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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

#491

Post by tills13 »

kogus wrote: post #489

The only feedback I've seen has echoed my own sentiment: "Good". What is the opposing point of view? Is there anyone out there who is willing to defend touch-screen interfaces in vehicles? What's the advantage to the driver? Is it even that much cheaper to the manufacturer? Surely plastic knobs are not a big hit to the bottom line of car makers.

Repairability and features as software instead of hardware. For example, Tesla was able to enable Spotify in all its cars with an OTA update. Hell, you can enable rear heated seats in the Model 3 SR+ via an OTA.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#492

Post by spaceandshit »

stevehawk wrote: post #408
TheKarateKid wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is not with the technology - it's from the people implementing it. Instead of leaving the design and software to tech companies, we have car companies trying to do it on their own. The result is terribly designed software that looks like it's from 2000.

The arrogance of that statement is amazing. I recently bought an iPad for the first time in 5+(?) years.. before multi touch and pressure sensitive screens. I have no f'n clue what I'm doing anymore. I accidentally had Safari running two windows side by side with no idea how to stop that. I'm still not sure what I did to make it go back to one window.. My friends and I decided to try out a (new to us) game which requ…

Unfortunately, that kind of arrogance is common on this forum.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#493

Post by sarah180 »

More accurately, they're putting back dials for temperature control in one of the only cars the make that doesn't already use dials. They're not getting rid of touch screens, nor are they pushing against the industry: they're aligning temperature controls in one of their cars with their other cars and much of the rest of the industry.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#494

Post by dpedu »

tills13 wrote: post #491
kogus wrote: post #489

The only feedback I've seen has echoed my own sentiment: "Good". What is the opposing point of view? Is there anyone out there who is willing to defend touch-screen interfaces in vehicles? What's the advantage to the driver? Is it even that much cheaper to the manufacturer? Surely plastic knobs are not a big hit to the bottom line of car makers.

Repairability and features as software instead of hardware. For example, Tesla was able to enable Spotify in all its cars with an OTA update. Hell, you can enable rear heated seats in the Model 3 SR+ via an OTA.

Tesla also takes away features via OTA updates. It's a double-edged sword.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#495

Post by JackRabbitSlim »

JensRex wrote: post #442
robocat wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple physical knobs and buttons add multiple points of failure: moving parts fail and even worse, they often fail intermittently. We all have that experience. Even optical encoders fail (I’ve had one fail on an engine, and obviously consumer mice, or the connectors fail). A modern touch screen is superbly reliable because it has no moving parts, and it can be tested. The (consumer grade) iPad touchscreen is very…

A mechanical switch is easy and cheap to fix or replace. A touch screen is the opposite. It cannot be repaired, only replaced. A switch can usually be cleaned easily, to restore its function. And proper quality switches can be actuated millions of times before failure.

Point of fact; A touch interface digitizer and the LCD screen are two separate components just often glued and sold as a single unit. Replacing a digitizer, or a screen should be no more difficult than swapping out an analog component with a proper modular physical layout and connectors.

A cheap phone or tablet hardly represent best of breed for the technology as a whole.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#497

Post by bonestamp2 »

avs733 wrote: post #460
bonestamp2 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, Volvo has gone to a unified interface for their whole lineup. The standard stuff can be controlled with a few knobs and buttons and all the minor differences between models and trim levels are controlled on screen. I'm sure it saves them a ton since the part count would be very low now. They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option,…

I would think that would be where good context aware software would come into play. Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.

> Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode?

For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.

It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#498

Post by tropdrop »

samizdis wrote: post #8

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.

Thinking of voice-activation in a car in lieu of analog manual controls misses the point - perhaps you weren't advocating for it as a replacement, but the article above seems to.

There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:

1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car's voice recognition grammar/syntax/parsing/etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)

2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)

3. Female voices [1]

4. AAVE voices [2]

5. Immigrant voices [1]

Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we're still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it's difficult to calibrate higher pitched "noise" out and keep higher pitched voices in when they're at a similar range.

Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper's onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.

All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2019/05/voice-recognition-still-has-signific... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#499

Post by brozaman »

masklinn wrote: post #338
samizdis wrote: post #8

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.

> I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective. They all suck and they’re literally not workable for rentals. Nobody will waste an hour configuring a rental car’s VA on departure.

The previous BMW one is pretty good and requires 0 configuration, at least in Spanish. I haven't tried the new one and my accent is very clear though.

It has few functions like call X or go to Y but in my experience, it doesn't do that many things but makes them very well.

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