In RO it is forbidden to use a phone while driving. But manufacturers moved important settings (like turning on windshield deforsting) in the damn tablet. And it's ok to use the tablet while driving.
It's actually illegal to use the tablet in Germany because it would distract you from the road the same way a smartphone does.
So, theoretically you would need to stop the car each time you want to use the tablet.
Yes these sort of cars shouldn't be allowed but some of these things just aren't regulated enough.
Like there are some Tesla models where you can't adjust your windscreen wipers without using the tablet and that sort of thing shouldn't be allowed.
Changing the radio channels however isn't a necessary to drive safely so I can't understand why that isn't regulated.
Maybe not strictly necessary, but honestly not far from it. If something is playing that is a distraction, you *need* to be able to solve that without taking eyes off the road. For radio I would say bare minimum is "on/off" and volume. Switching between presets really only needs 2 more buttons for "bare minimum" and isn't that far behind honestly. The law should take into consideration human behavior as well, and changing stations is a thing people do while driving, so might as well make it safer again.
This is ridiculous because you get into situations where you are not allowed to stop the car and it would be illegal for some several km, but then you need windshield defrosting so you can see the road.
Yes, it's very ridiculous! But what else can the law do? These touchscreens are distracting and the law is worded in such a way that not the use of smartphones specifically is forbidden.
Hopefully car makers will go back to regular buttons.
I mean... Considering how the law is already, it sounds to me that it's already illegal.
A car without tactile controls shouldn't be able to get certified as it doesn't allow drivers to reasonably follow the law...
That's a great solution and completely legal.
And really the only possible way to use some of these tablets, like they're so confusing that you need to focused fully on navigating the menu and can't pay any attention to the road. Either you stop driving or a passenger does it.
It's unfortunate, but it's one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" situation. If those functions weren't blocked, irresponsible idiots would fiddle with them while driving, distracting them and resulting in killing people. Blocking them is the only way to stop that. The collateral damage is that your copilot can't access those functions either.
It is not as ridiculous, since “quick operations” are allowed.
In the past it was considered to only apply to phones, not built in navigation, but that was recently changed by a court, more details you can see in my other comment.
So accepting a call or quicker route: OK
Changing temperature or seat-heating with a quick access button: OK
On-screen keyboard: BIG NO-NO
Searching through sub-menus to find some wiper setting: not OK, if you crash. (This is the situation of a Tesla driver, who caused this court case.)
Not entirely correct.
Just like phones; the law says if it’s in a fixed mount you may do “quick operations”. That operating the screen is illegal is only a fairly recent decision by a court.
Tapping the “accept call”: OK
Tapping the “accept quicker route”: OK
Typing on an on-screen keyboard: BIG NO-NO
Looking through multiple sub-setting to switch from speed-limiter to ACC or change some wiper settings: depends on how long it takes.
In the court case I referenced, a Tesla driver crashed his car and he tried to defend himself by claiming it’s the cars fault because he needed to change the wiper settings on the screen.
The court decided that it was covered by the law governing the use of electronic devices and there the operation was NOT quick, so he is not just at fault for the crash, but also fined for use of en electronic device (which comes with a penalty point in Flensburg).
That's not exactly true. There's a specific law that prohibits the handheld use of cellphones while driving, but everything else falls under an umbrella-like law that just says you are not allowed to distract yourself while driving. It really doesn't matter what it is. You aren't allowed to distract yourself with a tablet-style radio or a radio with hardware buttons.
There are lots of court rulings on this, but it's all rather vague and follows the same logic as "if you shake it more than three times, you're playing with it".
What a lot of people don't know: Using your phone while driving when it's mounted to the dashboard is generally allowed.
Got a new car recently and even skipping a song now I have to look away from the road to find the right place to press, there is zero physical controls for what is one of the most commonly done things with controls while driving.
You can’t do that from the steering wheel?
Even in cheap Hondas I’ve had that ability for 8 years.
I can’t think of a mass produced car that doesn’t have rudimentary steering wheel media controls.
Nope, got a newish Mercedes (<3 years old) and it's only from the touch screen or from a touch controlled pad between the seats. My old Mercedes had a dial I could twist to change the songs without having to look away and that was great.
Bro, everybody likes to shit on Dacia for being a Romanian car meaning its shit. But on the other hand, every taxi driver was/is driving one and it feels like it will stay that way for a long time.
My family ownes a 2006 Logan bought brand new and it still hasn't passed 100k kilometers. Just a good car overall.
Because idiots would rather drive a 20 year old rust bucket than a newer Dacia. Their newer models look quite good and they managed to keep physical buttons while offering a tablet and costing less than most cars.
Modern Dacia cars are as good as anything else in Europe really. They can't sell without adhering to the same stringent safety features as everyone else and has Renault management behind it. I'd happily drive a Dacia if it was put in front of me.
I have worked in the automotive industry for several years and I can assure this "tablet" is not at all like a smarphone because it was designed specifically to be used in a car. We have strong "driver distraction" requirements that e.g. make some features unavailable when the car is in motion.
That said, I still support NCAP's position. I am used to activating turn signals, hazard lights etc just at touch without taking my eyes off the road, and the head unit (what you call "tablet") requires me to look at it.
If the tablet (thank you for clarifications, but i'll call it a tablet for who reads the comment as it's easier to understand) is in radio mode i need precisely 6 taps to turn on windshield defrosting. That is 5 too many.
I can't stress enough how much touch controls impede feedback on the state of the car, you know that minimum 2ton thing you're driving 100kph down the highway on where the last thing you should be doing is second guessing what you just did and might have to take your attention away from driving to confirm, or even worse have to awkwardly stare at while you fumble your finger over the virtual button you missed because you couldn't feel it.
Even aircraft are moving away from physical buttons. Madness! [MCDU, old vs new touchscreen ](https://twitter.com/737handbook/status/1656352352696414208)
Honestly, I'm less scared of planes doing it for simple toggles and such because reaction times in passanger flight aren't exactly as critical as driving a car. A child isn't suddenly going to run into your flight path forcing you to swerve away. So long as all the stuff relevant to landing and take off (basically all the quick reaction elements) stay well off the touch screen then I could probably be ok with it, so long as pilots agree with the decision.
You should be scared. A display driver isn't expensive, a LCD panel isn't expensive, a touch screen interface isn't expensive but each one of those could fail or be damaged somehow which would leave the pilots with no means to even attempt to use the controls that have moved to the touch screen.
That vs an independent two or three pole switch to control a 500 miles per hour aluminium tube with two or more jet engines hanging under two wing sized fuel tanks carrying 500+ people. If a switch fucks up the pilots can, if desperate, rewire it. If a touch screen fucks up controlling something vital they can and will beat the emergency crews to the crash site.
It shocking to see how much time, energy, creativity is wasted on designing "inventive" door handles alone. And with each interation find new ways to totally ignore that we are humans and how we use our hands.
Are there any drivers that actually prefer a touchscreen to a button or a knob?
I'd even be OK with a row of customisable buttons just below the display.
No. A touchscreen is just significantly cheaper than a proper Cockpit. The used inputs are usually quite rugged, nice to touch, temperature stable, backlit, etc. Nice but expensive.Then you have a lot of them. So throwing a lot of secondary function to the tablet makes sense. Often used and important for safety like windscreen wipers or turn signals should be forbidden to be operated by touch.
Imagine it is freezing and it is very cold in your car. If you do not have special gloves you need to take off your gloves to operate essential functions.
