82% of vehicles sold this year came with a touch screen

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-infotainment-dashboard-screen-tops-consumer-reports-ratings-2019-05-01

by lxm • 7 years ago

84 190 7 years ago

marketwatch.com

sexydefinesher• 7 years ago

Horrible, like stoves with touch interfaces that can't handle water.

silversconfused5• 7 years ago

Any interest in a voice controlled stove? Just an idea I've been kicking around...

kevinconroy3• 7 years ago

Flame on!

OrgNet• 7 years ago

how about old fashioned nubs and buttons?

RandomBacon3• 7 years ago

I do not want voice control anything.

hiharryhere• 7 years ago

No thanks. I want my stove to last 10+ years. Replacing a single knob is a lot simpler to repair, and less likely to fail than the microphone, speaker, logicboard etc. in a voice stove.

NikolaNovak7• 7 years ago

Absolutely not.

First, I don't want to yell at my stove. I don't want it to misunderstand me. I don't want to forget it is on (dials are pretty easy to notice out of place; yes you can add a LED but now you're compensating for a flaw that doesn't need to exist).

I don't want to compete with my Google Home or my Alexa. I don't want my Kitchen to end up a constant stream of barked commands as I cook.

I don't want to stop conversation or music just to turn my stove on and off.

I don't want to take the time to speak "Stove, please turn on the bottom right burner to setting of five" when it takes me one fifth the time to actually change the knob.

It's a UI that works. It works great. Everybody STOP messing with UI that works great, pretty please :P

throwaway55554• 7 years ago

Nope. That's a bad accident waiting to happen.

blakesterz• 7 years ago

Friend of mine just got a new Volvo, that touch screen was such a UI/UX disaster it was just shocking. The number of touches it took to do anything was ridiculous. He was trying to figure out how to do something super basic, like it should've just had a dial on the dash basic, and it took minutes to find. I don't know if others are better, but that thing made me want to never buy a new car.

itsaidpens2• 7 years ago

XC90? I'd say they have a pretty great touchscreen interface.. My favorite right now is from JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) with physical dials embedded into a screen - that can context change. [1]

1. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wj857_eHVHE/maxresdefault.jpg

elsonrodriguez• 7 years ago

Don't forget the OLED buttons on the steering wheel that also change context.

Land Rover is so far ahead in UX it's unbelievable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6YYun90S8g&feature=youtu.be...

dman• 7 years ago

Ditto

bredren• 7 years ago

Subaru’s is horrendous as well. It’s amazing how crappy they can get away with on products that cost like $30k+.

werdnapk• 7 years ago

I've had the updated XC90 since 2016 and while yes, the touch screen took some getting used to, I can now access everything I need quite easily. I really do like the clean looking interior.

I test drove a Porche Macan as well and it's the exact opposite of the XC90... literally buttons everywhere you look.

I guess the different interior designs attract different people. I really just prefer the minimalist approach with the XC90.

r00fus4• 7 years ago

I've had a touch-screen in my system since 2005 (Prius). I prefer to the nest of buttons that is my 2012 Sienna.

I don't mind if temp controls are dials/buttons.

Nowadays a strong feature point is a decent implementation of CarPlay/AndroidAuto in the vehicle. That requires a touchscreen.

WillPostForFood2• 7 years ago

BMW does a good integration of CarPlay without a touchscreen. Select by turning the control knob, push down to click.

r00fus4• 7 years ago

How do they do maps integration? I assume they have a display somewhere...

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

Nowadays a strong feature point is a decent implementation of CarPlay/AndroidAuto in the vehicle.

I rather strongly prefer a car that lacks CarPlay/Android auto integration in the first place.

thebeefytaco• 7 years ago

It's hard to keep your eye on the road and use a touch screen interface. There's no tactile feedback.

dragontamer• 7 years ago

You can have both a touch-screen AND tactile feedback. Ex: have a volume nub AND a touch-screen.

The touch-screen is almost a necessity with Apple Play and Android Auto. If you want to interact with your cell-phone apps with your car system, you better have a touch screen.

