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Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

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Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#81

Post by vehemenz »

cs702 wrote: post #40
smt88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could do almost anything with the buttons in my car without looking away from the road. That's never going to be possible with a touchscreen.

How do you, say, check tire pressure? Setup a new garage-door opener? View your calendar for today? Do you have physical buttons for those things? A car that does everything (or "almost anything") via physical buttons would be insanely hard to use . It would look like, and be about as easy to use as, a jet cockpit. The best approach is clearly not all-physical-buttons, nor all-touchscreen-buttons, nor all-voice-comma…

Obviously a car doesn't need to do any of these things, especially in the age of the smartphone. A good tradeoff might be:

1. Physical controls for everything

2. A separate mini tablet screen for an advanced CarPlay-like dock that connects to your phone.

Ideally the physical controls would do everything on the screen as well, so the advanced functions can be accessible while driving (if you absolutely need something there).

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#82

Post by ajross »

everdrive wrote: post #9

As folks noted in the other thread on this topic: This is self-evident to most of the HN audience, but the more studies and more awareness is brought to this topic the likelier things are to improve.

This isn't a study. It's a "test" run by a Swedish car magazine, analogous to Car & Driver or Motor Trend, and similarly captured by its advertising base. Auto industry rags have always hated Tesla, for fairly obvious reasons, and it's sort of a running joke within the Tesla community.

Does that mean it's wrong? No. But it does mean you need to apply some salt. This isn't first principles science being reported, as you seem to have been led to believe.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#83

Post by kayodelycaon »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #57
misnome wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we bought our last car we specifically avoided touchscreen-heavy interfaces. Worst we looked at was Peugeot, which not only had framerate stuttering _on the actual digital dashboard_, the radio turned on loud for us and although the digital volume button was large, you couldn’t just hold it down - you needed to repeatedly tap/lift/tap/lift/… to move it more than just one volume notch. We bought a (non-peugeot) c…

Oh, thank you for mentioning digital dashboards, I completely forgot about those! So, in addition to mandatory physical controls for common functions, my imaginary EU legislation would also prescribe that all essential vehicle information (speed, outside light status, fuel level) has a physical representation (lights, dials, etc., in the sense that there is nothing that could be described as 'software' driving these…

I like the dashboard in my 2014 Prius. The speedometer is digital numbers, which is great because I have trouble reading dials. Never had an issue with anything freezing up.

Later Toyotas I’ve rented have full color screens. They work okay.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#85

Post by acd »

Usability is another reason air cockpits have physicall knobs and buttons.

Physical knobs and buttons are preferred because they are easy to locate and use, even in high-stress situations.

Why sudennly would car dashboards be different? We have had physicall knobs controlling car functions before.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#87

Post by prepend »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #70
Kaibeezy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car, born from jets, has no tire pressure checker, no garage door opener, no touchscreen, no automatic transmission, and smack-you-in-the-back-of-the-head turbo lag. I honestly can’t think of a new car I’d trade it for (unless selling that new car to buy more old cars isn’t cheating).

I miss my old Saab... One of these days I need to pick up another one.

As a COVID project, I looked for a Saab to play around with. The cheapest I found was a 2009 crappy GM 9-3 for $11k.

I really miss my pre-Malibu 900s and 9-3s.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#88

Post by glowingly »

cs702 wrote: post #18

The actual "study" (really, an unscientific test) is here: https://www.vibilagare.se/english/physical-buttons-outperfor... At home we have both traditional vehicles with lots of knobs, and vehicles (Tesla) with mainly touchscreen buttons and voice commands. My personal experience: * It takes at least a few weeks to become familiar enough with the touchscreen buttons and voice commands that they become second-nature.…

So.... what happens when someone decides it's a smart idea to replace all of those commonly used functions that had physical buttons on the steering wheel with more touch buttons? Let's even say, capacitive touch zones? :D

I do agree that a good physical button arrangement on the steering wheel is quite useful.

On my car, the layout is quite good, IMO.

* All of the audio is controlled through a D-pad on the left side.

* All phone/voice handled through three physically different buttons on the lower left, accessible without changing how my hand grips the wheel.

* All car-computer/cruise-control through a D-pad on the right.

* As a result, any "type" of command is specifically associated with one hand, and one area of the steering wheel in particular.

As I've learned through a number of long term rental cars, the physical button layout can be bad.

* Many have the audio spread across both hands.

* Many require one to break grip to even do simple audio adjustments (my car doesn't).

* They often overload each area with too many buttons and controls.

* The car GUI can also have many slow, confusing layers that one navigates to get commonly used functions, like digital speedometer, estimated range, etc.

This isn't even getting to strange things, such as having the older generation UI completely present under the veneer of a newer, slower UI.

The car brand I have isn't faultless either - all of their newer cars exhibit the same bad habits. Some bad habits have been slowly walked back a bit in the latest 2022/2023 cars, but the damage is still present.

Sort of like bad ideas in Windows. The worst UI elements (IMO) in Win 8 were walked back a bit in 8.1, then successively more rollbacks via a number of Win10 updates. But the baseline is still worse in some ways vs 7 and before (e.g, start menu is less meaningfully customizable than 7, which is still less than XP, IMO). We see tiny hints of that with Win11 updates. I expect 11.1 or 12 to mostly remove the worst offenders.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#89

Post by dontlaugh »

tialaramex wrote: post #71
Ma8ee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Awareness in my view is useless because touchscreens in auto infotainment are far more visually impressive so they will always be preferred from a buyer's perspective. Except that the HN audience also buys cars, and prefers something else. And we aren't that unique or exceptional.

All ordinary televisions are now advertising-filled garbage, technical people I know just don't buy televisions. If they need a display they buy either the panel or a projector. But if my mother or sister buy a television it will be advertising-filled garbage. There is a tiny niche of people who care, and for some reason insist on buying a TV, as a result on a very small scale it is technically possible to buy a TV w…

You can’t get a 65” OLED with HDMI and ARC that isn’t a TV.

Re: Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens

#90

Post by samch »

I’d like to offer a possibly controversial alternative viewpoint on this. On a longer time horizon than just the past few years, we saw the introduction of touchscreens for drivers way back in the early 2000s. We just called them smartphones. Before that, rush hour commuters could be spotted reading newspapers, shaving, applying makeup, and eating breakfast while driving. All of those pose real dangers to themselves and others. My point is that the fundamental issue at hand is more significant than the UI / haptics of the car, but the attention paid by the driver. Humans have already cast their vote on this. As drivers, broadly speaking, we do not want to give the action of driving our full attention. There are simply too many other things vying for our focus. The solution, in my opinion, is not about the controls in the vehicle. Rather, it’s about removing the distracted driver from the equation altogether and finally mastering the immense challenge of truly autonomous vehicles. We are at a point in history where the UI/UX has advanced faster than true self-driving. If the latter can catch up, the UI will become a non-issue, the screens will continue to grow, and the driver will merely be an operator.
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