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Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

motorauthority.com

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Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#181

Post by marvin »

When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality.

I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.

Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.

The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#182

Post by Shivetya »

Well after owning a Tesla Model 3 I am of the opinion, why in the hell do we need forty plus buttons in cars? Seriously! (Go count your buttons, some cars are higher than that)

First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. Navigation is voice controlled and works.

I posted before when people came down on touch screens but let us be honest. In most modern cars there is so much automatic that you really never use the majority of controls you are presented with. Go ahead, put a sticker on every button in your car, count them. Then for each you use take a sticker off. Have fun.

Fortunately the Tesla interface is simple to use and almost everything you need is only one level deep. Unlike my other previous cars where menu travel seemed to go on for weeks.

So yeah, badly designed or badly placed touch screens are not good in cars but so is this myriad of buttons in most cars. Each car you get into you have to do a quick take on where things might be. Plus there are so many buttons. Buttons for functions you truly may never use!

edit: grammar/typos

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#183

Post by rahoulb »

haberman wrote: post #72

I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."

That's great when I'm going somewhere for work. It's not so good when I've not put the "appointment" in my calendar. If the voice interface were 100% perfect it would be OK, but it's not (especially with weird road names).

The key issue for me is, if I'm driving, I have to look at a touch-screen to hit the right button. With physical controls, I can use muscle memory and keep my eyes on the road.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#184

Post by _carl_jung »

rland wrote: post #140
kkarakk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s

Pull over to adjust the map. Does anyone really believe that adjusting GPS while in a moving vehicle is safe?

This gave me pause for thought. It really toes the line of socially acceptable behaviour for a driver, as evidenced by how common it is to do so. How many times have you been a passenger in a car and the driver has pulled over to adjust GPS?

I don't think I have particularly dangerous friends and family, but they rarely do.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#185

Post by bgarbiak »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #135
kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look…

Did they change this on the new Mazda3? I had a CX-5 and you have buttons that took you to those places (audio, gps, and two more I don't remember) around the wheel thingy. I am thinking on their new (soon) CX-30 as a possible new car as I loved the CX-5 and was told it would be mostly be based on the Mazda3.

No, they didn't change it. Buttons are slightly re-arranged, but they're still there. See the 3rd pic in the article.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#186

Post by hkai »

m3at wrote: post #15

Touchscreen are so common because they're cheaper. They also look great when you're buying the car, and using the screen while parked in the store. It's simply not optimised for usability but for attractiveness (both cost and aesthetic wise)

Same as the glossy monitors that look nice in the store but ruin your eyes and productivity.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#187

Post by Aardwolf »

I love tactile feedback and love that for all controls like heating, volume, windows, ....

Except for GPS destination input (except if they provide a nice mechanical keyboard ;)) and map zooming. Imho they should allow touchscreen for GPS input and map zooming, and disable the touch for the driver when driving (except when it knows a passenger is sitting next to it and sees the passenger is touching it, should be possible to detect)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#188

Post by hiisukun »

cyxxon wrote: post #75

I was actually pondering buying a Mazda, but now I am not so sure. Generally I get the idea - please give me hardware buttons for radio/music volume, temperature control, or to toggle suspension modes or whatever. But I want to use e.g. the Spotify on my phone, and Google Maps. Someone further down commented that it seemed to him that car makers have given up on their own branded version if car software, and ohmygod…

I have driven a 2018 Mazda 3 quite a lot. The touchscreen is disabled while the car is moving.

For complicated things while driving - that you wish you had a touchscreen to accomplish - I wish you wouldn't do them while driving. I say this after more than a decade working responding to road accidents.

However, the Mazda interface has been great for all the Android Auto functions (including Google maps and Spotify) simply using the physical buttons. They clearly went to some effort to make it work well.

And if you prefer, you can use voice controls fairly effectively via Android Auto or Apple carplay.

Please keep your eyes on the road.

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