I'm not big on touchscreens on phones, though it doesn't drive me mad personally. Real estate is a practical limitation and so forces trade-offs.
The big difference with a phone/tablet is that you're looking at the screen when using it. That's fundamental to the interaction experience. Cars are _completely_ different: a driver should be looking at *the road*.
Touchscreens as the main control interface for cars were a stupifying dumb idea right from the start. It's as if the alphageeks burst through the design studio doors, shunted the ergnonomicists aside, and proclaimed anything physical was neanderthal and out of date. Behold, the emperor has new clothes! "We can do all this in SOFTWARE, and it's adaptable, we can use clever colours, and look if you just tap this menu three times and slide along here, YOU CAN BOOST THE BASS IN THE RIGHT REAR SPEAKER! Show me how you do THAT with your Victorian buttons!".
Fair play to Mazda for leading the resistance movement here - and good to see VW actually listening and doing something about it. With any luck, touch screen car control will suffer the ignominious death it deserves.
when you think about it, touch is good for complex things and it's universal, the UI can shift to anything
for specialized repetitive control, doesn't seem to make much sense to me - certain functions in car, will be super repetitive, AC control, speaker volume, etc.
even for phones this logic applies, volume buttons are still physical
this means that something like navigation is better of with voice/touch (coz who would want physical letter keyboard there) ... but to pull down a window? yeah, hell nah with touch
Wish car manufacturers simply design a place for an ipad and Apple integrates Carplay with it. That’d be my ideal setup. I rather not pay $5,000 (implied) for some infotainment system that will be outdated in two years.
More like already out of date. There’s no chance that any system that doesn’t play Spotify is a match with my phone. Or any navigation that isn’t based off Google Maps. And so on.
Some airlines went to free WiFi (limited to streaming local content) and bring-your-own-tablet instead of screens in seatbacks. I’m not sure how that’s worked out, but my sense is it didn’t solve everything.
What if car dashboards were BYOD? A standardized API and connector, and you could have a choice of aftermarket UI -- screens, buttons, knobs, whatever. You could get used to it and bring it with you for rentals or to your new car.
The design in the pic looks reasonable. Big screen for nav, setup, rarely used functions. Then a set buttons with a knob for volume (or other rotary control when in setup mode on the screen) and buttons around it to provide just the minimum functions you need while driving such as defrosters and climate control.
You really don't need a lot of physical buttons for a car UX to be safe. And each button shouldn't need a separate cable. That button pad can be the exact sam N buttons for every model, every trim, and regardless of which side the steering wheel is on. The design with "flying" screens in front of the dashboard feels modern but it's of course a cost saving, which can be copied for the button pads. And use a single cable to the button console. I can't see how it's a massive production headache or cost if it's built that way.
It's not 1989 you don't need 2 wires per button and 9 buttons for favorite radio stations.
Ah, the sweet spot between a cockpit and a calculator. You're spot on; we're not trying to relaunch Apollo 13 here. Sure, give us a touchscreen for the tech savvy, but let's not forget the tactile satisfaction of a good ol' button. And yeah, a universal button pad is like the Swiss Army knife of car controls – versatile, yet uncomplicated. Let's keep the touchscreens for Candy Crush and leave driving to the buttons.
They should just copy Mazda's design, a screen that's not touch enabled and do not need to be put within arm's reach (so it can be put further away, and thus closer to driver's point of view when driving, that driver just need to glance slightly to the side to see the screen).
Then physical buttons/controls for common things (volume, wiper, etc.), and a general knob for navigating things on the screen.
Funny enough, the Taos and Jetta, which are their cheapest models, have physical buttons for volume and climate control and there isn't this level of friction using the car. I have a Taos, so I paid less for a better experience than a GTI or ID4 driver.
I just bought a Taos this past July and the general familiarity of the interior controls (pretty much all buttons) coming from a Mk7 Golf was a big factor in going with it.
The dashboard test:
Arrive from a long flight at night at the airport, get a car rental, attempt to
operate the buttons to enter the gps address of the hotel and turn
on the headlights on before exiting the parking lot.
The last time, my 2020 Lexus SUV insisted that I needed to download the
Lexus App to my phone before I could access navigation tools in the dashboard.
This was a luxury car for chris sake.
Cars today are victims of the Nokia feature curse. A bunch of features (calendar, reminders ) that nobody used during the flip-phone era. But you had to have the darn feature in order to compete weather people use it or not.
