command! I'll take a physical button or dial for my AC over a touch screen submenu slider any day in a car, even if the touchscreen was <18ms and button had a second or two of delay. In this scenario the responsiveness of UI is completely irrelevant if it requires me to take my eyes off the street to find it and to validate my input in the first place. When i operate a secondary control in a car i technically already have to shortly compromise ideal safety by taking one hand off the steering wheel and thinking about an additional process. That might be brief, but things happen FAST at 100 km/h. If __on top of that__ I have to stop observing what my car and other cars around me are actually doing, hence interrupting the control mechanism that would let me interrupt the current action and react in the case of imminent danger, I'll be compounding the risk of the whole operation (driving) by orders of magnitude. "Waiting for response" might feel annoying, but it's nowhere near the safety concern "looking at a screen on the center console to hit the right thing on a glass pane while moving and experiencing inertia" will always present. And that's even without additional complications like "hitting the wrong thing because I didn't look and having to visually debug what i just did on the fly, all still while driving". Touchscreens aren't an issue because their software is bad, but because they're the wrong interface in the first place. If the UX is bad, the best UI won't fix it. And this goes x1000 for tools that can literally kill me and others.

astral303 4y ago

"What do you get when you cross a computer with a car?" "A computer!" It's a "Riddle for the Information Age" that in Alan Cooper wrote in 1999 [1] in "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". One of the riddles is: "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane?" but things have gotten much much worse since then, it needs an update with the contents of this article. He writes: "That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car... Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines..." We have seen this coming for 20 years now easily. iDrive happened and excuses were made. Nobody cares about response times or human-oriented design, it seems, which is incredibly baffling in a car! Where the rest of the controls are supposed to be designed with humans in mind. My 2022 Subaru's Harman Kardon-built head-unit will block out my entire navigation view for 3 seconds if I dare to brush the volume control with my hand. I've learned to not adjust it after that because doing so only prolongs the time that I can't see where I'm supposed to be going. Also, if I am so unlucky as to lower the volume while the navigation speaks, I end up adjusting the "voiceover volume" and not the "radio/media volume." So when I wonder: "hey why did the navigation stop talking?" I have to remember that I hit the unlucky time to use the invisbily-modal volume knob. Of course, nobody cares and they let this travesty out the door because it's just the "entertainment system." 1 - https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp/0672326140 https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...

sublinear 4y ago

I agree, but blaming the devs is completely incorrect. In any nontrivial piece of sotware most of the latency is added by synchronous network requests. I'll leave it to your imagination what those are for and whether it was the devs who wanted it or the PMs and execs.

bitcharmer 4y ago

This is hilariously wrong on so many levels : - )

Aeolun 4y ago

The thing is that with physical buttons you’re suddenly back with electrotechnical engineers, whom, on the whole need to be a whole lot more competent than software engineers to do their jobs.

KyeRussell 4y ago
Yep. And they’ve pretty much got the track record to prove that they can.

practice9 4y ago

And if that physical button is for clicking through 4+ states, I would rather take a touchscreen with well designed main screen widgets.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

Amen. Pushing a mechanical button (with no CPU middle man) has zero latency.

ricardobayes 4y ago

Believe me it's not about the developers. Even just a few years ago premium, even luxury makes used a 333 MHz processor in the head unit to power their onboard entertainment. Again, it's no such much about software - in safety critical automotive ECUs load must never reach above 33% or so. The hardware is ridiculously underpowered in most cases due to cost cutting. Remember most car makers operate on razor thin margins, often (much) less than 1k USD per car sold.

chillbill 4y ago

I think it’s ridiculous that this of all things is what has riled you up this much.

KyeRussell 4y ago

Your constant blaming of bad engineers is s clear invitation to point out that you’re incredibly incredibly naive to think that software people are sitting unencumbered by wider business realities and are just deciding to do a Bad Job. You are no better.

washadjeffmad 4y ago

In my state in the US, it's illegal to operate a cellphone while driving. I would appreciate if the law were extended to cover cheap tablets mounted to the spot in cars where our physical buttons belong.

barrysteve 4y ago

The complexity of functionality, that you can never really get familiar with, is a problem too. Two US Navy crashes (17 sailors dead, unfortunately) are attributed to touchscreen complexity and unfamiliarity with the controls. [0] The Navy is ditching touchscreens too, and going with mechanical switches and wheels. Maybe cars and ships make a larger trend away from touchscreens? [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

gcatalfamo 4y ago

Physical buttons allow you to press them without looking away from the road. This is the only real topic about buttons and driving.

blarghyblarg 4y ago

I worked on an infotainment system some years back. Trust me: we hated the response times more than you do, and I'm sure you hate them a lot. There were, and are, layers and layers of issues leading to it.

garyrob 4y ago

"So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. You've just removed one problem. " At least for me, response time isn't the issue. It's being able to reach without looking, feel the position of the button I want in relationship to other buttons, and then press it and get the desired results. That is something that can't be duplicated with a touch screen, particularly one on which the button I want isn't on the very top level.

bick_nyers 4y ago

Let me see if I am understanding what you are saying correctly. Docker microservices running a python backend and a JS frontend with 1000 dependencies for a web-based UI for basic car control systems? Edit: Fuck it, let's put some AI in there too. Volume adjustments should pass through a 100M parameter model first to determine if we should change the volume and by how much.

