- buttons and dials I can feel with my hands without looking for climate/volume/etc. controls
- Car has a well documented API that can be used to control all non-safety critical features of the car (climate, media, etc.) as well as get lots of read only stats (current speed, current gas levels, current GPS location, etc.)
- mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)
- Car has an official app that can talk to said API over bluetooth or whatever for iOS/Android.
- Or I can write my own apps or programs, etc. that talk to the API.
Maybe I want to listen to audiobooks on Tuesdays and my own app would know to push that to the speakers as soon as I start the car on Tuesdays
Or maybe I want a raspberry pi in the trunk to log my car's current location and speed once per second because it's my teenager.
Just stop forcing crappy touchscreens attached to crappy laggy computers into my car! I want to choose my own computer and I want to be able to replace it if it breaks without taking apart my whole car and paying someone $1000 in labor. A stock iPad is 10x more responsive than the crappy touchscreen in the Model S; just let me mount my iPad
I’m genuinely on board with most of this, but it reads like satire.
On topic, it is wild how dated even brand new car consoles feel. Luxury brands do a bit better, but it’s still worse than my phone. Where do I sign up to overhaul vehicle UX?
Last time I got a new car the dipshit at the dealership was trying to get me to pay more cuz the car I wanted had a touchscreen. I told him I'd pay more if he'd take it out and put in one with buttons. Car consoles are such a gimmick...
Yeah, that's my least favorite part of how buying new cars works. The dealerships have cars on the lot with various semi-arbitrary combinations of options, and if you want some other combination then the process of buying a car gets more complicated and expensive.
Well, it's not like that just happens. It's a deliberate strategy to enable price discrimination. Calling it "semi-arbitrary" makes it sound like it isn't carefully planned. The whole game is to get everyone to buy either a budget or a luxury model and avoid selling a middle-of-the-road product for a fair price.
I have read so many times where car enthusiasts complain that they can't get the options they want with a manual transmission. Well, it's perfectly logical - when one aspect of a product is the deciding factor for a subgroup of customers, and the seller knows it, it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else. It's nothing personal, just optimization of the business.
> I have read so many times where car enthusiasts complain that they can't get the options they want with a manual transmission. Well, it's perfectly logical - when one aspect of a product is the deciding factor for a subgroup of customers, and the seller knows it, it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else. It's nothing personal, just optimization of the business.
I do actually think this is a special case. most people in america can't drive stick and don't want to learn either. for most cars that still have manual as an option, it saves you $800-1200 on the base trim of the car. so I imagine there's a weird bimodal distribution where one group of people wants manual just because it's the cheapest version of the car, while you also have enthusiasts who are willing to purchase a lot of the options (at least the performance related ones). either way, cars with manual transmissions are a fairly low volume market in the US. they can be pretty hard to move.
Oddly, I hear more groaning about not being able to buy manuals every day here. It sees more of a metro vs rural thing. Metro folk only want autos because traffic, and rural folk like the control, and feel of manuals more on smaller roads. Living near mountains manuals are hugely popular as they allow much safer driving by engine braking, while many will overheat their brakes.
Other than a few fleet style trucks, most manual options in the usa are performance models.
...it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else.
I doubt that, the margin on the luxury options has got to be higher than on the base model.
It's probably more that they don't want to be stuck with a car on the lot that has a manual transmission and all the other luxury options maxed out, that they end up having to sell at a substantial discount to move (because most of their customers, particularly the ones willing to spend on the luxury options, want an auto box).
What I doubt is that, considered in isolation, the sale of a manual car with all budget options is more profitable than the sale of the same manual car with additional luxury options. Sorry if that is a misinterpretation of your comment.
Autogefühl [1] is a great YouTube channel for finding out if a new car is available with non-leather seats.
They also made an interesting video a few days ago [2] saying the leather industry is trying to pay YouTuber's to recommend leather seats in their car reviews.
There's a surplus of dead cows floating around. Gotta do something with those hides, what better than make it a 'premium' product in the auto/furniture industry.
Seriously. I have gone so far as to get junkyard seats from a 'lesser' trim to upgrade the leather seats in used cars. When new they are okay, but seem to last 4-6 years before looking hopelessly worn thanks to the cheap quality used even in luxury cars nowdays. Gone are the days of full-grain that patina'ed instead of disintergrating.
What do you find complicated and expensive about custom ordering a car? Most dealerships are totally willing to order whatever you want. You get exactly what you want at the price you want. (Within the limitations of the options)
When I went to buy my first car, years ago, I opened the shiny brochure and asked "Can I get X with Y and maybe Z?", and was told flat out "No, we don't sell option X at all." Just because they advertise it doesn't mean you can buy it.
