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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

#791

Post by tom_ »

lostjohnny wrote: post #395
krab wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural. The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen. If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen eith…

> One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural. True. Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.

I am 99% sure my Clio had it attached to the steering column, so the controls were always in the same place regardless of the steering wheel angle.

I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.

(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#792

Post by jdietrich »

JangoSteve wrote: post #633
smackay wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.

None of this is untrue with touchscreens. They also have wires and connectors and must be certified.

Have you ever seen behind the dashboard of a modern car? It's a monstrous tangle of wiring, with inch-thick cabling bundles and dozens or hundreds of connectors. A touchscreen-centric interface like the Tesla Model 3 could easily save several kilos of cables and connectors. There's a huge amount of labour involved in installing all that wiring and a huge number of opportunities for failure.

I support Mazda's efforts here, but there are compelling commercial and engineering reasons to go in the other direction.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#793

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

raydev wrote: post #490
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…

Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls: I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk. I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinc…

I don't get why we have buttons for climate. It's asinine.

Are you hot? Go ahead and press the down arrow 20 times to go from 80 to 60. Maybe it's not so bad if you switch your car to Celsius.

Or, with 50-year-old tech, turn a knob a quarter turn or a slider by 4 inches.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#795

Post by intopieces »

In general I am against this move. Buttons can only do one or two things, and you have to learn it. Touch screens can do infinite things, and can display unique indicators based on state. Still, if the choice is between and infotainment system that won’t get updates or a just buttons, give me a spot for my phone on the dash and call it a day.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#796

Post by bonestamp2 »

laughinghan wrote: post #764
JangoSteve wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have 2. One for power and one for data. I don't think I've ever seen a touch screen with only two wires. For one thing, even power requires two wires, not one. Data for a touch screen typically requires more than one wire as well, especially considering there are two completely distinct types of data a touchscreen must transmit, those being display output and touch input. Most touch screens I'm aware of have w…

Most touch screens I'm aware of have wire connections more like this [...] That link is to a toy touchscreen. Are we counting every strand of metal as its own wire now? I think the power and the data cables are each bundles of lots of such strands, and no car manufacturers worry about the individual strands because each cable plugs into the circuit board as a cohesive unit, like: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detai…

I do know about this stuff (currently work for one OEM and have worked for 2 others) and you're exactly right.

Something that hasn't even been mentioned is all the meetings, documentation, coordination between people that work on the components that have to interface with each other. That labor is significantly reduced when you offload most of that to the touch screen because some of that interface can now be done by the same person without any meetings. That's not just cost savings, it's also time savings, which is part of why Tesla was able to bring the model 3 to market so fast (fast at least in the car world).

That said, I much prefer tactile controls. I recently moved from a BMW to a Volvo had the BMW had physical controls for most common functions while the Volvo only has a handful of buttons and one knob for volume. It's a pretty good balance, but I do miss a few buttons and more could be done on the touchscreen to ease that longing (such as customizable shortcuts).

Cadillac is starting to go back to more tactile controls because they've learned how terrible it is without any (my wife has a CTS so I completely understand why they're doing it -- it is awful). I hope Audi changes course too.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#798

Post by kenhwang »

twblalock wrote: post #768

Mazdas still have screens. They have a knob and a few buttons between the seats to control the screen. This change doesn't do much for safety or usability. The knobs are just as distracting as using a touch screen -- you have to look at the screen to see what is being selected, and you have to take a hand off the wheel to use the knob. In many cases it takes several knob movements and button presses to get to somethi…

Arguably, if you can't safely operate a vehicle one-handed for your other hand to use the knob, you definitely shouldn't be using a touchscreen.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#799

Post by pbreit »

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. >…

Hopefully you were able to grasp the need for touch screens on mobile devices. Same for cars.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#800

Post by ClassyJacket »

haberman wrote: post #72

I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."

"You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar."

Less than 1% of my car trips would have ever been in a calendar...

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