There is an Atlantic column by an author who thinks touch screens cheapen automobiles. Basically, he likes the old fashioned knobs, being able to fix stuff yourself, and finds too many extra electronics add little to appliances but make them harder to fix.
Everyone knows the Internet of Things is a double edged sword. Personally, I don’t want a TV or computerized data device in, say, my fridge. As for cars, the touch screen has some real benefits but nothing you couldn’t do in other ways. I see it as neither terrific nor terrible. You?
Basic controls such as radio, headlights, turn signals, horn, climate should be physical buttons, knobs or levers that can be operated without taking your eyes off the road. Screens should be informational only. Having to go into a menu to open the glovebox(idiot Musk) or swiping up and down to change gears(more idiot Musk) is beyond idiocy.
My car is predates the era when touch screens became fashionable, but every rental car I’ve had recently had one, and I absolutely hate them. They typically offer something like 10,387 different functions, none of which I need or care about. What I want is the ability to turn on the radio and tune it to CBC, and these idiotic screens seem designed to make that simple function as difficult as possible.
Fully agree. Another bit of idiocy not related to touch screens but definitely related to needlessly over-complicating cars are car doors that open electrically, via push button (and perhaps also via touch screen menu!). So what happens when the electrical gadgetry fails? I recently came across an article – I’m not making this up – that was essentially a tutorial on how to escape from a modern car that has such a failure!
I despise even the look of screens in cars – even if they were as functional as dials and knobs, which they’re not. Cars with big screens look cheap to me, like they’re trying to impress the impressionable who think all screens look whiz-bang and must be an indication of quality or performance or something. Any manufacturer can cram in a screen and call themselves done with the design, but it doesn’t look right to me.
There is a nearby sushi restaurant that I really like. Like most similar Canadian places, it follows a “value for money” system. You get a lot of Japanese food for a reasonable price. The salmon is very good, but otherwise the sushi and fish quality tends to be mediocre by Japanese standards. But there are lots of other good things, and the Korean choices are often exceptional.
They use a robot to deliver the sushi, but not other items, and only once per table per visit. The robot plays music, is vaguely catlike, flashes which shelf your order is on. Maybe some people like the novelty. I don’t much. Once you remove your sushi, you need to hit OK on the same touch screen, in the same place every other table uses. I am not exceptionally fastidious, but seeing the robot makes me wonder how often they clean the screen, then wish I hadn’t wondered that.
I think we humans have a tendency to take any new and interesting technology and apply it haphazardly, without thinking whether it will be a good tool for the purpose.
Hey, we have the internet now! Let’s put it in refrigerators! Let’s have connectivity for, I don’t know… teapots!
I think we’re seeing this now with AI, and we’ve definitely been seeing it with touch screens, which shouldn’t be an integrated part of any moving vehicle operated by humans. It’s stupid, it’s unsafe and that’s before we even get to the fact that driver training in the U.S. is nearly worthless as it is.
I’m a person who loves properly executed technology. But sometimes a clipboard and pencil are the proper tools.
And I suspect we have only ourselves to blame for the touchscreens-in-cars situation. While the manufacturers may have their own reasons for wanting to utilize them, it’s not as if most people are up in arms about it, demanding change.
Especially on bad roads. It’s bad enough I need to look down once to make sure my finger is in the right place because there’s no tactile feel on a flat screen but when you look back up at the road & manage to hit a bump/pothole which means you now press something other than your intended ‘button’ I now need to look down a second time & for longer as I figure out what I just did & how to accomplish what I was originally intending to do. Sometimes that’s as simple as pressing the third radio preset instead of the fourth one but there have been times where I’ve accidentally changed the screen so I need to figure out where I am & how to get back to where I wanted to be to make my desired change.
Her car as hi/low/off seatwarmer controls only on the touchscreen. High is too much for me but I’ll occasionally use low in the dead of winter; it seems about half the time I try to change them from low to off I accidentally press it twice so now it’s on high. Great it was too hot & I just made it hotter; invariably that happens in a cattle chute with a merge; ie, not the time or place to take eyes off the road.
Well, like all technology, the user interface can be well designed or poorly designed.
I have a 12” touchscreen in my 2022 Bronco. I like it a lot.
Almost all controls that need to be adjusted while driving (A/C, Stereo, Cruise, etc, etc) have physical controls. It’s only the 2nd tier controls that use the touch screen. There are so many settings that if they all had a physical control, it would look like the cockpit of a Blackbird.
Yeah, this. Even physical buttons kind of suck, if they’re designed poorly. My current truck has a button for switching the heating from windshield to vents to floor vents, but it’s one button, and it contains a light that shows which vents are chosen. So I have to push it three or four times to get what I want, and if I mis-count, I have to look down at the light to see what actually happened. My old trucks had a knob for this, and you could tell which way it was pointing just by feel. Windshield? All the way one way. Floor vents? All the way the other way, and so on.
