We should NOT have touch screen interfaces in cars. Full stop. If the driver has to divert their gaze from the road to operate e.g. the heating/AC[0], that is a failure of UX sufficiently egregious to keep the car off the road. It is not a toy, it is not a fashion statement, it is a thousand pound chunk of steel that will indiscriminately kill and maim if not operated with care and diligence.
[0] This is the complaint I have with my wife's Honda Civic. If I want to do something as simple as turn on the fan but turn off the AC, it means navigating into a sub menu and correctly hitting one of several choices on a touch screen.
that's the issue with industries like this.. no one asked for touchscreen controls, but they're cheaper and make the manufacturers more money. no one asked for their private conversations to be recorded and sold, but that juicy data is profitable.
it's not like people can stop buying cars until the situation improves. joe q public can't be expected to start a grassroots movement and go lobby, he needs to get to work to feed his four kids, which means he's buying whichever car is available. it's also impossible to vote with your wallet when every [0] auto company places profit above safety/functionality.
If business is unable to self-regulate, it is the job of government to step in and force them to correct.
Unfortunately for us, government has largely failed in its official capacities and responsibilities, nearly all of them, and so things will continue breaking until loss of life and limb becomes common, where no one can sit on the sidelines any more if they want to survive.
This is what happens when corrupt people are allowed to warp existing systems for personal gain, and cannot be removed except in egregious violations of law.
If people did not buy cars with touch screens when they started to get introduced, they would be gone by now. But they seem to be accepted by new car buyers which is the market that matters to manufacturers.
Might be fine for non-critical entertainment systems which nowadays also take voice control, but never critical vehicle functions. Things like hazard lights and HVAC should be illegal to be on touch screens.
Add "turning on the windshield wipers" and "indicating with your blinker" to that list. Looking at you Tesla with your death-trap touch screen controls.
> Might be fine for non-critical entertainment systems which nowadays also take voice control
As someone who uses a lot of greasy sunscreen lotion during long sunny-day drives: no, they still aren't. I don't want to talk to my car in the first place, and it probably couldn't hear me anyway with the music loud and the windows down.
100% this.
The good news is that we're in the majority.
The bad news is hardly anything seems to be done about it. Maybe we should push back more?
I'd happily "vote with my wallet" but it seems all the major auto manufacturers are going this route. Sad.
My car has a little sub menu area on the dash board behind the steering wheel with panels for media, phone, navigation and something else. These can be navigated with the steering wheel buttons.
The climate controls cannot be controlled that way. Really annoying and dangerous to have to tap about on a touchscreen to just turn the fan up or down. Sometimes I'll try to use the voice thing but it rarely works even when I do guess a valid command phrase. At least if I have to drive about with a bug in the car, I should get use out of it!
> The climate controls cannot be controlled that way. Really annoying and dangerous to have to tap about on a touchscreen to just turn the fan up or down.
Other than Tesla, which car manufacturer is stupid enough to put climate control behind a touchscreen?
Mandatory regular (every 5-10 years) driving tests seem like a no-brainer regardless of age. Also seems like the driving tests should be more stringent.
At least make them pass a road test. Make sure they can operate the car safely at the posted speed limit. Give them a vision test, maybe limit them to daytime driving. Some 90 year olds are fine to drive, but I agree many are not. And driving around 10-20 mph under the limit is a hazard in itself.
Previously it was a political 3rd rail to even suggest a maximum driving age. "You can't take my freedom to travel!!".
But now, with Uber/Lyft/Waymo and all the other options, it seems much more reasonable to implement such a thing. Why do we have to wait for someone to cause an accident before we take their license?
Depends on the 89 year old. Some are as sharp as a tack, while others don't have a clue where they are let alone what they are currently doing. If you don't understand that, you clearly need to widen the range of people you interact with beyond your day to day experiences thus far in life.
I am in the middle of watching my own parents age, and it is eye opening. We have checks and balances in various systems exactly because there is a wide range of capabilities in the elderly. Where I live it is mandatory for drivers to be tested regularly once they hit 80, or at even earlier ages in the event of an accident or other precipitating event. This can include recommendation by doctors, social workers or even police. This works without needlessly discriminating against individuals.
The only counterpoint to this - when it comes to interacting with managing audio and navigation, the alternatives to a touchscreen are probably more dangerous. Maybe the worst offender was Lexus who offered a mouse pointer in lieu of touchscreen until quite recently.
But I agree that there should be a federally mandated set of commonly-used buttons while driving that have to be tactile - windows, HVAC, audio, etc.
