> Now, Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features
This is much more reasonable than I assumed. Unlike seemingly most people here I have no problem whatsoever with fan controls or audio controls or whatever on the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (of course the vast majority of car touchscreens are not, but some are). However, the absence of a physical speed control for the windshield wipers is the single worst design flaw of Teslas. Or at least it was, until they removed the physical turn signal controls. I'm very much in favor of requiring safety critical controls that must be used frequently or urgently to be physical.
But even then, how do you find the A/C or volume control on a touch screen without taking your eyes off the road, without accidentally touching something else? You just can't feel your way to the volume knob. Sure, you are a responsible driver and would only do that at a traffic light or other completely safe situation, but I don't know how many accidents touch controls in cars already caused with less responsible drivers, trying to adjust their AC while driving by an elementary school.
On a more serious note, there's a big difference between a vehicle like a car that is operated by one person, and a ship with a large crew with dedicated tasks.
Each crew member should have been assigned the management and activation of a given portion of the touchscreen.
Morning briefing by the Captain: “John, you’ll supervise and operate the bottom left corner of the Touchscreen. Adam, as a left handed sailor, you’ll stand right to John and operate the bottom right corner of the Touchscreen with your left hand so there are no collisions in case of emergency”
A/C is automatic and I don't need to touch it the vast majority of the time. While driving the most I might want to do is adjust the temperature, and since it's not safety critical I can choose a convenient time. It's at the bottom of the screen so it is easy to do by grabbing behind the bezel and only requires a quick glance to align your thumb. In practice I glance at physical A/C controls when adjusting them too, so I don't see a big difference here.
If you really need to adjust the temperature so often and can't stand the thought of using the touchscreen, you can assign that function to the left scroll wheel.
It seems like you have a more sensible car than many. I was recently in one with really dumb automatic AC that needed adjustment very often, the AC settings were in a menu behing two clicks, there was no convenient landmark to orient my hand without looking, the temperature slider was very small and dense needing high precision and the temperature text was rather small. And the steering wheel buttons are, of course, not remappable.
I drive about a dozen different modern electric cars on a regular basis (carsharing) and all of them have at least a few of the above flaws (if not for AC then for something else that needs adjusting while driving).
Avoiding to get into a "which car brand is best", I'll just say that I think there is simply a difference in the "DNA" of the car brands for how they approach the driving experience. It takes many many years and iterations and care about driving a car to produce a good car UX and some brands you can just immediately conclude that the CEO or the product managers don't care about driving and probably have never driven the specific model themselves, while in some brands you really feel they are a "driver's car".
This goes for tech in general and not just cars btw :)
Like rental, but per minute. Look up car2go, although maybe they're no longer in business in the US, i. Europe they changed their brand name.
It's like those scooters you can hire and leave (almost) anywhere, the benefit with a car is, if you park it idiotically, they can check that you were the last driver and forward the parking ticket to you.
Car2Go and Reachnow both ended in the US around 2020.
There are some other carsharing services in the US in some major cities (e.g. gig car share in sf/seattle), but I would argue overall there's less carsharing now compared to 8-9 years ago. Partly the age demographics have changed, ridesharing (uber/lyft) rose in popularity, and carsharing in the us has had its share of profitability issues.
Peak carsharing in the US to me was around 2017-2018 (car2go, reachnow, limepod, maven, ...)
I think cheap uber/lyft ate their lunch originally but what sealed it was the introduction of dockless bikes & scooters.
Of course those smart cars didn't really help either. They were great for parking and stuff but damn did it feel like driving a gocart. My foot was either at full throttle or no throttle.
I think another kicker for carsharing at the time (~2020) was this forecasted revolution of driverless cars and robotaxis, which has sortof continued (waymo) but also collapsed (argo, cruise / tesla safety issues, etc. ) over the past couple years.
I liked carsharing from the stance that even if it didn't make me want to get rid of car ownership, it made me feel less inclined to invest as much into car ownership (i.e. keep an old used car with cheap insurance, use carsharing if my car needs maintenance or going on a trip where i dont want to worry about breaking down or if taking another mode of transit back.)
This line of thought kinda gets into the predicament of carsharing (and arguably rideshare/robotaxi) services owned by automotive companies - they're fairly deep in the business of selling cars much more than attempting a service business.
The kind of carsharing I use is company-run, so it's basically just rental, but billed by the minute and with parking spots scattered all over the city. I imagine they have a very expensive fleet insurance in the background.
There are also a handful of "peer-peer" carsharing systems where you let other people use your car and I have no idea how insurance would work there.
> While driving the most I might want to do is adjust the temperature, and since it's not safety critical I can choose a convenient time.
I'm not sure how much I agree that temperature is not safety critical. It's relative for sure, less safety critical than breaks or transmission, but it can still impact safety in certain situations. In the city when you have a lot of red lights and stop signs, it's not a big deal to wait for the next stop. But on a free-way when you've got a ways to go before you can make a stop then uncomfortable temperature can create a distracted or nervous driver situation. I suppose you could pull over on the shoulder if it were that big of a deal, but even that isn't the safest thing to do on freeways and it's recommended to only do that if you're making an emergency stop.
In my opinion this shouldn't even have to be a big deal. The only reason we're even discussing it is because car manufacturers are moving from tactile buttons to touch screens. People are accustomed to working these types of auxiliary systems without stopping and historically have been able to do so without taking their eyes off of the road. People aren't going to stop doing those things because now they have to use a touch-screen.
Purely from a consumer standpoint, why on Earth would I EVER choose a vehicle that expects me to pull over to change the AC or to take my eyes off the road to control it, if there are competitors on the market that allow me to do so without doing those things?
Can you imagine actually pulling over off the interstate to change your AC? Absurd. Totally absurd and disconnected from reality. Nobody would do it, they would take their eyes off the road and then it doesn't matter AT ALL whether the function they're trying to perform has to do with safety or even operating the vehicle -- it's a distraction, and that's sufficiently bad.
Can we stop putting distractions in front of drivers, in general? Please?
I'll forgive Android Auto and Apple's thing because people won't stop looking at their phones otherwise but the driver should be able to control the vehicle and everything they might want to do in it without looking away from the road.
My mother-in-law has had a Mercedes for four years. It has a self-parking feature. She still doesn't know how to use it and probably never will. She couldn't possibly assign a function to the left scroll wheel either. And she's Mercedes Benz's target market.
The HVAC controls are a safety critical control because they are what dehumidifies your windshield screen.
And quick changes of T or RH needing the user to crank up the heat, turn on the AC and direct the air to the windshield at full speed are very possible depending on where you are.
Imagine crossing a miles long tunnel under a mountain separating two weather zones.
A sensible approach I saw in the BMW i4 was to keep the defrost buttons around, among relatively few buttons. (I forget if the climate temp controls were physical too though.)
In my car, I basically never change the A/C. My dad used to have a same-vintage car for a while, but a different make, and it absolutely needed adjustment depending on whether the sun was shining on you or not, and possibly other parameters. They both had "automatic" A/C.
Now these cars are ~20 years old, maybe things have improved. I haven't ridden in my dad's ~2yo car for any long stretch during the summer to compare.
Automatic climate control is one of those things that sounds good and is nice when it works but never works properly in all situations. I much prefer manual controls.
The "smarter" they get, the worse they are to use. Modern cars are always blasting air into your face, at temperatures which deviate enough from the current temperature to be incredibly distracting.
I just want a gentle breeze of slightly warmer or slightly colder air, damn it!
> While driving the most I might want to do is adjust the temperature, and since it's not safety critical I can choose a convenient time.
That is good reasoning, but are you sure a high number of drivers are also waiting with adjustments, instead of fumbling on the screen while continuing to drive?
A lot of people send and read phone messages while driving. I highly doubt that same people gives a second thought before playing with the screen while driving, unless they are under a real stressing situation (pouring and twisted road at 2 AM).
1. Physical controls that you can interact with without the need to take your eyes off the road
2. Touch screen that you need to look almost every time, much of the time while actually interacting with it. But you can mitigate that by using it more responsibly, waiting until you are at a stop, our out of range of anything you might need to react to (which might not happen for 10 minutes or even longer)
Then #1 is clearly the winner. Because 2 is more dangerous for everyone on the road (not just you with your own behavior, but everyone else that might act irresponsibly and hit you). We specifically craft laws to make people interact with their phones less (hands free only, etc) because "people must act more responsibly" is not a reliable solution.
Exactly. That is why physical buttons you can use without looking are so much better. For the perfect driver it does not matter so much, but that is a rare species.
I think this is missing something fundamental. If it's too hot or cold, folks are distracted - from driving. Perhaps you are less distracted than most.
Yes, they can reassign buttons. But the core problem is distraction, which causes users to go to the touchscreen, which creates even further distraction by capturing their visual attention.
No. Ventilated and heated seats are something I want to control easily. And when driving in the sun I have the AC set to 64. When driving at night it's set to 72.
And it's different if I drive with the top down depending on weather. I don't need to look at the buttons to do that now.
This is presumably one of those models with the screen that's not integrated in the dashboard and looks like an afterthought. Those usually have some kind of bezel you can grab to stabilize your hand, but the actual control is still touch-based and on the screen.
Yes you can. My last three cars have had a volume knob under the left thumb. My current car has a second volume knob behind the gearstick, and the A/C is the only analog dial along the center console. I can easily adjust both without looking away.
I have volume controls and similar on my steering while, and I never use them.... because I can never remember which is where. I prefer my stereo controls to be in the stereo controls area, my climate controls to be in the climate control area, etc. Spreading them out makes it more annoying to deal with.
I know it will cost me karma to point it out, but in a Tesla you can use voice control to adjust your AC/radio/navigation while your eyes are on the road and your car's 10 eyes are on the road.
Exactly. I have a mild accent, but my dad still has a thick brogue. Would a car understand him? Not if it's using the same algorithm as YT's captioning.
I don't change the AC while I'm in motion. All my cars have auto AC so I rarely touch them even as the temperature changes outside. I probably adjust the AC a handful of times a year. I'd rather not waste a lot of dashboard space on buttons that practically never get pressed, I'd rather have my map be even bigger and easier to quickly glance at and have more space to browse my media collection while stopped.
I don't understand how so many people have come across cars with seemingly terrible auto AC systems. Even my old 2000 Honda Accord had a competent auto AC system. I haven't had manual AC on any of my cars in decades. Whenever I rent a car it's always infuriating having to constantly muck with the AC system.
I'm not talking about a single car, I'm talking about several different makes and models over the last couple decades.
Works on my machine implies it's something special about that one device. My experience has been auto AC has worked fine with several different car models from several different makers across the last 24 years of car manufacturing.
I take it your AC controls aren't behind a touchscreen then?
I'm mostly arguing having AC controls on a screen aren't that big of a deal, because chances are if they're on a touchscreen they're auto, and if they're auto you really shouldn't need to ever really mess with them while moving. The only real exception to this would be defrosters, but I do agree there should be a least a physical defrost toggle button.
Fair enough, I wouldn't mind controls behind the screen for stuff you wouldn't need on daily basis. But I feel like we already had it with early screens and infotainment.
Functionality that might be needed when you drive (fogging up, change audio src, increase temp) should have physical interface.
So if you have auto AC it could go behind the screen.
But what I am afraid is that cars are sold with premium features as upgrades. So features that are fine behind screen would suck in cheaper models. And when looking at what BS automotive industry is pushing now (subscription services for physical features that are present), I am not hopeful this would be addressed.
> Functionality that might be needed when you drive...should have physical interface.
I generally agree. Safety critical features need physical control options close to the driver's normal inputs.
> But I feel like we already had it with early screens and infotainment.
I have two cars. One with a big screen and few physical buttons, and one with a small screen with lots of physical buttons.
Because of all the physical buttons, the screen had to be a lot smaller. The vast majority of those buttons relate to actions I really shouldn't be messing with when driving or are connected to the auto AC system which as mentioned doesn't really get used. So it is a ton of wasted space on the center console.
On the other car, the screen is very large. There's still important physical controls related to driving and defogging and adjusting media and what not, but they're all immediately around the driver's area not the center console. This allows for the maps for navigation to be very large and easier to glance at. The interface for changing media a lot easier to use when stopped and wanting to actually look at what choices I have or have my passenger make changes.
At least to me, I'd much rather have the center console be filled with the map and actually used input surface rather than just have it filled with tons of buttons which generally still shouldn't be used when driving.
I guess I should have phrased it as "chosen to own cars with seemingly terrible AC systems". Theromostatic controls are pretty cheap to implement, its not like you'd need some high-end extreme luxury car to have that feature be normal.
If the AC controls are on a touchscreen, chances are they're auto. If they're auto, you probably shouldn't have to mess with them at all while moving.
You need at least sun direction, temperature and humidity sensors and reasonable software behind them to have good automatic AC.
Basic thermostat is somewhere in center console, which doesn't help much if your chest is blasted with sun. Also temperature you feel is different depending on humidity.
I live in North Texas. I guarantee you we get a lot of days with intense radiant heat.
Both of my cars have glass roofs. Previously they had sunroofs. Lots of sunlight in the cabin.
I haven't had issues with automatic AC in decades in cars that aren't exactly luxury cars. It is a solved problem for at least every brand of car I've owned.
This explains why you are content with automatic AC. When you live with fost and snow many months a year you get a need to adjust the AC while you drive.
It snows in Texas. I wake up with many mornings of frosted windows and several week stretches below freezing. I still don't need to adjust my AC other than pressing "defrost" at the start and pressing it again later when its all melted. I'm 100% for a physical defrost button as things related to visibility should absolutely be physical, but that's not really a part of regular AC settings.
I'm still not adjusting the overall temp or vent activation or compressor on or off, I'm just setting it to max defrost and turning that off when it's done. Even when I drive to places where its below freezing every day, I'm still just leaving it on auto AC other than defrosting. Why would I need to adjust the AC while I drive when its snowing outside of defrosting? The AC can automatically adjust itself.
People say auto AC can't possibly work when its hot and sunny. People say auto AC can't possibly work when its cold out. And yet every car I've had for over 20 years of model years with auto AC has worked perfectly fine at 0F and at 110F.
In my other car, which adheres to the “buttons for nearly everything” philosophy, the steering wheel heater (for example) is down by the driver’s left knee, even using it via the touchscreen is probably safer.
Experiences with this sort of thing are subjective, but I’ve never had any problems with Google Assistant in the car.
I can’t believe that Tesla still ships cars without a center-press horn button.
I own a Model S Plaid, and the horn button’s location on the yoke can generally only be reached by the driver’s right hand. Even more dangerous, its position in space changes dramatically any time you are in the middle of a turn. The horn button is not easy to press in an emergency.
Same story with the turn signals.
If you are in the middle of a turn and you have rotated the yoke 180-degrees, your turn signal buttons are now upside-down, and on the other side of the yoke. I have owned my car for a year and a half, and there are still times when I have to look at the yoke mid-turn to figure out which turn signal button is which.
100000% this. It's mind boggling that they managed to ship a car without the center horn, and it's even more mind-boggling that the NHTSA let and is still letting them.
I got used to the turn signals and the wipers because I use them a lot. But I still haven't gotten used to the horn and the lights because these functionalities are used very infrequently, so there is no muscle memory for them at all. I've had this car for over a year now.
my current car (tk barina) has two horn buttons just to the left and right of where you expect a centre horn to be and it drives me insane. i dont typically feel the need to use the horn but whenever i do i have to make the conscious decision to press my thumb in on one of those specific spots because theyre also small enough that using the heel of your palm to do it feels wrong
Given that you are most likely to use the horn to prevent an collision, and that during collisions the airbag deploys.. I would say that the center of the wheel is just about the worst place to put the horn button.