LorenPechtel 4y ago

This isn't about response time, but about what you can do *without looking*. Everything I generally need to do while driving I can do without using the touch screen. Being experienced with my car I can do it purely by touch, no looking *at all*. We make a big issue about hands-free use of phones while driving--other than for a new driver I do not believe that matters. I learned on stick, that most certainly isn't hands-free but nobody says it's unsafe. What's actually important is that driver tasks be eyes-free and concentration-free. (And, yes, once you've learned stick is concentration-free.) And hands-free doesn't eliminate the problem of people taking phone calls that require thought--that's what is actually dangerous. I don't give the slightest hoot about the response time of the controls so long as they count activations independent of the response time. (I click a control 5 times, I care that it actually moved the relevant value 5 but if it takes a second per click to acknowledge that's irrelevant. I'm unlikely to even look at the result.)

lisasays 4y ago

I'd be curious as to where the magical 16ms figure comes from. Yeah, a single monitor refresh. But is that really needed for most UIs? these imbecile developers ... under-experienced software "engineers." Yes, I know we've all been conditioned by the relentless pecking order of this industry to direct our ire downwards and sideways, rather than where it belongs. But in my experience, at least 80 percent of the time the developers (whatever their caliber) are perfectly aware of when stuff is inadequate, and how to do stuff better. Ultimately it's managers and executives who make the call on what to create, and when to release.

hinkley 4y ago
I spent a lot of time in my career directing it upward, but it's not wrong to blame your peers either. Boundary setting is a two way street. There's a certain ratio of 'no' in your responses and if you don't hit it then you don't have a healthy relationship. And as the member of a group dynamic, you're letting down your peers. But the real shocker was when I caught developers agreeing with me in philosophical discussions and then sitting around doing nothing when slack occurred in the schedule. It didn't occur to me that developers would agree with engineering philosophy only to appear high minded, and then defect when the cameras weren't rolling. Boy was that a hard (and angry) week.
- lisasays 4y ago
  Oh sure - there are definitely morale and trust issues. Even (and sometimes especially) among otherwise smart and capable people. Vastly more common (and destructive) than simple incompetence, I have sadly come to find.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    "Groomed for failure" is one of the oldest engineering terms I stole from someone else. There's a definite "drive it like you stole it" mentality among managers about how to get work out of devs. I've never had much luck with Burnout and Replace. Building momentum by getting better at writing code (not better at taking shortcuts) has a lot going for it but seems hippy dippy to some people. I was just thinking this morning that Ted Lasso may make it easier for some of us to try again to reintroduce some of these concepts.

hinkley 4y ago

Signing off on interactions has usually been an iterative process and so on most projects there's a bit of frog boiling going on. The logarithmic increase in set/insert times as your user base swells by orders of magnitude, for instance. This was all fine when we had 100 test users in our database. Response time is not so great with 100k. The first app I ever did performance tuning on essentially had time series data and (when I got there) quadratic search time with 2 criteria. Nobody before me had bothered putting a year's worth of data into the sample data, let alone 5. They also hadn't dreamed of 3 search criteria (surprise, cubic time!) Of course before me the app was too slow to care - literally could watch the UI paint it was so slow. When you have two buttons on the interface everything is snappy. Each new button should reasonably expect logarithmic overhead, decent designs often add square root overhead (memory costs on real hardware are n^0.5), and bad designs add constant or quadratic overhead, and either nobody checks or is so focused on the deadline that they can't see the project burning down around them. Every day that click takes a few milliseconds longer.

winternett 4y ago

I've got a volvo XC90... The "ipad-like" touch screen looks cool, but it's very uncool as software updates have slowed it down over time... When I shift into reverse, the camera often doesn't come on for what seems like ages... The car also does not turn completely off when I turn it off, completely bewildering to me, as the battery can go dead easily in a crisis because of this issue, especially when the car is connected to Android Auto, the car never wants to turn itself off. The volume control on the car turns up every time I switch the radio to a new station or input, even when the stereo is on mute, which is verrrrry jarring. The car beeps constantly for no reason as well, reverse sensor noises and a lot more unhelpful options need to be turned off every time the car is started, almost feels as if they want to frustrate drivers. I am really beginning to hate advanced technology in cars, because the software in them is geared towards people that constantly want to be distracted and entertained by the tech, whereas I like to stay focused on the road. Mobile phones also drive the tech and stimulation obsession for many, whereas old cars just serve a common and simple purpose, and with an audio jack and car-native GPS (which phone/car makers got rid of) life was so much more simple and enjoyable while driving from what I can recall. Software driven cars create tons of distractions that translate into real world accidents that could be preventable, especially with developing hands free commands (they work very poorly still in most cars to this day).

dreamcompiler 4y ago

This is basic soft realtime programming 101, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be taught in schools much. Nor do many managers seem to understand that it's even a thing, much less a desirable thing, much less a dealbreaker if it's not done. I also suspect many of these in-vehicle infotainment systems are using a non-realtime OS like plain-vanilla Linux without PREEMPT_RT.

mldqj 4y ago

Most of the time, the unresponsiveness is due to the touchscreen itself not the software. They usually use inexpensive touchscreens. It's expensive to use something like the iPhone's touchscreen on large screens in cars.