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Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

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Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#701

Post by justeleblanc »

geraldwhen wrote: post #548
TheFragenTaken wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that these cars pass safety certification, makes me question certifiers. It's illegal to look at your phone while driving, for good reason, but it's legal to fiddle with a damn computer screen, because it's part of the car. I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.

In many states you can absolutely use your phone while driving, either to call someone or actively use gps without a window mount. What’s explicitly prohibited is texting/writing and driving.

The US is not a beacon of consumer safety. In my European country, having your phone in your hand while driving is illegal.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#702

Post by londons_explore »

alkonaut wrote: post #359
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.…

Unless the hardware can and will be upped from a $20 to a $200 SoC because it’s required to keep response times low, then someone isn’t doing their job. There has obviously been mountains of specs during these projects, but the most important one - the response time - was obviously overlooked. I’m not saying like the GP that this indicates inexperienced developers, but it does indicate poor technical leadership and p…

A higher powered SoC might help make it lag-free... But the real solution is simply to put in the requirements that 90% of taps must be fully responded to within 100ms. Animations must complete within 350ms and be 60 fps. Dragging must have a glass to glass latency of under 50 ms. Booting from door open to usable must be done in 5000 ms.

While we're there, lets put in the requirement that a random joe from the street, with no training, when given the UI and asked to complete a task (eg. Play me some coldplay, turn on the window defroster, pair a bluetooth phone, get directions to the nearest gas station), must be able to figure it out within 20 seconds and 6 taps on average.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#703

Post by londons_explore »

gjadi wrote: post #507
berkle4455 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude Winamp was a clean, simple and wickedly responsive UI that allowed a multitude of real-time audio tweaks and supported playlists with thousands of files. This was in the late 90’s running on 166Mhz processors with maybe 16MB of system ram. Are you saying modern car infotainment systems have fewer resources allocated to the UI?

I haven't yet worked on automotive stuff but I work in the embedded space. We're using small MCU (not CPU) to drive 480x272 or 800x600 screen. 240Mhz, 8MB of RAM. For example on ESP32-S2 or ESP32-S3. If you had GPS, bluetooth, wifi, etc. to the mix, yeah that's a challenge and you need to make your UI pretty simple.

Nearly everything automotive now has a GPU. When you have a GPU, even a very low power one, graphics get far easier. simple operations like "fade from this screen into that screen at 60 fps" become easy. They would be impossible with CPU graphics, simply because a slow CPU can't update every pixel on the screen at 60 fps anyway.

Despite that, automotive graphics ramain laggy because they normally build something barely gpu accelerated using java or QT or something else laggy by nature...

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#704

Post by chrisan »

quacksilver wrote: post #663
itsoktocry wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What actions are you referring to? Changing the audio volume? The interior fan speed? This entire thread has me wondering the same thing. I've owned many cars and drive far more than average. What are y'all adjusting so much that's causing issues here? If we exclude infotainment, which even the best have lousy driving ergonomics, you need to be able to turn wipers on/off (most are automatic now), turn the HVAC up o…

Some things that I personally have have had to do include adjusting the HVAC to have full output on the windscreen on a hot setting, enable the rear demister / mirror heaters or turn the hazard lights on. The windows or mirrors steaming up is a visibility issue and is dangerous if you allow it to occur. This may not be needed at the start of the drive if people's breath gradually steams up the windows or the weather…

The front/rear defogger should be 2 buttons, with the mirrors coming on with the front normally (at least in the cars I have driven).

Hazard button is pretty hard to miss in every vehicle I have entered

Do you find those difficult in your vehicle's layout?