Slapping yourself in the face somehow seems worse than the airbag deploying properly.
As someone who has had an airbag go off 'in my hand' (resulting in, among other things, a hyperflex of my wrist... trust me, the 'slap in your face' is the least of your concerns. The airbag will be doing that too.
Volume control is a very commonly used feature in cars. That should definitely should be a physical button. I drive a Lynk & Co (reskinned Volvo XC40) and it has a rotary knob on the center terminal for fan speed, temperature, and volume. Which are all within reach without me having to look or lean over. There's also a volume button on the steering wheel next to my thumb, which is great.
The only annoying part is that the left button pad on the wheel is the absolute worst. It's essentially a d-pad with a center press, but it's one single button cover. Which leads to a lot of wrong clicks.
But you are not legally required to use the volume control regularly in order to drive safely. You are not even legally required to have any kind of volume control in your car.
You are legally required to have and use the turn signals. You are legally required to have and use the windshield wipers (because you need to be able to see the road when it's raining). Same is true for the horn and hazard lights - those are safety-critical features, with their use at least partially regulated by law.
While I agree that volume control should be a physical button due to my personal taste, I would not go so far as to mandate it legally to be a physical button, with the reason being that it is not a safety-critical feature. The market can figure this out by itself. But for safety-critical features whose swift and correct use is mandated and regulated by law, I would absolutely mandate them to be provided to the user in a way that supports the swift and uninterrupting use expected from the driver, and that means: physical controls, placed reasonably reachable.
Volume control is pretty damn safety critical when the driver takes their eyes off the road to jab at the f&^king miserable touchscreen and accidentally wipes out your family.
Sir Issac Newton wrote down the laws about piloting a couple of ton of steel some time ago. Very unlikely to be repealed.
Every control that will be used by the driver for any purpose whilst the vehicle is in motion is safety critical.
That is true, but in that mind your kid in the back seat is safety-critical, so maybe we mandate no kids in the back? Or your wife next to you in the passenger seat, she could also make you remove your eyes from the road (happens quite a lot actually) - mandate no wifes in the passenger seat anymore?
You need to draw a line, otherwise really anything in your car can be safety-critical, you just need to imagine the right circumstances.
I would draw the line at the controls that are mandated by law. Every control mandated by law should not only be mandated to exist, but also be mandated to exist as a physical, easily reachable button.
> Every control that will be used by the driver for any purpose whilst the vehicle is in motion is safety critical.
Okay, that's at least limiting it somewhat. However, what about the setting for Bluetooth connectivity of the radio? It technically can be used while driving, and there's probably a non-zero count of people who have already used such a setting while driving to pair their phone or whatever. What about the time/date setting of the clock in your car? Same thing. Physical buttons for all of that?
> That is true, but in that mind your kid in the back seat is safety-critical, so maybe we mandate no kids in the back? Or your wife next to you in the passenger seat, she could also make you remove your eyes from the road (happens quite a lot actually) - mandate no wifes in the passenger seat anymore?
You're being intentionally obtuse. Like everything else, this is a question of what options we have to make things safer. "Not allowing children in cars" isn't reasonable, because there isn't a simple alternative. Using controls that require less attention focus is reasonable.
I think you are doing a strawman here. Nobody but you is talking about "mandates", and then you go ridiculing imaginary mandates that nobody is defending.
Case: seat belts. First introduced in 1949, three-point seat belt invented in 1955, Saab made them standard in all their cars in 1958, Volvo in 1959 after being shown studies with fatalities. The first compulsory seat belt law was in 1970 (Victoria, Australia), and only began in the US in the 1980's (with great opposition).
Case: ABS. Patented anti-locks in 1930-ish, the modern ABS in 1971, the system was slowly introduced first in high-end models, soon in every model. The US only mandates ABS in cars since 2012, Europe since 2004 (for new cars). Read: all cars were already being sold with ABS in those dates, except for the cheaper and shittiest ones.
Case: Airbags. I skip the history there, because airbags are still not mandated anywhere. They are subject to some regulations, but you can technically build and sell a car without a single airbag in it.
My conclusion: we should not wait or even hope mandates do anything. In the car market we should do our own research and trust (to a point) car brand safety records and voluntary tests like NCAP, IIHS or NHTSA. If a brand doesn't give a shit about safety unless under a government mandate, don't buy that brand, because they are decades behind safety standards.
Mandates are not the bare minimum in safety, they are well below that. Take for example one of the lowest scores in the current NCAP: Lancia Ypsilon 2015, two stars. Still, they have (not mandated): two front airbags, two side head airbag, belt pretensioner, belt load limiter, belt reminder and ESC. Fear no more, even if we find today that kids in the back raises the death rate in a collision by 20%, we won't see it mandated until 2080 if ever, way after car makers figure out a solution by themselves.
Your first link doesn't prove nothing, it has nothing to do with airbags being mandatory. According to this: https://autoily.com/when-did-airbags-become-mandatory/ , they are only mandatory in the US (my fault, sorry). Some countries, like India, are requiring ONE front airbag since 2019. The core of my message stands: car makers go way ahead the mandates. I don't recall any safety technology that ever banned or delayed a car model from the market, unlike for example emission regulations, that are announced with a deadline in a "by 2030 no car can emit more than X CO2 g/km, so you better comply or be banned" fashion. In Europe that kind of regulation is causing diesel cars to vanish from the market. Safety regulations are always after the fact: "it seems than 100% of the new cars already have seat belts. Lets make it mandatory", and are usually announced with "the UE would like all cars to have anti-collision alert mechanisms before 2025", signaling that maybe in 2030 they make it mandatory for the remaining 20% that still don't have it today.
About the NCAP, I don't understand your message. Maybe you understood that brands send their cars to NCAP voluntarely? What I meant was that NCAP is a voluntary non-profit organization, and they can't do much even if your car is a cofin with wheels other than giving it zero stars. It's not like they can ban your car from the market under safety motives, like a government could do if they want.
What happens with these non-mandatory programmes is that a manufacturer can give the programme money to buy their standard equipment vehicle and then the programme will buy the appropriate car from a dealer. The vast majority of vehicles are purchased this way.
This way they can't manipulate the vehicles being tested. The easiest way for your new 4954 model to get excellent NCAP scores is to make the actual 4954's people can buy from a dealer all good enough for excellent NCAP scores, the NCAP will just buy one and test it and it should score well because it's a 4954.
If only there was some way to move cars from one place to another :D
A fellow passenger on a train one day was in that line of work. Customer dispatches him to pick up a car, he gets a train to the nearest station, gets a taxi to the car, picks the car up, drives it to the desired destination, another taxi and another train ride. Pay is reasonable if you like driving and can fill your time on a train (e.g. you like to read or listen to stuff, not great if you're an outdoors person or you need to be at home looking after the kids). Obviously most customers are moving valuable cars they can't get to, classics, high end luxury or sports cars where there might only be two dealers in the country, that sort of thing, but he doesn't care if you want him to drive a mid-market hatchback bought new off the lot yesterday afternoon, pay is the same.
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. We don't really want to mandate physical volume controls, because they're necessary. We want to ban touchscreen volume controls, because they're unsafe. If Tesla want to deal with this by having no volume control, that's fine! Good luck to them.
Touchscreens are not exactly the only way to construct a control in a way that's problematic to use when driving. You can just as well place a physical control in a hideous spot in the car, which you can't reach easily, hence making you as the driver bend over and search for the control. Also, physical controls don't necessarily mean that you can recognize them safely without looking at them - buttons can be physical, but still blend into their surroundings in a way that provides no real tactile feedback to your fingers when they find the button. I've seen crazy physical controls in cars that aren't much different from touchscreens with regard to their usability when driving, but still they were technically physical controls and would thus pass your "touchscreen ban".
If you want physical controls that actually are significantly safer to use than touchscreens, you need to lay down some ground rules for them as well (reachability, size of buttons, tactile difference from surroundings,...). And that rules out a "blacklist" approach (banning some particular undesired solution) and instead requires a "whitelist" approach (requiring a solution within a defined set of guidelines that constitute what's considered an acceptable solution).
Just make it like 90-second rule for aircraft escape chutes. The manufacturer has to prove the stock interface is reasonably safe.
It'll be exploited a lot, so the standards must be high enough, and implementations also must be continually scrutinized by independent neutral bodies.
And we know what comes of it; the industry consortium implementations pass the test with flying colors and it'll look like hugely unpalatable dinosaurs, while new entrants like Tesla struggle to even interpret the spec to follow. The consortium may also explicitly or implicitly ban Chromium based everything.
Being able to use your phone to talk to people is not safety critical either. And yet, we make laws to lower the amount of physical interactions required with the phone while driving. Because people _do_ use them in ways that negatively impacts safety, both for themselves and other people on the road.
The question isn't whether or not the interface needs to be interacted with at times when it would be a safety issue. The question is whether or not the interface _will_ be interacted with in a way that would be a safety issue. And how much of a safety issue that is to _other_ people. And what better options there are to prevent those issues.
"People can use it responsibly" is not a viable strategy here, when the (many) bad actors injure and kill 3rd parties.
Having music in a car isn't safety-critical. But we should have unflinching acceptance of reality that a lot of people WILL have music in the car, and so if music adjustments are unsafe then the car is more unsafe.
A while ago I worked on a military vehicle intercom system (communication between different station in tanks and armored vehicles). It had a number of pragmatic requirements, learned through experience. One of them was that each station had a 3.5mm jack that mixed its signal into what the headset was hearing. They had learned that whatever you did, soldiers were going to listen to music when they got bored. If you gave them a jack then at least they'd still have their headset on, and would hear instructions (and you could override the music if necessary...). Without the jack they'd just take their headset off.
You have to accept the reality of the world you're designing for not the world you'd LIKE to be designing for.
[Another pragmatic requirements anecdote from the same system: the comms bus had to be able to cope with random disconnects. Why? Because on a tank, the comms bus went to the commander in the turret via a contact ring and when the main gun fired, sometimes that contact ring would disconnect. But then we were allowed 1.5s to reconnect. That's a surprisingly long time - how come? Because that's how long it takes the tank commander's hearing to recover after firing!]
Is there a car without a physical volume control? Teslas have it on the steering wheel.
What really kills me is my wife's Civic has no pause button at all, physical or otherwise. And it autoplays media on your phone when you get in. Don't want your phone to play whatever random YouTube video you happened to click on hours ago? Gotta pick up your phone to pause it there. And this doesn't happen right away, oh no, it takes at least a minute into your drive for the Bluetooth to wake up.
A Mercedes C-Class, 2023 model, also has no way to pause the music with physical buttons. It has a volume switch, and that clicks in, but doing the Airpod double click doesn't do anything. It just mutes the music.
Instead you have to either use a weird capacitive DPad to navigate the Android Auto interface, or click the screen. It's terrible for UX.
Most MEB cars with the VW ID style center screen have a touch strip under the center screen to adjust volume. On earlier models this isn't even illuminated at night.
Properly defrosting/defogging the windows would be more than just a fan control. Ideally you want to ensure the AC compressor and heat are both running and you need to change the vent settings.
Far better to have a dedicated defrost button next to the driver's normal controls that does it all as a single toggle rather than have the driver make multiple adjustments. Which is what I have on both of my cars, one of which people complain about how it's just a giant touchscreen.
If you live in a place where this is frequently required, in a Tesla you can put the defrost button on the shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen, where it only requires a quick glance to align your thumb to activate it. Which is actually easier than many cars with physical controls that may require multiple button presses and/or knob turns to configure all of the correct climate settings for defrosting in the current conditions.
My electric car, a Zoé, have real buttons to toggle the defrost.
I know what the buttons are like, so I can jut move my hand until I feel I'm on the right button.
I don't need a "quick glance".
Overstated. It's at best marginally easier to hit a random physical button on the center console than to hit a single button on the bottom bar of a Tesla screen, where it is very easy to grab by design. I generally don't hit those physical buttons without at least a glance, and that's all it takes for the Tesla bottom bar buttons too.
This doesn't save the wiper situation, though, because that requires navigating menus. Clearly far worse than a physical control in that case.
I can touch type and hit 'u' without looking, sure. But only if my hands start on the home row. This has no relevance for the situation under discussion. I cannot hit the 'u' key on a physical keyboard confidently and reliably without looking if it is mounted on the center console of a car and I am driving with my hands starting on the steering wheel. I always look to position my hand to hit those buttons. Meanwhile, the Tesla bottom bar buttons are far easier to hit than any key on my phone keyboard because they are much larger and mounted in a fixed position relative to me with a built in place to rest and align my hand. These situations are completely incomparable.
>I can touch type and hit 'u' without looking, sure. But only if my hands start on the home row.
The keys have bumps to let you know when your hands are in the right place.
Similar affordances exist in many cars. Even where they don't; the much smaller amount of them makes remembering things like "the third button from the left mutes the audio" and finding it by touch entirely possible.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that touchscreens are useless or whatever — if you like your touchscreen, fine, whatever, your problem.
But claiming that they're _as easy_ to use without looking as button is just not believable.
There are knobs on the f and j key so you can find the home row without looking. Similarly, physical buttons in a car can be shaped in such a way that they allow for feeling your position.
Be honest: when you reach for a physical button you might glance for 0.5 seconds or even less. Usually you'll try to reach it without looking, and only glance if for some reason you can't do it. You glance, reposition your hand, and operate the knob without looking.
When you try to use a touch screen, you look at it all the time. I've just tested: to unlock my phone I have to push a physical button on the right side, swipe up and then make an easy pattern. I can grab the mobile, orient it correctly and push the side button without looking or even thinking. But just to make the up swipe I look at the screen (I can force my self to not do it, with effort). But I'm unable to make the pattern without looking all the time I trace it. It's like the brain don't want or can create muscle memory for touch screens.
thinking about it, I actually like this comparison. You make a good point, in that the physical keyboard is a more accurate tool. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have drawbacks.
The advantage of the digital screen is the customizability and adaptability. If I never use the web browser or music on my iPhone, i can just move those apps off the home row. If my keyboard has a numpad, but I don't need it, I'm stuck with a numpad until i buy a new keyboard.
In my old Land Cruiser, the pull knob to open the vents is right next to the pull knob to open the choke which is right next to the pull knob to activate the hazard lights which is right next to the pull knob to activate the fan. None of them are lit, they all look the same in the dark. We've come a long way since 1981, but the point is that the improved reliability of a physical button means nothing if the ergonomics of the interface as a whole are bad. And it's a lot easier to improve the ergonomics of the system (or adapt them to the user's needs) if the controls are on a touch screen.
Well, I'm the customer and I want physical buttons!
Edit: I had a car that used a touch screen feature to activate the heated windscreen - it was perfectly responsive, easy to find but I still hated it. Current car has a single physical button to turn on all relevant features with one press and I love it.
Why touch screens should be an absolute no-go for anything safety adjacent: gloves. The overwhelming majority of touch screens just do _not_ work with the user wearing gloves.
If I get into a car and it's -20F out, last thing I want to be doing is removing my gloves to operate a fucking touch screen to turn on heater/defroster/defogger/wipers, etc. And I absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, do not want to have to be removing/putting gloves back on while actually driving to adjust anything.
> Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel.
What people call "real buttons" usually require a certain force and travel to activate. Capacitive buttons require little to no force or feedback, sometimes not even solid contact.
I think the easiest way to understand the difference is to ask 2 questions: "can I put my finger on that button and not immediately trigger it" and "can I can physically tell that I am triggering it (ideally some physical travel)?" If the answers are "yes", then it's probably the kind of button people look for when talking about wanting "real buttons".
