The fact that these cars pass safety certification, makes me question certifiers. It's illegal to look at your phone while driving, for good reason, but it's legal to fiddle with a damn computer screen, because it's part of the car.

I predict it's a matter of time before we'll see a correlation between number of crashes, and cars with touchscreens.

It is not about 'looking and pushing' the button.

It's about stateful UI.

physical layout of buttons is usually stateless - press button thing turns on, press it again it turns off.

You don't need to think in which menu you are, and where to press, while driving.

> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems

> Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control

I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it.

If a touch screen interface were properly designed with large enough touch affordances and the correct levels of responsiveness, I'd be just as happy with that as I would a big dashboard full of buttons.

For me, when things get dangerous, its when pressing the button (physical or touch) doesn't do what its suppose to do.

Yes, but if you are bored from a long drive, you can watch some commercials on the screen or navigate 20 submenus to move the AC one degree up or down.

Are you sure you want to modify the temperature? Please read the following agreement and type I AGREE if you agree.

Strong disagree about response time. There is a huge difference between a quick glance and tap, and having to watch an interface and figure out if it registered the touch or not. An unresponsive screen demands significant extra attention because you have to monitor it.

> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems.

It depends on how the physical button works. You functionally don't get tactile feedback if the response time isn't good. You don't actually always know that you've activated a control (e.g. Did I not press it hard enough? Did I need to rotate it further?) Cheap buttons or knobs or dials can often feel mushy and be unclear as to whether you've fully turned them or pushed them.

Not taking eyes off the road is definitely better, but general distraction is still a problem even if you don't have to look away.

> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems

That’s not true with all buttons. Those infinitely turning dials have some of the same problems, especially with response latency and the same magnitude of input not always resulting in the same magnitude of change. The presence of the dial is better than the touchscreen, but with those dials you still need to monitor the screen to get feedback on how much change you’re (usually slowly) effecting.

Physical buttons have the distinct advantage of being physical (duh!)

I can triangulate my way to the right button on the dashboard with just my fingers without ever taking eyes off the road.

I can touch and feel a button without "pressing" or activating it. Impossible with a touch screen!

Buttons can be differently shaped to make this even better.

Touch screens invite and allow bad ux with nested menus. You need to know which screen you're on, which menu is activated.

I know distinctly if I pressed a button once or twice or thrice, or long pressed it. No dice with touch screens.

No software update will ever change the physical layout of those buttons. Period. So much simpler.

And if buttons are more expensive, well thats good ! Make it harder to put more buttons. We don't need more.

Anecdotally, my 2006 prius had a touch screen. Always worked as expected, no lag. I could never, through 5 years of ownership, change the temp, or start the defogger without looking at the screen. A nissan I drove last week with physical buttons, took me a day to get used to with physical buttons and knobs for these functions.

I dont see a single end user benefit for touch screens. I see a bunch of reasons for the manufacturer tho.

Big latency is distracting. Random latency is hugely distracting.

Our Subaru has a physical volume knob.

Its position is only a "gentle suggestion" to the software to move volume up or down.

At times, especially when starting the vehicle, there is major latency in the software processing the knob movement..

Also, if the knob is moved too fast, the sw gets the wrong reading.

This results in volume being way too high for serveral seconds as well as many other frustrating, dangerous situations.

UX in cars made in the 60s were better than this.

I don't think slapping on fake physical knobs onto laggy buggy software is a solution at all.

Why not have haptic feedback like in phones

I'm willing to credit this type of feature creep for some of the problem, but only some.

Decades ago, we had hardware that was so much less capable than anything anyone has put in a car in ten years that the comparison is absurd. Nonetheless, those old systems were often very capable of doing useful things, and the UIs were often very, very fast by modern standards. And a lot of this was that the software stack was tuned for performance and latency and did not do things that hurt latency too much, and this came at a substantial modularity cost.

Back when a TI calculator with a whole OS running on a Z80 was an order of magnitude or so faster than your average new car, it didn't have a compositor (which still eats a good frame or so of latency, maybe more, and, as an industry we still don't know how to solve this). It ran an OS that was surely far harder to tweak than a modern car stack, but it had fewer layers and could be kept performant. An Apple ][ and its clones were, of course, much faster than a TI calculator, and we still can't match that level of performance.

