[minutillo]

There's another reason why touchscreens are used. It breaks up one of the "long poles" in the project schedule.

Hardware buttons and switches have to be designed, tested, re-designed, and validated very early in the process of designing a new model so that there is time to figure out how to manufacture / source all the parts, how they integrate with the rest of the car's systems, and how they'll be wired and assembled. Just imagine what the impact would be if late in the process a new feature needs to be added! Pretty much forget about it, add it in the next major model refresh.

With a touchscreen all those dependencies go away. The hardware team just says "there's going to be an iPad sized capacitive touch screen here for climate/infotainment, and another custom sized display here for the instrument cluster". The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated.

[titzer]

The solution to that is simple. Put four/five physical buttons down each side of the screen, maybe along the bottom too, and then you can make everything still programmable in software. I have no idea why you absolutely need to put buttons in the middle of the screen to be touched. It's one thing to put items or whatever that can be selected, or allow pinch/zoom, but in reality almost all interaction just boils down to picking between a limited set of options at any given time.

With a decent response time and hierarchical menus, it's easy to make a system that is navigable without looking. Throw in some (hopefully non-annoying) audio feedback, and it is extremely accessible--even by a blind passenger! In fact, that's a good benchmark. If a blind passenger could operate the thing, then the driver should be able to as well.

[jlkuester7]

This. %100 this. The airline industry figured this out years ago with some of the cockpit controls. (admittedly there are a lot of other buttons and switches for the pilot to worry about too, but it seems like the digital display panels always are flanked by rows of buttons which were used for interacting with the panel. Works great even with gloves on and does not lock you into a single feature set.

[tablespoon]

> The solution to that is simple. Put four/five physical buttons down each side of the screen, maybe along the bottom too, and then you can make everything still programmable in software.

This, though functions like climate control, audio, and anything needed to operate the car while in motion should still have dedicated buttons. Touchscreens in cars are an abomination.

> I have no idea why you absolutely need to put buttons in the middle of the screen to be touched.

They don't need to, they're just following the touchscreen all the things UX fad. Turns out capacitive touchscreens were a great fit for cell phones, but that doesn't mean they have a place anywhere else.

[thwarted]

Another solution is to not make every make and model have a completely custom dashboard interface. The physical interface for turn signals is completely standardized. The physical interface for windshield wipers is about 95% standardized (I wish we would finally decide on if the short bar or the long long bar indicates frequency of activation or delay between activations). The physical interface for the radio is mostly standardized, at least the icons on the buttons are well defined and understood. It just gets worse from there. The climate controls look standardized, and often have well-established icons and coloring, but not standard positioning. Then again, even things that are standardized, people can't fully grok: how many people know how to find out which side of the vehicle the gas tank is on while sitting in the driver's seat? It's so goofy, the Mini I drive regularly is infuriating because the touchscreen has a paddle/joy-knob in the center console for navigation, and you turn it COUNTERCLOCKWISE to move "forward" and "down" through menus/option lists.

[mbjorkegren]

Encoders are great for this too. Music hardware often uses mappable encoders with LED rings to indicate the current value, and/or with the screen showing what the encoder is controlling.

https://www.ableton.com/en/products/controllers/apc40mkii/tr...

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keyb...

[mfer]

> With a decent response time and hierarchical menus, it's easy to make a system that is navigable without looking.

There is a difference between working with a touch screen where you can focus on it and using a touch screen where you need to focus elsewhere (like the road). There is also a difference between something like a plane where you have a great distance from other moving objects most of the time and a car where you are regularly around other cars.

My wife has a slightly older car with no touchscreen. We can operate it by feel. Without ever needing to take our eyes or focus off the wheel. My car has a touch screen. I can't operate that by feel. Constant glances are required.

These are different experiences. Looking at the situational environment is important when creating a good user experience.

I wish I could buy a car with more physical buttons. Would make the whole car driving experience more usable with me as a less distracted driver.

[Findecanor]

BTW, what you are describing has a name: "Soft keys", and had first been developed for use in air plane cockpits. (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_key>)

[kawfey]

They really should.

