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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

#631

Post by xeromal »

gnicholas wrote: post #477
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.

Voice control still isn't there yet. Siri frequently thinks I'm talking to her when I say "hey [kid's name]" — despite the fact that my kid's name shares zero letters with "Siri", either in English or in IPA. This is pretty surprising/disappointing, considering that the /s/ sound is pretty distinct, and considering that I did the "hey Siri" training when I got my phone.

It's started working pretty well on my Tesla. I can tell it to set the thermostat, turn on specific heated seats, play music, call or text someone, etc. It's not perfect but it gets better every update and we get an update at least once a month if not more.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#632

Post by yitchelle »

Wistar wrote: post #403
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.

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--all…

This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute.

Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#633

Post by hvidgaard »

mattmanser wrote: post #581
twomoretime wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about minimizing points of failure, it's about removing singular points of failure. Perhaps "redundant" was the wrong word but the point is instead of having a single UI component (touchscreen/UI thread) which can cause the whole system to fail, if you group buttons/knobs into individual microservices they are unlikely to all go down simultaneously.

I don't get how we can explain it in a simpler way? If you add a microservice, you're adding another point of failure. You add another interaction, you add more code. Add more code, you add more bugs. It's pretty much the only empirical thing we have in software engineering, more code = more bugs. Lots of little microservices means lots of extra code means lots of extra bugs. Plus you've got to manage how they all in…

Erlang is build around the idea of microservices and message parsing. It's by far one of the best languages we have to make fail tolerant programs - it was invented to solve exactly that problem. While it does not mean you can take every program in any language and make them into a micro service architecture, it shows that if implemented correctly, the idea of microservices and messages absolutely increase reliability.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#635

Post by numpad0 »

bl0b wrote: post #583
Judgmentality wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Interesting link. Can anyone explain why a car needs so much code?

Apparently a lot of it is just generated templates coming from commercial SDKs. Adding to that, a car is a set of distinct embedded systems interacting in a sort of a ladder network topology rather than a vertebrate analog like multi-core PCs, so a lot of code in a car would be redundant or has little footprint restrictions.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#636

Post by ondravn »

WalterBright wrote: post #420
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…

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems Touch screens in the cockpit seem like madness to me. Cockpits sometimes fill with smoke and the pilot has to be able to find and operate the controls. Ever notice that the flap levers have little flaps on top of them? The nosewheel steering control has a little tire on the top? That's so the pilot knows without looking what his hands are on…

Another consideration is vibration; trying to press a virtual button while in a high turbulence situation can be non-trivial, for example.

Critical functions will (hopefully) always remain on tactile controls for these and other reasons.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#637

Post by numpad0 »

FriendlyNormie wrote: post #571
freeopinion wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unders…

> flipped it thousands of times

This raises a question: how many times do an average pilot actually flip a switch over their carrier?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#638

Post by friendlybus »

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…

Look at the upcoming TEMPEST fighter to see touch screen displays in full force.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#639

Post by burfog »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #398
hnarn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I'd pay extra for a 1999-style car. That year was near the peak for car design quality. Fancy cars hit the peak around 1995, and cheap ones hit the peak around 2010 or 2015.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#640

Post by numpad0 »

LMMojo wrote: post #578
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.

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.

Which control do you exactly need to adjust in the middle of a turbulence?
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