
A New Concept for Usable Touch Interaction in Cars - caskes
https://www.theturnsignalblog.com/blog/new-touch-concept/
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alliao
I have a 2000 BMW 318ti as a daily beater. I was adjusting the clock on it the
other day and loved it.

It ticks over very slowly, 1 second is 1 minute when you hold the Minute(M)
button down.

I just held it whilest driving and counted to the minute, and when I let go
later and glanced it, it was right.

So satisfying. I think Mazda have announced that they aren't going for touch
interfaces any more. Personally with more things becoming increasingly digital
I find even more satisfaction in touching well made physical objects...

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messe
Touch interfaces in cars should be banned. They're 95% unusable without taking
your eyes off the road.

Whomever first came up with the idea should end up mentioned in historical
footnotes alongside Thomas Midgely Jr.: Inventor of leaded gasoline and
freon/CFCs; a man who probably caused more destruction than any other living
organism in history.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr).

~~~
userbinator
Midgley made lots of lives better, at least for a while. I don't think the
same can be said of touchscreens in cars...

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roldie
I agree with the other comments here. Physical knobs and buttons are superior
for cars. Until operating a vehicle can be done safely and reliably without
driver focus (true autonomous) then we should really be focusing on physical
knobs and buttons.

My car has a physical button that is customizable. Much like the radio station
preset buttons, but it could be for switching to radio or cd or bluetooth. I
think there were a few other options besides just media, but there were only
like 5 or 6 options in total. I would love to have a wider selection of
functions available to set for that button, and to have at least a handful of
programmable buttons that could handle some simple tasks like switching to
Android Auto, toggle between Spotify and my podcast app, activate voice, or
setting the climate control to a certain setting.

In addition to bringing back physical interfaces, I think car designers should
focus on improving NLP/voice recognition to the point where a driver shouldn't
have memorize keywords or commands (too much thinking is also very
distracting).

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kingnothing
I'm surprised to see no mention of haptic feedback. I've always thought
Apple's Force Touch was a gimmick on a phone, but in a car it could be very
useful on a touch screen like what Teslas have. Imagine being able to run your
finger over the screen to "feel" the climate control touch area then "hard
press" it to activate.

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jimmies
The problem is that you wouldn’t be able to feel the haptic on a shaky car
(running on a highway).

~~~
kingnothing
That doesn't discount it from being useful in most scenarios, though.

~~~
stan_rogers
"Car on road and in motion" seems to cover most scenarios where operating the
controls of a car would be something you'd want to do.

~~~
kingnothing
I drive a Tesla. I'm speaking first hand that this would be a useful feature.
Most of my driving is not on a gravel road that's bumping so much I can't feel
anything; it's on smooth surface streets and highways where a little vibration
from the screen would be beneficial.

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causality0
I despise touch interfaces in cars and you should too. Every time you add a
control that requires the driver take their eyes off the road, you kill
people. Every time you have a control you can't touch without activating, you
kill people. A completely blind passenger ought to be able to control the
stereo and air conditioning.

~~~
uniqueid
I despise touch UI _everywhere_ (at least in its present incarnation). The
only things it's good for is saving space on a small device, or simulating the
experience of having no nerve-endings in your hands.

The industry could sell another trillion mobile phones, and it still wouldn't
change reality: (a) it's uncomfortable to hold your hand hovering in midair
for more than a few minutes (b) fingers are opaque and block screen real
estate (c) to use a finger with precision requires tactile feedback (edges,
textures, nubs) (d) a hand can't comfortably and quickly manipulate a screen
larger than about 10 inches.

I look forward to the day when I can use a touch UI able to _feel_ and _sound_
like buttons, keys, sliders, etc. Until then, I will favor devices that don't
use it.

~~~
causality0
I just let out a wistful sigh at the thought of a smartphone with a big juicy
d-pad below the screen. Imagine being able to scroll without your finger on
the screen. I think we hit peak usability with the TH-55's rear-mounted scroll
wheel and it's been downhill from there.

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joezydeco
You're putting touch surfaces _way_ too far for a normal driver to interact
with. There's a reason why many of the automakers are using knobs/buttons by
the resting position of the right arm to allow for interactions while in
motion. My Mazda even disables the touchscreen while moving for this reason.
With no proprioception on a touch surface you need to watch where your finger
is going and that's a distraction. Not to mention gorilla arm fatigue.

You might also want to look at what Cadillac has just shown for their Lyriq
EV:

[https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/my23-lyr...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2020/08/my23-lyriq-gallery-api-0126-v2.jpg?w=620)

~~~
caskes
Great point, I'd say it is the main drawback at the moment. I tried to test
this using VR and it was not a problem then, but I must admit that I used a
small hatchback as interior model. So I don't think it would work in its
current form in a wide SUV

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dpkonofa
This is nearly identical to the infotainment display in a Tesla. Was the
author only looking at 1 type of car?

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Silhouette
Upvoted for potentially interesting discussion, but with the standard first
question of how long we have to wait before the safety regulators ban the
foolishness of using touchscreens for important driving controls entirely.

There are some very interesting display technologies for cars that have been
at least the subject of experiments or small-scale applications. Imagine if
the little HUDs, night vision systems, navigation displays and camera feeds
that have been appearing in recent years could be combined, AR style. When you
were driving at night, your main view could be enhanced with the night vision
and danger recognition technologies. Essential navigation information, such as
the required lane/path for your route, could be clearly visible right in front
of you as you approached each junction, though subtle enough not to block your
view of the outside. Displays from external cameras could be overlaid as
appropriate depending on the type of driving or manoeuvres being performed.

There is so much potential in these kinds of technologies to make driving
safer and easier. And yet manufacturers are going with touch screens and naff
UIs, because shiny and, presumably, much cheaper for now.

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radium3d
To those doubting touch screens in cars, how do you explain Tesla cars amazing
real world safety data then? Despite having most controls via touch screen
they outperform other vehicles in avoiding accidents over ten-fold.

"Q2 2020 In the 2nd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.53 million
miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without
Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for
every 2.27 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and
without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.56
million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in
the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles."

[https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport](https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport)

~~~
Silhouette
There are plenty of plausible explanations for those statistics where the
comparison isn't a good one. The 479K figure given appears to be an average
over the entire population of vehicles and drivers.