A group of engineers that were willing to keep the managers away and make a simple, limited-purpose system, could surely get excellent performance out of any currently available car computer hardware, but it would come at a cost. Buzzwords would not happen :) Also, the software developers had access to full data sheets for the hardware, and when you told the hardware to put something in its framebuffer, it was there, and no blobs or firmware were in the middle.

I still remember when Windows 2000 launched with "layered windows": an application could opt in to being composited, and it would gain the ability to be translucent, but it came at a very obvious performance cost. Sadly, 23 years later, that performance cost is still there, but it's not opt-in any more.

I believe that the engineers are competent at developing software, and think that a lot of the quality issues are due to engineers abdicating authority over the software to managers and never saying "No, adding in that feature at this point in the timeline is going to make this a steaming pile of shit and I refuse to do it and still call myself a software engineer."

I get that we have families to feed, but I've seen far too much of a mindset shift in fellow engineers into thinking that we're warcraft peons rather than professionals. "The business" has engineering feedback as a necessary input, and speaking individually with steakholders they expect this - they'll push until we push back.

Even if the infotainment has been in development for 15 years, all new cars I've played with seem less responsive than a 1st-generation iPhone despite having a UI that is no more capable. Either the engineers aren't making the most of the hardware or the hardware is underpowered by a few decades.

There's a 0% chance 4 yr old hardware can't handle what GP is asking it to do.

> Product people have been picking at the design and asking for changes way too late

Sounds like classic everything-bolted-on-never-refactored-always-add-features you see in the vast majority of companies. Which is fine if you're making a social app or CRM but not okay when talking about heavy machinery. No company ever prioritizes making things snappy and it's ultimately always on the engineers to push back. Sorry, this one is still on the software developers to me.

That still just sounds like people not knowing what they're doing.

In no world would automakers say, "Hey you know, we just did all of this tire engineering with this rubber, but let's change the composition at the last minute and not retest all of its physical properties."

So, why should it be any different with software? Because some sucker PM didn't have the brains to say, "We can't actually do that."?

Dude Winamp was a clean, simple and wickedly responsive UI that allowed a multitude of real-time audio tweaks and supported playlists with thousands of files. This was in the late 90’s running on 166Mhz processors with maybe 16MB of system ram.

Are you saying modern car infotainment systems have fewer resources allocated to the UI?

A computer running at 2.048 MHz and with 2048 words RAM took men to the moon.

I don't buy it that a 4 year old SoC cannot run GPS navigation, play music, do whatever a car infotainment system does, without half a second delay

It's great to get your perspective on this. Aside from the GPS/navigation features, aren't car infotainment systems extremely basic?

We've been controlling heating, cooling, audio source, and audio volume since the dawn of time.

How are technical requirements related to these basic functions changing such that their UIs haven't been absolutely perfected by now? Is the entire infotainment code being rewritten all the time so there's no chance to iterate and improve on the previous versions work?

Windows 95 runs pretty well on 10 year old hw and does much more than these car screens do. So no, software is fundamentally crap there.

I wouldn’t necessarily the engineers, but I’ll certainly blame the designers and product managers.

I absolutely hate my Acura’s infotainment system. My “favorite” feature isGPS autocomplete.

You type in part of an address (which of course has a very slow response time), then you pick the completion off the list.

Sounds fine right?

But when you click it, you’re met with a SLOW ANIMATION OF THE COMPLETION BEING TYPED INTO THE SEARCH BOX. Motherfuck dude! What the hell is that? Why does anyone want to watch the keyboard flash for five seconds?

I buy this. Did you all forget the GTA5 loading delay caused by a JSON added after the game was developed in game purchase items.

my experience working with industrial manufacturing is that there is ALWAYS a push to cut costs and the SoC that runs your software is usually the first thing to get to the chopping block. Given it is extremely hard to gauge how well software will perform before it is actually built and the SoC is chosen way ahead of time it leads to bad performance

And from the other side, there is a big push to add more and more fluff to make the UI design sleek, you could make it performant if you used DOS-style interfaces but no product manager is going to allow that and making animations from scratch (vs using a platform like Android or browsers that has a ton of abstractions to create fancy UIs) is extremely costly

A talented software developer should know how to use the phrase ‘no’ Effectively.

