I have a 2002 acura mdx. The old console finally gave away and now I can't control air ventilation in my car. The only physical button I have is auto and defrost. So I'm either full blast heat or off. I hate it.
I only have old vehicles and I'm actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff...
To change the temperature of the air, seats, or clear windows, I have to look down and across, away completely from the road, and watch my fingers press "buttons". Or worse, use menus!
At some point it feels like I'll crash because I can't see through the fogged up window, or I'll crash because I was looking at touch screen instead of road.
Ford? If so I feel your pain. The controls for the ventilation in their infotainment system are godawful. The time between input and output is so long that you have to look down to hit the "button" to bring up the ventilation menu, look back to the road while it takes 2 literal seconds for the menu to pop up, then look back down to the diagram of the vents to decide what you want blowing or not blowing, hit the right "buttons" and then wait for the thing to respond and do what you asked. Meanwhile you've gone 1/4 mile at highway speeds with your eyes barely on the road.
What was wrong with a dial with all the possible vent combinations? I want the defroster on and I want hot air on my feet? That's at 7 o'clock. Just blast my face? 12 noon. It was simple, it worked. It did not require looking away from the road once you were familiar with it.
I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.
It states this fact in the article, although that 5 star rated is highly coveted so if they say a car with no touch buttons will only get 2/3 stars things will change pretty quick, at least in europe
It's cheaper to put one screen and write software than spin up manufacturing operations for all sorts of differently shaped custom buttons and the control systems and wiring harnesses that are required to operate them all, so that's why automakers are doing it. Not saying I like it lol.
For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.
iirc.
He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.
2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.
I think what happened to Yelchin is a separate issue. The joystick was still a physical object that gave tactile feedback. The design was fine, but GM flushed the mouse on the implementation.
Where we have a bigger problem is when common vehicle controls are just an image on a screen, and a driver has to take their eyes off the road to do something simple like change the A/C temperature or skip a song track.
I've never heard the term "flushed the mouse". I tried to google it but all I got are -people flushing live mice down the toilet (?) and -the movie flushed away. Can you elaborate?
Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don't give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it's quite possible that the button wasn't pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It's a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it's done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.
I'm watching an episode of Bluey with my kids right now and they're playing Pass the Parcel and Lucky's dad is trying to stop the music on his phone but his touch screen isn't working lol.
Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.
BAS inputs (all physical inputs really) require muxed and addressed circuits on the board level to accomplish some connection to the software interface, whereas one touchscreen can have an arbitrary number of software interfaces it interacts with.
True but wasn't really thinking of it that way when I said $100 dollars, since I usually have way more I/O than I need. It is the physical operators, the running wire, the mounting, the inventory etc.
Same I sell access control and my comment was really more additional context for the normies. Recently I've been thinking about what the barrier of entry for Bacnet native access control hardware would be, and I can't come up with good reasons that jci or kaba hardware is priced at the level it's at except to consider it's proprietary software interface.
Manufacturers don't want to supply complete interoperable devices, because then they couldn't sell software
Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.
And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.
Don't forget heating and cooling too. There's a ton of things that are necessary to operate while the vehicle is in motion and should never be delegated to a touchscreen.
I'm fine with touchscreens for in car entertainment for the back seats and maybe a passenger one with the appropriate shutter technology to block the driver's view. None of those things are important for vehicle safety... but if there is a speaker that the passengers can control there needs to be a mute button for the driver to turn that shit off too :)
If you brick your car's firmware, at least you can keep driving without unreasonable levels of difficulty or distraction
That's impossible for a large portion of safety critical systems. Engines don't run without a controller, they literally control the fuel injection valves (and have done so for decades). Brake systems have physical failsafes for when the electronics die (I.e. basic hydraulics without the booster), but you should not be able to move a vehicle without a working brake system after it stopped.
The shitton of software running modern cars is there for good reason (at least large chunks of it), lots of which is safety, especially in the drivetrain.
It's completely different for infotainment, which I agree the vehicle should be able to function without (although the dashboard must work)
I don't really think that physical buttons on the dashboard are any less distracting. I still have take my eyes off the road to make sure I press the correct button. At least I can press right scroll wheel and give voice commands.
You can just feel your way around. If all the buttons have the same shape, sure, you can't, but they don't have the same shape. For example, if one button has a little raised nub, like the F key in keyboards, you know immediately which button your finger is on.
This. I don't need braille to know which button, it becomes muscle memory. A touch screen UI changes dynamically, so having muscle memory like for a physical momentary switch is impossible. And the tactile feedback is important too.
You don't have to take your eyes off the road to operate a control. You might need to learn where some are in a new car, but then you instinctively reach for and operate the ones you use all the time. It's muscle memory.
This is not the case in a touch screen where controls may or may not be visible at any given time and you have no chance of operating them unless you physically look at the screen to control where you touch it. Maybe this arrangement is fine for some non-critical functions, but it absolutely isn't for critical ones.
What is worse is that cars from Tesla are even getting rid of indicator stalks which is fantasically dangerous. Maybe it's not a big deal in the US where roundabouts are uncommon but they are all over the place in Europe and the rest of the world and lack of indicators will cause crashes and fatalities. Just so Elon Musk could save a few bucks on a stalk. And if that results in a lower EuroNCAP score then boohoo for him. I can imagine the raging and legal threats that he'll engage in if that happens.
Any controls that aren't multimedia need to be separate from the infotainment system.
I want to be able to change the radio unit without losing my air conditioner. I don't want a cracked touchscreen to prevent me from turning on traction control.
To be honest zooming isn't great on my 2010 yeti with a physical zoom wheel either.
These systems are always crap in cars because compared to modern phones they feel unbelievably slow; my yeti is now 14 years old but my phone is 2 years old so it's a pretty unfair comparison!
I understand. Android auto is quite nice. I don't like that the assistant can't be changed to another app. There should be an open protocol which allows any device to take over the cars multimedia systems.
Yeah it's normally automatic. The shifter has a +/- and I can move up or down with a little flick. The automatic transmission is otherwise annoying so sometimes I use that. Took a lot of getting used to.
