Btw, I believe touch screens originally was more or less created for military vehicles, so I don’t buy a lot of comments in this thread.

The disappearance of buttons and knobs in cars is super frustrating. Thanks Elon and all the sheep copying his bad UX.

The DAB system is a thousand times better, and I can use it 90 percent of the time without looking at it. The tablet? No way.

Context is important, of course. Many have mentioned airliners with buttons surrounding a screen. That is very different from the automotive use case. For one thing, the cognitive load required to interact with a full touch screen or one with buttons and knobs around the periphery is much comparable. The difference is that pilots are able to take shift their sight and attention to the display for as long as necessary to operate it. Anything important during takeoff and landing is on a physical interface they can just reach for. Also, outside of single-seat fighter jets (which is an entirely different category) you have a copilot to assist. Anything works if there's another person who can focus on the UI while you do something else. And, of course, let's not forget that pilots have far more training on the aircraft they are flying than the average driver has on their vehicle. It isn't about experience, it's about having to pass tests to obtain qualification to operate the equipment.

The problem with touchscreens is cars is that it takes a non-trivial level of concentration, focus and physical interaction to operate them. Beyond that, they are fragile. Very fragile. I don't mean in the mechanical sense (not talking about breaking them). Randomly run your hand on the surface of your iPad and see what happens. That's a fragile UI. It's OK for a tablet, where you are focusing on that task. Not OK for a vehicle where you could end-up in some undetermined state if you touch the wrong area on the screen. I've been involved in some pretty high level evaluations of touch screen technology for aerospace. The outcome is always the same: For things that matter, add dedicated physical buttons.

A long time ago we worked on a project to add full touch-screen control for an industrial CNC machine. The end result was to abandon the idea completely when a mistake caused the Z axis to crash into the table at high speed, causing severe damage. As I said: Dangerous.

I would argue that the issue on the road has nothing to do with being able to operate the touch screen and everything to do with potentially causing a horrible accident due to the shift in focus. I am sure accidents have already happened because of touch screens. They are probably not recorded in statistics for us to be able to understand just how prevalent this might be. I know I still see tons of people messing with their smart phones while driving on the highway, which isn't a formula for safety.

"The easiest car to understand and operate, by a large margin, is the 2005 Volvo V70. The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h."

That's my car (2004 actually) and it fits like the proverbial glove. I am pretty anxious about getting a new car. I may just get a newer V70 - like a 2015.

Puzzled how these new interfaces passed regulators.

Why does that need to be tested? Does any driver exist on this planet, to whom this is not immediately and completely obvious?

> WHICH TESTS WERE PERFORMED? Activate the heated seat, increase temperature by two degrees, and start the defroster. Power on the radio and adjust the station to a specific channel (Sweden’s Program 1). Reset the trip computer. Lower the instrument lighting to the lowest level and turn off the center display.

It's only a matter of time, folks.

Edit: saw this has already been posted, which made me say "duh" again.

Oh, and OTA updates to the buttons too, please.

  - no touch screens
  - no embedded screen below the dash, instead screen is at instrument cluster height
  - in center column, where your hand natural can rest, a palm-sized wheel:
    - tactile feedback on rotation
    - multi-directional shifts (cardinal & diagonal)
    - pushing/clicking wheel is selection/confirmation
    - finger tips buttons surround wheel with shortcuts: 
      - navigation (either CarPlay/Android Auto nav app or GPS)
      - music (either radio or CarPlay/Android Auto currently playing music app)
      - favorites (can be radio, satellite, etc.) 
      - home (one click -> CarPlay Home, double click CarPlay Dashboard with map & media)
      - back

I've seen myriad folks passing judgement on these systems because they've lived with touch screens in cars for a very long time. I was lucky to skip that entire generation going from a minimal LCD digital screen straight to a Mazda with this system. It took a few weeks to feel comfortable, but not once did I ever feel as insecure as I have in a vehicle with an touch screen located below the instrument cluster line.

I think we've numbed ourselves to the routine distraction of touch screens which (generally) bypass most people's ability to mentally map physical buttons to specific actions. It's obvious as has been mentioned in this thread that touch screens are a massive cost saving (initially at least) and vehicle production timeline trick.

The huge missing story for touch screens is user experience and safety. The Mazda input system does take some time to learn, and it does divide my attention when I use it, but it has trained me to be more sparse with my interactions with the multimedia system and to rely far more on voice input control whenever I absolutely need to input data into the system (music selection, route finding, text response, etc.)

This isn't even getting into the surprisingly well-designed software and hardware intermingling that Mazda has accomplished between the instrument cluster (which features one central LCD gauge that mimicks the two real physical gauges that surround it) and the multimedia operating system navigation.