> In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.

What aspects of the hardware would lead to 500ms response times?

The solution is quite evident is it not? Regulatory bodies to set response latency and limits with over-life degradation as an additional parameter.

Only reason "they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver." happens is because automakers know they can get past all regulatory approval with lead/silver or whatever metal you prefer.

Yeah this is nonsense. If not for hardware considerations, probably some bureaucratic nonesense. Disputes between teams, or suppliers*, something fell through the cracks because it was nobody's problem; stuff like that.

Probably not because they lack 10x l33t coding skills, and have fat fingers.

* I'm not sure if people realize that many automotive dev teams are buying enormous stacks of software from outside parties that often have motivation to throw you under the bus... if it's not an external supplier, it's probably another team on a different continent... but maybe it's different in infotainment?

Unless the hardware can and will be upped from a $20 to a $200 SoC because it’s required to keep response times low, then someone isn’t doing their job. There has obviously been mountains of specs during these projects, but the most important one - the response time - was obviously overlooked.

I’m not saying like the GP that this indicates inexperienced developers, but it does indicate poor technical leadership and priorities. Further, good/senior developers would have been more likely to call this out.

> In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.

I find this hard to believe. An Intel 486 from 30+ years ago could run Doom full screen with nearly instant key press response. A 6502/6510 C64 could repaint the entire text screen each frame. Why would today's auto hardware require 500ms to respond to touches on a static menu?

> In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.

Then someone else didn't know what they were doing.

Meanwhile some car company is putting a Ryzen APU capable of playing Steam games in the infotainment system.

the thing is, even the brightest of us are still terrible. There’s no such thing as a good software developer

Car infotainment as responsive as a 2004 iPod would be earth-shattering. I refuse to believe that in 2019 the hardware to do this was a material expense on a $25,000 car.

We had responsive hardware/software 20 years ago, and car UIs are not doing anything out of the ordinary. To what do you attribute the low quality then?

My top of the line Android Auto compatable head unit is pretty ordinary. A RAM mount on the windscreen holding my phone is significantly more responsive!

What is the compensation range for software engineers in the auto industry? Is there a place to look at job descriptions?

> they’re just being asked to turn lead into gold and often get silver.

TBF thats literally leaded gasoline

This isn't how tactile buttons in modern cars work. You're doing the same thing as pushing keys on a keyboard. The software can still be slow.

Turn the physical volume dial on a car with a slow Apple CarPlay interface and tell me how that works out for you.

Oh, it's too loud? But it takes 2 seconds for the software to respond due to lag and now you're fiddling with the volume button trying to not make it worse?

A physical button didn't fix that.

A lot the knobs and buttons these days are digital anyways. So there is no real tactile feedback, since they are just activating some digital function anyways.

Indeed. Touchscreens are extremely flexible interfaces, but they are not superior in certain use cases, especially where eyes must be kept elsewhere.

And with a physical button I don't have to look to push it. I know roughly where it is and I can use touch to orient myself.

When slow response times are because of software, they not only slow but variable.

If you're accustomed to 90ms delay and the adjustment doesn't come in 250ms, then it pulls your attention, and even your eyes. "What's wrong with my volume knob" shouldn't occur to someone driving a vehicle.

the apple Macbook trackpad proves that this tactile feedback could be done for touch screens also.

touchscreens are worse but they don't have to be. manufacturers just don't care enough to make them better. they're too busy charging more for touchscreens while saving tons of money on buttons, which are expensive in comparison.

I have a memory from the 90's of sitting in someone's car and fiddling with the ventilation system. The blower would take seconds to respond to changes of the fan speed dial. I don't know if that was electronic or if the fan blade was made out of depleted uranium. I know it was distracting, which is not something you want in a cabin control system.

Luckily I was just the passenger. If I'd have been driving that car my distraction level would be higher until I got used to it. You don't want people crashing in general, but crashing their brand new cars is ugly.

Yeah, it's just poorly thought out engineering. There's really no excuse. I owned a B7 Audi A4 which simply limited the volume level to a user-defined setting when you turned on the car.

That concept is roughly 20 years old.

Going from audiobook on one trip to radio on the next sure wakes me up, and not in a good way. At least I have a physical volume dial with a power button in it.

