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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

#531

Post by robocat »

takeda wrote: post #352
hobs wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still loved all my physical buttons which made input a breeze and didnt require constantly correcting my dang text, in a phone context, nah, he's still wrong; maybe a hybrid is even better, but amorphous movement and inferring intent is not a great user experience as things get more complex.

Agree, now it is very difficult to find a phone that has physical keyboard, sdcard, phone jack and is current. I really hate those trends.

Instead you get a phone that can get wet, that the charging port doesn’t break after a year, and that has enough memory to not need to use an sdcard (I bought a good brand sdcard from a reliable retailer, and it fucked out in the phone: I would never make that mistake again).

I love equipment I can hack and fix myself, but I love reliable equipment more.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#533

Post by aloukissas »

Until voice control (or fully autonomous vehicles) is 100% awesome, nothing beats tactile, physical controls. If designed right, you never have to leave your eyes from the road (good luck doing that with a Tesla, for example) and you know 100% what you're controlling.

What also nobody discusses (except for maybe Doug DeMuro): digital screens and controls age POORLY. Any car that's 10-ish years old with tons of tech looks ancient, where an even older one with mostly-analog controls can still look sharp. This obviously mostly matters for high-end cars.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#534

Post by chiefalchemist »

My parents have a Subaru with a touch screen for the radio, and I guess some apps.

For the radio, it's crap. For anything else, why would I want something built into the dashboard that'll cost 10x what it's worth to repair?

I don't understand what's so appealing about an in-dash touch screen.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#535

Post by im3w1l »

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…

User controls should never change. It leads to people getting confused and making mistakes.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#536

Post by chiefalchemist »

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.

So in due time we can be almost certain to hear about a crash due to a bad touch or a wonky screen.

New isn't always better.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#537

Post by mamon »

est31 wrote: post #262
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.

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 to mention that airplaines usually have TWO pilots onboard, so one can use touch screens while the other watches the sky ahead. Cars, on the other hand, have just one person in driver's seat.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#538

Post by adrianmonk »

> The new Audi A3’s electronics boss Melanie Limmer told Autocar recently its decision to remove some physical buttons was made as “more and more people are getting into touch functions with smartphones”

That is totally the wrong lesson to take from the popularity of touchscreens on smartphones.

Hardware buttons were eliminated from smartphones for one reason: the devices are small and screen real estate is critically important. So the screens need to take up 100% of the usable area of the front of the device, leaving no room for buttons. (The first iPhone proved how game-changing it was to be able to any web site.)

It's not because touching the screen is better than pressing a button. It's because eliminating buttons is an acceptable sacrifice for something even more important.

But in a car, of course, you don't have these constraints on size, so the reasoning doesn't translate from one type of device to another.

It's the equivalent of saying, hey, we noticed that having only one burner is overwhelmingly popular on camping stoves, and campers really seem to prefer it that way, so for all our new models of kitchen ranges, we are going to just have one burner too.

Of course, I am assuming it even is a sincere belief. It's also possible they have some other reason (maybe cheaper?) and this is just a way of justifying the choice.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#539

Post by kenhwang »

woobar wrote: post #528
kenhwang wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of sales volume in the US, you are correct: Mazda is not selling more cars. If you look at their financial reporting, they're making more money from car sales. Looks like ~60% more. Anyone with a lick of business sense would happily trade -10% sales volume for +60% profit from higher margins. They didn't price themselves out, they just decided to not play the loss-leader volume game Ford/Honda/Toyota is play…

Looks like ~60% loss to me. (From $1.1B net in 2015 to $572M net in 2019) https://money.cnn.com/quote/financials/financials.html?symb=... EDIT: $1.1B in 2016. In 2015 net income was $1.45B :-(

From what I can tell from the investor docs, the overall loss was from exchange rates and tariffs from losing access to sharing Ford's factories and costs and the high capex to building a replacement factory and generally transitioning to a fully independent automaker.

Every shareholder report in the last couple years stated that their premium offerings are doing better than they expected and they're making more money than they expected given the capex.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#540

Post by travisgriggs »

im3w1l wrote: post #530
vel0city wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. A bug which would prevent inputs from working right on a touchscreen could also happen on reading inputs on other systems. Not that I'm arguing for touchscreen controls, just that these days having a physical knob does not mean you're directly manipulat…

> In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. Even so, a program for processing a switch or dial can be really short and simple. You can print it out on a sheet and check and double check every line of code for to make sure it's correct and all possibilities are accounted for. A program handling…

You've done a lot of programming for hardware switches and such then?

I do some. And the last device we built, we still fight with a simple rotary switch. You have to do things like debounce inputs that seem like obvious binary switches. Getting the debounce windowing right can be just as "guessy". And guess what the highest point of failure on said device is. That selector switch. Had similar experience with buttons. I think the software part is just two forms of the Law of Conservation of Ugly.

I do like tactile better, but more for affordance/discoverability (e.g. ergonomic) issues than what you're driving at above.

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