Here's some references for folks who find it interesting and are interested hardware/software design for safety in vehicles:

  - https://www.wardsauto.com/interiors/why-mazda-blindfolding-its-engineers-and-designers
  - https://www.mazda.com/en/innovation/technology/philosophy/human-centric/

"New cars must have dedicated physical controls for critical functions A, B, and C, and always-present displays (physical or otherwise) for critical info X and Y"

Can leave room for nonessential functionality to live on a touch screen

I think it's a safety issue and I think manufacturers will never be motivated to do it otherwise

What controls are we talking about? Air conditioning? Radio? What else? I've always felt the analog controls were made out of cheap plastic regardless of how expensive the car was.

After a few months in a car with tactile controls it is easy to turn on the A/C, radio, whatever with a quick glance or not looking at all.

Maybe the Prometheus era folks eventually got sick of touch screens and sleek, barely useful software that keeps changing for the sake of it.

To me it seems "why not both?" with proper thought to the UI is the right approach.

But I can not stand the touch screen.

What screens make sense for are maps and safety features like showing your cars relation to the road, people, or other cars.

Hopefully this is a fad

> A new study says that people who quit smoking have healthier lungs. Yet another groundbreaking story from the pages of the medical journal "DUH".

Critical (to me) operations like volume control, should be manageable from any context, and with physical controls for precision and no-look-requirements.

To those who want to say “use voice control” let me tell you about all the times I say “turn the fan speed up” and it turns it DOWN.

Maybe one day touch interfaces will evolve into serious performance but most of the time physical interfaces got enough performance as they were before smartphone came into play.

A physical knob, slider, or lever is always going to be a more effective control, but if it's only usable a small percentage of the time, it's pretty wasteful to have it always sitting there taking up space.

There are contexts in which the space and uniformity matters more, like smartphones and tablets, and contexts in which the effectiveness of the control matters more, like in a car.

Cars invented by computer people have touchscreens because they're cheap and easy, and because some computer people don't understand effective interface design. Of course, now cars invented by car people also have touchscreens because they're cheap and easy and because Tesla's getting away with it, so why can't they?

Having a round knob (or slider, but a round knob is standard in cars) always in the same place for volume control is better than having a touchscreen widget that might or might not be visible at all times, because it can be found by touch and doesn't require anyone to take their eyes off the road while driving, and because it can be spun or pushed quickly when needed.

This is really, really basic stuff.

We have computer with a full keyboard, that all of the commands can be entered, and many key combinations are possible, so a touch screen is not needed. Even many function should not need mouse but sometimes mouse is helpful, though.

Specifically in a car controls (I am sometimes passenger, not the driver), tries to lock some controls while car is moving, preventing the passenger from adjusting the controls. It is better to allow the passenger to adjust the controls in order that the driver will not be distracted from driving the car, I think.

I think that a reasonable design for buttons will including a numeric keypad. You can include other controls such as volume, channel, play/pause/stop/rewind/fast-forward/previous-track/next-track/eject, radio (AM/FM), and possibly a few other function if needed, but many function can be done by combination of other function, e.g. sequence of numbers for a more complicated function option

Even better than buttons are good old fashioned dials and knobs, those little twisty things that click into place and give you mechanical feedback when you are adjusting something in a car. Rocker switches are great too.

And I want my bottom buttons on my smartphone, too. No, I don't need the extra ~50 pixels at the bottom for some video or game, damn it.

If you have to design an interface with physical buttons you need to fully design that interface because you can't easily or cheaply update it after you ship it. This is expensive. This is in addition to physical buttons themselves being expensive.

With a touch screen a UI change is just a software update. The net effect of this is you can be lazy about UI/UX development because hey you can always fix it later.

For cars in particular, physical buttons allow some use without looking at the display. Touch screens do not.

Phones went touch screen because of their limited size, so much so that on iPhones we even lost the home button (which I still miss). Actually the home button is a perfect example because the swipe up gesture is strictly worse. Example: which direction is "up"? It depends on orientation. Also some apps are only in, say, landscape orientation so "up" is actually "right" from the user's perspective.

Driving with a giant iPad is generally suboptimal.

TBH, the test should have been more real world: - Turn off the heated seat (this is more likely than turning it on... most turn it on when getting in and turn it off later) - Turn on the wipers when rain starts - Use the washer fluid - Turn on the headlights when it gets dark - Change the navigation destination - Change the climate temperature - Change the vent direction

The results would have likely been more ambiguous for a car like the Tesla. Heated seats can be automated, so that would depend on whether the person liked the Tesla algorithm. Wipers and headlights are likely automated in the touchscreen car too. Voice works pretty well in some for navigation selection, and probably doesn't work well in the non-touchscreen cars.

OTOH, Tesla would do really poorly at climate temperature changes and vent direction. I suspect some other cars would fare badly at those too, but probably Tesla is uniqely bad at vent direction.

"$EXTREMELY_OBVIOUS_THING that literally everyone outside the corporations knows, $STUDY_FINDS"

...I lose a little bit of hope for humanity.

Physical knobs, levers, buttons etc. have superior usability and the fact that car manufacturers deliberately closed their eyes on that is only saying bad things about them.