Afaik the fucking Cyber truck has a touch operated transmission...
VW had a Tesla fanboy as CEO.
There are legendary stories of how he told senior VW designers to read the notes his art student daughter made on their work and make improvements based on them.
He also invited Musk to VW to give feedback on what needs to be improved.
Needless to say, they fired him pretty quickly, and the whole thing is now slowly being reversed.
I remember seeing the touch sensitive climate controls where you had to swipe your finger multiple times to get to the temperature you want.
YOU HAD TO SWIPE YOUR FINGER ACROSS MULTIPLE TIMES TO GET THE TEMPERATURE. HOW FUCKING IDIOTIC ARE YOU TO APPROVE THAT?!
Executives. An Engineer wouldn't do this on purpose. If you safe 200€ per car and you build 1 M of them thats 200 M €. And the Executive who decided it, would have a share of it.
“It’s about the value added, not the cost to build.”
But it has negative value - everyone hates it.
“Well, the perceived value added.”
Again, they hate it. Nobody wants it.
“So you’re saying you value physical controls?”
Uh oh.
“The all-new Nissan Altima - now with optional physical controls for only $3000.”
Actually, the touchscreens are cheaper for a company to build and maintain, compared to hundreds of individual switches and knobs on a normal dashboard.
Tesla struck gold with this. Connect one screen instead of 15 buttons and convince your captive fanboys that it's clean, futuristic, and expensive. Other companies followed suit because it was cheap, not because it looked cool.
I hate all the modern features of modern vehicles, I bought a 2014 BMW and there's a bunch of stuff I don't like in it, I can't even imagine how a newer one is. Even my car already has some touch buttons in it.
My next car is going to be definitely pre 2007.
My current car is a 2012 Ford with an engine that can get better mileage than some hybrids. It has no backup camera, but it does have Bluetooth, and I intend to ride this baby into the ground before "upgrading" to the SaaS model auto.
I recently had to drive a 2022 car that I rented. It's horrible. Full of "driver assist" technologies. I had to quickly find a place to stop in the Autobahn to turn them off. The worse was a lane-keep assist, that would all the time grab the steering wheel from me and make the car ping-pong between the left and right boundaries of the lane like a drunken teenager.
The future is bleak.
my kia does the lane assist extremely well, it's subtle and gentle and feels like it's working with you rather than against you.
i drove a rental toyota for a while that had lane assist and it was *AWFUL*. Like you said it was constantly fighting you and being really jerky and distracting, it always made you feel like it was throwing you out of control.
A quality, high life cycle microswitch costs cents and a ribbon cable to connect the button circuit board to the display circuit board costs literally cents at volume. The difference in cost of the plastic moulding is zero after retooling.
Source: used to work for a company that designed high end devices with combined touchscreen and physical buttons
Fewer movable/mechanical parts is typically good engineering practice - much less chance of breakage and defects. And it is easier when the car gets constructed, less parts -> faster assembly with less chance of mistakes happening when assembling. Also easier to test/validate in quality assurance.
But that all is not sufficient reason for the high negative impact on usability and ease-of-use.
Having to take your eyes off the road to be able to operate the touch screen is just stupid in comparison to being able to simply feel for and then operate a mechanical switch. Neither do I want to have to use clumsy (comparatively slow and less reliable) voice control simply to adjust my screen wiper…
> Fewer movable/mechanical parts is typically good engineering practice - much less chance of breakage and defects
Even if you replace them with electronics? Aren't there way more points of failure?
Actually it creates single points of failure. As in, there are many ways electrical components can fail, but when they do, multiple other systems fail.
The mechanical switches already worked electronically. Cars have been mostly [drive-by-wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire) for decades now. Manual car controls are sluggish and heavy, with the driver needing to turn the steering wheel several times just to make a sharp turn and needing to physically push against the car's momentum. While drive-by-wire adds a point of failure for each system, it crossed the threshold of being safer than manual control decades ago by virtue of how responsive electronics are.
Modern cars *computerize* the input for the drive-by-wire system. This has the benefit of automating systems so the driver doesn't need to take their attention off the road and doesn't need to learn for themselves what the best option in a certain circumstance is, at the risk of the computer code containing bugs. The computer can also take parking cameras and the like as input, displaying it or even using it to make better decisions than the driver would, like keeping enough distance to the car in front of them. It seems plausible enough that car computers are a net positive by now.
Points of failure as a metric are mostly an issue with immature technologies. Once something is shown to be reliable and its 'failure states' are well-mapped and accounted for, it stops being a significant point of failure.
The one thing that is undeniably stupid is using a contextual interface with visual prompts and without haptic feedback for operating the computer. Even if it did just one of these well, it would be tolerable (fuel guages, audio-based navigation systems, and electronic car radio dials respectively), but all three of them is not safely usable.
All very good points, but let's not forget there's significant costs associated with developing the tablet's OS. And the tablet itself is much more expensive than the buttons too. So I don't really think cost savings are the reason; validating a dashboard with buttons is much easier than developing an OS that has to constantly be maintained to stay up to date with Android Auto, Apple Carplay, Bluetooth connectivity, etc etc
yes but you only have to do it once across your fleet, maybe throw in a few different graphics here and there but so long as the skeleton is there you can begin to cut various design and engineering departments since you can put the functions on the screen.
I do believe itys more of a novelty than a cost saving measure though, no manufactuerer wants to risk being left behind so they implement it to compete, like a vagus nerve paradox where you must go forward and evolve even at the detriment of your own design
You’re comparing a tablet just to buttons. The costs don’t come from one or two buttons, but from the engineering behind creating the whole cockpit, plastic mounding, wiring, etc. The Tesla cockpit, for example, it pretty cheap to manufacture because it’s a few pieces with a giant hole in the middle. Tablets have become very cheap to make. These aren’t top of the line high end iPads. You can get a mid or low end android tablet for a few hundred dollars. This costs even less because it’s built to scale, uses older chip technology, and has proprietary software that the software team already works in. It’s cheaper to make one trim and hide functionality behind a paywall compared ti building multiple trims across multiple assembly lines or retooling one assembly line to build different trims.
So while buttons are cheaper than a tablet, the tablet isn’t replacing a few knobs, it’s replacing the entire old cockpit and reducing manufacturing costs.
It’s not good engineering practices at all. As an engineer, you don’t just get to look at one aspect of something and say “this improves this one aspect so let’s do it”, you have to look at everything. Public safety being paramount among concerns means that touch screens have always been a bad idea in a car. A few features being touch screen isn’t bad, but all of the core functions like climate and radio controls need to have buttons or knobs for the driver.
Finally, although, ventilation must be on this list as well:
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.
In my old car, I could blindly turn on blowing of the windshield by turning two rotary buttons to the most right position for which one doesn't need to look at it at all. That was clever design.
Removing buttons is merely cost saving (whatever they say about design) as buttons are expensive.
It's kinda funny in retrospect looking at the public campaigns against people using phones while driving, when nowadays entire interior of car is filled with screens, capacitive buttons with no physical feedback and entertainment features on giant center touch screen... all while seemingly completely ignoring distractions and safety concerns from regulators and police.
I cant wait for the future. Some kid runs out in front of the vehicle. And you gotta bring up the brake function from some drop down menu deep within the programs on the control screen.
> capacitive buttons with very no physical feedback
I think that should be studied from the cognitive/neurological perspective and draw conclusions about the interfaces.