The car has carplay (or androidauto), apple/google/whatever maps will take me where I want to go, same as it does in any car.
If the car didn't have car play I'd refuse to take it as it's clearly faulty. I can't remember the last time I had a rental car without those features.
This test is now does the car have a screen compatible with CarPlay/Android Auto. I don’t ever want to be entering an address into a car’s infotainment again.
I absolute prefer proper physical interfaces for the most commonly used things. Like steering, acceleration, breaking, blinking, volume control, door handles, wipers, that sort of things. These are things I would use almost every drive.
However, I would prefer to plan my navigation, browse settings, configure the car, and peruse statistics on a nice snappy capacitive display UI. Please do keep/build that.
It's really simple: Anything that needs adjustment during driving should be a physical button so I can interact with it without looking away from the road. Especially basic climate and media controls have no business in cascaded touchscreen menus and these things probably have caused countless accidents.
I won’t own a car with a touchscreen. Ever. If I were given such a vehicle, I would get rid of it quickly.
My last car purchase it was not easy to find a newer vehicle without that junk. I see such things as signs of low quality. I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on anything connected to some cheap Chinese touch pad. It ruins the entire experience.
If I wanted navigation I’d use my phone. Any car I have to configure, I will loath deeply.
I think older BMWs (with only iDrive and no touchscreen) and current Mazdas have the most ergonomic and easy to use head unit setup. Since there is no touchscreen the headunit is just below the windscreen (easy to glance at while keeping road in peripheral vision). The knob has 6 inputs (4-axis tilt and rotation) and you get additional buttons around the knob. The knob also works in carplay (rotation changes focus, tilt does stuff like moving the map) and I bet after a few hours you'd be faster and more accurate than on a touchscreen with that. The only thing I always wish for is to get CarPlay navigation into the OEM HUD/instrument screen.
> on a nice snappy capacitive display UI.
Heh, until very recently a lot of manufacturers' infotainment was comically unresponsive, VW being a standout there (along with the worst-in-class screens).
I wouldnt be opposed to have an option of touchscreen control (current BMWs have that), except that touchscreens are neccesarily placed so low that you have to take your eyes almost fully off the road.
It's kinda funny that this piece is written with nothing about all the issues and changes at Cariad, VW's software group having all sorts of issues for years and is been undergoing a reorganization.
They’ve replaced it since, but I’ve really come to appreciate the control scheme of my 2016 Acura RDX.
Two screens, one positioned and angled for touch, one for driver visibility. Physical controls for climate, volume, and accessing touchscreen functions & menus.
This doesn’t seem like an incredibly hard problem, but rather that designers (or the marketing folks) have been convinced customers are impressed by extremes. In the ‘90s, dozens of buttons on the steering wheel. Today, nothing but massive screens.
There are two cars in my life that I liked more than any other car. The first was my 1965 Corvair and the second was my 1998 Kia Sephia.
Today’s car drive you, you don’t drive the car. I sat in a Tesla and felt I was in a future that I didn’t want to be in. Everything physical abstracted away into a smooth curve or a flat screen. we have let middlemen come between us in reality and we’re going to pay for it whether it’s in more expensive repairs or dislocation from nature.
I've recently been having to drive a higher end Audi from maybe... 2008? And the physical button situation is a complete fucking mess and I hate it. While driving I was trying to find the way to turn off the AC entirely because I was fed up with it being too hard to control and it took me literally 15 seconds to find it (mostly due to also driving at the same time). The UI (if you can call it that) of physical buttons is complete garbage in most cars. My daily, when I'm home, is a Yaris with three huge physical knobs - temperature, fan speed, and vent choice. It's perfect, I get exactly what I want, I don't physically have to look at it at all, I don't have to deal with automatic climate control which sucks in every single car. I'm just venting and have no real point here I guess other than physical controls suck unless it's super basic and simple.
The members of the business committee who decided that to operate the 4 windows 2 buttons are enough should be sentenced to driving a Trabant in their remaining lives. What were they thinking?... Of course, it was a desperate cost saving measure. No engineer could have come up with that stupid an idea.
Reminds on Rich Hickey ranting about touch screens in cars [1] in Design in Practice:
> We do not have feature X" is never a valid problem statement. If you need proof of this you only need to look at a modern car which has a touch screen where no one said, "I need to slide my finger on some random piece of glass to a precise point to set my blower in my car while I am driving." No one has ever said that, right? But somebody did say, "We need touch screens because young people will never buy our cars." This is what happens when you are not talking about the problem.
