This is a win for consumers, touch screens are bloody awful when driving and take away far too much of your concentration
IMO the capacititive buttons with no feedback are even worse than the touch screen. at least with the touch screen, you will likely have a colored UI element on screen to press. with the cars that replace all the buttons with capacitive buttons with no feedback, theyre all the same color.
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.
That doesn’t work well in a car though. It works in a phone because you’re holding it, or a trackpad because you’re putting a lot of pressure on it. In a car it’s already shaking from the engine, road, etc. Plus those taps are generally much shorter and lighter and less likely to feel the vibration.
Just have it swerve when you press a button!
no feedback? 🤔
either the button or an indicator lights up or you see/hear what the button is supposed to activate or stop
*haptic feedback. The touch and press should be two different actions, not the same action. Otherwise, you need to look at a button to know where it is and if it did what it was supposed to do, which distracts you from driving.
Touchscreens are not that much better in this regard, IMO
do you also need haptic feedback with light switches at home? How do you know if they work or not?
Light switches are physical objects, when you touch them you are going to feel them moving.
So… yes.
Additionally, I’m not flipping light switches while controlling a giant machine capable of killing people. Not sure why they compared the two.
Of course I do. Imagine for a second not feeling the different light switches in the dark and turning on all the lights in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom.
Sure, I know which I’ve touched AFTER I’ve touched it. I need to know BEFORE I press it, without having to look.
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I do agree with you, though why not just not buy cars which have touch screen controls? You don’t need legislation to filter your purchases.
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 feel like I’m the only one here who is driving a car and not a spaceship. What’s there to interact with while you’re driving? Key multimedia buttons are already on the wheel.
Some Teslas have their windscreen wiper settings on the touchscreen.
It’s actually one of my biggest gripes …. Washer and single wipe are on a control stalk but wiper speed is on touch screen.
I think the theory is that wipers are automatic so you don’t usually need to control them manually, but that automation doesn’t work very well or maybe the rain sensor doesn’t work very well
The problem with automation is usually that while it can do 90% of the cases well, and that’s where it brings value, for safety critical stuff, like critical car components, there needs to be a way to quickly and easily override it.
In the 1994 Ford Mondeo I used to drive, if a truck with a poorly secured load and a questionably awake driver was barreling down the highway at 110-120 in a rainstorm, if I wanted to get the car ready to pass, it was one move to click the wiper into “wipe for your life” mode before the truck started to powerblast the windscreen with water splashing up from the tires.
I’m not sure if I could do that in a Tesla, especially since if it does it only when it would already be needed, that’s too late. And the thing is, even if the automation did work, how do I know 100% it does work when I do something that would be dangerous if it did not work?
Actually just now on my way home discovered a new feature ….
If I click the button for a single wipe, it also pops up the wiper dialog on the touch screen, so all the configurations are right there. You have to act fast before it disappears , so it’s possible that it’s always been there but I didn’t look at the screen right after pressing the button. Anyway, that greatly simplifies the process. While the controls are still touch screen at least I don’t have to click through the menu to find the controls
You can use the left scroll wheel on your steering wheel to adjust the wipers once you’ve pressed for a single wipe. Just click it right for more, left for less. No need to look at the screen at all really. There’s a little graphic on the wiper controls showing you this.
Is that what the little arrows onscreen are meant to say? I’ve been trying to click on them, since it is a touchscreen and I expect to click on controls
Edit: sweet . Thanks for the tip. I think the timeout was just too fast for me to have discovered it
That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard today
I think the latest models also have the gear selector (or whatever they’re called for automatics / EVs) on the touch screen, so you need to swipe up to put it into drive.
So… the entire car is bricked if that screen malfunctions and the car is not usable by those with poor motor skills in their right hand?
Or left hand for right-hand drive cars, but yes.
I watch the CarWow channel on YouTube and they review a lot of EV’s, and the host struggled with it - it would take him several attempts to get it into drive as he’d swipe up but not all the way so it would never actually engage. I guess in that case a software fix could be applied to make the control more sensitive but it’s still fucking stupid to have it there in the first place.
Also for more WTFs, on that same channel, they do these challenges where they drive a bunch of EVs on a route and see which one goes the furthest, which has the closest range to what the manufacture claims it’ll do and what happens to the vehicle when it runs out of battery. There was an instance where the Tesla ran out of charge, but they couldn’t open the recharging port because the little door is electronic.
Making it “more sensitive” could be awful. Imagine the carnage of suddenly dropping into reverse because a shirt sleeve brushed the button while reaching for something else.
Critical controls all need to be physical. Period. Putting something like rbgd mood lighting on… okay. That kinda makes sense.
But anything a driver might need while driving…. Dont have to reinvent the wheel. Which, is probably the biggest issue with Tesla’s. They were more interested in finding new ways of doing things than doing things well.
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
Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017
Touch screens should not be used for any controls needed to operate a car. You can’t use them without taking your eyes off the road.
