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The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

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Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#41

Post by galangalalgol »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #12
rkagerer wrote: post #8

Are there any reliable modern vehicles with a UI more like a decade or two ago? (eg. physical knobs and a dash that doesn't blind you)

Mazda and Honda both have said they will avoid touch screen for climate. They both use the three knob system (fan strength, temp, zones) and there is no possible improvement as far as I am concerned.

Didn't mazda eliminate touchscreens entirely? Buttons around a screen instead.

I want a steering wheel with more buttons than an xbox elite controller, with chording, pressure sensitivity, long press double press etc. Why settle for a steering wheel that isn't Turing complete while you are touring? And your eyes never leave the road.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#42

Post by readingnews »

I do loathe the screen, however, am I the only person to note this problem with the new car climate controls? I see this on Honda, Nissan, Acura, Toyota (that I know of):

  - Set the climate control for say 70
  - If it is 80 outside, the AC comes on. Great!
  - If it is 69 outside, the HEAT comes on. Even if the car HVAC is off. Uh, not so great?
So you end up during the milder months in this strange battle of the AC. Even when the unit is off, the car lets in some outside air. That air passes over the coils of the system, which are primed for heat or cold depending on where the control is set. This sort of drives me nuts in the nissan (it does it the worst). The system should be off when it is off.

Back to the OP article, wow that Benz control is nutty. I had a (very) old Mercedes that was gifted to me years ago and the controls were a dream. Not one of them had words on it just symbols, and you could muscle memory them in no time. A very well thought out design. A wheel for temps and fan speed, buttons for activation. I think it might have been a total of 6 inputs. I would trade that for my Hondas sucky four touch screen buttons to turn the fan down screen any time, even if I had to pay dearly for it.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#43

Post by rocket_surgeron »

a2tech wrote: post #7

My Ford Edge has almost all the important controls accessible only through the touchscreen. If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature. Its terrible. Adjusting the seat warmers requires moving an onscreen slider which is weirdly overly sensitive and yet at the same time laggy. Adjusting it while driving is almost impossible without looking at the screen which…

>If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature

For every single millisecond after you check your backup camera to make sure there's no kid in the blind spot behind your car, your whole-ass body should be rotated with you head looking over your shoulder and out the rear window.

Unless you have a monster SUV that you can't see out of anyways, in which case use the screen.

In either case the driver should be spending an exact and precise 0.0% of the time a vehicle is in reverse manipulating any control not related to steering and acceleration.

"But what if the passeng.." Don't. Please don't.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#44

Post by LegitShady »

Around 5 years ago I was buying a car and tried out a whole bunch of them. One thing that stood out at the time was trying a Ford Fusion - not only were all the controls touch screen, the touch screen was painfully slow. You had to navigate pages of settings and page changes weren't instant. Even stopped the experience wasn't satisfactory. I ended up not buying that car 100% because the environmental controls (really all the controls) were so slow and bad.

Hilariously, though, its not just the car companies that are bad. Google used to have an acceptable solution with google maps and voice commands to change songs in google music. It worked without much effort. Today I can't get my pixel to reliably start music or change a song. Android auto, instead of being its own app, seemingly has to detect you're moving a car and then does stuff. It's a disaster - I'm not sure why anyone would have wanted it that way but I hate it, and have been thinking of getting a dedicated GPS unit instead.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#45

Post by robertlagrant »

sbradford26 wrote: post #39
xyzelement wrote: post #25

As someone who doesn't want to navigate the touchscreens, I love that my 2021 Highlander has physical climate controls. But I also realized that you no longer need them. My wife set her climate control to 70 degrees and never touched it since. In the winter it warms her up, in the summer it cools her down. Her car is a perfect 70 degrees all year round. So for her, it doesn't matter how inaccessible the controls are,…

Yeah I think if manufacturers do a good job you don't really have to adjust the temperature often. But also it is also a learning curve for some people. My dad has a brand new F150 that he is always adjusting the temperature up and down and turning off the auto fan. It very much is the setting the thermostat higher in an attempt to heat the house faster.

> It very much is the setting the thermostat higher in an attempt to heat the house faster.

