The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens

Agreee. Touch screens on cars are infuriating. You must look away to touch them and any movement might mean you accidentally touch other on sceeen buttons.

A good mix of both touchscreens and physical mobs and buttons seems preferable. Similar to how the Apple Watch is designed.

Seems like all the car manufactures are failing to learn all the lessons that Google and Apple have learned about touch screens and voice interfaces.

What's worse is whatever your phone of choice is, it's likely to know a HUGE amount more about your. Your contact list, what you searched on recently, tickets you bought, public transit research, etc. So instead of say "Navigate to Joe Random" you end up hunting and pecking at a terrible on screen keyboard with a terrible touch interface that doesn't even allow multitouch or swipes. God forbid you change your mind underway.

Distractions can cause lives, and car manufacturers are doing worse than Apple/Google. The easiest fix seems like it would be mandate that car manufacturers allows users to choose their navigation system.

More info on the distraction claims at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aaa-apple-and-googl...

I am learning to fly and know a fair few in aviation, most pilots actually detest touchscreen and much prefer physical controls that are tactile and gives hard-realtime feedback.

If you have payed attention to the controls in a cockpit, you will see that all the switches, knobs, and levers have different sizes, shapes, texture, and tilt. That is not accidental. It helps with muscle memory and when you have to alter many many different parameters in a short span of time, knowing where to look for and getting "instant" and tactile feedback is important, that is hardly possible with touchscreen interfaces as I know them.

On my old car I could both read and write any value to the car without looking at the controls. That's important -- if I was feeling cold, but the temperature was set to where I wanted it, I'd turn on the seat warmer, as I knew I'd need to feel warmer only temporarily. Now I have to look at the controls all the damn time. One important thing was that all of the controls were asymmetric -- the buttons were all different sizes and positions, which looked awful if you were looking at it but YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING AT IT. It made it really easy to just reach out a hand and know where on the surface you were.

There's a reason that many professionals who use computers for repetitive high-skill tasks (video editing, music production) have custom input hardware for it.