Bmw has the best in business, they left climate, track, volume controls as separate physical buttons and their console is incredibly quick to respond and feels fluid like a phone. New Audi’s really made a bad decision to use two screens without physical buttons, both of the screens are little laggy too.
2015 Mazda 3 here. Has touchscreen but I usually forget that, and never use it. Dial is nice, like BMW. But... Laggy, buggy computer. So bad.
Fortunately Mazda seems to be listening. 2019 loses the touch panel entirely and relies fully on knob and buttons! In videos, the screen looks super responsive. So at least not all hope is lost with every manufacturer...
BMW uses the Qt GUI framework in its center console AFAIK. Ford Sync 3 does, too. Those are some of the better and more responsive car GUIs.
Disclaimer: I offer Qt services. And... I actually prefer cars without any screens for my own use.
Screens are important in cars, for backup camera, bird view camera (incredibly useful), for everything else I use the head up display, I still don’t understand how more companies don’t adopt it, I can’t drive without it anymore, incredibly useful and does not take eyes off the road
I took a ReachNow from the airport and got one of the new 3-series and WOW. The dial in the center console beautifully splits this difference between touch screens and old-school tactile interfaces.
Measured in money and man-hours, car companies actually spend mind-boggling amounts on software. They largely just haven't figured out yet how to do it right. They also think that they are special as in better when they are much, much worse at software than other industries.
I mean, I assume it is shared across many Chevy product lines, but I haven't done an exhaustive study. If it only existed on the later Volts and then disappears forever with their discontinuation, that makes the loss even sadder.
If you can honestly make a claim that you can consistently and accurately change climate control on the bottom screen without taking your eyes off the road I will... well I don't even know. Disbelieve? :-/
On the other hand the new-looking Q5 I got as a loaner couple months ago had a perfectly fine physical button interface, with a little touchpad on the MMI comsole you could use to scroll around (and apparently even write). That was quite good.
That's another issue. It used to be that even the most basic car (like the cheap Geo Metro) still had a pretty decent user interface. Now it's: "well, if you don't like the crap at the low end, have you tried the latest $75K luxury sedan?"
This sounds amazing. And all of that (even the physical controls, in a sense) is really more about interfacing with the onboard computer systems, which arguably aren't part of the car itself, but something extra built on top of it.
For most cars that aren't Teslas, the head unit is designed independently of the physical control surfaces of the dashboard, because they want the head unit to be a thing you pay extra for via some navigation or entertainment option package.
I hope in the future the head unit won't be a separate thing that coexists with a potentially standalone dashboard. Like Tesla, but with physical controls alongside nice displays where appropriate, even with touch surfaces.
Cars are going through something similar to what happened with DSLRs when displays (and sometimes touchscreens) started to become common. Some companies fully embraced having a big touchscreen and very few physical controls and some companies grudgingly added a non-touch display but retained almost all of the physical controls. The best camera designs (IMO) ended up being ones that tried to find a happy medium between those extremes, not by combining half-assed physical controls with half-assed touchscreen controls, but rather by really thinking about the least compromised, best overall experience.
It's because of screens that I looked for a slightly older model when I recently purchased a vehicle. Ended up getting a 2009 BMW 328. The design on the inside is wonderful, and screen-free.
The computer is simple to use and gives you all the functionality you would have on a screen.
I now want to keep this car going as long as possible, in the hopes that this awful trend will change, and there will be options like people are describing here.
It reminds me of phones. The newest phone was willing to buy was a 2nd gen iPhone SE. It's the only new phone in a small form that has decent internal hardware.
I see it as part of a bigger trend that goes against excellent design. Is this some sort of marketing vs design thing that causes this?
In practice you still needed to suss out whether it was metric or imperial din/ddin and find a mounting kit, wiring harness, and trim specific to your car. It still wouldn't fit, of course, so you'd have to file it down / twist it until it did, and then you'd find out that your wiring harness didn't interface well with the amplifier / dash sounds, so you'd have an audible static hiss at all times and a maximum audio level at conversational volume except for the assorted alert beeps/dings which played loud enough to make your head spin. I think it's exceedingly generous to call that a standard.
You always wanna replace the factory amp when going aftermarket tho. And the euro din spec is hardly used anymore, just get the ugly larger frame that works with all the jap din spec. A good local installer will cost you a little bit more, but will save you time and grief.
Din standard is actually quite nice and I miss it dearly. The new intergrated audio/climate/navigation will look dated in a decade anyway.
