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My favorite car control system is the BMW iDrive rotary dial. Touch screens are fine for given much more fine-grained access to controls. But they should be li
by insane_dreamer 2y ago
My favorite car control system is the BMW iDrive rotary dial.
Touch screens are fine for given much more fine-grained access to controls. But they should be limited to controls that you _don't need to set while driving_. It's absurd that it takes 3 taps on a screen -- diverting my attention to the screen -- on my Tesla to turn on defogging (a common event here!) while I can do it with a one touch (now muscle-memorized) on my Subaru.
- kdmtctl 2y agoDid you ever tried to use the rotary dial for text input? I gave up immediately. The car has a regular screen regular, no touch. Something is good only when balanced.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoYeah, agreed on a rotary dial being terrible for text input. That's where a touch screen shines. But you shouldn't need to do anything requiring text input while driving.
- kdmtctl 2y agoI barely used the dial while driving, except for track selection. There are lot of different knobs in old models)
- piperswe 2y agoThey have touchscreens now, so you can input text with an on-screen keyboard but do everything else with the controller.
- kdmtctl 2y agoSure. That what I meant balanced.
- hadlock 2y agoOnly twice in seven years did voice control not work for me. I can't recall the last time bmw didn't have touchscreen in a car but it predates 2014
- kdmtctl 2y agoI haven't had many, so I do have a touch screen. But I've tried the rotary input on a rental 2 series that had a dial but no touch screen, and I had to use the GPS.
- ggreer 2y agoThat's odd. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually turn on defogging. Often my Model 3 will say, "auto defogging". Maybe your humidity sensor is faulty? I agree that physical controls for these things would be ideal, but nowadays the only one that annoys me is lack of the wiper controls. I think even that issue would go away if Tesla used rain sensors instead of cameras to trigger the wipers.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoThey’ve improved the wiper controls in the Tesla in a recent update. I haven’t found the “auto defogging” - will check for it.
- ggreer 2y agoThe wipers are certainly better than when I got the car 5 years ago, but they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions. I don't have much to compare them against, as my previous cars have all been from the early 1990s or cheap rentals. I don't remember a setting for auto defogging. My car just does it sometimes.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> they still seem to go too slow or too fast in some conditions yeah, same here. Our Subaru does better in this regard.