What's even more despairing is seeing comments arguing in favor: "it's cheaper". Yeah well, it's also cheaper to die on the road because you couldn't press the touch-screen control and not live 20-50 more years and pay those pesky bills and food now, is it? Both what they say and what I said are complete non-sequiturs.

What's "cheaper" might seem like an awesome idea to some manager looking for a promotion but they never play the long game. They'll be gone and another more sensible human will take their place... eventually. Any day now... Maybe this century?...

[starts crying]

On a related note I would never own a vehicle that has software control over steering, drive train or brakes. This will be an unpopular opinion right now but I think it will sadly and unfortunately age well with time.

The lane keeping works very well too.

Only thing that sucks about the car is the CHADeMO fast charge port. There's a good number of them around here but not as many as CCS or Tesla and they're probably on their way out. Of course I don't road trip with it that much so it's not a huge deal for me personally.

There are some indie folks working on a CHADeMO/CCS dongle but it's non-trivial. It can't just be a dumb dongle. Basically has to emulate both sides. Will end up being expensive, and would also mean your car has a dongle. But then again in the future everything has a dongle.

I know how to use this but most people I know prefer to start with the touch screen.

My wife's new car, to many screens. My old car, buttons I can touch from memory without looking. The worst part about her car, you can customize the screen in front of the driver but not really. 3 items on the screen - circular thing, status thing, circular thing. There are a total of ~12 versions of the stuff in the circular thing. The information in circular things would work just fine on either side. However for some reason they spilt it 6+6. You want item from right circle to be on left side, nope! There is no reason why. It is a flat display (ie, on flat screen, not 3 screens) and it is just software. No reason for this. It is a display.

For everything that is normal, like AC, etc. please just stick to buttons!

Given the added cost of physical buttons, the compromise was a series of physical buttons along the edges of the screen.

One technique used to convince stakeholders that the added cost was worth it: have them sit an an office chair and ask them to complete tasks on each prototype while someone holding the back of their chair occasionally jerked it around to simulate vehicle movement. Never had objections from anyone who went through one of those presentations.

I have a 2002 Ford Focus, and I can use everything while still looking to the road. This is very important for my and everyone else's safety. Every other newer car I have driven needs much more attention to do simple tasks, and I'm traveling 80km/h at that point. This is dangerous.

I have read that Ford had a vehicle simulator to test cognitive loads of their consoles and dashboards during driving, but can't find the article now. Hope they're still using that, because new screens are a clear step back with no tactility.

That's not a good analogy. The main interface to the car is not the controls/screen, it's the steering wheel and pedals. The controls and screen are interacted with only intermittently. There is more information available allowing for automating most of the controls, and voice control for the rest, meaning the screen is mostly just used for visualization and the occasional action.

Tractors and boats have amazing layouts that accommodate your engagement in operating. Cars are full of gimmicks and showroom fluff

I miss the hold rotation knob so much.

That's lame. 3D printing buttons is a very quick and simple solution to that problem. They can even use my lasts-forever, contactless analog hall effect Void Switch design: https://github.com/riskable/void_switch

Keeping buttons--something that's so quick and easy to 3D print--in stock seems like a huge waste of storage space.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually been inside the vehicle.

Buttons are easier to find without looking. Nice tactile "you pressed it" feedback instantly.

And the fact that all of the cars have such horrible touchscreen UI design. We're used to Apple and Android, and what the cars have is so crappy. And it's always those junky feeling plastic screens. Like how is it they don't just hire Samsung or any tablet maker to build something nice and then hire good designers to just blatantly rip off Apple?

Honda seems about as good as any I've used. I was in a Ford the other day... it was horrible. Just unusable. I couldn't find how to turn the radio on. It was tucked away under "input" and it took me literally 5 taps to get from power off to music playing. And forget trying to tune the damn thing, I had to pull the car over before I realized those buttons were on the steering wheel.

Cars used to be really standard. You could hop into any car and you knew the radio was in the center console. And the lights were on the left (or right if you're foreign), but the brights turned on the same way in all cars. It's just the wild west right now. The designs aren't just non-standard, they're really bad. The tech the cars are using is really bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv7OLP41nlM

https://i0.wp.com/blog.carlider.com.br/wp-content/uploads/20...

Buttons and instruments would vary depending on the model, of course, but the satellites were there for a long time before being replaced with more usual levers.

In a sense, it's a design reminiscent of the Citroën Karin concept:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lkoNEToBeSo/YW2L9JqMzgI/AAAAAAAAg...

Creative Selection is a good book to read. It details the process at Apple from the dev who worked on the very first keyboard of iOS. The design of the keyboard + autocorrect needed to be good enough that people could type on it reasonably well. It was one of the credited reasons why the Newton was said to have failed so they put A LOT of effort into this feature of the handset.

Does this apply to a car screen? Probably. A car is also much bigger than a handheld device so maybe you don't have to choose. But in the end great design is always about making good choices.

This is also a car where when you slowly park close to something (bushes, wall) it has a complete meltdown as if in a car crash.