I'd settle for just #1 and a 3.5mm TRS aux in (which was the standard for about 10 years prior to the new touchscreen phase).
I'll give a little praise for Toyota here though. The 2015 Corolla had a row of terrible low-quality touch buttons on either side of the touch screen[1] but the latest model has replaced all of those back with real buttons and two real knobs[2]! Maybe the tide is turning...
I would also like hard physical disconnect from the car's essential motoring functions and from it's auxiliary and entertainment functions. You would think that would be a no-brainer but it has been demonstrated how many new cars can be shut off or have essential motor functions remotely changed by hacking in through entertainment/media systems. Not sure if it is because of ignorance, penny shaving, or intentional implementation, but I don't see how I can trust a car that some punk on a laptop can disable or crash at will using simple scripts someone could post online.
I like CarPlay. Updating an app or upgrading phone is effectively updating the head unit in the car. And my climate controls are all physical dials with detents that I can use without looking at them. Ironically, the cheaper cars have smaller screens and physical controls.
This is great until your insurer steps in and starts using installed UI/UX as another factor on which to start varying rates after different UIs cause (or correlate with) accidents at different rates.
The good news is that if they are profitably factoring that information into their premiums, they also probably have a pretty good idea of what sort of driver you are.
> - mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)
That's probably never going to happen. Devices on mount are a securiry nightmare during a crash and car manufacturers don't want the associated liabilities.
At CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem.
We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.
You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).
Ideal car UX: click wheel with a few dedicated function buttons on the steering wheel and a transparent display on the rear view mirror. You can send the royalty checks to my secretary.
It is insane to me that we are coming up with these impractical user interfaces with implausible limited use cases, when... we had interface that works! I'm refusing to let go of my aging Subaru, because any rental I've tried is impossible to drive without taking your eyes off the road or a myriad other safety and practicality compromises
I'd be interested to see human factors research to see if it helps. Still, if you've got kids in the back seat who are asleep and there's background road noise from a highway, you don't want to yell "Carbot, turn down the A/C". Turning a knob isn't that hard.
As a new parent this is something I hadn’t considered. I use Siri quite a bit in our car with CarPlay and haven’t noticed if it bothers our child but I’ll be more aware now. Thanks!
Again, that sounds just awful. Why do we put up with this when we had a UI that worked perfectly, with no interruptions to music or family or taking our eyes off the road? Why are we putting up with these compromises? :<
So you're saying you had good voice UI without muting other streams? Or you're saying you could listen and type in those commands while listening (and driving)?
Because I would rarely want it to be the latter - especially knowing how dangerous it is.
Hard buttons pretty much a hard requirement for me on a car. Thankfully they still exist and will probably continue to exist. The trend towards touchscreen everything is already starting to reverse.
personal experience, own a TM3, I rarely if ever need to use the screen. Not even for navigation. Some simple actions are almost automatic for me when I do want to toggle, muscle memory even works then.
with regards to touch screens vs physical buttons, I tell friends at work who have mocked the TM3 display. put a sticker on every button then remove them as you use them on a drive.
plus some cars put buttons in far worse places but as with most cars you adapt real quick. after all its not that you need more than a few buttons from the dash
I think by this point most center console displays are touch-enabled. That doesn't necessarily mean there's much besides drive computer data and radio controls in them, although bigger screens and less physical inputs is certainly where they are heading, for better and for worse.
I don't find this diverse touch screen statistic all that interesting; it would be far more interesting to know how many of them don't have certain traditional physical inputs, e.g. for climate control.
The backup camera in my 2010 Tacoma is embedded in to the backup mirror. The usability is nearly perfect because it's right next to where you were looking already and is tremendously useful.
I recently rented a u-haul that had this and couldn't believe all cars don't do this. It is very useful having the camera and the mirror viewable at the same exact time.
On the other hand size, weight, power consumption, and heat dissipation are all vastly less important. Vibration is also generally easier to deal with than shock as these things don’t need to survive the 10’ drop tests.
Car electronic systems suck because they are not a major selling point.
Automotive electronics tend to have an operating design range from -20 to 120C ambient. Not that they see this kind of ambient temp but usually they have to be AEC-Q:100 qualified. Think about solar loading. Touchscreen (VHB tape, backlite, etc) all have to withstand intense temperature swings and last longer than a typical consumer electronic. If you look at the some of the Automotive testing, its pretty intense (High temperature Operation endurance testing and Thermal shock testing) in comparison to commercial grade testing.