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#705

Post by postingawayonhn »

bjarneh wrote: post #417
checkyoursudo wrote: post #393

With. A. Passion. Other touch screens (or similar things) I dislike: - the controls on my stove top - the controls on my monitor - the controls on my tv - the controls on my thermostat - probably more All of these should have physical buttons for the limited number of functions required. Or, at a minimum, for navigation and confirmation. Touch screens there suck. My wife's car has a touch screen on the control/infota…

> - 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…

I love my induction stove with touch buttons. Easiest stove I have ever had to clean. Just like wiping any other part of the bench.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#706

Post by to11mtm »

chrisan wrote: post #696
acapybara wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Subaru has a physical volume knob. Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down. At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement.. Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading. This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous s…

Clearly that is a problem with Subaru (and Honda from someone else?) and not physical buttons themselves. Just because some vehicles have a piss poor implementation doesn't mean the idea of physical is wrong. I have a 2015/16 Ford and Chevy with the infotainment screens - both have physical buttons and both respond instantly to my changes. They also both have an additional volume control on the steering wheel itself…

My 22 Ford has problems with the volume. Sometimes it just keeps pumping to max and you have to fight with it for up to 30 seconds as it's blasting your ears out.

That's kinda the problem; these 'Infotainment' systems keep getting upgraded/etc for marketing purposes but don't have enough care put in the upgrades to make sure stuff works right.

"Move Fast and Break things" is not a good motto for anything that does in a car IMO.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#707

Post by kasey_junk »

hasmolo wrote: post #661
acapybara wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Subaru has a physical volume knob. Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down. At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement.. Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading. This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous s…

i'm dropping my subaru for this among other reasons. 1. throttle response, move your foot to 20% and experience between no throttle and wide open as the 'turbos' kick in in my outback 2. every time we get near an intersection with bollards, it thinks it's a kid and slams on the brakes 3. you're not allowed to persist auto start disabling 4. you will be nagged for looking anywhere other than dead straight, especially…

I thought 3 was federal law and was universal amongst US cars.

I personally don’t mind it, but thought it was indicative of how unpopular that feature was when a software update moved the disable button to my Subaru’s dock.

FWIW my Subaru doesn’t experience the other issues mentioned besides 1 & 5. 1 is like any turbo I’ve driven before so maybe my expectations are off but 5 is crazy annoying.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#708

Post by DonHopkins »

acapybara wrote: post #664
DonHopkins wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant: You've reinvented Braille with googly eyeballs for sighted drivers! It illustrates the point that accessibility isn't only for disabled people. It benefits everyone, and if you're lucky to live long enough, you'll need it more and more as you get older. Unless you're planning to die young, you're not just abled, but predisabled. https://twitter.com/BeingCharisBlog/status/14558902395205877...

Everyone is just predisabled? I suppose we're all just pre-dead as well? What a depressing way to look at life. You may want to seek out help from a counselor.

I'm glad that by using and defining the word "predisabled", I have raised your consciousness enough to consider your own mortality, and the fact that your vision, hearing, dexterity, mental acuity, and memory are all inevitably going to degrade as you get older.

Not everyone is predisabled: many unfortunate people won't live long enough to suffer the consequences of old age.

But I'd rather not die before I get old, myself.

Do you know anyone currently alive who isn't pre-dead?

I certainly hope I'm currently predisabled instead of just short lived, myself.

It sounds like you're the one who needs a counselor if you're so depressed and having such a hard time facing the fact that you're getting older and less abled every second, until you die.

If you're designing user interfaces, you might want to seek out help from an accessibility specialist.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#709

Post by mytailorisrich »

rlpb wrote: post #668
mytailorisrich wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This obviously depends on the jurisdiction. Here in the UK: There is a specific ban on using phones while driving. There is an obligation to drive with "due care and attention" so taking your eyes and attention off the road to spend time fiddling with a computer screen can be an offence as well.

In practice the bar for "due care and attention" is low (ie. you have had to be really, really careless or really, really inattentive to be convicted). The courts in the UK hold drivers only to a pretty low standard in general. That's why they had to pass a separate law to ban handheld use of mobile phones.

This can be a fixed penalty (no court involved unless driver does not accept penalty). So I think it really depends on what the driver was actually doing (especially impact on driving), how the driver responds to being stopped by police, and whether police is having a bad day.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#710

Post by smaudet »

londons_explore wrote: post #677
nicky0 wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in a rainstorm and the wipers are set to "minimum speed" then turning the speed up would be critical.

The safe thing to do would be to pull over first, as you see the rain getting heavier, then adjust.

I can immediately think of several situations where that is not at all possible to do.

Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc.

Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.

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