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Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

ben.stolovitz.com

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Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#71

Post by anon7000 »

sedatk wrote: post #34

More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself. That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.

With the knob, you have a few issues:

1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.

2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.

3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.

Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#72

Post by citelao »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #23

The $6,000 profit per car referenced in the article is gross profit, not net profit. Net profit is considerably lower, around 5% for the mass manufacturers. So a $100 cost savings is very significant against a ~$3,000 net profit on a Bolt.

OP: ooooo, that's neat. Do you have a source? I struggled to find a source for even that $6,000 number.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#73

Post by kube-system »

My biggest issue with touchscreen controls is that they are not ergonomic.

1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be

2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons

Resulting in two problems:

1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks

2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#75

Post by Fwirt »

aftbit wrote: post #37

They're getting better though. The first gen touchscreens were tiny and unreliable. The one in my 2024 Ioniq 5 is pretty decent. I am really glad I still have physical AC controls though, even if they're capacitive. Touchscreens are modal. If I want to control the climate, I first have to press the Climate capacitive button or scroll through the screen to find climate. That takes my hands off the wheel and my eyes of…

Touch screens don't have to be modal, that's a UI choice. The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times, even when CarPlay is open. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of buttons it has, including both a volume knob and a temperature knob.

That being said, the touchscreen software is abysmal and laggy. CarPlay works great, but any time I have to navigate the car's built-in software is a headache.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#76

Post by scottyah »

oblio wrote: post #39
iamdamian wrote: post #31

There has been more pushback on car screens over the past couple of years, and the optimist in me hopes this leads to change. With enough pushback, manufacturers will have to listen to the market, cost savings be damned. A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_…

In Europe it's done through EuroNCAP: https://etsc.eu/cars-will-need-buttons-not-just-touchscreens... It has already started asking for physical buttons for key functions to give manufacturers the top safety rating, and it's working. Buttons are coming back.

Their source is "a Swedish motoring magazine in 2022". Europe sure does love regulation- no desire or call for finding the best way to implement vehicular controls, just a desire to lock in old functionality with a flimsy excuse.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#77

Post by Miraste »

scottyah wrote: post #53
sedatk wrote: post #34

More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself. That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons. The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.

There are zero touchscreen designs that are better than (physical, tactile) buttons.

You can hit buttons without taking your eyes off the road.

You cannot do this with a touchscreen.

There's no way to design or engineer around it, it's simply the wrong tool for the job.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#78

Post by sedatk »

scottyah wrote: post #53
sedatk wrote: post #34

More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself. That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons. The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.

Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience.

BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#79

Post by urbsgpw »

wilg wrote: post #47
urbsgpw wrote: post #44

I gotta say, the one redeeming feature of Ferrari Luce, for me at least, was the interior. I don't dislike screens, I just hate the tesla-esque obsession (where, for them with FSD - for all the hate they get about it up here - it might actually make sense since u are gonna have a FSD+Grok car) with no buttons. I know buttons add cost, but going back to the Luce example again: you have a healthy sized screen (so u don…

Tesla arguably has better, more useful, and more obvious physical buttons than most cars. Most car manufacturers spray confusing physical buttons everywhere with esoteric icons and insane UX. Everything you'd want to do as a driver in a Tesla has a physical button or a set it and forget it "auto" mode.

Uhm, I like Teslas a lot. The design and the philosophy of just minimizing the amount of components. But where I would draw the line is AC via touch screen (again, if Grok can now do it reliably, fine, otherwise, buttons please). Also, depending on the model, I know some models had turn signals in some weird places (above the head? or am I hallucinating?). Also to make your point: if it hadnt been for carplay and its android equivalent, legacy auto would have been cooked long ago. I never use my VW native apps.

My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.

Re: Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

#80

Post by scottyah »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #41
gumby271 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the click-wheel on my Mazda3 and I love that it allows the screen to sit out of arms length up on the dashboard. Its a very nice interior. What I don't love is how Android Auto is slowly breaking since it assumes more and more that you have a touchscreen. It used to be that it would focus buttons in notifications, making it easy to interact with. Now the focus doesn't seem to change at all (or only sometimes)…

I cried when Mercedes go rid of the click wheel. Research in this article be damned, I’d argue that rotary knobs with directional shifting like Mercedes paired with great software are the best car infotainment interface in recent history for screens in cars.

I love voice control, have you tried/gotten used to that?
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