I don't want touch screens in cars period and I can't stand this trend of using them. I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.
The round knob to increase / decrease sound volume is simply the best UX in the car. Why do I have to navigate to a submenu to push a button repeatedly to change the volume. The less I look at the road the higher the risk of an accident.
Worth noting that that round knob, where it exists, has lost a lot of functionality:
1. Setting volume to 0 will pause the recording, even though I sometimes want to silently forward through some unwanted parts (intros or ads in podcasts).
2. These knobs are also infinity knobs, I liked to have fixed start and end position with an indicator how loud it's going to be when I switch on. That last part has been taken over by software and probably can't be done reliably any more.
3. On the leftmost, zero position that round knob was also used to switch a radio on or off. It is very convenient to have a single movement to switch music on, and with the same movement adjust the volume, or to lower the volume and while doing so, maybe decide to switch it all off entirely.
Analog potentiometers is what we all want. The worst are the rotary encoders (infinity knobs) that glitch when you turn them fast, like trying to turn down the radio your kid left on full blast, only to have it do nothing or actually turn it up instead.
Yep. Everything turned to garbage when "it all went digital", in the early 2000s. Now every single electronic product from appliances to vehicles are completely broken. Even the average thermostat spazzes out. There's no standard for anything.
My old car has a navigation thing that pops up out of the dashboard. It's not a touchscreen: all control of that is by a four-way button plus a confirm and an exit button on the back of the steering wheel.
The new car has a big flashy touchscreen, but there's no way to interact with it without taking a hand off the wheel and looking down below the dashboard line.
I don't know why they can't at least add button-based navigation to the UI.
Tried a quick search and couldn't find it. Is it like the scoll wheel on a mouse? Would be nice to have those on the steering wheel instead of up/down buttons.
I assume they mean the levers on the steering wheel, indicators and wipers... They look like whiskers in a cat's face that is the steering wheel (and you find them by touch, which is a nice double entendre)
Aye my skoda has a touch screen but I rarely use it (2016 model with touch screen and proper buttons, not the horrific current design of xbox style touch buttons) because I have 2 scroll wheels (volume and screen between the rev counter and speedo control), buttons to skip back and forward music, button for voice assistant, and a phone button. Its the best design out there I'm convinced.
Skoda is part of the VW group, as are Audi and Seat. There are some common parts used across the group, from chassis and engines down to much smller elements. But the different marques have different feels and appeal to different markets. Skoda cars have a reputation for being cheap and very reliable, unlike Audi which is positioned as a luxury marque
> 'I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.'
I drive a 12 year old Focus that has just about the right amount of modern functions - such as aircon, bluetooth connection and rear parking sensors.
I guess the problem with cars nowadays is that there isn't much to differentiate between them so all these added features have become a bit of an arms race?
The irony, of course, is seeing all of these fancy Range Rovers and Mercs broken down at the side of the motorway waiting to be towed away because they have become so sophisticated to the point of not being able to fulfil their primary function of getting from point A to point B?
I feel similarly about my 2019 GTI. The fundamentals are available without the touch screen, but you still have CarPlay. The later model GTIs went fully touch screen and capacitive touch buttons everywhere, including the steering wheel. Disappointing.
No, even worse. You can take phone to the front of your face. So you may still be able to peek the road depends on situation. But a damn touch screen fixed to the car itself? Enjoy your car accident.
The last thing I want to do when driving a car is turn my head away from the road.
Somewhat counterintuitively even just talking with your phone near your face or on speaker greatly increases your accident risk when compared to talking with someone else in the car.
This seems to be because when you are talking to someone in person there are two things that help offset the risk from the increased distraction of the conversation.
First, your conversational partner being in car provided another set of eyes that might spot something the conversational distraction makes you miss. I personally saw this once where I was driving and started to pull out into an intersection after a stop sign where cross traffic did not have a stop sign and somehow completely missed a car approaching from the passenger side. My friend in the passenger seat saw it and yelled "STOP!" and I immediately hit the brakes.
Second, when you are in situations where you need to devote extra attention to the road such as dealing with heavier traffic or trying to navigate an in person conversation tends to slow down or pause naturally. On the phone the other person has no clue what is going on at the car and so conversational flow control is not as good.
I think touch screens are ok right now for two things: settings menus that you set once and never touch again, and Apple CarPlay.
I recently moved backwards from a CarPlay car to a non-CarPlay car. Even with a very convenient MagSafe phone mount right where the CarPlay screen used to be, I still miss CarPlay. It was just easier and more convenient for controlling phone media, gps, etc.
On the settings app, the choice is between a crappy touchscreen UI and a crappy non-touchscreen UI, so I’m kind of neutral.