Even commercial and fighter aircraft -- which have human-interface requirements of incredible depth and complexity -- are transitioning to large touchscreen displays. ALL of which require physical boundary buttons and knobs as a redundancy for touchscreen controls.

In fact, controlling the screens via buttons are the preference for many pilots since accurately fiddling with touchscreens during turbulence, pulling Gs, evading missiles, while being task-saturated etc is very hard to do, but doing the same with physical buttons is far more reliable. Button-pushing tasks can be performed from memory in the blind (or while not looking) (a.k.a. "memory items").

There's always been a dichotomy in human-machine interfaces between airplane customers (airlines, charters, governments, and militaries) vs. their own pilots. Airplane builders have to keep up appearances and look cool by putting in putting in flashy, futuristic features like big screens and AI, and ditching old button-laden displays and the "old way of doing things." It too often disregards the needs and wants of pilots and "human factors" engineers. Fortunately, safety comes first, so the buttons and redundancy must stay.

[fridek]

FWIW this is what Audi's MMI does. (Or used to do? My car is old.)

The control panel has:

* 6-8 buttons for switching between different MMI modes, labeled

* 4 universal buttons, function contextual to the current screen

* 1 return button

* Turn/press controller

I can navigate 90% of the menus blindfolded. Despite my older MMI not being a marvel of UX, I can access functions 5 actions deep, while driving, from pure muscle memory.

[mywacaday]

Audi have had this for years, dial with four buttons around it down by the handbreak so you don't have to reach up. Also some industrial pick and place machines work this way, I used to operate them over 20 years ago and the speed you could navigate through the screens once you built a bit of muscle memory beats any touch screen.

[macspoofing]

>The solution to that is simple. Put four/five physical buttons down each side of the screen, maybe along the bottom too

Absolutely. It's why smart-phones and tablets (the ultimate 'touch' devices) still put some physical buttons (power, volume control).

A well designed UI, complemented with physical input (buttons or knobs) is best.

[Kye]

More to the point: the missing physical buttons that really grind people's gears are gimmes. You need some way to control the heating and air. Some way to control audio. Some way to control safety stuff like wipers and signals. These have been around as long as the things they control. Decades! It is known. This is the way.

Give those physical buttons and 99.999% of complaints vaporize, and people are happy. Apply your idea for stuff that's up in the air. Boom. Done.

[kbenson]

A central rotating knob or directional jiystick that can be pressed is also fairly intuitive. I fortunately they've futzed that one up often too by making it rotate and a directional pad (such as in Honda Odysseys, at least circa 2017), where you can rotate and also tilt the knob left or right, and I can never remember whether a particular menu section wants one or the other to change selections.

To the automakers, when two controls have overlapping things they're good at doing, maybe pick the one that fits best and just include that, but at a bare minimum make sure they are always used consistently and clearly, please.

[illiac786]

My dream:

* a row of programmable buttons with LED or lit e-ink screens for software developers to go nuts with =) – and for end users to customise to their preference. * static physical buttons for basic functions (climate control, wipers, cruise control, volume, etc.)

And of course a large touchscreen with buttons on the sides as well.

ok, ok, it’s probably too expensive… As an option maybe? Let the end users vote with their wallets.

[andrewla]

General-purpose buttons whose action changes with context are just as bad as touchscreens. The whole point of tactile interfaces is that the buttons and controls have a consistent action regardless of context. A button that sometimes does one thing and sometimes does another depending on what is on the screen is no better than a touchscreen, since it requires active attention to operate.

[cjohnson318]

Absolutely. I have a 2016 Outback with a touchscreen that I can't see in sunlight about 90% of the time. I can, however, see the smudge on the screen where I press play for audiobooks. (Plugging a phone in pauses the audiobook.)

I'd love more physical buttons because, and this may come as a shock, usually when I need to use these darn things, I'm driving.

[snowbrook]

Just like every gasoline pump I've used in the last decade.

[LordKano]

I think that manufacturers are too busy trying to be the Steve Jobs of cars.