Apple has actually combined the two with their touchpads. When you press on them you get the "click" feedback. But its not actually a physical travel that activates, it's what they call "the haptic engine" that vibrates in a way that makes it feel like you've clicked a physical button. It works really well.
However, I think that such buttons are far more expensive than a physically activated button, even if the latter is engineered to last a lifetime of heavy use.
> But its not actually a physical travel that activates
This was the little (to no) feedback of a press I was mentioning. Simulating the absolute bare minimum of travel. With the pressure sensors and the piezoelectric actuators it becomes a super-expensive, overengineered button simulator that works almost as well as the real thing.
Even Apple dropped the fancier 3D touch completely, and the less fancy Force touch is just for trackpads. Everything else is the cheaper Haptic touch doing away with pressure sensors entirely. It was fine for my iPhone 8 home button and old watch.
But a car is different. A hazard light button has ~5mm of travel. Blinker or wiper stalks have centimeters of travel. Same for rotary knobs. They're also well spaced from each other with hard to confuse actuation methods. In noisy and vibration prone environments, with time sensitive requirements, you want to have very clear and distinct ways to act and receive feedback that actions were performed, especially if critical for safety.
I do not disagree with you. I was pointing our that there is a certain class of physical buttons we can replace with an "emulation" that works just as well. That is not to say we should.
The parent commenter was making the point that the particular buttons on the latest Model 3 (Highland) actually feel almost like physical buttons. They require pressure and won’t activate just by being brushed against.
Still, as blinker controls they don’t have tactile markings and a stalk would be much better.
You're correct. But I was addressing GP's wording (emphasis mine):
> those 'haptic' buttons are real buttons
I was making the point that it's not a "real button" if, as you also say, it just "almost like" a real button. Knowing the M3 buttons, that "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Press a classic hazard lights button, and a Tesla signal button and see if they really feel similar. No need to go to the vastly different stalk.
For any normal person a button involves not only the application of pressure but also the consistent feedback of travel. Things like Apple's taptic engine and similar techniques simulate already bad buttons with microscopic travel.
I wrote more in the comment above but just to add that the old trackpad is not the best point reference. This is just Apple chasing thinness by making any button barely have any travel. Signal or wiper stalks have 2 orders of magnitude more travel.
Tesla planned that everything in the car would be automated, including driving. In such case people don't need a thought out UI and responsive controls and all that can be cut down to either save money or to focus on media entertainment for the passengers. That's why they replaced steering wheel with a yoke, buttons with screens etc. Unfortunately they forgot that car need to be fully automated first, and then redesigned later. Not the other way around.
I would call them virtual buttons rather than true physical buttons, as they are capacitive touch buttons that don't depress and are missing a defined physical boundary. Granted, they are fixed in place and don't move. Except that, as you point out, they do move...
"Designed for California" nonsense. It's pretty common to wear gloves while driving in the winter in Canada. Now you have to make sure your gloves are compatible with your car.
You’re supposed to signal before you turn the wheel.
Way too often I see people signaling as they turn, not because they are trying to communicate with other road users but because it’s the law. Indicate your intent first and then take the indicated action.
Yeah, that might actually be an advantage of that new Tesla layout (never seen a Tesla from the inside): small fiddly sensor surfaces on the wheel are best operated while going straight, whereas the stalk keeps tempting the driver to leave operation to the hand movement that happens anyways when starting the turn. Guilty as charged, deeply sorry about that (I don't think it's a regular habit of mine, but we've all seen cars driven like that)
But, as a sibling comment already mentioned: roundabouts! One of the most important indicator engagements is made crazy awkward for people who keep "walking" their hands to neutral position while the wheel is turned instead of wrestling it like some animal.
Which does make me wonder: has any carmaker started engaging turn signals from navigation? I'd imagine that this could be an amazingly subtle user interface for following a route: just don't press the veto button when the car decides to engage indicators and steer as if the indicator decision had been your own. No more following robot voice orders. An established pattern I don't know about? Tried, but turned out to be terrible? Legal uncertainty (or legal negative certainty)?
And crossroads that aren't at 90 degrees. Like, you know, old cities that weren't built on a grid.
The one time i test drove a Tesla I abandoned a left turn because all the roads involved were curvy enough I couldn't get the turn signal to stay on ;)
Mind, it was just a test drive. I guess that if I practiced for years I could master the wisdom of Tesla controls.
Some countries, e.g. Poland, require you to turn on your left indicator as soon as you enter a roundabout and as long as you stay in the roundabout. If you intend to exit, you have to switch from left indicator light to right indicator light. Switching happens while steering left.
Poland has multi lane roundabouts where you are expected to stay on the innermost lane possible and only move to an outer lane when your exit is close.
People in the UK actually use their turn signals. Try driving around Central Texas. The joke, as another commenter pointed out, used to be BMW drivers. There is some kind of linear relationship between the luxury of a car and the lack of conscientiousness amongst many American drivers.
I want at the least a physical recirculate/bring air from outside button.
The use case is coming up behind a vintage truck that was made before they even thought of pollution standards on a winding mountain road where you can't overtake and you need to pay attention to the road. And you also need to set the a/c to recirculate before you suffocate.
For audio... with radio dying or dead I guess you can just run Spotify the whole trip. I'd still like volume and mute buttons.
My Jeep Wrangler has a physical volume knob that may or may not elicit a change in volume when turned within the first 30 seconds of starting the car. Which can be literally deafening if you had on e.g. a podcast at 75% volume when you turned the car off and it turned back on to the radio. Some of these things need a dedicated circuit.
The 2022 Acura MDX has that too, but it's not a "may or may not", it just doesn't. Thankfully they fixed it in the 2023 model, but I still don't understand why it's not fixed in the 2022 model since it's obviously software and both get OTA updates.
Even if I wouldn't be hating Musk for his position re actual freedom and his apparent respect for murderous dictators, these moves would solidly cement Tesla as a company I wouldn't buy a car from.
Stupid, arrogant moves nobody asked for pushed down the throats of unsuspecting users. A colleague's model 3 died during rain (apparently its such a solidly built car that a bit more than normal amount of rain can kill it for good, got replaced without questions which indicates this is a well known issue). Newer version didn't have physical turn signals. He was almost crying, an early adopter with a lot of love for the company that evaporated in an instance. Its not every day that car manufacturer actively tries to increase chances of people getting killed and acts like all is fine.
I'm going one step further and arguing that if a function has no physical control, it's not essential but just a distraction and should be done away with.
I don't hate that Tesla tried to do something different with indicators. I think there are some issues with how stalks work, and thinking about how to make cars better and safer is good. Complicated stalks that make adjusting your wipers feel like playing a game of Bop-It? Total pain in the ass. And assuming something is well designed because that's how it's been done for decades is obviously silly.
But that doesn't make it wrong to do the research, go through the design process, and come to the conclusion that, in the end, putting blinkers on a stalk is still better than the alternatives proposed. It reeks of change for the sake of being different, rather than an actual innovation.
My biggest issue with the choice is that, on a wheel, indicator buttons are constantly moving. And when the buttons are right next to each other, it makes it significantly easier to indicate the wrong direction. Or have to take your eyes off the road to find the indicator when your wheel isn't straight (suppose you're trying to exit a roundabout)
And then with the lack of dashboard on some teslas, there's the knock on problem of having to look away from the road to see which way you're indicating if you think you've indicated incorrectly, rather than the indicator arrow clearly flashing at the bottom of your field of vision.
Tesla wiper? Just push the wiper button on the left stalk and you can cycle through the speed settings with the left funky switch (multi function button) in addition to the on screen display options that then pop up. Very easy to do.
> Just push the wiper button on the left stalk and you can cycle through the speed settings with the left funky switch
Yes, they added this relatively recently. For the first few years I owned the car this was not possible. Also, guess what, it still sucks! More steps than a physical control, fiddly because of the short timeout, and still requires an extra step of looking at the touchscreen because you can't know which way to push the wheel without finding out the current setting. Is it on "Auto" or "Off"? They're at opposite ends of the menu. Acceptable for something less important like setting the A/C temperature; definitively not acceptable for something safety critical like wipers.
I had cars in which for the life of me I could not ever remember which part of which stalk controlled the wipers and which part controlled the lights.
Ah, and then there are Volkswagen and Opel which had the light control as a wheel outside the wheel-drive, on the bottom left, and you had to take a hand off to modify it.
My point: just having physical controls doesn't mean it is easy or safe to use, if the layout sucks.
I haven't driven that many different cars in my life, but isn't it usually the stick on the same side as the driver's seat? Aka if the driver's seat is on the right, then the blinkers are on the right, and the other way around in left-seated cars?
I switch between Indonesia and EU fairly often and most cars I've driven followed that pattern as far as I can remember (maybe I just never noticed though)
My wife's car has a stalk that you can turn the end, turn the inside. It has a slide that moves up and down inside of the inside rotating part. The stalk can go up, or down, or double up. You can also pull the stalk towards you. It's bonkers.
Yeah but there might be 2 stalks on that side. Also in some car you need to pull the stalk down X positions, in others you have to rotate a crown, so it really depends.
The safest solution is to have properly working automatic wipers (UNLIKE current Tesla, where wipers are complete dogshit) so you just don't care. The same for lights.
I have a 2018 model x with a traditional wiper dial stalk and it almost never works. It has markings for 5 settings and most of the time it just ignores the setting you have it on. The auto setting doesn't seem to change the behaviour at all. My model 3 was annoying with the wipers on the touchscreen (mostly) but at least they worked consistently.
Imagine that someone rents a car and is tired + every manufacturer has their own konami code, or secret button to start the wipers.
That's how accidents happen.
That's just lame, sorry to say it. I'll start with the end by saying that most probably voice command won't work in a downpour, for the simple reason that downpours are usually associated with lots of noise that will cancel out your voice commands. And all the other "options" involve taking your eyes off the road and looking at a big screen in order to adjust wiper speed, all this while there's a potential downpour happening. That is a very big no from me. And, no, "automatic" wipers never do their job perfectly when it comes do downpours, you always have to adjust them in one way or another.
Granted, that guy that posted it was from Australia so that they probably don't have that sort of downpour problem over there (the same goes for places in the US like California or Texas).
No just make buttons. Screens can hickup, scroll weird, etc. also you don't get any tactile feedback.
I don't wan't a touchscreen keyboard on my laptop, and the travel is already small enough - i say bring back tactility! The dead cold glass orb has destroyed so much.
How about the voice commands for these? ("Wipers 1-slash-4"). I just got my first Tesla, MYLR, and even though it's annoying not having the stalks given the rain sensor is absolute junk the voice command seems to work 98% of the time. The voice command is activated from a button on the steering wheel - it may require a network connection though. I haven't tried the fog lights, it may not have a command, but there's apparently a shortcut with the left stalk where you pull or push and a quick light menu comes up - 2 clicks instead of 1 but seems reasonable - I could never find my fog lights quickly enough on most of my previous cars anyway.
My only concern with the wipers would be for an emergency, ie the street washers drive by and suddenly I have no visibility, but for those situations I have the button on the left stalk that fires the wipers on demand.
Voice commands are absolutely crap and are never ever a substitute for actual controls. The device can't either hear you, mishears you, doesn't speak your language, doesn't understand your accent, doesn't understand your dialect, doesn't like the tone of your voice or just doesn't like your particular combination of words.
why are so many people in the tech world obsessed with voice controls? Seriously, this is imperfect at best and definitely a downgrade from a physical button.
> almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes
The concept of a physical button is the mother of all distractions. The touchscreen is just the physical button problem moved somewhere else.
Maybe today voice commands are not state of the art, or maybe, holy ball and chain batman, not even close to being the solution either, but I hope in the future nobody remembers there used to be cars with 113 physical buttons:
Half of the time it says it doesn't understand me, or it does something completely different "turn or rear window defrost" -> turn heat to high!. Fog lights it does understand, but it's "not yet implemented", whatever that means.
> pull or push and a quick light menu comes up - 2 clicks
Yeah, so I have to flash someone in front of me to turn on my fog lights, great.
And don't forget to turn off automatic lights because it will turn off the fog together with the other lights but not turn them back on.
Apart from that I really like the car, just put a few more functions on the stalks and it would be a great car.
Depends very much on where you live. Some people need them every other day, some may never use them at all. Certainly not "limited use" when you're in a mountainous region with regular fog.
Let's check all those items with the Tesla Model 3 2024 manual
To engage a turn signal, press the corresponding arrow button on the left side of the steering wheel. (The buttons move on the Highland steering wheel)
Turn signals:
To turn on the hazard warning flashers, press the button on the drive mode selector located on the overhead center. All turn signals flash. Press again to turn off.
Hazard lights:
Overhead console drive mode selector with arrow pointing to hazard warning light button in the middle.
If a severe crash is detected by your vehicle, the hazard warning flashers will automatically turn on and flash quickly to increase visibility. Pressing the hazard warning flashers once will return the lights to their normal cadence. Pressing a second time turns all hazard warning flashers off.
To sound the horn, press and hold the center pad on the steering wheel.
You can access wiper settings by touching the wiper button on the steering wheel
Press the wiper button on the steering wheel to wipe the windshield.
Press and hold the wiper button to spray washer fluid onto the windshield. After releasing the button, the wipers perform two additional wipes then, depending on vehicle and environmental conditions, a third wipe a few seconds later. You can also press and hold the wiper button for a continuous spray of washer fluid—the wipers perform the wipes after you release.
Whenever you press the wiper button on the steering wheel, the touchscreen displays the wiper menu, allowing you to adjust wiper settings. Press the left scroll button on the steering wheel left or right to choose your desired setting.
>> I have no problem whatsoever with fan controls or audio controls or whatever on the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (of course the vast majority of car touchscreens are not, but some are).
It was -27f/-33c this morning when I started my car. At those temperatures ALL touchscreens generally become slow and unresponsive, especially when wearing mittens. I want the defrost/fan/temperature controls on a physical switch. I also don't want a screen that isn't happy unless it is getting a full 12v/14v. Not all car batteries will give that when cold. Frankly, I'd be happy with a series of valves ... anything other than a touchscreen.
Fyi, automatic wipers are a nightmare in winter. It is very easy for them to break if caked in snow. Standard procedure being to start the car first and let it warm up as you remove the snow and ice. So you need them to be on a physical switch to ensure they are off prior to turning the car on.
A physical control changes position and stays in that position so you can feel it to know if your turn signal is on for example.
Real button changes position when you press it.
Haptic button is flat surface with vibrating motor inside that buzzes so it "feels" like a click. Like in a smartphone.
The ones I have seen have a lag, so you don't immediately know if your button press was registered or not.
Not Teslas, unfortunately. The auto wipers are trash and always will be because Tesla refuses to add a dedicated sensor. It's a double whammy: handicapped auto mode and awful manual controls.
Cars for 15-20 years have had good automatic wipers, they're just becoming more widely available now (and evs are generally in the price range where it's expected). Well... except for Tesla. They decided that a person can tell when wipers are needed just by using their eyes, so certainly they could save a buck or so and do it using just a camera.
Cars had it, because an ICE drive train is so cheap that in the price range you are talking about it's almost negligible. All the cost is in nice to have things like extra sensors for every tiny niche use case. Fast forward to BEV and suddenly the drive train eats such a large part of your cost budget that you are hard pressed to cut much of the fat of the ICE era.
