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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

#391

Post by woozyolliew »

president wrote: post #224
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 always assumed companies were drawn to it not just because of the trendiness but because engineering and general development of these features are faster, cheaper, and easier to fix compared to dealing with physical parts (e.g. knobs, wiring).

Yeah, there’s probably an awful lot of truth to that. More software eating the world.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#392

Post by djhaskin987 »

I have a touch screen in my Nissan and it's almost useless when I'm driving down the road at 60 miles an hour and trying to navigate menus 8 layers deep to do something simple that used to be a button press on my old Honda.

Relatedly, the US Navy removed touchscreens from all vessels after a collision happened because someone couldn't navigate the interface in time. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#393

Post by beefalo »

aembleton wrote: post #153
koheripbal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jaguar/Land Rover have been starting to do this. They have knobs where the knob label is a tiny screen and they change function based on the context of the menu you are in.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#394

Post by taurath »

Thank goodness. I bought a Honda quite a few years ago and got the top trim, but insisted that they remove the navigation system as just using it as a radio was far worse because it was entirely touchscreen focused. This might keep on me on Honda's for a while.

Edit: Wait... they're just talking about climate controls here. They're not adding any dials. Apparently other carmakers are going just touchscreen for everything. I guess its just gotten worse over the last few years. Tesla can sort of get away with it. But goodness a huge part of the reason I liked a lot of luxury cars was they tended to do more dials instead of touchscreens.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#395

Post by barkingcat »

hnarn wrote: post #252
arcticfox wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP was making an appeal to authority, that avionics manufacturers know what they're doing and decided against touchscreens. So IMO it does strongly refute OP's argument. (That's not to say that OP is wrong, of course, just that their argument isn't really a valid one. My belief is that touch screens would suck for flying a plane, but I'm not a pilot.)

What I was trying to say was more that avionics are by nature risk averse, so if they're doing something it's probably worth understanding why. So it's not so much "it's safe because it's in an airplane", I was more going for "consider why this very safety-focused environment looks different". So sure, I might be in the wrong if what I said was interpreted as a simple appeal to authority, but I was trying to get a po…

It is very clear that the aviation industry is NOT risk averse. They are averse to losing money (via needing to spend money to redesign systems, recertify interfaces, re-train pilots, rebuy new equipment and simulators, all of those reduce risk but are capital intensive). But they are no longer risk averse. They might never have been risk averse at all - the roots of the aviation industry is exceedingly risk seeking in the first place (to fly is itself a risk seeking activity - and that's something understood by all pilots and all aviation and aerospace engineers on day 1 of wanting to fly)

You can say the civilian oversight groups that seek to regulate the industry are risk averse, but the companies that build the planes themselves, if they had their say, we'd be flying mach 3 upside down all day.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#396

Post by frosted-flakes »

eyegor wrote: post #331
huffmsa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now would be a good time, there are very few of us who use the engine disconnect pedal these days.

What is an "engine disconnect pedal"? You rewire the ignition or something?

The clutch pedal disconnects the engine from the transmission.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#397

Post by frosted-flakes »

mywittyname wrote: post #387
izacus wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There shouldn't be menus at all. Modal systems in general are hard to use while driving.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#398

Post by light_hue_1 »

hnarn wrote: post #221
chc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical driver systems (i.e. steering, signaling, acceleration and brakes) aren't controlled by touchscreen in any car I know of either, so if non-critical systems are beside the point, what is the criticism here? Or are you thinking of some particularly extreme cars that are even more reliant on touchscreen than the Model 3?

I was just trying to make an illustrative example of why I think static interfaces are safer and therefore better, at the end of the day it comes down to subjectivity for the part of a positive user experience, but when it comes to safety the trend is, to me, worrying. I also imagine that there are other reasons for both airliners and cars to replace buttons with touchscreens, namely that of cost instead of prioritiz…

If you believe that aviation not having touch screens means that cars should not either, then evidence to the opposite should change your mind. The A350 and 777X both have touch screens now.

It's not just Boeing, who you accused of being backwards who are doing this, Airbus is too, along with every other manufacturer. Garmin and BendixKing now offer touch screens and it's clearly the future of GA as well not just commercial aviation.

Everyone believes that this will increase safety. That showing only the relevant information in a tunable and interactive way will decrease distractions and help focus on what matters.

The idea that this is to save money is totally absurd! A 777X is $350 million dollars. Any accident would cost an astronomical amount compared to the cost of switches. Even leaving that aside. The touchscreens are actually far more expensive than the old instruments.

This is just a way for Honda to cover up the fact that they can't write software, can't design a reasonable UX, don't want to spend money on it, and want to live as if it's 1999 forever.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#399

Post by yason »

PaulHoule wrote: post #332
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.

A plane isn't a good analogy for a car. Airplanes have keypads that control complex functions on a screen, going from that kind of keypad to a touchscreen is logical. In the case of cars, a touchpad is overkill for controlling the cabin temperature, stereo volume, etc.

I wonder about the temperature settings. I have manual dials but I basically set them to 21C for winter and 19C for summer. Other than that, I don't readily touch the hvac panel at all: I could certainly do those rare adjustments over a touchscreen.

I can imagine people would need to tune a radio panel more often, so at least basic functionality would be good to have as physical inputs. But even then basic radio functions are usually accessible via steering wheel buttons.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#400

Post by GuiA »

squarefoot wrote: post #346
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.

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 leav…

There are plenty of individual use cases where touch screens make sense. The interactive map as it is enabled by the multitouch screen, with arbitrary rescale and repositioning and display of arbitrary layers of data, all handled at the speed of thought, is something unmatched by any other object or interface, for one example amongst many.
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