European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

I'd be fine with one that works like the Taptic engine on iPhones or how ever the trackpad on my Macbook does. It's a solid surface with no moving parts but it clicks when you press it and it feels 100% the same as pressing a physical button. It's way different than haptic feedback done with just the vibrator motor.

no feedback? 🤔

either the button or an indicator lights up or you see/hear what the button is supposed to activate or stop

Some Teslas have their windscreen wiper settings on the touchscreen.

Temperature control or defrost

In my Subaru, hvac is three large distinctive knobs I can use without looking. In my Tesla, it’s more automatic so I need to change it less, but it’s all in touch screen menus

There's actually a good number of things: windshield wipers, blinkers, cruise control, climate control, defrost, headlights, hazards, and gear (prndl). You'd be surprised at which of these some companies have tried to put on the touch screen.

Now im imagining a spaceship with all the controls only on one big touchscreen

You do though. Without legislations, cars wouldn't have safety features by default like crumple zones, airbags etc. Without legislations, companies could do whatever they want to pad their bottom line. You need laws to define what is and isn't acceptable, especially when it comes to safety.

I won't. And I don't need legislation to filter my purchases. I need legislation to filter the number of drivers using a touchscreen behind me on the highway.

As Teslas and cars like it become more popular (especially in the EV space), more automakers will be adding touch screens. A lot of Fords new cars have them for instance. I was in a Hyundai rental a few months ago and it has a touch screen. I personally think it's a trend that will at some point be checked by the NHTSA or similar because they already know interacting with a phone slows reaction times, is distracting, and contributes to accidents. Why putting what is essentially a larger version of a smart phone on the dash should be better somehow is a question I've had since Tesla first started doing it.

Because it is a dependency for most things that buyers want in their cars. Not a technical dependency but cou cannot get Climate Control without a Touch screen in Some Cars for example.

doesn't make sense

Who's taking about legislation?

It’s really hard to find a car to buy that doesn’t use touch screens - they slap them on everything. Car quality in general has declined tbh - my modern Honda Civic was a fucking lemon.

If you read the article this is specifically about things needed to operate the car. Radios and AC or whatever is fine, but car manufacturers are starting to move things actually needed like turn signals into touch controls, and that is not okay.

Clarify allowed. Is it actually illegal in the EU to turn on the radio or air conditioning while driving unless the buttons allow you to do it from the steering wheel?

This differ by countries. Here I'm required by law to operate the car as needed to operate it safely.

If the cloud vanish, I am allowed to put sunglasses, if I get vapor on my windshield I am allowed to push the button to remove it and so on.

But you have to do it safely and smartly. If you get in an accident that you would have been able to prevent otherwise, you may be found at fault. Even if you didn't cause it.

Hands on 10 and 2 while operating the 2 ton death trap!

Didn't Tesla put the wiper settings on the center console

So if my windows fog over I shouldn't be able to put the defrost on?

Technically, you know vehicles went 80 years without any steering controls? Buttons on the wheel still isn't a requirement.

Suspect it depends on where you live, but you're not wrong.

I think I've driven a million kilometres by now, it's all become so fucking boring and second nature, that you start really being sloppy and distracted. Because you gained so much experience, you start to (unconciously) overestimate your skills.

But the two hands thing really is necessary for if you hit something slippy or need to make an unexpected manoeuvre. The risks of driving are incredibly low, but if shit does hit the fan you're in for a world of trouble if you're doing something else.

"allowed"? where do you live with such laws?

Maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and all the functionality packed in to them has created a “touch screen == high tech” association in the general public.

But those of us who work with tech rather than just consuming it know the difference between functionality and UI. And we use nice physical interfaces like mouse + kb to interact with various tech all day, even if we use our phones too.

It's not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.

all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards

I never thought of it this way, but it make sense.

To be fair you probably already had software in engine before 2000.

In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.

The difference for me is that my phone is sitting in a holder stuck to the windscreen and looking at it means I'm only slightly looking away from the road, so I will still see movement in my peripheral vision.

