European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls
In 2026, Euro NCAP points will be deducted if some controls aren't physical.
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.
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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.
There's actually a good number of things: windshield wipers, blinkers, cruise control, climate control, defrost, headlights, hazards, and gear (prndl). You'd be surprised at which of these some companies have tried to put on the touch screen.
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.
As Teslas and cars like it become more popular (especially in the EV space), more automakers will be adding touch screens. A lot of Fords new cars have them for instance. I was in a Hyundai rental a few months ago and it has a touch screen. I personally think it's a trend that will at some point be checked by the NHTSA or similar because they already know interacting with a phone slows reaction times, is distracting, and contributes to accidents. Why putting what is essentially a larger version of a smart phone on the dash should be better somehow is a question I've had since Tesla first started doing it.
Because it is a dependency for most things that buyers want in their cars. Not a technical dependency but cou cannot get Climate Control without a Touch screen in Some Cars for example.
doesn't make sense
Who's taking about legislation?
It’s really hard to find a car to buy that doesn’t use touch screens - they slap them on everything. Car quality in general has declined tbh - my modern Honda Civic was a fucking lemon.
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
Technically, you know vehicles went 80 years without any steering controls? Buttons on the wheel still isn't a requirement.
Suspect it depends on where you live, but you're not wrong.
I think I've driven a million kilometres by now, it's all become so fucking boring and second nature, that you start really being sloppy and distracted. Because you gained so much experience, you start to (unconciously) overestimate your skills.
But the two hands thing really is necessary for if you hit something slippy or need to make an unexpected manoeuvre. The risks of driving are incredibly low, but if shit does hit the fan you're in for a world of trouble if you're doing something else.
"allowed"? where do you live with such laws?
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.
Can you actually hit the tiny button on the radio without looking? I cant, i would prefer big Touch spaces, because they reduce the time i have to look for the action.
I can as all the buttons are in a row. Same for the AC and heater controls. I pretty much know them by heart so it takes a fraction of a second to glance where to roughly put my finger, and then I can count them out by feel while looking at the road.
Channel change and volume control are all physical buttons on my steering wheel. All feel, no look. To me, that's the best way it can be. The only time that isn't useful is if I'm out of town and presets don't work. For those situations, I'm generally streaming ahead of time.
Absolutely. You only need to find it once... And another thing, you can keep your finger on it and press it as many times as needed and know whether or not your press registered because guess what: it always does when you press it down.
Even in a car I've never driven before I can find controls by feeling across the dashboard and pushing at random until I get what I want. With a touch screen you can't push at random without taking your eyes off the road because there is nothing to feel.
Ideally, a well designed physical button wont need any visual confirmation to push or tell if it's already toggled
Think old school hazard lights, horn or turn signal stalks with clicking noise. You dont need to look at it at all to toggle them, or confirm button is depressed or activated. You can tell by auditory confirmation or haptically
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.
It's not the first time someone comes up with the next great thing that ends up being a user interface disaster. Light pens (w/ link for the younger crowd) come to mind.
all the cool kids would have ditched their mechanical keyboards
I never thought of it this way, but it make sense.
I never thought it would bother me, until I actually sat in a car where everything was dependent on software the first time.
At first I thought I was just getting old. But it dawned on me that relying on software to fucking roll down the windows or starting the car doesn't feel too good.
(It was also an extreme jump in technology for me because the last car I drove before that was an old Corsa around the year ~2005.)
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.
In IT the failures are the reason there is an industry - to some degree - and a feature of systems, so they require large numbers of staff to deploy and maintain. Quite similar to the ICE automobile historically in that regard. So the cars impact is now not just manufacture of parts , local mechanics for repair, but also buildings of software engineers, IT professionals, the cloud engineers, the cloud infrastructure itself and so on. Of course that isn't necessarily exclusive to EVs, or even to just the auto industry.
Because they are stupidly dangerous. The reason physical controls work is because you can memorize where they are and touch them without looking. With the touch screen you have to loo EVERY TIME you want to do anything, and that's an opportunity to not notice something on the road and end up in an accident.
There are so many things that can go wrong with software where in mission critical situations like cars electricity is the preference
Also tracking comes with that software.. nerd types (like me) hate that type of stuff. I think tracking data like that should be banned and is the reason why I won't buy a new car until that happens
There is no discernible difference to me between using a builtin touchscreen and a phone. If one is distracted driving, then so should the other. You have to take your eyes off the road to use both, and with physical controls, I might glance it it but most of the operation of them is done by braille. If I pressed a button, I know I pressed a button and I pressed the right one, I don't have to look back at it to know that. And if I have to follow it up with another action, my hand already knows where that control is relative to the one I just pressed.