When in a traffic jam, 10 minutes later it loudly alerts "slow traffic ahead".

It even auto breaks in situations where I had plenty of response time, and then some more.

It feels like I'm in some sociology test. How far can we push this guy before he drives this piece of shit off a cliff? I imagine a team of engineers watching me on a live feed for Friday afternoon entertainment.

For some things (e.g., turning on blinkers, turning on a windshield wiper), a physical control may be the best choice.

For other things (e.g., scanning the map of an area, configuring trunk opening height), a touch screen may be the best choice.

And for yet other things (e.g., choosing a destination, finding a charging station), a voice command may be the best choice.

Finally, if we ever get fully-conversational self-driving cars at some point in the future, most physical controls may become unnecessary. For now, I'm OK having a modest number of physical controls for common everyday tasks and a touch-screen and voice commands for all other tasks.

And even worse, putting what would have been a physical button on an old dashboard, or car stereo, 2 levels down in a touchscreen menu. If we have to have touchscreens in cars, then at least put "the most used buttons" at the top-most level.

The current touchscreen-in-cars is a dangerous UX disaster.

Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been more accidents. Perhaps annual accidents statistics will increase as more cars get touchscreens.

I knew touchscreens were a nightmare path we were going down when I had the Sidekick phone and I was typing without looking at a very rapid clip, while the iPhone had come out and typing on a shitty feel-less keyboard became the latest fashion.

And here we are. I hit backspace probably 15 times typing this (and that's with word prediction). Not on an iPhone though.

The API and how it as accessed (e.g., OBD port, Bluetooth, USB-C) would be specified, along with an extension mechanism to allow car makers to optionally allow more than just the required things to be controlled in a way that wouldn't conflict with extensions from other makers.

Then go ahead and go full touchscreen if they want. I'll buy a nice third party set of controls and use that with the car, and since the API and interface is standardized I can move it to my next car and so on, and so not have to learn a new layout for each car.

I say "non-dedicated controls" above instead of "touchscreen" so that a manufacturer can't do something like have a knob and a couple buttons coupled with a screen where you use the screen (via touch or using the knob and buttons to navigate) to choose a set of functions from a menu tree, and then activate/adjust those settings with the knob and buttons, and say that they don't need to provide the interface and API because they are using physical controls.

I have the touch screen in my Porsche, as well as in my fiancée's Civic. But I definitely prefer the dial.

All that being said, there are some quirks. Mostly around CarPlay "losing" the focus. It might just be an app thing (it pretty much only happens in Apple Music). I'll scroll through some options, and just as I'm about to click something, the focus goes back to the first option.

One of the features of modern cars is conversational UIs (CUIs) that enable a truly hands-off approach from controls altogether, both touchscreen and analog.

I hardly use my car's touchscreen except for discoverability, and definitely not while driving. Speaking to the car is easier and more efficient:

- "I'm cold"

- "Turn on the windshield wipers"

- "Navigate to work"

CUIs have evolved to the point where controls are generally a hindrance to consumers and manufacturers both. Why include expensive, breakable analog controls when you can give the driver a better user experience hands off.

Lets have a home screen consisting of a 2x5 grid of icons, and because we have 14 icons to fit in, lets make that scrollable by swiping, but not give any visual indicator of that at all.

And just for fun, lets have half the icons overlap in functionality, so Radio, CD and USB Media are all different icons to get to mostly the same functionality, and we have two different settings icons, so if we did a better job of grouping functionality we could manage with <10 icons...

Why not testing the navigation system or the radio? I suspect they would not get the same results. Like who cares about changing the luminosity of the instrument system while driving?

Also, after having just read the title my immediate reaction was "duh". I've been aware of this ever since phones switched from keyboards to touchscreens. Back in the day I could text with the phone in my pocket, or while driving. Nowadays I have to steer with my leg so that I can operate the huge mobile phone with both hands.

Studies about how using the touchscreen was less efficient than physical buttons.

Shocker: It's still true!

My new phone which arrives shortly will have a full keyboard.

Also: Stay off my lawn.

I'm sure manufacturers have known since before the proliferation of touch screens in cars that it's a worse product, but they chose it for convenience. Maybe there's an argument that the convenience allows them to make things cheaper or spend the development budget elsewhere, but I'm not convinced it's a good trade-off. The lack of a tactile button is a huge downfall when one needs to keep their eyes on the road.

In a car, maybe they have a place for people who want customization; my personal take is the opposite though.

I just want something tactile where I know that I've depressed, turned or toggled the right knob without any visualization.

My cars have had simple analog buttons that I enjoy using and can switch without distraction through muscle memory.

What's next? Touch screen gear shifting? Touch screen horn? It's dumb IMHO.

Bad physical controls can be almost just as bad initially, but easier to remember and feel for.

But at least it doesn't happen very often, only half a dozen times a month...

Isn't technology progress wonderful? /s

That being said I don't actually use any features during driving, except for adjusting climate control and compulsively checking fuel economy.