They're thinking about making their vehicles look differently than everyone else's instead of thinking about what would work the best?

[ChikkaChiChi]

Is there a standard for this or any defaults in an OS for this? In the past, I've been monumentally frustrated by the inability to bind inputs to non standard keys.

I've tried building out several projects like this, and using HID keyboard as standard, you are relegated to ANSI keystrokes or combos that a user/os wouldn't need, or third party drivers that come with their own headaches. Another option is a video game controller.

I never understood why we can have a billion emojis but adding some additional unused input mappings is a bridge too far.

[mnot]

Like the Apple Touch Bar.

The problem is that it’s contextual, so you still have to look to it you can trust that a hardwired button won’t change purpose; that’s the important property here.

[linkdink]

This is not a solution. You still have to look at (or listen to???) the screen. But now you also have to find and operate one of several identical input devices that are not colocated.

This works for cheap oscilloscopes because you're not simultaneously driving a car. What you're proposing would make the safety issues worse, and probably be unacceptably frustrating for most people.

[pavon]

That's not a panacea. My Honda CRV has buttons along the side of the screen, and after seven years of owning it, I still have to look at the screen to do anything.

[djaychela]

Exactly. Back in the hardware days of music technology, I had an Akai S2000 Sampler. I could navigate the most commonly used functions by touch alone, using actual buttons - even with complex menus.

With simple menus (or a custom setup of your own), the common things could be on buttons, instead of taking your concentration off the road.

[LorenPechtel]

And put different textures on them so you can easily feel which button you have (so long as you don't have gloves on.)

[Angostura]

Put physical buttons and knobs on and allow configuration of the image displayed on the button - like programmable keyboards.

[_nalply]

> even by a blind passenger

but not by a deaf driver

[th1s1sit]

Because unlike airline and medical industry, the auto industry does not have regulation around user experience.

Normalized functionality is required by law for air and medical to reduce risk of operator error.

The auto industry does not have to consider a confused operator killing someone else. That risk is on the individual driver, not a hospital, airline, or airport.

[khy]

I had a car that had a single physical input: a dial that you could press. The dial would move the focus around the screen, and you'd press the dial to click. This was, in my opinion, a far superior experience than regular touch screens, and it probably doesn't suffer from the problem you're describing.

[SomeBoolshit]

For use cases where you don't want to look away from the main task you're performing, it's definitely better than a regular touchscreen.

You don't have to aim your finger at anything, you just have to scroll and check whether you're there, yet.

And you'll start remembering how many notches you have to scroll to reach the functions you need, becoming less dependent on the screen at all.

The difficulty is in balancing the number and arrangement of submenus and the buttons/menu entries triggering whatever function, although the same issue exists with regular touchscreens.

[Tagbert]

No but it converts the action into a multi-step process. A button is a single-step process. Multi-step is fine for infrequent configuration-type actions that happen when you are not actively driving but are a distraction while driving.

[banannaise]

Audi used this through around 2018. It's wonderful. Absolutely superior to a touchscreen. It's very hard to precisely touch a screen at the distance and angle typical of a car touchscreen (and even harder if you're actually driving the car). Wheel-and-button means more scrolling through options, but zero accidental inputs, and you don't need to focus on the precision of your inputs.

It's a bad interface for everything but a car screen, and an unquestionably superior one for a car screen.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> The dial would move the focus around the screen

That sounds dangerous. It's basically the interface that AppleTV uses.

I find it extremely confusing, as I frequently select the wrong item (and I have been using AppleTVs for years).

Also, it's no fun to program.

[someguy5344523]

Really? That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me; you still have to look at the screen to see what you're selecting, but you also can't just click the thing you want directly.

[ricardobeat]

The BMW i* line is like this, and although it works alright, it's a terribly clunky experience when you're actually driving, even more distracting than a touchscreen.

[dmead]

cars that support android auto try to do this. theres a button on the steering wheel that turns on the voice assistant like a phone. you can do a lot an definitely not take your eyes off the road.

[bluedays]

I had an ipod once.