The only thing I could live with on touchscreen is music or diagnostics since neither are particularly necessary when you're in the act of driving.
The difference for me is that my phone is sitting in a holder stuck to the windscreen and looking at it means I'm only slightly looking away from the road, so I will still see movement in my peripheral vision.
By contrast, a large touchscreen in the middle of the dash necessarily means taking my eyes entirely off the road and probably also adjusting to the brightness of the display.
Neither are great, but one is worse than the other
Apart from being dangerous in a car they are also super annoying. I got a Walkman a couple of years ago just so I could pause and skip tracks by pressing a button in my pocket.
I've hated touchscreens on everything since forever, and have been shouting into the darkness about how stupid they are in cars since the idea was first introduced. I think most nerds have been doing the same for a long time. Touchscreen are only good for mindless tapping on unimportant things, everything else needs dedicated controls.
Time and place. Do I want everything on a touchscreen at home? More compact and allows more options. Yes.
While I'm trying to fumble for a control when I'm driving a 2000 lb deathtrap at 55 MPH? No.
Agreed, but what the heck car do you drive that's as light as 2000 pounds??
I am doing car shopping right now, anything that doesnt have physical controls is out of the question no matter how good a deal it is or how cool the car otherwise is
Touch screens are so dumb.
Basically everything you might touch during the drive should be physical.
Wait, are there cars with lights/wipers on a touch screen?
Tesla for a very long time had wiper speed on the touch screen. Wipers were supposed to be automatic so they didn't provide physical controls. But of course auto wipers don't work all the time and Tesla's camera detector is particularly bad. They since changed the steering button to bring up touch control.
Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.
It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.
That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.
Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.
Tesla and VW’s idiotic light controls are touch (but not a screen) so you have to take your eyes off the road to turn fog lights on and off. The panel is completely flat and there’s a risk you might turn the main beam off. I mean, the mind boggles.
I know about Aç and volume controls. I hope the rest are not (yet) on touch screens.
I think on the newly revised model 3, Tesla removed the steering column stalks completely.
so no virtual hookers / toy boys?
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.
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"
Bring back the standard DIN design. Then we can all change out our head unit with something that has Garmin but doesn't affect the physical buttons on the dash below it.
i wish that still existed, there's conversions for some modern cars, but it has basically vanished.
welp, gotta stock up on spare parts for my little nugget i guess...
but imagine how incredible physical controls for navigation could be
I’m imagining etch-a-sketch plan routing.
My 2012 Pathfinder was the last year of that generation and had navigation designed before UX was really emphasized. It mainly relies on physical buttons and it's overall terrible. Part of it involves an iPod-like scroll wheel, which is actually kinda nice to control zoom but that display is another kind of terrible.
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 15 18 23 people have shown they don't know how to drive.
Read the full comment before replying you lemon
Mate there's like, a whole paragraph left in my comment. You can't safely type any navigation information while driving. If you want to use voice control to navigate, it doesn't really matter if it's physical controls or a touch screen. Maybe read the whole comment where all of this was already addressed.
Epic downvotes
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:
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~
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 :)
Any controls that aren't multimedia need to be separate from the infotainment system.
I want to be able to change the radio unit without losing my air conditioner. I don't want a cracked touchscreen to prevent me from turning on traction control.
Radio???
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 don't really think that physical buttons on the dashboard are any less distracting. I still have take my eyes off the road to make sure I press the correct button. At least I can press right scroll wheel and give voice commands.
You don't have to take your eyes off the road to operate a control. You might need to learn where some are in a new car, but then you instinctively reach for and operate the ones you use all the time. It's muscle memory.
This is not the case in a touch screen where controls may or may not be visible at any given time and you have no chance of operating them unless you physically look at the screen to control where you touch it. Maybe this arrangement is fine for some non-critical functions, but it absolutely isn't for critical ones.
What is worse is that cars from Tesla are even getting rid of indicator stalks which is fantasically dangerous. Maybe it's not a big deal in the US where roundabouts are uncommon but they are all over the place in Europe and the rest of the world and lack of indicators will cause crashes and fatalities. Just so Elon Musk could save a few bucks on a stalk. And if that results in a lower EuroNCAP score then boohoo for him. I can imagine the raging and legal threats that he'll engage in if that happens.