I'm curious what features people miss now that physical controls are mostly gone.

Much simpler to remove something from a digital UI in a way that the consumer knows what's happened than it is to disable a physical button and leave the customer wondering why it no longer works.

I like physical buttons and dislike cars :)

Why do those have to be in conflict? I want a big screen, and physical buttons (for the most common car functions - AC/Heat, Volume Control, windshield control, etc.)

You have to wait for it to boot, button layouts change in different modes, it will be updated by the manufacturer.... All these things add to a feeling of less control which is not what I'd like in a manually driver car

If it's your car, this problem will solve itself for you in short order. There's not that many functions that a dashboard needs to do that you won't familiarize yourself with it in a month or two of driving.

Look to a computer for an example, some shortcuts that you probably use on your keyboard are downright arcane, but because you use it so frequently it's probably natural.

I can't speak to all cars, but this isn't the case for Tesla. It's a very good user experience. It may be inconsistent across manufacturers right now, but as that evens out I don't see a barrier to more adoption.

Driving a car with touch screens (new BMW or Mercedes) has left me very unimpressed. My 2016 VW Golf has actual buttons, switches, and knobs to twist and turn and press and flip.

Car reviewers, too, often say it's a shame that car manufacturers are switching to touch screen nonsense. It's such a shameful trend if you think about it. The BMW series of pre-2022 had buttons in the dashboard, but the upcoming new series will do away with those entirely.

Touch screens even find their way onto steering wheels and doors.

Of course, it's easy to understand why:

1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want.

Honestly, I hope European legislation makes it illegal at some point. For the sake of safety. With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch.

What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance!

So, now you need to do everything with an outstretched arm in a moving vehicle to operate tiny buttons on a flat touch screen.

Oh, and the touch screen can only barely hit 60 frames per second and often feels much slower. They're even saving costs on GPU power in their fancy luxury cars.

More generally: I want to be able to feel the state something is in. Whether it is push/pull, turn, or flip doesn't matter, but it has to physically maintain the state I put it in.

An exception to this of course are functions that are used temporarily, like the horn, and the wipers swipe-once. And if direction indicators turn off automatically, the input device has to change its state accordingly.

Not surprisingly, this test is highly contrived and nonsensical. Let's review:

> 1. Activate the heated seat, increase temperature by two degrees, and start the defroster.

> 2. Power on the radio and adjust the station to a specific channel (Sweden’s Program 1).

> 3. Reset the trip computer.

> 4. Lower the instrument lighting to the lowest level and turn off the center display.

1. Seats, steering wheel, air are warmed by the app before I leave. Seats and air temp are set on auto and I rarely have to change them during a trip. defroster is a button on the bottom.

2. I click a button and say "Play <Blah> on Spotify". Sometimes I play stuff from my phone. Four years in, I have not yet used the radio.

3. Car has auto trips from last charge, last park as well as two manual ones. They are burried deep, in the menu. But why is anyone resetting trip counters while driving on the highway?

4. Ugh, it's set on auto brightness and I've never touched it after setting it up. Switches to dark mode on sunset as well.

Touchscreens are better because you don't need to fiddle with the cars they come with.

If we had to dial every number we want to call manually, physical buttons on phones would outperform touchscreens too. But nobody does that anymore. And it is nicer to select the name of a friend on a touchscreen than to type it with physical keys.

Same goes for cars. Humans spending their time keeping the car in lane, stopping at red lights, starting when the light turns green, doing turns etc will phase out more and more over the next 10, 20 years.

The interaction we still want to have with a car is probably nicer on a touchscreen. Especially when you are not dabbling with a steering wheel anymore.

Stuff like seeing the route on a map, selecting waypoints etc. We would not want physical keys for that when we are at home at our computer, right? I think dedicated keys are just legacy from the "I'm busy with the steering wheel and need to do other stuff blindly" area.

Much of it will probably also move to voice control.

In a previous discussion someone mentioned that part of this trend toward screens in cars is that new cars are now required to have rear-view camera. So once you are required to have the screen, it's really almost nothing to waltz over to touch screens. Of note: the "winning" car is so old it doesn't have rear-view cameras.

https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive...

My steering wheel has volume controls and the environmental controls are still button based.

If Toyota half-way through shipping their latest car realize it's better to have two knobs on the dashboard, they can very easily add one if the dashboard is just one big touch screen.

I do agree with the premise that physical buttons and knobs are generally far superior to touchscreen UI's, at least for the common core basic things.

However, I don't agree that it's about the boomers, or the capitalists, or any other Internet strawman forcing something onto the masses against its wishes. I think it REALLY IS a matter of test audiences and "casuals" having tastes that differ from power users and other people that think deeply about a thing. You see this in many different domains.

I suspect that the engineers fighting them is really just a case of the hardware team and the software team not understanding the world the other lives in. The hardware team is working with a slow as molasses processor that is the only thing thats been approved for the ridiculously rugged life that a car CPU lives and the software people don't understand that just because a webkit rendering engine is completely fluid on their 6 month old Precision workstation it won't be on a 500mhz in dash processor.