Technically the only thing you’re allowed to fiddle with, while driving, is what you can operate from the steering wheel. You’re not supposed to fiddle with radio, AC etc. from the center console while driving even if it’s physical buttons.
I know people don’t drive like this, but you’re only allowed to take your hands off the steering wheel for changing gears if driving a manual, otherwise it’s two hands on there at all times…technically
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.
Wait… what? What???
Yeah, thank Tesla for that one. Because of course it was Tesla.
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.
The wording is probably similar here, but very few critical systems are not controllable from the steering wheel.
Wipers, volume, AC, cruise control are all controlled from the steering wheel of modern cars, there’s really not anything you need to do from the centre console to drive safely. If it’s not a critical system, you shouldn’t be using it, physical buttons or not.
I’ve never seen a car where you can adjust the AC from the wheel.
Same, I’ve got an Opel Corsa from 2016, so it’s pretty much brand new.
The only things in the wheel are the speed control, wipers, and default lights.
For everything else required for driving, such as fog lights, emergency lights, front and back Window heating, AC, radio, and of course the shift stick, I’ll need to remove a hand from the wheel.
Luckily for me, the Touchscreen in the middle only handles less important things like navigation and external music sources.
Wait, you don’t even get radio volume, next track etc on the wheel?
So if my windows fog over I shouldn’t be able to put the defrost on?
You should have configured your AC before you started driving.
I haven’t had windows fog up during a drive spontaneously since forever ago when AC became standard in even cheap vehicles since they dry the air.
I’m driving. There is not a drop of rain in the sky. 2 hours into my drive it starts raining and my windows fog up. Your answer is I should have turned on the defrost before I left. Interesting. Against reason and human nature. But interesting.
What kind of shit-buckets are you people driving that requires you to turn on defrost just because it starts raining!?
I regularly drive in conditions that go from sunny to rainy, or even sunny to snow/slush…that’s pretty much all our weather is where I live. I never have to start defrost mode while driving, ever. I use defrost to defrost and remove ice from the the car before I start driving, the AC keeps everything fine without me adjusting anything no matter the change of conditions while I’m driving.
I generally get cold. I don’t turn on the A/C unless it’s hot out. So generally what happens is, in winter (because of where I live and the amount of daily precipitation) I either leave the climate controls off or I turn them on when I get cold or when my windshield starts to fog over. Not everyone who drives a car drives a nice brand new car with nice modern brand new features.
I don’t know what kind of car you do drive but I will say your experience is probably not the norm and certainly not enough to justify your original statement. You keep using the term A/C which suggests to me that you have climate controls that either automatically adjust to a specific setting when you start the car, or you turn the A/C on every time you get in the car.
How much condensation builds up depends on a lot of factors. Your own body chemistry can add to it. I have a friend who runs hot and every time he gets in the car he cracks the window because if he doesn’t him sitting there will fog that window up.
AC also keeps the car warm you know…and yes, I tell it to keep my car at 21°C and it does just that. Its a Peugeot 308, medium trim level, that’s more than a decade old with +250k km on it, I’m not driving a nice new car at all. My wife’s VW up is exactly the same, also not new and definitely not a “nice” car.
Hands on 10 and 2 while operating the 2 ton death trap!
Actually your hands are supposed to be at 9 and 3
“allowed”? where do you live with such laws?
I’d rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.
Automotive vim when?
emacs auto
alias emacs=/usr/bin/vimno.
evil mode
I only have old vehicles and I’m actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff…
To change the temperature of the air, seats, or clear windows, I have to look down and across, away completely from the road, and watch my fingers press “buttons”. Or worse, use menus!
At some point it feels like I’ll crash because I can’t see through the fogged up window, or I’ll crash because I was looking at touch screen instead of road.
Not crashed yet, but lot swerves.
Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.
Touch screen, Vibration feedback/Color change or not, means that you have to look at what your hand is doing and not on the road.
A physical button means you can keep your eyes on the road and find the right button with easy.
So let’s be honest. At this point, touch screens are chosen by car makers because cost and not design. So essentially, safety is less important than cost for the car makers.
It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.
But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.
Enjoying tech is one thing, wanting touchscreens everywhere is another. If they were so cool as an input device, all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards from their desks.
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.
I have a love/hate relationship with phone touch screens. On the one hand it enables us to have controls that would be impossible on a phone, like selecting a point on a map, infinite variety of button controls, etc. On the other hand I can’t tell you how many times I’ve barely brushed the screen by accident and the damn thing is off doing something I didn’t want. “NO! DON’T SHUT OFF THE APP YOU…sigh”
As an IT guy I have a case of “familiarity breeds contempt” when it comes to tech. A lot of it feels unnecessary and overcomplicates things and increases the chance of a failure.
No one ever requested screens instead of buttons. It’s probably some BS some CEO came up with and forced the engineers to implement.
Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.
And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.