A touch UI is actually always trying to simulate physical controls, it’s only better because you can have many controls in a small area but you need a lot more focus/brain to use the UI. Physical buttons are ideal still and as proven for cars
Even the small area argument is questionable; yes, cars these days have more functionality than they did in 1993, but the center console has also gotten progressively larger.
It might be relevant to know though, that the way VW did their on-screen and on-steering wheel buttons where not state of the art. Glitches, missing feedback, latency etc.
Tesla also added more on-wheel capacitive buttons in their Model S refresh and got negative feedback, but they worked on it for the new Model 3 refresh and I only heard a much improved, basically physical button experience. Not to mention their non-existent UI lag on their screen.
So if customers only know laggy screens, and weird feeling buttons, maybe it is not always the right way forward to go backward.
The only way to realistically use a non-tactile button is to take your eyes off the road to look at what you need to press. That's the issue, anything else is irrelevant. I'm glad they're going back to physical buttons, I won't buy a car that doesn't have them.
Thank god. I hate cars with touchscreen controls for core functions. I shouldn't have to look away from the screen for more than a minisecond to turn the temperature up a bit or turn up the volume.
Four years after Mazda. But the video still shows big touchscreens, useless themes and distractions of the driver. Why they mount office monitors on the cockpit instead of building them into the cockpit?
I count 9 buttons. No distinct knobs for volume or temperature.
Again One button, one function. Not two functions, no long pressing, half pressing or whatever bad user interface ideas somebody can have. Donald A. Norman explained that well in The design of everyday things. And group that stuff logically.
Good. Can the regular roadworthiness tests be updated to fail cars that don't have physical buttons or dials for essential controls? These cars need taking off the road.
I thought for the longest time that touch controls were a misguided attempt by manufacturers to do something "cool" because buttons are considered "boring". But I've come to realise they are doing it simply because it's cheaper. I'm sad that most electronics I've bought in the past few years have touch buttons. In all cases I wish they were real buttons. There are very few actual advantages, apart from it being cheaper.
(buying a brand new Volkswagen in future) What's in the trunk in a plastic bag? your physical buttons, sir! You can stick them with double-sided tape wherever you want!
[+] [-] neogodless|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686967 17 hours ago, 211 comments (thedrive.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678853 1 day ago, 52 comments (afronomist.com)
[+] [-] sjfjsjdjwvwvc|2 years ago|reply
God I hate touchpad or touch based controls or whatever the correct term is, even on mobile phones they are almost always terrible to use.
[+] [-] spinningslate|2 years ago|reply
The big difference with a phone/tablet is that you're looking at the screen when using it. That's fundamental to the interaction experience. Cars are _completely_ different: a driver should be looking at *the road*.
Touchscreens as the main control interface for cars were a stupifying dumb idea right from the start. It's as if the alphageeks burst through the design studio doors, shunted the ergnonomicists aside, and proclaimed anything physical was neanderthal and out of date. Behold, the emperor has new clothes! "We can do all this in SOFTWARE, and it's adaptable, we can use clever colours, and look if you just tap this menu three times and slide along here, YOU CAN BOOST THE BASS IN THE RIGHT REAR SPEAKER! Show me how you do THAT with your Victorian buttons!".
Fair play to Mazda for leading the resistance movement here - and good to see VW actually listening and doing something about it. With any luck, touch screen car control will suffer the ignominious death it deserves.
[+] [-] polski-g|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ess3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponector|2 years ago|reply
Few buttons and a wheel - all you have to go through the journey to type your start and destination points, amount of people, age, discounts, etc.
[+] [-] johny115|2 years ago|reply
for specialized repetitive control, doesn't seem to make much sense to me - certain functions in car, will be super repetitive, AC control, speaker volume, etc.
even for phones this logic applies, volume buttons are still physical
this means that something like navigation is better of with voice/touch (coz who would want physical letter keyboard there) ... but to pull down a window? yeah, hell nah with touch
[+] [-] mihaaly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvl102|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakpan|2 years ago|reply
More like already out of date. There’s no chance that any system that doesn’t play Spotify is a match with my phone. Or any navigation that isn’t based off Google Maps. And so on.
If I have to connect my phone, they already lost.
[+] [-] Kaibeezy|2 years ago|reply
What if car dashboards were BYOD? A standardized API and connector, and you could have a choice of aftermarket UI -- screens, buttons, knobs, whatever. You could get used to it and bring it with you for rentals or to your new car.