* The one and only physical button car took 10 seconds total to complete their tasks

* Two touch-screen cars (Volvo C40 and Dacia Sandero) took only 13 seconds to complete the tasks

* Most touch-screen cars take 20-40 seconds

These results are certainly consistent with the hypothesis, "A moderately well-designed physical interface is likely to be better than an extremely well-designed touch-screen interface". But it's not really enough data to support the hypothesis that all physical interfaces are better than all touch-screen interfaces. You'd want to see what the curve looks like -- with it so close, it's quite possible that some, or even many, physical interfaces would take longer than 13 seconds for their benchmark.

And if you slow people down by 30% but reduce costs by a significant fraction, I think that's probably worth it.

Not so good for typing, but can be quite good when there's a good UI that narrows down options for you at each entered letter.

I think the big sticking point is usually climate control and radio since that's what people fiddle with most while driving. Maybe little things like the ride mode selector (but I'm not sure how many people actually fiddle with those sorts of things in practice). But nowadays the "radio" is rarely just radio or disc/cassette player. It's music, audiobooks, or podcasts off a phone. I don't really know how you do that with integrated controls that aren't screen based, like most luxury cars already have the little control wheel and also controls on the steering wheel. So what more would you need? Maybe some haptics on the control wheel to give you more feedback?

But maybe the jealousy is a too strong of a word.

The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design). Most people like the new trendy one and unfortunately in cars that's a large touchscreen.

Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.

Honda has features they implemented in some attempt to streamline the experience but you still get lost easily.

After having a few vehicles with large touchscreens and then buying an F-150 XL to simplify, I can't even describe the elated feeling of operating a vehicle where the screen does what it's supposed to do with the vital controls all being physical. Yeah, I look like peasant but I get to keep my sanity.

"UI revision 1.23: move the Passenger Seat Blender switch further away from the air conditioning controls"

Also, chalk me up as someone who has never heard a positive thing about car touch screens after a week or so of interaction.

Years ago when I was working in IT at FoMoCo I recall seeing a piece of paper on an office bulletin board outlining how they had managed to save like $40 on the production cost of a Taurus, a vehicle that at the time was about $20,000. Those savings were the result of multiple sub-$1 to several dollar cost savings tweaks made between production years.

Ford has built something like 8 million Tauri, save a few dollars on each of them and it adds up to real money, like enough to redecorate the executive cafeteria.

My favourite feature of touchscreens in cars is when you try to click a button but go over a bump[1] so your finger misses and you press something else. Genius.

I do get that touchscreens allow manufactures to add and remove controls though.

Rolling out UI changes for self-driving cars, like getting rid of the, knob behind the wheel, will help with safety no end.

1. Not sure what the bump was, probably the neighbour's kid or dog or something. Too busy trying to get the latest Smartless. That Will Arnet, what a card, etc, etc...

Gluing a single tablet is much faster.

Back in the day, you could easily tell the difference between an expensive high-quality amplifier and a molded piece-of-plastic mass-produced boombox.

Car companies are already kind of doing this, usually just a button or two on the steering wheel. But IMO the entire dash should be a bunch of blank configurable buttons.

Actually, Porsche Taycan apparently has an amazing knob. MKBHD was very impressed by it[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/BAZX9p2oGOg?t=631

While there has been a lot of progress made to date, much of it (IMO) has been around the low-hanging fruit kind of stuff. Sure, we've mapped a lot of roads and covered many of the basics. But none of the systems are really able to do human-level context awareness, like you see a bunch of kids running around near, but not on, the road a few hundred feet up, might want to slow down or at least be extra aware, or people clearly driving in "tourist mode", etc.

My personal assessment is that we are still 20+ years away from the point where the human driver is mostly along for the ride (and thus to the point of this thread, can fiddle with a poorly implemented touchscreen UI without risk). I am led to believe the ultimate solution is going to involve altering/enhancing the road infrastructure, along with the general improvements for the in-vehicle stuff (which itself has at least a decade of development still to go). Combine those things together, and we're still quite a ways off from the vision that was sold 10 years ago.

this is a unproductive conservative attitude

no I won’t get off your lawn

I’ve been burned by changing UIs but it’s the price we pay for progress

Mechanical keyboards have mastered haptics, replaceability and reliability over high repetitions. They could easily iterate over a mechanical keyboard housing that's custom, but the individual components within it stay completely interchangeable.

Also, why is it so hard to understand that touchscreens can be good if they've got haptics ? Is a mac-book-sized haptic-trigger motor THAT HARD to facilitate in a vehicle ? Is a blackberry like physically moving touchscreen a complete no-go ?

Lastly, I wonder if touchscreens can be used as a large capacitive backend to put physical buttons on top of. That way the UI can be designed independently, and the independently tested buttons get added last minute onto whichever grounding spot on the touchscreen is agreed upon by the designers.