You have confirmation affordances. "We have received your request and will get back to you shortly"

Of course, if the button is sometimes ignored, that undermines the affordance and people learn not to trust it.

Though all in all it is a minor nuisance, my car navigation system has this safety feature of randomly displaying over the map a popup (that you have to touch/click OK to have it go away) about how you shouldn't be interacting with it when driving.

For some reasons it tends to pop up every time I am approaching or already inside a roundabout, preferrably one of those where if you miss the right exit and take the wrong one it will take you 20 minutes in the traffic to get back to where you were.

Is there a reason not to have auto start and auto stop headlights?

Developers. Engineers seemed to have no issue with making interfaces and systems that work in cars before the touchscreen fad.

In newer software versions, you should be able to control the wipers with the left scrolling wheel, right after you have activated them with the push button on the left arm.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-A5C33F3....

In a Tesla, you can press the physical button on the left stalk to operate the wipers. Pressing that button performs two actions at once:

1. The wipers perform a full sweep, clearing the windscreen.

And

2. The wipers' configuration appears on the screen, ready to be set to any configuration with a single tap.

I did not like it at first, but after some practice it really works well. I still hate the AC controls, though, and must enable lane keeping before even trying to adjust the climate.

You can put the wipers icon at the bottom bar now, that makes it much better.

First of all, an SoC comparable to an iPad isn't $1000 more expensive than what they're using.

More so, the current hardware they use is quite faster than the original 2010 iPad, yet the og iPad is dramatically more responsive than all these laggy cars.

I spent a lot of time in my career directing it upward, but it's not wrong to blame your peers either.

Boundary setting is a two way street. There's a certain ratio of 'no' in your responses and if you don't hit it then you don't have a healthy relationship. And as the member of a group dynamic, you're letting down your peers.

But the real shocker was when I caught developers agreeing with me in philosophical discussions and then sitting around doing nothing when slack occurred in the schedule. It didn't occur to me that developers would agree with engineering philosophy only to appear high minded, and then defect when the cameras weren't rolling. Boy was that a hard (and angry) week.

Yep. And they’ve pretty much got the track record to prove that they can.

Speaking of stove tops - Neff's "TwistPadFire" somehow manages what I previously thought was impossible - it actually takes touch buttons and makes them even worse. The control is a a magnetic circular thing you stick on a specific area on the stove top. It comes off the stove top so first of all you have to manage not to lose it / you have to find it before you can use the stove. Then when you try to use it you have to press down then turn it without using too much force. If you use too much force, or fail to turn it in just the right way, it will pull it off the magnetic area and the whole thing stops responding to any input until you do some magic incantation to unlock it.

The problem is that you don't realise any of this until it's too late and your only option is to rip the stove top out and replace it with another brand.

The only saving grace of those is the ease of cleaning spills. Otherwise I completely agree with you and GP - how annoying it is that every physical button is now a clunky touch surface!

I love my induction stove with touch buttons. Easiest stove I have ever had to clean. Just like wiping any other part of the bench.

On my particular electric stovetop if I spill a tiny bit of liquid from cooking onto the buttons, the whole stove goes into protection shutdown mode, and I have to thoroughly dry the buttons to get it to work again. I hate that something that is so simple has such a terrible design flaw.

I have the Ikea Högklassik induction stove top, and it has 4 touch sliders, one for each zone. I'm actually quite happy with it, it works well enough, not as easy as knobs but close. Also they seem to have worked on the spilling/wet hands problem, it's still sometimes annoying but seems much improved from older designs.

Is that induction? The product page says "Elektrisk platetopp" and not "Induksjonstopper".

I'm looking for an induction top or an oven combo with knobs and it's difficult.

It's because they're easy to clean. No crevices or edges where oil and grime can accumulate. Sure, you can still clean buttons, but to have them look "as new" takes more work than touch controls, especially in an environment like a stove, where "accidents" can happen regularly.

I still prefer physical buttons though.

I've used some kitchen equipment (fortunately, not ovens...) that think the buttons are pressed if you spill liquid on them. You have to stop and clean the thing before you can continue.

I literally just came from Ikea for a new kitchen and asked for this feature on my stove haha. Luckily they said i could choose my own stove so i will think i will do that

It was never about an upgrade.

