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For example, I hate it when I can't pan/scroll through the map on the car screen for lack of touch screen. But I also hate it when I have to use touch buttons to change the music that's playing.
I think what Tesla did was cost cutting by putting everything in one big screen - no need to think about hardware knobs and buttons - have the screen UI and update it remotely if it is not intuitive.
Build your console with a big hole in the middle. Mount the buttons to the insert, figure out your UI and adjust the button placement, so really most of the last minute design is producing a new mounting bracket for the electronics and physical controls.
The biggest problem I see there is that you are very limited in button placement without resizing the panel. But if you pick a clever panel size to console hole ratio you could buy yourself some flexibility. For example, an almost square panel could allow you to rotate it and move some buttons from vertical to horizontal.
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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.
And customers apparently like them, when deciding what to buy.
The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.
When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.
You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.
You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.
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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.
I'd like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen. That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.
I will defend the screen in the Tesla 3, the simple fact is that you really never have to use on your typical drive and yes muscle memory works for simple UIs like what the Tesla employs. Compared to 40+ buttons in my previous Volt AND a screen. Many cars have that many or more buttons and this is easier? Where screen's become distracting is when the UI is shit, having more than one or two clicks to do anything, and…
Touchscreens that are huge are somewhat less of an issue because tap targets are much bigger. But most non-luxury vehicles come with 7 or 8 inch screens, so tap targets are small/clustered. Layer on that the fact that many screens aren't capacitive (and instead require a certain amount of pressure from your finger/fingernail), and things get even more annoying/dangerous.
Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…
I mean, the other point of a dynamic interface is that you can now have more controls than would fit on a static interface. Touchscreen fit-to-purpose controls might suck more than hardware fit-to-purpose controls, but either option is better than a single set of generic controls that control multiple systems that "should" have different control paradigms, translating to the generic controls being a compromised bad fit for any use-case.
E.g. a hardware English-language keyboard is probably better than a touchscreen English-language keyboard (though people with modern Blackberries might dispute this); but both are better than entering English text through T9 on a dial pad. And the touchscreen has the benefit of allowing you to have more keyboards (for e.g. the multiple native languages you type that use different alphabets), which wouldn't even fit on the phone as hardware keyboards.
I bring this up, because eventually you run out of space to stuff additional controls. As airplanes become ever-more advanced, their cockpits will approach that point. At that point, dynamic affordances may be necessary, just so you can have some kind of "pagination" allowing you to squeeze more controls in. (Hopefully it'd just be for the non-time-critical switches to flip.)
There is a trend to assume new technology will always replace old technology. During the Vietnam war the F4 ditched its cannons for the sidewinder air to air missile. The sidewinder is fire and forget for the most part and somewhat of a no brainer whereas cannons require more skill and training in dogfighting. It also gave the US a MAJOR advantage (in theory) vs the MiG. The problem is that the Vietnamese picked up o…
I don't think there's been an air to air gun kill in four decades, maybe five (US at least). Essentially all air to air combat is with missiles, to the point two of the three JSF variants don't even have a built in cannon and will likely almost never fly with the gun pods they are building for them.
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The problem is not "having touch interfaces", the problem is "having touch interfaces for critical systems ".
I can assure you that PFD (primary flight display) interfaces are very much safety-critical. And they will be touch interfaces.
[1]: https://www.boeing.com/777x/reveal/touchscreens-come-to-777x...
Otherwise - yes, 100%, physical buttons and knobs are far superior. Especially for making adjustments without looking.
Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…
I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.