I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.
Honestly, I thought I would love touch controls in my car. But I drive a LOT for work and what I've learned is there are very few things as frustrating as being on a bumpy road trying to press a touch screen button and hitting every other button on the screen in the process.
Yeah there's that too. It really isn't practical. At the very least you want some sort of tactile feedback so you have confirmation "yes I pressed the thing"
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.
Tesla’s on-wheel turn signal buttons are criminally bad.
So is their "swipe up or down to go forwards or backwards", ON THE SCREEN.
So is a missing shift stick, or the touch shift screen on the final roof.
Hyundai's one-pedal mode that can bring a car to a complete stop without lighting the brake lights is even worse.
Great news. I wish they would also deduct stars if the heating/cooling controls are not physical too.
So one time someone broke into my car and tried to crowbar the radio out. They destroyed the whole dashboard, but failed to get the radio (it was nice of them to still take the face tho).
What this resulted in all of the controls hanging out by their wires. Everything still worked, I just had to sift through the exposed wires, pick up the proper control and twist the dial or push the button. It was ridiculous but still miles better than touch screen for these things.
What kind of car? Sounds like good build quality in their wiring, lol.
My father's Avalon has touch sensitive HVAC controls. They're not touchscreen, it's a panel of plastic that has little labelled sections that have grooves cut around them as if they are buttons, but it responds like a modern touch screen. The temperature control is used by sliding your finger along. It's SO GODDAMN STUPID.
For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.
iirc. He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.
2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.
I think what happened to Yelchin is a separate issue. The joystick was still a physical object that gave tactile feedback. The design was fine, but GM flushed the mouse on the implementation.
Where we have a bigger problem is when common vehicle controls are just an image on a screen, and a driver has to take their eyes off the road to do something simple like change the A/C temperature or skip a song track.
Yes, this is a bit outside the screen problem, but it is pertinent to car UI. Buttons/Joysticks give a form of tactile feedback, they don't give positional feedback. Take a button. Pushing it does give tactile feedback (she feels that she pushed the button), but it's quite possible that the button wasn't pushed enough or long enough to register the push, same with joystick up/down. Flipping a switch for example is different. The position changes, and latches. She is certain that her intentions (turn on the light) were either carried out or not, because the switch with either be in position one or two. Buttons/joysticks require a second evaluation, to check that the button knows it was pushed. It's a subtle difference, but serious. Sliding the gearshift all the way forward, we just know it's done. Likewise pulling up on the handle, hearing the ratchet sound, I know that my parking brake is on.
Antov Yelkin who played Checkov
You mean Anton Yelchin who played Chekov?
most definitely that. not the other. The guy who played Pavel Checkov, the Enterprise's navigator. Not the noted author born in 1860.
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.
This is insane. Why is it illegal to use a phone while driving (here in the UK at least) but not that? They are basically the same thing!
Ford? If so I feel your pain. The controls for the ventilation in their infotainment system are godawful. The time between input and output is so long that you have to look down to hit the "button" to bring up the ventilation menu, look back to the road while it takes 2 literal seconds for the menu to pop up, then look back down to the diagram of the vents to decide what you want blowing or not blowing, hit the right "buttons" and then wait for the thing to respond and do what you asked. Meanwhile you've gone 1/4 mile at highway speeds with your eyes barely on the road.
What was wrong with a dial with all the possible vent combinations? I want the defroster on and I want hot air on my feet? That's at 7 o'clock. Just blast my face? 12 noon. It was simple, it worked. It did not require looking away from the road once you were familiar with it.
Tesla's Model 3 uses a touchscreen for damn near everything. Some things are buried and require multiple presses in different places on the screen. It looks really good, but the actual purpose and the fact that humans driving at potentially deadly speeds need to operate it seems to have been placed a distant second to safety when the thing was designed. Given who is in charge of Tesla it's not much of a surprise.
I'd never realized how convenient/natural a joystick is for adjusting your side mirrors. I'm not even sure my wife has the reach to both press a touchscreen in the center console and have her head in driving position to adjust the mirrors with real time feedback. Even I'd hate to have to tweak a mirror while driving with a touchscreen.
