71–80 of 1001 posts
Great trend for getting into a truck with cold, wet, gloved hands and wanting to do anything. Like adjust heat and seat heat and defrosters.
For the life of me I can't find the link, but there was an awesome HN or Reddit post a few years back where a designer tried to design a touchscreen experience that might work for cars that takes into account that drivers can't focus on the screen. It's been years since I've seen it so I probably don't remember the exact details, but I think it worked by the system working based on gestures wherever the drivers' hand…
It's going to be a decade of no synergy, of no programmability, of no softness.
Ideally there are semi flexible reconfigurable systems, with a couple physical buttons & knobs, and some touchscreen displays, and the phones can also via local area APIs be given permission to control & manipulate the car too.
But we just don't have a mature software ecosystem in general to support the complex assortment of peripherals (av, hvac, lighting, windows, seats, etc) that cars present. This is a crisis because it's one of the softest most configurable most attuneable things mankind has made, and we have only crude ability to carve in stone some choices that then will broadly apply. These systems are firmer than soft, and that's a broad problem the CS world in general has helped little with in the last decade (after extremely involved & interested work in uniquotous & pervasive computing simmered away).
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…
Apparently they're available for flight sim games, if I had the time and know-how, it'd be neat to bu one (e.g. on AliExpress) and integrate it to my car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gysmVPYX2Fc
Saw the Impreza’s 2024 redesign, apparently Subaru missed the memo. https://www.carscoops.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2024-Su... I recently test drove a Mazda, and while I’ve seen people online complain about their “commander knob” and lack of touch screen, I liked it pretty well. Screen up further on the dashboard is nice for glancing at maps.
"Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls."
That surprises me. I seem to recall having read something about the difficulty Tesla had in getting their fancy screens and how much they cost. $50 for a tiny one maybe.
For the life of me I can't find the link, but there was an awesome HN or Reddit post a few years back where a designer tried to design a touchscreen experience that might work for cars that takes into account that drivers can't focus on the screen. It's been years since I've seen it so I probably don't remember the exact details, but I think it worked by the system working based on gestures wherever the drivers' hand…
That solves one problem but now I have to memorize a bunch of arbitrary gestures. Still seems like a terrible experience overall.
That said, the general point of the article seems very correct, physical buttons have always felt radically superior to touch screens.
I love my touchscreen. It’s so much better than the knobs in my old car.
How so? You're the first person I've heard express this view, so I'm genuinely curious.
But for me the whole thing is set and forget, if I need to adjust volume it's a scroll wheel on my steering wheel -- air conditioning I never really need to adjust. Sat nav -- yes I need to adjust this occasionally, but it's either voice command or park and change the destination with a keyboard -- but I don't see this being different in any other car? (Maybe a scroll wheel with recent destinations?)
I actually don't understand what it is that drivers are changing so regularly that they need to take their eyes off the road and look at a screen or twiddle a knob?
My signular gripe is that there is no physical button to open the glove-box, which is an annoying but very infrequent occurance.