[+] [-] alkonaut|2 years ago|reply
You really don't need a lot of physical buttons for a car UX to be safe. And each button shouldn't need a separate cable. That button pad can be the exact sam N buttons for every model, every trim, and regardless of which side the steering wheel is on. The design with "flying" screens in front of the dashboard feels modern but it's of course a cost saving, which can be copied for the button pads. And use a single cable to the button console. I can't see how it's a massive production headache or cost if it's built that way.
It's not 1989 you don't need 2 wires per button and 9 buttons for favorite radio stations.
[+] [-] hdjY28|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seszett|2 years ago|reply
It certainly is nice being able to switch to one of a handful of stations with just one press, though. Why not have that?
[+] [-] fishywang|2 years ago|reply
Then physical buttons/controls for common things (volume, wiper, etc.), and a general knob for navigating things on the screen.
[+] [-] _ea1k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollyllama|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamincan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javier_e06|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta1243|2 years ago|reply
If the car didn't have car play I'd refuse to take it as it's clearly faulty. I can't remember the last time I had a rental car without those features.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ListeningPie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] metafunctor|2 years ago|reply
However, I would prefer to plan my navigation, browse settings, configure the car, and peruse statistics on a nice snappy capacitive display UI. Please do keep/build that.
[+] [-] sigmoid10|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2devnull|2 years ago|reply
My last car purchase it was not easy to find a newer vehicle without that junk. I see such things as signs of low quality. I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on anything connected to some cheap Chinese touch pad. It ruins the entire experience.
If I wanted navigation I’d use my phone. Any car I have to configure, I will loath deeply.
[+] [-] thworp|2 years ago|reply
> on a nice snappy capacitive display UI.
Heh, until very recently a lot of manufacturers' infotainment was comically unresponsive, VW being a standout there (along with the worst-in-class screens).
I wouldnt be opposed to have an option of touchscreen control (current BMWs have that), except that touchscreens are neccesarily placed so low that you have to take your eyes almost fully off the road.
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] seltzered_|2 years ago|reply
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38131504 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35851369
Feels more like PR to encourage improvements are coming.
[+] [-] twoodfin|2 years ago|reply
Two screens, one positioned and angled for touch, one for driver visibility. Physical controls for climate, volume, and accessing touchscreen functions & menus.
This doesn’t seem like an incredibly hard problem, but rather that designers (or the marketing folks) have been convinced customers are impressed by extremes. In the ‘90s, dozens of buttons on the steering wheel. Today, nothing but massive screens.
[+] [-] Podgajski|2 years ago|reply
Today’s car drive you, you don’t drive the car. I sat in a Tesla and felt I was in a future that I didn’t want to be in. Everything physical abstracted away into a smooth curve or a flat screen. we have let middlemen come between us in reality and we’re going to pay for it whether it’s in more expensive repairs or dislocation from nature.
[+] [-] 93po|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haspok|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jugjug|2 years ago|reply
> We do not have feature X" is never a valid problem statement. If you need proof of this you only need to look at a modern car which has a touch screen where no one said, "I need to slide my finger on some random piece of glass to a precise point to set my blower in my car while I am driving." No one has ever said that, right? But somebody did say, "We need touch screens because young people will never buy our cars." This is what happens when you are not talking about the problem.
[1]: https://youtu.be/c5QF2HjHLSE?si=M6apr6fG_YaIDOpj&t=1826
[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralmidani|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgoetzke|2 years ago|reply
Tesla also added more on-wheel capacitive buttons in their Model S refresh and got negative feedback, but they worked on it for the new Model 3 refresh and I only heard a much improved, basically physical button experience. Not to mention their non-existent UI lag on their screen.
So if customers only know laggy screens, and weird feeling buttons, maybe it is not always the right way forward to go backward.
[+] [-] adamjc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliebrkr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ho_schi|2 years ago|reply
Four years after Mazda. But the video still shows big touchscreens, useless themes and distractions of the driver. Why they mount office monitors on the cockpit instead of building them into the cockpit?
I count 9 buttons. No distinct knobs for volume or temperature. Again One button, one function. Not two functions, no long pressing, half pressing or whatever bad user interface ideas somebody can have. Donald A. Norman explained that well in The design of everyday things. And group that stuff logically.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] billpg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plagiarist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eimrine|2 years ago|reply