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.
That doesn’t work well in a car though. It works in a phone because you’re holding it, or a trackpad because you’re putting a lot of pressure on it. In a car it’s already shaking from the engine, road, etc. Plus those taps are generally much shorter and lighter and less likely to feel the vibration.
no feedback? 🤔
either the button or an indicator lights up or you see/hear what the button is supposed to activate or stop
*haptic feedback. The touch and press should be two different actions, not the same action. Otherwise, you need to look at a button to know where it is and if it did what it was supposed to do, which distracts you from driving.
Touchscreens are not that much better in this regard, IMO
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.
It’s actually one of my biggest gripes …. Washer and single wipe are on a control stalk but wiper speed is on touch screen.
I think the theory is that wipers are automatic so you don’t usually need to control them manually, but that automation doesn’t work very well or maybe the rain sensor doesn’t work very well
Temperature control or defrost
In my Subaru, hvac is three large distinctive knobs I can use without looking. In my Tesla, it’s more automatic so I need to change it less, but it’s all in touch screen menus
Cherish that Subaru, because it’s not that way in them anymore. At least, not in ours, which was purchased in 2021. Now hvac is all touch screen; it’s awful.
I have a 2024 Subaru and the A/C contols are on the screen now as well. The temp control and defrost are still buttons though, so while I would prefer physical buttons, the current setup is manageable and I’ve gotten used to it. I just make sure to set everything before driving, then use the physical temp controls to adjust when needed.
Now im imagining a spaceship with all the controls only on one big touchscreen
Imagine what happens one morning when you’re having your morning coffee while walking to the big screen. You suddenly slip, and the coffee mug hits the display, decorating it with a spider web of cracks and a splatter of coffee. I hope you can make it to the next space station using nothing but voice commands.
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.
You do though. Without legislations, cars wouldn’t have safety features by default like crumple zones, airbags etc. Without legislations, companies could do whatever they want to pad their bottom line. You need laws to define what is and isn’t acceptable, especially when it comes to safety.
Before we started legislating car safety, more often, if you got in a crash at speed, you would be either dead or seriously injured. It was not uncommon for a front-end collision to shove the entire steering column into, in some cases THROUGH, people’s ribcages because there was no shock absorption. “Defensive driving” - avoiding a collision at all costs - was taught mostly because of this sort of problem.
I’ll speak to the effectively of modern safety engineering myself - I was involved in two serious accidents within the past two years that, were I in a vehicle without safety features, would’ve left me dead or crippled for life. One, my Jeep spun out on a patch of wet road and got slammed by two other vehicles in a pinball situation - airbags deployed and I was left with some soreness and a thoroughly-wrecked vehicle. The other, my work van got T-boned by a semi truck at speed while crossing an intersection - once again, the airbags deployed, the seatbelt locked me in place, and the fact that the rear of the vehicle was designed to squish in on itself saved me from, at the very least, a severe case of whiplash, and more than likely some severe head injuries.
What’s funny is thay Adam Smith predicted all of our late stage capitalism before Marx and Engles were even born. He warmed that leaving capitalists to their own devices would destroy the economy, but instead he is regarded as the father of free marker capitalism by morons who never even read* Wealth of Nations. *
The hand was fine until some point for most purposes, just like Newtonian physics were fine.
It did work as expected before that. The funniest thing is that the Soviet system started smelling of piss at the same time.
So libertarian and marxist views on economics were both like “now our enemy’s flaws are not much worse than our own, but it will get apocalyptic for them and we’ll win”, and somewhere in 60s it started getting apocalyptic for both. Damn funny.
I won’t. And I don’t need legislation to filter my purchases. I need legislation to filter the number of drivers using a touchscreen behind me on the highway.
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.
