Congratulations! You have now opened up the navigation tab, giving you convenient access to the many info and control screens for vehicle functions!
Your next press will take you to the climate menu (if you hit the right spot this time) where you can browse a complicated set of icons and visual aids we made way too stylish and modern to understand at a glance. Eventually I'm sure you'll figure out the very intuitive way that you can change the direction of AC airflow by swiping near the digital version of your vent and staring at it the whole time because there's no feedback on how far you're moving it except for the subtle, minimalist misty lines coming off the graphic~
According to a friend of mine the actor who played Mr. Miyagi would buy a lot of weed and sell joints he rolled himself to people who wanted a joint rolled by Mr Miyagi.
I really freaken wish I had some evidence for this story since it is the weirdest one I know.
The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly, but I also have physical climate control so I can't fully relate
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly,
Are you suggesting a Wi-Fi Bluetooth device inside of the same vehicle its trying to connect to via Wi-Fi Bluetooth would have connection problems, and not be able to connect, at that short range?
It uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired. Have you ever been on Wi-Fi and had connection issues right next to the router? All of those factors also affect Bluetooth.
That said, I've never had any issues connecting my phone to AA via wireless.
Yeah sorry about that. I actually know it's Bluetooth and not Wi-Fi, but I was just working on my Wi-Fi in the house before I posted that comment, so it got stuck in my head. I connect my phone to my stereo system in my car via bluetooth.
But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired.
Over long distances, sure. But in a vehicle, with that short of a distance?
It would have to be one hell of another thing interfering to break a Bluetooth connection in a car.
I have an irrigation valve that turns the water on and off for the garden. It talks to the app via Bluetooth, and I've found that my phone has to be at least 3m away from it or it won't connect. Any closer and the signal must overload it to the point where it can't interpret it. The first one I bought, I took back to the store and swapped it for another before I figured out what the problem was.
I'm sure it's a bad design on the valve's Bluetooth implementation, but nevertheless, it exists.
I have an irrigation valve that turns the water on and off for the garden. It talks to the app via Bluetooth, and I’ve found that my phone has to be at least 3m away from it or it won’t connect. Any closer and the signal must overload it to the point where it can’t interpret it.
Not to discredit your example, but that's not exactly a car that we're talking about right? I would imagine more due diligence would have been done on the engineering side for a Bluetooth connection in a vehicle, versus a lawn sprinkler.
If cars were having that same problem of close distance issues that would be making the news, especially if it was a whole fleet of cars that that problem was happening for.
Just trying to get more information about their experience as well, maybe it's not actually Android Auto and it's a weird half baked system built into the car
Being honest here, I have a car with android auto and I hate having to plug it in for a variety of reasons.
I just want to get in and drive, the music should just play and all the stuff should just get out of the way.
I don't want to charge my phone every time I drive my car, it's not necessary and can be hard on the battery
This is doubly important for an EV, I don't want to waste EV power charging a phone that doesn't need charging
My opinion, Phone OS makers need to get their shit together around android auto / apple carplay. Too much nonsense gets in the way of all the actually important pieces. When you get in a car with only a radio, the music just starts playing when you get in. Which means, your experience is better with old tech. That's just ridiculous.
I personally think a better idea is to just start equipping cars with cell modems that you add to your plan or something. There is no need to offload this work to your cellphone when the car has more physical space for that kind of thing anyway. I mean tesla's just have a borderline gaming computer in them these days.
You definitely don't want wireless android auto...the interface sucks and it's amazing to be able to unplug it and use your phone correctly then plug back in
I have wireless android auto in my GLI. It's fine. There have been a few random instances where being connected wirelessly has been inconvenient. But my biggest gripe is the battery drain.
I totally agree, anything that takes people's eyes off the road is not a good choice to put into cars. Cars may have more safety features than ever, but let's face it, drivers are still too easily distracted and too careless. Here in Utah we have so many highway fatalities every day, people driving the wrong way on freeways, and speeding around school buses with their stop signs out. There's no good fix for "stupid."