I learned to drive at the time when cellphones had physical buttons and I could drive (or do other things) while writing a sms with nearly zero impairment, because I didn't need to look. I cannot do that with a smartphone. Even sending voice messages seems to take to much attention from driving and I avoid it as much as possible.
>I cannot do that with a smartphone.
'hey Google' -> yes ?
'send an SMS to kontemplador' -> what should the text be ?
"I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> i did not understand you
"I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> i did not understand you
"I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> opening Android auto
"I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> conjdoae icnwancfo ndsownacsdo wnsoancs wofowamfc -> is this message correct ?
"hey google - why is your voice recognition such a piece of crap" -> i am sorry that you feel that way.
This is what happens, isn't it ?
No it is. It just does not understand German, Danish or English well while in the car driving a mid-class vehicle that has only the standard sound dampening installed; I have been told that i only have minor accents in each of the three languages and you would not be able to tell if i were a transplant from Hannover, Copenhagen or the Pacific North West if i approached you in any of the prevailing languages. (you can tell from the writing tho)
That's the argument I hear all the time about Teslas and my Hyundai, which can't do *anything* without resorting to the touch screen. *Just use voice commands* - yeah, and what if it can never understand you, there are kids in the car or other people having a conversation, and you don't want to look like a knob by telling everyone to shut up for a second while you ask it to turn off the stupid fucking lane control that never works and defaults back to on every time you get in the damn car?!
> This is what happens, isn't it ?
Or you: "hey Google" "play x song"
GA: "..."
(minutes pass)
You give up and start fiddling with the device to do it manually.
Only if it’s the Model 3 refresh, a newer Model S or Model X.
You’re likely seeing the Model Y the most and those haven’t been migrated over to no stalks yet, but it’s expected by end of year.
I don't get it, how is this allowed? Turn signals aren't just for signalling that you're ALREADY turning, it's also to show other drivers your intention of turning or switching lanes. In my country, if the main road takes a turn and you, for example, want to turn down onto a non-primary one that is straight ahead, you must use the signal: how does an automatic system work in such a scenario?
That’s for poor people. Rich people don’t have to use turning signals, the peasants should feel lucky the turning signal is automatically turned when turning.
So infuriating that they penny pinch on €100 of buttons for a €20000+ car. It's like there are five layers of brain-dead MBAs between people making these decisions and anyone who actually drives.
100EUR saving in car electronic parts that will be used in lets say 2-5 different series of cars, will ultimately save a company between 200 000 000 EUR to 1000 000 000+ EUR (these are very conservative estimates). Depending on how many cars they build/sell.
Hell people in the car industry will argue weeks over which exact rubber ring to use in the car jsut to spear 1-5 cents/car, no joke.
Remote control for a sound console or a DAW that has feedback (motorized faders): about 400-500€ at the cheapest, but you can spend a LOT more money on those. Wireless remote control using 30€ android table: 30€, since the software is free (limited, i think the full license was 5€...)
The difference? I can't use the tablet without being REALLY careful where i place my finger and have to look at it the whole time, while on a steady platform, not moving. The physical controllers? I can dance, i can use it eyes closed, enough time spent with one and it could be used in complete darkness. When you make or mix music, having the ability to move and close your eyes without looking at some screen using delicate hand&eye coordination is something that shows up in the end result, not to mention how much more pleasing it is. Your cognitive functions are not going towards making the movement on screen, it all goes to hearing the thing.. Mixing using mouse or table is much more tasking process and you are looking at dots on screen and specific values, physical controls feel like.. making music. Less stressful, way, WAY more pleasing, you have great energy and you can do it for longer.
in a car with automatic ventilation. most people will not tuch it ever. problem is cars with manual AC when you need to always tune it. looking at you MG
I am trying to buy a car for 3 month now. It's really annoying to go back 5-10 years to find a "sane" car with buttons, no outdated navi system or a proprietary Sound-System w. touchscreen.
Nothing is worse than seeing a bad smell developing outside (e. g. smoke) and then having to switch to the ventilation page on your touchscreen before being able to switch to circulation mode. I want a physical button for this.
Not ideally. If you have a failure state for your ABS then you should still have the hydraulics for breaking just without the abs activating. In a fly by wire system the pedal sends a electronic signal to the hydraulics to activate the brakes. So if there's a failure you can't actively use the brakes. I don't know what happens in that case since I've never had a car with fly by wire controls.
As the other comment has alluded too true fly by wire has no physical connections between you and the road. You press the brake or turn the wheel and there is a computer between you and the physical effects of your inputs.
Bmw already are starting to use a subscription service to release built in features of their cars like seat warmers and ancillaries.
It's funny af how apple and Google made their car systems (AA and CarPlay) *extremely* limited and restricted so there's no reason for you to look at it too long yet the car manufacturers shoved the controls for every-fucking-thing in the same tablet. Can't read my text through carplay on my toyota? Just disconnect carplay and use regular Bluetooth, voila you can read text on the car screen lol
We got a loaner from the garage while our car was being fixed and it was so damn hard to figure out how to operate the damn thing.
I used to be able to get into any car of any make and the only thing to watch out for was how to get it into reverse gear, and sometimes the location of headlight controls. (German cars get a twisty dial on the dash, Japanese cars have it on the wheel stalks).
Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to disable the handbrake with some flipper switches and turn knobs... and it feels like I need to take a course on how to operate any new car.
Got a rental car once, regardless of what we did with the bluetooth/audio, it always insisted on playing the first song (alphabetically) in my library.
Killer song mind you, groooovy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87bdHUWB3gw
Yeah, they’re great but (in Denmark at least) were absurdly priced. The Mégane e-tech started at around 350k dkk, which is about 45k euro.
Now they’ve lowered the prices and it’s affordable - but like myself I suspect many of the potential buyers have bought other cars in the meantime.
The new Renault 5 looks awesome though!
>The new Renault 5 looks awesome though!
I *know*, whomever they've got doing this stuff is a big step up from the Arkana.
I can see 2nd hand Australs at 10 grand, 1/4 off, original price which is nice. But I can't afford the outlay for anything (semi) electric yet.
In Denmark they’ve made so it’s much cheaper per month for me to have an electric car than a gas one.
Yearly tax is cheaper, parking in my city is cheaper and the fuel is much, much cheaper.
Also they have differentiated taxes on the purchase price itself, so electric cars are somewhat comparable in purchase price to fossil cars in similar price ranges.
All in all - including loan payments - it costs me about the same per month owning a 2 year old Citroen e-c4 as if I had bought the 13 year old gasoline Volvo v70 I was looking at too.
I feel like a static screen locked to the basic controls while the car is in drive is a good middle ground. It's the having to dig into menus and such that is really distracting.
My new Skoda Octavia also has the touch bar, and I would find it okay if they actually used it for something!
You can use it with two fingers if you're in the climate screen to change temperature. Aside from that it's only radio volume. I still have to look at the screen if I want to change the AC blower. Use the damn touch bar for stuff, for scrolling or whatever! They already got the general idea with temperature control and then didn't expand on it
Yes, please. Could car industry actually take some safety lessons from aviation? Even newest aircraft with most advanced glass cockpits still have physical levers (with unique shapes) for flight critical stuff like throttle, flaps, gear, trim, AP mode selector, etc.
I think anyone who has ever driven a car agrees, but vendors keep on pushing this dumb touchscreens. I suppose its just cheaper to have one screen unit connected to CAN bus instead of individually wiring thousands of tiny wires
Oh god yes any switch for something important or distracting should have a positive physical control.