>when it comes to interacting with managing audio and navigation
Depends what you mean by managing audio - 90% of my audio interaction is adjusting volume and pressing the next/previous buttons. All easily done on my steering wheel buttons, though there are buttons near the radio to do the same thing (though they are capacitive buttons that are barely better than a touchscreen). I recently discovered that the "mute" button on the steering wheel is actually a "pause" button which is perfect since I rarely want to actually mute audio, but just pause it.
I’ve not used the mouse pointer but the previous models had a rotary encoder which is easier to work with. What isn’t mentioned is that there are hardware controls on the steering wheel for volume, next previous etc so you don’t need to interact with things very much
Too late. Tesla has set the example of removing the turn signal and drive selector stalks. I believe there is a law that the emergency flashers need a physical control, which is why teslas have a dedicated button.
I think we smoothly transitioned from touchscreens in cars being a luxury signifier, to them being both pretty cheap and STILL kind of a luxury signifier, though to a smaller extent nowadays.
Preference is irrelevant. It's demonstrably dangerous. Maybe Gen Alpha will also prefer cars without functioning headlights, but those are thankfully banned.
This would require a level of polish and sophistication that I have no reason to suspect car manufacturers would ever by capable of. I can only imagine making some sort of awkward swiping gesture while frequently glancing at the screen to verify that it worked.
I'm forced to quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy:
"A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program."
As a side note, the F-35 has a touchscreen interface that has been described as difficult to use when the jet is in motion.
Tactile feedback is still a big issue with gestures. With a physical button you can feel that you have hit the button, can easily find it by touch if you missed it, and you can feel that you successfully actuated it. All of those are difficult on touch surfaces. Not insurmountable, but you have to put a lot of effort into things you get for free with physical interfaces
This seems to be an real and important problem with capacitive touch screens. My elderly mother is often unable to make a touch register on recent Apple devices when a touch appears to have clearly happened and with reasonable force. She blames it on her fingers being "numb" but there genuinely seems to be a problem unrelated to her actions. (I've used the devices in question, and they appear to be fine. This is not an issue where she is not touching the device with her skin or a situation where the device is dirty.)
Same thing with my octogenarian grandmother, her fingertips are often so dry the screen does not register the touch; she has arthritis and poor vision so hand-eye targeting is poor with the tiny touch areas many apps have even on a tablet; the lack of any tactile feedback exacerbates these issues, people this age didn't grow up with capacitive touch screens and the lack of sensation after an action is alien to them. She finds the iPad extremely frustrating.
What I found more surprising is that voice control isn't the solution, either. She is very reluctant to talk to Siri because it feels to her like there is an actual person there and she doesn't want to bother them. It would actually be better for her if you could choose a more robotic voice for Siri to make it seem more like a machine.
Not looking forward to getting older and having to interact with the brave new world that Big Tech will be bringing us. With some manufacturers you can't even drive a car without using a touchscreen -_-
Mom is almost 82. Just bought her an iPad to try because the computer was getting difficult to use with her essential tremor. Setting it up was a nightmare because I didn't spend the money for a model with face id. She had to keep touching(but not clicking!) the fingerprint reading button on the side. Training her fingerprint was also a nightmare because of Apple's surprisingly bad decision to require you to click a pop-up dialog whenever you fail to position your finger properly, unlike Android where you just try again.
I think the touchscreen was the least of her problems. A virtual keyboard with bigger keys would be nice. Not sure if that's an option on Apple though.
I'm not convinced she'll have much luck with the iPad, so if anyone has suggestions for an elderly person to stay connected, let me know.
I'm not yet "elderly " -- contrary to what a troublingly large fraction of younger software developers seem to believe -- but I do have occasional issues with touch screens, for several reasons.
They behave unreliability when I use the fingers on my left hand. I play guitar, so I assume that callouses are the issue. Older folks often have calloused finger tips; it's somewhat inevitable.
I often make or repair things, as well as work in my yard. At the very least, this often renders fingerprint recognition useless for days or sometimes weeks at a time. Sometimes my finger tips get scuffed enough that it affects touch screen use, too. I wear gloves when I can, but that is its own issue. "Screen friendly" work gloves don't stay that way for long, and aren't great anyway.
I also live in a northern area, so for about half the year humidity is very low. Even drinking plenty, and using moisturizer, my skin gets dry enough sometimes to make screens unresponsive.
Of course, we also get actual winter here. Even the best "screen friendly" gloves I've tried have been mid at best, just as with work gloves. Certainly not good enough to rely on.
I get the same problem when I work in the garden digging a lot. The skin gets thick and dry and touch screens start behaving strange. Not that I can't use them, but like the centre of the tap has an offset.
I have a similar problem and I honestly only notice it on Apple devices.
Android and other random touchscreens seem fine, but my iPad can be a nightmare. I have to touch things multiple times for it to register. The fingerprint reader on there also hates me.