As someone who relies on GPS, a doordasher I kinda think it should be only for multi media and maps. AC and other controls should be nobs. Also steering wheel controls
Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.
I think I'd rather use a phone with bluetooth. Radio is pretty dead these days IMO. Are you syncing with bluetooth buttons or is it radio? Bluetooth control would be pretty rad. What kind of car do you have?
I have never listened to the radio in my car by choice. My phone is plugged in (currently Apple CarPlay but I used Android Auto with my last phone) but for simple play controls the buttons on the dash or steering wheel are still superior.
My rented Chevy Bolt does this. It will start playing whatever it can find, even if the last moment when the car was turned off, I had nothing playing.
Enjoying tech is one thing, wanting touchscreens everywhere is another. If they were so cool as an input device, all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards from their desks.
Maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and all the functionality packed in to them has created a “touch screen == high tech” association in the general public.
But those of us who work with tech rather than just consuming it know the difference between functionality and UI. And we use nice physical interfaces like mouse + kb to interact with various tech all day, even if we use our phones too.
I believe this thinking is what the car companies are banking on too, assuming people see 3-4 screens means it's more premium when I just screams the opposite to me and those I know.
Yep, physical input devices all the way. I literally just upgraded my computer from an Aya neo (touch screen only), to a GPD Win 4 specifically to have more physical inputs. While the Win 4 is also a handheld gaming pc (that is even smaller than the Aya), it has a slide out keyboard and an optical mouse sensor, which has honestly made so much of a difference in being able to use the device. Even just simple things like scrolling through Steam has become easier, never mind situations that involve any sort of typing.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone touch screens. On the one hand it enables us to have controls that would be impossible on a phone, like selecting a point on a map, infinite variety of button controls, etc. On the other hand I can't tell you how many times I've barely brushed the screen by accident and the damn thing is off doing something I didn't want. "NO! DON'T SHUT OFF THE APP YOU....sigh"
It's not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.
Dumb terminals were extremely prevelant throughout the 80s and into the early-mid 90s. Most people just didn't know that they were "dumb terminals" and either just thought they were early desktop computers or just heard them referred to as a "terminal". That same library didn't update their dumb terminals to actual computers until the mid 90s, but they did however remove the light pen in favor of a keyboard at some point well before then.
I am doing car shopping right now, anything that doesnt have physical controls is out of the question no matter how good a deal it is or how cool the car otherwise is
I never thought it would bother me, until I actually sat in a car where everything was dependent on software the first time.
At first I thought I was just getting old. But it dawned on me that relying on software to fucking roll down the windows or starting the car doesn't feel too good.
(It was also an extreme jump in technology for me because the last car I drove before that was an old Corsa around the year ~2005.)
Quite likely even power windows were driven by microcontrollers close to 2000 and used bus messaging between buttons and (non driver window) controller. Mercedes, certainly.
There are so many things that can go wrong with software where in mission critical situations like cars electricity is the preference
Also tracking comes with that software.. nerd types (like me) hate that type of stuff. I think tracking data like that should be banned and is the reason why I won't buy a new car until that happens
As an IT guy I have a case of "familiarity breeds contempt" when it comes to tech. A lot of it feels unnecessary and overcomplicates things and increases the chance of a failure.
In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.
Because they are stupidly dangerous. The reason physical controls work is because you can memorize where they are and touch them without looking. With the touch screen you have to loo EVERY TIME you want to do anything, and that's an opportunity to not notice something on the road and end up in an accident.
I've hated touchscreens on everything since forever, and have been shouting into the darkness about how stupid they are in cars since the idea was first introduced. I think most nerds have been doing the same for a long time. Touchscreen are only good for mindless tapping on unimportant things, everything else needs dedicated controls.
