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Having a touchscreen to operate your car with is a safety hazard compared to having buttons and knobs.
My Mazda had a nice combination of touch screen which disabled itself when the vehicle was in motion and you could then use the rotary control instead. Was really nice and intuitive with entirely separate AC, heated seats etc controls.
I had a rental Mazda and I have to say, that rotary control is the worst combination of tactile and touch interface I have seen to date. Maybe that gets better after using it for 6 months, but I can more or less memorize touch interface control positions in that same timeframe and without the distraction of figuring out which element the rotary dial highlight moved to this time.
I would rather have had full touch than that monstrosity.
I enjoy it on my Mazda, find it super easy to use and safer than a touch screen. To each their own.
I have a Mazda like this. I absolutely hate it.
I have a small built-in touchscreen on the top of the dashboard which is visible in my peripheral vision while driving. But it turns off touch controls while the car is moving. And the physical controls are in the center console behind my manual stick, on the passenger’s side. So I have to blindly feel around for my knobs and buttons while driving, or take my eyes completely off the road to look down at my center console.
It would be safer if I could just tap the screen quick while keeping my eyes facing the road, versus trying to search for knobs down next to my passenger’s thigh.
I also hate that this newer model removed the mute button from my steering wheel. I used to be able to immediately mute my radio by pressing that button on my 2010 Mazda. But in my new 2017 Mazda, I need to find the tiny volume knob by my passenger’s thigh and slap that knob. I still have volume buttons on my steering wheel, but I can’t immediately mute by holding the down volume button. So I need to go searching for that knob, which is more time I’m not looking at the road.
My Mazda has the same controls and I’ve never really felt like they’re hard to find. The button layout makes a lot of sense and the large center wheel is easy to find so you can use it as a reference point to find the other buttons easily (I pretty much just use the home and music buttons and that volume knob).
Even just the bright light from it is a hazard.
I turned down my dash panel for the “plus lights” night mode (my car is a 2012 Honda civic, so night mode is literally whenever I turn on the headlights) because it was so blindingly bright I couldn’t stand it.
I was in car with a friend with a Prius… not a super new one, but with the central touch center of shit and it never got very dim… it was always just this distracting light in the middle of the car. I literally would not be able to drive that car, my attention would be drawn to the light because I like dark. But then it also reflects off the windshield and shit and just nope.
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Depends how well the voice controls work. I have been so frustrated with AI assistants’ inability to understand simple instructions while I’m driving that it has become a serious distraction at times. I have never found myself yelling at knobs.
When I’m driving, all the people I yell at are knobs
What cooks my god damn goose isn’t the stupid screen I’m going to break one day. It’s that they run buses for other systems through the radio so you can’t replace it with what you want.
Yep, infotainment and HVAC should have different control systems entirely. If your radio dies it should not mean the death of your car completely. And I consider not having access to your government mandated cameras and defrosters a dead vehicle.
I had a 1988 Pontiac 6000. I took out the radio/tape unit and replaced it with a CD player. My goddam cruise control was disabled after that. They’ve been running other systems through the radio forever.
I take trips to Tallinn. Beautiful city. I use the car share apps there for convenience. Pick up a car and park wherever. I get to try out many different cars, if only for a while. I hate touch screens. One even was set with brightness to zero and I was unable to change it.
Dials and knobs for everything please.
Lived in Eesti for several years back in the 90’s mainly in Nõmme and Lasnamäe. Beautiful country, amazing people. Hotel Viru had its own cool vibe back then, and Vanalinn in the winter is breathtaking. If I could apply for citizenship, I do it in heartbeat.
Why are you going to break it one day?
Embrace tradition
That one we can accept modern ebikes.
Yep. Usually I’m bluffing when I say “I’ll die before I buy [a smart TV/a phone with a selfie cam hole punch/a computer running Windows/a console without a disc tray],” but there are real alternatives to buying these death traps. I could stand to lose weight anyway.
I would, if there were any bike lanes in my city.
There are in mine once you’re in the city, but there’s a river and a freeway between there and here.
I miss biking to work.
… I’M JUST SAYING.
That seems so GM
Admitely the better solution than the more modern featureless knob you have to look where it currently was.
That or a knob where you feel the position.
For our younger audience: this is from when the show Cheers was popular, that’s why there’s a “Norm” setting.
Pretty sure this was the exact control panel my mom’s 80s Ford Econoline van had.
Yup. You can move the levers to one extreme and blindly gauge where it’s supposed to be. Also: each of these things provide additional feedback (fan direction, speed, etc) so you don’t even need to memorize detents or positions for stuff.
I will say that the temp lever, over time, gets very sticky and hard to move. Other than that: it’s good design.
I can press any button I like on the console without looking, while knowing what button is.
I will never prefer anything else.