[packetlost]

I've long had the belief that a handful of multi-function buttons below a touch-screen headunit or something would be ideal. Give me physical buttons and a very clear and easy way to tell what "mode" they're in (and switch it if necessary). As long as you don't have too many functions and have glance-able labeling (perhaps with small OLEDs on the buttons themselves) you'll get the best of both worlds

edit: hire me VW, I'll fix your awful infotainment lol

[unwiredben]

Effectively an ATM-style interface?

[toss1]

Yes, that is definitely a key reason touchscreens are used.

This does NOT mean that it is a good reason.

The design team saves time & project risk once, and every user for decades (the car is supposed to live that long, right?) pays for the entire life of the car, a few pay with their own lives or the lives of a random pedestrian/cyclist because they are distracted by a bad UI at just the wrong moment and end up in a preventable accident.

Plus the test in the article is GREAT! It should be enhanced and required as a manufacturing standard. The test should also include blindfolded trials, or with a screen blocking the dashboard — it's not rare to have to operate the controls without looking at the dashboard — rainy, cool, dark, in 2-way traffic, and your windshield is fogging fast... that should require 1.5sec blindfolded for a person new to the car.

[giantg2]

"Hardware buttons and switches have to be designed, tested, re-designed, and validated very early in the process of designing a new model"

To be fair though, the buttons should be pretty standard from the previous model or other models. Vehicle design is generally iterative, building off the prior models.

[otikik]

Hi, I am the guy who was going to buy a house in the countryside and who might need to talk to you about killing hornets. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32149932)

I'm contacting you to tell you that I bought the house, and I have finally moved, and I love it here.

But guess wha? We have hornets. And I already hate them. 10 minutes ago I removed my first nest. It was a small one, inside our mailbox! Highly inconvenient and disgusting.

There must be some other nest nearby, those buggers keep coming to pester us while we eat.

Do you have any pointers about how to find where a hornet's nest is?

[dr_orpheus]

Yes, but a lot of car manufacturers got around this by making a relatively common control suite for all of their cars. There are car-specific items, and luxury versions of a brand tended to change it up from the standard, but most manufacturers seemed to have an identical set of buttons/knobs for climate control in each of their cars.

[logifail]

> Yes, but a lot of car manufacturers got around this by making a relatively common control suite for all of their cars. There are car-specific items, and luxury versions of a brand tended to change it up from the standard, but most manufacturers seemed to have an identical set of buttons/knobs for climate control in each of their cars.

I drive in rental cars quite often and it's always a huge relief when I'm at the desk to pick up a vehicle and they hand me a key for either an Audi or a VW.

Before even I've even seen the vehicle, I know I'll be able to use the controls in it.

[katbyte]

I am pretty sure my 2022 tacoma has the exact same clutch start cancel button as my 1998 4Runner did. But then that’s a very Toyota thing to do.

[ec109685]

The Tesla Model S/X did this right. All commonly used functions are on the steering wheel, with customizable rocker knobs, and voice control works.

[powerbroker]

In 3 Tesla's I've owned, voice commands are only 80% accurate. This is with a male midwestern accented (U.S.) English. I can talk with a Texas drawl... if that is necessary, to see if the car gets my speech better.

My wife, on the other hand, thinks voice recognition is a joke, and doesn't even bother trying. Its hard to call voice recognition redundant or helpful to the touch screen.

[rstupek]

Agreed. I never need to look at my screen to change volume, skip songs, adjust the A/C.

[itslennysfault]

Sometimes "long poles" are good.

Having a touch screen means they can (and will) half ass the UI/UX because they can update it later.

Also, this isn't just a car problem. You can see it all over the web and mobile apps. I'm a huge fan of rapid iteration, but it has the unintended side effect of allowing people to ship half baked products because they "will iterate on it over time"

[neogodless]

Yeah I'm starting to notice how pre-release slowness is hand-waved away... but the reality is that they may not actually fix it in time for production (or ever).

[tomxor]

> if late in the process a new feature needs to be added! Pretty much forget about it

This is a feature of the physical process... can you imagine how annoying it would be if the dial for your aircon or volume control kept changing it's position!

