8 ms·

There is truth to that, but it’s also true that cars simply have way more functionality than they did 20 years ago and it’s effectively impossible to assign a b

There is truth to that, but it’s also true that cars simply have way more functionality than they did 20 years ago and it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing.

James_K 2y ago
I think the added complexity is in areas where it doesn't really matter. The stuff the driver actually cares about is still the same as it was then. You can just put the rest in a bluetooth phone app. If it is more complicated than a button press, people probably shouldn't be messing with it while driving anyway.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  I definitely don't want my car controls tied to a phone app. No matter what I should be able to configure my car's functions long after the company stops distributing their app. But there's no reason why we can't have a "best of both worlds" sort of deal. I have a modern Mazda with a touch screen that comes with a center control knob and has physical controls for a good chunk of the settings you'd ever want to change while driving. So I don't have to go through menus to change my air conditioning from low to high, but I also don't have to use a tiny character led display and a "push 3 times, then hold for 5 seconds then pull twice and rotate 37.8 degrees" multi function button to find and access settings outside of those physical controls. In fact, the touch screen disables touch input at speed, so the control cluster MUST be able to access any functionality without relying on the touch display. It works pretty darn well. In fact the only thing I'd argue it could do better is be more responsive and have a decent set of distinct tones for navigating the screens without sight. It's not often I want a setting in the menus while driving, but it would be a lot nicer if each menu screen had a distinct set of sounds so that by ear I could know where I am and memorize those controls if I needed to.
  - James_K 2y ago
    > long after the company stops distributing their app There is a cool idea called open source, but I suppose something as radical as giving users ownership of software for their car isn't something companies would be willing to consider. Much better when you get to charge a subscription for heated seats.
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      Even if its open source, I don't want to spend my own time or depend on other people deciding to keep the software working and building on newer devices just to configure car settings. There's no reason in the world to eschew a touch screen or other control interface in a car and instead put all the control in a phone app.
      - James_K 2y ago
        I would say safety is a big one. It's a lot easier for users to justify fiddling with a touch screen interface when it's a part of the car vs on their phone screen. Sometimes you want to make unsafe things harder to do.
        tpmoney 2y ago
        If fiddling with the touch screen while driving is the issue, you can solve that with software lock-outs. The Mazda's touch screen stops responding to touches at faster than 5 MPH, and if necessary you could also lock out option and setting controls entirely while the car is in motion so that even the control knob couldn't be used to fiddle while driving. Moving control out of the already on board computer and control system and onto some external device is just plain over-engineering a worse solution.
        vel0city 2y ago
        The vast majority of these settings are unavailable to even browse on my cars while the car is in motion. No need to go with putting it in a separate app. Which putting it in an app doesn't even prevent it, the driver could still just be messing with their phone anyways.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
Do cars really have that much more functionality that it requires everything to be thrown into a touch screen? I have a 2017 Chevy Sonic with a built in touchscreen and I basically never have to touch it other than to input an address into Android auto. I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality I cannot access through a button somewhere on the dash or steering wheel I doubt a 2024 car has that much more functionality than my 2017
- vel0city 2y ago
  Both of my cars from different makers have a ton of things which don't have a physical button. Configuring the colors of the lights in the interior, setting restrictions on secondary keys, changing the doorpad settings, configuring navigation quick saves, configuring auto lock on walk away, whether the car moves the seats back for easier getting in and out, how much it moves the seats for that, toggling liftgate gestures, setting the default settings for ADAS systems, configuring if the mirrors automatically tuck in or not, configuring the puddle lights, configuring charging settings, configuring stereo equalizer and other deeper settings, rear occupant alert systems, configuring how long it waits to have the lights on, defaults for auto-high beam and its sensitivity, configuring remote start options, deeper setting options for drive modes, configuring cross traffic alerting, deeper route planning, etc. Probably still a hundred more options I haven't listed here.
  - miltonlost 2y ago
    And so you can have physical buttons (left, right, up, down, enter) and a screen with a menu for all those options.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      How is that better? Press press press press press press press press press press press press press press press cool just set one setting. Versus tap settings, flick scroll, tap to set.
      - 2y ago
jabroni_salad 2y ago
How many settings does a typical TV have these days? You can modify all of those with a d-pad. What is happening in your car that actually needs touch?
- appplication 2y ago
  I see your point, but I wouldn’t exactly uphold TV menu navigation as a model of good user design.
- pnw 2y ago
  Smart TV's effectively have touch-style interfaces as well now, where the remote is like using a mouse in free space versus the traditional D pad. The LG Freespace and Sony One Flick come to mind.
