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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

#561
post #481
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fly recreationally and all the higher end gear has touch screens. Some of them are redundant with paths using hardware controls or not. But that's definitely the minority. There are a slew of critical operations that I simply cannot complete without interacting with a touch screen. Not saying it's right or wrong but your original post is 100% incorrect.

Are these things certified? Many recreational pilots fly with uncertified gear (GPS in particular), and even regular smartphone/tablet apps. They also have the required paper documentation and certified instrument but that's just to cover themselves, and as a backup.

Yes this has all been in Pipers and Cessnas.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#562
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…

The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.

For consumer cameras it definitely has happened. But for professional DSLRs you’re serving are market that absolutely puts function over form, and will happy pay a big premium for a devices that makes them more productive.

Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#563

IMHO the physical controls invoke muscle memory and haptic feedback which enables driver to keep attention on the road. Touchscreen does not give this to same/any degree. I should not have to take eyes, or attention, off the road for longer than it takes my hand to find the right control. Physical controls current significant advantage over digital is "no interpretation required" - feel or microsecond glance tells yo…

I've been driving for 40 years. I totally agree with you. Old school controls you can operate reflexively. Often with barely any conscious thought. Your brain adapts to treat the car an an extension of your body.

That simply does not happen with modal controls.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#564
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.

Angular or React?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#565

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.

Another factor is having to keep a larger variety of inventory for mechanical switches, vs a single touch screen SKU standardized across many models.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#566
Touchscreens are not the only UI problem in recent cars. I have a recent Honda, it suffers from the problem that they decided to make the crucial buttons below the touchscreen touch sensitive (with no tactile feedback). So for eg. if you wipe them should some dirt land on them, you set them all off/on by accident! What's worse, they are glossy, and hard to see with glare. It looks good though and sells cars, I call it "the iPhone" design.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#568
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…

Too late! Boeing 777-X will have touch screen interfaces for pilots. Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.

Well keyboards are an interesting one. Airliners have space to install hardware keyboards, light aircraft don't so they have touch displays.

You could argue that an onscreen keyboard is significantly less mental load for the pilot than having to scroll letter by letter on a "dumb" interface.

Where do accidents happen? It's fairly rare for a plane to just break. And even then, if your electronics fail there are usually mechanical backups for the critical instruments. It's much more common for pilots to reach task saturation and make mistakes.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#569
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mone…

JPY/USD rate changed 9% over the last 5 years, are you sure it explains 70% lower net income?

You stated that they make 60% more money. If the point you are trying to make is that they make 60% more than they expected, I won't argue with you.

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