Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

Absolutely not true. In cruise, stabilized, especially with AP - the margins are MUCH MUCH higher. Pilots have fallen asleep (two of them) - overflown airports still landed etc.

> physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen

Agreed, this is the end game.

The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.

Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!

BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.

There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.

I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.

Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.

Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems

For one, you're too late, touchscreens are prevalent in modern avionics, and unlabeled buttons on the border of a screen that change function depending on what screen you're viewing are the second most common. The more relevant part to the Honda discussion is that there are different considerations for a car and airplane interfaces, and they are so different it's not a good argument to say "planes don't/shouldn't do this so cars shouldn't either."

The issue with a car isn't the interface, it's the fact that people look inside their vehicle for too long to fiddle with the radio. Even if the buttons/knobs could be operated entirely without looking, most people would still stare at their radio while they are doing it. Pilots learning to fly are trained to look outside after pretty much any action, they shouldn't ever stare inside the plane. They do a quick instrument scan and look outside. They glance at their chart and look outside. If they need to change frequency they do it and then look back outside. It's kind of hard to break the habit of looking outside when you start instrument training.

But most car drivers don't have the same amount of training and fixate on things inside the car, like the radio or climate controls. TBH, pilots still get fixated on things, it's just that they usually snap out of it and regain situational awareness before anything bad happens because the skies are pretty spacious. But car drivers don't have spacious roads. There's another car right next to you going 75 mph and if you drift out of your lane you'll cause an accident.

The issue isn't the design of the buttons at all. That matters to a fighter pilot, but the issue for a car driver is the fact that the screen is even on and the radio is accessible while driving down the road. The real critical safety feature would be disabling the screen while driving, and either locking out controls or only allowing voice control. But people would never buy a car that doesn't let them fiddle with the radio or stare at their little screen, so the actual safety feature that needs to be implemented won't happen.

Edit: When I say "fiddle with the radio" I'm including all activities that take place in a car's center stack- audio, navigation, climate control, etc. I'm also a pilot, have designed tests for avionics upgrades for multiple fighter jets, and own my own plane. I have lamented the introduction of touchscreens into modern avionics at a professional level and the personal level. I own three cars with varying levels of touchscreen invasion. So I've thought about the issues surrounding touchscreen quite a bit, and have concluded that the interfaces in a car are so simple that the issue isn't whether you can operate it without looking, it's the fact that people aren't trained to do so.

My Prius prime has the worst controls possible. During spring and fall, when one part of the day is cold and the other warm, it’s annoying to turn on the car. For instance, if I commute home and used A/C, turning on the car in the morning will have the A/C blasting when it’s also cold outside. And I have to sit through the animation and boot up of the screen and then go to the climate control settings which usually is a very uncomfortable 30 seconds every time. And then, the touch is not as smooth as a modern smartphone. This is a 2019 Prius too so idk what Toyota was thinking going all touch on this one.

I work in data visualization. Every programmer who gets into datavis goes through a "3D all the things" phase where they look around and realize that 3D visualizations aren't used in a lot of areas where it seems like they should. Eventually you realize that there are big tradeoffs and 3D is very difficult to get right for the human brain.

Touchscreens are similar. The appeal is obvious. Screens are space efficient, customizable, upgradeable, flashy, etc. But they simply aren't as nice as physical controls with tactile feedback. Not only should we not be forcing touchscreens into every HCI situation, I think we should be moving the other direction, adding more physical buttons, dials, sliders etc to our computers and smartphones. In school a couple years back I worked on a project[0] for adding generic bluetooth buttons on a wrist device.

Imagine if you had 4 extra physical buttons, a scroll wheel, and a slider all sitting on your wrist, and your phone and apps were designed in such a way that you could map these to whatever you wanted.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lTOxHxHFjwJXeCLROAPf6OJD...