My Mitzu has hella steering wheel controls and I loooooove it
The climate control things are off-wheel but I just have the dial set to automatically make it 70°F all the time and never touch it.
Can we add ‘cars with spare tires’ to the list?
Having to call a damned tow-truck just to get a flat tire fixed is not a winning move if you’re trying to sell how much your car benefits the environment.
Wait, new cars don’t have spare tires? Wtf has the world come to?
First they switched to the mini-spares. Then they got rid of them altogether.
If you’re lucky, there are little filler canisters and a cigarette lighter-powered air compressor to let you get slowly to a tire shop. Sometimes, not even that. If there’s a nail or a blowout, tow-truck city. Just hope it’s not out in the middle of nowhere in the dark or in bad weather.
And keep in mind that the Fix-a-Flat kind of spray will make your tire unrepairable.
I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but it definitely makes the inside of your tire (and rim) a goddamn mess
I could see that if they ran run-flats. If not, they could fuck off with that bullshit.
Many new cars have “run-flats,” which can be used even if they get a puncture/go flat.
However, they are more expensive, they don’t function under certain kinds of flats (e.g., sidewall damage), they have limited range, and limited speed.
The tiny “donut” spares on some cars are also not intended for high speeds, but I’d much prefer that to a punctured run-flat. (You should probably place the donut on the rear of your car is front wheel drive, though.)
(You should probably place the donut on the rear of your car is front wheel drive, though.)
I read somewhere that you should always replace a back wheel with a donut spare, even if that means swapping a punctured front wheel with an original back wheel. The donut spares are so flimsy that they can’t be trusted to reliably handle the side loads a front wheel experiences when your car is turning.
That’s one for safety in case you can’t get help, but one should drive slower than 60kmph and seek help immediately when using T rated tyre(such as the donut spare). The control sucks when your front tyre is a donut spare, and braking also sucks, so driving slow is the only way to do it.
I thought that was a legal safety requirement in the US.
Do you know in the US, the car maker can make a car use brake lamp as a turn signal? The standard is weird.
I did - I’m from the US and have been confused by this before.
Also I saw Technology Connections’ rant video about this! As always, in case you’re not familiar, I highly recommend his channel.
Yeah it turns out no one uses them or keeps em pumped up or applies that rubber stuff to em to keep em in good shape so the manufacturers replaced em with “24 hr roadside assistance”.
Spare tires have come in handy many times in my life! And im only 30. Fuck 24 hour roadside assistance i can put a spare on faster than they can get out to me
No doubt they have been and are handy to many, but with increasing amount of people not knowing how to change their tires and the tire being empty and gone to shit anyway, I guess I get not having as a default.
Yeah it sucks
I feel like the saved weight could be a net benefit for the environment
I very much prefer the extra cargo space. I have never had a flat tire. I go on vacations/road trips every year, multiple times.
If you’re pulled over for using an iPad while you’re driving you’ll get a ticket. But if you build the iPad into the car it’s somehow okay.
Nah, see, when you turn on the car’s iPad, it shows a pop-up telling you not to use it while driving, so it’s totally different.
You mean if you drive hands free as opposed to having a tablet being held by your car so you can use your hands on the wheel? You can mount an iPad in your car. Lol.
I want 3 things in a car navmod:
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Decent enough sized screen for Android auto to show me the map. My 2018 Nissan leaf is probably the smallest I’d go on this, but I wouldn’t even double it
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For the love of GOD could we let me upgrade the unit, or force android auto to use my powerful-enough-for-this-purpose phone handle rendering the video feed? My pixel can handle an external monitor at 1440p no problem, I’d love to give the shitty PC in my car a break from scrolling maps at 3fps
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Physical buttons for everything HVAC, can honestly take or leave the volume and tuner knobs as long as they’re put on the steering wheel
This 100% I hope other brands will follow with Škoda’s new smart dials (or even go further)
I’m totally onboard with this. Unless I’m mistaken in my country the law still forbids looking into a screen and away from the road, which is now needed to drive many cars!
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There’s a middle ground. Give me a decent-sized [touch]screen for Android Auto with physical HVAC & media controls.
Honda is one automaker that has separate climate controls, and it is a great balance with things that are nice on a screen like navigation. Heck, even though the music is through the touchscreen it still has a volume knob to quickly adjust or turn off no matter what the screen is showing.
I have a small (4-5") screen that has my clock, media information, which displays my backup camera feed if I’m in reverse, which I think is a modest improvement over the all-analog option, and a huge step up from the deathtrap touchscreen configuration. In my mind, the touchscreen is the point where it starts to drop off quickly, as it stands I don’t think I’d buy a car with a touchscreen that doesn’t lock it out while moving.
The existence of a touchscreen isn’t a problem, just having common controls moved to it. The touchscreen is useful for interacting with active phone apps, e.g. maps. A total motion lockout might be excessive.