Touchscreen is fancier, looking and cheaper to make them buttons or knobs.

It’s just cost it always was. They made it shiny, so you thought it was better.

You can charge more for touch controls, than for cheap, reliable physical knobs.

In a way though, Apple tried to solve the problem with haptic feedback. What is completely lacking in all touchscreen controls these days is any kind of feedback. So Apple actually recognized the need for a feedback with touchscreens and invented a solution. Industrial designers didn't even try to "solve" this problem.

You guys don't have capacitive gloves so you can use your phone while wearing them?

at least twice a year. more often if traveling across time zones.

Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV).

I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.

Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).

The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.

I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?

> Touch screens are also pretty terrible for older people. Vision and fine motor skills both degenerate. Without tactile feedback, it is hard for older people to determine if they've successfully clicked on something. Gestures can be tough to teach and successfully implement without error.

And I've seen that when people are holding their phones in a living room. The cars are vibrating (normally), and the user is trying to drive, with one hand on the wheel, etc.

I’m not THAT old (although grew up without touchscreens) and touch screens are horrible when I’m in motion in the car. No chance in hell I’m able to hit what I what when there’s even a slightest minor bump. And with the state of USA highways it means - all the time.

Especially, as designers think it’s cool to have tiny buttons on the touch screen.

I agree with you on the tactile angle, but the Tesla touch screen offers larger font sizes for people with presbyopia which is something that physical controls cannot offer.

Hyundai I'm looking at has 2 customizable buttons. It's a cool idea, except they really limit what you can make the buttons do (I was hoping it would be possible to use them for climate controls but that's not an option)

As long as there is a dedicated back/home button, it's okay in my experience.

I think mazdas all donthis and always have. They had touchscreens for abwhile and then went back to buttons around a non touch screen.

And on like every car made in the era where screens were high in pixel density but weren't touch capable yet.

The way they're implemented, I've found them pretty intuitive.

Avionics manufacturers are generally pretty serious about Ux. Or at least the test pilots berate them into caring, when I was in Flight Test Engineering I remember a lot of "spicy" feedback about avionics usability issues getting sent back to the manufacturers lol

Fighters like the Hornet use HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) which places buttons, 4-way switches, or other controls (mini joysticks, etc.) under most of the fingers. So pilots have something like 30+ commands that they can perform at any time without moving their hands. Interacting with MFD's would mostly happen when the plane is cruising straight and level, probably on autopilot.

Planes have the nice feature that 99% of the time there's nothing but air around you. With the exception of features used in a critical moment (takeoff, landing, etc), the UI of planes can afford to be far worse than a car!

Airbus A380 has a keyboard, I am not sure if that's common on other planes:

https://www.google.com/search?q=airbus+a380+keyboard&tbm=isc...

Maybe that's the endgame -- dedicated buttons for commonly used functions, keyboards for everything else.

On gliders it's common to have buttons on top of the stick. There are <enter> and <escape> like buttons and a 4-way button emulating the arrow keys. Using these to navigate menus still demands a whole lot attention. It just isn't very predictable.

Isn't it the job of the faa to regulate every conceivable safety issue out of existence? Why did they let touchscreen controls through the net?

The issue is needing to look away from the road. If I don’t know what the button will do right now because it arbitrarily changes, that’s just as much of a problem.

That’s still suboptimal but better, IF the labels never change. I’ll quickly learn that rear defrost is button 2 on screen 1 or whatever, but if some software update changes that I’ll be pissed.

I have an older Mercedes (2004) that is like this. There’s a screen, but it’s not touch. There is are columns of physical, pushable buttons at the left and right sides, and the labels appear on the screen next to the buttons.

fighter planes actually do that. In relation to another comment, the pilots memorise sequences of button presses, which slightly negates my own comment. I remember reading a book where a harrier pilot describes a systems pod which upgraded the plane. Unfortunately, the RAF couldn't afford the software upgrade to make the button labels match the actual function of the buttons so the pilots had to memorise every sequence.

I believe what the OP meant by hatred is that ER doctors and Insurance Companies need to clean up after auto accidents caused by drivers who were distracted by mandatory touchscreen use (which is ironic when mobile phone use, and distracted driving in general, is outlawed in many jurisdictions.)