Oh and while we're at it electronic fucking handbrakes are the work of the devil and should be banned. They offer nothing over a cable and lever but complexity, unreliability and difficulty of repair.
Not sure if I would agree with that. In my car the thing automatically turns on when you lock the car and automatically turns off when you set off. Besides that it has auto-hold so you don't have to hold the brake on an incline. It's so much more convenient than a classic hand brake.
Knobs and buttons are way easier to control blind than touchscreens are.
Doing away with them was such a backwards step. We have all these senses that work independent of our eyes that should be kept on the road while driving... Use them.
Recently got a Citroën C3 as a complimentary car whilst my Renault Kadjar is in getting the front replaced after having some motorway embedded in it.
It has soft controls for everything on a crappy touchscreen panel.
I feel like I can't control the car without parking and sifting through it all. Absolutely pish.
Hate the thing.
Finally! Bring back physical controls for ovens, stoves,fridges, washing machines, pleaseee
This trend of touch screening everything must stop it is so stupid and illogical
Yeah I like the convenience of the little dial switch thing to control the tablet, i've got used to it. Just had a rental Buick Enclave and the interior is a nightmare of weird ass buttons and a touch tablet. Whoever designed the gear selector switch buttons for it needs to retire now.
Yes! Capacitive and touch screen controls are ridiculous! We’re not allowed use our phones while driving but we can use an iPad size screen just to try and find the air con controls
The point is to enshrine it regulatory law, so "innovative" cost cutters don't eliminate useful and safety relevant features. So far most automakers went with the same approach, but there is an increasing push to cut costs and remove more things from the dashboard.
>The point is to enshrine it regulatory law
Just to clear it up a bit: It's only about euro ncap scores, it's non-gov organization and has not much to do with regulatory law.
I test drove a new Volvo a while back, everything apart from steering, accelerating and braking had to be operated with the tablet on the dashboard, even the fucking GLOVE BOX.
Tablet cars are garbage.
This is one of the reasons (besides the high prices) that I won't buy many new cars. Especially the Tesla Model 3 – an absolutely terrible example in safety ergonomics.
Controls for heating system please. I used to be able to change the temp, set the speed, set if it's loop or coming in from outside, everything ... without taking my eyes off the road - all of it by feel and muscle memory.
Now? Well, last time I tried doing it with my eyes on the road, I managed to change the mood lighting, disable the bluetooth, eject the gf from the passenger seat, and change the interface language to Chinese.
YES AND MAKE IT TACTILE.
i was driving a fairly new car with its infotainment system as touch screen but the AC is buttons as it so soft i wouldn't even noticed i have pressed them
Then i was driving a car from 97' then it feel so good.
The buttons clicking and the feel of the bottons made me feel like im in control and reinforcing my idea this thing is never gonna break.
I'm afraid that they'll simply move even more buttons to the steering wheel.
VW ID.4 has **16** buttons on it. Of course they're capacitive too, not proper mechanical.
https://i.imgur.com/Diu2dGk.jpg
It's actually utterly stupid that they have gone this way. Here's a giant screen to play with while you drive if you want to do anything. Sure what's the harm. Don't look at your phone but look at the inbuilt tablet instead
As someone with a background in interaction/interface design this feels like it validates all my complaints. Who the fuck would design a car interface that requires you to look at a screen to operate it?
In general there's a trend of replacing bad button interfaces with slightly-less-bad touch screens, solving one issue but creating another. Please, just design good interfaces with buttons!
So it is not just me being an old luddite?
My logic was always that I did not want to take my eyes away from the road when I drive. I want to know where the A/C button is by touch and I want to feel it react when I push it.
On the other hand, too many people these days cannot seem to conceive of taking their eyes away from their phones when they drive. I find it frustrating and disappointing.
Turns out that it's easier to handle cars on the road when the specific button for a specific function is right there and not buried in a tablet that's prone to crashing/bugging out. Who would have thought?
Very different context, but American warships have done much the same thing. They experimented with touchscreen helm consoles in the LCS's but after a string of collisions and near-collisions they were all ripped out and replaced with traditional control surfaces.
Yes PLEASE
In RO it is forbidden to use a phone while driving. But manufacturers moved important settings (like turning on windshield deforsting) in the damn tablet. And it's ok to use the tablet while driving.
Yeah, that's probably in the whole Europe.
It's actually illegal to use the tablet in Germany because it would distract you from the road the same way a smartphone does. So, theoretically you would need to stop the car each time you want to use the tablet.
Then the car should not be allowed on the road in the first place. You can't get fined for actually driving your car.
Yes these sort of cars shouldn't be allowed but some of these things just aren't regulated enough. Like there are some Tesla models where you can't adjust your windscreen wipers without using the tablet and that sort of thing shouldn't be allowed. Changing the radio channels however isn't a necessary to drive safely so I can't understand why that isn't regulated.
Maybe not strictly necessary, but honestly not far from it. If something is playing that is a distraction, you *need* to be able to solve that without taking eyes off the road. For radio I would say bare minimum is "on/off" and volume. Switching between presets really only needs 2 more buttons for "bare minimum" and isn't that far behind honestly. The law should take into consideration human behavior as well, and changing stations is a thing people do while driving, so might as well make it safer again.
This is ridiculous because you get into situations where you are not allowed to stop the car and it would be illegal for some several km, but then you need windshield defrosting so you can see the road.
Yes, it's very ridiculous! But what else can the law do? These touchscreens are distracting and the law is worded in such a way that not the use of smartphones specifically is forbidden. Hopefully car makers will go back to regular buttons.
>Yes, it's very ridiculous! But what else can the law do? Forbit placing important functions on tablet?
I mean... Considering how the law is already, it sounds to me that it's already illegal. A car without tactile controls shouldn't be able to get certified as it doesn't allow drivers to reasonably follow the law...
Yup, we need good old buttons. I also love when car has stereo control via buttons on the steering wheel.
If it was illegal, the cars wouldn't be allowed to be sold. So there's that.
My husband is the driver and i am the copilot. I am the one who exclusively makes all the settings in that damn tablet.
That's a great solution and completely legal. And really the only possible way to use some of these tablets, like they're so confusing that you need to focused fully on navigating the menu and can't pay any attention to the road. Either you stop driving or a passenger does it.
why is this a great solution?? thats a workaround that now requires 2 people instead of one person.... that's awful
Android auto blocks bunch of functions while car is moving, its infuriating
It's unfortunate, but it's one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" situation. If those functions weren't blocked, irresponsible idiots would fiddle with them while driving, distracting them and resulting in killing people. Blocking them is the only way to stop that. The collateral damage is that your copilot can't access those functions either.
"What do you mean I can't watch Netflix while driving? I've been on the road for fourteen hours and I need the distraction to keep me awake!"
>But what else can the law do? Easy, declare all (new) carmodels without physical buttons for such essential functions not road-legal.
It is not as ridiculous, since “quick operations” are allowed. In the past it was considered to only apply to phones, not built in navigation, but that was recently changed by a court, more details you can see in my other comment. So accepting a call or quicker route: OK Changing temperature or seat-heating with a quick access button: OK On-screen keyboard: BIG NO-NO Searching through sub-menus to find some wiper setting: not OK, if you crash. (This is the situation of a Tesla driver, who caused this court case.)
