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Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

motorauthority.com

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Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#411

Post by amluto »

blattimwind wrote: post #194

It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching…

Real low-end cars don’t have a thermostat at all, so you’re constantly fiddling with the HVAC controls to maintain comfort. It’s the mid-range cars that get it right :)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#412

Post by CrazyStat »

amluto wrote: post #409
BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're trying to support his point or refute it, but those scroll wheels are a great example of physical controls done right.

The original Model S scroll wheels are not. They regularly fail to correctly count the number of ticks. Worse, you spend quite a bit of time staring at the dash computer trying to get them into the correct mode. My first car had dedicated buttons, which was the correct design.

The fact that they don't accurately track the number of clicks is annoying, but I spend zero time staring at the dash to get them in the correct mode. My left is set to volume and the right set to AC temp and in the past year I've never felt the need to change that.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#413

Post by rco8786 »

CelestialTeapot wrote: post #326
rco8786 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly…

"Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. " And Teslas ALMOST never kill their driver or innocent bystanders when the driver is negligently ignoring -- or bored and not paying attention to -- the road. There have been low speed accidents where the operator is tasked with taking ov…

I wasn't commenting on the current state of self-driving car's safety...we can debate that endlessly so I won't. But the direction we're currently heading in is pretty darn clear.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#414

Post by LeifCarrotson »

zaroth wrote: post #333
vanderZwan wrote: post #316

Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011: > There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years. > Now, take out your favori…

And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere. Rant is the right way to describe this. Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember…

I remember the first time I used a map on a capacitive screen (iPod Touch 1st gen) and yes, it was pretty special. But I also remember many hours around that era (and many following, adding more often) working with 3D models by touching and middle-mouse-dragging around. Then I got a 3D Connection SpaceMouse 6-axis joystick, which is hugely superior to the smoothest touchscreen.

Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and modern games produce astonishing graphics and realism that feel really immediate; my eyes tell me I'm in the plane, and when I'm coming in too low and too fast I want to will the plane upwards. But I can't feel it. Pulling the stick back on my ancient force-feedback joystick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (wow, the graphics on that feel dated now) gave a tangible control surface load. The buzz of 'haptic feedback' just isn't the same.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#415

Post by mstade »

navigatesol wrote: post #405
mstade wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assessment is spot on. CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. The only car interfaces I like that aren't CarPlay are all buttons and dials, i.e. pre smart phone era cars, and even then only a handful really made sense to me.

> CarPlay is the best all screen car interface I've used, and these days it's all I ever use if it's available in the car I'm driving. Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them? Maybe that's why some people are such advocates for the Apple/Android interfaces: when you're driving different cars regularly it's helpful to have a consistent interface. Meanwhile, I have never had any problem "getting used to" the…

> Curious, do you own a car, or are you renting them?

I rent. Living centrally in a major city owning a car is more trouble than it's worth I find.

Consistency is definitely one of the prime reasons I prefer CarPlay. I feel CarPlay is really dumb, and that's a good thing. There aren't really that many things I want from my car interface, beyond temperature and music control, and navigation. Of those only the latter two would be controlled in CarPlay, and it works really well – better than any other interface I've used. It doesn't try to be fancy, have a bunch of useless animations or weird interaction. There's also no dragging anywhere, or at least not that I've seen – only simple pointing. Trying to drag a slider to change temperature in one of the newer Volvos is an absolute pain.

If I spent more than a week or two with the car, maybe I'd care to learn more about its interface, but I almost never do. So you're absolutely spot on with your reflection, at least in my case – consistency is key.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#416

Post by rco8786 »

sumedh wrote: post #331
rco8786 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly…

> just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B. just another device which can kill you and others in a split second if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

yes. what's your point

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#417

Post by galangalalgol »

SargeZT wrote: post #285
mc32 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can make most things non responsive while the car is in motion. This would inconvenience the shotgun passenger but typically the driver calls the shots on the radio (in-car entertainment system) anyhow.

Unless a law is passed restricting manufacturers from allowing responsive interfaces while driving then any disabling of them will be a significant market disadvantage. No sane car company would do it.

At least ford and Toyota already do to some extent.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#418

Post by sangnoir »

kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56
sametmax wrote: post #10

Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster. That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.

> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look…

> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time)

Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose.

Curiously, most of the people who are defending touchscreens in this thread are not addressing the 2 safety issues brought up - inadvertent torque applied by drivers and inattention to the road ahead.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#419

Post by rco8786 »

bumby wrote: post #360
jodrellblank wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people vastly prefer touch screens Do they? A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally. I still hate t…

If people really do vastly prefer touch screens, I would expect to see different control mechanisms moving in this direction (steering, shifting, etc.) The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.

Come on. My iPhone still has some tactile mechanisms also. But 99% of my interactions with it are via touch screen. That's what you're describing.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#420

Post by bdickason »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #168
romwell wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago. Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music. The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now. The sy…

The DX7 had one slider. If it had had knobs, it would have been much bigger and much more expensive. And it wouldn't have been much easier to program, because it used a novel form of sound generation which most people still find hopelessly unintuitive. A Germany company made a programming box for the DX7 with one-knob-per-feature. It was very expensive and sold very badly, even among professionals who could easily af…

Thanks for introducing me to the Microbrute!! Just watched a ton of videos and I like how simple the design is. Looks like it’s a great starter kit (in the video I watched, they recorded a simple piece then spent a bunch of time tweaking sounds to figure out what each one does).
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