Don’t forget heating and cooling too. There’s a ton of things that are necessary to operate while the vehicle is in motion and should never be delegated to a touchscreen.
I’m fine with touchscreens for in car entertainment for the back seats and maybe a passenger one with the appropriate shutter technology to block the driver’s view. None of those things are important for vehicle safety… but if there is a speaker that the passengers can control there needs to be a mute button for the driver to turn that shit off too :)
I assume steering too, right?
i.e. a “If you brick your car’s firmware, at least you can keep driving without unreasonable levels of difficulty or distraction” situation.
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)
I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.
It states this fact in the article, although that 5 star rated is highly coveted so if they say a car with no touch buttons will only get 2/3 stars things will change pretty quick, at least in europe
BuT tHeRe Is VoIcE cOnTrOl!!!
Yes but if I have two friends on board that are talking I won’t say
“SILENCE EVERYONE! I WILL NOW ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE NAVIGATIOM DESTINATION THREE TIMES WHICH WILL ALL FAIL!”
And zooming the map on skodas with touch screens is just THE WORST.
To be honest zooming isn’t great on my 2010 yeti with a physical zoom wheel either.
These systems are always crap in cars because compared to modern phones they feel unbelievably slow; my yeti is now 14 years old but my phone is 2 years old so it’s a pretty unfair comparison!
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.
I don’t disagree, just pointing out a general issue with car nav systems
I understand. Android auto is quite nice. I don’t like that the assistant can’t be changed to another app. There should be an open protocol which allows any device to take over the cars multimedia systems.
Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as “backup”
Touch screens are great in cars!
No, no they aren’t. If I have to stop to use a control in a car, it’s bad design.
So far
151823 people have shown they don’t know how to drive.Ok, lets hear your idea for how to navigate while driving. Please don’t say voice control, because voice control rarely works as needed.
Passenger does it? Have a sensor to see if there is a passenger, then allow it.
You’re rightfully getting downvoted because having a passenger is not at all a given and before the days of navigation systems you had to handle physical maps at the next red light or pull over, but there’s a kernel of truth to your statement:
A passenger who can actually navigate is a godsend. I learned how to do it properly during my draft time (civil defence) and a proper navigator takes so much load off the driver it’s not funny any more. Incomparable to a computer navigation system. The driver is getting instructions exactly when necessary, confusing situations get called out and clarified, and when the driver makes a call “can’t drive left here” it’s the navigator’s responsibility to re-plan. You can actually focus on the road because the navigator takes on full responsibility for the route. It’s how you can get fast to a place in an area unknown to both driver and navigator, and with “fast” I mean with or without sirens, without that navigator backup sirens would generally be pointless, no brain cycles left to care about routes when you’re “breaking” rules of the street and dealing with apparently deaf and blind drivers left and right.
The average passenger, though, is magnitudes worse than computer navigation. And I don’t just mean people who need to rotate the map to not get disoriented, I mean practically everyone.
I was getting down voted because apparently everyone thought I means have a passenger do the navigation?
I meant that the driver should NEVER do navigation whilst driving because that kills people, there is no discussion there. So you either pull over, set the navigation computer and continue, or if you have a passenger, that passenger can do the navigation computer while you are driving.
This is not controversial, this is basic driving
And of course, we can rely on the universally true mutual exclusivity of always having a passenger when we need to navigate, and never needing to navigate when we don’t have any passengers. As constant as the north star, that one.
If you need to do navigation, you stop your car. If you have a passenger, he or she can do it while you are driving. It’s not that hard
The main reason why I didn’t want high end packages for our last car was, that I am a cheap bastard. The second reason is, that I think touchscreens in cars are one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.
There are places where touch controls make a lot of sense. Cars is not one of them.
My stove also has touch controls and I’d like a stern word with whomever designed it because it’s the biggest fucking bullshit. I’ve burned myself on those controls, I’ve had the stove turn itself off and refuse to turn on again because of water splashing onto the controls, I’ve had it turn on and glitch out because I’ve cleaned it off with a slightly damp rag.
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. Plus, the lack of tactility sucks for blind people. Sure blind people won’t drive, but imagine having to ask the driver to change your AC for you? In the dark of winter with ice on the roads that’s just horribly irresponsible of whomever designed it.
Man I HATE touch controls, especially on stoves. Any time I use them I bitch and moan chronically.
This is an accurate description of me.
100% agreed! I don’t want to take my eyes off the road while driving. Just let me feel for the right button
Using my touch screen my sequence goes like this:
- Glance once to locate the button I want to hit
- Look back at road
- Attempt #1 to hit the button: miss
- Look back at the road
- Attempt #2 to hit the button: miss
- Look back at the road
- Inhale Mr Miyagi breath, preparing to catch fly with chopsticks
- Attempt #3 to hit the button: success!
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~
This feature is unavailable while the vehicle is in motion (despite the pressure sensor detecting the passenger operating the shitty touch screen.)