There is no discernible difference to me between using a builtin touchscreen and a phone. If one is distracted driving, then so should the other. You have to take your eyes off the road to use both, and with physical controls, I might glance it it but most of the operation of them is done by braille. If I pressed a button, I know I pressed a button and I pressed the right one, I don't have to look back at it to know that. And if I have to follow it up with another action, my hand already knows where that control is relative to the one I just pressed.
The only thing I could live with on touchscreen is music or diagnostics since neither are particularly necessary when you're in the act of driving.
The difference for me is that my phone is sitting in a holder stuck to the windscreen and looking at it means I'm only slightly looking away from the road, so I will still see movement in my peripheral vision.
By contrast, a large touchscreen in the middle of the dash necessarily means taking my eyes entirely off the road and probably also adjusting to the brightness of the display.
Neither are great, but one is worse than the other
Apart from being dangerous in a car they are also super annoying. I got a Walkman a couple of years ago just so I could pause and skip tracks by pressing a button in my pocket.
I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.
Honestly, I thought I would love touch controls in my car. But I drive a LOT for work and what I've learned is there are very few things as frustrating as being on a bumpy road trying to press a touch screen button and hitting every other button on the screen in the process.
Yeah there's that too. It really isn't practical. At the very least you want some sort of tactile feedback so you have confirmation "yes I pressed the thing"
My father's Avalon has touch sensitive HVAC controls. They're not touchscreen, it's a panel of plastic that has little labelled sections that have grooves cut around them as if they are buttons, but it responds like a modern touch screen. The temperature control is used by sliding your finger along. It's SO GODDAMN STUPID.
Hard disagree. The facts are that phone use is a far more likely cause of death than having touch screen controls. To say "it can't be regulated" is a cop out. It may not be able to be "perfectly" regulated, but the greater impact on preventing deaths (which is the goal here) is much much much greater by limiting phone use while driving than forcing cars to have physical buttons. I mean, what percentage of phone users are knowledgeable enough to root and flash a phone? 0.1%?
I, for one, would like to see single-function, physical switches for everything that isn't specifically infotainment. I want turn signals to be a single switch, and I don't want any other features integrated into that switch, and I want each individual module to be easily replaced.
God yes. Having ten buttons on the turn signals is a nightmare. No I don't want to play "guess which button controls the wipers" when I sit in an unknown car for 10 minutes. Thanks.
I guarantee this will never happen. Manufacturers picked touch screens and capacitive buttons because they are cheaper to produce. There is no way they’re going back to physical controls.
Well, if your vehicle can't be sold in an entire economic zone because you aren't complying with safety regulations, that's a pretty big incentive to change your design.
I don’t really believe for a moment that a company would care really. They exist to make profits by any means necessary, legal or not. Changing designs requires changes in tooling, processes, and design. That all costs lots of money.
If any design is changed as a result of gov regulations I’ll eat my entire dick.
So, uh, have you heard of a guy named Ralph Nader? He wrote a book called "Unsafe At Any Speed" in the 60s about how auto manufacturers were selling cars that they knew to be dangerous, and how they resisted changing in order to make vehicles safer. It resulted in the US DOT and eventually NTHSA, and a whole bunch of new regulations that auto manufacturers were obligated to comply with.
You also have things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission that can force companies to recall products--at their own expense--to fix products with health and safety defects. The results of recalls can be fines, as well as the product being entirely removed from the market, which can easily end up costing more than has already been spent on tooling and processes.
So, yeah, companies can, and do, change designs as a result of regulations.
Now, how were you planning on eating your entire dick?
Everything you listed happened in the past in different political and economic climates. Those changes would never be able to be implemented in today’s climate.
And if you think that they EU won't regulate companies and force them to change their business practices in order to do business in the EU, well, you haven't been paying attention.
]I see your view as jaded not wrong. Don't want to gaslight you and say things are like they were, your view is valid through your expereinces, but Apple was forced to change a charging port to the cost of god knows how much. Also we can only list things in the past, if i try and list a now its already past, semantics I know but language is powerful in teaching your brain what is possible.