This bugs me :) Having said that, I don't know if some cars apply an s-curve to their heat output that you could hack by doing this, so I keep my opinion to myself when I see people doing it.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#46

Post by Pxtl »

I like my Prius Prime's climate controls. I have a lot of problems with the in-dash system in general, but two big permanent buttons for temperature and a menu screen for everything else seems right. My only complaint is that I'd like a physical button to cycle through blower modes, since I hate having the air blowing in my face.

And for navigating menus, there's a mini-screen just under the windshield that can be controlled by a d-pad on the steering wheel. I can manage the audio in every way without ever taking my hand off the wheel.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#47

Post by passwordoops »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #12
rkagerer wrote: post #8

Are there any reliable modern vehicles with a UI more like a decade or two ago? (eg. physical knobs and a dash that doesn't blind you)

Mazda and Honda both have said they will avoid touch screen for climate. They both use the three knob system (fan strength, temp, zones) and there is no possible improvement as far as I am concerned.

Honda did go the touchscreen route - or at least they did - one of my relatives has a 2017-ish civic sedan with climate on the touchscreen. It's an absolute pain, especially in winter where I like to start on high to make sure the windows are clear, then reduce the power as I'm driving.

Kudos to them if they reversed the decision. Touchscreens have no purpose on the dash except for navigation and maybe the rear camera

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#48

Post by Pxtl »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #43
a2tech wrote: post #7

My Ford Edge has almost all the important controls accessible only through the touchscreen. If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature. Its terrible. Adjusting the seat warmers requires moving an onscreen slider which is weirdly overly sensitive and yet at the same time laggy. Adjusting it while driving is almost impossible without looking at the screen which…

>If I'm in reverse for example I lose all ability to adjust the temperature, fan, or seat temperature For every single millisecond after you check your backup camera to make sure there's no kid in the blind spot behind your car, your whole-ass body should be rotated with you head looking over your shoulder and out the rear window. Unless you have a monster SUV that you can't see out of anyways, in which case use the…

What really? I find the side mirrors and the backup cam 10X better for lining up the car perfectly than doing the oldschool look-over-shoulder arm-over passenger seat thing.

Especially since the backup cam doesn't change in perspective as I crane my head to get the side of the car in view in the sideview mirrors.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#49

Post by waboremo »

culebron21 wrote: post #11

My impression is that almost everything that's made with touchscreen is a worse of an interface. I think the're four big reasons: 1) the notion of design has been subtly replaced with style; Sleek wins over functional. For instance, scroll bars on desktop UIs were thrown away, because they were too fat for phones, and phone UI now sets the trend. So nobody among designers cared that the scrollbar you see with periphe…

None of these reasons are exclusive to touchscreens, you haven't really justified why the touchscreen results in a worse experience. Even the scrollbar example, phones have those still, they just aren't the huge glossy things of windows XP. Or the idea that feature creep requires more items on the screen, when the reality is different, features get dropped and more things are hidden under different tabs. Which is a problem itself, but not the one you're describing.

I do agree however regarding accessibility. But again, this problem exists no matter the interface. Old people aren't thriving on desktops, they're struggling to manage flip phones with actual large buttons on them. We need to do more here, but I sincerely doubt changing the interface will solve the problem entirely.

Re: The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

#50

Post by ethbr0 »

culebron21 wrote: post #11

My impression is that almost everything that's made with touchscreen is a worse of an interface. I think the're four big reasons: 1) the notion of design has been subtly replaced with style; Sleek wins over functional. For instance, scroll bars on desktop UIs were thrown away, because they were too fat for phones, and phone UI now sets the trend. So nobody among designers cared that the scrollbar you see with periphe…

The problem is modern attempts to birfurcate UX into silos of efficiency-agnostic design art + implementation-only engineering.

If you call designers artists, remove objective KPIs, and give them free reign, you get one-button mice. Similarly, if you let engineers build something, you end up with git's cli.

In contrast, design and use been studied as a unified discipline since the early 1900s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

Taking decades to reinvent a preexisting organizational wheel is why "Humble" should be a corporate value in every company: learn from the past.

I drive a 2015 Hyundai Genesis. Why? Because I test drove recent Infinities and Mercedes (and I can't stand Lexus' grill). Knobs with tactile bumps work.

> Social network VK offered music playing, but over the last 5-6 years the number of taps it takes to start playing grew from 3 to 6 or 8 if you need a particular playlist

(Cue MySpace laughing in the corner, smugly rocking zero-touch autoplay since the early-00s)

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