I'm not sure why car manufacturers thought it's a good idea to have essential controls on a touchpad you have to look at to navigate. I mean, shouldn't you be looking at something else when controlling a vehicle?
And that’s a tolerable outcome if the UX is responsive and well designed. Tesla can just barely get away with their approach because the software is sufficiently good.
Unfortunately most legacy auto seem to have hired their talent directly from printer manufacturers like Canon and Epson. So blindly copying Tesla isn’t going to turn out quite so well for them.
Tesla gets away with it because almost everyone esle followed them to save costs. And because they managed to convince people to cope with that shit in first place (cars are now software because of EV and reasons and all that crap).
I really don't get why vehicle manufacturers skimp on software - it's a super competitive and massive industry, and the consequences of failure are high. If they paid SV-level salaries, they'd get SV-level talent.
Because Tesla did it and the market blindly slovenly and stupidly follows leaders regardless of their sanity.
See also how every laptop is becoming a MacBook and every phone is becoming an iphone. Non removable batteries, touch screen car interfaces, soldered in memory, removal of things like headphone jacks ... Competitors fall over themselves trying to follow any design signal they see.
You can disagree but you really ought to be evidence based and not just vibes.
They're obsessed with differentiation for the sake of it. Look at the cybertruck. It's a company run by a middle aged man with hair plugs, 3 wives and 11 children who bought a 44 billion dollar company as a vanity project.
This! At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than physical buttons.
Cap touch buttons or physical buttons both require a circuit board, so that costs the same, but cap touch buttons just need one big sheet of material with some screen printing placed over the circuit board. Physical clicky buttons require each button to be designed, manufactured, screen printed, and the clicky action to be tuned for feel and durability, none of which is cheap. Physical buttons may not all be exactly the same size and shape due to design considerations, so that's injection mold tooling variations, additional supply chain part numbers to manage, and additional ways that manufacturing can screw up assembly. Physical buttons can jam, get stuck, or fall out, so engineering time needs to be spent ensuring this won't happen 10 years from now, too.
> At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than physical buttons.
I hate whoever was responsible this decision. After Internet connectivity, this is the 2nd worst trend in modern electronics.
Why is Zigbee or similar not an option there? I have a whole bunch of physical controls all around my house without running a single wire, why can't car manufacturers do the same?
Think about it a bit more. You still need wires for power, you can’t be swapping batteries in car accessories as you can in your home. If you are already running wires for power, running 1-2 more for data is not that problematic, you are already running the harness. In addition, you don’t want the latency and unreliability of wireless solutions in a car. It might be ok in your home, but not in a pretty rough environment such as your car. It would also be much more expensive both hardware and software wise, not even mentioning the potential bugs and such.
Exactly. The HW is pretty cheap but no HW is cheaper.
It has a ripple effect for other parts.
Button for everybody: More expensive and can't be sold as a package
Button optional: No Button -> Hole in plastic molded cover -> Either need different molds/parts or an additional preparation step removing the plastic covering the hole. Car manufacturing is traditionally very low margin business and extremely streamlined. Sooner or later EVs will also end up in the same situation
My parents have a 2019 Subaru Forester and it has too many buttons. It also has too many screens each with their own settings menu. Which goes to show that the battle isn’t really between buttons vs screens, but rather good UX vs bad UX.
This VW solution really is worst of both worlds, as these are capacitive surfaces with printed symbols. So you cannot really iterate on them post-release.
Automotive grade, smart touch screens are not that cheap. And all the do is allowing for lazy development and the release of pre-Beta software if used the way they currently are.
It is decidedly not. First, the environmental conditions, heat, cold, vibrations, sun (just ask Tesla how those cheap non-automotive grade screen did). Second, if the screen is just used to capture input and display atuff, sure it is stupid. A lot aren't so as they include some computing power.
But hey, good luck sourcing your parts for serial car manufacture, or anything even remotely serious in a commercial environment, from Alibaba... What's your alternate source of choice, Wish or Temu?
The motivation is the same as what Steve claimed in the 2007 iPhone keynote – you have to reuse the buttons you put in the device for all interaction and that makes it clunky. And if you get a great new idea after you ship the product, then tough luck, you cannot change the buttons anymore.
I personally drive a Model 3 and would appreciate to have a few more physical buttons though. (But it's not a bug deal for me.)
I used to drive a Nissan Juke that I felt had the best of both worlds: a regular screen with a physical dial and buttons that change function based on the context displayed on screen (e.g. AC, drive mode). The buttons even had little screens on then so that they could display the function label.
Yes, there is something special about cars. Design mistakes result in death. It's not a race to get the most features out, it's a race to get the most features into proven, quality-assured, heavily-tested products. The software development mindset of "we'll fix it later", or "get the MVP out ASAP" has NO place.
As has been pointed out by others, putting stuff like climate controls or volume controls that commonly need to be accessed while driving on a touch display is dangerous, since you need to look at a touch display to find the thing you're pressing. Anything that the driver might need interact with while moving is essentially a driving feature and deserves a stable interface, and IMO a tactile one. Frequency of updates and rigor of validation are [negatively] correlated in software and elsewhere, though they don't necessarily need to be, if you're willing to spend on a giant QA pipeline.
I'm fine with the idea that navigation data or some nonessential entertainment stuff that mainly exists for passengers can be updated on a rolling basis, it can be OTA, whatever.
Anything else, I stand by what I said. It's silly to put it on a touch display for the sake of potential improvements via software update. A bigger improvement is just not having those things on a touch display, forgoing that ability.
Volume controls on my car are physical and I don't need to look at the touch screen to control temperature - I know exactly where those virtual buttons are.
However, my car has gotten better through over the air updates since I bought it.
I mean, look, I absolutely don't deny you your preference, and as I also said previously I would like to have a few more physical buttons. But it's not the end of the world for me (like some commenters in this thread pretend).
Not sure what you mean, actually. Navigate? You mean pressing the microphone button and saying "Let's go home", or some other kind of navigation?
Route planning typically happens when stationary — or if you have passengers, they'll obviously use the systems onboard (or on their personal devices) to do navigation.
But if you're driving alone, and no-one else is navigating for you… you'll have to stop.
...unless you have physical inputs, in which case you just have two or three glances at the screen, each quicker than the mirror check i know you're doing every few seconds.
the problem isn't that you're doing something with your free hand and sparing some mental capacity--else the manual transmission would be outlawed--it's that if you have a poorly designed car, you have to look away for long enough to lose track of what's happening around you.
good on you for realizing when you can't safely operate your car. but me, i just bought a car i can operate safely.
If it would come to that, I would just not do it. It would be a peripheral activity anyway, if it's not afforded by my steering wheel or voice controls. So, yes, I would stop to navigate that. Not sure what that would be, in your car? In my car that might be something like planning the charging for the next night, or unexpectedly running out of battery and planning a detour? Very rare.