I am sure ER doctors hate to use touchscreens as well, but that's for another thread.

I could be wrong, but I think I've seen removable silicone membrane covers over mechanical buttons in some pieces of medical equipment.

Silicone is inexpensive and suitable for cookware that gets exposed to heat. I bet that sort of thing could survive an autoclave.

But a small screen feels 'cheap' and for many ruins that car's experience.

No, but it's still the law. By 2054 (31 years from now), the NHSTA's estimates say it will save less than 2000 lives. https://www.extremetech.com/cars/179635-car-backup-cameras-a...

I assume somebody's kid got ran over by a parent backing up into them and they then channeled their guilt and grief into lobbying for such a law.

Start paying attention to driveway deaths involving little children, and you might wish a retrofit mandate of existing cars was already in place.

It's not always about lives saved. In the scenario that backup cameras help prevent, the vehicle isn't going very fast. And kids are small. That doesn't mean kids don't get seriously injured as a result. I've known three people that have been backed over, myself included (and that's just the ones I know; I don't survey everyone I meet). Minor injuries for two of them, very-much-not-minor injuries to myself that I deal with decades later.

My guess would be that it faced little resistance as those cameras have many other benefits than saving lives.

Few that wouldn't have been saved by Suburbans and Excursions going out of vogue with the upper middle class in favor of 4Runner, Pilots and a myriad of crossovers.

I think you can go more detailed on that and say physical controls for common, quick inputs especially ones people use while they are driving and you don't want them to look down for.

Touch screen is fine for setup screens, extra info, fine tuning stuff etc.

Point is when I'm driving down the road I should be able to muscle memory/tactily skip song, change volume, change air-conditioning settings etc...

But Bluetooth settings... changing colour of display, changing voice assistant tone... leave that on the touch screen. Don't need it.

On the Tesla3, I use the on-wheel buttons for everything I need while driving.

If I really need to i.e. hunt for a particular radio station I'll do it when stopped.

I expected to dislike the screen but it's fine.

It'll be interesting to see how Android Auto / Apple Car Play adopt physical controls, if at all. I guess at a basic level a rotary encoder could emulate a "tab" key when rotated and an "enter" key when pushed (keyboard support already exists in the mobile OS, of course). Until then, at least they have great voice input.

Our car UX is becoming terrible for both touchscreens and physical controls. It could benefit from simplification a lot, and I think Tesla had many good ideas, even if they might have over-committed to the touchscreen.

For example, VW cars often have multiple knobs and buttons just for controlling the AC, which is far too complicated. If the car is electric, one might also need to put it into a regular mode (non-eco) to use AC and heating through a dedicated button/menu option. A better solution would be to emulate electric mirror adjustments, incorporating all climate control functions into one single knob - up-down for fan speed, left-right for temperature, and clockwise-ccw for zone/area.

Similarly, gear shifters come in various forms, such as buttons, levers, and sticks, or a combination of both, creating confusion. For example, it's common for AT vehicles to have a parking mode on the gear shifter, but also a parking brake button or lever. Sometimes drive, neutral, and parking are buttons, but there is a lever for multiple drive modes. The most dangerous configuration so far I've seen is where D and R buttons are next to each other. Electric cars, in particular, should only require a simple but clear switch between forward and reverse as their pedals already can stop and go, and many will be effectively parked if fully stopped, they won't roll.

Head units are also problematic with unclear and inconsistent button labels like "Media", "Source", "Input", "Map", "Nav", "Car", sometimes different on the head unit and the steering wheel.

In some cases, like Porsches, there are over 60 buttons within the driver's reach, making it difficult to operate without looking. This is not much better than a touchscreen, it totally distracts you from the road. I would even say that any interface with more than 4-5 buttons in a row that feel the same isn't much better than a touchscreen.

All these issues may not be as pronounced for those familiar with their own cars and are easier to see in rentals. And perhaps they are not big issues, there is still very significant room for UX improvement.

I would like to see more cars go in the way of Tesla and remove a lot that is not necessary. This is not to say that they can't keep buttons. But as I said, climate control could be one knob, the automatic transmission selector could be another. If the parking brake will be electronic, just make the car automatically engage it when parked and turned off. The content shown/played on the media unit could be controlled by another knob - up/down for modes and input sources, left-right to skip tracks or tune radio stations, clockwise-ccw for volume. And then sure, the rest can be on the touchscreen.

