Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#471

Post by kgwgk »

the_overseer wrote: post #312
prng2021 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great to get your perspective on this. Aside from the GPS/navigation features, aren't car infotainment systems extremely basic? We've been controlling heating, cooling, audio source, and audio volume since the dawn of time. How are technical requirements related to these basic functions changing such that their UIs haven't been absolutely perfected by now? Is the entire infotainment code being rewritten all the…

Yes. The infotainment code is rewritten every time. By different devs. Because that is how automotive industry works. This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract (because it's the cheapest usually). For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch. The components that make up the infotainment a lot of times are actually developed by different companie…

> Because that is how automotive industry works. This time BMW wants infotainment and a third party wins the contract (because it's the cheapest usually). For the next BMW car another company wins the contract. Everything is rebuilt from scratch.

Yeah, that's how the automotive industry works. For each car BMW will change the third parties manufacturing each piece and every model is completely rebuilt from scratch. They literally reinvent the wheels all the time.

You shoudn't read too much into the fact that you have a dozen or two of models listed under each version in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_iDrive because it's just a concidence that starting each time from scratch they arrived at the same thing.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#472

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

modzu wrote: post #353
flyinghamster wrote: post #39

I think one of the most frustrating aspects of this whole kerfluffle is the automakers' longstanding willingness to ignore customers and double down at any pushback. It's downright stupid that it has taken this level of screaming from customers to roll back a design choice that should never have been made.

in every large business there is a very simple formula for decision making: what option maximizes profit? if we have to kill 100,000 cyclists and pedestrians in the process, who gives a shit, people die every day for no damn reason at all. lets kill em all, bastards arent our customers anyway

Tobacco companies have no problem killing their customers.

People dying is just the cost of doing business.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#473

Post by esperent »

calmoo wrote: post #462
bjarneh wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - the controls on my stove top How were these stove-top touch-buttons ever considered an upgrade to their predecessor? They always have no feedback, or that annoyingly high "beep" feedback. They are always slow to respond. They typically use only two or three buttons to control the actual temperature, forcing you to select location first, which is typically slow and terrible as well. Nobody in their right mind can…

On my particular electric stovetop if I spill a tiny bit of liquid from cooking onto the buttons, the whole stove goes into protection shutdown mode, and I have to thoroughly dry the buttons to get it to work again. I hate that something that is so simple has such a terrible design flaw.

It's not just your stovetop, it's every non-high-end stove top with touch buttons. I move around a lot and stay in short term rentals. They all have stovetops that stop working if you spill a single drop of water on the controls. It's crazy.

I don't think it's anything to do with touch buttons being easier to clean. I think it's just that they are cheap.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#474

Post by Cyphase »

ISO-morphism wrote: post #308
sircastor wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.…

I believe that the engineers are competent at developing software, and think that a lot of the quality issues are due to engineers abdicating authority over the software to managers and never saying "No, adding in that feature at this point in the timeline is going to make this a steaming pile of shit and I refuse to do it and still call myself a software engineer." I get that we have families to feed, but I've seen…

Work work.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#475

Post by DonHopkins »

mr_november wrote: post #335
rsync wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"After His Son’s Tragic Death, This Doctor Fought to Put Backup Cameras In Every Car"[1] "He had gone under the vehicle, I had gone right over his head and killed him. I jumped out of the car, tried to do CPR.” Gulbransen can still taste his blood in his mouth, remembers the way Cameron bled from his nose, his ears. “I knew at that moment he was dead.”" [1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/2018/05/14/after-his-sons-tragic…

Completely unnecessary and upsetting quote. If you must, just link it with some background instead of quoting a sensationalized headline.

You're really more upset at him for quoting a doctor who accidentally killed his own kid then fought to make backup cameras mandatory, than at the auto industry and regulators who fought against backup cameras for 15 years?

Just whose sensitive feelings are you trying to protect with such censorship, and why?

Did reading that upsetting quote ruin your day as much as backing over and killing your own kid would?

Some times you just have to upset people to affect change.

Do you also oppose quoting grieving parents to pass gun control laws too?

If you feel so strongly about it, then instead of just telling people to shut up, why not spend 15 years of your own life trying to pass a bill and enforce government regulations to prohibit quoting grieving parents -- maybe they'll name it after you.

>But while King and then-Senator Hillary Clinton got on board early, automobile maker resistance made sure that results came slow. King and Clinton introduced backover safety legislation in Congress and the Senate in 2005 and Congress enacted the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act in 2008 requiring federal transportation officials to write a regulation to correct vehicle rear visibility problems. President George Bush signed the bill into law. But the the bill languished, thanks to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

https://associationsnow.com/2018/05/advocacy-battle-behind-r...

>The Advocacy Battle Behind Rearview Cameras in Cars Tragic "backover" accidents involving young children gave advocacy groups a reason to push for a law requiring the use of rearview cameras. This week, federal regulations will require the devices in every new car on the road—a decade after the law was passed.

>[...] “I’m a pediatrician, I baby-proof my house, I go out of my way to make sure children are safe and healthy,” Gulbransen said in a recent interview with WABC. “And it happened to me? OK, guess what? It can happen to anybody. So use my example. I own it, I took responsibility, here it is. Let’s channel our grief and get something productive done out of it.”

>[...] “It took a long time, and sadly, along that journey, we had more families joining us in our fight because they had lost their children while knowing there is this preventable technology,” Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#476

Post by hackernewds »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #253
morkalork wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did back up cameras save that many lives?

No, but it's still the law. By 2054 (31 years from now), the NHSTA's estimates say it will save less than 2000 lives. https://www.extremetech.com/cars/179635-car-backup-cameras-a...

What about pets? And injuries?

Wouldn't imagine a reversal killing most healthy adults, so the fatality rate isn't a great measure

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#478

Post by Xelbair »

jjav wrote: post #371
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #189

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally…

> So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot. Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems. If the ac…

It is not about 'looking and pushing' the button.

It's about stateful UI.

physical layout of buttons is usually stateless - press button thing turns on, press it again it turns off.

You don't need to think in which menu you are, and where to press, while driving.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#479

Post by DanielHB »

sircastor wrote: post #229
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #189

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally…

> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.…

my experience working with industrial manufacturing is that there is ALWAYS a push to cut costs and the SoC that runs your software is usually the first thing to get to the chopping block. Given it is extremely hard to gauge how well software will perform before it is actually built and the SoC is chosen way ahead of time it leads to bad performance

And from the other side, there is a big push to add more and more fluff to make the UI design sleek, you could make it performant if you used DOS-style interfaces but no product manager is going to allow that and making animations from scratch (vs using a platform like Android or browsers that has a ton of abstractions to create fancy UIs) is extremely costly

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#480

Post by hackernewds »

8ytecoder wrote: post #119
roland35 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having designed electronics, I absolutely appreciate how much a pain in the butt buttons are (maybe that's why they are called buttons!). It isn't just the cost... Each button requires mechanical design and tooling, graphics, manufacturing, etc etc. Plus no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" or tactical properties. But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens! Funniest button story.. one time we were working on…

I absolutely love the buttons in Porsches and Mazdas.

Why?
Post reply on HN