I know car software is an afterthought for companies because most consumers don't make their car buying decisions based on how good the software is, but if any company made truly intuitive car software, I would be won as a customer.
Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
791–800 of 1001 posts
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#792Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly that is a problem with Subaru (and Honda from someone else?) and not physical buttons themselves. Just because some vehicles have a piss poor implementation doesn't mean the idea of physical is wrong. I have a 2015/16 Ford and Chevy with the infotainment screens - both have physical buttons and both respond instantly to my changes. They also both have an additional volume control on the steering wheel itself…
> Just because some vehicles have a piss poor implementation doesn't mean the idea of physical is wrong. Yes it does. We constantly ban entire classes of goods because some of them can be badly built or badly used by customers knowingly using them wrong . Sydney even banned a few hundred bars in 2013 because tenants were using alcohol then misbehaved on the public street. Of course, a proven track of horrible impleme…
This is great satire. I just can't understand how people go home at night knowing that this thing they built could easily have got right but they just got it so wrong. I think the big "system constraint" isn't so much the technical system but the business management system that clearly has to please "stakeholders" allows these flaws to keep continuing.
As a Sydneysider you know we like those shame pages for bad restaurants and the like, maybe we need one for crappy UX
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the driver was attempting to adjust non-critical features of wipers not turning them off and on We should be very careful not to include the kitchen sink in with "essential" items. Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not
> Turning the wipers off and on, is critical, adjusting delay timings is not You've never driven in rain, have you?
Fun story:
My ex (one of my best friends), born and raised in Seattle, used to give me serious grief anytime I mention rain in Boston or NYC. She had no belief in what I would describe.
Work finally ships her out to (NYC). She calls me up to say she just ran ~2meters from the hotel to the taxi and is soaking wet.
She has never commented on Seattle "rain" since.
REAL rain.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
The judgement should have been against tesla, not the customer. Wipers are essential and should not require fiddling
50:50 maybe? The customer, upon realising how shitty the car is, should have returned it as not fit for purpose
And risk having to go to court over whether it really is unfit? That's not something they should decide, that's something that regulators should have stopped before the car was even put on the market in the first place.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#795I know car software is an afterthought for companies because most consumers don't make their car buying decisions based on how good the software is, but if any company made truly intuitive car software, I would be won as a customer.
Isn't that what Tesla tried to do? I've heard their software was good. Or maybe I'm imagining that.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our Subaru has a physical volume knob. Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down. At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement.. Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading. This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous s…
i'm dropping my subaru for this among other reasons. 1. throttle response, move your foot to 20% and experience between no throttle and wide open as the 'turbos' kick in in my outback 2. every time we get near an intersection with bollards, it thinks it's a kid and slams on the brakes 3. you're not allowed to persist auto start disabling 4. you will be nagged for looking anywhere other than dead straight, especially…
Surely 5 is a warranty claim. I actually went through 3 head units on my 2014 Subaru XV with a very similar sounding issue.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#797Ideal world:
The only thing the screen does is backup camera and provide bluetooth connection to CarPlay and AA and _maybe_ some tucked away very rarely used settings for things I definitely don't need while driving. No car company is going to write software that is better than CarPlay because a: they aren't Apple and b: my phone is also where all of my music, podcasts, contacts, map history, etc. is located.
Everything else has a physical button.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't how tactile buttons in modern cars work. You're doing the same thing as pushing keys on a keyboard. The software can still be slow. Turn the physical volume dial on a car with a slow Apple CarPlay interface and tell me how that works out for you. Oh, it's too loud? But it takes 2 seconds for the software to respond due to lag and now you're fiddling with the volume button trying to not make it worse? A phy…
My car has this problem. I'm not sure if it's CarPlay specific or not because I've never played audio any other way.
I don't think it's CarPlay specific. I occasionally get similar erratic results for both volume and speed control on my Model 3 if I spin the steering wheel dials too quickly (and in the case of speed control, it's actually intended to be a supported function, spin it fast enough and go up in 5-mph increments instead of 1). I suspect it's just an artifact of that sort of infinite dial technology.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#799The US Navy is also replacing touch panels for Navy vessels with physical controls when they found that touch panels were part of the reason of some accidents with Navy vessels.
https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to...
As someone who has both a car with only a touch panel and a car with only physical controls, I prefer the physical controls every time, all the time.
Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
#800Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our Subaru has a physical volume knob. Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down. At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement.. Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading. This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous s…
I guess that's what we get when a rotary encoder is much much less expensive than a 4-6 gang potentiometer. And I also feel your pain with the car "booting up" phenomenon. I don't even have a particularly tech-heavy vehicle and upon starting the car the entire infotainment system feels like booting up a packard bell in 1996.
Is the problem that the same systems are used for car media and potentially other systems and that encoders "can" be more flexible if they need to be?