To sum up - many buttons (especially when mislabelled or when they handle the same function in combination with other inputs) are also attention-grabbing and inconvenient. Buttons or touchscreens - the UX in cars can be improved a lot.

It’s the distraction of having to pay attention to where you are in the UI navigation that sucks… tactile buttons on the wheel wouldn’t fix this if you only get to use them as a proxy for the same UI navigation.

Physical buttons for common car features should be non-modal and not context dependent, and in a consistent location you can memorize without looking. You should be able to pause the music without having to navigate to some UI submenu first. Same with climate control, volume, etc.

Which is useless when you put your hands at 9 and 3 like you're supposed to.

Imagine paying attention to the road and not needing to look at radio to be able to do everything.

In both cases it's a cost/finance reason. "Smart" TVs can profit from selling customer data and touch screen cars save some cost over tactile interfaces.

>I can't think of very many people who genuinely enjoy the "smart" aspect of "smart TVs", for example

Count me in the camp that does. My TV runs GoogleOS (Android), and it's great, because I don't need some other device plugged in to do what I want to do with it. There's only 2 things I want from this thing:

1. Playing external media. It has a USB port, so I can plug in thumb drives and play video files from them. The built-in OS works fine for this, and seems to handle any media file or codec I throw at it.

2. Playing YouTube with a good player. Since it's Android, I can load APKs from wherever I want, and so I installed "SmartTubeNext", which blocks ads and sponsor segments automatically. It works almost too well.

I think the mistake most other people make with smart TVs is that they get ones with crappy proprietary OSes, so with those you have no control over anything and can't run any 3rd-party software like SmartTubeNext. Of course, eventually this model could lose support from the mfgr, causing security issues or not being compatible with the apps I want, but for now it's quite nice.

im pretty sure nearly every single person in existence wants a tv that connects to the internet dude. people dont want to plug in an hdmi cord to access streaming services.

My smart TV (LG C2) has never and will never touch the internet. Apple TV for all the functionality (and occasionally terreistrial)

Profiting off of a less safe product that kills people could be seen as an egregious moral deficiency.

From a product and even financial standpoint, the trade-off doesn’t make sense. All the litigation that could occur due to accidents caused by a less safe design plus the reputational damage that an inexcellent product could cause to the brand sounds so expensive to me.

If it was just about the bottom line, and consumers actually cared enough to be willing to pay for physical controls, then why wouldn’t there be plenty of options on the market?

Tobacco companies have no problem killing their customers.

People dying is just the cost of doing business.

Case in point: SUVs and trucks.

Fortunately AC starts out on auto which works great even while your kids are screaming.

Last software update allows to map many functions to long-press of steering wheel button. So you can assign AC temperature to it, then you don't need to take your eyes of the road - just long-press left button and scroll up/down.

Their new models allow you to enable it all the time (CX-50, I assume CX-90 and the upcoming CX-70), which I do think is a good idea.

Not even just for the driver to be touching it, but if you have a passenger you can let them deal with putting in directions or managing your audio and the wheel is a lot less obvious than a touchscreen to someone who isn't familiar with it.

And as a driver, it felt like there were some things where it'd be easier to just touch the screen too. Like for the buttons scattered around the corner of Maps, scrolling through a list or a grid is easy to navigate, random stuff all over the screen you'll have to learn the order.

A have a 2016 Mazda3. The infotainment is useless, so I just leave it on the home page usually. I've ordered a CarPlay retrofit that uses the stock screen, wondering if the enabling/disabling behaviour will be the same it CarPlay.

FWIW I've never had an issue with the wheel in my CX5. I don't use the touchscreen at all, even at low speeds.

Is CarPlay really that terrible? I don't have issues using Android Auto easily with my Mazda, it all takes a few very learnable clicks.

Personally, I'd rather have the rest of the HVAC controls on buttons/knobs (for that matter, I'd rather have the temperature on knobs instead of buttons), and the screen is really low. The top edge of a map on that screen is going to be under the bottom edge of where a more dashboard integrated screen would be.