Carmakers haven't stopped doing electric variants of ICE models because it's oh so difficult to put batteries where an engine, tank and gearbox used to be (it's not), they switched to dedicated BEV designs to have an opportunity to do a "cost reset" about their approach to all those little nice to have things they introduced in the late ICE era to maximise the price buyers were willing to pay for a given vehicle class. The BEV-specific base architecture certainly helps, but it's as much about the expectations reset. This certainly does not mean that they switch their rain sensor to the Tesla approach, they might actually end up cheaper cost-optimizing what they have and know, but BEV does mean looking at costs in a very different way than in the ICE era.
> However, the absence of a physical speed control for the windshield wipers is the single worst design flaw of Teslas.
My 2015 Model S has a stalk with a rotary switch for wiper control that includes several automatic and manual modes and speeds.
But I was loaned a Model 3 when my Model S was being repaired and I hated it because most of the stalks had been removed making things like cruise control and the radio much more awkward to use.
Around 10 years ago, I started looking into buying a new car. I couldn't believe the number of cars that switched to touch controls even 10 years ago. It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving. I refused to buy any car that replaced physical buttons with touch controls 10 years ago and I still have this rule today.
Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights. You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights. Furthermore, the same car will have yellow signal lights in the front and side. So yellow signal lights in front and side, red in the back. Just make it all yellow for turn signal!
> 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.
My 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.
Yep. 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.
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".
There'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.
It's the same reason why headlights are white and taillights are not (unless reversing, in which case the tail becomes the head temporarily, and thus white reversing lights.)
I know Technology Connections complains about it all the time, but I don’t feel like he’s even made a case, he just asserts over and over “and we ALL agree it’s awful” as if he asserts it strongly enough it will become true.
Why is it a problem? How is a red blinker actually measurably worse than an amber one?
I have never had any sort of issue interpreting a blinking red taillight as turning? With red, you can more easily tell the direction of travel and the aesthetics of a single color are far nicer. I frankly don’t see the problem.
Commenter a couple levels up says you can’t see red blinkers in the sunlight? I don’t think that’s true on any measurable level, amber is a far closer match in hue to sunlight than red.
"A 2008 US study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggests vehicles with amber rear signals rather than red ones are up to 28% less likely to be involved in certain kinds of collisions,[81] a followup 2009 NHTSA study determined there to be a significant overall safety benefit to amber rather than red rear turn signals,[82] US studies in the early 1990s demonstrated improvements in the speed and accuracy of drivers' reactions to the stop lights of vehicles ahead when the turn signals were amber rather than red,[76][83][84][85][86]"
Whoever wrote that section of the Wikipedia page either didn’t read the cited documents or heavily cherry-picked.
The cited document for that “up to 28%” actually states that a first analysis found amber lights leading to a reduction in being struck “between 3 and 28%” Quite a range of uncertainty.
The very same document also states that in their second analysis they found no correlation between signal color and odds of being struck.
Another one of the cited documents goes so far as to say
> Richard Van Iderstine: We have studied the crash involvement of vehicles having yellow rear turn signal lights versus red ones. With our data, we have found it challenging to prove that yellow is better than red.
Based on the actual text of the citations I’m inclined to believe there’s very little difference.
And I don’t see how there could be. The only practical difference I see between a red signal and amber signal is that the signal might ever so briefly interpreted as a brake light activating before the first cycle completes. The course of action of the driver behind in either case is to slow down, so it’s a distinction without a difference in action.
So a red light turns on. What does it mean? For the next 0.5 s you don't know. Maybe it will turn off, maybe it won't. In the meantime, you have delayed your braking action and decreased your margin of safety. Or you have started braking for no reason, endangering people behind you (and yourself).
> It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving.
Does anyone actually think that though? Or was it considered “good enough” in light of its other benefits like reducing costs, reducing BOM, eliminating part design work, reducing wiring complexity, adding flexibility and customizability, (potentially) increased reliability, making it easier to jam the multitudes of controls and options a modern car has into a more usable and understandable interface, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, when I bought a new car, one of the selling points was the manufacturer was one of the few to still offer physical control and navigation of the touch screens (in fact the touch functionality is completely disabled at any speed faster than 5 mph). But I don’t think “safer and easier to use while driving” has ever been the driver for touch interfaces in cars.
I would the main driver was economics. It would be easier and cheaper to manufacture one big screen in the middle compared to a bunch of physical controls with wiring.
Also makes it easier to change things later in the design if you do not have a bunch of physical controls to move.
Do not forget the massive "tablets are the future of computing" hype because Apple released a thing. Touchscreens were super cool by association. It was all pretty stupid. I say that as someone who creates mostly software for touchscreens... using keyboard and mouse because they are much better input devices. You just need the space and the budget for them.
> Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights. You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights.
I'm also starting to see really thin - single narrow LED strip - turn signals that are barely visible next to the much larger headlight nearby.
are you me? I did the exact same thing in roughly the same timeframe. Went to a toyota dealership, when I realized all the vehicles were touch I asked if I could get one without and they told me they don't do that anymore.
I walked out and just continued driving the corolla I had (still have it to this day). When I needed a minivan I purchased an older honda odyssey and fixed it up.
> You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights
I can't say that I've ever had trouble seeing the red turn signals in the sun. Being able to see them in the sun from a few hundred feet away is legally required in most, if not all, states.
Obvious limitation is something like Maps and media.
My guess ones that use mechanical dials (i.e. Lexus until ~ year ago) cause more distraction than touchscreen by simply being harder to use and taking more time to solve your problem.
Given how well chatgpt's voice recognition works - why not just put it on all cars!
I've only used a Lexus that had a touchpad. I do however regularly use a Mazda with its commander knob, and it is far safer than a touchscreen in my opinion. You can do most navigation without looking at the screen, with just an occasional glance to confirm you're doing what you think you're doing. Whereas a touchscreen requires constant attention while you're manipulating the screen.
The only thing that annoys me about Commander Knob + Android Auto is that AA still forces attention breaks as you scroll through big lists (e.g. Spotify playlists) which is really stupid because you're not usually looking at the screen if you know you need to scroll say 75% down. You're just looking occasionally to see how far you've made it. By making the task take longer, it's reducing safety.
The biggest safety issue by far with Mazda+AA is Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving.
My Mazda is so weird. Android Auto has a completely random load time. It could be a few seconds, or it could take over 1 minute. Often I don't know if left or right is the fastest way to get somewhere, so I'd like to check google maps or waze, but it won't finish loading until a while after I've guessed and committed myself. It'll play the radio instead of my phone audio at some starts, then usually switch to phone audio automatically. There are times when the map will "freeze". New frames are only rendered as a response to moving the knob. I have a USB cable and Bluetooth both connected (no idea why both). There is no logical place to put your phone (I bought a holder accessory, it's great). There's no physical music pause button. People who like car accidents and being careless and don't mind pointless death and destruction like to point out you can pause music by fatfingering the knobe through a bunch of menus.
This is probably Spotify's fault, but when you're in a song search, the "next song" button goes to the start of the currently playing song, instead of the next song. The "next song" button works correctly for all other Spotify list-ish things AFAIK, just not search. And search is obviously the place you need a skip button the most.
I haven't seen most of the issues you describe, but I do know that AA is incredibly finicky with the quality of cable you use. When I first bought my car I would use a random cable from Amazon and Mazda's infotainment would straight up crash (can't blame that part on AA though). Mazda's infotainment is pretty notorious for being terrible; that it takes so long to connect (and get past the safety disclaimers EVERY SINGLE TIME) is truly annoying. I will say that I just bought a wireless AA dongle off Amazon and since I got that it's a lot more reliable because I'm not swapping cables all the time, though my Mazda still will take a while to connect to AA, then start playing my phone music, then switch back to radio for now apparent reason. It feels like the two subsystems are competing.
>Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving
Is it just me or is Google Maps voice input in AA completely busted now? I used to be able to press the "Search" bar on the touch screen in the app, say the search term and it would just show the results. Likewise for adding stops along the way. Now for the former I need to explicitly say "navigate to X" (or it says that it doesn't have a screen and refuses to do anything???) and for the latter I have to say something like "add a navigation stop at X", the assistant lists our the result (??????) and asks me which one I want to choose. Of course I don't see anything on the map in either case.
Open/Close all windows comes to mind. Fading audio forward/backward/center is a PITA on a Tesla. There's tons of things one should be able to automate - don't you have any imagination?
> Obvious limitation is something like Maps and media
I would love to see some data to see how dangerous it is to operate Maps and Media apps on a touch screen while operating a moving vehicle. This is data modern automakers should have access to. I suspect the answer is that it does reduce safety.
Nobody has access to that data, even if you're excluded it to extreme cases like "an at-fault crash happening as the user was manipulating the map software directly". We can't bridge the gap between that and accident reports.
And that doesn't get into the more subtle cases, e.g. a crash that happens later due to an earlier loss of situational awarenesses.
It's also hard to quantify the opposite. E.g. I sometimes have to manipulate the map while driving, and resent the distraction. But afterwards I'm more likely to be in the right lane earlier, not be distracted because I'm trying to read a traffic sign in the 1-2 second window I might have etc.
There are enough sensors in a car to know when a collision has occurred. The car is capable of capturing touchscreen use metrics. Bonus points if you can find metrics for the same region/timespan for cars with tactile controls. You can then do any year 1 statistics algorithm to see if using the touchscreen is correlated with collisions. Yes, this doesn't prove causation. A correlation is enough to raise the flag about a safety issue.
EDIT: A decent statistical analysis will also uncover if using the touch screen is negatively correlated with accidents -- if people that use maps in general are less likely to get into an accident. This again won't prove causation but would be of interest to the general public and regulators.
Check how Mazda did it with their ring control. I love it in mine. No touch screen needed.
It's amazing that accessibility is such an afterthought that having a physical wheel that tabs forward and backward through a UI as the primary means of using it is unfathomable until it's actually implemented.
I just wish Android Auto had an option to disable activity boundaries for spinning so I can spin from Maps to media, and use the joystick control for directional selection (i.e. it tries to find the next button in that direction). I was excited for Coolwalk but then never got used to switching between Maps and media with the joystick. In the end I just reverted to pressing the Nav and media buttons then spinning.
If it’s like the old BMW iDrive systems, it’s pretty good but I think it’s a bit like comparing a blackberry and an iPhone. Sure the physical keyboard on the blackberry has advantages.
> Sure the physical keyboard on the blackberry has advantages.
Yes, being able to operate it without looking at it and capable of navigating arbitrary 3rd party apps. And because the tab position is stateful you can perform complex actions incrementally. Touch screens win for phones but you would hate one as your laptop keyboard. It's not a better or worse situation as much as a fit-for-purpose situation.
I took a ride with an owner of a brand new BMW with glass cockpit and minimal buttons. He complained to the dealer about not being able to find any of the actions in the endlessly nested menus. The dealer's response: Use voice controls.
He tried it, and it's even worse than Siri in terms of reliability. Absolute unmitigated disaster.
Tell a Tesla to "go home" sometime, and it will respond what's obviously the best interpretation of your wish, namely playing Boney M's minor 1979 hit "Gotta Go Home" on Spotify. Fortunately, "stop wipers", "stop navigation" or in fact any kind of stop at all will instantly pause the disco assault.
Not all drivers can speak. Not all drivers speak in a way a voice control can reliably understand them. Not all drivers are in environments where voice commands can be easily understood, like loud music. If you are driving a car you likely have the ability to push a button.
And even when the driver can speak, use the language, be understood and the voice controls are reliable, sometimes they don't actually want to disturb the passengers sleeping in the car just to crack the sodding window open a bit!
I'm not entirely sure you've ever used voice controls.
I've never had experience with any car voice controls which didn't make me want to drive my car into a divider just to end the pain. Voice controls are so frustrating to use that I'm sure they are more distracting to use than even a touchscreen. I might be able to keep my eyes on the road easier with voice controls, but, my brain is going to be quickly annoyed and focused on trying to suss out why the voice control system is not understanding me, or am I using the wrong phrase, or do I need to put the windows up (impossible for me 6+ months of the year) so the car can hear me better?
It's like trying to pair bluetooth with a non-carplay (or non-android auto -- which I haven't used but heard good things about) with virtually all OEM and many aftermarket receivers. A uniquely frustrating experience which makes me wonder if QA departments at automakers actually exist.
> But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features like the European Union's eCall feature.
Those are exactly what is at issue.
This also needs to deal with multiple languages and regional accents for Europe.
If I, an American, rent a car in Germany, do I need to speak German in order to engage the windshield wipers? For that matter, navigating the on screen controls may also be problematic.
Yes, I have it. It's great. I much prefer a quick swipe on the side of the touchscreen to having a giant physical gear selector wasting a ton of space.
I honestly love just about everything about the UI of the refreshed Model S, from the yoke to the turn signal buttons to the on screen gear selector. Only thing I don't like is the horn button for the two times a year that I honk it.
Wasting what space? Sure, the gear selectors on a lot of cars are in the center console, and maybe I’d rather store something there. But I have never, in my entire history of driving cars, wanted to put anything right behind the steering wheel — first, it’s really awkward to get anything else there and second, any dangly thing there could tangle with the wheel, thus killing me.
So no, please keep the critical driving controls in fixed locations that are easy to access without looking away from the road or looking away. IMO that includes the horn, the turn signals, the wiper control, cruise control settings, and turn signals. And things I might want to adjust in a moderate hurry while driving should have fixed, tactile locations; climate control and sound volume are in this category.
My first car nailed all of this. Recent cars, not so much.
IMO, voice controls are good additional control modality, but not a good primary one, since the discoverability is zero. (And also they're usually just...not very good.)
Causing drivers to get road rage because they can't figure out the correct phrasing for voice controls probably also isn't a good idea.
Google Assistant still regularly misinterprets what I say <.<
Not to mention most voice assistants are fucking awful slow in language. It's like they pick a rural dweller as their speech model instead of a city slicker.
Just give me a button instead, it'll be quicker and less distracting.
Being able to honk the horn or turn the windshield wipers on from the back seat would certainly be an interesting feature, especially for people with kids.
I've heard some of the newer cars have pretty good voice controls, especially on the more expensive models. However, the companies tend to put these behind a subscription wall, which I hate. I don't want my car to be always connected to the cloud. I'll do my navigation via my phone, and nothing else requires connectivity (except perhaps if I had an EV and wanted to schedule charging stops).
Some reactions are instinctive and don’t require thought.
Imagine mid-sipping a drink and something falls out of a truck… garble garble garble —-crash.
Voice controls in an emergency wouldn’t work unless you require like 500 feet (maybe more) car to car separation. And then you have people with temporary voice conditions (losing voice) and permanent voice conditions (mute/dumb)
Like voice control is a reliable method of communication lol. Have an accent? Sorry can’t use your car.
Mute?
Cough?
Lost your voice at a concert?
Have the windows down?
Come on…
This was the primary reason I bought my 2024 Mazda3, instead of alternatives in market. The Mazda was the only option that had physical controls for everything. In fact it disables the touch screen altogether when you exceed 10mph, forcing the use of physical controls. It works flawlessly with wireless carplay
Yeah, I was hoping to replace mine with something like a modern 6 PHEV but they went full on SUV these days. A pity, their interior and UX design is still second to none
They do sell en EV in some places, the MX-30. It’s a terrible EV that was outdated before its release, so that’s perhaps why they don’t try to sell it more. We are talking about the company that still invest in internal combustion engines so don’t have too high hopes.
Toyota has not been a leader in full-EVs because they believe that most customers want a non-charging hybrid solution — one they "just put gas in to" and forget about anything else.
IMHO, this is the correct solution for all but a handful of commuters (e.g. a WFH citydweller could probably enjoy a full EV, but not for vacations).