But please don't get rid of my AC buttons or fan setting knob.

m4636• 7 years ago

"make the system as simple as possible, but no simpler"

I think designers get into a mindset, and then keep going (too far)

kgwxd• 7 years ago

Same reason touchscreen-only phones suck, and no one is doing anything about it :(

joezydeco• 7 years ago

All new vehicles sold in the US after May 2018 were required to have a backup camera.

https://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/49/4/4

If the automakers have to install a video display, it's not much of a leap to turn it into an infotainment system.

aero142• 7 years ago

The backup camera in my 2010 Tacoma is embedded in to the backup mirror. The usability is nearly perfect because it's right next to where you were looking already and is tremendously useful.

bb2018• 7 years ago

I recently rented a u-haul that had this and couldn't believe all cars don't do this. It is very useful having the camera and the mirror viewable at the same exact time.

SubiculumCode2• 7 years ago

My 2010 Honda has the same. So much better than putting it on a console screen

pi-rat• 7 years ago

Most of them are still so slow, unresponsive and laggy that they break any illusion of "touch" when interacting with the UI.

The iPad is almost 10 years old now.. come on..

Dig1t• 7 years ago

Car tech is _insanely_ bad; I don't understand why, but it boggles my mind.

seabird• 7 years ago

US automakers are ridiculously wasteful, slow-moving, and don't really give a shit about anything. These companies are risk-averse for a reason, but you would be floored if you could experience first-hand the sort of bureaucracy and complacency you have to deal with when working with an automaker. I live somewhere that basically revolved around the auto industry until recently, and everyone else I've met that has dealt with automakers has had the same experience.

itake• 7 years ago

Armchair Electrical Engineer here:

The parts used in cars need to handle a lot of vibration and heat and last 10+ years.

The tech lags behind consumer electronics because consumer electronics don’t need to work in these difficult environments.

cortesoft• 7 years ago

The Tesla one is pretty good

m4636• 7 years ago

Model S/X - #1 thing they could do for safety is to minimize touches to get to a function, and also increase the size of touch targets.

examples would be: touches to raise air suspension or adjust climate temperature without accidentally turning on seat heater.

Model 3.. no dashboard. a tragedy. Not only are critical displays to the side, the controls are even further to the side.

umvi2• 7 years ago

I hate this trend.

My ideal car:

- buttons and dials I can feel with my hands without looking for climate/volume/etc. controls

- Car has a well documented API that can be used to control all non-safety critical features of the car (climate, media, etc.) as well as get lots of read only stats (current speed, current gas levels, current GPS location, etc.)

- mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)

- Car has an official app that can talk to said API over bluetooth or whatever for iOS/Android.

- Or I can write my own apps or programs, etc. that talk to the API.

Maybe I want to listen to audiobooks on Tuesdays and my own app would know to push that to the speakers as soon as I start the car on Tuesdays

Or maybe I want a raspberry pi in the trunk to log my car's current location and speed once per second because it's my teenager.

Just stop forcing crappy touchscreens attached to crappy laggy computers into my car! I want to choose my own computer and I want to be able to replace it if it breaks without taking apart my whole car and paying someone $1000 in labor. A stock iPad is 10x more responsive than the crappy touchscreen in the Model S; just let me mount my iPad

reb• 7 years ago

I’m genuinely on board with most of this, but it reads like satire.

On topic, it is wild how dated even brand new car consoles feel. Luxury brands do a bit better, but it’s still worse than my phone. Where do I sign up to overhaul vehicle UX?

thatoneuser3• 7 years ago

Last time I got a new car the dipshit at the dealership was trying to get me to pay more cuz the car I wanted had a touchscreen. I told him I'd pay more if he'd take it out and put in one with buttons. Car consoles are such a gimmick...

rossenberg792• 7 years ago

Have you tried the new Audi A7’s interface? Pretty great, especially with CarPlay.

usaphp2• 7 years ago

Bmw has the best in business, they left climate, track, volume controls as separate physical buttons and their console is incredibly quick to respond and feels fluid like a phone. New Audi’s really made a bad decision to use two screens without physical buttons, both of the screens are little laggy too.

saalweachter2• 7 years ago

The new Chevy (Volt) HVAC interface has three separate toggles for panels, feet and defrost, and you can toggle any combination of them you want.

It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

prawn• 7 years ago

Paul Graham had a tweet relevant to this recently:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1122803944206544897

--- The two axioms that explain your experience with devices that contain software (except Teslas):

I. It takes extraordinary effort to make software that's not horribly difficult to use.

II. Companies whose main focus isn't software don't expend extraordinary effort on it.

Arguably the reason Tesla is an exception is that it is actually a software company. ---

m4636• 7 years ago

For years I've just wanted a car with the equivalent of a 19" rack with some standard power + other interfaces.

