It should be illegal to make cars with high latency UIs. It routinely takes 1+ seconds for touchscreen button presses to be registered on my 2015 and 2018 Toyotas. This leads to erroneous actions being performed, which is not safe. If I were a software engineer on these teams I would quit if these systems were released on my watch.
Please make a dumb car
441–450 of 671 posts
Re: Please make a dumb car
#442I love having a dumb car. My wife has a modern car and my experience is superior in almost every way. She has to select a temperature and then her AC system blasts her with freezing or burning air until it decides the car is at the desired temperature. Since the selector only goes down to 65, it's impossible to get medium-temperature air on a nippy day. My dash, on the other hand, has a dial that goes from cold to ho…
Its too bad your experience with automatic climate control systems is so terrible. I'm of the exact opposite experience. I recently had to have my car in the shop and as a rental they gave me a mid-tier level Nissan Sentra with manual climate controls. I absolutely hated having to manually adjust the climate, usually 2-3 times every trip. Why would I want to fiddle with climate controls when it could be entirely auto…
You're going to have a bad experience if you're always setting it to max cold or max heat instead of just picking a comfortable temperature in the middle and letting the car get to that temp.
That's the issue. Suppose the car is at an ambient temperature of 50 degrees. I get in and start it up. I want air that's just slightly warmer than ambient but I can't get it. If I set it to 65, I get hit with air that's probably 90 degrees until the whole car hits 65, meanwhile I'm sweating like it's high summer. If I set it to Low, the only setting below 65, it turns me into a frozen dinner. Generally I'm forced to keep the AC off and just be slightly cold because I have no direct control of the air that's hitting me. There's no way to tell the car to blow slightly warm air if the ambient temperature is below 65 degrees.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#443I love having a dumb car. My wife has a modern car and my experience is superior in almost every way. She has to select a temperature and then her AC system blasts her with freezing or burning air until it decides the car is at the desired temperature. Since the selector only goes down to 65, it's impossible to get medium-temperature air on a nippy day. My dash, on the other hand, has a dial that goes from cold to ho…
> I love having a dumb car. Did you find a newish one?
Nope, mine's a 2007. Still going strong.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#444What I hate about "car discourse" like this is the apparent blindness to public transportation. Trains, bikes, buses, and street cars solve almost every problem that the author complains about. The only outstanding problem, however, is that American infrastructure has been deliberately designed solely around the car. Those who suggest alternative modes of public transportation are immediately written off as "impracti…
I would absolutely love to ride a bike or say, roller skate to work, but as i live in a stroad infested car dependent mess of a town, that is sadly impractical at best and outright deadly at worst.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#445It should be illegal to make cars with high latency UIs. It routinely takes 1+ seconds for touchscreen button presses to be registered on my 2015 and 2018 Toyotas. This leads to erroneous actions being performed, which is not safe. If I were a software engineer on these teams I would quit if these systems were released on my watch.
It's worse than "erroneous actions being performed". It leads to the driver watching the UI for a second, which, unless you're stopped, is much too long.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#446> Power seat adjustment, though, that’s a luxury even today. Use the lever. Probably the one thing I disagree with the article on. Power seat adjustment is a heck of a lot safer in the driver seat than manual levers, and it's not even close. If a passenger accidentally adjusts the seat too far forward or too far back while the car is in motion, fine, it's an inconvenience. If the driver does this, they become a road…
It's not even a safety thing. Power seats with memory functionality are a must-have for anyone that shares their car with someone else. It's so much less annoying to press one button and have the car revert to your preferred seating position with side mirrors angle perfectly vs doing it manually every time.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#447One thing I was flabbergasted at recently was Tesla offering, and the government allowing, regular drivers to use a yoke steering wheel like F1 drivers. Not only is it harder for the average person to handle but their firmware hadn't accounted for the fact that if you steer fully left or right the yoke is upside down and if you try and indicate it ends up indicating on the wrong side. What is wrong with a wheel and f…
I've not seen any evidence that the yoke steering wheel is dangerous. The downside that you're describing can only happen at zero or near to zero speed. BMW doesn't even install turn signals at all so I think the occasional errant turn signal is fine. The reason the NHTSA hasn't "forbid" the yoke is because... it isn't unsafe, it's just stupid.
It would be significantly less stupid if it had physical buttons on the steering wheel.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#448I don't mind having a smart car, in fact, I like most of the "smart" features - lane centering, adaptive cruise, emergency braking, TPMS, lane change cameras, auto headlights, auto wipers, etc. But I want buttons and knobs for everything I use while driving. I probably wouldn't pay extra for built-in navigation (it generally comes with other options that I do want), but I've found it useful a few times when I was out…
"I like most of the "smart" features - lane centering, adaptive cruise, emergency braking ..."
Please drive your car.
I don't care what choices you make wrt bluetooth or heated seats or iphone integration ... but if you can't be bothered to drive the car then perhaps a different transport option would be a better choice for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
"... as we look at this accident history what we find is that in 68% of these accidents, automation dependency plays a significant part ..."
"... automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."
Re: Please make a dumb car
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always surprised how defeatist and negative the tech community's attitude towards computerized UX in cars is. Often the opinions are simplistic and dismissive instead of zooming into the details. It's similar to when onscreen keyboards in phones where "obviously never going to work" when now, most people probably wouldn't want to give up the screen real estate for a hardware keyboard, except even more one-note. I…
The big difference between cars and smartphones is that you can focus all of your attention on your smartphone screen to use it. That's not true for the driver of an automobile. The best automobile interfaces use knobs of different sizes and with different textures so that you can find them without looking. Buttons should be arranged in rows, so they are easy to find with a short look. Extremely common buttons should…
I think that’s the point and also what sho_hn is saying. There’s nothing inherently wrong with screens and touch controls it’s that the car companies have done a truly terrible job in implementation. We have lots of tech including haptics and other feedback to make these interfaces work far better for humans that isn’t being taken advantage of. On the other hand a great counterpoint is the story of the Mac Touch Bar. (I’m a software person who also works on cars)
Re: Please make a dumb car
#450Fascinating that, in a purportedly capitalistic economy, there is product demand going unserviced.
We argue on good grounds, and the author mentions, that we need standards for safety and reliability, sure.
But at what point do we admit that Regulatory Capture[1] destroys innovation to the benefit of only the major players?