Yeah, I know it’s an intentional strategy. I’m just commenting that I wouldn’t have particularly high hopes in the near term for Mazda EVs due to the Toyota partnership. Toyota are one of the leading companies researching solid state batteries, though (or so it seems), so that could be a game changer.
Yep. My 2011 Mazda3 is great but getting on in age and we'd like to switch to an EV. Sadly Mazda's not in the running at all :( Probably will get either the Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6, whichever has fewer touch screen controls.
I am waiting for the day when mechanical keyboard enthusiasts finally put kailh hot swap sockets into a car's controls. Then we can have debates about whether car controls should be tactile, linear, or clicky. GMK keycaps for German cars. Japanese cars with Topre switches. Anime dye-sub keycaps on ricers. QMK firmware forked and re-written in MISRA-C. It would be grand.
Modern cars already have a ton of unnecessary RGB backlighting and I hate it so much. It’s really distracting at night to have trim LEDs reflect in every glass surface.
I hate clicky keyboards, because there's usually a pretty quick on-screen result from hitting the button, and you might press keys tens of thousands of times in a day. Love me some tactile.
But in a car when you might interact with controls a couple dozen times per trip? Absolutely clicky.
MG4, when I turn on A/C or defog, the navigation is overlayed by an A/C controls screen, which must be tapped in a specific small area to get rid of it. I still fumble with it every damn time after six months of use.
Not to mention that on cars like Tesla, UI updates will change the location of these buttons.
This drives me INSANE. The other one: some of the Tesla UIs feel like they were made with "minimalism" in mind. For instance the rear defroster vs the windshield defroster. I still, 3 years into my model Y, have no idea which is which, and every time I need to defrost the front windshield it's like a fight against the HVAC system and buttons and touchscreens to make it do anything.
I love my tesla, probably to the point of being annoying, but I **HATE** the ridiculous "minimalist" UI stuff, and I absolutely hate it when they push a UI update which moves things around.
How is it possible to love a car that does things you hate when there are other cars at the same price that does everything the object of your love does, and doesn't do the things you hate?
>other cars at the same price that does everything the object of your love does
Because there aren't? My tesla has FSD which I use for the majority of my driving, it looks cool, it's really fast, I really like the in dash display (just don't like UI updates, and some very specific parts of the HVAC controls).
This is such a funny question to me. Do you love your city? Is there *nothing* you dislike about it?
In part Europe thew answer for the first is "all of them".
(And yes that works. I recently finished a 2k+ road trip in Germany and had no issues at all. Plug and charge worked flawlessly on every DC fast charger I visited. AC charging worked by swiping my RFID card).
I don't have a problem so much with the touch screen itself. It's a waste for a lot a things and I frequently just turn my screen off, but it is nice to be able to bring up a map with directions and arrival estimates.
But I am constantly disappointed by just how awful and useless the software is.
Need some directions? Sorry, I can auto-play this music station you haven't used in a week, but if you want those directions you looked up on your way out the best I can do is (maybe) have the address in your recent search history.
Want to resume the music you were streaming from your phone through your media center? Yeah, just give me a few minutes to load up this other UI and...Are you sure you have a music app on your phone? Maybe you just need to add it to the car app? Here, let me bring that up on your phone screen. Hold up. There's some audio coming through the bluetooth, I'll just play that.
Want to see why the "Check Engine" light came on? Oh, well for that you need to buy a $50 dongle with Bluetooth and install an app on your phone.
I hate them in all applications that don't benefit from touch and even in many that do. For example, electric cookers. Despite being easier to clean I still find them absolutely infuriating to interact with, plus cats can activate them.
Most of the time, though, they are implemented simply because it's cheaper. There's no benefit to speak of. In fact, I think the only device for which a touch interface works is a smartphone. I can't think of any others.
For vehicles manufactured as of approximately January 2024: To sound the horn, press the middle of the steering yoke (or steering wheel). For vehicles manufactured prior to approximately January 2024: To sound the horn, press and hold the horn button on the right side of the steering yoke (or steering wheel).
"press and hold" doesn't seem like it'd be easy to do if all you wanted was a quick toot.
Thanks for that link, which has images. Jesus, the pre-2024 horn is insane. It's one tiny button among many on the right side (of that stupid yoke, but I digress...) The whole point of having the horn in the middle of the steering wheel is you can just mash it with your palm, no need to hunt for anything. Really wonder how that ever got into a production car in the first place.
> Really wonder how that ever got into a production car in the first place.
Teslas are the Dunning-Kruger cars. Designed by people who seemingly do not really know how to design cars (a wheel is boring; let’s put a yoke because video games! Look how cool we are! Also, touchscreens!) and built with poor quality control. I was not aware of the horn button, but if I had to guess, Tesla would be my first choice.
It's weird that Tesla is being called out over the horn.
In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers - only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash.
But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.
...
I'm not sure Tesla improved the situation, but it definitely seems like the situation has room for improvement.
> In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers
This is definitely not a cultural universal. Different countries have different practices. In some places the horn simply means “I’m here, check your mirrors”, in other places it means “You bastard!”, and in some other places it means “We are both stuck in traffic let’s make as much noise as possible to pass the time”
> only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash
Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.
> Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.
Being readily accessible is a must. The point I was trying to make (poorly; it was late) was that having the horn button in the middle of the wheel is about the worst place imaginable if you lay on the horn to avoid a crash and it happens anyway, because some portion of your arm is probably going to be broken when it gets crushed between an exploding airbag and your rapidly-decelerating body.
Exactly - you need to have quick access the horn in a safety critical use case, so it shouldn't be a small button you have to find among other small buttons. You should be able to mash the center of the steering wheel.
>But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.
... what? I had a car who's horn stopped working and the airbag didn't explode or go off.
> And specifically the horn button being capacitive co-located with the voice assistance and windscreen wiper buttons.
... Wait, is this a real thing, or just a joke about them being bad at UX? If a real thing... goodness, I'm quite surprised that doesn't break some mandatory safety rule.
Touché! It's interesting how early vehicles were very different in their controls, but seemed to mostly converge and stabilise for a few decades, before again diverging and changing rapidly.
The Model T (Ford) had a throttle on the steering wheel and 3 pedals, but not the ones you'd expect today:
Congress didn’t “mandate” it, they made it such that the federal government could only buy vehicles that used the PRND sequence for auto transmissions. If you don’t want any corporate welfare you can make your transmission shift in any order you feel like.
My 1995 Renault Clio had it as a button on the indicator stalk. Worked very well, in my view. Much easier than pressing the centre of the steering wheel. There's often no need to even move your hand!
Probably a French thing. My dad’s 70’s Peugeot had the horn where in most cars today is the windscreen washer action, ie pull towards you the right stalk.
I would prank my 6-7yo cousin at the time that all you had to do is ask the car to beep and it would do
I had the same on a 2003 Twingo. Very handy, except for that time when I horned at a poor jogger on the side of the road instead of activating the turn signal :(
Although it seems to have changed, my 1990's Twingo also had the horn on the indicator stick but a 2000's Megane already has it in the steering wheel proper.
My grandmother used to have a car where the horn was a button at the end of one of the stems. I think it was on the same stem that controlled the wipers. I wish I remembered what kind of car it was. I think it was from the 40s.
First generation Chevy Volt (2011-2016) has a button at the end of the left stem that sounds an alternative polite (aka "pedestrian") horn. It's several very rapid, but somewhat quiet honks, that sound like "brrrap".
I like that. I used to have a car that would give that kind of polite honk with a light press and a louder honk with a harder press. I’ve always wished that were still a thing.
My parents had one of these... I believe it was Ford Corcel from 1978 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Corcel), a South American model, according to Wikipedia, based on Renault 12.
Tesla Cybertruck uses steer-by-wire with almost no redundancy. Electric power steering was bad enough to cause crashes, this is just ambulance chaser's dream.
Nope, ColPAS and ParPAS solutions both normally have the mechanical connection of the steering column between the rack and pinion mechanic and the steering wheel, they mainly differ by the way of introducing the mechanical assist force to the system. (on the steering column, or at the rack and pinion mechanism).
They generally have the following root safety requirements:
- the assist system must not cause "blocking" (unturnable wheels/steering wheel)
- the assist system must not cause unintended steering
- the assist system must be able to restart in less than 20 milliseconds
- the assist system must stay passive after a number of unsuccessful startups/unrecoverable errors (typically 3). In this case the mechanical steering column still provides a way for the driver to control the car.
It has been 10+ years since I last worked such a system, but drive by wire was only on the horizon, not the norm, and as far as I know the authorities only allowed drive by wire solution some 2-3 years ago, with product development lifecycle of around 5 years that means they are still not the norm among new cars I believe.
Back then more redundancy in the electric motors (more gradual failure if one phase goes bust, not going into deadlock in certain angles when any of the 3 phases is malfunctioning) and authenticated communications on the system bus (which was considered trusted earlier) were on the roadmap for the next gen steering systems, which are mandatory requirements before you can get to steer by wire.
Why even put it on the bus? Adding a couple of meters of cable per critical system like steering or even 10 for braking couldn't offset the complexity of bus steering.
On the contrary, adding just "a few meters of cable" per each critical system, and adding separate sensors instead of using the same critical sensors would greatly increase complexity. Also so really underestimate the cabling and sensor needs for modern requirements.
Having redundant bus and redundant sensors usable by multiple subsystems is a better way.
Well, I have heard of power assist using a single simple potentiometer as a steering wheel position sensor in some really cheap cars... I'm not sure how much of an urban legend that is, but nowadays it surely wouldn't cut it for road permission in the EU.
On one hand you are right, but only if we can ignore the highly increased risk of electric malfunction from the extensive traditional (non bus based) wiring. This was a common problem in the 1980s when electric gadgets became numerous, but no standard bus was used on many such cars.
To overcome this the plan back when I was working on that product was to use 2 system buses, one isolated internal for the safe critical sensor/control network, and one user facing untrusted bus, with a ECU designed to serve as a firewall basically.
Why even have the firewall? Wouldn't a true airgap be preferable? At the same time, having say steering and brakes on the same bus adds a single point of failure to both steering and brakes, which is not ideal.
Cost and risk management. These systems undergo rigorous safety evaluation, auditing, and testing. This is a manageable risk (very low) given the business requirements and the threat model.
No. Almost all cars except some concepts and prototypes have mechanical link between the steering wheel and the steering rack. Even if the link is augmented by a hydraulic or electronic booster.
If a booster fails you have a chance of overpowering it, it's not that strong. A faulty steer-by-wire will swing you into the oncoming lane with no recourse.
Anywhere in aviation it's redundant transducers (the thingies that transform rotation into some sort of signal), redundant flight law computers implemented by independent teams on dissimilar hardware, a stupidly robust vote/compare module, I think mostly analog, and usually a last resort direct mode.
When all of that is implemented in cars and weathers for 10-20 years I might consider it.
Otherwise, seeing as Toyota's regen braking code had like 10k global variables, I'm not touching that with at 10 foot pole.
Acceleration/braking can be quite bad but there's normally neutral and ignition switches. With steering there's literally nothing between you cruising along a highway and you splattered on some concrete pillar 200ms later.
That is more than likely generated code. Model based development and code generation (by certified toolchains) are the norm in automotive and aerospace.
This doesn't necessarily follow. Planes became pressurized and got oxygen masks, it's very unlikely that cars ever do. Having steel cables and/or hydraulic lines for the 4-6 dimensions of aircraft controls adds up to some serious extra weight worth fighting for on a plane, while one steel rod might never be more problematic than the heap of problems its absence creates.
As long as the steering wheel is there it might as well be connected to the rack, forever.
Motors have nothing to do with this, you still have to have the suspension struts, and the wheels still have to be mechanically linked by the tie rod and usually the sway bar.
Also inside the wheels makes no sense at all, google unsprung weight.
Peugeot through the 505 put the horn button on a stalk on the steering column. The 505 ended production for most of the world in the early 90s and I've not seen any of their more modern cars so I've no idea how long that design lasted.
The French made some really… interesting choices with their cars.
Except for radios. It's very annoying that every radio had a different UX, likely in the name of innovation and differentiation. I think that's a safety issue for e.g. rental cars.
The radio is a feature in which a move to change station should not take more than a fraction oft a second. If it takes more you should stop. That is valid for any action but for some reason people start adjusting their entire audio setup while driving...
You don't feel the hydraulic feedback in the brake pedal (just the ABS buzzing), and gas pedals in many modern EFI vehicles feel more like foot-operated potentiometers than throttle linkages.
> gas pedals in many modern EFI vehicles feel more like foot-operated potentiometers than throttle linkages.
In my EV it literally is a potentiometer. I really miss the feel of a physical throttle linkage on the snow and ice, I feel it's much more difficult to judge grip.
Also, since it's just a pot, I don't know why there's not a speed mode for it, it to make it operate the cruise control speed set-point rather than torque.
> I really miss the feel of a physical throttle linkage on the snow and ice, I feel it's much more difficult to judge grip.
The throttle is separated from the wheels/ground by the transmission and the whole engine, which makes me wonder if the response you felt probably was a combination of eg rpm/physical vibration and a few other factors. It should be possible to recreate these even in an EV, then.
The throttle feeling of a cable operated throttle is more about how much air the engine wants to breathe. I’d say it’s kinda still related to rpm, but it might be a completely different feeling on a turbo engine, that I haven’t experienced.
On most turbo engines these days they are electronically operated and have no linkage anyway. That's even the case in most modern petrol cars where people think there still is a linkage. And that trend has been going on for at least 20 years.
Right, but how does the changes in engine wanting to breathe manifest through the throttle pedal feel? Changes of vibrations? Changes of resistance? Changes in lag from pushing the pedal to the engine responding? Perhaps on the direct throttle car you could simply hear the engine better?
It changes resistance. My dad had an old, full mechanical/hydraulic automatic car and it was an extremely visible feeling from the throttle pedal when it changed gears or when it engaged the extra clutch (it had torque converter and some extra clutch on top of it for fuel efficiency)
The sound of the engine also changes greatly depending on the throttle position and engine load but for me it was more audible and I couldn’t feel it from the throttle. Modern cars are pretty good with sound insulation from the engine, but I’ve heard some “sporty” cars direct the intake sound to the cabin for giving the noisy sports car experience to the driver without being obnoxious with the exhaust side.
There is a noticeable difference in feel between ICE cars with physical throttle cables and those with electronic throttles…the drive-by-wire models have a very small amount of lag between pedal input and engine response. If you’re attuned to it, or drive “spiritedly”, the effect is quite noticeable. I think mainstream cars mostly switched over around 20 years ago, I remember learning about it when I googled for why the accelerator pedals in new cars felt so weird to me.
I think there are a few reasons for it, one of which is simply increasing efficiency by smoothing the accelerator input a bit. I’ve only driven an electric car a few times, so I’m not sure if they also have this delay, but I would expect they do.
> one of which is simply increasing efficiency by smoothing the accelerator input a bit
Right, it feels very much like I'm just changing a set-point. Putting the car in eco mode makes it very noticeable, but even though it's less noticeable in sport mode it's still not the same.
Many modern cars have a turbo that makes this almost impossible to tell. It almost feels irrelevant, compared to planning ahead for the inevitable wait for the turbo to build pressure.
That's what I had thought, but mechanic that replaced the throttle pedal assembly called it a potentiometer (had a weird pulsing in the force feedback).
I read the "unintended acceleration" report from NASA. The Toyota cars involved had two independent hall effect sensors. Hopefully there's been no backsliding since then.