They kind of make them for police cars - center consoles with mounting holes plus different height cover plates.

But I suspect the future consumers will get will be app-based because the connected car might be a data harvesting revenue stream.

sigh.

ipython• 7 years ago

It used to be this way: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736

I remember buying aftermarket “din 1” size radios for my dad’s car in Europe.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

While the future is pretty hopeless for cars, you can still convert many trucks to use double-DIN radios.

turtlebits• 7 years ago

Sounds absolutely terrible. Android auto exists and is pretty good. Add Tasker and it covers your example use cases.

foota• 7 years ago

Isn't Android auto the API described?

Nition• 7 years ago

I'd settle for just #1 and a 3.5mm TRS aux in (which was the standard for about 10 years prior to the new touchscreen phase).

I'll give a little praise for Toyota here though. The 2015 Corolla had a row of terrible low-quality touch buttons on either side of the touch screen[1] but the latest model has replaced all of those back with real buttons and two real knobs[2]! Maybe the tide is turning...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/A63ESpX.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/9FQF7oh.jpg

mwfunk• 7 years ago

This sounds amazing. And all of that (even the physical controls, in a sense) is really more about interfacing with the onboard computer systems, which arguably aren't part of the car itself, but something extra built on top of it.

For most cars that aren't Teslas, the head unit is designed independently of the physical control surfaces of the dashboard, because they want the head unit to be a thing you pay extra for via some navigation or entertainment option package.

I hope in the future the head unit won't be a separate thing that coexists with a potentially standalone dashboard. Like Tesla, but with physical controls alongside nice displays where appropriate, even with touch surfaces.

Cars are going through something similar to what happened with DSLRs when displays (and sometimes touchscreens) started to become common. Some companies fully embraced having a big touchscreen and very few physical controls and some companies grudgingly added a non-touch display but retained almost all of the physical controls. The best camera designs (IMO) ended up being ones that tried to find a happy medium between those extremes, not by combining half-assed physical controls with half-assed touchscreen controls, but rather by really thinking about the least compromised, best overall experience.

chrisseaton• 7 years ago

Sounds like a ‘Homer car’. Keep it simple.

umvi2• 7 years ago

It is simple - get rid of the touch screen, and whatever APIs the touchscreen was using, expose them to me.

everdrive• 7 years ago

We have pretty similar preferences. Here's mine:

My ideal car:

- buttons and dials I can feel with my hands without looking for climate/volume/etc. controls

- Car has a radio or something, which should be enough.

bobthepanda• 7 years ago

This is great until your insurer steps in and starts using installed UI/UX as another factor on which to start varying rates after different UIs cause (or correlate with) accidents at different rates.

maxerickson• 7 years ago

The good news is that if they are profitably factoring that information into their premiums, they also probably have a pretty good idea of what sort of driver you are.

jcpst• 7 years ago

It's because of screens that I looked for a slightly older model when I recently purchased a vehicle. Ended up getting a 2009 BMW 328. The design on the inside is wonderful, and screen-free.

The computer is simple to use and gives you all the functionality you would have on a screen.

I now want to keep this car going as long as possible, in the hopes that this awful trend will change, and there will be options like people are describing here.

It reminds me of phones. The newest phone was willing to buy was a 2nd gen iPhone SE. It's the only new phone in a small form that has decent internal hardware.

I see it as part of a bigger trend that goes against excellent design. Is this some sort of marketing vs design thing that causes this?

leetcrew2• 7 years ago

you could have just bought a new 911 GT3 and deleted the infotainment unit.

spullara• 7 years ago

It is not a big deal when your car can drive itself well enough while you are messing with it for a few seconds.

AngryData• 7 years ago

I would also like hard physical disconnect from the car's essential motoring functions and from it's auxiliary and entertainment functions. You would think that would be a no-brainer but it has been demonstrated how many new cars can be shut off or have essential motor functions remotely changed by hacking in through entertainment/media systems. Not sure if it is because of ignorance, penny shaving, or intentional implementation, but I don't see how I can trust a car that some punk on a laptop can disable or crash at will using simple scripts someone could post online.

