51–60 of 770 posts
What if--and stay with me for a moment--what if it's good for different manufacturers to have different approaches to the problem, giving people the option to choose Honda for buttons or Tesla for touchscreens? What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it's good that there's both options available?
Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.
Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better? Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.
No, I will not be talking to my car.
Knobs and buttons with tactile feedback were great and should be used for major functionality.
My favorite fan controller of all time was a fan pull knob on a FJ40, which had physical clicks for each fan setting as you pulled it out:
https://forum.ih8mud.com/attachments/p13-jpg.509941/
It was intuitive and deeply satisfying.
Thank you, Honda! Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea (unless the vehicle is stationary, and even then...)
> Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea Touch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls. The only time they're an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.
It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner.
Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls. Really, you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
But yes, all controls that a driver would want to use while the vehicle is in motion should be controllable with hardware controls that can be located and operated tactilely.
I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at han…
Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development. It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.
Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly interesting to learn about: https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...
Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.
Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.
Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better? Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.
Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.
Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better? Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.