In my mind, the issue is that cars are incentivizing drivers to use high attention controls like touchscreens while driving. Actions that need to happen while driving, whether they’re directly vehicle operation, or something like air conditioning or media volume, should be simple low-attention controls, ideally with tactile feedback. Keep it simple for your brain, keep focus on the road.
I have volume buttons, skip, jump backwards, and a numpad on my dash that interact with phone apps via Bluetooth. Maybe there’s a physical (or voice) control that can be added to the dash or wheel to interact with map/navigation apps. Using the touchscreen is dangerous, and a car shouldn’t provide a reason to do so. I’d rather solve the problem another way.
But if a touchscreen is required to update the clock, or do Bluetooth pairing, that’s fine. There’s no reason to need to do those while driving.
Being able to feel controls instead of having to look at them while driving is key, but some of you take this to Luddite levels.
Dear Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
Unless you have specifically read up about the labor rights of Luddites you really dont know what you are talking about when you throw the word Luddite around (I know I didn’t)
“[T]he Luddites did indeed understand the advantages which mechanization would bring,” Raymond Boudon, a sociologist at Paris-Sorbonne University, wrote in his Analysis of Ideology, citing the work of influential historian Lewis Coser. But “their machine-wrecking was an attempt to show the owners of the new textile mills that they were a force to be reckoned with, that they had a ‘nuisance value’. By acting in this way, their main objective was to gain concessions from the employers.”
The Luddites weren’t technophobes, then. They were labor strategists.
“This strategic interpretation of the Luddite movement is confirmed by the fact that the workers often destroyed only those machines which were turning out faulty goods,” Boudon wrote. “It was still true, of course, that a worker who went on strike could easily be replaced by somebody from the army of unemployed people willing to be strike-breakers, at a time when nascent trade-unionism was harshly suppressed. Since machine-breaking brought the factory to a halt, it was not only a functional substitute for striking, it was also much more effective.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-labor-technophobe/
Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves. Their struggle has been tragically warped into a caricature when it is more relevant than ever.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right
Welcome to lemmy. AI bad. Cloud bad. Screens bad. Tesla terrible. Ad-based monetization the literal devil. Paywalls, the devil’s brother.
Do any of those things have redeeming qualities?
AI has uses when it’s not being rammed down peoples throats or used to plagiarize content (personal assistant/home automation type stuff is the first that comes to mind - I’d like to eventually set up a locally-hosted LLM based alternative to Alexa to control my house so I’m not relying on an internet connection for everything).
Cloud is an essential part of a robust backup strategy, and makes it easier for the average person to create a web presence.
Tesla, being an EV company, is still an important interim solution to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ICE vehicles until (hopefully) better public transit infra is built so people don’t need to use cars as much. Not to mention it was the kick-starter for other vehicle companies to make EVs.
Ads and paywalls: People gotta eat. You want to consume content that someone produces as their job? Pay them. If you won’t someone else will, thus advertisements.
Absolutely.
- AI can write boilerplate code and test cases with a failure rate so low that it saves a significant amount of time. It’s also good summarizing text, like a 1 month old back and forth support ticket. Probably other uses too, but those are the ones I use a lot.
- Cloud is a huge accelerator for any company that doesn’t want or can’t afford to hire dedicated experts. Plus for workloads with big peaks and valleys it is actually much cheaper.
- Screens show navigation, provide entertainment and allow changing complex setting much more easily than other UIs. (turning volume down is not a complex setting)
- Teslas have incredible performance per dollar (in a straight line) and are very fun to drive daily. Also their software and charging network are great. And are cheap to maintain (and to buy used).
- Ads allow content to be consumed without monetary exchange while still paying the workers creating that content in money instead of exposure.
- same for paywalls, journalism is very important for society and good journalists deserve a good paycheck. Paywalls allow to have well paid journalists without billionaires sponsoring (manipulating) and allowing people who don’t like ads to still have access to their work.
Get out of here with your nuance, don’t you realize you’re on the Internet?!
In all seriousness, thanks. I think what a lot of people tend to forget is none of these things are inherently bad. They’re just often misused and/or overused, typically due to the insatiable capitalist profit motive.
The main issue with these is their proponents have a lack of nuance.
love how looking at phone screens is (rightfully) considered bad while driving, but then they just put a big fucking tablet on cars.
I hate how they don’t give you a choice in the matter… Just give me basic controls, then sell a bespoke android tablet that mounts in the car. I thought car companies love to push extras?
But if it just mounts in the car they can’t tell you that you will need a new car because your built-in tablet doesn’t get updates anymore.
Except they could be pushing a new tablet every few years. Like you need this tablet to unlock full self driving
Why would you do that if you can instead sell people a whole new car?
