When I’m in charge of a car company, we’re going to have one strict rule about interior design: make it so it doesn’t cause you to crash the car.
You’d think this would already be in effect everywhere, but no. Ever since the arrival of the iPhone, car designers have aspired to replicate that sleek, glassy aesthetic within the cabin. And it never works, because you tend to look at a phone while you use it. In a car, you have this other thing you should be looking at, out there, beyond the high-resolution panoramic screen that separates your face from the splattering june bugs.
If a designer came to me with a bunch of screens, touch pads, or voice-activated haptic-palm-pad gesture controls, I’d trigger a trapdoor that caused the offender to plummet down into the driver’s seat of a Cadillac fitted with the first version of the CUE system—which incorporated a motion sensor that would actually change the screen as your finger approached it. And I’d trigger my trapdoor by turning a knob. I wouldn’t even have to look at it.
I couldn’t agree more. One of the things I dread about ever replacing my 2009 Volvo S80 are these crappy touchscreens that are added to every car these days, often of dubious quality, with no regard to user interface design or driver safety. For instance, I don’t want to take my eyes off the road just to adjust the temperature of the climate control – there should be a big, easy to find knob within arm’s reach.
This just seems extremely unsafe to me.
I like what Subaru keeps doing despite of the touch screens: volume and AC have buttons and most stuff you should care about is accessible from your steering wheel or voice commands.
This actually describes a large percentage of the vehicles I’ve seen here in the US (other than the voice command part). Some brands (for example Honda) are even still doing knobs for certain things in some of their vehicles.
No, they are an AWFUL distracting mess.
The systems are non-intuitive and difficult to use, even for the passenger. It shouldn’t take a Ph.D. to sort out the radio stations, or jump to the bluetooth controls.
The Chrysler PT Cruiser had the “instrument console”, which eventually contained a “Vehicle Information Center” beneath the left fuel/temperature gauges. The VIC’s primary display included outside temperature, vehicle orientation, and the radio station tuning.
Granted, these things are incidental to the operation of the vehicle, but they were in the same visual plane as the speedometer and tachometer. This is a crucial point: just like touch-typing, the hands and fingers can go many ways, but looking at something with the eyes should require minimal head-turning, eye adjustment, and visual cognition before returning to the road view.
Anything that takes more than half a second to view *and understand* while driving is a distraction. And any critical operation with the hands should be a matter of reach-and-touch.
If someone reaches to the radio volume knob (which might be a touchscreen “knob”), then hits a pothole, causing her thumb to drive the volume to maximum, it should take ABSOLUTELY NO VISUAL REFERENCE to find the volume knob and turn it back down to a safe level. Touchscreens are not the way to go for this; tactile is the ONLY way to go!
Oh, but your design is for the convenience of the driver? I call bullshit. When the driver’s “convenience” is more important than the safety of passengers and the others on the road, your priorities are fscked up.
I’m a truck driver and some of the touch screens are not only overcomplicated and distracting, but take a firm and very precise touch to do what you want. For example: I linked my iPhone to the computer in an MAN truck the other day (MAN is owned by VW so you may find something like it on their cars and vans too). When a call came through, I had to touch the green panel which is only just tall enough for my finger to press it correctly — the red “reject” panel is right underneath it. Worse, the volume is too low so you can’t hear the person on the other end and it forgets what volume you turned it up to when you turn it off and back on again. Struggling to get the phone to answer is a distraction when you’re supposed to be driving and if you cause an accident while distracted, the law comes down hard on you here even if you’re not physically holding your phone. At least the MAN computer pairs reliably; Mercedes onboard computers don’t.
In many countries this isn’t a problem because by law the touch part of the touch-screen interface is disabled whenever the vehicle is in motion. But hey, life in the land of the free, you have a right to do whatever you like even if it results in your own or someone else’s death! I suspect one certain country will legislate about this, but still let you carry a loaded small arms in your car, for traffic bears and such!
There’s your problem!
cpcf,
I think most customers would ultimately recognize that tactile physical buttons are better for non-distracted control. It’s far cheaper to replace everything with touchscreen controls, manufacturers are driving this trend in order to reduce their own costs. It’s going to end up with all manufacturers following this trend.
It’s kind of ironic that premium brands like tesla are so gung ho about replacing practically all physical controls with the electronic touch screen interface. They’ve created a single point of failure for everything. Seriously even trivial things we otherwise take for granted with physical controls like opening the door or hood of the car becomes a problem when it’s all under digital control with no backup. Tow mode (releasing the parking break) becomes unavailable if the car’s touch screen isn’t functioning
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/opening-the-doors-in-the-model-s-if-power-fails.9452/
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/how-put-dead-tesla-neutral-or-tow-mode
I can only imagine what the first telsa virus is going to do.
“It’s far cheaper to replace everything with touchscreen controls,”
No it’s not. I can guarantee that a touchscreen of ANY SIZE can be replaced with switches, levers, and dials that do the same thing for 1/100th the price. You’ve obviously never priced touchscreen panels before… and that’s totally neglecting the system needed to run the panel… and all the transducers needed to drive the things that the switches, levers, and dials directly connected to originally.
JLF65,
I have doubts about that. A lot of consumer electronics continue to dump physical controls in favor or cheap touch screen technology because it’s cheap. It costs a heck of a lot more to engineer, manufacture and assemble special purpose physical controls. It’s easier and cheaper to buy commodity touch screen parts at wholesale and build the interface in software instead. Sure there are some trade-offs, but I expect the economics to continue to favor a consolidated touchscreen over physical controls to the point where physical control will no longer be available except in classic cars. I guess we’ll see. Many of us in the future will miss the “old ways”, haha.
Besides being over-complicated, in-car touch screens are often poorly designed, requiring a firm press on a small panel to do what you want and not something you don’t. For example: to answer a call on the MAN truck’s touch-screen as I had to the other day, you have to firmly press on the little green ‘Accept’ panel and *not* the little red ‘Reject’ panel immediately below it. This means you have to take your eye off the road to repeatedly press the little ‘button’. This is a distraction and if you crash while distracted from driving, even if you are not holding your phone (which is a specific offence), the law will come down hard on you. MAN is owned by VW, so a similar system may well be found in their cars. At least the Bluetooth pairs reliably on the MAN touch screen system; in Mercedes vehicle stereos, it’s a hit and (usually) miss process.
All those Scala and Java devs will be very disappointed when we stop buying vehicles with touchscreens, what is next phones with 7 segment vacuum flouro displays?
Despite all the valid points, I suspect many on this forum may have rejected a brand of vehicle as a potential option because it didn’t include an iTunes app, so are we being hypocritical, do we only want our Ubers to come with Full HD?
Any of them that require more than two… or three interactions (max) to do anything are the problem. I came to those numbers because even interfaces that incorporate tactile feedback require the same. I’ve seen some screen interfaces that follow the three interactions max stipulation I propose and I think they’re great.
My car (Ford Fusion) utilizes the Microsoft sync interface which is utter garbage.
Also horrible single point of failure for a lot of controls.
I was going to say the Panamera gets this, but they went from
http://chattypics.com/files/old_0epb3n0won.jpg
to
http://chattypics.com/files/new_zzybm7fqqd.jpg
Crazy. I wonder how often this things are switched purely by accident.