I have never driven a Mazda but I watch a lot of car reviews. It seems to me they're the only car manufacturer that gets car interactions right. They actually have a philosophy how human-cars should interact and design everything based on it. Hence everything comes natural and consistent and logical.
I moved from a Mazda to Hyundai and find my Elantra very much like my Mazda 6 in terms of ease-of-use.
It has android auto/carplay. To change songs, increase the volume, mute you use buttons on the steering wheel. There is a physical volume up/down knob as well in case the passenger wants to use it and these can be done via the touch screen as well.
They have done an excellent job blending new technology and continuing to use "what works" from the past.
Too many of these touch screens in cars requires accessing menue's and sub-menu's to do basic things that should be on the steering wheel. My ex-wife's Lexus which cost 5x what i paid for my Elantra wont let her access the navigation system unless it is stopped and in park?? I can simply hold a button on the steering wheel to access Siri and state where i want to go. Far too often if you touch the screen on her lexis you get "vehicle is in motion".. Great.. and i'm in the passenger seat confused as to why this is an issue?
perhaps they should have done a better job planning this out before releasing it to the public?
Personally i feel Hyundai provides better "value for your money". By not having the incredibly complicated model and options packages you find in North American cars they keep their costs down and the variations on their products low.
No need to deal with the NA style "you want package A, you need to get packages B and C as well" crap.
I can't say it's the main reason I would choose a car, but bad UX (the whole thing, from UI to knobs) is certainly one of the no-compromise ones I would bail a car on.
They've had their hits and misses over the years. Not at all typical, I'm sure, but a fun anecdote: I had a 90s bmw at one point, with electronic controls for the adjustable driver's seat down near the floor between the seat and door. The buttons got wet one time when it was raining, and it led to the seat coming alive and trying to crush me against the steering wheel while in highway traffic. Mashing on the controls didn't work and the motor was quite powerful. I was barely able to pull over with the room I had to move. If I wasn't as thin as I am, I might have been pinned down and crashed.
I’ve got an off button in the center of my controls. The only oddity is that I have to press it to lower the airflow from 5 to 0 (off) but otherwise pretty easy to find and use. It says “OFF.”
I misunderstood what you were looking for. AC seems easier for me as there’s a button labeled “A/C” that is lit up when AC is turned on and not lit up when it is off.
Really? What model do you have? I have a 330e and it does not have an A/C button, only a "MAX A/C" button. I can turn the A/C on with this button, but I can't turn it back off.
2018 330. That’s weird you don’t have an AC button. What I find curious is that “Max AC” is on the left side on a big round button but “AC” is on the right side on a square button with another square above it.
I don’t understand the layout sense but at least I’m lucky enough to have buttons.
Dad has a Mazda. Can vouch for this 100%. It's very clear to me when I drive it that their car interfaces are very deliberate and properly designed. That rolling knob thing which controls the screen is amazing and I wish it were standard
This was the first thing I disable when I got my 2016 Mazda 3. SSH'd into the infotainment and locked the GPS position. Now the car thinks I'm always parked, even when rolling. I also reduced the warning/notice on boot to about 500ms.
Considering this, I don't think I've ever even had to touch the screen since; the wheel is just so nice. The volume knob down in that cluster is also very ergonomic.
Some cars like My ex-wife's lexus wont let you access the navigation system unless the vehicle is stopped.
This is VERY VERY stupid and TBH dangerous. Should se find herself lost on the highway she would need to leave the highway or stop on the side of the road to access the navigation system??
If you attempt to access the nav system while the vehicle is not stopped it simply displays some sort of "vehicle is in motion" alarm.
My Elantra wont let me use the keyboard to enter an address while the vehicle is in motion, but it will let me use Siri so i can make changes while moving if needed.
Is the system still disabled if someone is present in the front passenger seat (modern vehicles have sensors for this)? Oftentimes the passenger acts as the navigator and it wouldn't make sense for them to be locked out of the system.
Yes, it has been a while since i've been in her car.. i think you actually need to put it in park to "unlock" it, not just be stopped.
This is why I said the system is very stupid.. one would think that a passenger can access the navigation system given they are not driving.
The lesson I took away from this is: Never buy a car with a built-in GPS system.
Android auto/carplay are a much better - They are not likely to hold your car "ransom" for map updates or such, and don't have stupid rules like must be in park.
It's weird that they didn't think of the simplest solution, which is to use the speedometer, and instead chose to use GPS. I suppose that makes it so you can't even use the nav if you happen to be riding on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off .
I have a Mazda 2, touch is disabled as soon as the car starts rolling, but is available at a stop.
I like their rotating joyknob implementation, which can be used without looking nor stretching arms, and integrates well with CarPlay as well. It's so good I skip on touch even when touch would be a good fit.
