Anyone with two brain cells could tell you touchscreens suck in cars. They physically demand visually attention to do anything.
Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what's wonderful about Doom. The simplicity of what it does belies the effort put into achieving that on limited hardware. When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product. I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering. If the stake holder care…
Yep.. and oddly the stake holder who want more features are the customer. I want a radio, a cd player and AC. I don't even use the Bluetooth, because I don't talk on the phone when I drive. The features on these new cars do IMHO too much.
I adapted the very old FM/AM, cassette, and external CD changer in my very old Range Rover to have Bluetooth because it doesn't have an aux input and my phone doesn't have a headphone jack anyway, and I want to listen to music or audiobooks off it when I'm driving.
I looked into reversing the protocol between the CD jukebox and the stereo, and using an Arduino to inject the appropriate commands - maybe even get the "next" and "back" track buttons working too - but in the end I just fitted a cheapy bare-PCB bluetooth deelie into the cassette deck and wiring it to permanently think it has a tape in.
It works pretty well, and it looks pretty standard. My phone sticks to the flat 1990s dashboard (remember when cars didn't have to have swoopy curves everywhere?) with a couple of bits of double-sided sticky Velcro, and plugs into a USB-C socket fitted where the lighter socket used to be.
Good old farm truck technology.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it's legal to fiddle with a damn computer screen, because it's part of the car. In Germany it is only legal to operate a touch screen while driving for essential functions with only a brief glance. For example, a judgement was handed down against a Tesla driver who tried to switch up the interval of the windscreen wiper via touchscreen and ran off the road in the process. Source: https://www.burhoff.de/asp_weit…
Which would have never happened if the car had normal physical controls for that function. Mine has a little rocker on the wiper stalk.
If you know ahead of time how to do it. If you are in a new car, discovering which of 12 different switches, knobs, and dials adjusts the wiper speed is somewhat baffling. I always spend 5 minutes in a new rental car trying to memorize how to do this, but if it's been a couple days since I rented the car and I'm trying to do it for the first time, it is not something that I try to attempt to adjust while still on the road.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Yes. I am. That guy (and everyone else involved) probably has ten times blood on his hands as a result of "wE doN't need TO CarE aBOUT REaR vIsIBILITY BeCaUsE we have a BACKup CaMERa" engineering and touch screen distractions than he's saved by getting backup cameras put in things. Backup cameras are the unholy trinity of upper middle class moral panic and shirking of responsibility, government Doing Something (TM) a…
You can put duct tape over your federally mandated backup camera display if you really believe they're so distracting that they cause you to run over more people in reverse.
But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Honda Prelude. Maybe 1985. Everything off for me. Radio controls, lift my hand off the shifter, vs my Toyota: extend a finger. Hated that Honda.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#786I like a big display with buttons on the side. I like getting to see the song name, the station and some of that digital info, I like Apple Maps on Apple car play. Those are nice features. I love the back up camera display. But I have to have a button or knob to adjust temp, audio, next track, etc... because while those things are helpful, when I'm going down the highway and I need to adjust while paying attention ju…
I'm pretty thrilled with my '23 BMW.
Not only are there buttons and knobs for most of the obvious things (temperature, volume, etc.) but even the infotainment is controllable by buttons and a joystick+knob+touchpad. I virtually never touch the screen itself.
For some bizarre reason, they do have a separate single row of touch "buttons" for a few functions, namely, seat heating and ventilation, which whatever, but also fan speed. Not the hugest deal, but just why? They were so close!
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
These comments with exactly the same problems I have are really making me LOL. Thanks. (I'm battling fever bouts post chemo so I need a laugh)
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#788I always thought phones and other devices benefitted from keeping a few physical buttons for repetitive or key tasks. With phones, three buttons across the bottom are great - for going back or to the home screen for example. For a car, I can imagine that volume, climate control, defrost, things like that - should be kept as physical buttons
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm willing to credit this type of feature creep for some of the problem, but only some. Decades ago, we had hardware that was so much less capable than anything anyone has put in a car in ten years that the comparison is absurd. Nonetheless, those old systems were often very capable of doing useful things, and the UIs were often very, very fast by modern standards. And a lot of this was that the software stack was t…
Even as someone who believes in the indefensible bloat of modern software, I'd say TI-OS on my 84+ (from using it in high school and college several years ago) is not exactly the fastest to use: - Graphing a plot was slow due to slow CPU and high-precision math libraries (could take 3-10 seconds depending on function complexity and detail) - MathPrint mode slows down printing expressions to an extent, IIRC even movin…
The main latencies in TI-OS (from memory) boil down to actual computation (graphing, solving equations, etc), the really slow LED, and those occasional slowdowns (GC).
Of course computation was slow on the slow, under-featured CPU, but that was to be expected. My car’s touchscreen system doesn’t do anything that is computationally complex — a computer from the late 90s could run a media player and do work at the same time, and my car’s CPU is faster.
The LCD is what it is. I’m talking about latency too when the pixels start trying to change. Anything with a CRT avoided this problem.
And GC is a fair criticism. But my car’s touchscreen is always slow. Oh, and it also often. takes a minute or two to start working when I get on the car.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
sounds like a different type of hell, didn't realise it could get this bad!
Thing is... most of these are quite small bugs. The software development team working on this stuff for just a week or two more would have fixed 80+% of these. Problem is they probably had project managers breathing down their necks about "don't spend time working on non-release-blocking tickets".
Why did the project managers introduce the bugs in the first place?