Usually car manufacturers have to spend significant amount of Reliability testing before the launch the product to avoid recalls. Tesla missed some of the typical automotive testing and the early Tesla vehicles had a bluish Mura after a year and some the adhesive layers on the TFT panel started seeing issues and they had to replace the screens on a rather large number of cars
Yes, Crappy automotive SW is solely because most if not all infotainment SW is written by third party vendors. GM/Ford/FCA have engineers who are good at drafting Requirements and throw these said requirements over the wall to vendors like panasonic, bosch, Lear etc. They write 100 page documents on how the system needs to behave and these OEM vendors need to deliver these infotainment black boxes without any significant issues. (You can imagine why, if the infotainment board (Say intel or Qualcomm FW) has a bug that was found in production; they would need to update over USB or some other form debug method and reflash on the side of the production line and this cost hundreds of millions).
Again tesla has done a great job and implemented OTA and some of the automotive companies are following suit but this still does not help them much as the updates are given by the vendors whose sole job is to cover themselves (So most updates will go through a year of testing even for minor changes to make sure not to brick anything)
Many years ago, I worked on computer systems for luxury RVs. At that time, anyway, the primary issue that electronics had to deal with wasn't temperature or vibration (although those are certainly factors), but electromagnetic interference. Vehicles tend to be insanely electrically noisy.
I would phrase it slightly differently - they are not a dealbreaker, partly because people are almost always going to put other considerations first, and partly because most people are not going to experience them thoroughly before buying.
The software is terrible though. There is no vibration consideration that justifiably makes software horrible.
Every vendor has their own telematics tech. You need to use their horrible app to unreliably access your car.
Why not have a single standard api for say, lock and unlock, headlights on and off, etc ...
The manufacturers think that by being covetous and proprietary it'll work out best for them in the end.
It's a 1970s way of doing software: Zero open platforms, Zero open standards, Zero open source, blackbox machines with a completely proprietary pay-as-you-go manufacturer-specific system.
I manage a fleet of Hyundais we got through a special partnership with Hyundai of South Korea and we weren't allowed to directly talk to their proprietary "BlueLink" technology. That was kept as a Manhattan-level company secret.
Instead we had to go through a third-party authorized company who also wasn't given the information. They were the only ones authorized to reverse engineer it (and they were bozos). So we had to put our own telematics into the cars because Hyundai decided to be so covetous and secret about theirs.
These cars ship with a USB port and 3.2GB free on their in-dash computers. It has "apps" on it but not really because you can't add any additional ones.
Why isn't there a way for me to make my own apps? There isn't even some crippled Qualcomm BREW style way of doing things - there's nothing.
Write software, place on USB stick, install on car. Why is this impossible? Come on now, we're almost 1/5th of the way through the 21st century.
Then when it comes to Android/iPhone Auto it can't read OBD2 or CAN information such as battery voltage, fuel level, odometer, speed, no nothing. It can um, play music, take phone calls, and show maps. Whooppee.
It's entertainment integration, not car integration - there's some apparently super secret firewall between the phone and actually getting useful information from the car, when plugged into the actual car.
Why not just put up some permission request dialogs and only allow signed software? This has been a solved problem for 20 years. What on earth...
We could do early mechanical failure detection, OTA software updates through the phones, data gathering to know if components are failing to avoid expensive recalls or wrongful death lawsuits. This would save Manufacturers billions. But they want to have their secrets as if they're shipping their own little enigma machines.
It's like one of the iterations of the Internet TV ideas from the early 90s of how Comcast and Time Warner would write a bunch of shit software running on a tv appliance and that would be consumers interface to the internet. What a terrible idea. But with cars it's the reality we live in.
Expensive, bloated, crappy products with aggressive vendor lock-in and required subscriptions. Just Awesome.
I don't think that's needed. One of the manufacturers needs to get with the times and make an open platform and an app store and developers will come.
Once one of the cars starts getting useful excellent third party software that can say, do parallel parking or smart cruise control or some other killer feature (maybe a car "doctor" that guesses what's wrong with a vehicle at actionable levels), the other manufacturers will eat shit for a while with their own in-house clones and fail then finally give in and adopt the open standard.
They're better staying out of the software game entirely.
Maybe most consumers don't really care as long as they're able to connect their phones to it to play music. Thus, their margins being tight enough as it is, car makers see the infotainment system as a good area to pinch pennies.
Microsoft’s car system through at least 2018 can’t handle more than a few thousand tracks. It used to crash and reboot but they “fixed” it by popping up a modal dialog requiring you to dismiss it to use anything on the entertainment system and playing a warning message — every single time you plug in a phone, even if you’re just using Bluetooth audio!