These are very good points, and I wish like hell auto manufacturers were actually thinking about system logic and ergonomics, but they clearly are not.
I was at a party once with a guy who supposedly had something to do with auto design, and he said they were mostly designed around their entertainment systems. Not much thought to making the controls intuitive or usable, let alone safe. It’s clear to me the auto makers will do whatever suits them unless forced otherwise by regulation.
When it comes to system logic / integration, even my mostly sensible Honda has some inane problems. The button for one system (traction or lane assist, I think) lights up when there’s a problem and it’s not functioning properly. Another button lights up when its system is activated and working.
That would have been a great help for those two unfortunate teenagers who died in a burning Tesla in Brandenburg in August 2022. (Link in German, partial translation below):
Burning Tesla: desperate attempts to open the doors
Tim S., who had been sitting in the back seat with Laura and Noèl, described: ‘I tried to shake the doors, I pushed hard on both sides’, but he couldn’t get the rear doors open and then managed to get out through one of the front doors. The first responders also reported their desperate attempts to open the doors and the boot in order to rescue the unconscious teenagers from the rear. However, the recessed door handles did not respond and became an insurmountable obstacle.
‘I grabbed it - it was already hot,’ said construction worker Kenny H. (32). ‘Nothing worked, the handle was not protruding.’ Professional lorry driver Ronald M. (61) reported: ‘We couldn’t open the doors because there were no handles on them.’ ‘We pushed against the handles - nothing happened,’ said Bundeswehr soldier Andreas M. (35). ‘The handle was already hot - but pulling it would still have been possible’ - assuming it had worked.
Translated with DeepL.com with some cursory corrections by me
But does the way people or different generations feel about things change over time? Of course a phone needs a touch screen. And twenty years ago, they seemed miraculous.
But maybe there is a reason people (though not me) are buying records. They like tangible things. But also, as the article implies, maybe you don’t want everything to be like an IPad now that screens are so common and people better understand the disadvantages of “gee whiz”technology.
If memory serves, this has been the consensus view whenever the topic has come up before on the SDMB.
As far as other things besides cars: I don’t think I own anything with a touchscreen except where the screen is central to the point of the device (as in a smartphone or tablet), but I can’t think of anything that would be improved by adding a touchscreen.
Every recent model car I’ve driven has physical buttons for all of those sorts of things (horn, climate, volume etc.). On our car, the touchscreen does allow more choices on the audio, for example (not sure there’s a way to switch from Bluetooth to FM Radio without it, for example). Arguably, you shouldn’t be doing stuff like THAT while driving anyway. I think our car also allows some climate control via the screen, but does not REQUIRE it.
Gar shifts / glovebox??? Yeesh. The one time I ever looked inside a Tesla, I remember being concerned that it seemed like everything was on the touchscreen, including stuff I’m used to seeing right in front of the steering wheel.
Other tools:
A TV remote with a screen might be useful.
A fridge with one is not likely to be anything I will need any time soon.
Yeah, touchscreens are really intended to facilitate flexibility in the design process more than for the benefit of the user. If you add a new feature or change how the environmental controls work, you just update the firmware to add or modify a screen versus having to modify the design of a physical panel and the layout of controls, which is not only expensive and time consuming but also requires another set of inspection and quality control procedures, or else the driver ends up with knobs falling off after a year or two in classic ‘Eighties General Motors style.
That being said, I’ve used navigation and configuration screens that just had a scrollwheel or a set of back and forth navigation buttons, and it was an enormous pain in the ass regardless of how well designed the interface was. Touchscreens at least provide the flexibility to design the graphical interface to facilitate navigation and get to the features you want quickly, even if the physical interface is lacking in feedback. The addition of haptic feedback would help to avoid drivers from having to continually look at the screen but thus far no manufacturers seem to have adopted this approach.
Agreed that any critical electrically operated controls, such as opening doors, should have purely mechanically actuated auxiliaries; even if the mechanism itself is highly reliable, power provided to operate it may not be available.
Agreed. And a lot of the mistakes are so obviously stupid. A few years ago I had a Ford Escape for a few days and one of the things I absolutely hated about it that apparently the designers thought was clever was that a bunch of knobs on the console all looked exactly the same even though they did entirely different, totally unrelated things. For instance, radio volume and tuning knobs looked exactly the same as temperature and fan speed controls. This is just fundamentally terrible ergonomics!
A touchscreen in cars also allows the manufacturer to add features at a later date over the air, not a small feature. Our Cadillac Lyriq has a pretty awesome mix of physical controls and touchscreen, plus it’s a totally different form than most tablet-style interfaces–it’s a 6" tall x 33" wide curved display integrating the gauges, infotainment, charge controls, etc. The only clunker is having to open the glovebox from the screen, which is in fact profoundly dumb.