xyst 2y ago
> more functionality The functionality you refer to is probably the creature comforts (ie, multi zone A/C, memory settings for front seats, …). But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades. What has changed though is: - increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers - a large majority of class C holders largely unprepared for the size of these vehicles - this gives manufacturers the opportunity to stuff as much tech junk into these vehicles to give these less qualified drivers more assistance - coincidentally, all of this tech junk comes with a very high premium for manufacturers and dealerships Fear sells in this country. 9/11 changed the game.
- RunSet 2y ago
  > increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers I understand the average vehicle size increased to exploit a loophole in emission reduction requirements. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...
  - immibis 2y ago
    People still choose to buy them.
- 71bw 2y ago
  >But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E9B387D7-AFEF-4AAF-8685-4FE71E09287D.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E9B387D...
- vel0city 2y ago
  Many of those essentials of a car have changed a good bit in the last few decades. Hybrid drive trains have become far better and far more common. Electric vehicle drive units are far better than they were before. Transmissions these days are far more complicated and achieve much better mileage than older transmissions and allow people to select gears electronically despite otherwise being an "automatic". Designs for structural integrity are also different. Look at a 1997 Honda Accord and how big its windows are and how skinny those pillars are. Look at a modern Accord and see how big its pillars are. Look at a crash test of a 2000s Town and Country and compare that to a modern Pacifica. Radically different.
eloisant 2y ago
I don't mind having the extra functionality on the touch screen, just let me use the basic ones that already existed before touchscreens (A/C control, volume, etc.) on physical buttons.
- sedatk 2y ago
  Exactly. They've just gone too far.
- lupire 2y ago
  The touchscreen is in the same space the buttons were.
tikhonj 2y ago
Right, it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit. Which would actually be cool but it would be a pain to learn and, presumably, quite expensive.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit. AFAIK, an airliner cockpit also hides the "long tail" of functionality behind multi-function screens (though AFAIK they use physical multi-function buttons and keyboards, instead of touch screens); only the essential functions have physical buttons (but there are a lot of essential functions on an airplane).
marssaxman 2y ago
I sure wish they wouldn't build so much functionality into the cars.
deergomoo 2y ago
I'm not sure I buy this. My 2020 Civic has physical knobs and buttons for most† of the climate functions, media/radio controls, answer/hangup a call, lights, wipers, cruise control (including speed limiter and follow distance), driver's display, brake hold, eco mode, stop/start on/off, dampers, gears (though it's a manual so goes without saying), windows, mirror folding, and then a few down by my knee that I never need to touch like collision detection, traction control etc. I've edited this post four times already because I keep remembering more buttons it has. With the regrettable exception of the couple of climate controls I detail below, the only functionality on the touch screen is stuff I shouldn't be fiddling with while in motion anyway: GPS, car settings, and anything that CarPlay displays. I know a Civic isn't a prime example of a "high tech" car, but it's a well-specced one and I'm struggling to think of much that substantially fancier cars have that would blow past a reasonable limit for physical controls. † on/off, temp, screen blower, seat heaters, and defrosters all have physical controls. The manual fan speed and direction controls are on the touch screen. I wish they weren't, and I believe the newer 11th gen has restored these as physical knobs and buttons.
- CoryAlexMartin 2y ago
  I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are. I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.
  - wincy 2y ago
    Toyota has also swung back into the button direction. Only the CarPlay and a few of the backup camera controls use the touch interface (and the button I use most for the camera is a physical button). I’m sitting in my car right now waiting, and so just counted all the buttons I can reach while driving from the drivers seat and got to 95 including things like left toggle right toggle for the mirrors adjustment being two buttons, so being as liberal as possible in my definitions of a button or knob. There’s then a touch screen a little bigger than an iPad in the center console that has the Toyota infotainment stuff (which I disabled and opted out of the master data agreement so it does nothing) and CarPlay. The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.
conductr 2y ago
I don’t think that’s what people want either. But there is a dozen or two features so commonly used that an analog control is the obvious choice. One of my newer cars has only one physical control and that’s for volume. I never realized it before owning this car but I change the AC much more frequently than I change my audio volume.
giancarlostoro 2y ago
> Airplanes have entered the chat.
- AlexAndScripts 2y ago
  And, really, wouldn't a car that had controls like a plane be awesome? Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I'd adore a set of metal physical switches just above the windscreen. Add a HUD while you're at it...
CamperBob2 2y ago
It’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing. My 95B.2 Macan: "Hold my bier and watch this..." (Naturally, many of the 90+ buttons were gone with the next facelift, which is why the old one is still in my garage.)
amatecha 2y ago
"it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing." - maybe not? see: any commercial airplane.