"Old" cars tend to have brake pedals where the pressure is used to judge how much force you are applying - find the point where it bites and then modulate the force. Many "modern" cars brake pretty much as soon as the pedal moves, and the amount of braking is determined by the position of the pedal, rather than the force applied at a certain point. I have no idea how they do this, but whenever I switch to a car with the "old" style, I always end up braking way too hard until my brain recalibrate.
Every vehicle I've ever driven since I learnt to drive 20 years ago has had an electronic throttle body, a digital accelerator and ABS. Welcome to 2024.
I did learn to drive manual, but I'd never buy another car like that. Maybe it's fun for racing, but for every day driving, automatic requires less effort and longevity isn't a concern today.
Remember to press both left and center pedals to stop.
Manuals proliferate in EU, but we have also always had automatics on the road - and a significant increase since DSGs hit the market - so no one who has driven a few normal cars would be surprised by two pedals in an electric.
Using the clutch before you need to when braking is bad form. The engine will assist in braking if you let it, especially in the low gears, and this doesn't use any fuel -- dumping the clutch immediately consumes more fuel to keep the engine running. Put the brake pedal in first, and then the clutch pedal as you approach idle RPMs.
It's still not correct. You press the brake to stop. You press the clutch to not stall. They're separate concerns, or maybe more accurately one is only a response to the other - you clutch as you're about to stop because otherwise you'll stall, you don't brake and clutch at the same time because you decide to stop and not stall at the same time.
If you really want to nit, the only function of a clutch is to slip during start from standstill. All other steps of driving can be done without touching the clutch pedal and with less wear, including shifting and stopping. That's just not a nice way to drive.
If you don't press the clutch during a stop, you risk increasing your stopping distance both due to engine inertia and due to it fighting back below idle - especially in a diesel van. We only have muscle memory when we panic, and it's bad if someone is taught in a way that makes them miss a pedal.
That's also part of why you are taught with stick over here - better be trained to press a pedal too much than a pedal too little. If you do take the license in an automatic, you get a mark on your license disallowing you from driving stick.
I think "proliferate" is the wrong word. Automatics seem to be on the rise - I learned on a manual but have only been driving automatics for a decade. They're also more accessible and I'm not sure there are any EVs that emulate manual transmission as there's literally no point. So if anything, manuals are largely on the way out.
I don't know where you live, but if you're feeling smug about being in Europe, Europe is going automatic. 30% and rising if I recall correctly plus EVs don't need manual transmissions anymore.
Except DD2 and KZ, well true, they only have 2 pedals, but they also have a hand operated clutch. But you only need it to start the kart. You shift without the clutch, and for starting you can have it in neutral and just push it in first when you have build a little speed and sit in the kart. I suppose if you have one with an electronic starter you need it.
No, it’s the feedback loop. You feel the hydraulic system for the brakes and the steering. If you have an accelerator cable then you feel that tension as well… but the accelerator feel is less important.
Electronic power steering already exists. It's used in a lot of cars, and has been for at least 10 years. Your car may have one of these systems in it.
In an electric power steering system there are steering angle and torque sensors that know what direction the wheel is turned an how hard it has turned, and this is connected to an electric motor that powers the gears to move the steering rack.
There are still regulations in place that require a mechanical connection to the steering wheel and rack, but try and turn the wheel with the car off and see if your wheels move... But when the car is running when you turn the wheel you're just a voting remember in the system.
There are no such regulations for throttles. Pretty much every car since the late 80s has electronic throttle control and there are no mechanical linkages from pedal to throttle body.
Most of the modern steering systems are just hydraulic or electronic power steering which boosts your input with a hydraulic or electric assist motor. You're still moving the mechanical linkage at any time you're steering, it's just that when the car is off the assist motor is disabled and because modern cars have massive tire contract patches, huge weights, and a lot more caster compared to yesteryear, it's damn near impossible to turn the wheels when the car is off and not moving. If you simply disabled the assist, started the car, and let it roll, you would find that it is only maybe 1.5 times harder to turn the wheel than a classic car with skinny tires and larger steering wheels and such. You're still fully controlling the direction the wheels are turned in said systems, the assist motor simply adds force.
> it's damn near impossible to turn the wheels when the car is off and not moving.
That was also strongly discouraged on older cars and only possible with big steering wheels and good grip. Just move very slowly and the turning becomes really easy even without assistance (and which is what you were thought when this was still a thing in countries with required driving lessons).
Exactly, just have to move it a bit. I owned an old Fiat when I was a teenager so I was lucky to learn how to drive a car without assists. I prefer the assists most of the time though!
Turning my car at low speed with the engine off feels much harder than 1.5 times the turning of an old times car of similar weight. I could hardly make it turn at all when it happened. I don't think I'd be able to make it through a real turn on a road. And I have a small car of about 1000 kg.
Yup, cars designed for power steering don't work as well without it as cars specifically designed to operate without power steering. Not just the steering wheel size, the whole steering geometry is probably different.
> “There are still regulations in place that require a mechanical connection to the steering wheel and rack”
Are you sure? Fully “steer by wire” vehicles with no mechanical steering link are already in production. The Tesla Cybertruck is the most well-known example.
Toyota/Lexus has also been demonstrating steer-by-wire for a while (Lexus RZ), and it will apparently ship in consumer vehicles later this year.
Are any of these cars available outside the US? From what I've been able to tell, US regulations are much weakest in this regard which is possibly why there are so many words cars there.
(In some aspects the US automotive regulations are actually stricter than in Europe. For example, in Europe there are some vehicles (eg: Audi) where the wing mirrors are replaced by screens/cameras, but this is not permitted in the US. Adaptive matrix headlights are also not allowed in the US.)
> Pretty much every car since the late 80s has electronic throttle control and there are no mechanical linkages from pedal to throttle body
Electronic throttles became widespread much later than the 80s. Pop the hood of common 2000s economy cars and you’ll find a mechanical throttle linkage.
Yes, the throttle cable operates the opening of the throttle. Downstream of that is the airflow meter which is an input to the fuel injection computer so it knows how much air is going in.
Experimenting? It’s been around for a long time. My 1999 Jetta had it. It’s smoother and you can control the fuel adder on throttle opening from all angles.
Sure, it’s not instant, but stabbing the gas in a non dbw is not great either.
In electric cars there is no other way than dbw
Well I see what you mean. Steer by wire is part of drive by wire if you want to be specific. But before that was a thing “drive by wire” meant a throttle body controller by the ECU.m for many years. So if you go to a shop and say DBW what the other end hears is “stepper throttle”
It's be really cool if there were some giant high power potentiometer connected directly from the batter to the motors in an EV. Just smash the pedal, see a blast of plasma and you take off. Just like slot cars. I can't see a single downside to this :p
If my steering wheel isn't connected to my front wheels mechanically, that's asking for a lot of trust. Previously a severe mechanical issue would be the only thing to worry about. Maybe on an EV with always connected and charged batteries it would be better, but on ICE I can imagine a number of ways the electrical system suddenly fails and now the wheel does nothing, even if just for a short lag.
At least on brake by wire ICE systems I could let engine braking slow me if the brake system fails somehow (even if I have to blow the engine to save my life, worth the trade).
Having previously driven a car with a mildly unreliable power steering system, it’s an extremely good thing that the power steering was backed up with a mechanical linkage (that worked very well — it was surprisingly subtle when the power steering crapped out at 30mph).
A drive-by-wire system had better be a lot more reliable and also notice impending failures.
I personally cannot stand power steering systems. There’s always a dead zone and the feedback is delayed, in some vehicles more noticeably than in others, but it’s always there.
I feel like I have had several close calls that would have been accidents for sure had I been driving with power steering.
What car do you have without power steering? Or, are you referring to electric as opposed to hydraulic power steering? I haven't seen a car without power steering since the early 00s (which was a 90s car).
The steering deadzone is not purely a function of power steering. Some of it is design or could be attributed to that, but a bunch of it also comes from slop in the physical connections in the steering column, as well as the suspension bushings, your tyre profile, etc.
It turns out I was mistaken! I haven’t done enough research to determine the actual cause of the effect I have noticed. It might be hydraulic vs electric but I don’t want to make that assumption and be wrong again - I’m going to have to research the steering in other cars I’ve noticed that issue in.
There’s definitely a different feel to the electric motor driven assist. Though there are just many different implementations probably the specific one you had was particularly quirky.
Relatedly I had a Hyundai i30 for a while which has a well known fault where the plastic gear connection (called a Spyder Bush) from the electric motor to the steering column would break. Resulting in slop and a clunk. Not hard to imagine similar failures or bad design.
I once drove an early car with an electric steering assist system. (It was either a renta or a test drive, I think it was an American car, and I don’t remember what brand or model.). It was terrible. There was essentially no feedback from the road to the wheel.
The opposite is true. Those old AMCs without power steering were just as easy to steer on the highway as any other car (once you managed to get up to speed) but the parking lot was a chore and parallel parking was neigh impossible.
Fancier power steering systems basically fully disengage at speed because you don’t need them; they’re for moving the wheels when you’re stopped or nearly so.
A combination of whatever fiddling the mechanic did and making sure the fluid was topped off seemed to solve the issue. Also, it was a good, if somewhat old, car, and the mechanical steering was quite good. I was able to steer it without much difficulty at pretty much any speed even in no-power-steering mode.
But yes, I agree, unpredictable steering response is dangerous.
Mechanic connections can, and do, fail. Ask Ayrton Senna. AFAIK, steer by wire are already doing full redundancy, like it was a plane.
There has been a number of plane accidents related to physical connection between the yoke and the actuators (cables loosing tension under high temperatures, or cut/trapped on a deck failure). Electric cables does not suffer that, and they are easily doubled.
SbW makers are already making software that does constant surveilance of the system, something that traditional systems has never done.
The number of dead people caused by the steering column going straight through their chest in a collision is huge. That shouldn't happen with SbW.
I hate the trend towards car controls in a screen, but Drive by Wire sounds like a real advance towards better cars to me. DbW without redundancies and continuous tracking could be a safety issue, but with them I don't think it's an issue. Fly by Wire has a good safety record.
Post ALB there isn’t the same feedback thru breaks as there are steering. Steering systems have been highly engineered so you can get feedback from the road while still having power assist.
There must be a physical connection though? How do you stop if you're out of power? If not, I can only think of truck-like system where brakes are "on by default" and user input disactivates them.
And in that situation it probably was easy to use because most likely you REALLY needed it, which these laws are trying to make sure happens: it's easily accessible.
I disagree, whenever in the past I needed to use the honk, I've failed to do so because it's hard to press and requires you to take one hand off the wheel, which is the last of your instincts when you panicking, or both if you are juggling your gearstick.
Your instincts suck. Sorry to be blunt. It's similar to correcting a slide: your brain won't do it automatically, but it's worth learning because it's a safety feature.
If somebody enters your lane at speed, the safest thing to do is to let them know you're there. Swerving or breaking in response multiplies the problem, as now there are two cars driving erratically. The horn won't always resolve everything, but it's by far the most effective way to get somebody's attention in a hurry.
>Swerving or breaking in response multiplies the problem, as now there are two cars driving erratically.
Holding your steering wheel with a single hand will cause you to drive erratically too.
>The horn won't always resolve everything, but it's by far the most effective way to get somebody's attention in a hurry.
That's why it should be possible to activate it with an easy to reach button or lever, preferably next to the emergency lights, instead of a heavy pressure button right in the center of the steering wheel.
> 99% of time there is absolutely no reason to honk
Could it also be that in different places, there are different expectations, and different environments that makes people use the honk for various purposes?
I get that in the US it seems to mostly be a social signal of "fuck you", but in Spain where I mainly drive, I've avoided a couple of accidents by honking after seeing cars slowly coming close to my own car on the highway, especially when passing lone cars when things are no so busy. People seem to stop paying attention then.
Then in Peru the honking is seemingly constant, and people honk in prevention when they pass you, like a "just in case" honk. Honking seems to be a way of life there, rather than for emergencies.
Using the horn to prevent myself from being squashed by yank tanks with a hood and tailgate height significantly taller than my car (and most adults) helps the commute. They'd have to shut down part of the road to clean the car bits and the red goo off the road otherwise. If my country legislated those absurd vehicles out of existence I wouldn't need to lay on the horn to make my existence known.
> It helps when people try to merge into the side of your car
fair enough!
> when someone forgets to watch traffic signals after stopping at a red light
I dunno. If you wouldn't blow a horn while walking the sidewalk when inconvenienced, I don't think drivers should either. You're not the only two people on the street, there's other people around here and they don't need to be abused by impatient drivers. ymmv, ianal, etc.. of course.
I don’t lay into the horn like a jerk when someone is inattentive to a traffic light. I just give a quick tap to get them to snap out of whatever it is they’re distracted by. I also wait at least a few seconds. Most people seem to appreciate this because they don’t want to block traffic, either.
Touchscreen controls are the feature on my Tesla I dislike most. Try poking a small icon an arms length away while bouncing over typical Midwest roads and you'll see that it's impossible to do while keeping your eyes on the road. Physical controls would be fantastic, but at the very least they could:
* Radically improve the ability to control the car with the scroll wheels on the steering wheel.
I don't mean assigning certain functions to the buttons, I mean having a cursor I could glance at, then put my eyes back on the road while I click right twice, up once, click again and then scroll to change whatever.
* For the love of all that is holy, ANCHOR controls to the top or bottom of the screen where you can brace your hand on the bezel while trying to poke the buttons. Pretty much the opposite of the fan control that is right in the center of the screen.
> I mean having a cursor I could glance at, then put my eyes back on the road while I click right twice, up once, click again and then scroll to change whatever.
They added a menu kind of like this in a recent update. Long press the left scroll wheel and then you can control a bunch of things using a menu that's controlled entirely by the wheel, no touchscreen.
On my car I can assign one specific function to the left scroll wheel, like the fan speed. What I want is something like the experience of using Windows without a mouse. I should be able to navigate the entire UI without touching the screen.
It's not really "assigning" a function. It's simply a menu that remembers where you were. You can always navigate through the menu to control all of the other functions as much as you want.
Good. My Tesla doesn't have a stalk for wiper control and it's just awful UX. The auto function is erratic (often triggers on a sunny day, doesn't pick the right level in the rain). Might be fine for sunny California infrequent use, but terrible for England.
I'd much rather have easy full control at my fingertips than have to faff about with scroll wheels or the touch screen.
Exactly. I love the car in so many other ways that it just really makes some decisions stand out as ridiculous. Why try and skimp $50 manufacturing cost on stalks and sensors in a $50k vehicle when it's otherwise such a great car?
Ultimately poor wiper controls and fixed headrests are hardly the end of the world, but they could trivially make it so much better...
> Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel.
What the actual fuck? Who thought that replacing such a common function with the least reliable input method possible (capacitive "buttons") was a good idea?
Also, if I get into a rental car or whatever, I don't need to learn basic controls with sane manufacturers, because they're fairly standard. If I get into a rental Tesla, do I need to read the owner's manual first?
I'm confused now. I haven't been in a current Tesla, but what do we refer to when we say haptic button nowadays? To me that's synonymous to tactile button = physical button, but you talk about capacitive buttons. Did Apple's introduction of haptic feedback for touch somehow shift the meaning?
> To me that's synonymous to tactile button = physical button
Why would we need a synonym for a perfectly working word? A physical button is a physical button, to me a haptic button necessarily means some sort of virtual button as otherwise the haptic properties don’t have to be specified.
> Why would we need a synonym for a perfectly working word?
Because that's just how language works, I can think of a dozen perfectly working words that have synonyms. The word haptic existed long before touch screens and capacitive buttons. What else could it have been used for then?