By contrast, a large touchscreen in the middle of the dash necessarily means taking my eyes entirely off the road and probably also adjusting to the brightness of the display.

Neither are great, but one is worse than the other

Agreed, but what the heck car do you drive that's as light as 2000 pounds??

Tesla for a very long time had wiper speed on the touch screen. Wipers were supposed to be automatic so they didn't provide physical controls. But of course auto wipers don't work all the time and Tesla's camera detector is particularly bad. They since changed the steering button to bring up touch control.

Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.

It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.

That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.

Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.

Tesla and VW’s idiotic light controls are touch (but not a screen) so you have to take your eyes off the road to turn fog lights on and off. The panel is completely flat and there’s a risk you might turn the main beam off. I mean, the mind boggles.

I know about Aç and volume controls. I hope the rest are not (yet) on touch screens.

I think on the newly revised model 3, Tesla removed the steering column stalks completely.

When I’m driving I absolutely don’t want to dig through non-tactile menus just so I can adjust the climate or turn on my heated seat.

Look at Mr. Fancypants over here who can afford a heated seat subscription.

Touch controls on induction stoves do make some sense though. It simplified cleaning a lot when all you have to clean is a single large pane of glass

I think touch controls make sense in cars, but only for navigation and advanced settings, like for how long the headlights should stay on when you leave the car, should the mirrors fold when you lock the car, stuff like that.

Everything else should have a button.

Man I HATE touch controls, especially on stoves. Any time I use them I bitch and moan chronically.

i wish that still existed, there's conversions for some modern cars, but it has basically vanished.

welp, gotta stock up on spare parts for my little nugget i guess...

I’m imagining etch-a-sketch plan routing.

My 2012 Pathfinder was the last year of that generation and had navigation designed before UX was really emphasized. It mainly relies on physical buttons and it's overall terrible. Part of it involves an iPod-like scroll wheel, which is actually kinda nice to control zoom but that display is another kind of terrible.

Read the full comment before replying you lemon

Mate there's like, a whole paragraph left in my comment. You can't safely type any navigation information while driving. If you want to use voice control to navigate, it doesn't really matter if it's physical controls or a touch screen. Maybe read the whole comment where all of this was already addressed.

Ok, lets hear your idea for how to navigate while driving. Please don't say voice control, because voice control rarely works as needed.

Epic downvotes

Congratulations! You have now opened up the navigation tab, giving you convenient access to the many info and control screens for vehicle functions!

Your next press will take you to the climate menu (if you hit the right spot this time) where you can browse a complicated set of icons and visual aids we made way too stylish and modern to understand at a glance. Eventually I'm sure you'll figure out the very intuitive way that you can change the direction of AC airflow by swiping near the digital version of your vent and staring at it the whole time because there's no feedback on how far you're moving it except for the subtle, minimalist misty lines coming off the graphic~

According to a friend of mine the actor who played Mr. Miyagi would buy a lot of weed and sell joints he rolled himself to people who wanted a joint rolled by Mr Miyagi.

I really freaken wish I had some evidence for this story since it is the weirdest one I know.

If you brick your car's firmware, at least you can keep driving without unreasonable levels of difficulty or distraction

That's impossible for a large portion of safety critical systems. Engines don't run without a controller, they literally control the fuel injection valves (and have done so for decades). Brake systems have physical failsafes for when the electronics die (I.e. basic hydraulics without the booster), but you should not be able to move a vehicle without a working brake system after it stopped.

The shitton of software running modern cars is there for good reason (at least large chunks of it), lots of which is safety, especially in the drivetrain.

It's completely different for infotainment, which I agree the vehicle should be able to function without (although the dashboard must work)

Radio???

You can just feel your way around. If all the buttons have the same shape, sure, you can't, but they don't have the same shape. For example, if one button has a little raised nub, like the F key in keyboards, you know immediately which button your finger is on.

You don't have to take your eyes off the road to operate a control. You might need to learn where some are in a new car, but then you instinctively reach for and operate the ones you use all the time. It's muscle memory.