US automakers are ridiculously wasteful, slow-moving, and don't really give a shit about anything. These companies are risk-averse for a reason, but you would be floored if you could experience first-hand the sort of bureaucracy and complacency you have to deal with when working with an automaker. I live somewhere that basically revolved around the auto industry until recently, and everyone else I've met that has dealt with automakers has had the same experience.
sheesh. The point is that the targets on the V9 UI are too small and even if you brace part of your hand on the bottom of the screen frame, it's easy to select the wrong function, whether it is seat heater, or fan speed or temperature or whatever one you haven't conventiently assigned to the right scrolly wheel.
Before buying my car I test drove a Mercedes that had what I assumed was a touchscreen. Upon trying to tap it the person working at the dealership said none of their cars have touchscreens because they don't make sense to operate when driving, and instead had a easily reached dial in the center console that controlled everything on the screen. Seems to be the case with any other German car I've been in.
Takes some getting used to compared to just old fashioned knobs & buttons, but far and above better than all the cars we test drove with touchscreens.
It's the worst of both worlds. Rather than having dedicated dials for each function, or a touchscreen, you have a single dial and loads of menus to work through. Want to change the radio station first you have to make sure you are in the radio display context and then scroll through the stations until you find your desired station. Meanwhile, you're constantly taking your eyes off the road to work this dumb wheel.
I've had cars with either, and I'm kind of ambivalent on BMW iDrive vs Honda touchscreen, but my main complaint with everything I've driven is the way Bluetooth will not connect reliably. Sometimes you have to restart your car or your phone to get it back, and once that didn't work and only unpairing it and repairing it worked. This is really, really, basic and I sometimes feel like screaming because when I was younger, whatever the flaws of a radio or CD player, at least they consistently worked every time you switched them on.
I've heard Ed Sheeran's A-Team every time I start the car because the Bluetooth receiver thinks it has to play something and it's going to start at song 1 of my library.
The main benefit (or supposed benefit, if you insist) of the big encoder knob system is that decision and action are decoupled: you can have a short glance at the narrow/deep menu, then take your time doing the next steps of finger work with the eyes back on the road. This is incredibly slow compared to interfaces designed for full attention, but the impact on driving ability is very low. It's kind of like a garbage collector that sacrifices throughput for shorter pauses.
Touchscreens on the other hand lure the eyes into guiding the hand through the selection process, particularly when you lack a haptic reference point because the screen isn't handheld. And then the eyes are already focused on the screen when the next menu page shows up, so it's tempting to continue right there. I guess there must even be some threshold in UI slowness beyond which touchscreens are not quite as bad for safety as faster ones because one would quickly learn that there is plenty of time to focus on the road while the glacial computer's cogs are turning.
Even physical per-function controls are worse once the number of functions gets too high. Volume up/down is easy, but how do you {insert any of the hundreds of functions that you can make safely discoverable, in time, with a slow menu}? Interrupting the process of scanning a wall of buttons with tiny symbols on them for a context switch back to traffic and then continuing the scan without generous re-scanning on resume is a skill that few people would ever develop without explicit teaching, so most would simply take their chances, keeping their mind in the scan. Throughput might still be higher than a deep menu, but the effective pauses are way too long (a quick glance up just to stifle the worst fears while the mind is still on the screen/scan does not count). I would not even be surprised of the annoying inclusion of some frequently used functions in the menu wasn't just penny-pinching or a misguided interior designer striving for cleaner lines, but a deliberate decision to train users in the interface system.
Are there studies to back this up? Because it sounds like that UI has a much higher cognitive load, which can be as bad as having to take your eyes off the road.
Mercedes also has a touchpad that hovers above the command wheel, along with the a tiny little touchpad on the steering wheel for your thumb. Just in case you wanted additional options, though neither work with Android Auto (for 2017 models, at least). The lack of a touchscreen is probably the second most annoying part of Mercedes' Android Auto experience, next to AA's lack of support for the ultrawide display.
Interestingly, Mercedes is sort of simplifying things with the MBUX interface[0] they unveiled with the A-Class: they're adding a touchscreen, ditching the command wheel for a trackpad, and have much improved voice controls. The early reviews were all pretty positive.
I've used these such as bmw idrive and I think it takes far more attention to navigate menus using a wheel than either dedicated function buttons or a touch what you want touchscreen. Selecting a nav address is kill-me-now tedious.
I tried a nissan with nav and it had a pretty useful mixture of the two. It had dedicated function buttons for say radio or map or volume up/down/power (most duplicated on the steering wheel), but the touchscreen was used when that made sense, like selecting a nav destination from a list, or typing a destination with the on-screen keyboard (allowed when stopped only).