> as otherwise the haptic properties don’t have to be specified
They need to be specified precisely because today buttons that don't have any haptic feedback exists.
> The word haptic existed long before touch screens and capacitive buttons. What else could it have been used for then?
Haptic is anything having to do with touch, it's not specifically feedback (although you can tune the haptic feedback of physical devices as well). A handshake is haptic communication for instance.
> They need to be specified precisely because today buttons that don't have any haptic feedback exists.
Again, that's not the case of physical buttons. So you have three categories of buttons:
- physical
- virtual (non-haptic)
- virtual (haptic)
You don't need to specify that a physical button is haptic, it is that by definition. You can discuss the haptic properties (UX) of different kinds of buttons or physical controls, but that's not the subject here.
Well then maybe we should avoid the term haptic button. I've definitely seen it refer to physical buttons. It wouldn't be wrong to use the term to refer to either, even if it's technically pointless for physical buttons, and I guess that's why people do it when it comes to the physical vs touch debate, to emphasize that specific property of a physical button.
Couldn't agree more. Tesla is the biggest violator. In new Teslas, they are removing physical stalks, so if you want to reverse the car, you have to use on-screen controls!
Have you seen the other BEVs available in America? There really isn't much choice if you don't want an SUV -- your options are basically a Tesla or a Chevy Bolt.
I just got a Mercedes EQB and it's great. Depending on trim it's either about the same price or somewhat cheaper than a Model X. There are physical controls for damn near everything too. The voice assistant isn't terrible, but Carplay/Android Auto is standard anyway so who cares.
I bought a used Model 3 that has the stalk and works fine.
(The lack of wiper controls is absolutely ridiculous and is part of the Jonny Ive-ification of cars)
As for why they are in business, it is because they were first to market with Electric cars, and as a consumer I trust they are better at battery management than other companies that are not all-in on electric. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that the degenerate billionaires that run other car companies are not better than the degenerate billionaire who runs Tesla.
(I would not buy the new models wo/ physical controls, my next electric car will probably be something Chinese in 10 years)
Never having driven a Tesla, I'm legitimately curious how much of a difference the infotainment makes.
The onboard system of my Chinese BEV is not great to be honest (rest of the car works well) but it has Android Auto so it navigates and plays my media.
Since as a sole driver I have to keep my eyes on the road at all times, it seems possible that passengers could benefit but I would like to have some first hand reports.
Or is it common for some people to sit in the car and use the infotainment just for fun?
i've rented electric cars for the last three years and own a Model 3. massive difference.
yes, the tesla doesn't have buttons. however, basically every common operation you'll do can be done in five actions or less.
if i want to navigate somewhere with our tesla, i simply tap the navigation search bar, enter the destination like I would on Google Maps, select and drive. Or i can share the destination with the Tesla app from Google or Apple Maps.
It's at least four taps with CarPlay to do this...and you're hoping that it doesn't crash mid-drive (like it's done to me so many times before). Google Automotive actually does a really great job here, but that's only shipped with select cars.
i can swipe left or right on the cabin temp to adjust upwards or downwards. many cars have dedicated controls for them, but some, like the Kia EV6, use that strip for multiple uses, so you think you're changing cabin temp, but you're actually adjusting sound volume.
ADAS (Lane Keep Assist, Autosteer, adaptive cruise, etc) is where the Tesla experience shines most brightly. On EVERY OTHER CAR, configuring ADAS involves navigating a labyrinthine maze of menus, guessing what a bunch of acronyms mean (LKA, HDA, VCC, etc. Toyotas are the worst at this), and, when it's on, figuring out if it's actually on (autosteer is the worst about this) and hoping you'll develop muscle memory in changing speed and stuff from the steering wheel.
On Teslas, you single- or double-tap the gear stalk or press a button on the steering wheel. To configure, tap the car, tap "Autopilot," go nuts. The only acronym in this menu is FSD, and it's spelled out (full self-driving). the small speed indicator turns blue if traffic-aware cruise control is on; the wheel on the display turns blue if autosteer is on; and the display shows you its view of the world at all times.
What makes you say that? An EV is more than the drivetrain (where Tesla’s are said to be more efficient). EVs from other manufacturers have batter suspension, noise insulation, steering etc.
Have never seen their infotainment system. My BMW i4 has CarPlay - what else would I want?
Yes, many people find these touch screens annoying, and they’ll tend to buy cars with physical controls. But just like people who prefer physical keyboards on their phones, these consumers are a vocal minority who aren’t big enough to cater to.
If touch screens make cars less safe, then we should see higher liability insurance rates for such cars. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The same argument can be made about other products too but it only distracts from the real problem.
Bad practises and products do stick around regardless of their actual usefulness and benefits.
For example take headphone jack. Nobody forced anyone to buy an Apple phone without a headphone jack, yet it is a challenge now to find a good premium/mid-range phone with a headphone jack. Other OEMs are simply copying Apple and people too get along with the new trend.
The same is happening with touch controls too. Once a popular desirable brand introduces an (anti)feature, its competitors misunderstand the feature as a contributing factor for its desirability and blindly copy it without getting into actual merits.
You overestimate how much people want headphone jacks. Most people today use Bluetooth headphones and don’t miss their headphone jacks at all. I honestly forgot that my phone lacked a headphone jack until you pointed it out. That is how little I use wired headphones.
Moreover, why would every manufacturer copy a design that consumers don’t want? If the feature is so widely desired, it would only take one manufacturer not removing the headphone jack to win market share. Your model of the world requires every manufacturer to be incompetent in the same way. A much simpler explanation is that phones are a very competitive market and the manufacturers have calculated that, like physical keyboards, headphone jacks are not a feature most people care about. They prefer the headphone jack be sacrificed for better water resistance, better battery life, and lower cost.
No but because so many people still buy tesla because they're cheap and despite the lack of controls, suits at other manufacturers think they now have to get rid of physical controls as well.
> if you want to reverse the car, you have to use on-screen controls!
So? If you're switching to reverse then by definition you're stopped (or nearly so) and can afford to take your eyes off the road. The control is no further than most cars' center tunnel-mounted gear levers. Plus it only has the two common drive/reverse settings accessible via the swiping action, rather than all the rarely-used options. (Do you know how many times I've shifted into Neutral or Low by mistake in an unfamiliar car...?)
That you can still look at your surroundings with the stalk and keep a tab on what people around you are doing.
Without the stalk someone can walk into a blind spot and you didn’t catch them because you were finding reverse on the screen.
The person next to you is getting ready to open their door.
Or simply you want to make a 3 point turn quickly without being stopped in the middle of the street fiddling with a screen
Poor usability and the generally spartan interior are the reasons why I did not even look at Tesla and ordered a BMW i4 instead. Sadly, they too have moved functions like the aircon into the touch screen.
But at least you still get a driver dash with head up display, proper indicator stalks, real leather seats and quality materials throughout.
Reminds me of the adidas run tracking app. I need to go forward and back in the menu to even start a run. Then it does a countdown. So you start, because why wait until the end of the countdown. Once your phone is in the pocket. Then it decides that you need confirm something like (GPS signal is weak) through a popup. Of course you have no idea it did that. So you pull out your phone once you get back to your car, only to realize it wasn't tracing anything at all.
On the opposite end, it's never smart enough to realize that you're no longer running and you got in your car and started driving. So it will happily add tens of kms. Then to correct it you somehow need to change the distance, time and km separately.
It's like it's an incredible combination of both smart and stupid at the same time. You have to tap, double tap, slide, and press and hold at different places in the UI too.
I did not watch the video linked in the previous post (yet!), but a fun fact is that for the F-35, they decided it was a great idea to use touchscreens instead of push buttons, and they are finding out the hard way it was.. ..not the best of choices.
It turns out that not having tactile feedback means that pilots are pressing the wrong button about 20% of the time. Even more so under g-loads..
I really like Mazda's setup. Honda CRV setup is pretty good too. It seems like a lot of manufacturers are moving towards at least restoring physical controls for climate.
In my 2016 Mazda 3 the physical selector is superb - rotating it scrolls through on-screen CarPlay buttons, pressing it activates the highlighted item. Way less dangerous IMO than reaching to the screen, trying to touch it with some degree of precision.
Yea, I generally agree with that. At least in my '14 model, it also has some weird internal gate where it won't let you scroll through more than 5-10 items in a list while you're going more than 5 MPH. And if you're stopped, and scrolling further than that, it resets you to the start of the list if you start moving. It's infuriating when I'm just trying to play an album that doesn't start with A-D.
I can understand disabling touchscreen scrolling while driving, but at least save my place in the list.
I understand that reducing buttons has a cost-saving and reliability benefit, but it's unfathomable that core and frequently used controls are reduced to touch screens while emphatically stating that a driver must not be distracted by the screen while driving. I've lost all trust in car manufacturers that do this, it's not just wrong, it's obviously dangerous.
Not too familiar with this specific sector, but I can see two reasons why this could be more than nothing
1. If the evaluator is well established it's likely companies would be negatively impacted if they get lower scores even if it just means lower sales rather than an outright ban
2. It seems that while Euro NCAP is not a regulator it is pretty involved with national agencies, so this might be a signal that things are starting to move towards official rules. Of the "self-regulate or you will be regulated" variety
Car manufacturers still like their cars to look good and some people do look at those ratings when buying a car. Or you think people bought the old Volvo 240 because it’s sexy?
Touchscreens tend to be a plague in cars—the last place you want sluggish non-responsive visual attention magnets. What's worse, a poorly engineered and implemented one may render your vehicle inoperable (safety-wise) and thus force you to expend exorbitant amount of money to get them replaced. Physical buttons are high availability and do not depend on absurd amounts of complexity to perform basic functions. It's impossible not to pay attention to this after being burned once by it. Even if a car may offer some limited physical buttons (such as defrosting) for the least ease of access, it may happen that you're unable to revert its secondary effects until you get it fixed.
I couldn't agree more. Touch screen aren't cool, they're a necessary inconvenience where there's no room for physical controls (ie, phones and tablets) and can have some uses in multimedia systems, but using them for driving related or critical controls in cars is both stupid and dangerous: latency and lack of feedback could distract the driver attention away from the road, then a single hit on the screen and the user loses all controls at the same time.
It is somewhat crazy that the shift to a touch screen, which for some, is hard to use and for all, lacks tactile feedback. You can't beat a button or a dial-in in that respect or even replicate that fully on the limitations of a touchscreen.
It almost feels like there is an untapped market for after-market physical controls that can interface with the car that is begging to be tapped. Equally, shudder if somebody patented the ability to add physical controls to augment touch interfaces.
I got rid of my last car many years ago when cars still had casette players. What kind of controls do you really need in a car? I realize that a lot of cars have built in GPS now, but in my opinion all controls that require typing or looking at a screen should be disabled until the car is stopped.
These people basically live in their cars. Imagine just sitting on your bicycle without actually going somewhere on it. Seems weird, but that's what they do. These controls are all for the mobile living room aspect. Nothing to do with driving.
Preach. Very little further “innovation” required for turn signals, lights, wipers, windows, mirrors, seat heaters, horn (?!), gear shifter, HVAC, radio.
I love the direction of recent Toyotas that have actually made the driver and passenger side temp. controls even larger knobs than before, with rubberized grips. Also generally pleased with BMW’s iDrive knob to control the center screen for more complex menu-based controls.
Maps/Nav is the only thing that should require a touch screen, and the best interface for that is to delegate to the driver’s phone via CarPlay. Yes, having to lean over and use an index finger to interact with a touch screen while moving is unsafe. Hope the US follows suit.
The ideal car control has the following: Everything that was in the car twenty years ago needs to have physical buttons. This includes the controls for the audio system that were there twenty years ago. The touch screen should be exclusively be exclusively reserved for CarPlay or Android Auto, no overlays or pop ups or anything from the car manufacturer. Ideally there is a second screen, maybe in the mirror like some BMWs hav, to be used for the backup camera. Car companies should stick to what they are strong at and what they have perfected and not mess with it while they leave the fun software stuff to SV companies.
I think my BMW X5 has the best middle ground for buttons vs touchscreen. I think in the new one they've moved more towards my i4 setup though which is too far on the touch screen.
The X5 has nice push buttons on the steering wheel for media control and stuff like cruise and lanekeep functions. Then it also has heating controls, a volume knob, and some shortcut buttons I can control. All the other gubbins is in the touch screen which works fine.
My i4 moved heating controls to the touchscreen too and dropped the shortcut buttons which is annoying. It still has the nice steering wheel buttons though and a volume knob but it's heading the wrong way IMHO.
It is like a 2+2=4 equation that touchscreen blocks more time out of the road to carry out simple controls over the car.
Mazda in 2019: “And of course with a touchscreen you have to be looking at the screen while you’re touching...so for that reason we were comfortable removing the touch-screen functionality,” And still to this day, Mazda has minimum controls over a touchscreen.
I have a 2021 Ram Classic 1500 "plain Jane" truck. The only option it has is the tow package and the medium size touch screen. To adjust the HVAC air flow, you have to go to the touch screen! (you can adjust the fan speed with a dial.) The cab on this truck is pretty large, so adjusting from the lower vent to the defroster vent is quite risky while going down the road.
On my wife's Pacifica, the fan speed dial is also a button that can be used to change the vent settings, which is much more safer. Why Mopar didn't include this on my truck is anybodies guess.
This is absolutely wonderful. As someone who has only had a driver's license for about a year, it feels beyond scary to start fiddling with a touch screen to do anything of import while driving.
Bumpy roads are the bane of touch sensitive interfaces.
Without any doubt, a driver will spend more time and attention trying to operate a touch sensitive interface than a physical knob or button if the car is bouncing or shaking at all due to road surface irregularities.
Not all roads are smooth highways (and some highways are in a horrible state of repair), so managing car systems without physical controls is almost as dangerous as operating a mobile phone.
The voice commands on my Tesla are pretty handy and I prefer to use them over the touch screen when possible. 'Set wipers to auto', 'Set temperature to <NUM>', and 'Open glovebox' are my go-tos. Main downside is that it requires cellular/internet connectivity.
This vivid discussion really makes me want to see what Apple did come up with for the UI. I doubt they made it all touch screens. But Apple might have had one of the biggest influences on car UIs. After the iPhone came out all the car makers wanted to be cool as well and put them in?
I wonder if it's possible to make adaptive surfaces on touch screens using the developments in bending displays. Being able to provide physical cues on a touch screen would have a wide array of applications.
Obviously physical buttons would be the sensible solution here though.
I'm generally sympathetic to this (I have a Tesla and I wish they used traditional turn signal stalks). But is the set of prescriptive rules really the way to evaluate the safety of the car? Wouldn't some statistics like the number of crashes per 1m km be more informative?
Apparently "physical controls" in new cars now work almost as badly as touch screens. Turn the fan speed knob then wait two agonizing seconds before the fan speed changes. Gods know what kind of telemetry they stuck in the middle of that operation to gum up the works.
Systems that are vital to the operation of a moving vehicle should never under any circumstances force the driver to take their eyes off the road even for a split second to interact with them. It's mindblowing that this was even allowed to happen in the first place.
I wonder if there should be criminal liabilities against designers and engineers who create such monstrosities, especially now that every EV refuses to have any physical buttons. This can end up being life-threatening
The worst is when the touchscreen freezes and there is no master breaker switch to throw to reboot it “in flight.” You have to pull over, shut the car off, open the door, close the door, then start the car to reboot it.