TYPE_FASTER• 7 years ago

I like CarPlay. Updating an app or upgrading phone is effectively updating the head unit in the car. And my climate controls are all physical dials with detents that I can use without looking at them. Ironically, the cheaper cars have smaller screens and physical controls.

philwelch• 7 years ago

My ideal car has buttons, dials, and no computers at all aside from very small microcontrollers.

stunt• 7 years ago

I think that is the direction that German manufactures are headed to.

brmgb• 7 years ago

- mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)

That's probably never going to happen. Devices on mount are a securiry nightmare during a crash and car manufacturers don't want the associated liabilities.

kevinconroy3• 7 years ago

At CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem.

We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.

You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).

asaph• 7 years ago

How do you feel about using voice commands?

Causality12• 7 years ago

They're great if you operate your car in complete silence. Personally I'm usually listening to something.

kevinconroy3• 7 years ago

I'd be interested to see human factors research to see if it helps. Still, if you've got kids in the back seat who are asleep and there's background road noise from a highway, you don't want to yell "Carbot, turn down the A/C". Turning a knob isn't that hard.

NikolaNovak7• 7 years ago

I would like to travel with my wife and kids.

It is insane to me that we are coming up with these impractical user interfaces with implausible limited use cases, when... we had interface that works! I'm refusing to let go of my aging Subaru, because any rental I've tried is impossible to drive without taking your eyes off the road or a myriad other safety and practicality compromises

flukus• 7 years ago

"Turn on wipers"

"Playing weezer"

It might be good if voice control was perfect but it'a long way from that and still offers little benefit over buttons and knobs.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

In most situations, I find voice commands to be very annoying and inconvenient. Particularly in a car.

Plus, given that most voice recognition is done in the cloud these days, if something has voice control then I am immediately very suspicious of it.

pault• 7 years ago

Ideal car UX: click wheel with a few dedicated function buttons on the steering wheel and a transparent display on the rear view mirror. You can send the royalty checks to my secretary.

jdhn• 7 years ago

I'd rather have a HUD above the speedometer myself, this way you just have to glance down to see any relevant information.

hodder• 7 years ago

Touch screens are without a doubt more dangerous. You are forced to take your eye off of the road to navigate the screen menus.

There is nothing I prefer more in a car than the classic 3 physical knob layout for heat/cold, vent/selector and music.

I feel every car should start with that, and maybe add a touchscreen only for deeper interactions, usually needed when the vehicle is not in motion.

kenhwang• 7 years ago

Hard buttons pretty much a hard requirement for me on a car. Thankfully they still exist and will probably continue to exist. The trend towards touchscreen everything is already starting to reverse.

eMSF• 7 years ago

I think by this point most center console displays are touch-enabled. That doesn't necessarily mean there's much besides drive computer data and radio controls in them, although bigger screens and less physical inputs is certainly where they are heading, for better and for worse.

I don't find this diverse touch screen statistic all that interesting; it would be far more interesting to know how many of them don't have certain traditional physical inputs, e.g. for climate control.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

personal experience, own a TM3, I rarely if ever need to use the screen. Not even for navigation. Some simple actions are almost automatic for me when I do want to toggle, muscle memory even works then.

with regards to touch screens vs physical buttons, I tell friends at work who have mocked the TM3 display. put a sticker on every button then remove them as you use them on a drive.

plus some cars put buttons in far worse places but as with most cars you adapt real quick. after all its not that you need more than a few buttons from the dash

robertnealan• 7 years ago

Before buying my car I test drove a Mercedes that had what I assumed was a touchscreen. Upon trying to tap it the person working at the dealership said none of their cars have touchscreens because they don't make sense to operate when driving, and instead had a easily reached dial in the center console that controlled everything on the screen. Seems to be the case with any other German car I've been in.

Takes some getting used to compared to just old fashioned knobs & buttons, but far and above better than all the cars we test drove with touchscreens.

yardie2• 7 years ago

It's the worst of both worlds. Rather than having dedicated dials for each function, or a touchscreen, you have a single dial and loads of menus to work through. Want to change the radio station first you have to make sure you are in the radio display context and then scroll through the stations until you find your desired station. Meanwhile, you're constantly taking your eyes off the road to work this dumb wheel.

perl4ever5• 7 years ago

I've had cars with either, and I'm kind of ambivalent on BMW iDrive vs Honda touchscreen, but my main complaint with everything I've driven is the way Bluetooth will not connect reliably. Sometimes you have to restart your car or your phone to get it back, and once that didn't work and only unpairing it and repairing it worked. This is really, really, basic and I sometimes feel like screaming because when I was younger, whatever the flaws of a radio or CD player, at least they consistently worked every time you switched them on.

usrusr• 7 years ago

The main benefit (or supposed benefit, if you insist) of the big encoder knob system is that decision and action are decoupled: you can have a short glance at the narrow/deep menu, then take your time doing the next steps of finger work with the eyes back on the road. This is incredibly slow compared to interfaces designed for full attention, but the impact on driving ability is very low. It's kind of like a garbage collector that sacrifices throughput for shorter pauses.

