European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls • Hacker News Board

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#641

Post by mythhabit » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 10:28 AM UTC

close04 wrote: post #485

mythhabit wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has actually combined the two with their touchpads. When you press on them you get the "click" feedback. But its not actually a physical travel that activates, it's what they call "the haptic engine" that vibrates in a way that makes it feel like you've clicked a physical button. It works really well. However, I think that such buttons are far more expensive than a physically activated button, even if the latte…

> But its not actually a physical travel that activates This was the little (to no) feedback of a press I was mentioning. Simulating the absolute bare minimum of travel. With the pressure sensors and the piezoelectric actuators it becomes a super-expensive, overengineered button simulator that works almost as well as the real thing. Even Apple dropped the fancier 3D touch completely, and the less fancy Force touch is…

I do not disagree with you. I was pointing our that there is a certain class of physical buttons we can replace with an "emulation" that works just as well. That is not to say we should.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#642

Post by rkangel » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 11:07 AM UTC

Slartie wrote: post #326

ClikeX wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volume control is a very commonly used feature in cars. That should definitely should be a physical button. I drive a Lynk & Co (reskinned Volvo XC40) and it has a rotary knob on the center terminal for fan speed, temperature, and volume. Which are all within reach without me having to look or lean over. There's also a volume button on the steering wheel next to my thumb, which is great. The only annoying part is tha…

But you are not legally required to use the volume control regularly in order to drive safely. You are not even legally required to have any kind of volume control in your car. You are legally required to have and use the turn signals. You are legally required to have and use the windshield wipers (because you need to be able to see the road when it's raining). Same is true for the horn and hazard lights - those are…

Having music in a car isn't safety-critical. But we should have unflinching acceptance of reality that a lot of people WILL have music in the car, and so if music adjustments are unsafe then the car is more unsafe.

A while ago I worked on a military vehicle intercom system (communication between different station in tanks and armored vehicles). It had a number of pragmatic requirements, learned through experience. One of them was that each station had a 3.5mm jack that mixed its signal into what the headset was hearing. They had learned that whatever you did, soldiers were going to listen to music when they got bored. If you gave them a jack then at least they'd still have their headset on, and would hear instructions (and you could override the music if necessary...). Without the jack they'd just take their headset off.

You have to accept the reality of the world you're designing for not the world you'd LIKE to be designing for.

[Another pragmatic requirements anecdote from the same system: the comms bus had to be able to cope with random disconnects. Why? Because on a tank, the comms bus went to the commander in the turret via a contact ring and when the main gun fired, sometimes that contact ring would disconnect. But then we were allowed 1.5s to reconnect. That's a surprisingly long time - how come? Because that's how long it takes the tank commander's hearing to recover after firing!]

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#643

Post by tialaramex » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 11:43 AM UTC

guappa wrote: post #640

tialaramex wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens with these non-mandatory programmes is that a manufacturer can give the programme money to buy their standard equipment vehicle and then the programme will buy the appropriate car from a dealer. The vast majority of vehicles are purchased this way. This way they can't manipulate the vehicles being tested. The easiest way for your new 4954 model to get excellent NCAP scores is to make the actual 4954's pe…

They might know which dealers are in the area of the testing facility?

If only there was some way to move cars from one place to another :D

A fellow passenger on a train one day was in that line of work. Customer dispatches him to pick up a car, he gets a train to the nearest station, gets a taxi to the car, picks the car up, drives it to the desired destination, another taxi and another train ride. Pay is reasonable if you like driving and can fill your time on a train (e.g. you like to read or listen to stuff, not great if you're an outdoors person or you need to be at home looking after the kids). Obviously most customers are moving valuable cars they can't get to, classics, high end luxury or sports cars where there might only be two dealers in the country, that sort of thing, but he doesn't care if you want him to drive a mid-market hatchback bought new off the lot yesterday afternoon, pay is the same.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#644

Post by pzduniak » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 12:05 PM UTC

pzduniak wrote: post #455

peeters wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only used a Lexus that had a touchpad. I do however regularly use a Mazda with its commander knob, and it is far safer than a touchscreen in my opinion. You can do most navigation without looking at the screen, with just an occasional glance to confirm you're doing what you think you're doing. Whereas a touchscreen requires constant attention while you're manipulating the screen. The only thing that annoys me ab…

>Google's baffling regression in handling voice input for common tasks while driving Is it just me or is Google Maps voice input in AA completely busted now? I used to be able to press the "Search" bar on the touch screen in the app, say the search term and it would just show the results. Likewise for adding stops along the way. Now for the former I need to explicitly say "navigate to X" (or it says that it doesn't h…

Oops, accidentally cut off the last few words.

Coincidentally it's back to working in the first case I described. Adding stops is still broken:/

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#645

Post by NoobSaibot135 » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 12:46 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #207

> Now, Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features This is much more reasonable than I assumed. Unlike seemingly most people here I have no problem whatsoever with fan controls or audio controls or whatever on the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (…

> the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (of course the vast majority of car touchscreens are not, but some are)

Normal refresh cycle period for tablets(iPads) is ~5 years.

Normal life of a car is 10 years (2x).

That means that by year 7 or so, multi-touch performance in autos starts to seriously lag consumer tablet market.

