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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#341

Post by diydsp »

daotoad wrote: post #257
jasondclinton wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is off-topic: the article is about physical buttons for non-safety-critical systems. E.g. the article explicitly mentions climate control.

You can still die if the driver spends too long messing with air conditioner settings instead of focusing on the road. CarPlay and Android Auto make this problem worse, IMO. Now you have app publishers writing arbitrarily complex UIs for cars. Spotify is a bitch to use while driving and because of Apple's reluctance to enable Siri support for third party apps, it's not very controllable by voice.

yup, just rented a cool modern car and was distraught at how much menu-diving there was. and even if you memorize it, the lag was still huge vs. real-time controls!

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#342

Post by nateburke »

This is fantastic news. Reminds me of this GREAT READ: https://www.amazon.com/Hand-Shapes-Brain-Language-Culture/dp...

I would not be surprised if this decision resulted in even greater brand loyalty, e.g. drivers becoming attached to the "feel" of a Honda.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#344

Post by [deleted] »

hnarn wrote: post #138

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…

[deleted]

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#346

Post by squarefoot »

CivBase wrote: post #162
hnarn wrote: post #138

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.

Touch screens add multiple points of failure to a device that, if properly built, would last decades. A single glitch in a software driving a screen could render useless all touch inputs displayed on it, information loss aside. I'm all for mechanical switches everywhere. As for potentiometers, sliders etc, we already have optical and mechanical encoders that hardly fail, or if/when they do, it happens gracefully leaving enough time for replacement. To me, the reason for touch screens is either cost or aesthetics, or both.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#347

Post by dirtyid »

xt00 wrote: post #336
CivBase wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sad but real reason a ton of this is happening is one very big word that is typically not present in things like car / airplane design: flexibility... flexibility to change the user controls, flexibility to fix problems, flexibility to let the SW team work up until the last minute to get stuff working, and the second part that goes with this is cost. Touchscreens mean increased flexibility for the design and bett…

Planes have multiple screens which provides more redundancy vs broke physical switches.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#348

Post by wil421 »

I like the UConnect system in my ‘19 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It has a mix of touch features and dials/buttons. Some features you can control with both touch and dials/buttons. Front seat warmers and coolers do no have physical buttons and I dislike it a lot.

Physical and touch controls should complement each other. Too much touch is bad and too many buttons are bad. I remember looking at Acura’s with to many buttons a few years ago.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#349

Post by colechristensen »

vwcx wrote: post #268
est31 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In airplanes touchscreens are less of an issue than in cars. In cars you have to have a hand on the wheel 99% of the time, and your gaze on the road. You can't afford interaction with a complicated non-haptic touch screen menu. In airplanes it's different. Here, outside of takeoff and landing, it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds while interacting with it with a hand.

Not necessarily. There are many moments during the operation of an aircraft where full attention is paramount. Yes, you see a pilot leaving the cockpit to use the lavatory while the co-pilot is monitoring the autopilot, but the margins are just as small as operating a motor vehicle.

Modern airliners are just short of autonomous. Even if they aren't, unless you are landing or on initial ascent, you are generally minutes away from catastrophic outcomes regardless of your control inputs. In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.

A car is very often fractions of a second away from a serious accident.

A plane at cruise altitude is rarely less than minutes away (unless, in some planes, you are actively trying to crash the plane/make the wings fall off)

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