I don't even like electronic climate controls. I drove a minivan last week that had a click-wheel for the blower speed, which inexplicably suffered from a several-second lag. Yes, multiple seconds before the fan speed changed, making the selection of one a ridiculous pain in the ass.

And any UI that makes you poke at a button or twiddle a dial to iterate through a list one item at a time, without showing the whole list at once, is a monumental failure. You see this blunder way too often, when there should simply be a drop-down list for a finite number of options.

Not quite. You need a rough idea of where the controls are going to be so you can make sure that the user can reach them. The placement of that "iPad sized capacitive touch screen" is incredibly important, especially if the user has to search for the control.

That's no less true with hardware controls, and I'm probably splitting hairs, but it's not as simple as just allowing for it. There is still hardware to consider early on.

And when manufacturers do forget to plan for it, and shovel a touchscreen into an old-design cockpit, it's super-obvious, and awful.

No they don't, just use the same ones as the previous model.

What are you going to need to do while driving?

Operate the headlights. Operate the wipers. Operate the climate control fan speeds, mode, and temperature. Operate the windows.

There are not an endless number of essential operations that cannot be foreseen at design time. These are the ones that should have single-purpose, fixed context physical controls.

Development/schedule impact is NRE, but any addition to COGS impacts the bottom line in every car.

On the cost of what? Driver safety?

> One important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started.

Having tactile, easily memorized controls with screens is a solved problem in the avionics industry. It's just that car makers refuse to learn any lessons from them.

1. The entire page hierarchy was only one level deep. You had 10 buttons that select a parameter, and a single data entry slider. So, with two hands, you could very rapidly manipulate parameters. I believe the Yamaha DX7 also had this, but what made the ESQ-1 cool was that the button usages were listed right on the digital readout next to the buttons themselves, rather than off to the side and hard-coded to the parameter. So it was like hitting a hardware button that could automatically remap.

2. Again unlike the DX7, there was no button-press needed to "edit" -- you just hit the button and moved the slider. It felt very natural to use even though it was technically a digital parameter being editing. If you needed additional editing power, you could still hunt for the other buttons outside of the 10 "screen" buttons.

I had one about 5 years ago, and swapped it for a JP-8000. I regret it. Very cool synth, very innovative UX.

In a clickwheel car the wheel moves the focus rect. You twist it blindly to approximately the right spot. Then you look at the screen and adjust one or two clicks and press to confirm. You won’t trigger the wrong action by accident and the focus rect makes the operation async: you don’t have to look while you turn the wheel, you can look at the screen when it suits you.

Physical dials and buttons for all the important controls for, y'know, driving the car - but for stuff like interacting with maps, streaming music and all the other CarPlay/Android Auto apps - what you've described is exactly what they have, and I got used to it very quickly. Even though the touchscreen works at low speed, I never use it.

I'm sure there are other manufacturers who have resisted the urge to copy Tesla's omni-screen and I'd love to know who they are.

Context-sensitive buttons are less awesome. They might be superior, if you memorize the combination, but they're decidedly inferior to touchscreens for the long tail of infrequently used features.

The study linked here focused on "simple" tasks, and the top performing cars probably have dedicated buttons for everything measured. The story would likely be very different for context sensitive buttons, and subjective reporting would likely be unreliable, if studies on the speed of mousing vs keyboarding are anything to go on [1].

[1]: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-r...

(I think it is not trivial to buy a dumb TV set that doesn't phone home… that'll soon hold for cars as well, I'm afraid.)

Like, just changing the window open/close button to a capacitive touch surface is bad enough - you rest your arm there, and the window opens.

But no, that wasn't bad enough for VW engineers - they reduced the number of buttons from 4 down to 2, + another(capacitive of course) button to switch between front and back windows. How do you know which ones are being controlled? The button lights up, of course! Don't you love looking down by your elbow to see which window you are about to control? It's great! So futuristic!

Another comment claims Audi no longer uses this system and went to touch as well.

Asynchronously, yes. And since there's physical feedback (detents in the turning), you can do it by feel eventually.

> you also can't just click the thing you want directly.

If it's off screen, you still have to do some kind of scrolling, and hope you don't inadvertently select something while trying to scroll. I do this ALL THE TIME with the touch screen I have.

Also, our car (BMW i3) has 8 programmable buttons (like old-school radio presets) that let me jump around in the user interface to frequently used screens.

Some niche things I use frequently (check my email for new GPS destinations, bypass FM auto-tuner, and advanced energy efficiency monitors) are buried two or three menus deep, so I created shortcuts for them. I use buttons 1, 3 and 8 all the time.

I use the jog dial more frequently than the shortcuts though. The menus provide fast access to more commonly used stuff (pair bluetooth, choose podcast / artist / album, control GPS zoom and routes, turn off screen). You can skip audio tracks and initiate phone calls to people in your phone book with dedicated buttons and a thumb dial on the steering wheel.

There are dedicated buttons and knobs for climate, and eco drivetrain modes.