Friend of mine just got a new Volvo, that touch screen was such a UI/UX disaster it was just shocking. The number of touches it took to do anything was ridiculous. He was trying to figure out how to do something super basic, like it should've just had a dial on the dash basic, and it took minutes to find. I don't know if others are better, but that thing made me want to never buy a new car.
XC90? I'd say they have a pretty great touchscreen interface.. My favorite right now is from JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) with physical dials embedded into a screen - that can context change. [1]
I've had the updated XC90 since 2016 and while yes, the touch screen took some getting used to, I can now access everything I need quite easily. I really do like the clean looking interior.
I test drove a Porche Macan as well and it's the exact opposite of the XC90... literally buttons everywhere you look.
I guess the different interior designs attract different people. I really just prefer the minimalist approach with the XC90.
You can have both a touch-screen AND tactile feedback. Ex: have a volume nub AND a touch-screen.
The touch-screen is almost a necessity with Apple Play and Android Auto. If you want to interact with your cell-phone apps with your car system, you better have a touch screen.
But please don't get rid of my AC buttons or fan setting knob.
First, I don't want to yell at my stove. I don't want it to misunderstand me. I don't want to forget it is on (dials are pretty easy to notice out of place; yes you can add a LED but now you're compensating for a flaw that doesn't need to exist).
I don't want to compete with my Google Home or my Alexa. I don't want my Kitchen to end up a constant stream of barked commands as I cook.
I don't want to stop conversation or music just to turn my stove on and off.
I don't want to take the time to speak "Stove, please turn on the bottom right burner to setting of five" when it takes me one fifth the time to actually change the knob.
It's a UI that works. It works great. Everybody STOP messing with UI that works great, pretty please :P
Clearly you have not met my stove! It literally polls the buttons once per second. It's a total crapshoot if you need a short press or a long press to register input. Voice control on this unit would not remove anything you'd miss.
I grew up with a stove that had an analog clock and a mechanical timer. Now THAT was a nice stove interface...
My sympathies - that's because, unfortunately, you have a stove where somebody took UI that works and tried to "modernize it". It sounds like it has touch buttons.
We have a brand new, nice stove that has knobs. It works GREAT :).
My next purchase will be a microwave oven that doesn't have million useless buttons but instead two dials/knobs - how much power, and how long. And I don't expect to ever use the how much power dial either :P
I am the complete opposite of you, give me voice control on every last device. All that I ask is that my data doesn't get fed into your network, give me an option to opt out of that and I would be happy.
Yeah, my thinking is that this is a simple enough task that no network connectivity would be needed. Plus removing hands on control could increase safety and cleanliness.
1) I don't want to have to trust the company that sold the product that they currently aren't doing anything with the data, or trust that they won't change their policy a year down the road.
2) Voice recognition doesn't work for mute people, people with speech impediments, people with voices that speech recognition doesn't understand, people that don't speak (insert language here), people that just want to easily and quickly push a button and not waste time or energy saying something, people that don't want to wake the kids in the back seat, etc.
(I wonder if removing hand controls for speach recognition would violate the Americans With Disabilities Act.)
No thanks. I want my stove to last 10+ years. Replacing a single knob is a lot simpler to repair, and less likely to fail than the microphone, speaker, logicboard etc. in a voice stove.
FWIW my GE electric stove/oven was installed when my house was built in 1967 (52 years ago). Everything works perfectly except for one front burner, which went bad about 2005. Oven is perfectly calibrated. I bought the house (and stove) in 1983 and have never required a service visit. When I mentioned to an appliance tech who was installing a new Maytag washer/dryer that I was thinking of getting a more modern stove, he said, "Don't."
None of those parts could be expected to break. This wouldn't be IoT. Just a static dumb voice control system on an SoC.
But I'm with ya. My stove is turning 15 this year. Looking forward to it being able to drive next year. Maybe I can even expect some bouncing baby grandstoveren a few years after that (but hopefully not too soon, there's so much world out there for a young adult stove to see).
Not a fan. Sure, a touch screen makes it easy to have an interface you can change on-the-fly all through software, but it requires eye-hand coordination which forces you to stop watching in front of you. How is this any better than trying to type on a cellphone while driving? I prefer proper dials and buttons in such a situation, which I can easily use without looking at them.
What are people using the screen for? I do maps and Spotify, all of which is controlled through the phone, voice, or steering wheel control. None of it requires interaction while driving aside from thumb flicks
Having a screen is much better than a separate phone or gps unit showing maps.