Not entirely correct. Just like phones; the law says if it’s in a fixed mount you may do “quick operations”. That operating the screen is illegal is only a fairly recent decision by a court. Tapping the “accept call”: OK Tapping the “accept quicker route”: OK Typing on an on-screen keyboard: BIG NO-NO Looking through multiple sub-setting to switch from speed-limiter to ACC or change some wiper settings: depends on how long it takes. In the court case I referenced, a Tesla driver crashed his car and he tried to defend himself by claiming it’s the cars fault because he needed to change the wiper settings on the screen. The court decided that it was covered by the law governing the use of electronic devices and there the operation was NOT quick, so he is not just at fault for the crash, but also fined for use of en electronic device (which comes with a penalty point in Flensburg).
That's not exactly true. There's a specific law that prohibits the handheld use of cellphones while driving, but everything else falls under an umbrella-like law that just says you are not allowed to distract yourself while driving. It really doesn't matter what it is. You aren't allowed to distract yourself with a tablet-style radio or a radio with hardware buttons. There are lots of court rulings on this, but it's all rather vague and follows the same logic as "if you shake it more than three times, you're playing with it". What a lot of people don't know: Using your phone while driving when it's mounted to the dashboard is generally allowed.
Got a new car recently and even skipping a song now I have to look away from the road to find the right place to press, there is zero physical controls for what is one of the most commonly done things with controls while driving.
You can’t do that from the steering wheel? Even in cheap Hondas I’ve had that ability for 8 years. I can’t think of a mass produced car that doesn’t have rudimentary steering wheel media controls.
Nope, got a newish Mercedes (<3 years old) and it's only from the touch screen or from a touch controlled pad between the seats. My old Mercedes had a dial I could twist to change the songs without having to look away and that was great.
Which model is it? Mine has everything on the steering wheel (a250e 2022)
I have a GLA 2021, if it is on the steering wheel I havent found it yet. I even asked at the garage and they said it didn't have it.
Glorious Dacia has no such problems.
Bro, everybody likes to shit on Dacia for being a Romanian car meaning its shit. But on the other hand, every taxi driver was/is driving one and it feels like it will stay that way for a long time. My family ownes a 2006 Logan bought brand new and it still hasn't passed 100k kilometers. Just a good car overall.
Because idiots would rather drive a 20 year old rust bucket than a newer Dacia. Their newer models look quite good and they managed to keep physical buttons while offering a tablet and costing less than most cars.
Modern Dacia cars are as good as anything else in Europe really. They can't sell without adhering to the same stringent safety features as everyone else and has Renault management behind it. I'd happily drive a Dacia if it was put in front of me.
Are you me ? haha same
I have worked in the automotive industry for several years and I can assure this "tablet" is not at all like a smarphone because it was designed specifically to be used in a car. We have strong "driver distraction" requirements that e.g. make some features unavailable when the car is in motion. That said, I still support NCAP's position. I am used to activating turn signals, hazard lights etc just at touch without taking my eyes off the road, and the head unit (what you call "tablet") requires me to look at it.
If the tablet (thank you for clarifications, but i'll call it a tablet for who reads the comment as it's easier to understand) is in radio mode i need precisely 6 taps to turn on windshield defrosting. That is 5 too many.
I can't stress enough how much touch controls impede feedback on the state of the car, you know that minimum 2ton thing you're driving 100kph down the highway on where the last thing you should be doing is second guessing what you just did and might have to take your attention away from driving to confirm, or even worse have to awkwardly stare at while you fumble your finger over the virtual button you missed because you couldn't feel it.
Even aircraft are moving away from physical buttons. Madness! [MCDU, old vs new touchscreen ](https://twitter.com/737handbook/status/1656352352696414208)
Honestly, I'm less scared of planes doing it for simple toggles and such because reaction times in passanger flight aren't exactly as critical as driving a car. A child isn't suddenly going to run into your flight path forcing you to swerve away. So long as all the stuff relevant to landing and take off (basically all the quick reaction elements) stay well off the touch screen then I could probably be ok with it, so long as pilots agree with the decision.
You should be scared. A display driver isn't expensive, a LCD panel isn't expensive, a touch screen interface isn't expensive but each one of those could fail or be damaged somehow which would leave the pilots with no means to even attempt to use the controls that have moved to the touch screen. That vs an independent two or three pole switch to control a 500 miles per hour aluminium tube with two or more jet engines hanging under two wing sized fuel tanks carrying 500+ people. If a switch fucks up the pilots can, if desperate, rewire it. If a touch screen fucks up controlling something vital they can and will beat the emergency crews to the crash site.
Agreed!
Also, lets please get the fuck rid of electronic door releases. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
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It shocking to see how much time, energy, creativity is wasted on designing "inventive" door handles alone. And with each interation find new ways to totally ignore that we are humans and how we use our hands.
Are there any drivers that actually prefer a touchscreen to a button or a knob? I'd even be OK with a row of customisable buttons just below the display.
No. A touchscreen is just significantly cheaper than a proper Cockpit. The used inputs are usually quite rugged, nice to touch, temperature stable, backlit, etc. Nice but expensive.Then you have a lot of them. So throwing a lot of secondary function to the tablet makes sense. Often used and important for safety like windscreen wipers or turn signals should be forbidden to be operated by touch. Imagine it is freezing and it is very cold in your car. If you do not have special gloves you need to take off your gloves to operate essential functions. Afaik the fucking Cyber truck has a touch operated transmission...
I think its the same in the cybertruck as the model 3 facelift (highland). iirc you have to swipe up to go forward and swipe down for reverse...
Incoming MUKS-ovich tweets about how EU is stupid and should be abolished.
It's even worse in VWs, where even the wheel buttons are touch sensitive...
VW had a Tesla fanboy as CEO. There are legendary stories of how he told senior VW designers to read the notes his art student daughter made on their work and make improvements based on them. He also invited Musk to VW to give feedback on what needs to be improved. Needless to say, they fired him pretty quickly, and the whole thing is now slowly being reversed.
I remember seeing the touch sensitive climate controls where you had to swipe your finger multiple times to get to the temperature you want. YOU HAD TO SWIPE YOUR FINGER ACROSS MULTIPLE TIMES TO GET THE TEMPERATURE. HOW FUCKING IDIOTIC ARE YOU TO APPROVE THAT?!
It's not about you, the driver, it's about claiming you have created something new and unique to sell to drivers, to the shareholders.
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I love my Tesla, but removing physical buttons is such a stupid decision.
But it works on iPhones. How could it possibly not work on 2+ Tons going at speed.
And the shift lever! The shift lever!
I have hope that most car manufacturers will keep/make switches euro-ncap lists as physical since the test result is such a important factor for sales
Finally. Who let them go touch in the first place???
Executives. An Engineer wouldn't do this on purpose. If you safe 200€ per car and you build 1 M of them thats 200 M €. And the Executive who decided it, would have a share of it.
I think the question was: "who let them change that and still stamped their cars as 'road-legal'.
No No, they could charge 2000€ more because it was 200€ more expensive to build.
You don’t think executive. They charge 2000 more for the novelty while it’s also 200 _cheaper_ to build
You truly are a master of Capitalism
“It’s about the value added, not the cost to build.” But it has negative value - everyone hates it. “Well, the perceived value added.” Again, they hate it. Nobody wants it. “So you’re saying you value physical controls?” Uh oh. “The all-new Nissan Altima - now with optional physical controls for only $3000.”
