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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

#381

Post by core-questions »

izacus wrote: post #289
jetrink wrote: post #15

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…

They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer. It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen base…

Problem of course is that the interior of a Tesla has the aesthetic sense of a consumer electronics manufacturer, not of a precision automobile. It looks like a big fuckin' iPad stuck to the dashboard, almost aftermarket. It's tacky, even if the interface on the screen is better than most.

Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#382

Post by BrandonMarc »

woozyolliew wrote: post #23

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said). Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

... I see your cargo cult, and I raise you Elon Musk and Tesla with gargantic touch screens in their cars. Aesthetically neat; realistically trouble.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#383

Post by catalogia »

kube-system wrote: post #164
catalogia wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all.…

> Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all. How is this an improvement over having it on a touch screen?

I thought that was obvious; because then you can eliminate the touchscreen entirely. Cars are better without them.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#384

Post by FillardMillmore »

I believe Mazda made this decision not too long ago.

I hope this is a sign of things to come for the automobile industry.

Essentially, why I don't like touchscreens in automobile media interfaces:

-no tactile response

-more distracting due to the increased dexterity required to get where you need and the greater necessity to focus your eyes

-less intuitive than button/wheel controls (in my experience)

-uglier interfaces (again, in my experience)

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#385

Post by ferongr »

ghaff wrote: post #354
ferongr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geotagging on my X-T3 with the Camera remote Android app is very reliable to be honest. And you don't have to query the phone at the same rate as you're taking pictures, it's perfectly sane to assume the same location for 5-10 seconds during a burst.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure I'm convinced that, today, you're not just better off putting a GPS receiver in the camera. GPS is a bit hard on battery life but with the bigger batteries in these cameras, I'm not sure that's much of an issue. (And of course you can turn it off.)

Depends. MILCs are generally pretty hard on battery and keeping a constant GPS lock would exacerbate their generally poor "active standby" (camera turned on with the viewfinder or LCD active) battery life. On the other hand, my smartphone, using both GPS and augmented network location services can instead very quickly acquire a lock when needed with minimal battery usage only when needed. And it also has a way larger battery, and the system is generally more optimized.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#386

Post by woozyolliew »

closeparen wrote: post #125
woozyolliew wrote: post #23

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said). Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

How do you feel about the MMI scroll wheel? I don’t feel safe using that either; it still requires eyes on the screen to see what you’re selecting. Even my passengers, who can give it their full attention, are routinely stymied by the process of pairing their phones for Bluetooth audio playback. At least I can get the volume and temperature knobs by feel.

I mean, it certainly isn’t perfect at all. It has the down side that you are invited to stare at the screen. But if I’m disciplined, I can get away with a click-glance approach to adjusting things, which is still better than the multi-second hover I had to do with the touchscreen.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#387

Post by mywittyname »

izacus wrote: post #289
jetrink wrote: post #15

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…

They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer. It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen base…

What kills me is when "legacy" automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly. It's especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#388

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

In an odd way that Douglas Adams predicted this weird evolution of controls making fun of how manual controls were eventually replaced by controls that forced a pilot to sit perfectly still so as not to change a radio station.

I applaud Honda. Touch screen is a distraction in my car.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#389

Post by woozyolliew »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #382
woozyolliew wrote: post #23

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said). Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

... I see your cargo cult, and I raise you Elon Musk and Tesla with gargantic touch screens in their cars. Aesthetically neat; realistically trouble.

Never owned a Tesla, but always worried about this when I’ve been inside one.

Elon says they drive themselves now though, so there’s that ;)

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#390

Post by BrandonMarc »

solatic wrote: post #111

Last year I bought a motorcycle (Honda CB300R) and it was a revelation. No touch screens. No stereo. No GPS. No Bluetooth. No automatic transmission. No cupholders. Basically no "modern car features". And it's a much, much better road experience than any car I've ever been able to afford to drive. Get rid of all the distractions at a price point under $30k with an engine that doesn't feel sluggish and maybe I'll cons…

You'd probably be better off with a snowmobile there, too
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