Perhaps we need to have a replaceable/swappable infotainment console now

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#646

Post by rjmunro » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:16 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #159

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that link, which has images. Jesus, the pre-2024 horn is insane . It's one tiny button among many on the right side (of that stupid yoke, but I digress...) The whole point of having the horn in the middle of the steering wheel is you can just mash it with your palm, no need to hunt for anything. Really wonder how that ever got into a production car in the first place.

The whole point of having the horn in the middle of the steering wheel is you can just mash it with your palm, no need to hunt for anything. One can easily see this "meme" if one searches for images of "driver honking horn": https://www.google.com/search?q=driver+honking+horn&tbm=isch

I always worry about the interaction of sounding the horn and the airbag firing, sending your arm into your face.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#647

Post by masklinn » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #636

masklinn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me that's synonymous to tactile button = physical button Why would we need a synonym for a perfectly working word? A physical button is a physical button, to me a haptic button necessarily means some sort of virtual button as otherwise the haptic properties don’t have to be specified.

> Why would we need a synonym for a perfectly working word? Because that's just how language works, I can think of a dozen perfectly working words that have synonyms. The word haptic existed long before touch screens and capacitive buttons. What else could it have been used for then? > as otherwise the haptic properties don’t have to be specified They need to be specified precisely because today buttons that don't ha…

> The word haptic existed long before touch screens and capacitive buttons. What else could it have been used for then?

Haptic is anything having to do with touch, it's not specifically feedback (although you can tune the haptic feedback of physical devices as well). A handshake is haptic communication for instance.

> They need to be specified precisely because today buttons that don't have any haptic feedback exists.

Again, that's not the case of physical buttons. So you have three categories of buttons:

- physical

- virtual (non-haptic)

- virtual (haptic)

You don't need to specify that a physical button is haptic, it is that by definition. You can discuss the haptic properties (UX) of different kinds of buttons or physical controls, but that's not the subject here.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#648

Post by devmor » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

lathiat wrote: post #79

devmor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally cannot stand power steering systems. There’s always a dead zone and the feedback is delayed, in some vehicles more noticeably than in others, but it’s always there. I feel like I have had several close calls that would have been accidents for sure had I been driving with power steering.

What car do you have without power steering? Or, are you referring to electric as opposed to hydraulic power steering? I haven't seen a car without power steering since the early 00s (which was a 90s car). The steering deadzone is not purely a function of power steering. Some of it is design or could be attributed to that, but a bunch of it also comes from slop in the physical connections in the steering column, as w…

It turns out I was mistaken! I haven’t done enough research to determine the actual cause of the effect I have noticed. It might be hydraulic vs electric but I don’t want to make that assumption and be wrong again - I’m going to have to research the steering in other cars I’ve noticed that issue in.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#649

Post by hot_cereal » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 6:08 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #207

> Now, Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features This is much more reasonable than I assumed. Unlike seemingly most people here I have no problem whatsoever with fan controls or audio controls or whatever on the touchscreen, as long as it is responsive (…

I don't hate that Tesla tried to do something different with indicators. I think there are some issues with how stalks work, and thinking about how to make cars better and safer is good. Complicated stalks that make adjusting your wipers feel like playing a game of Bop-It? Total pain in the ass. And assuming something is well designed because that's how it's been done for decades is obviously silly.

But that doesn't make it wrong to do the research, go through the design process, and come to the conclusion that, in the end, putting blinkers on a stalk is still better than the alternatives proposed. It reeks of change for the sake of being different, rather than an actual innovation.

My biggest issue with the choice is that, on a wheel, indicator buttons are constantly moving. And when the buttons are right next to each other, it makes it significantly easier to indicate the wrong direction. Or have to take your eyes off the road to find the indicator when your wheel isn't straight (suppose you're trying to exit a roundabout)

And then with the lack of dashboard on some teslas, there's the knock on problem of having to look away from the road to see which way you're indicating if you think you've indicated incorrectly, rather than the indicator arrow clearly flashing at the bottom of your field of vision.

Re: European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

#650

Post by hot_cereal » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 7:01 PM UTC

klausa wrote: post #327

modeless wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overstated. It's at best marginally easier to hit a random physical button on the center console than to hit a single button on the bottom bar of a Tesla screen, where it is very easy to grab by design. I generally don't hit those physical buttons without at least a glance, and that's all it takes for the Tesla bottom bar buttons too. This doesn't save the wiper situation, though, because that requires navigating men…

> It's at best marginally easier to hit a random physical button on the center console than to hit a single button on the bottom bar of a Tesla screen You presumably typed this out on a keyboard of some sort. Which one can you do more confidently and reliably without looking: — hitting the "u" key on a physical keyboard without looking — hitting the "u" key on a touchscreen keyboard on your most used mobile device?

thinking about it, I actually like this comparison. You make a good point, in that the physical keyboard is a more accurate tool. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have drawbacks.

The advantage of the digital screen is the customizability and adaptability. If I never use the web browser or music on my iPhone, i can just move those apps off the home row. If my keyboard has a numpad, but I don't need it, I'm stuck with a numpad until i buy a new keyboard.

In my old Land Cruiser, the pull knob to open the vents is right next to the pull knob to open the choke which is right next to the pull knob to activate the hazard lights which is right next to the pull knob to activate the fan. None of them are lit, they all look the same in the dark. We've come a long way since 1981, but the point is that the improved reliability of a physical button means nothing if the ergonomics of the interface as a whole are bad. And it's a lot easier to improve the ergonomics of the system (or adapt them to the user's needs) if the controls are on a touch screen.