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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

#571

Post by FriendlyNormie »

freeopinion wrote: post #529
BrandonMarc wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... until something goes wrong. Then a touch screen is the last thing you want. An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right spot of the screen, and avoid touching the wrong spot.

Kinda like trying to flip just the right toggle switch and avoid flipping the wrong one? Just because it's on a touchscreen doesn't mean it has to be tiny and hard to touch. A 17" touchscreen could have fewer controls than the same hardware panel. And the controls could be bigger on the touchscreen.

It’s not like trying to flip just the right toggle. You’ve flipped it thousands of times and memorized its exact location through haptic memory. You gently feel the surroundings to ensure your hand is in the right location and then you make the decisive motion with your fingers. You don’t need to look while doing this. This is how hands work. This is how you type. I wish people would stop pretending they don’t understand this.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#572

Post by Judgmentality »

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…

> A program handling a touchscreen will be complicated. Millions of lines of code. Maybe even billions.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/millions-lines-of-code/

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#573

Post by 0x262d »

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…

Pretty sure this has everything to do with planes being old. Boeing pretty clearly demonstrated that planes being planes doesn't mean they're immune from bad design, corruption, or any other problem.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#574

Post by TomVDB »

Dahoon wrote: post #473
TomVDB wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audi may be doing some things right (I love the location of the audio volume knob), it doesn't compensate for that ridiculous touch pad which you're supposed to use to enter street names by writing the characters one by one with your finger... and many other UI warts. The best thing about Audi's console is that fact that they support Apple CarPlay.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u... Using Apple Carplay is more dangerous than texting.

When you're driving: it can't possibly be more dangerous than the Audi system.

When you're not driving: irrelevant

Conclusion: CarPlay is better than the Audi system.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#575

Post by kenhwang »

woobar wrote: post #569
kenhwang wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mass market automakers usually target ~7% margin, so a 9% change in exchange rate without adjustment in price would make an automaker flip from profitable to unprofitable (observable with Nissan as a real world example). It doesn't decrease their profit by 9%.

Mazda raised their margin target to ~10% per vehicle, which is pretty standard for the premium segment. Which if they performed to expectations, would mean 40% more profit; they're slightly overperforming at ~60%.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#576

Post by c3534l »

I understand the problem that touch-screens solve on cell phones. How do you squeeze the most functionality onto the smallest surface? By doubling up on functions, and reusing existing functionality to be context-sensitive. The trend of moving designs from where they make sense to where they do not because the inferior design is seen as more modern since the devices with these constraints are modern has been a very annoying one. Designers have been making software and technology progressively worse. It isn't in any way surprising, it's just annoying that when a piece of equipment or technology can fully utilize the features and interfaces that cheap and mobile technology is forced to do without, they choose not to use it. It'd be like if bicycles became really popular all of a sudden, so auto industry stopped putting in seatbelts and airbags in cars, because bicycles are modern and they don't have those things in bicycles. You're building a car with a fixed set of controls for the machine you're driving in: you can afford to use a physical UI, what are you doing putting in touch-screen?!

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#577

Post by mod »

saagarjha wrote: post #526
perl4ever wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well, people are selective in their concerns. How much does it affect reaction time to have passengers in the car who you may talk to, or may be doing all sorts of things that distract you?

Aren't passengers much better to have in your car, because they can "copilot" for you?

No. Even if they were helping, they would have to communicate things to you in a way where you could interpret them and react more quickly than just doing it yourself.

Passengers are largely not helping, and certainly are not good at communicating problems.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#578

Post by LMMojo »

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.

What happens during turbulence when you can't accurately touch a specific point on the screen? It doesn't take much turbulence, either, as I cannot reliably use the GPS on my phone, while driving, when it's in its (very stable) mount, and I'm on an average paved road.

Touch screen looks awesome on Star Trek, but in actual use it's an inaccurate, attention-magnet, nightmare.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#580

Post by solinent »

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…

One time I had to create a button for a in-flight software which would control a lidar instrument. The button would enable you to select when to turn on and off the instrument.

We went for a few iterations where the button would light up when the laser was on. There were tons of issues--the state of the laser was not stored in the hardware, so every time the button would disconnect briefly, the state would get reset and lost. After months of back and forth dealing with algorithms to save the state and deal with spurious button presses when the device disconnected, we ended up with a completely useless button, as disconnects would happen very often inside helicopters, rendering the button useless due to the spurious presses near disconnect/reconnect.

Finally, we decided to go with a hardware switch (which I wanted from the start). In about one day the whole thing blew over.

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