I don't agree with not giving you a paper copy of the manual though, especially when its a luxury car. The digital manual should be in addition to the paper one. They shouldn't be pinching pennies like that.

In my current and previous cars, there's been a separate button which turns the AC heat to max, fans to max and directs it all at the windscreen.

When you suddenly lose visibility while driving, you definitely appreciate having a physical button in a known location that fixes the issue.

Then as I get away I turn the volume back up

You might think that, but lots of people complain about how BMWs have different turn signal stalk behavior than other cars.

Is there actually a way (apart from pulling a lever to open it and looking in a mirror if it is the type which flips open)?

The symbol on the fuel gauge indicating the side of the tank opening is a myth isn’t it? Doesn’t consistently hold true for my car, and people seem to remember the version the does - does the hose indicate the side of the flap or the side the hose needs to be on?

Other than that - it worked and somehow had all the needed papers to be street-legal.

Very unrelated.

Disabling chunks of the UI while the car is moving should be illegal. First, I learn how to use the car while it is not moving. Then, I have to re-learn the damned UI on the freeway with people cutting me off because I'm swerving or whatever.

I wonder what percentage of rental car accidents are caused by this effect.

2) Those who want to keep up appearances with their richer friends (often in group 1), but are financially savvy enough to lease rather than finance a loan, especially since they would not be caught dead in a five-year-old car. This is by far the largest group, and why there is (or has historically been) such huge depreciation on high end luxury/sports brands, excepting Lexus.

3) The group who really wants to fool people into thinking they have more money than they do, and actually takes the idiotic road of financing a depreciating asset in such a way that they will be perpetually "upside down" on it, and responsible for horrendous maintenance and repair bills once the warranty period is up.

I'm tempted to say that cars matter less here - they're usually parked out of sight - but I bike to a different neighborhood and there are young guys in pristine luxury cars cruising around. If you visit a different part of the countries the composition of cars changes too.

It definitely varies according to nationality, too. Perhaps it's a function of culture, insurance prices and petrol prices.

Put another way: I dispute the existence of touch interfaces - at least for cars - that aren't poorly designed. I will admit the possibility of the existence of touch interfaces for other things that aren't poor, but I'm becoming ever more skeptical of that over time as well.

However, I have figured out that I can turn on the turn signal and the 360 cam will turn on and stay on after the turn signal is off.

For anyone else curious, "allows the truck to be started without the clutch pedal depressed". This generally causes the vehicle to lurch forward as the engine starts with first gear already engaged.

I am curious if you've ever had to use that button?

It just requires context. How that context is critically important. If it is a hierarchical menu, then the context is the navigation path (i.e. the sequence of previous button pushes, each of which transitions from one state to the next). Importantly, with a fixed hierarchical menu, the path to a button's functionality doesn't change and can be memorized. With some audio feedback, the current state can also be announced, so that a person's mental state matches the state the interface is in.

There are several problems with touchscreens, not the least of which is the context issue. The next issue is there is no tactile feedback, which requires you to look at where you are touching, often because interactive things can appear anywhere.

Also, hard no to "just as bad". I have no issue with volume control buttons also being camera triggers on my phone, for example.

Details matter.

I'd love buttons with braille on the surface so I could read what they said without looking at them. Does someone make mems braille screens?

*edit, looks like there is a bunch of stuff in the works

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mems+braille+screen&iax=ima...

From experience, in aviation nothing is simple or cheap to replace. Cheaper than replacing the entire Garmin unit though, yes.

It gets others, too: https://www.insightcentral.net/threads/passenger-window-stuc...

Maybe. If new cars are all self driving, I could see manufacturers keeping with touchscreens. It's safer to stay distracted longer if you're not in direct control of the vehicle.

We own a second, gas car for long trips, but if you don't have a need for a second vehicle, you can supplement this with ride sharing, or vehicle rental. Would I like more range? Sure, it wouldn't hurt. But do I need it? Really very rarely, and there are certainly options to charge mid-day if I do.

I have a not-too-old Mazda 3, and will switch to an EV the day after Mazda comes out with a 200mile range EV.

That is the ideal scenario, but its not realistic. The fact is that there are situations where the driver needs to be able to turn the volume down, adjust the ac or whatever and they don't need a giant screen to do it - they need easily accessible controls that don't require them to take their eyes off the road.

You can wrap it in whatever justification you want, you're still arguing for a car to be an entertainment center first and a usable tool second.

I’ve always thought touchscreens were a huge hassle and terrible for anything you needed to do regularly without looking. I bought my current vehicle avoiding touchscreens.

But the assertion was it shouldn’t be a thing using any non-driving essential controls at all while driving, correct?

My car actually has both. I think the rear view mirror display is primarily intended to be used at night to avoid glare, and is enabled using the same toggle as a traditional prismatic anti-glare mirror. To keep the image at approximately the same scale as the real reflection, the image is significantly cropped compared to what is seen on the dash display. It is fine for situational awareness, but I never use it for backing up.