Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls • Hacker News Board

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#641

Post by anonytrary » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

Who thought of the "touch-screen in cars" idea and how did he bait the entire industry into copying such a shitty idea? Touch screens in cars don't even make sense in fully self-driving cars, since you'd just lay down in the backseat on your phone on your way to work.

I still have no idea how to work the screen in my dad's old car. I would literally have to pull over and whip out my phone to Google how to use the damn thing. It made setting/changing the music way harder than it should've been. No one wants to pull over to look up a dissertation on how to use change the channel on your radio.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#642

Post by nikanj » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #387

izacus wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer. It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen base…

What kills me is when "legacy" automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly. It's especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.

It works better in a sales pitch. "If you want to text your broker to punch in a few trades, it's just one button away!".

Nobody bothers to write sales copy saying "You can actually change the cabin temperature and the radio volume on this car"

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#643

Post by thesmok » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

robocat wrote: post #435

squarefoot wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch screens add multiple points of failure to a device that, if properly built, would last decades. A single glitch in a software driving a screen could render useless all touch inputs displayed on it, information loss aside. I'm all for mechanical switches everywhere. As for potentiometers, sliders etc, we already have optical and mechanical encoders that hardly fail, or if/when they do, it happens gracefully leav…

Multiple physical knobs and buttons add multiple points of failure: moving parts fail and even worse, they often fail intermittently. We all have that experience. Even optical encoders fail (I’ve had one fail on an engine, and obviously consumer mice, or the connectors fail). A modern touch screen is superbly reliable because it has no moving parts, and it can be tested. The (consumer grade) iPad touchscreen is very…

The iPad touchscreen is very reliable until you splash water on it. I don't think splashing a cup of water onto 1995 car dashboard would trigger any of the buttons.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#644

Post by nikanj » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

dublin wrote: post #329

setr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use the market as an example of it, because the producers shifted in (almost) unison, and bundled it with other more valuable features. The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is…

The Macbook touchbar holds a likely never-to-be-surpassed record for "The World's Most Useless Touchscreen". I literally cannot imagine how this UI abortion got to market. To me, the touchbar was the canary that Apple's innovation days were done. Sometimes, it's really NOT a good thing to "think different"(ly)...

It looks real nice on a render.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#645

Post by omegant » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 6:59 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #640

LMMojo wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens during turbulence when you can't accurately touch a specific point on the screen? It doesn't take much turbulence, either, as I cannot reliably use the GPS on my phone, while driving, when it's in its (very stable) mount, and I'm on an average paved road. Touch screen looks awesome on Star Trek, but in actual use it's an inaccurate, attention-magnet, nightmare.

Which control do you exactly need to adjust in the middle of a turbulence?

Most of them, as you find turbulence in all fases during the flight.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#646

Post by dannyw » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 7:03 AM UTC

WWLink wrote: post #458

GordonS wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I have Dell monitors, which are fantastic in every way bar one - they have invisible, capacitive buttons at the bottom right of the bezel. I literally have to put my face right up beside it and squint to have any idea where the buttons are. You can't easily see where they are, and you get no feedback at all when you press on them, and it seems to be 50/50 whether a press is registered. Horrible, horrib…

The newer ones ditched the capacitive buttons for regular pushbuttons. Unfortunately being budget constrained (or profit motivated) the buttons are the cheap kind that move your monitor when you poke at them (and make creaky sounds of course, to compliment the creaky sound the monitor stand makes haha). Still, it's an improvement.

Were there ever monitor buttons that didn’t move the monitor when you poke at them?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#647

Post by cosmotic » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 7:05 AM UTC

downerending wrote: post #404

cosmotic wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to replace the hardware. They also enable the completion of hardware design before the interface design is completed. While the plastic molds and mechanical designs are worked out, the interface and software development can continue.

That sounds good, but for some reason, design of "virtual" controls always seems to end up far inferior to physical ones. Perhaps the thought is "We'll just toss something out there and we can fix it later", as opposed to "We only have one shot at this so we better get it right". I'm reminded as well of web "app" interfaces. In the early days, with relatively fixed controls, one could often navigate sites more easily…

Yeah, sorry, I should have been clearer on my opinion on the matter: virtual controls are almost always worse than physical ones.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#648

Post by azepoi » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 7:14 AM UTC

Real buttons provide tactile feedback. Plus they don't move around for each menu screen and with software updates. They can be operated by muscle memory. Buttons also provide information about the current state (think ventilation/heat). It's not about comfort but security that is maintaining visibility while keeping eyes on the road.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#649

Post by bialpio » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #601

bialpio wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.

I suspect you’re assuming too much about Tesla buyers. You are overlooking the possibility that the product is actually good.

It's all subjective, to me the touch screen on Model 3 is a deal breaker - I don't want to make this big a compromise for something this expensive. Other people have different utility functions, but from my perspective it seems that part of the reason to buy it is Tesla hype. It's a car, it moves me from point A to B, it gets stuck in the traffic exactly like everyone else's car, am I really getting ~$10k more worth out of it compared to other products?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#650

Post by nettdata » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 7:17 AM UTC

omegant wrote: post #645

numpad0 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which control do you exactly need to adjust in the middle of a turbulence?

Most of them, as you find turbulence in all fases during the flight.

Roll? Pitch? Yaw? Engine RPM? Prop pitch?

Those are “most” of the controls... none of which require touchscreens.

What controls are you referring to specifically?