If they can't plan the feature properly, I don't want it, I don't want a buggy piece of software with UI that changes every week. In a way I wish this was true for modern software as well... no more updates at any time, at least try to get it right the first time rather than just rushing any old shit out of the door "because you can fix it later AKA never".

I understand there is a balance to be struck with these manufacturing decisions and quality - sometimes it's worth sacrificing some things so that other areas can benefit and the overall quality can improve or the reach that a product has is greater - but this is nuts, touchscreens in cars is just dangerous and annoying.

[dottedmag]

In the world I'd love to live we as a humanity would conduct an experiment: design two cars differing only in touchscreen/regular controls, produce, sell them and collect accident history.

Let's say touchscreen version would end up having a bit more accidents, say, one death more per 10000 machines sold.

And then the critical step: for every other touchscreen car ever designed by anyone, charge a manager who signed off the touchscreen with one manslaughter for every 10000 machines produced.

[mLuby]

That makes sense.

Do aftermarket physical panels exist for consumers to replace their touch dashboard with physical buttons linked to the same functionality? That'd sidestep the long pole issue and give drivers the ability to customize their cars.

If they don't, I imagine the Devil's in the "linked to the same functionality" details. It could be that carmakers make doing this legally or technically impossible or maybe just that there isn't demand for aftermarket adaptor software.

[dublin]

No, we lost what little ability we had to do that when manufacturers abandoned the globally used single and double DIN radios for tightly coupled and proprietary systems tied to each individual car. NOTHING on current cars control and "infotainment" systems is upgradeable or changeable by the buyer anymore.

Oh, and a reminder: Stand for freedom and NEVER buy a car that has a data connection (Internet or private radio) back to the manufacturer. I want my car talking to its manufacturer (and by invisible proxy, the big ad tech corps, governments, and insurance companies) exactly never.

[nopenopenopeno]

How hard could it be to have physical buttons with miniature lcds in them so that their labels could be programmed as well?

In fact my 2022 Honda Civic has climate controls with dynamic labels like this, with LCDs in them. I see no reason why these couldn’t be programmable.

Also the left half of the gauge cluster in my Civic (behind the steering wheel) is an LCD that can almost perfectly imitate a physical needle gauge one moment and or be a settings menu the next, and a fully customizable output the next.

[anigbrowl]

Or, and hear me out on this, just standardize and keep it as modular as possible. Competition is said to require innovation, but we're all familiar with how this tips into planned obsolescence and just pushing out a new model with largely cosmetic changes every year for marketing purposes. It's not so uncommon to see excellent overall designs acquire incongruous and thus ugly chrome for no other reason than to distinguish this years' model from last.

[potamic]

The obvious solution is to use a touchscreen with cheap plastic buttons that sit on the touchscreen and emulate touch.

[screye]

Genuine question, why do buttons take so long when keyboards are so standardized ?

Mechanical keyboards have mastered haptics, replaceability and reliability over high repetitions. They could easily iterate over a mechanical keyboard housing that's custom, but the individual components within it stay completely interchangeable.

Also, why is it so hard to understand that touchscreens can be good if they've got haptics ? Is a mac-book-sized haptic-trigger motor THAT HARD to facilitate in a vehicle ? Is a blackberry like physically moving touchscreen a complete no-go ?

Lastly, I wonder if touchscreens can be used as a large capacitive backend to put physical buttons on top of. That way the UI can be designed independently, and the independently tested buttons get added last minute onto whichever grounding spot on the touchscreen is agreed upon by the designers.

[NonNefarious]

That's the rationale, for sure; but for mechanical features physically built into the car that can't be altered by software, there should be physical buttons.

I don't even like electronic climate controls. I drove a minivan last week that had a click-wheel for the blower speed, which inexplicably suffered from a several-second lag. Yes, multiple seconds before the fan speed changed, making the selection of one a ridiculous pain in the ass.

And any UI that makes you poke at a button or twiddle a dial to iterate through a list one item at a time, without showing the whole list at once, is a monumental failure. You see this blunder way too often, when there should simply be a drop-down list for a finite number of options.