Touchscreens on the other hand lure the eyes into guiding the hand through the selection process, particularly when you lack a haptic reference point because the screen isn't handheld. And then the eyes are already focused on the screen when the next menu page shows up, so it's tempting to continue right there. I guess there must even be some threshold in UI slowness beyond which touchscreens are not quite as bad for safety as faster ones because one would quickly learn that there is plenty of time to focus on the road while the glacial computer's cogs are turning.

Even physical per-function controls are worse once the number of functions gets too high. Volume up/down is easy, but how do you {insert any of the hundreds of functions that you can make safely discoverable, in time, with a slow menu}? Interrupting the process of scanning a wall of buttons with tiny symbols on them for a context switch back to traffic and then continuing the scan without generous re-scanning on resume is a skill that few people would ever develop without explicit teaching, so most would simply take their chances, keeping their mind in the scan. Throughput might still be higher than a deep menu, but the effective pauses are way too long (a quick glance up just to stifle the worst fears while the mind is still on the screen/scan does not count). I would not even be surprised of the annoying inclusion of some frequently used functions in the menu wasn't just penny-pinching or a misguided interior designer striving for cleaner lines, but a deliberate decision to train users in the interface system.

m4636• 7 years ago

I've used these such as bmw idrive and I think it takes far more attention to navigate menus using a wheel than either dedicated function buttons or a touch what you want touchscreen. Selecting a nav address is kill-me-now tedious.

I tried a nissan with nav and it had a pretty useful mixture of the two. It had dedicated function buttons for say radio or map or volume up/down/power (most duplicated on the steering wheel), but the touchscreen was used when that made sense, like selecting a nav destination from a list, or typing a destination with the on-screen keyboard (allowed when stopped only).

Bluestrike2• 7 years ago

Mercedes also has a touchpad that hovers above the command wheel, along with the a tiny little touchpad on the steering wheel for your thumb. Just in case you wanted additional options, though neither work with Android Auto (for 2017 models, at least). The lack of a touchscreen is probably the second most annoying part of Mercedes' Android Auto experience, next to AA's lack of support for the ultrawide display.

Interestingly, Mercedes is sort of simplifying things with the MBUX interface[0] they unveiled with the A-Class: they're adding a touchscreen, ditching the command wheel for a trackpad, and have much improved voice controls. The early reviews were all pretty positive.

0. https://www.thedrive.com/tech/23816/daddy-mbux-testing-merce...

codr7• 7 years ago

This used to be hilarious, but living it is about as much fun as predicted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

lapinot5• 7 years ago

Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here? I don't and i really don't plan to. Public transports, bus, subway, train, carpooling, stuff like that seems more than enough for me, here in europe (france) at least. I think we need to shift the subject here: sure current cars are bad (low reparability mostly), but to what extend do we need personal cars (at least specifically for people living in urbanized areas).

lapinot5• 7 years ago

Not sure about the downvotes, care to explain? I did not expect this would be seen as out of topic.

RandomBacon3• 7 years ago

I did not downvote you, but I imagine it's partly because of this:

Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here?

I think that's very self-centered to imply cars aren't worth talking about just because you don't have one.

brianpgordon• 7 years ago

Except in a few major cities, almost all working adults in the US own a car.

jalgos_eminator• 7 years ago

Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here? I don't and i really don't plan to. Public transports, bus, subway, train, carpooling, stuff like that seems more than enough for me, ...

Must not be from the US...

... here in europe (france) at least

Yeah, saw that one coming. I wish we had good public transport here in the US, but realistically most people need to have access to a car. Even people living in large cities.

My current commute is from the middle of the city to the edge along a major freeway. It is 10 miles by car and takes 20 min on average to work, ~30 min. back home because of traffic. Public transport would take 80 min each way not counting traffic. Riding my bicycle would take about the same amount of time, but I would arrive quite sweaty. I drive because saving those 2 hours per day is 100% worth it.