Its mainly touchscreen due to two reasons: 1. Touchscreens are significantly cheaper than analog controls. 2. Touchscreens support the 'publish now, debug later' approach of Tesla and a lot of Chinese car manufacturers.
it *used to look good, but then they fired the former-apple designer and hired some hack who worked on android, and it looks god awful
before: https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/model-3-ui-1.jpg
after: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*zNdNui2-s30EEAqCDy8vRA.jpeg
Neither of those options look at all appealing to me
Spoken like an Apple fan. 🙂
I think they both look nice, but I wouldn't want to have to actually use either of them, especially while driving a car.
This is an excellent example of why Steve Jobs was right to make Bill Atkinson add rounded rectangles to Mac OS
Of the two, the second looks easier to use. The first looks like everything is buried under "child-safe" menus you have to dig through to do anything. That said, they both kind of suck.
Just because they look all bubbly doesn't mean it's a better UI.
Not saying it's for everyone, but if it's not accessible from the home screen with a single press I can do without looking I'd rather just use the voice controls to keep my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
For someone who's the primary driver of a vehicle that's a good option, but there are plenty of Teslas out there that get driven often by secondary drivers who aren't familiar with the specific voice commands and IMO aren't going to learn them. Some standardization for controls is a good thing and although physical controls can vary, they're usually enough alike to easily figure them out. That's not going to happen with a touch screen.
I’d like a couple more physical controls, but I think you’re making it sound worse than it really is. I also don’t think the issue only is touch screen vs physical controls. Modern cars are a lot more complex - they have a lot more features.
I went for a few years renting higher end cars on a regular basis. The primary functions on every single one of the "modern cars" were easy to figure out with the exception of the Teslas. For occasional use Tesla's controls are absurdly cumbersome verging on dangerous.
I can understand your experience would be different if it's your primary ride.
It's tech on wheel, so safety is always second.
If their cheap-asses had actually done something other than cheapest possible implementation for the majority of input devices it might have been ok. Having driven several cars with touch input for various features the complaints I have are all the same:
I don’t hate touchscreens, they can be useful, but manufacturers have implemented them at the expense of actually driving the car.
Damn, am I just getting old or did anyone else have to google what "IOW" stood for?
Any control that requires you to take your eye off the road for a split second just to confirm that you even activated it, is dangerous. Then multiply that by each control they've moved to touch screen. So dumb.
I had to Google it too! "In other words"
The only semi nice thing my car did for the touchscreen is let you put shortcuts at the top, which is just the stupid screen for the heated seats. Everything else has a button in a easy to reach spot. I use Android Auto and I only have to bring up the actual car menu every few months, and not while driving. It isn't a perfect infotainment system, but it has certainly been the least annoying.
Thank you Europe!
I have better slogan: "EU, I belive in you!"
Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.
Airbags are several hundred dollars added to the cost.
Physical buttons are a safety feature.
BAS inputs (all physical inputs really) require muxed and addressed circuits on the board level to accomplish some connection to the software interface, whereas one touchscreen can have an arbitrary number of software interfaces it interacts with.
The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly, but I also have physical climate control so I can't fully relate
Were you using Android Auto with a USB cable or wireless? I have an aftermarket AA radio in my car that I use wired and it works almost perfectly,
Are you suggesting a Wi-Fi Bluetooth device inside of the same vehicle its trying to connect to via Wi-Fi Bluetooth would have connection problems, and not be able to connect, at that short range?
Being honest here, I have a car with android auto and I hate having to plug it in for a variety of reasons.
My opinion, Phone OS makers need to get their shit together around android auto / apple carplay. Too much nonsense gets in the way of all the actually important pieces. When you get in a car with only a radio, the music just starts playing when you get in. Which means, your experience is better with old tech. That's just ridiculous.
I personally think a better idea is to just start equipping cars with cell modems that you add to your plan or something. There is no need to offload this work to your cellphone when the car has more physical space for that kind of thing anyway. I mean tesla's just have a borderline gaming computer in them these days.
Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.
Well duh. Even when they were introduced, touchscreens in cars got a lot of pushback. I’d much rather flip a switch or turn a knob for things I do daily, rather than futz three levels deep in a car maker’s software. They put things in there that really should be simple pushbuttons.
Fucking finally. Thank you.
We want buttons
Well it could also be a lever or a switch.
I mean, no fucking shit.
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
Let's hope important enough.
This seems like common sense to me.