But what is the performance like for other drivers of expensive cars? Teslas
aren't cheap, so it's a reasonable hypothesis that their drivers might be more
likely to take care of them than the owners of a 20-year-old hand-me-down that
is nearing the end of its useful lifetime anyway.

What is the performance like for drivers in other cars that have relatively
good driver aid technologies? This might be correlated with more expensive
cars, but more basic models typically gain a lot of the safety tech as well
after a while.

What is the performance like for other drivers of the same ages and experience
levels as Tesla drivers? Given the cost of the vehicle, Tesla drivers might
tend to be older and more experienced than average, and both of those factors
are known to be strongly correlated with safer driving.

Or maybe Tesla's own statistics are based on such a small population that they
might not be representative anyway?

Or maybe Tesla's "registration" of accidents is flawed, and lots of minor
incidents go unreported in Tesla's stats but some of them would be counted by
NHTSA?

Or maybe Tesla's touchscreen controls are simply so complicated or annoying
that many drivers avoid using them as much as possible?

As I said, there are many plausible explanations that would make that "amazing
real world safety data" look a lot less impressive. It's impossible to
evaluate that record intelligently based on just the data you quoted.

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radium3d
Don't you think the data from Tesla's computers on wheels could be more
accurate than the second hand data (accident occurs, is written down, then
provided to the government agency) used by the NHTSA and other researchers.
Surely there is some loss here in unreported incidents that Tesla would not
lose, making the NHTSA reports actually better than the reality potentially.

~~~
Silhouette
Could be? Sure.

Definitely is? Again, there's no way to tell from just the data you cited.

We don't know what Tesla counts as "registering an accident", and clearly it
isn't a neutral observer here.

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rckoepke
A friend worked on an automotive version of these physical pressbuttons with
tiny OLED screens[0]. I thought it was a potential option for the difficult
problem of putting reprogrammable/contextual UI into a vehicle, where positive
touch interaction is inherently infinitely better than smartphone/ipad style
touchscreens.

0: [https://www.alliedelec.com/product/nkk-
switches/isc15anp4/70...](https://www.alliedelec.com/product/nkk-
switches/isc15anp4/70192511/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=surfaces%20across%20google)

~~~
brokenmachine
Why not just physical buttons below (or next to) the screen, like they
sometimes do (badly) on ATMs? They used to do this on the old Nokia phones
before touchscreens too.

Would be cheaper than separate OLED displays on every switch.

You could even have assignable physical buttons on the steering wheel, with a
HUD on the dash that shows what each button will do.

There's lots of different options and a touchscreen is the absolute worst one.

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jaimex2
Can't say I've ever had issues with any of the touch screen systems on Fords,
Mazdas and Tesla's I've own/ed

When driving touch screen is maps, all interactions come from the steering
wheel or a voice command except for heating and thats pretty quick, its not
like you dont have to look at what the dial is on for physical controls.

~~~
Silhouette
I could control the heating and other environmental settings in every car I've
ever owned without ever looking at them. You could immediately feel which way
a dial was currently pointing. The buttons were either in a clearly
distinguishable pattern or marked with a ridge or other touch-friendly
indication so you could tell which was which within a row.

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t0mbstone
I absolutely refuse to buy a car with a touch screen interface (unless it also
has physical buttons). Touch screens like what are in Tesla are NOT good, for
many reasons. Car companies should copy the idea of the electric car, but for
the love of God, please don't copy their terrible touch screens!

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yellowapple
Right there with you. It's one of three reasons why I refuse to buy pretty
much any car manufactured after 2010, the others being the sheer size of
modern cars (why is every car getting so much bigger?) and the increasing
hostility to user-servicability.

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Gravityloss
Good ideas.

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aslfksdfl
Why are we putting touch screens in cars while ignoring the fact that
touchscreens are inherently more distracting. We're having the wrong
conversations about car interfaces.

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jonas21
One reason is that having a screen is now required in the U.S. in order to
comply with backup collision safety regulations.

It doesn't necessarily have to support touch, but once you've dedicated all
that space and cost to putting in a screen, making it a touchscreen becomes a
lot more appealing.

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kevin_thibedeau
The true reason is that it's cheaper than mechanical switches, gauges, and
wires.

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toomuchtodo
You can’t software update mechanical switches and gauges. I think it’s
reasonable to pick a vehicle that can receive over the air updates improving
the user experience during the period of time when you own it versus one
frozen in time with static mechanical controls.

~~~
Silhouette
_I think it’s reasonable to pick a vehicle that can receive over the air
updates improving the user experience during the period of time when you own
it versus one frozen in time with static mechanical controls._

And who gets to decide whether a change is "improving the user experience"?

Hint: It's usually not the user in this scenario.

I'm just fine with having a car where I get to choose whether I like how it
works before I buy it and then it stays that way and doesn't give me any
unwelcome surprises. I doubt I am alone in this. Magically self-updating cars
are about as good an idea as magically self-updating operating systems, with
the added wrinkle that if something is broken or confusing after the update,
people could actually die.