How well do these work if I have wet hands? Like, if it's rainy or snowy and i get in the car, will I be able to control the temperature? Turn on the defroster? Every smart phone I've owned would be anywhere betw 0% and 50% chance of it working.
My 12 year old car (perhaps obviously) doesn't have a touch screen, and every time I drive a card that does have on, I find it to be either a complete distraction and/or a UI failure. Cars don't need to be gadgetized.
I’d guess most of the interfaces we see in 2019 are roughly 2009 designs and implementations. I think it’s changing, but many of the manufacturers started out by putting software in the same test/certify cycle as the hardware.
One big reason I looked at (and bought) my current car is that it's got a sea of button and dials. I can't stand touch screens in cars, they are hard to use while driving.
Regarding safety issues, many cars also come with an array of collision avoidance and other safety features that could potentially mitigate some of the risk of touch screens.
We will instead make the UI that doesn't work. It'll be more expensive, more prone to failure, and it'll come with safety compromises.
To address those compromises, we will install more software that's more expensive and more prone to failure.
I understand I'm the minority user who just wants to drive his car safely and use buttons and dials that I can move without staring down at my knees while hurtling down the highway at 100kph while hoping that collision avoidance saves me and paying extra thousands of dollars for the privilege of poor UI. But I do wonder which planet everybody else is on...
If my car is unsafe, to me, is it not my own risk assesment to judge? Should we ban extreme sports too? As an adult, I cherish the responsibility of choice.
If you were primarily only putting your own life in danger, sure.
But with driving the way it is now, I do not think it's a leap to make the claim that distracted driving is a danger to not just yourself but to others on the road. It's exactly the kind of thing that the government should be regulating.
Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here? I don't and i really don't plan to. Public transports, bus, subway, train, carpooling, stuff like that seems more than enough for me, here in europe (france) at least. I think we need to shift the subject here: sure current cars are bad (low reparability mostly), but to what extend do we need personal cars (at least specifically for people living in urbanized areas).
I love how this keeps coming up from people who cannot comprehend that there are other people in the world - people who don't live in downtown of a city with good public transportation; people who need to move stuff; people who have need to travel; people who cannot easily walk or bike - they may have health issues or specific disabilities; people who live in places with inclement weather; people who live in places where distances are large.
Essentially there's folks who think entire earth is a hipster downtown, and anybody else should just move, while collapsing economy, sending housing prices into stratosphere, impacting everybody's quality of life, and so on.
Yes cars are still a topic. Get out of your own head, travel a bit, talk to people, learn to empathize.
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but that's just an unbelievable amount of ignorance and lack of awareness and sympathy for other people.
I hear your point, i'm not offended. But you dismiss me as guilty by association, to some kind of superficial "hipster" who's hobby is to take part in gentrification. It's not rude, it's fallacious. For one gentrification is out of topic (i would gladly continue that argument some place else).
Also i don't recall my comment to have any kind of imperative tone: i'm stating what works for me, and for a lot of people i see, explicitly requesting comments about whether or not this applies to others. Some made up numbers from what i feel about my surroundings: young adults (<30yo), i'd say maybe 1 in 3-4 have a car around here. Families from friends that live in or near a city center (inside the subway zone), i'd say 1 out of 3-4 have no car, that's already significant: they rely on their children, friends or rental when they need one. Parking lots aren't cheap. Of course there are some difficulties, when you need to move some couch through the city you grab a couple friends, a skateboard and start pushing. Every couple weeks when you do some large food shopping you have to carry heavy bags. Maybe you get a trolley of your own like the grandmas at the saturday market, it's actually convenient.
In the country side where i grew up, i'd say half the people have only 1 car per household. There's a train station 30min from there, a small line but is used quite a lot, with a train every 1h or so. Almost all of my friends had a driver's license by the time they turned 18 etc. Yet i slipped through, always making my way using quite a lot of cycling, making my schedule around the one of the buses, sometimes hitchhiking when the time was bad. Most people i know use either some carpooling app or train when they travel across the country and don't transport anything they can't carry in a couple bags. People do have cars there, but it's because of necessity, not choice. And you see far less new cars, lots of people buy them refurbished, cars switch hands in the family, some are real utility vehicles which are adopting interface bloat at a slower pace, etc.
So i ask again: don't we have to change our ideas about (1) car ownership and (2) car manufacturing/reparation/life-cycle? From what i can see, things are already far from the "every adult owns a car which they change every ~5 years" model from post-war until the oil shocks. My point is the usual dependency vs convenience thing [#]: the more a particular infrastructure becomes widespread or reliable (may be cars, electricity, network), the more you start depending on it; yet giving up some of it may not make your life worse, it just implies different life constraints and capabilities to work around it.
