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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#661

Post by fleetingmoments »

shripadk wrote: post #627
robocat wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What happens if an object impacts a touchscreen and it breaks? I have my screens break (even behind a screen protector) and has failed to respond to touch. Imagine you are flying a plane and the touchscreen breaks due to impact. All your inputs are centralized behind that one touchscreen and you can no longer operate it. Wouldn't it be then better if there were multiple points of failure? You are decentralizing the i…

Have a spare screen that you can just slot in and carry on.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#662

Post by highmastdon »

My 2018 Opel Insignia also has mechanical dials and buttons for climate control and answering phone, setting cruise control and other “critical” things. But if you want to do detailed configuration for radio, sound balance, music etc you have a rich touch screen available with big buttons to hit. I find navigating between radio stations and navigation so much more accessible with touchscreen that I wouldn’t want these things in another way. Anything that has to be accessed using a joystick like interface should be on the touchscreen and critical one dial features on mechanical where possible.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#663

Post by t0mas88 »

Wistar wrote: post #403
samizdis wrote: post #8

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--all…

That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#664

Post by eru »

hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. 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 repl…

Cockpit design is strictly regulated by some very risk averse and conservative people. (And not just the cockpit, the passenger space as well.)

So it's hard to tell which parts of he design stem from being conservative and which parts actually enhance safety.

(I get your overall point. But your argument isn't really a good one for the point.)

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#665

Post by iamphilrae »

In my opinion, we need a mix of both. Trying to interact with an entertainment unit with some type of abstracted/bastardised joystick or touch pad is just plain awful. Whereas interacting using touchscreen is just so much simpler, plus allows for UIs that weren’t part of the original product development (e.g Apple CarPlay).

But for other things, we need dedicated physical controls that mean we don’t have to take our eyes off the road to use; for example, climate control, volume control, cruise control, hazard lights, etc.

A good manufacturer will integrate a mix of both, and user test at each stage of the manufacturing process to ensure what they’re doing is in the best interest of the user.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#666

Post by v8engine »

fleetingmoments wrote: post #661
shripadk wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if an object impacts a touchscreen and it breaks? I have my screens break (even behind a screen protector) and has failed to respond to touch. Imagine you are flying a plane and the touchscreen breaks due to impact. All your inputs are centralized behind that one touchscreen and you can no longer operate it. Wouldn't it be then better if there were multiple points of failure? You are decentralizing the i…

Have a spare screen that you can just slot in and carry on.

While your plane is falling from the sky?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#670

Post by mgkimsal »

ijidak wrote: post #630
im3w1l wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. Even so, a program for processing a switch or dial can be really short and simple. You can print it out on a sheet and check and double check every line of code for to make sure it's correct and all possibilities are accounted for. A program handling…

Billions? That sounds like a vast overestimate, no? Are there any programs that approach a billion lines of code?

I'd think a few npm dependencies should do the trick ;)

a quick search brought up https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-biggest-codebases-in-h... which reports google's codebase is around 2 billion LOC. MS Office comes in close to 50 million, for example.

Not sure how accurate these are, but seem to give some rough comparisons, and yeah, not too many things are billions of LOC.

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