[oliwarner]

> With a touchscreen all those dependencies go away

Not quite. You need a rough idea of where the controls are going to be so you can make sure that the user can reach them. The placement of that "iPad sized capacitive touch screen" is incredibly important, especially if the user has to search for the control.

That's no less true with hardware controls, and I'm probably splitting hairs, but it's not as simple as just allowing for it. There is still hardware to consider early on.

And when manufacturers do forget to plan for it, and shovel a touchscreen into an old-design cockpit, it's super-obvious, and awful.

[trey-jones]

Because this paradigm has been working so well for the software industry. Physical buttons being better (and safer!) for a driver is so obvious it's almost not even worth testing. No science required!

[falcolas]

Cost and driver safety are orthoganal. You can't increase driver safety without increasing the cost. And given how we treat companies which don't grow their profits yearly, it's (sadly) an unsurprising output.

[PontifexMinimus]

> Hardware buttons and switches have to be designed, tested, re-designed, and validated very early in the process of designing a new model

No they don't, just use the same ones as the previous model.

[SoftTalker]

> if late in the process a new feature needs to be added! Pretty much forget about it

What are you going to need to do while driving?

Operate the headlights. Operate the wipers. Operate the climate control fan speeds, mode, and temperature. Operate the windows.

There are not an endless number of essential operations that cannot be foreseen at design time. These are the ones that should have single-purpose, fixed context physical controls.

[incrudible]

I get it, but how much more crap must you pack into the interface of a car, to the point where you can't decide ahead of time, like with all of the other physical components? This is lazy design and the results are terrible. Is this really what people want, or what the car design echo chamber believes people must want, because Tesla is somewhat successful with it?

[ISL]

It is almost as if there is a market for a touchscreen that can reconfigure itself to present arbitrary tactile physical buttons.....

[incrudible]

No, the problem is that a car interface isn't supposed to reconfigure itself. You're supposed to be able to learn to use it blindly.

Designers need to be able to make decisions and stick to them. If they can't do that, it means they suck at their job.

[comicjk]

As long as the design team has the discipline to freeze the button layout for any given car, so the driver doesn't have to deal with moving or disappearing buttons.

[jfoster]

I've heard it's also cheaper from a hardware perspective, because ultimately any modern car was going to have some kind of screen anyway, so you get the screen to replace every instrument cluster. It might then mean using a better screen for usability reasons, but all of the other instrument cluster parts no longer exist; they cost $0.

[minutillo]

I worked on a project (not cars, phones) where we replaced an older model that was operated through buttons and LEDs with a newer model that was just a giant multitouch screen. Surprisingly to me, it was way, way cheaper! And cheaper in multiple dimensions: the hardware buttons and LEDs weren't just more expensive, they implied a multi-step manufacturing and testing process on every unit. The touch screen was relatively standard and just came as an integrated assembly from a supplier.

We also went through a phase where we had a hybrid interface, the most common interactions done through hardware controls, everything else on the touch screen. There was always some level of regret associated with the hardware stuff, like we had some extra LED we never actually needed or just one more button would have been nice.

[ortusdux]

It is really common for $1mil+ super-cars to have OEM turn signals, window toggles, etc. from budget cars for this reason.

[systemvoltage]

Yes, but the most important reason is cost. Alps catalog for switches has been diminishing and they are becoming more expensive.

Development/schedule impact is NRE, but any addition to COGS impacts the bottom line in every car.

[the__alchemist]

An MPD (screen with buttons around the edges) gets you best of both worlds.

[pkz]

Maybe a button cluster for cars could be standardized? Everything relating to AC, heat, etc could work with similar symbols and placement. Everything else had to go below or above this module?

[HellDunkel]

Games are fine with simple controllers which provide 2 analog sticks and a few buttons. Why can’t cars do the same? They have even put touch displays on steering wheels!

[albertopv]

For their front car doors Vw, Audi, Seat have been using same design for years. Touchscreens are just an easy way to cut costs.

[mralexc]

Clearly! One more dependecy gone away, phew!

On the cost of what? Driver safety?