That was for the places i know well; now you implied i didn't travel or talk. I do. There are lots of other environments where car can and are avoided.
Would you consider the whole north/west european cities (in nl, dk, de, ch, ..) to be just a big "hipster neighborhood"? Believe it or not, but not everyone on a bike or in the bus has a beard, fancy sticker on their macbook air or is some kind of alter-globalism&ecology activist. There, and to some extend in a lot of other places, personal cars are neither a big necessity nor very practical in most slightly urbanized areas. People there own and use less cars. Of course it doesn't come out of nowhere: there is less specialization of urban areas for living, shopping, eating/drinking, working. More smaller and distributed structures, roads organized differently giving a lot of space for pedestrians, bikes, some green spaces, playgrounds etc. I'm not saying it can be done everywhere and now, i'm saying it's being done in various places and probably could be expanded.
> Some made up numbers from what i feel about my surroundings: young adults (<30yo), i'd say maybe 1 in 3-4 have a car around here.
Even at those levels, cars are still relevant to a large portion of people, and it isn't wise to simply dismiss car ownership ("Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here?"), due to their functionality and uses.
> Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here? I don't and i really don't plan to. Public transports, bus, subway, train, carpooling, stuff like that seems more than enough for me, ...
Must not be from the US...
> ... here in europe (france) at least
Yeah, saw that one coming. I wish we had good public transport here in the US, but realistically most people need to have access to a car. Even people living in large cities.
My current commute is from the middle of the city to the edge along a major freeway. It is 10 miles by car and takes 20 min on average to work, ~30 min. back home because of traffic. Public transport would take 80 min each way not counting traffic. Riding my bicycle would take about the same amount of time, but I would arrive quite sweaty. I drive because saving those 2 hours per day is 100% worth it.
If I wanted to take the bus to work, my commute of 15 minutes would become 20 minutes of walking to the nearest bus stop, and 2h13m of riding on a bus. I live in an suburban area but because there's a state line, the bus line goes to the city center and then back out. We used to live in the city, but we moved when a drug deal gone bad across the street resulted in someone shooting his gun into the air while my daughter was playing in our front garden. Luckily she wasn't hurt, but our options for safe, affordable living conditions are limited to areas traversable by car in the US Midwest.
I think it's perfectly fine to have that opinion, but if you're reading this thread, it's about cars, so it equates to "this thread shouldn't exist" which isn't very constructive.
I was simply trying to have a broader thinking, not only about how current cars are bloated with hitech but about the place of cars. I care about technology and consumer goods getting more and more opaque, littered with useless electronics (not all, abs and esp have proved themselves). But to have a complete picture one should also take into account their usage of cars, which use case they fulfill, and whether or not this could be done otherwise.
Even if people in cities weren't using cars it would still be a problem if they were designed badly, and worth discussing. Conversely, even if cars' electronics were designed well, that would mean very little to the discussion of whether they are optimal transportation in cities. In summary, your comment is in the wrong thread.
I'm not sure i completely agree with that, maybe you're right. Isn't bad design is at least partly linked to the fact that these are personal (non-utility) cars, which are for a large part used in (sub)urban areas, ie usage influences the design and reciprocally. It seems to me utility cars (and other "professional vehicles") are among the less prone to this interface bloat. Actually to support your point i recently saw how this exact problem was a big issue for tractors, farmers being locked in with broken (electronic) stuff they're not allowed to/can't repair themselves.
My ideal car:
- buttons and dials I can feel with my hands without looking for climate/volume/etc. controls
- Car has a well documented API that can be used to control all non-safety critical features of the car (climate, media, etc.) as well as get lots of read only stats (current speed, current gas levels, current GPS location, etc.)
- mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)
- Car has an official app that can talk to said API over bluetooth or whatever for iOS/Android.
- Or I can write my own apps or programs, etc. that talk to the API.
Maybe I want to listen to audiobooks on Tuesdays and my own app would know to push that to the speakers as soon as I start the car on Tuesdays
Or maybe I want a raspberry pi in the trunk to log my car's current location and speed once per second because it's my teenager.
Just stop forcing crappy touchscreens attached to crappy laggy computers into my car! I want to choose my own computer and I want to be able to replace it if it breaks without taking apart my whole car and paying someone $1000 in labor. A stock iPad is 10x more responsive than the crappy touchscreen in the Model S; just let me mount my iPad