NikolaNovak7• 7 years ago

I love how this keeps coming up from people who cannot comprehend that there are other people in the world - people who don't live in downtown of a city with good public transportation; people who need to move stuff; people who have need to travel; people who cannot easily walk or bike - they may have health issues or specific disabilities; people who live in places with inclement weather; people who live in places where distances are large.

Essentially there's folks who think entire earth is a hipster downtown, and anybody else should just move, while collapsing economy, sending housing prices into stratosphere, impacting everybody's quality of life, and so on.

Yes cars are still a topic. Get out of your own head, travel a bit, talk to people, learn to empathize.

I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but that's just an unbelievable amount of ignorance and lack of awareness and sympathy for other people.

lapinot5• 7 years ago

I hear your point, i'm not offended. But you dismiss me as guilty by association, to some kind of superficial "hipster" who's hobby is to take part in gentrification. It's not rude, it's fallacious. For one gentrification is out of topic (i would gladly continue that argument some place else).

Also i don't recall my comment to have any kind of imperative tone: i'm stating what works for me, and for a lot of people i see, explicitly requesting comments about whether or not this applies to others. Some made up numbers from what i feel about my surroundings: young adults (<30yo), i'd say maybe 1 in 3-4 have a car around here. Families from friends that live in or near a city center (inside the subway zone), i'd say 1 out of 3-4 have no car, that's already significant: they rely on their children, friends or rental when they need one. Parking lots aren't cheap. Of course there are some difficulties, when you need to move some couch through the city you grab a couple friends, a skateboard and start pushing. Every couple weeks when you do some large food shopping you have to carry heavy bags. Maybe you get a trolley of your own like the grandmas at the saturday market, it's actually convenient.

In the country side where i grew up, i'd say half the people have only 1 car per household. There's a train station 30min from there, a small line but is used quite a lot, with a train every 1h or so. Almost all of my friends had a driver's license by the time they turned 18 etc. Yet i slipped through, always making my way using quite a lot of cycling, making my schedule around the one of the buses, sometimes hitchhiking when the time was bad. Most people i know use either some carpooling app or train when they travel across the country and don't transport anything they can't carry in a couple bags. People do have cars there, but it's because of necessity, not choice. And you see far less new cars, lots of people buy them refurbished, cars switch hands in the family, some are real utility vehicles which are adopting interface bloat at a slower pace, etc.

So i ask again: don't we have to change our ideas about (1) car ownership and (2) car manufacturing/reparation/life-cycle? From what i can see, things are already far from the "every adult owns a car which they change every ~5 years" model from post-war until the oil shocks. My point is the usual dependency vs convenience thing [#]: the more a particular infrastructure becomes widespread or reliable (may be cars, electricity, network), the more you start depending on it; yet giving up some of it may not make your life worse, it just implies different life constraints and capabilities to work around it.

[#] I'm getting out of topic here, but to read this argument developed in the field of energy, see: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...

---

That was for the places i know well; now you implied i didn't travel or talk. I do. There are lots of other environments where car can and are avoided.

Would you consider the whole north/west european cities (in nl, dk, de, ch, ..) to be just a big "hipster neighborhood"? Believe it or not, but not everyone on a bike or in the bus has a beard, fancy sticker on their macbook air or is some kind of alter-globalism&ecology activist. There, and to some extend in a lot of other places, personal cars are neither a big necessity nor very practical in most slightly urbanized areas. People there own and use less cars. Of course it doesn't come out of nowhere: there is less specialization of urban areas for living, shopping, eating/drinking, working. More smaller and distributed structures, roads organized differently giving a lot of space for pedestrians, bikes, some green spaces, playgrounds etc. I'm not saying it can be done everywhere and now, i'm saying it's being done in various places and probably could be expanded.

wincy2• 7 years ago

If I wanted to take the bus to work, my commute of 15 minutes would become 20 minutes of walking to the nearest bus stop, and 2h13m of riding on a bus. I live in an suburban area but because there's a state line, the bus line goes to the city center and then back out. We used to live in the city, but we moved when a drug deal gone bad across the street resulted in someone shooting his gun into the air while my daughter was playing in our front garden. Luckily she wasn't hurt, but our options for safe, affordable living conditions are limited to areas traversable by car in the US Midwest.

Zhenya• 7 years ago

"Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here? ...carpooling..."

Well there is partly your answer.