Having been driving Tesla for nearly a year went on a trip last week and got 2015 Toyota. Air con wasn't easier to control even after 6 days of driving. Still had to look at 10+ buttons all crammed up in 6cm diameter ring and figure out what is what.
With Tesla 99% of time I just flip temperature slider at bottom corner. For rest - open larger menu for very intuitive extra controls.
Kinda insane how mass media is picking up worst implementations from legacy auto and extrapolate that to a car that has best UX. It's literally 180 degree turn disinformation.
If any UX testing had been done on these cars it would have been noticed that the drivers eyes drift from the road for far to long while operating auxiliary features. These large glass interfaces are meant as eye candy and/or cost saving.
It's really sad that companies no longer care to do any type of UX research, we need it more than ever. There are so few good product left in pretty much all product categories. It seems that with the introduction of the iPhone even Apple has opted to just stop doing any type of research and experimentation into UX.
That won’t for a round trip in most driver centric cities.
Lucky for me my gf lived 25mi away and had a Leaf so whenever she came home after work or school she would have to charge it again before leaving. Who wants to do that in winter in the rain? Just stay the night!
I never want to see a car with any kind of monitor/touchscreen, I see enough of those at work.
If it is about cost savings, why do I see a new plague of animated flashing indicator lights, horrible! And the number of small towns I drove through on my last big road trip that had flashing LEDs dotted all over road signs, crazy. Reminds me of the old flashing web adverts. Just another annoying distraction from driving safely.
I'd like to see some rules like, no change is speed limit within certain distance of previous sign. Because suddenly we have a plague of signs, e.g. every 100m reducing the speed for a roundabout in 10km/h steps! are we allowing drivers on the roads that dont know to slow down in advance of a junction. And the best part, the roundabout has 'go around arrows' flashing in blue (the colour of police lights here) so straight away you assume a major traffic incident ahead, and then probably quickly learn to ignore blue flashing lights...
So physical buttons need to be the start of a bigger push-back against needless technology based on 'because we can'.
Most are pretty good in my experience, with the exception of Tesla. Tesla’s auto-wipers are comically bad. They NEVER work well because they try to use a tiny camera mounted to the top of the windshield to determine when to trigger them. The camera is probably unable to actually focus on the windshield itself, especially since it is also used for the driver assistance features and has to be focused at road-distance, so my guess is they’re using some kind of algorithm to try and detect distortion caused by rain drops on the windshield for an image captured with focus significantly further away than the windshield surface itself. And that challenge has so far remained unsolved. Tesla just pretend to have working auto-wipers.
Yes, please. I drive an early 2010's BMW with an aftermarket android head unit. The headunit was not a big deal for me but it was useful since maps were wildly out of date and upgrading them was a pain in the ass and having music, live traffic and all that is appreciated but that's all it is. Now... There one or two things I hate about the car. First one is not having a temperature gauge. Instead BMW added this fuel consumption gauge which couldn't be more useless. The second thing I hate is the way the indicator switch works. I got used to it but holy hell, why were BMW so keen on fixing a problem no one had. Keeping this in mind, the whole touchscreen control from everything from fan speed to driving mode is ridiculous: you actually have to turn your head and look at the screen, whereas in my car I can do that without looking at the buttons at all: I more or less know where the button is and it's size, shape and texture. Modern cars are the exact indicator switch problem BMW was trying to solve, but cranked up to 11.
This is totally off topic and will likely get downvoted, but the topic of whether physical controls in a vehicle is a non-issue or critically important is the kind of conversation I want to have when interviewing a prospective employee. It conveys so much in so relatively little. It shows:
* Empathy for others
* The ability to place oneself in an imaginary situation when using something and project what it might be like for you and others using that thing in all kinds of situations
* Evaluate something objectively even when you have sunk costs (say if someone spent a lot of money on a Tesla or something)
* most importantly, the persons judgement. How they view this topic of whether physical controls are important or not shows basic judgement, or lack thereof. That translates over into SO many other areas of life. As an employer, it tells you everything you need to know about whether this person is going to be a good decision maker or someone you have to micro-manage their every decision.
The idea that a touch screen is cheaper than buttons and that this is the driving factor I find hilarious. It's some top tier bean counter shit.
I mean, yeah, sure. It'd be cheaper for my tyres to be made of wood. I don't give a toss, a new vehicle costs tens of thousands, what's $50 for a few buttons?
edit: Top tier bean counter replies! Is it contagious?
I just randomly picked Ford for this. Ford had like 176 billion in revenue last year, but their cost of goods was like 150 billion and their final net income was 4.35 billion. Ford sells on the order of 5 million vehicles per year.
If you can generate $50 dollars of COGs reduction in a car, that's 250 million per year. Yes, that's basically nothing in terms of their COGs, but that's like 5% increase in net income (if they can channel all of the savings into the net income anyways). Alternatively, if you want to be less cynical, Ford's R&D budget comes from that ~20 billion dollar slice between their revenue, COGs and final net income. 250 million is still a pretty ~1% slice of their R&D budget.
> I don't give a toss, a new vehicle costs tens of thousands, what's $50 for a few buttons?
I don't think you've ever worked in manufacturing.
It's not just the cost of the buttons.
A larger cost is the fabrication of the housing for all the buttons: design the housing that goes into the dashboard/console, create a jig/die, continue creating new jigs/dies as the old ones wear out, keep the factory floorspace available even after the car has gone out of production, etc. This has to be done for each car model (yeah, even if you're using blanks).
Another cost that dwarves the cost of buying buttons is the fitment: the fitment robots have to be purchased, programmed and maintained just to put those $50 buttons in. It has to be done for each car model.
And, of course, design changes late in the process cause the manufacturer to spend all that money all over again.
Spread over the lifetime of the car (how long they keep providing parts for it), a minimum of around 5 years, that $50 is negligible compared to the tens of millions of dollars poured into fabricating and fitting of those $50 buttons.
Compared to a touchscreen, all that's done is to ensure that the dashboard design has a housing for the touchscreen. Done, and works for all models from baseline to top-end with no more money needed.
Eh. Let the market decide. Yes Tesla overdid the touch controls - but they were also the first company to put a touch screen that isn’t awful into a car. Yes, removing the stalks a going too far imo, but I can’t imagine how narrow my awareness of the world must be for that to register outrage.
I almost got hit by a porche 911 gt2 today. That car is completely mechanical - but it was being driven by an aggressive idiot; who gives a crap what the wiper button looks like. The controls haptic feedback must be at least on the 20 thousandth page of important things about a car.
The market doesn’t solve all problems - but if the touch controls are so awful, there are only two answer: either they’re not that awful, or tons of people are idiots and you’re really smart. You know, the fount of all bad legislation.
Euro NCAP is not a regulator. It tests the safety of cars and scores them in a way that‘s readable to potential buyers of cars.
Since potential buyers of cars can’t themselves test the safety of cars (they have neither the expertise nor the resources) this is pretty much the only way that exists to independently test the safety of cars in markets.
You can take comfort in the fact that the idiot’s repair costs will be ridiculously high. If you’re going to drive super aggressively on public roads, at least do it in a cheap car!
I am so tired of seeing touch everywhere in general. Not just in cars, but putting the touch buttons on the stove is such a fail. Water spills out of the pot and locks the stove or you can't even touch the buttons because they are too hot.
I have a VW (ID.4) and they took the touch craziness to another level. There are things that don't look like buttons, but are touch-sensitive, and there are also buttons, that apart from being pressure-sensitive, are also touch sensitive. Like volume buttons on the steering wheel, where if you try to feel for them without looking, you end up accidentally "swiping" and turning your volume up to the max.
The whole touch cluster on the left of the steering wheel, just below the vent, is a disaster, too. If I want to check the temperature of the air that's blowing into the cabin, I end up accidentally turning off the lights, turning on rear antifog lights, and turning on defroster heating for the windshield. The next minute or so is spent trying to get everything back to normal.
The rule should be that everything in the car needs to be a physically actuated button, and touching those buttons without pressing them should only ever light them up or show help messages, never perform any action.
I took and ID3 for a test drive, an accidentally activated the speed limiter on the highway. That got quite scary, and it took ages to realize I had to swipe on one of the fake buttons to disable it.
Compared to ID4, ID3 has another epic cost saving measure: They removed the two switches for the rear windows from the driver door, and replaced it with a toggle switch that decides whether the switches for the front windows really control the front windows, or the rear ones. So in total they saved one physical switch, but made the user experience much worse.
I also skipped the entire ID-family due to that. At least the Enyaq (Skoda's ID4) has a much better setup with physical buttons on the steering wheel, and more physical buttons for the console.
I ultimately decided against an MEB based model because the (steering wheel) UX felt almost unusable during my test drive. I partcularily struggeled with the cruise control swipe-click and hilariously the window switch.
The car i ultimately settled on has worse overall infotainment software but physical controls which can be operated blindely and reliably.
No wonder VW is already in the process of correcting this disastrous, budget driven, decision.
Just my own thought but I believe they were under immense pressure to achieve similar (or even some) margins with their very first broad market BEV, as they are getting with comparable ICE models.
As a car the MEB siblings are not bad at all and by now the software is fine I hear, but they cut just to many ergonomic corners instead of accepting the costs of getting started in a slightly different market segment.
Funny thing is, Skoda is doing better (no real news so), despite using the same platform.
What definitely didn't help, was putting a self-declared Tesla fanboy in the CEO seat. Only Tesla is Tesla, no other brand can get away with Tesla stuff. Should have been clear for VW, as they lived of marketing to sell overpriced cars for decades.
That's just it - these are no more customizable than real buttons! They come with preprinted symbols for their function, so no cost advantage of customization.
We're talking a few dollars per unit for the various capacitive buttons, if that. Steering wheel controls already connect over CAN bus so it's not like you're saving a great length of wire, for example. They still connect to controllers, etc. Even tiny savings add up, but the cost of non-capacitive buttons is something they could recoup with almost zero effort.
Instead, it's almost certainly a design choice: they're easier to design around and 'feel' futuristic. Or that's what the designers and marketers think, anyhow.
The bigger cost-savings are in the touchscreen infotainment systems, where they get to eliminate the physical cost of a ton of buttons while simplifying manufacturing and parts inventory (no having to deal with a bunch of different trim parts to accommodate buttons for various options, etc.). That's probably the biggest reason why consumer pushback against touchscreens has taken so damn long to barely start having an effect.
The Skoda I just rented in Portugal has real controls but they were really horrible. Even once I got used to their locations, I regularly made something happened than I wanted. Rear windows open instead of front, etc. There's even a control for the digital dashpanel enticing one to play with the display while driving.
I really wonder how much money you can save by removing the individual rear window buttons and instead adding a modal touch "rear" button, like VAG has started doing.
I was in the market for a car, and initially really wanted a Tesla or VW / ID, but with no buttons, no dials, and on the Tesla additionally no parking sensors, wonky rain sensors combined with missing stalks and no straight-on speedometer, it quickly became clear to me these were all potential usability and safety issues.
I found a nice Toyota instead with a button for every function, and everything just works.
An ability to turn volume up to the max, unintentionally, is a safety issue, IMO. And more generally, I wonder how many “took my eye off the road for the radio” accident reports are actually a result of bad physical UX.
> The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
By Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Did Douglas Adams travel in time.... this is scarily accurate!!! My BMW keeps turning off the volume if I wave at anything in the direction of the touchscreen. There is a little infrared camera near the roof that can sense hand-gestures and turn volume up or down ... and lots of other things.
You did buy a car without a dipstick, what do you expect? BMWs are fun to drive and are horrible too maintain. I remember helping someone because the radiator melted a reservoir tank, such a terrible design I never looked at another one!!
They should need forced to make dipsticks but the EU doesn't care when it's a European company. The EU is more anti American companies than actually caring.
Or as social criticism! A lot of tech giants seem to be trying to bring about the techno-future of scifi and completely missing the point that a lot of it is a dystopian hellscape serving as a thin veil over commentary on contemporary society.
The sense that you're being asked, or coerced, to participate in realizing someone's shallow, misunderstood, but aggressively peddled reading of a dystopian social commentary fantasy scenario is very near to the heart of what makes tech bro culture so obnoxious for everyone else.
I have been driving an ID.4 for almost three years by now. I consider much of what others criticize here in terms of UI, touch-sensitive buttons etc. to be „not great“ either but it did work for me. I didn’t really care to be honest.
What did not work for me was the re-charging experience on longer trips. I do not want to „subscribe“ to anything just to recharge my car in a reasonable amount of time. But even with a hypercharger it still takes way too long and without the „right“ subscription you feel like they steal your money from you. This is the worst from my POV when it comes to EVs, this is where they felt like inferior technology and business model to me as a consumer. Guess what, even though I was always a fan of EVs and hybrids (even drove three different models of Toyota Prius prior to my ID.4) my next car will be a traditional one (Hyundai Tucson to be precise).
I think it’s really hard to get good UX by setting up
some simple rules. In the end we need good UX, however this is done.
For things like lights or wipers the solutions from the past are quite good I would say.
For things like the Tesla turn signal buttons I would actually prefer to have both buttons and the traditional stalk. Depending on the situation one is superior of the other.
I bet you get bad controls even with a rigid prescription.
And then your rigid rule would prevent something like having a touch menu for a setup function that you would never have good reason to adjust while driving. Likely making it worse.
> Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel.
I hate to break it to the article writer, but a haptic button on the steering wheel, while absolutely not easy to use, is a physical control.
Self driving will largely make this topic irrelevant soon, however in the meantime, their time would be better spent developing a measurement of intuitiveness for touchscreens.
With a few exceptions that they've since corrected, in a Tesla operating most functions comes naturally, it's similar to using an iPhone. Even the lack of gear shifter in the Cybertruck isn't throwing me off (though they did put an additional touch control for it by the rear view mirror).
Apart from the logical notion of fix location tactile feedback physical buttons are much much better (reliable!) in mission critical systems than pleasuring a glass with the strokes of you finger in heist discovery what is what and where (that the US navy also discovered through bitter and tragic experience [1]) as a complicating factor the user hostile software engineering practices where The Product is in the focus and drawing lots of additional attention, requiring constant self training - ironically presented as 'intuitive' or 'simple' - additional frequent maintenance and care, more than necessary (updates, settings, confirmations, feature promotions, suggestions, configurations, customizations), not to mention the manipulation of the user into something as the main focus in making apps nowadays instead of serving in the background, also not to mention the constant spying for their own sake only, also the constant f ups making the system dangerously fragile through complexity that additional steps and even more user attentions is essential(!) to preserve the integrity against intruders - making it even more complex and so, fragile -, and that this became a totally accepted treat of software from a huge set of users as well - several times arguing aginst themselves by praising and 'explaining' (no, citing a particular viewpoint is not an explanation alone) - but at least not condemned beyond private audience or leading to refusal, therefore when we talk about our next car an older model (likely used) with traditional dashboard is an overwhelmingly dominant choice with my wife. After our current 'old' and traditional one. The irony is that I make software for living, I am supposed to love using software. No, I do not. In general, regrettably. Should be pushed out of many places it got into along undigested rush (and many times dumb) ideas. Like this, like the dashboard of a car, replacing well known and familiar ways with something else. Should I instead be greateful that we still have steering wheel and pedals instead of a gamepad?....
This is much more reasonable than I assumed. Unlike seemingly most people here I have no problem whatsoever with fan controls or audio controls or whatever on the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (of course the vast majority of car touchscreens are not, but some are). However, the absence of a physical speed control for the windshield wipers is the single worst design flaw of Teslas. Or at least it was, until they removed the physical turn signal controls. I'm very much in favor of requiring safety critical controls that must be used frequently or urgently to be physical.