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You are missing the point. (So I will spell it out for you: consumers have more power than your comments indicate).
by dh2022 3y ago
You are missing the point. (So I will spell it out for you: consumers have more power than your comments indicate).
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI will spell it out for you, since you were so kind to spell it out for me: consumers' power is limited by the interests of corporations. When a corporation can fix what is viewed by the consumer as a mistake without significant financial downsides, they frequently will (if the consensus is strong enough that it really was a mistake). However, they will not fix anything that causes them financial hardship unless forced to by the legal system.
- dh2022 3y agoArguing for the sake of arguing? If you read the article I linked you would have seen that touch screens were used by car manufacturers to lower their cost. Switching from touch screens to buttons causes them some financial hardship (their costs are going up). The article I linked directly refutes your argument.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago1. evidence for the cost savings in a single vehicle build is hard to find. The article you linked to cites a cost of $50 for the screen, claiming this is significantly less than tactile controls, but this is contradicted by the actual cost of the typical tactile controls used in mass-market vehicles. 2. design costs with tactile controls maybe a little higher for the first stage of a new design, but its not as if car companies did not have (a) in-house talent for this (b) decades of experience. Contrast with the (amortized) cost of implementing "car OS's" on touchscreens before even getting to "what does the infotainment screen look like". 3. where the screens do potentially save money is in allowing rollouts of new features without requiring new hardware (which in fact would generally be impossible to rely on). Of course, as Tesla found out, this doesn't always go as planned, and the company can incur extra costs because users know the change can be rolled back. 4. as the article you linked to, and dozens of others, makes clear, there is a growing body of both scientific and anecdotal evidence that screens are terrible for safety while driving. 5. whether manufacturers are responding more to consumers' demands for buttons, or the evidence that they are exposing themselves to legal liability for their interface designs is hard to get a handle on at this point, since they notoriously do not speak openly and honestly about such things. Therefore, please do feel free to believe it is an example of corporations responding to consumer demands, while I'll continue to believe that it is corporations covering their collective asses for the design mistakes they've made (preferably before they get sued over a collision on par with the navy vessel one that led to their removal from US navy ships).