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Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

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Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#271

Post by gonehome »

colordrops wrote: post #94

This keeps coming up on Hacker News. It's not that drivers hate touch screens. It's that most of them are terribly implemented. People hated smartphones until Apple released the iPhone. Just think about smartphones before that. The UX was horrid. I suspect most people in this thread piling onto the hate don't own a recent model Tesla. I know that some owners aren't fans, but most are. There are three things that make…

Yeah the Tesla screen is excellent.

The issue isn't so much with touch screens, it's every other car company being atrocious at software and software design.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#272

Post by jojobas »

naikrovek wrote: post #225
anamexis wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well.

> You still have to look to find where to press. With real buttons, you can find the right button purely with tactile feedback, as well. that's not a given at all. maybe for computer keyboards I guess, but not for cars. car makers always seem to want buttons to be flush with their surroundings and have no bumps or dips on them to help you find the button you're after. I always have to look for the button if it isn't…

I just checked and I could reach and operate aircon knobs (3x), radio volume and phone answer/hangup buttons without looking, fast. Granted most of these are on the wheel, but even aircon controls would be a no go on a touchscreen.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#273

Post by hkatx »

I like mazda approach to their infotainment. The initial boot is slow(2019 model new one may have faster boots), but once it loads, i am very happy with the way it works. Once the car is running or over a certain speed, the touch functionality of the touch screen is disabled. The rotary dial that is easy to reach can be used to do all the functions I need on my infotainment. HVAC are physical buttons as well as volume is a physical knob.

Once I got used to the rotary dial, I never needed to touch the screen again.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#274

Post by pnw »

testfoobar wrote: post #44
exabrial wrote: post #17

Pro Tip: So do ER Doctors and Insurance Companies. What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a fing…

Touch screens are also pretty terrible for older people. Vision and fine motor skills both degenerate. Without tactile feedback, it is hard for older people to determine if they've successfully clicked on something. Gestures can be tough to teach and successfully implement without error.

I agree with you on the tactile angle, but the Tesla touch screen offers larger font sizes for people with presbyopia which is something that physical controls cannot offer.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#275

Post by nluken »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #222
crooked-v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you have to already know what the voice command is to turn on the seat heater and reproduce that every time, versus being able to look around and just... see an appropriate button. And that's before getting into the mess of misheard commands that even Google and Apple still can't get right despite having gigantic teams working on it 24/7.

As is mentioned in a parallel comment this will change dramatically as LLM are introduced to voice assistants. LLM are much more robust in inferring semantic meaning from noisy language. As long as they don’t ask the LLM to solve partial differential equations and confine it’s originating prompt aggressively to only interpret voice text transcriptions to a finite set of actions, it’ll be amazing.

I don't doubt that voice recognition will continue to improve, but doesn't it seems kind of ridiculous for automotive manufacturers to pour millions of dollars into R&D (or spend millions licensing someone else's software) and add much more expensive processors to their cars at mass scale to solve an already solved problem? I can already adjust the climate control and other basic things without this sort of interface, and I don't have to look away from the road to do it.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#276

Post by im3w1l »

morkalork wrote: post #228
munificent wrote: post #214

I'm surprised the article didn't mention one of the key regulations that led to this as an unintended consequence: By law, cars in the US must now have a back-up camera. That means every car must have a screen. Given that, automakers figured they may as well use the damn thing for everything else too and cut costs. It wasn't just that they wanted to take away tactile controls to save money. It was that they had to ma…

Did back up cameras save that many lives?

My guess would be that it faced little resistance as those cameras have many other benefits than saving lives.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#278

Post by HWR_14 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #189

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally…

> That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous.

It doesn't matter if it takes 1 second for the radio to change stations. The problem with delays is me spending 500 ms trying to get the buttons to react. When I touch a physical button, I instantly know I did.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#279

Post by philsnow »

berkle4455 wrote: post #241
sircastor wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.…

Dude Winamp was a clean, simple and wickedly responsive UI that allowed a multitude of real-time audio tweaks and supported playlists with thousands of files. This was in the late 90’s running on 166Mhz processors with maybe 16MB of system ram. Are you saying modern car infotainment systems have fewer resources allocated to the UI?

You’ve just reminded me that I lived in a time when my desktop machine was not powerful enough to decode and play MP3s in real time. I had to decode to wav files and play those.

This was in a time when far fewer instructions were accelerated on the cpu, and my cpu at the time was something like a 66MHz 486-dx2, and even the (Frauenhofer) mp3 codec wasn’t as optimized as it was later.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#280

Post by uncletaco »

randomdata wrote: post #256
berkle4455 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude Winamp was a clean, simple and wickedly responsive UI that allowed a multitude of real-time audio tweaks and supported playlists with thousands of files. This was in the late 90’s running on 166Mhz processors with maybe 16MB of system ram. Are you saying modern car infotainment systems have fewer resources allocated to the UI?

Are you saying that you want to control a car’s infotainment system with a keyboard and mouse while staring at a CRT monitor?

Yes, unironically. Give me tactile buttons and a near zero latency screen.
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