Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens • Hacker News Board

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#881

Post by toast0 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

patentatt wrote: post #752

acapybara wrote: post #647

Earlier 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.

You can't really use a user facing pot for volume control when you've also got volume control buttons on the steering wheel and keywords for voice control.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#882

Post by nsxwolf » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

electrondood wrote: post #857

smaudet wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can immediately think of several situations where that is not at all possible to do. Construction, cliff roads, country roads, etc. Tesla are unsafe death traps by design.

[flagged]

Pulling over to adjust the wiper speed? Come on now.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#883

Post by concordDance » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #832

concordDance wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla are unsafe death traps by design. This is completely untrue by third party metrics (both governmental and not).

They meet crash standards, yes. But the interior design of them encourages unsafe driving. Between putting almost everything inside a touch screen and pushing autopilot (which encourages drivers to pay attention less), they are creating more distractions from controlling their 2-ton metal boxes. Drivers are licensed operators of heavy machinery that travels at high speed. Let's not encourage systems that turn us into…

If they were "death traps" the stats would have them as the most dangerous cars on the road rather than one of the safest (in terms of deaths per mile). The grandparent was speaking absolute nonsense.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#884

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

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...

At least my Corolla doesn't persist the screen--and it's instantly dismissed if I go into reverse and the backup camera activates. The driver assist stuff is fairly mild which is good because it's prone to errors. It routinely gets confused about what constitutes a lane, beeping about my not following something that isn't actually a lane. Usually something on the road but I've been scolded for not respecting the shadow of an electric wire. It also thinks I'm not holding the wheel when I'm in a very gentle high speed turn--there's a spot where the expressway gently curves that's very prone to triggering it.

The adaptive cruise is pretty good, it's been fooled once by two cars moving in front of me at the same time and it appears to have no understanding of cars with huge speed differences. (Bozos that enter the road at half the speed limit.) It also refuses to operate below 28 mph which I dislike because cruise control is good for using the engine to hold your speed down on hills--and there's a certain 25 mph mountain road I sometimes drive. Yeah, maybe the adaptive stuff can't work but at least give me basic control so I don't need to use my brakes!

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#885

Post by throwaway09223 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

postingawayonhn wrote: post #705

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…

I love my induction stove with touch buttons. Easiest stove I have ever had to clean. Just like wiping any other part of the bench.

My gas stove has both: Control knobs for burners, and non-tactile buttons on a display.

The control knobs are extremely easy to clean: I just pull them off and throw them in the dishwasher.

The display is never clean. It has grease on it and I can't ever scrub it hard or use caustics for fear of damaging it.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#886

Post by atoav » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

sd9 wrote: post #555

atoav wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> physical layout of buttons is usually stateless - press button thing turns on, press it again it turns off Not to be pedantic, but that is a state. But I get what you mean: the button has a fixed place. Know your car well enough and you won't even need to look there to turn the thing off or on.

> stateful UI OP means that the screen has different modes that you traverse between, the car is still stateful.

A switch with two positions is still a stateful UI unless it is a momentary push button without LED as the position of the switch represents the state of the system.

But gotcha, this depends on your definition of "stateful UI"

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#887

Post by htrp » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #769

randallsquared wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortening a delay timing has the same effect as turning the wiper on in some rain conditions.

I can't help but feel like we've made a mistake by concentrating so many of the people who design our standard software UX patterns in California. From Tesla designing car interfaces that don't understand how wipers need to work to Apple designing weather apps that don't clearly communicate wind chill to smartphones that require use of the touchscreen to answer a phone call rendering it impossible to answer while wea…

Self driving cars don't work in snow.....

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#888

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #620

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judgement should have been against tesla, not the customer. Wipers are essential and should not require fiddling

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

It's a critical function--high speed in light rain will cause problems from the rubber moving across basically dry glass, low/intermittent speed in heavy rain won't clear your view properly.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#889

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #621

zamnos wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do auto insurance rates on touch screen cars show this to be the case? Cars with touch screens have been around long enough that they should have data, and consequently be charging more for insurance on those cars if they are is that is indeed the case.

Auto insurance models like many other insurance models are often not that smart. The insurance company will charge more of there is more claims payout, but they also want to attract certain client segments and compete with competitors. Also, claim rates have all kind of confounding factors. Maybe a car is safer but more prone to theft, or more dangerous but easier to repair, or has better controls but is driven by in…

Yup, what sort of driver a given car model attracts is a substantial factor in the rates. Just try to insure a sports car to see this!

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#890

Post by hinkley » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #189

I wouldn't mind touchscreens as long as these imbecile developers would strictly limit UI response time to under 16ms. In no world where you're barrelling 3,000+ lbs of mass at tens of miles an hour should you be distracted by some moronic app or subsystem failing to respond in time because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." Any software running as a part of a motor vehicle should be federally…

Signing off on interactions has usually been an iterative process and so on most projects there's a bit of frog boiling going on.

The logarithmic increase in set/insert times as your user base swells by orders of magnitude, for instance. This was all fine when we had 100 test users in our database. Response time is not so great with 100k. The first app I ever did performance tuning on essentially had time series data and (when I got there) quadratic search time with 2 criteria. Nobody before me had bothered putting a year's worth of data into the sample data, let alone 5. They also hadn't dreamed of 3 search criteria (surprise, cubic time!) Of course before me the app was too slow to care - literally could watch the UI paint it was so slow.

When you have two buttons on the interface everything is snappy. Each new button should reasonably expect logarithmic overhead, decent designs often add square root overhead (memory costs on real hardware are n^0.5), and bad designs add constant or quadratic overhead, and either nobody checks or is so focused on the deadline that they can't see the project burning down around them. Every day that click takes a few milliseconds longer.