The design of in-car climate controls has gone backward

totally agree. In our previous apartment we had an oven with a touch screen and a stove with touch controls (no screen). They were our least favorite items at home. In a kitchen setting especially, it's very hard to operate touch interfaces.

Here's some good examples of what climate controls looked like before computers took over; automated, yet easily operated without even looking at them, and with actual text labels instead of confusing pictograms:

https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cold-comfort/cold-comfo...

There must be some bummed out designers in these companies who know better than to mediate all these tactile controls.

I bought a new car last year, and I didn't set out to buy the cheapest car on the lot, but I ended up buying an ecosport partially because I really liked that it has buttons for everything. This is probably because the car came stock with a 4" screen (the minimum required for the backup camera), but it's really nice having physical buttons for climate control, since pretty much everything else I looked at had touchscreen UI for nearly everything.

Plus, thanks to the excellent folks at cyanlabs[0], $150 worth of parts from a junkyard and I was able to get the larger screen so I can use Android Auto with the map at a usable size. I don't mind the touchscreen UI for something like selecting audio or map destination, since I can do that while parked. The only feature/option I actually miss from a higher optioned car is seatwarmers, which I'll probably add before next winter.

So yes, part of the reason I ended up in the cheapest car they sell is the better UI of the controls (that, and I liked the smaller physical size of the vehicle). I ended up spending ~20k less than I was originally budgeting for the edge. Sure, this is anecdotal and I realize I may be an outlier, but the UI was a major part of the purchase decision and I know enough about the industry to confidently state that most of that extra money is pure profit margin for Ford. BOM cost on an optioned up Edge isn't significantly higher than the base ecosport, so that is way worse profit margin for them.

Edit: forgot link [0] https://cyanlabs.net/applications/syn3updater/

I'm very happy to see that the author has included more than one factor in their analysis:

> "The main goal of climate controls is to make the passengers comfortable. PO Fanger defines thermal comfort as being influenced by six factors: air temperature, heat radiation, air flow, humidity, activity level, and clothing. The car can control the first four factors."

I would like to point out that direct conduction is also extremely important, and that radiation is generally more important than air temperature in daily life. However, it is difficult to directly control conduction and radiation - those are generally changed by changing air temperature.

In fact, liquid water is a bigger factor than any of the named factors, but we generally do not try to control how wet a person is with our HVAC systems.

Here's one tiny case study: A person is cold, because it is wintertime, and it is cold and overcast outside. Their windows are cold, but do not leak much air. After they pull the curtains closed, they feel warmer because their body is no longer radiating as much heat toward the window (you feel the relative difference in heat radiation).

They turn on their home heating system, which increases the temperature, but does not add total humidity. Thus the relative humidity and vapor pressure of water decrease and they perceive that the air has dried out. The home heater raises the air temperature relatively quickly, but their outside walls are cold-soaked and do not heat up quickly - they still feel a chill.

They turn on an oil-filled electric radiator. The radiator consumes 1400 Watts, much less than the home heating system (over 5,000 Watts), so it does not change air temperature much; but it does give the person some comfort.

They turn on a heating pad on the couch. It only consumes a few hundred Watts, but all of the heat is transmitted directly into the person and they warm up quickly.

The person also consumes a hot drink and dries off from the drizzle they walked through. As they dry off, they feel much warmer as their skin is no longer losing heat to water phase change (evaporation).

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Now, do I expect a car climate system to handle all of that? Not a bit. But we are always telling ourselves simplified stories. The actual story of comfort is very complicated.