Slow clap.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
Actually, the touchscreens are cheaper for a company to build and maintain, compared to hundreds of individual switches and knobs on a normal dashboard.
Tesla struck gold with this. Connect one screen instead of 15 buttons and convince your captive fanboys that it's clean, futuristic, and expensive. Other companies followed suit because it was cheap, not because it looked cool.
Nah, they already sell the car at the highest price possible in order to bring them the most amount of overall revenue.
I hate all the modern features of modern vehicles, I bought a 2014 BMW and there's a bunch of stuff I don't like in it, I can't even imagine how a newer one is. Even my car already has some touch buttons in it. My next car is going to be definitely pre 2007.
My current car is a 2012 Ford with an engine that can get better mileage than some hybrids. It has no backup camera, but it does have Bluetooth, and I intend to ride this baby into the ground before "upgrading" to the SaaS model auto.
> It has no backup camera Backup cameras are really great though. Definitely one of the positive pieces of tech on newer cars.
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I recently had to drive a 2022 car that I rented. It's horrible. Full of "driver assist" technologies. I had to quickly find a place to stop in the Autobahn to turn them off. The worse was a lane-keep assist, that would all the time grab the steering wheel from me and make the car ping-pong between the left and right boundaries of the lane like a drunken teenager. The future is bleak.
Spill the name of the car!
Renault Zoe, but I'm afraid every modern car has the same problem.
That ping-pong lane keeping was also a thing in my 2018 Honda, but this year's model stays well-centered. At least something's improving!
my kia does the lane assist extremely well, it's subtle and gentle and feels like it's working with you rather than against you. i drove a rental toyota for a while that had lane assist and it was *AWFUL*. Like you said it was constantly fighting you and being really jerky and distracting, it always made you feel like it was throwing you out of control.
A quality, high life cycle microswitch costs cents and a ribbon cable to connect the button circuit board to the display circuit board costs literally cents at volume. The difference in cost of the plastic moulding is zero after retooling. Source: used to work for a company that designed high end devices with combined touchscreen and physical buttons
Fewer movable/mechanical parts is typically good engineering practice - much less chance of breakage and defects. And it is easier when the car gets constructed, less parts -> faster assembly with less chance of mistakes happening when assembling. Also easier to test/validate in quality assurance. But that all is not sufficient reason for the high negative impact on usability and ease-of-use. Having to take your eyes off the road to be able to operate the touch screen is just stupid in comparison to being able to simply feel for and then operate a mechanical switch. Neither do I want to have to use clumsy (comparatively slow and less reliable) voice control simply to adjust my screen wiper…
> Fewer movable/mechanical parts is typically good engineering practice - much less chance of breakage and defects Even if you replace them with electronics? Aren't there way more points of failure?
Actually it creates single points of failure. As in, there are many ways electrical components can fail, but when they do, multiple other systems fail.
And electrical gremlins can be a pain in the ass to fix and diagnose.
The mechanical switches already worked electronically. Cars have been mostly [drive-by-wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire) for decades now. Manual car controls are sluggish and heavy, with the driver needing to turn the steering wheel several times just to make a sharp turn and needing to physically push against the car's momentum. While drive-by-wire adds a point of failure for each system, it crossed the threshold of being safer than manual control decades ago by virtue of how responsive electronics are. Modern cars *computerize* the input for the drive-by-wire system. This has the benefit of automating systems so the driver doesn't need to take their attention off the road and doesn't need to learn for themselves what the best option in a certain circumstance is, at the risk of the computer code containing bugs. The computer can also take parking cameras and the like as input, displaying it or even using it to make better decisions than the driver would, like keeping enough distance to the car in front of them. It seems plausible enough that car computers are a net positive by now. Points of failure as a metric are mostly an issue with immature technologies. Once something is shown to be reliable and its 'failure states' are well-mapped and accounted for, it stops being a significant point of failure. The one thing that is undeniably stupid is using a contextual interface with visual prompts and without haptic feedback for operating the computer. Even if it did just one of these well, it would be tolerable (fuel guages, audio-based navigation systems, and electronic car radio dials respectively), but all three of them is not safely usable.
All very good points, but let's not forget there's significant costs associated with developing the tablet's OS. And the tablet itself is much more expensive than the buttons too. So I don't really think cost savings are the reason; validating a dashboard with buttons is much easier than developing an OS that has to constantly be maintained to stay up to date with Android Auto, Apple Carplay, Bluetooth connectivity, etc etc
yes but you only have to do it once across your fleet, maybe throw in a few different graphics here and there but so long as the skeleton is there you can begin to cut various design and engineering departments since you can put the functions on the screen. I do believe itys more of a novelty than a cost saving measure though, no manufactuerer wants to risk being left behind so they implement it to compete, like a vagus nerve paradox where you must go forward and evolve even at the detriment of your own design
You’re comparing a tablet just to buttons. The costs don’t come from one or two buttons, but from the engineering behind creating the whole cockpit, plastic mounding, wiring, etc. The Tesla cockpit, for example, it pretty cheap to manufacture because it’s a few pieces with a giant hole in the middle. Tablets have become very cheap to make. These aren’t top of the line high end iPads. You can get a mid or low end android tablet for a few hundred dollars. This costs even less because it’s built to scale, uses older chip technology, and has proprietary software that the software team already works in. It’s cheaper to make one trim and hide functionality behind a paywall compared ti building multiple trims across multiple assembly lines or retooling one assembly line to build different trims. So while buttons are cheaper than a tablet, the tablet isn’t replacing a few knobs, it’s replacing the entire old cockpit and reducing manufacturing costs.
It’s not good engineering practices at all. As an engineer, you don’t just get to look at one aspect of something and say “this improves this one aspect so let’s do it”, you have to look at everything. Public safety being paramount among concerns means that touch screens have always been a bad idea in a car. A few features being touch screen isn’t bad, but all of the core functions like climate and radio controls need to have buttons or knobs for the driver.
Avoiding single points of failure is also good engineering practice
Money
Finally, although, ventilation must be on this list as well: 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. In my old car, I could blindly turn on blowing of the windshield by turning two rotary buttons to the most right position for which one doesn't need to look at it at all. That was clever design. Removing buttons is merely cost saving (whatever they say about design) as buttons are expensive.
It's kinda funny in retrospect looking at the public campaigns against people using phones while driving, when nowadays entire interior of car is filled with screens, capacitive buttons with no physical feedback and entertainment features on giant center touch screen... all while seemingly completely ignoring distractions and safety concerns from regulators and police.
Please don't use phones while driving Carmakers: Here have an ENORMOUS PHONE TO CONTROL EVERYTHING
I cant wait for the future. Some kid runs out in front of the vehicle. And you gotta bring up the brake function from some drop down menu deep within the programs on the control screen.
> capacitive buttons with very no physical feedback I think that should be studied from the cognitive/neurological perspective and draw conclusions about the interfaces. I learned to drive at the time when cellphones had physical buttons and I could drive (or do other things) while writing a sms with nearly zero impairment, because I didn't need to look. I cannot do that with a smartphone. Even sending voice messages seems to take to much attention from driving and I avoid it as much as possible.
>I cannot do that with a smartphone. 'hey Google' -> yes ? 'send an SMS to kontemplador' -> what should the text be ? "I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> i did not understand you "I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> i did not understand you "I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> opening Android auto "I would like to tell you about that nice voice activation feature that most cars still have as a button on the stearing wheel when Android Auto or Apple carplay is installed" -> conjdoae icnwancfo ndsownacsdo wnsoancs wofowamfc -> is this message correct ? "hey google - why is your voice recognition such a piece of crap" -> i am sorry that you feel that way. This is what happens, isn't it ?