This is not the case in a touch screen where controls may or may not be visible at any given time and you have no chance of operating them unless you physically look at the screen to control where you touch it. Maybe this arrangement is fine for some non-critical functions, but it absolutely isn't for critical ones.

What is worse is that cars from Tesla are even getting rid of indicator stalks which is fantasically dangerous. Maybe it's not a big deal in the US where roundabouts are uncommon but they are all over the place in Europe and the rest of the world and lack of indicators will cause crashes and fatalities. Just so Elon Musk could save a few bucks on a stalk. And if that results in a lower EuroNCAP score then boohoo for him. I can imagine the raging and legal threats that he'll engage in if that happens.

Yeah there's that too. It really isn't practical. At the very least you want some sort of tactile feedback so you have confirmation "yes I pressed the thing"

emacs auto

Well at some point I expect zooming a map to work without lag. I assumed we were talking about new cars here.

Our other car is a 9 year old Mercedes and physical zoom is super nice there.

The actual issue on the Skoda is not that it doesn't zoom smoothly but that it stops following your car when you zoom. It instead stayes fixed.

99 honda Civic. I loved that car. Abused the hell out of it because I was young and dumb, barely took care of it, and it still made it to 225k miles. Probably would have lasted longer but I got into a bad accident with it and it started leaking oil after that.

most definitely that. not the other. The guy who played Pavel Checkov, the Enterprise's navigator. Not the noted author born in 1860.

I've never heard the term "flushed the mouse". I tried to google it but all I got are -people flushing live mice down the toilet (?) and -the movie flushed away. Can you elaborate?

Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don't give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it's quite possible that the button wasn't pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It's a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it's done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.

That's how new cars are made. Just gotta find the cussy.

Head out on the highway!

This is insane. Why is it illegal to use a phone while driving (here in the UK at least) but not that? They are basically the same thing!

Ford? If so I feel your pain. The controls for the ventilation in their infotainment system are godawful. The time between input and output is so long that you have to look down to hit the "button" to bring up the ventilation menu, look back to the road while it takes 2 literal seconds for the menu to pop up, then look back down to the diagram of the vents to decide what you want blowing or not blowing, hit the right "buttons" and then wait for the thing to respond and do what you asked. Meanwhile you've gone 1/4 mile at highway speeds with your eyes barely on the road.

What was wrong with a dial with all the possible vent combinations? I want the defroster on and I want hot air on my feet? That's at 7 o'clock. Just blast my face? 12 noon. It was simple, it worked. It did not require looking away from the road once you were familiar with it.

For someone who's the primary driver of a vehicle that's a good option, but there are plenty of Teslas out there that get driven often by secondary drivers who aren't familiar with the specific voice commands and IMO aren't going to learn them. Some standardization for controls is a good thing and although physical controls can vary, they're usually enough alike to easily figure them out. That's not going to happen with a touch screen.

Neither of those options look at all appealing to me

Spoken like an Apple fan. 🙂

I think they both look nice, but I wouldn't want to have to actually use either of them, especially while driving a car.

This is an excellent example of why Steve Jobs was right to make Bill Atkinson add rounded rectangles to Mac OS

Of the two, the second looks easier to use. The first looks like everything is buried under "child-safe" menus you have to dig through to do anything. That said, they both kind of suck.

Just because they look all bubbly doesn't mean it's a better UI.

I went for a few years renting higher end cars on a regular basis. The primary functions on every single one of the "modern cars" were easy to figure out with the exception of the Teslas. For occasional use Tesla's controls are absurdly cumbersome verging on dangerous.

I can understand your experience would be different if it's your primary ride.

funnily enough, we already had an abbreviation for "IOW" (In Other Words), "I.E." (Id Est - That Is)

I had to Google it too! "In other words"

The only semi nice thing my car did for the touchscreen is let you put shortcuts at the top, which is just the stupid screen for the heated seats. Everything else has a button in a easy to reach spot. I use Android Auto and I only have to bring up the actual car menu every few months, and not while driving. It isn't a perfect infotainment system, but it has certainly been the least annoying.