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Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

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Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#731

Post by oblio »

maxdo wrote: post #695

to all antiquarian fans. Car didn't stuck in time when you got your first car. Look at the latest modern cars, it knows when the rain starts, it has climate control so you don't need to rotate hit/cooling controls. To drive to front or back car knows itself, and you don't have to switch gears every minute or two. There is no parking break, it is automatic. Modern car is much, much SIMPLER, it will be more simpler, so…

Well, you're both right and wrong. You're right in that your main point is right.

You're wrong in that modern cars are much more complex than old cars for 2 reasons: reducing pollution (besides the point for this conversation) and safety. Safety makes a car much more complex.

And touch screens are apparent simplicity which reduces safety.

So they're a dumb idea for cars except for multimedia, as you put it.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#732

Post by moogly »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #354
cypress66 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, an SoC comparable to an iPad isn't $1000 more expensive than what they're using. More so, the current hardware they use is quite faster than the original 2010 iPad, yet the og iPad is dramatically more responsive than all these laggy cars.

Comparing Apples to oranges. The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense in optimizing the SW to perfection using budgets of millions and devs with wages in the six figures plus. Meanwhile automotive software is developed by the lowest paid and most crunched people in the industry, in line with the gaming industry, in bottom of the barrel, race to the bottom of cost cutting. Especially that in Aut…

> The iPad ran so smooth because Apple spared no dev time expense

I think you should specify which iPad here because the 1st gen iPad ran like a crippled sloth

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#733

Post by Unklejoe »

Can we talk about capacitive buttons while we’re at it? Worse in every way from a usability perspective. Supposedly more reliable, yet I’ve had plenty of failures.

My damn dishwasher has capacitive buttons…a dishwasher - something you use while your hands are wet like 90% of the time. Infuriating.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#734

Post by eschneider »

If I can’t operate it by feel with gloves on, I don’t want it. I usually turn off the dash lights at night to improve night vision so big displays are no good anyways. CarPlay is ok as it’ll do most of what I need by voice and if it doesn’t, it’s not critical.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#735

Post by jclardy »

ConcernedCoder wrote: post #636
TheFragenTaken wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that these cars pass safety certification, makes me question certifiers. It's illegal to look at your phone while driving, for good reason, but it's legal to fiddle with a damn computer screen, because it's part of the car. I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.

The fact that my touch screen will often display a distracting message that reminds me that it's unsafe to take my eyes off the road while driving and require someone to touch the "ok" button to dismiss it is the epitome of dangerous stupidity...

Yes, it is the most useless thing ever. I think my truck displays it maybe once per day? It isn't every drive, which ends up making it worse because I look to tap on the radio and I have to first reach across the entire display to hit OK, then wait for it to load, then tap the radio...If it was every drive I could just be programmed to tap the button without looking at it, which of course defeats the purpose of it in the first place.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#736

Post by john_the_writer »

Lio wrote: post #490
onion2k wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom does very little work to draw each frame. It does a handful of small calculations to update the game state, and then traverses a BSP tree and draws some vertical blocks for walls followed by a flood fill for the floor and ceiling (although I suspect that was missing on the TI-84 ports because filling is slow). Calculating and drawing a complex graph often requires far more operations.

That's what's wonderful about Doom. The simplicity of what it does belies the effort put into achieving that on limited hardware. When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product. I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering. If the stake holder care…

Yep.. and oddly the stake holder who want more features are the customer.

I want a radio, a cd player and AC. I don't even use the Bluetooth, because I don't talk on the phone when I drive.

The features on these new cars do IMHO too much.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#737

Post by john_the_writer »

barrkel wrote: post #496
DanielHB wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you make the UI software more performant the sourcing team just picks a cheaper SoC in order to cut costs. There is little incentive to bend your ass backwards to make performant software when cutting SoC costs doesn't come up on your team's KPIs for upper management

I guess that's why you only remove the delay loop just before shipping.

Feature flag it :)

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#738

Post by bjarneh »

tomatocracy wrote: post #531
bjarneh wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - the controls on my stove top How were these stove-top touch-buttons ever considered an upgrade to their predecessor? They always have no feedback, or that annoyingly high "beep" feedback. They are always slow to respond. They typically use only two or three buttons to control the actual temperature, forcing you to select location first, which is typically slow and terrible as well. Nobody in their right mind can…

Speaking of stove tops - Neff's "TwistPadFire" somehow manages what I previously thought was impossible - it actually takes touch buttons and makes them even worse. The control is a a magnetic circular thing you stick on a specific area on the stove top. It comes off the stove top so first of all you have to manage not to lose it / you have to find it before you can use the stove. Then when you try to use it you have…

Never heard of it; but after seeing a video demo; yikes! That idea looks dreadful. Even the little coin flip that's done with it after they're "finished" using it, makes it seem quite easy to misplace. Two bad ideas poorly stuck together with magnets :-)

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#739

Post by bdavbdav »

munificent wrote: post #214

I'm surprised the article didn't mention one of the key regulations that led to this as an unintended consequence: By law, cars in the US must now have a back-up camera. That means every car must have a screen. Given that, automakers figured they may as well use the damn thing for everything else too and cut costs. It wasn't just that they wanted to take away tactile controls to save money. It was that they had to ma…

I'm not sure thats it at all - Most brands have had the option of the non-touchscreen screen before this, and most luxury brands have had a non-touchscreen by default before they all started going touch.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#740

Post by john_the_writer »

Transfinity wrote: post #314
ISO-morphism wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the engineers are competent at developing software, and think that a lot of the quality issues are due to engineers abdicating authority over the software to managers and never saying "No, adding in that feature at this point in the timeline is going to make this a steaming pile of shit and I refuse to do it and still call myself a software engineer." I get that we have families to feed, but I've seen…

There's no incentive for an engineer to do that. Saying yes and delivering crap gets you a bonus, hard truths get you shuffled around or made redundant. There's no real consequence for delivering crap, so that's what happens. Contrast this with other engineering fields, where the engineer is truly responsible for the decisions they make. My civil engineer friends face losing their licenses, fines or jail time if they…

Yep agreed. If you raise a flag, you'll be looking for work. Head down and build crap, and you have a job for life. I see it all the time. I've lived it.

Sometimes you have to decide, do I build a better system, or do I feed my family. The craft and world suffer, but...

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