There is truth to that, but it’s also true that cars simply have way more functionality than they did 20 years ago and it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing.

James_K 2y ago

I think the added complexity is in areas where it doesn't really matter. The stuff the driver actually cares about is still the same as it was then. You can just put the rest in a bluetooth phone app. If it is more complicated than a button press, people probably shouldn't be messing with it while driving anyway.

tpmoney 2y ago
I definitely don't want my car controls tied to a phone app. No matter what I should be able to configure my car's functions long after the company stops distributing their app. But there's no reason why we can't have a "best of both worlds" sort of deal. I have a modern Mazda with a touch screen that comes with a center control knob and has physical controls for a good chunk of the settings you'd ever want to change while driving. So I don't have to go through menus to change my air conditioning from low to high, but I also don't have to use a tiny character led display and a "push 3 times, then hold for 5 seconds then pull twice and rotate 37.8 degrees" multi function button to find and access settings outside of those physical controls. In fact, the touch screen disables touch input at speed, so the control cluster MUST be able to access any functionality without relying on the touch display. It works pretty darn well. In fact the only thing I'd argue it could do better is be more responsive and have a decent set of distinct tones for navigating the screens without sight. It's not often I want a setting in the menus while driving, but it would be a lot nicer if each menu screen had a distinct set of sounds so that by ear I could know where I am and memorize those controls if I needed to.
- James_K 2y ago
  > long after the company stops distributing their app There is a cool idea called open source, but I suppose something as radical as giving users ownership of software for their car isn't something companies would be willing to consider. Much better when you get to charge a subscription for heated seats.
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    Even if its open source, I don't want to spend my own time or depend on other people deciding to keep the software working and building on newer devices just to configure car settings. There's no reason in the world to eschew a touch screen or other control interface in a car and instead put all the control in a phone app.
    - James_K 2y ago
      I would say safety is a big one. It's a lot easier for users to justify fiddling with a touch screen interface when it's a part of the car vs on their phone screen. Sometimes you want to make unsafe things harder to do.
      - tpmoney 2y ago
        If fiddling with the touch screen while driving is the issue, you can solve that with software lock-outs. The Mazda's touch screen stops responding to touches at faster than 5 MPH, and if necessary you could also lock out option and setting controls entirely while the car is in motion so that even the control knob couldn't be used to fiddle while driving. Moving control out of the already on board computer and control system and onto some external device is just plain over-engineering a worse solution.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        The vast majority of these settings are unavailable to even browse on my cars while the car is in motion. No need to go with putting it in a separate app. Which putting it in an app doesn't even prevent it, the driver could still just be messing with their phone anyways.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

Do cars really have that much more functionality that it requires everything to be thrown into a touch screen? I have a 2017 Chevy Sonic with a built in touchscreen and I basically never have to touch it other than to input an address into Android auto. I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality I cannot access through a button somewhere on the dash or steering wheel I doubt a 2024 car has that much more functionality than my 2017

vel0city 2y ago
Both of my cars from different makers have a ton of things which don't have a physical button. Configuring the colors of the lights in the interior, setting restrictions on secondary keys, changing the doorpad settings, configuring navigation quick saves, configuring auto lock on walk away, whether the car moves the seats back for easier getting in and out, how much it moves the seats for that, toggling liftgate gestures, setting the default settings for ADAS systems, configuring if the mirrors automatically tuck in or not, configuring the puddle lights, configuring charging settings, configuring stereo equalizer and other deeper settings, rear occupant alert systems, configuring how long it waits to have the lights on, defaults for auto-high beam and its sensitivity, configuring remote start options, deeper setting options for drive modes, configuring cross traffic alerting, deeper route planning, etc. Probably still a hundred more options I haven't listed here.
- miltonlost 2y ago
  And so you can have physical buttons (left, right, up, down, enter) and a screen with a menu for all those options.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    How is that better? Press press press press press press press press press press press press press press press cool just set one setting. Versus tap settings, flick scroll, tap to set.
    - 2y ago

jabroni_salad 2y ago

How many settings does a typical TV have these days? You can modify all of those with a d-pad. What is happening in your car that actually needs touch?

appplication 2y ago
I see your point, but I wouldn’t exactly uphold TV menu navigation as a model of good user design.
pnw 2y ago
Smart TV's effectively have touch-style interfaces as well now, where the remote is like using a mouse in free space versus the traditional D pad. The LG Freespace and Sony One Flick come to mind.

xyst 2y ago

> more functionality The functionality you refer to is probably the creature comforts (ie, multi zone A/C, memory settings for front seats, …). But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades. What has changed though is: - increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers - a large majority of class C holders largely unprepared for the size of these vehicles - this gives manufacturers the opportunity to stuff as much tech junk into these vehicles to give these less qualified drivers more assistance - coincidentally, all of this tech junk comes with a very high premium for manufacturers and dealerships Fear sells in this country. 9/11 changed the game.