It's cheaper to put one screen and write software than spin up manufacturing operations for all sorts of differently shaped custom buttons and the control systems and wiring harnesses that are required to operate them all, so that's why automakers are doing it. Not saying I like it lol.
"Back"?
There are people who'd entrust their life to a touchscreen?
They've been buying Teslas for years.
I can’t even entrust my video games to a touch screen.
You have a smartphone don't you?
What are you gonna do when your hands have blood all over them? Good luck dialing an emergancy number on your phones touchscreen.
So yes. Pretty much everyone in a developed country do entrust their lives to a touchscreen on a daily basis.
On iOS you can just hold the side button and one of the volume buttons to bring up the SOS menu, if you keep holding the buttons it'll sound an alarm, do a countdown, and call the emergency services. You don't actually need to interact with the screen. Obviously this means you'll need to be able to squeeze your thumb and another finger together, but a phone with buttons would require you to be able to operate that somehow too.
I think you could also try to ask Siri if that's enabled.
I've no idea about Android but I'd assume you can do something similar there.
I, for one, would like to see single-function, physical switches for everything that isn't specifically infotainment. I want turn signals to be a single switch, and I don't want any other features integrated into that switch, and I want each individual module to be easily replaced.
God yes. Having ten buttons on the turn signals is a nightmare. No I don't want to play "guess which button controls the wipers" when I sit in an unknown car for 10 minutes. Thanks.
Imagine changing gear without feeling which gear you have/changed to.
You have now given me the nightmare of a touchscreen gear shifter.
Paddleshift ever?
It's almost like the Tesla cars where you started the engine via the touch screen.
As someone who relies on GPS, a doordasher I kinda think it should be only for multi media and maps. AC and other controls should be nobs. Also steering wheel controls
Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.
They can fuck that up too. My wife's genesis is up for back and down for next...what?
This is what I have in my honda civic, it's perfect.
Europeans are hardcore, we use plastic dummys to crash test our cars, theirs can talk!
Im.on board with buttons, and touch screens should be guesture only.
Wonder if capacitive touch buttons qualify as 'physical' buttons. If not, VWs are going to need to make a lot of changes.
Those are literally the worst
They already said they will.
the 2010s was a mistake
Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017
I'm watching an episode of Bluey with my kids right now and they're playing Pass the Parcel and Lucky's dad is trying to stop the music on his phone but his touch screen isn't working lol.
It’s the rotary shifter knobs and the AC controls buried in touchscreen menus that kill me
Now actually do something about the touchscreens they bring with them
I have a 2002 acura mdx. The old console finally gave away and now I can't control air ventilation in my car. The only physical button I have is auto and defrost. So I'm either full blast heat or off. I hate it.
I totally agree, anything that takes people's eyes off the road is not a good choice to put into cars. Cars may have more safety features than ever, but let's face it, drivers are still too easily distracted and too careless. Here in Utah we have so many highway fatalities every day, people driving the wrong way on freeways, and speeding around school buses with their stop signs out. There's no good fix for "stupid."
Does car with touch screen has no button for warning ?!
No one ever requested screens instead of buttons. It's probably some BS some CEO came up with and forced the engineers to implement.
Imagine someone told you your stove has to have levers to be a stove and your gearbox had to be manual and your phone had to have buttons and oh wait they did for several years
You know what would save many more lives than car physical controls? Mandating car mode on phones.
That's not as feasible as regulating how cars are made, because many phones can be rooted and flashed for full user control, unlike most cars.
Touch screen controls shouldn't be in cars regardless of all the above.
Hard disagree. The facts are that phone use is a far more likely cause of death than having touch screen controls. To say "it can't be regulated" is a cop out. It may not be able to be "perfectly" regulated, but the greater impact on preventing deaths (which is the goal here) is much much much greater by limiting phone use while driving than forcing cars to have physical buttons. I mean, what percentage of phone users are knowledgeable enough to root and flash a phone? 0.1%?
I guarantee this will never happen. Manufacturers picked touch screens and capacitive buttons because they are cheaper to produce. There is no way they’re going back to physical controls.
Well, if your vehicle can't be sold in an entire economic zone because you aren't complying with safety regulations, that's a pretty big incentive to change your design.
I don’t really believe for a moment that a company would care really. They exist to make profits by any means necessary, legal or not. Changing designs requires changes in tooling, processes, and design. That all costs lots of money.
If any design is changed as a result of gov regulations I’ll eat my entire dick.