Folks own cars for different reasons: family, location outside of place with public transport etc

dev_north_east2• 7 years ago

Who owns a car here?

I do (Uk). I don't know of a single friend, family member, work colleague or as part of a couple, which doesn't have a car.

thatoneuser3• 7 years ago

One more reason to not buy a new car I guess. Nothing like a latency ridden touch screen that some autist designed.

erobbins• 7 years ago

One big reason I looked at (and bought) my current car is that it's got a sea of button and dials. I can't stand touch screens in cars, they are hard to use while driving.

KorematsuFred• 7 years ago

I find Jeep's Uconnect OS and Console to be pretty good but nowhere close to say iPad in 2015.

I hoped Car play and Android Auto would be better but they suck too and have many bugs that make them unusable.

orev2• 7 years ago

Regarding safety issues, many cars also come with an array of collision avoidance and other safety features that could potentially mitigate some of the risk of touch screens.

NikolaNovak7• 7 years ago

I love how that sort of argument keeps coming up.

We are going to take UI that works.

We will instead make the UI that doesn't work. It'll be more expensive, more prone to failure, and it'll come with safety compromises.

To address those compromises, we will install more software that's more expensive and more prone to failure.

I understand I'm the minority user who just wants to drive his car safely and use buttons and dials that I can move without staring down at my knees while hurtling down the highway at 100kph while hoping that collision avoidance saves me and paying extra thousands of dollars for the privilege of poor UI. But I do wonder which planet everybody else is on...

orev2• 7 years ago

I’m not saying it’s the right thing, but it at least helps.

jimktrains2• 7 years ago

How well do these work if I have wet hands? Like, if it's rainy or snowy and i get in the car, will I be able to control the temperature? Turn on the defroster? Every smart phone I've owned would be anywhere betw 0% and 50% chance of it working.

Causality12• 7 years ago

I'll happily stick to using my phone mounted to the dash, a 3.5mm input, and a set of bluetooth controls mounted to the driver's side door.

akeck• 7 years ago

That's terrifying. (Have car with touch screen. No car should have a touch screen)

b_tterc_p• 7 years ago

What are people using the screen for? I do maps and Spotify, all of which is controlled through the phone, voice, or steering wheel control. None of it requires interaction while driving aside from thumb flicks

Having a screen is much better than a separate phone or gps unit showing maps.

kitotik• 7 years ago

I’d guess most of the interfaces we see in 2019 are roughly 2009 designs and implementations. I think it’s changing, but many of the manufacturers started out by putting software in the same test/certify cycle as the hardware.

aussieguy1234• 7 years ago

Soon, with self driving cars, a touchscreen will be all you will have to control the car

megablast• 7 years ago

As if 40,000 deaths a year due to cars in the US isn't enough? How there not any laws about making cars more dangerous to drive?

whenchamenia4• 7 years ago

If my car is unsafe, to me, is it not my own risk assesment to judge? Should we ban extreme sports too? As an adult, I cherish the responsibility of choice.

jrib• 7 years ago

I don't think it should be only yours, no.

If you were primarily only putting your own life in danger, sure.

But with driving the way it is now, I do not think it's a leap to make the claim that distracted driving is a danger to not just yourself but to others on the road. It's exactly the kind of thing that the government should be regulating.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

If my car is unsafe, to me, is it not my own risk assesment to judge?

Not when you are endangering others on the road.

SubiculumCode2• 7 years ago

82% of them were mistakes.

m-p-3• 7 years ago

Not a fan. Sure, a touch screen makes it easy to have an interface you can change on-the-fly all through software, but it requires eye-hand coordination which forces you to stop watching in front of you. How is this any better than trying to type on a cellphone while driving? I prefer proper dials and buttons in such a situation, which I can easily use without looking at them.

t0astbread• 7 years ago

Do cars these days also come with non-replacable non-free software or tons of tracking?

dev_north_east2• 7 years ago

My car has a touch screen and I hate it. Aside from being crap, I cannot safely use it while driving.

JohnFen9• 7 years ago

Touch screen in vehicles are pretty bad, in my opinion. But worse is the whole "internet connected car" business.

doctorRetro• 7 years ago

My 12 year old car (perhaps obviously) doesn't have a touch screen, and every time I drive a card that does have on, I find it to be either a complete distraction and/or a UI failure. Cars don't need to be gadgetized.

82% of vehicles sold this year came with a touch screen

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