Nah push it as the “hi-tech” package or some such nonsense, “way better than our base model with the old world knobs.” Comes just like in the pic, but have both models.
Then you can sell it for more money to the dumb dumbs and let the people who know what is good in life have that sweet knob action.
No no no, they only push “extras” that are already included in the car so they can charge more for doing nothing. This requires doing something.
I’d like to keep the Reverse Cam alongside the knobs personally.
In these heady days of internet porn, this sounds like such an innuendo
There’s an easy way to make everything sound dirty.
Just add a place name to any noun. Wheelbarrow isn’t much, but an Arkansas wheelbarrow? Sounds filthy.
St. Louis bagel…
Yeah, it works.
St. Louis everything bagel. With a schmear.
The Auchtermuchty Stepladder will change your life
Auchtermuchty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auchtermuchty
I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t something you came up with by random keystrokes.
Whaur the fuck did ye think The Proclaimers came fae?
The Proclaimers
I had to check and see who they were.
I had heard the ‘500 Miles’ song before, but I always thought it was a musical gag from ‘The Simpsons,’ like ‘Baby On Board’ or ‘Dr. Zaius.’
same but that also just brings up another rant about modern cars. mine has surround view cameras -so you can see a birds eye view when parking. it’s really nice. but then why do I have to suction cup a dash cam right next to the built in camera and run a USB cable around my car? please just let us plug in a USB storage device and use the built in cameras as a dash cam.
On the other hand I can see why allowing arbitrary USB devices to be plugged into a safety-critical system wouldn’t be a good idea, particularly one that doesn’t get easy security patches.
You’re not wrong, but in my case and presumably others there already are USB ports and relevant drivers for both playback of media files, and funny enough for applying security patches or other updates.
In practice I think the concern becomes most USB storage devices are not intended to be constantly written to, while vibrating from the car, and it would definitely destroy data and cause support complaints. But it’s still annoying all the hardware and most of the software I want is there and wouldn’t take that much more to do what i want… but instead if they ever do decide to let us use the built in cameras as a dashcam, I expect it will require replacing my entire car with a new model
USB video class is far from arbitrary
My 2019 Kia seems to give the best of both worlds. I’ve got a small I think 10" display for reversing camera and Android Auto/Apple Carplay/radio and physical buttons and knobs for climate controls, volume, etc. the display is just big enough to be useful for maps, and Kia’s UI for the screen on the display is really nice with almost entirely white on black so it’s not distracting nor too bright at night and it really blends in when you aren’t looking at it while being there and ready for you when you are
My 2014 GTI has a touchscreen but everything on the screen can be controlled with knobs and buttons, and all it does is music and navigation. Everything else is knobs.
No backup camera, though.
My major problems with this design trend, in my own (biased) experience:
- Center console entertainment UI is usually the slowest thing ever made, making it an even bigger distraction than needed. I could develop muscle memory for blindly pushing the right virtual buttons, but the slowness makes this impossible. It’s usually wildly under-specced, but what’s stranger is that there’s never an upgrade option you can buy from the manufacturer.
- Can’t use the panel blindly, creating a big honkin’ distraction within reach of the driver. Speed (see above), iffy capacitive touch with no haptic feedback, as well as multiplexing the UI through deep menus, are the chief culprits here. If there were standard controls that were always on screen in the same place, with a suitably responsive UI, this wouldn’t be as big a problem.
- For systems that are fully-integrated, it’s all or nothing. If the panel/CPU dies, you lose your stereo, navigation, and climate controls all at the same time. My car, fortunately, has the A/C physical controls. This creates a distinct point of failure which is nice - I’m pretty sure I will still have A/C if the panel craps out.
- It’s dirt cheap to manufacture and I think we all know it. We’re already paying historically high prices for cars, and cheaping-out on the bits we touch the most is just an extra kick to the junk at this point. To the manufacturers: we have remarkably better experiences on our freaking phones every day, so nobody but your grandma is impressed with the weak-sauce, crippled, bogus UX you bolt into your expensive vehicles. You’re not making cars cooler, you’re just making car ownership worse. Do better.
Reject smart cars because they’re collecting your data and it will be used to increase your insurance rates.
Like your phone carrier, maps application developer, Facebook, and any other app with location data, isn’t actively trying to sell that info to as many paying customers as possible…
- Only if you drive in a way they can call unsafe
- There is one brand that will let you opt out of tracking, storing data, etc: Tesla.
Companies just use black boxes anyway lol
Volkswagen in the 70s and 80s had three horizontal control levers for the heating on the center of the middle panel which you could push with one speedy gesture to the very right, and then the front window would get max heat and max air flow to defrost/to demoist very fast.
Was so intuitive and fast you didn’t think about it and never had to take your eyes from the road for. That was peak design in my eyes.