Even their homegrown UI isn't that bad, which is actually praise given the crap automakers can come up with.
Side node: touch is useful for the passenger though, as reaching to the knob can be annoying for the driver, even at a stop.
It’s interesting to consider that your grandfather was probably wrong about somethings being superfluous. Im not saying that as a criticism — but there are probably necessities of modern cars you and I find magnificent and essential (whether we our conscious of them or not) that your grandfather disdained.
Don’t get me wrong, touchscreen gloveboxes are stupid as hell, but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m being discerning or closed-minded.
> but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m
being discerning or closed-minded.
You're being discerning. And a little over-generous.
I'll counter - as a fellow 'older' one :)
There's a tendency to be over-conciliatory and exercise excessive
tolerance towards folly, for fear of being labelled a throwback.
Don't minimise the wisdom your age brings.
Some things just get worse, objectively, until a correction occurs.
Reality is, there are perverse design incentives and it's also the
younger people who are tearing their hair at the madness of gratuitous
tech and UX as a cult/ideology.
Diminishing returns? Let me do an inverse car analogy. I know how to write a complicated SQL query in SQL and in maybe a couple of different ORMs, because customers don't know SQL and want everything in (say) Ruby, Python, Elixir. Then the world inflicts us another ORM and I have to waste hours to learn all of it again only for the ORM to build my original SQL query and send it to the DB. Rolling eyes and WTF!
That reminds me of payment processors. They usually have SDKs for PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and maybe others. Often these just end up doing a simple HTTPS post of name=value pairs.
It is almost always easier and cleaner to use their HTTPS name=value post interface directly if they officially allow it and support it.
Often you are going to get your payment information from the user in that format anyway, such as via a post from your checkout page, or as a row of named columns when you retrieve on file payment information from your database.
In that case submitting name=value pairs mostly just requires translating the field names from your checkout page or column names from database to the names that the payment processor uses, plus adding a few more name=value pairs.
Going through their language specific SDKs often requires building up some ridiculous object oriented mess.
That grandpa probably complains about ridiculous things like having to uninstall the bumpers to replace a front lightbulb which don't matter in the grand scheme because I know a mechanic who does it for 20€ (excluding the cost of the parts) but it is still silly because it is something that anyone with zero training could have done.
I’m pretty much with you and was exactly the same - until I got a Polestar. All the stuff I need is still an actual button - although not ac controls. Physical buttons for volume, front and rear demist, cruise, lights and wipers. So I only need the touch screen for maps and some audio - like changing radio or which streaming service. Can still be eyes off road for a second admittedly. My dad has a VW golf with this don’t have to quite touch it interface and it’s always changing stuff on him as he chats away, waving his hand about - it’s super dangerous imho.
"Blame" that on Volvo. They've had some of the best in-car UX imo. Dozens of physical buttons, but they're intuitively laid out and it requires almost no thinking to do something.
While I agree things like volume, glovebox release, and other standard functions should stay far away from a touchscreen, I do like that touchscreens have enabled highly customizable options/settings that would be a bit tougher to achieve without a touchscreen.
Or at the very least a digital screen with manual navigation buttons, but in this case, a touchscreen is a bit more convenient (and you usually have to have the car parked to change settings, anyway).
Sadly it's only going to get worse. Companies left and right are seeing the light so to speak (i.e. how much money can be saved by using touchscreens) and putting them in everything in tandem with switching over to being electric. Doesn't help that countries everywhere are demanding that ICEs be phased out despite EVs having a host of problems and having nowhere near the amount of reliability.
But there's no way that a manually-operated latch is more expensive than a latch that is controlled by an electronic component, and that's leaving aside any time spent by developers and product managers to design the look, location, and functionality of the button in the software itself.
I wish they had left navigation to external devices which can be updated independently of the rest of the car. It took less than a year for the in-car navigation system to be effectively obsolete.
Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
No, the same couldn't be said about smartphone keyboards. The space in a smartphone is at an extreme premium and having the ability to display a keyboard or something else is very valuable. In a car this problem doesn't exist - you can have a touchscreen AND a normal glovebox latch. Removing the glovebox latch and replacing it with a touchscreen is nothing but idiocy, with zero benefits for anyone, ever, at any point.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.
> Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.
In 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving. According to automotive historian Michael Lamm, “Opponents of car radios argued that they distracted drivers and caused accidents, that tuning them took a driver’s attention away from the road, and that music could lull a driver to sleep.”
It's true but the physical buttons on my car radio let me get things over with very quickly.
The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.
Nope. I bought phones with physical keyboards for as long as I could, because they work better for me. But I'm not in the majority, and manufacturers didn't want to keep selling phones with moving parts, so here we are.
And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.
