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> It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving. It is likely that neither safety nor ease of
by pwg 3y ago
> It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving.
It is likely that neither safety nor ease of use were part of the automaker's "thought process".
It is much more likely that a first misguided "designer" created the first touch panel control and somehow sold it to "management" as being "futuristic" and/or "ahead of the competition". And once the first car model arrived with one, the rest, like firefox to chrome, felt the need to play the imitation game for fear of being seen as not as "trendy" or "futuristic" as that other guy. I.e., purely the "fashion trend" aspect.
Then, as they proliferated, the reduced BOM costs from removing every other previous mechanical control was reverse justified as the reason for continuing to add them to ever more car models.
- userbinator 3y agoSafety was part of the thought process --- just enough to get by whatever regulations are currently in effect.
- lelanthran 3y agoWell, yes, that's the main reason - it's cheaper. There are other reasons of course - planned obsolesence is a big one. Why would they want cars to work after the primary owner is done with it? With software-everything they can lock the car to the first 3 or 4 owners, and then remotely kill it. It doesn't even have to be actively disabled, just stop providing the replacement head unit as a part because "we don't have that software anymore".
- drc500free 3y agoMy understanding is that the real driver is in being able to decouple the design of the controls from the rest of the interior design. I read somewhere that being able to design those in parallel with fewer dependencies makes a significant different in getting the car into production on time.
- ryukoposting 3y agoYep. Putting as much of your UX as possible in one place makes product development a LOT more efficient. It doesn't always make the product better, though.
- hnbad 3y agoThere's a simple selling point to touch panels that most people here seem to be missing: it decouples the software/firmware from the hardware. Car manufacturers want to be able to change cars after they are sold. This can be in the positive via OTA updates that fix firmware issues or in the negative by providing "subscription" features that provide a passive income beyond the initial sale. Tesla has been paving a path here with its grandiose claims of "full self-driving" and industrial manufacturers like John Deere have been experimenting with bringing smartphone-style DRM and rent-seeking to motor vehicles. Replacing as many "hardcoded" physical controls with flexible and fungible virtual controls is a logical part of the transition. Why bother producing five different physical "editions" if you can just produce one and then downgrade it in four different ways by gimping the firmware or disabling controls in the UI? This way you can also upsell the features later or put them in a subscription model.