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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

#651

Post by m52go »

filoleg wrote: post #645

This whole thing honestly reminds of the pushback against touch-screen only smartphones, along with the infamous "mixing the input and output on the same surface" quote (I cannot recall the exact quote, but my bastardized version provides a pretty good gist of it). People will scream, people will kick, but it will eventually happen. sidenote: I was initially in the "bring the keyboards on smartphones back" camp as we…

They are completely different situations. People are intently focused on their smartphones, whereas they're distracted when using car controls.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#652

Post by filoleg »

justinpombrio wrote: post #634
bitwalker wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that you are neither reading or writing them, they are read _to_ you, and you dictate messages if you feel the need to reply while driving, but both can be done with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suppose it is up for debate whether just the act of listening or speaking is distracting enough to be considered a bad thing.

It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous. The NHTSA says: "The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free." Though it doesn't link…

>It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous.

Just like talking to other people in the car or doing anything else other than driving. I know that I will take a driver getting their messages read out to them over a driver who takes their eyes off the road and glances at the phone. Good is the enemy of the perfect, and I would rather take an attainable good over an unattainable perfect.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#653

Post by _wk3u »

ubermonkey wrote: post #368
marapuru wrote: post #47

Praise to Mazda for making this decision. As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch. >…

>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject. After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay. >It basically means they ha…

> Correct. They have given up, and it's good that they have, because they've all proven they absolutely suck at it.

I started my career working on Ford Sync. I remember going to an exec fireside-chat type of thing where someone stood up and said "the worst mistake of my career was outsourcing vehicle interiors in the 70s/80s." This was to a group of engineers who were almost entirely outsourcing all of Ford Sync development to an offshore team. They didn't see the irony.

When I bought a car I went out of my way to find a way to avoid having Sync on it. I did succeed, but the best I could do was bug a separate cigarette outlet usb adapter so I could use it instead of the built-in USB port in the car. Why? Because plugging it into the car would force me to inherit all of the bugs in the assumptions built into Sync.

I left Ford with the impression that vehicle OEMs are the Nokias of the auto-world. I wouldn't bet on them to make a good consumer electornics end user experience.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#654

Post by [deleted] »

rco8786 wrote: post #413
CelestialTeapot wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

[deleted]

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#655

Post by bestouff »

celticmusic wrote: post #629
tetrep wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Car conversations are a serious issue with respect to distracted driving. I personally can't handle thinking about driving safely and thinking about a conversation. Humans are famously bad at multi-tasking and I don't see how being in a car gives us magical powers. I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being dru…

If I'm speaking with someone in the car and I detect a potentially dangerous situation, I immediately stop talking to focus. It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.

In fact the passenger will also detect the potentially dangerous situation and stop taking focus from you. The person in the phone will not, and may continue to distract you involuntarily.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#656

Post by jamexcb »

lloeki wrote: post #217
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…

My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress ba…

I have one! I love the interior desing and the rpm is like floating! And the AC control is just stupid easy because the auto works very well not like on a BMW were you need to set the speed of fan for auto?!? If is auto whay i need to do anything? That's why Civic was "red dot: best of the best".

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#657

Post by giobox »

TheGRS wrote: post #610
pwg wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation. The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs. A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and button…

Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.

I imagine they are that expensive. Even low volume car manufacturers often "borrow" switchgear from mainstream brands to avoid the cost of making custom switches. This is why any reader fortunate enough to afford a modern Aston Martin will find the cabin filled with a lot of Mercedes switchgear, as one example. Go back farther than that and Aston were owned by Ford, which is why mid-2000s Astons are filled with very cheap feeling physical Ford controls from this era. Etc, etc. Parts sharing is critical to affordable production.

Touch screens are staggeringly cheap now, as anyone with a Raspberry Pi and too much free time can attest, and fits virtually any car, as opposed to switch gear design which often requires the rest of the dash to fit with the design of the button or knob too. A screen mounting location is usually just a rectangular hole in a dash.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#658

Post by skibbityboop »

magduf wrote: post #611
galangalalgol wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't suggesting they ditch android auto, but literally everyone but Mazda and Toyota have carplay as an option. Even Kia and Hyundai. Chevy,GMC,ford,Dodge, Chrysler,jeep,Fiat,Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi. All have carplay. Mazda is going simple, which I respect. I drive a Miata pre touchscreen and I use a $50 Android phone. But to have a touchscreen an not have android auto and carplay? Why?

Current Mazdas have CarPlay and Android Auto.

Current Subaru models also have both included. Hopefully that's the norm, rather than a manufacturer choosing only CarPlay or only Android Auto.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#659

Post by ufmace »

Reedx wrote: post #644
marapuru wrote: post #47

Praise to Mazda for making this decision. As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch. >…

Agree with this for now, but what about when we're no longer driving the car? When that happens a touchscreen and the ability to play games/etc makes a lot of sense. I think what Tesla and others are doing is designing and preparing for the future. Although not ideal right now, they'll be far ahead of Mazda when we transition to self-driving cars.

In order to do that, we're also going to need tens of thousands of dollars worth of additional hardware - high-end weatherproof sensors, and full-range actuators for all controls with enough authority to use all of the power the car has. Not to mention whatever pile of computers and software is needed. Changing out the UI so you can play games a little better seems like a sidenote beside that.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#660

Post by toyg »

potta_coffee wrote: post #528
toyg wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steering wheel is where most of this stuff should be all the time. The second you force me to reposition my hand, security levels drop off a cliff, since you get involuntary movement on the other side (as proven by this post) and likely take your eyes off the road, which is bad even for a split second. I know this for a fact, having crashed a car on a motorway as I was turning down the fan (controlled by an analo…

Have you ever driven a stick shift?

I'm European, I didn't even know automatic transmission existed before I was 30 :)

The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.

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