RunSet 2y ago
> increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers I understand the average vehicle size increased to exploit a loophole in emission reduction requirements. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...
- immibis 2y ago
  People still choose to buy them.
71bw 2y ago
>But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E9B387D7-AFEF-4AAF-8685-4FE71E09287D.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E9B387D...
vel0city 2y ago
Many of those essentials of a car have changed a good bit in the last few decades. Hybrid drive trains have become far better and far more common. Electric vehicle drive units are far better than they were before. Transmissions these days are far more complicated and achieve much better mileage than older transmissions and allow people to select gears electronically despite otherwise being an "automatic". Designs for structural integrity are also different. Look at a 1997 Honda Accord and how big its windows are and how skinny those pillars are. Look at a modern Accord and see how big its pillars are. Look at a crash test of a 2000s Town and Country and compare that to a modern Pacifica. Radically different.

eloisant 2y ago

I don't mind having the extra functionality on the touch screen, just let me use the basic ones that already existed before touchscreens (A/C control, volume, etc.) on physical buttons.

sedatk 2y ago
Exactly. They've just gone too far.
lupire 2y ago
The touchscreen is in the same space the buttons were.

tikhonj 2y ago

Right, it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit. Which would actually be cool but it would be a pain to learn and, presumably, quite expensive.

cesarb 2y ago
> it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit. AFAIK, an airliner cockpit also hides the "long tail" of functionality behind multi-function screens (though AFAIK they use physical multi-function buttons and keyboards, instead of touch screens); only the essential functions have physical buttons (but there are a lot of essential functions on an airplane).

marssaxman 2y ago

I sure wish they wouldn't build so much functionality into the cars.

deergomoo 2y ago

I'm not sure I buy this. My 2020 Civic has physical knobs and buttons for most† of the climate functions, media/radio controls, answer/hangup a call, lights, wipers, cruise control (including speed limiter and follow distance), driver's display, brake hold, eco mode, stop/start on/off, dampers, gears (though it's a manual so goes without saying), windows, mirror folding, and then a few down by my knee that I never need to touch like collision detection, traction control etc. I've edited this post four times already because I keep remembering more buttons it has. With the regrettable exception of the couple of climate controls I detail below, the only functionality on the touch screen is stuff I shouldn't be fiddling with while in motion anyway: GPS, car settings, and anything that CarPlay displays. I know a Civic isn't a prime example of a "high tech" car, but it's a well-specced one and I'm struggling to think of much that substantially fancier cars have that would blow past a reasonable limit for physical controls. † on/off, temp, screen blower, seat heaters, and defrosters all have physical controls. The manual fan speed and direction controls are on the touch screen. I wish they weren't, and I believe the newer 11th gen has restored these as physical knobs and buttons.

CoryAlexMartin 2y ago
I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are. I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.
- wincy 2y ago
  Toyota has also swung back into the button direction. Only the CarPlay and a few of the backup camera controls use the touch interface (and the button I use most for the camera is a physical button). I’m sitting in my car right now waiting, and so just counted all the buttons I can reach while driving from the drivers seat and got to 95 including things like left toggle right toggle for the mirrors adjustment being two buttons, so being as liberal as possible in my definitions of a button or knob. There’s then a touch screen a little bigger than an iPad in the center console that has the Toyota infotainment stuff (which I disabled and opted out of the master data agreement so it does nothing) and CarPlay. The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.

conductr 2y ago

I don’t think that’s what people want either. But there is a dozen or two features so commonly used that an analog control is the obvious choice. One of my newer cars has only one physical control and that’s for volume. I never realized it before owning this car but I change the AC much more frequently than I change my audio volume.

giancarlostoro 2y ago

> Airplanes have entered the chat.

AlexAndScripts 2y ago
And, really, wouldn't a car that had controls like a plane be awesome? Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I'd adore a set of metal physical switches just above the windscreen. Add a HUD while you're at it...

CamperBob2 2y ago

It’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing. My 95B.2 Macan: "Hold my bier and watch this..." (Naturally, many of the 90+ buttons were gone with the next facelift, which is why the old one is still in my garage.)

amatecha 2y ago

"it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing." - maybe not? see: any commercial airplane.