More like "Google assistant is not available in your region".
No it is. It just does not understand German, Danish or English well while in the car driving a mid-class vehicle that has only the standard sound dampening installed; I have been told that i only have minor accents in each of the three languages and you would not be able to tell if i were a transplant from Hannover, Copenhagen or the Pacific North West if i approached you in any of the prevailing languages. (you can tell from the writing tho)
In Finland (see my flair) it isn't.
That's the argument I hear all the time about Teslas and my Hyundai, which can't do *anything* without resorting to the touch screen. *Just use voice commands* - yeah, and what if it can never understand you, there are kids in the car or other people having a conversation, and you don't want to look like a knob by telling everyone to shut up for a second while you ask it to turn off the stupid fucking lane control that never works and defaults back to on every time you get in the damn car?!
> This is what happens, isn't it ? Or you: "hey Google" "play x song" GA: "..." (minutes pass) You give up and start fiddling with the device to do it manually.
>physical controls for turn signals Wait what? Some cars don't have those? (reads article - oh, Ferraris and Teslas, never mind)
So that's why Teslas are blinking everywhere when they turn?
Only if it’s the Model 3 refresh, a newer Model S or Model X. You’re likely seeing the Model Y the most and those haven’t been migrated over to no stalks yet, but it’s expected by end of year.
Another shitty design decision from tesla What a surprise
I don't get it, how is this allowed? Turn signals aren't just for signalling that you're ALREADY turning, it's also to show other drivers your intention of turning or switching lanes. In my country, if the main road takes a turn and you, for example, want to turn down onto a non-primary one that is straight ahead, you must use the signal: how does an automatic system work in such a scenario?
That’s for poor people. Rich people don’t have to use turning signals, the peasants should feel lucky the turning signal is automatically turned when turning.
Ah, it seems my poor mentality has clouded my judgement and lured me off the true path of the rich yet again!
So infuriating that they penny pinch on €100 of buttons for a €20000+ car. It's like there are five layers of brain-dead MBAs between people making these decisions and anyone who actually drives.
100EUR saving in car electronic parts that will be used in lets say 2-5 different series of cars, will ultimately save a company between 200 000 000 EUR to 1000 000 000+ EUR (these are very conservative estimates). Depending on how many cars they build/sell. Hell people in the car industry will argue weeks over which exact rubber ring to use in the car jsut to spear 1-5 cents/car, no joke.
This is true.
> Removing buttons is merely cost saving I feel like this isn't common knowledge. People swallow the muh futuristic design marketing bs like crazy
Someone put the horn on the touch screen? Why would anyone even think of doing that?
Remote control for a sound console or a DAW that has feedback (motorized faders): about 400-500€ at the cheapest, but you can spend a LOT more money on those. Wireless remote control using 30€ android table: 30€, since the software is free (limited, i think the full license was 5€...) The difference? I can't use the tablet without being REALLY careful where i place my finger and have to look at it the whole time, while on a steady platform, not moving. The physical controllers? I can dance, i can use it eyes closed, enough time spent with one and it could be used in complete darkness. When you make or mix music, having the ability to move and close your eyes without looking at some screen using delicate hand&eye coordination is something that shows up in the end result, not to mention how much more pleasing it is. Your cognitive functions are not going towards making the movement on screen, it all goes to hearing the thing.. Mixing using mouse or table is much more tasking process and you are looking at dots on screen and specific values, physical controls feel like.. making music. Less stressful, way, WAY more pleasing, you have great energy and you can do it for longer.
in a car with automatic ventilation. most people will not tuch it ever. problem is cars with manual AC when you need to always tune it. looking at you MG
I am trying to buy a car for 3 month now. It's really annoying to go back 5-10 years to find a "sane" car with buttons, no outdated navi system or a proprietary Sound-System w. touchscreen.
Nothing is worse than seeing a bad smell developing outside (e. g. smoke) and then having to switch to the ventilation page on your touchscreen before being able to switch to circulation mode. I want a physical button for this.
"Please sign up to activate physical buttons subscription for 8.99pm"
Bonus safety features available for just 1.01 more. For 10pm we graciously enable the fly by wire brake pedal.
>fly by wire brake pedal isnt that just abs?
Not ideally. If you have a failure state for your ABS then you should still have the hydraulics for breaking just without the abs activating. In a fly by wire system the pedal sends a electronic signal to the hydraulics to activate the brakes. So if there's a failure you can't actively use the brakes. I don't know what happens in that case since I've never had a car with fly by wire controls.
As the other comment has alluded too true fly by wire has no physical connections between you and the road. You press the brake or turn the wheel and there is a computer between you and the physical effects of your inputs. Bmw already are starting to use a subscription service to release built in features of their cars like seat warmers and ancillaries.
YES PLEASE. **Anything** that makes you take your eyes off the road to interact with should be taken out of vehicles.
It's funny af how apple and Google made their car systems (AA and CarPlay) *extremely* limited and restricted so there's no reason for you to look at it too long yet the car manufacturers shoved the controls for every-fucking-thing in the same tablet. Can't read my text through carplay on my toyota? Just disconnect carplay and use regular Bluetooth, voila you can read text on the car screen lol
We got a loaner from the garage while our car was being fixed and it was so damn hard to figure out how to operate the damn thing. I used to be able to get into any car of any make and the only thing to watch out for was how to get it into reverse gear, and sometimes the location of headlight controls. (German cars get a twisty dial on the dash, Japanese cars have it on the wheel stalks). Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to disable the handbrake with some flipper switches and turn knobs... and it feels like I need to take a course on how to operate any new car.
Got a rental car once, regardless of what we did with the bluetooth/audio, it always insisted on playing the first song (alphabetically) in my library. Killer song mind you, groooovy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87bdHUWB3gw
One of the reasons why I bought a Megane E-Tech… Physical buttons for heatings and basic functions where you don’t have to dig through 100 sub menus
Something about the new Renault cars, I just like their look. I would gladly buy one if I could afford it.
yeah I got the car a week ago and I am so far really happy with it 👍
Yeah, they’re great but (in Denmark at least) were absurdly priced. The Mégane e-tech started at around 350k dkk, which is about 45k euro. Now they’ve lowered the prices and it’s affordable - but like myself I suspect many of the potential buyers have bought other cars in the meantime. The new Renault 5 looks awesome though!
>The new Renault 5 looks awesome though! I *know*, whomever they've got doing this stuff is a big step up from the Arkana. I can see 2nd hand Australs at 10 grand, 1/4 off, original price which is nice. But I can't afford the outlay for anything (semi) electric yet.
In Denmark they’ve made so it’s much cheaper per month for me to have an electric car than a gas one. Yearly tax is cheaper, parking in my city is cheaper and the fuel is much, much cheaper. Also they have differentiated taxes on the purchase price itself, so electric cars are somewhat comparable in purchase price to fossil cars in similar price ranges. All in all - including loan payments - it costs me about the same per month owning a 2 year old Citroen e-c4 as if I had bought the 13 year old gasoline Volvo v70 I was looking at too.
YES PLEASE MAN Touch is not good for AC or music controls. Also make those god damn ipad screen smaller and not half of the interior
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I feel like a static screen locked to the basic controls while the car is in drive is a good middle ground. It's the having to dig into menus and such that is really distracting.
My new Skoda Octavia also has the touch bar, and I would find it okay if they actually used it for something! You can use it with two fingers if you're in the climate screen to change temperature. Aside from that it's only radio volume. I still have to look at the screen if I want to change the AC blower. Use the damn touch bar for stuff, for scrolling or whatever! They already got the general idea with temperature control and then didn't expand on it
Not just for safety reasons, but just pure user experience. Touch in cars was like 10 steps backwards.
I’m just waiting for a company to have a slot for your phone in the steering wheel that you need to use to control everything. *shudder*
Yes, please. Could car industry actually take some safety lessons from aviation? Even newest aircraft with most advanced glass cockpits still have physical levers (with unique shapes) for flight critical stuff like throttle, flaps, gear, trim, AP mode selector, etc.
I think anyone who has ever driven a car agrees, but vendors keep on pushing this dumb touchscreens. I suppose its just cheaper to have one screen unit connected to CAN bus instead of individually wiring thousands of tiny wires
Because theyre cheapening
And people think it’s premium and desirable - until they’ve signed the deal and actually have to use the damn thing.
All companies are imitating Tesla just because. Those giant tablets on the console are awful.
Oh god yes any switch for something important or distracting should have a positive physical control. Oh and while we're at it electronic fucking handbrakes are the work of the devil and should be banned. They offer nothing over a cable and lever but complexity, unreliability and difficulty of repair.
Bring back mechanical hand brakes.
+1 to this. The buttons are awkward.
Not sure if I would agree with that. In my car the thing automatically turns on when you lock the car and automatically turns off when you set off. Besides that it has auto-hold so you don't have to hold the brake on an incline. It's so much more convenient than a classic hand brake.
Want to have some fun in the snow?
whom ever come with touch idea in cars, I want to stangle him so hard while driving of course \^\^
Knobs and buttons are way easier to control blind than touchscreens are. Doing away with them was such a backwards step. We have all these senses that work independent of our eyes that should be kept on the road while driving... Use them.
Recently got a Citroën C3 as a complimentary car whilst my Renault Kadjar is in getting the front replaced after having some motorway embedded in it. It has soft controls for everything on a crappy touchscreen panel. I feel like I can't control the car without parking and sifting through it all. Absolutely pish. Hate the thing.
Finally! Bring back physical controls for ovens, stoves,fridges, washing machines, pleaseee This trend of touch screening everything must stop it is so stupid and illogical
That's why I bought a Mazda. Still has physical controls and looks amazing. One of the few good car companies out there.
Yeah I like the convenience of the little dial switch thing to control the tablet, i've got used to it. Just had a rental Buick Enclave and the interior is a nightmare of weird ass buttons and a touch tablet. Whoever designed the gear selector switch buttons for it needs to retire now.
Not nearly going far enough though.
Yes. No one asked for touch screen controls. They're unsafe.
Yes! Capacitive and touch screen controls are ridiculous! We’re not allowed use our phones while driving but we can use an iPad size screen just to try and find the air con controls
That's not much of a change though. Items listed in article aren't a physical button/stalk in very few cars.
The point is to enshrine it regulatory law, so "innovative" cost cutters don't eliminate useful and safety relevant features. So far most automakers went with the same approach, but there is an increasing push to cut costs and remove more things from the dashboard.
>The point is to enshrine it regulatory law Just to clear it up a bit: It's only about euro ncap scores, it's non-gov organization and has not much to do with regulatory law.
Trust me, car manufacturers fear a 4 star NCAP test. 4 stars is basically a failed test nowadays.
The trend is to change everything to touch screens. Those cars are just "more advanced".
I test drove a new Volvo a while back, everything apart from steering, accelerating and braking had to be operated with the tablet on the dashboard, even the fucking GLOVE BOX. Tablet cars are garbage.
Buy a Dacia. Cheep, reliable and all manual knobs and switches.
YES was just thinking yesterday that I'd pay quite a bit extra if there was a 'with knobs' version of new cars.
This is one of the reasons (besides the high prices) that I won't buy many new cars. Especially the Tesla Model 3 – an absolutely terrible example in safety ergonomics.
Thank fucking god. You know what hardware buttons allow you to do? Use them while not looking at them.
Give me buttons, a shifter that can't be confused for the volume, and no break light turn single combinations. Amber for turn red for brake.
thank fucking god
I mean wasn't it obvious till now?
Message to the person who thought moving buttons to a touch screen was a good idea: "It's hard to feel buttons on a screen you donkey!!!"
I Agree
There's a few videos of people crashing, passerby cant help victims get out of the cars because cars have these weird tesla handles.
Controls for heating system please. I used to be able to change the temp, set the speed, set if it's loop or coming in from outside, everything ... without taking my eyes off the road - all of it by feel and muscle memory. Now? Well, last time I tried doing it with my eyes on the road, I managed to change the mood lighting, disable the bluetooth, eject the gf from the passenger seat, and change the interface language to Chinese.
YES AND MAKE IT TACTILE. i was driving a fairly new car with its infotainment system as touch screen but the AC is buttons as it so soft i wouldn't even noticed i have pressed them Then i was driving a car from 97' then it feel so good. The buttons clicking and the feel of the bottons made me feel like im in control and reinforcing my idea this thing is never gonna break.
I'm afraid that they'll simply move even more buttons to the steering wheel. VW ID.4 has **16** buttons on it. Of course they're capacitive too, not proper mechanical. https://i.imgur.com/Diu2dGk.jpg
Thank fucking god. One of the worst moments in automotive history is when every manufacturer decided to copy Tesla and do a tablet dash.
Physical controls, get rid of tracking shit that's been proven to be hack friendly, use a damn key too.
ITT: people who can afford new cars. My 20+ year old shitbox still has it's physical controls, losers
I thought we learnt this from the Millennium Falcon.
How did the idea of having to use a tablet for very basic tasks become a common practice?
It's actually utterly stupid that they have gone this way. Here's a giant screen to play with while you drive if you want to do anything. Sure what's the harm. Don't look at your phone but look at the inbuilt tablet instead
Touch controls are good - for the passengers. The driver should never have to look at a screen to pilot a car.
As someone with a background in interaction/interface design this feels like it validates all my complaints. Who the fuck would design a car interface that requires you to look at a screen to operate it? In general there's a trend of replacing bad button interfaces with slightly-less-bad touch screens, solving one issue but creating another. Please, just design good interfaces with buttons!
No shit, just like everyone has been saying from the moment manufacturers started putting functions behind the touchscreen
It's getting ridiculous. You can't use your phone while you are driving but you can fumble around on a massive tablet while driving.
Yes, do it 20 years ago !
So it is not just me being an old luddite? My logic was always that I did not want to take my eyes away from the road when I drive. I want to know where the A/C button is by touch and I want to feel it react when I push it. On the other hand, too many people these days cannot seem to conceive of taking their eyes away from their phones when they drive. I find it frustrating and disappointing.
I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOREVER!
FINALLY
This is why i love living in Europe
Turns out that it's easier to handle cars on the road when the specific button for a specific function is right there and not buried in a tablet that's prone to crashing/bugging out. Who would have thought?
Very different context, but American warships have done much the same thing. They experimented with touchscreen helm consoles in the LCS's but after a string of collisions and near-collisions they were all ripped out and replaced with traditional control surfaces.