I frequently have problems with some touch screens, because my fingers are too dry. Seems like some touch screens are better, i.e. I don't notice it at all, and some are intolerably bad.
Also those damnable single button interfaces to earbuds, vapes, etc.
Older people can have trouble double clicking, it's even more difficult for them to "click 5 times rapidly", and to remember exactly where they are in a UI that has almost no outputs.
Hopefully as Gen-X ages, we'll see more thought put into this problem.
Not defending the interfaces here, they do suck, but the elderly definitely aren't the target market for vapes. It's not unsurprising that they're not designed with them in mind.
I know a couple of older people who smoke marijuana for pain/relaxation.
You are correct though, they're not the target market. I would like to see some of the more modern conveniences redesigned though. Perhaps I can win the lottery and start a business for that need. Kind of like the bras and shirts with magnetic clasps for people with limited mobility.
The iPhone has settings for physical button click speed for this reason. It's not just the elderly, but really any sort of motor difficulty. It takes a lot of force!
My newer car has a touch screen for the radio channels, and I experience frequent difficulty changing the channels. This becomes impossible when I'm wearing gloves, which of course is often in a Midwest winter.
> he said the touchscreen wouldn't even function (as in no video) until the car warmed up.
In 1980, imagine a model that had inoperable controls until the engine warmed up. Owners would hammer their dealership until it was resolved.
My take is that buyers are more timid when confronted by excess tech - and less likely to hold carmakers/dealers accountable for a crap product. I think that would feel like meth to an CEO.
I'm an older adult that's worked on touch interfaces and whatnot.
I don't blame the touch mechanism as much as I blame all the UX designers that adopted Material design schemas and their descendents. Bad layouts, unreadable fonts, horrible color schemes and literally NO contrast between type and background. It's apparent that none of this was tested on older users.
Apple is just as guilty of this. If you switch your iPhone into high contrast mode with thicker font weights it helps, but it wasn't necessary back in the early days of iOS.
Gnome with Enlightenment back in 1999 had configurable window decorations. If you wanted a border around a window that was a few pixels wider and easier to land a mouse on, you could do that.
Naturally all of that functionality was thrown out when the Gnome project did a total rewrite that was "going to make everything better" and "fix all of the problems" they ran into in the first version.
Has there ever been a product segment that has removed "innovative" features because of consumer pushback? Asking in good faith, I hope it's happened, but I can't think of anything.
I think touchscreens are great in cars as long as they aren't used to replace physical controls. I bought a new Ford Maverick last year and it follows this guidance well. I can still do all the important stuff like skip tracks, tune the radio, change volume, all from both the steering wheel and a cluster of physical knobs and buttons below the touchscreen.
The touchscreen is useful for less common and more intricate tasks like GPS navigation.
Legislation (fairly unlikely in the US under present trends) or massive and compelling lawsuits and settlements are far more likely to generate results.
I'm going to mention again the 1967 interview by Studs Terkel of Ralph Nader in which Nader details a prior round of reforms, largely involving safety, and the automobile industry:
As much advances as have been made, the dynamics which lead to Nader's initial campaign are still intrinsic to the capitalist-market model, and the behaviours are highly evident not only in the automobile industry but the high-tech world and much of the rest of industry as well.
(The Studs Terkel broadcast and archive at WFMT/Chicago are both absolute gems of the current Internet: <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>. This is a compilation of forty-five years worth of near-daily interviews with artists, activists, politicians, and most of all, ordinary people, Studs's true subject and audience.)
One thing to add to this, it's amazing that in 2025 voice assistants still suck so badly. You'd think this is a problem AI could finally nip in the bud.
But even giving my phone the dumbest of instructions will result in an agonizing back and forth where it doesn't hear me quite right and constantly has to repeat back things.
Heaven forbid you ask the phone to do anything useful like change a setting or pull up directions for you. You will be unceremoniously dumped out of the conversation and into some sort of hellish afterthought experience.
I ski a lot and wear headphones for music and to take any emergency calls. I use siri to ask “What time is it?” 50:50 whether or not it works. This has been my experience for as long as siri has existed and I have kept up to date on hw and sw. I only stick with it because pulling the phone out in the cold is even more annoying than having to repeat the long press and myself. Don’t get me started on a question that simple needing an internet connection… because I’m excluding that error case.
Siri was better in the past while driving, and actually helpful at times. Nowadays it demands that I unlock my phone. My mistake? My car doesn't have Car Play. I drove a rental last week and Car Play was far more cooperative. Sadly, it appears that I am being punished because I don't happen to be able to replace my car as often as I upgrade my phone.
It downright sucks when the local pronunciation isn't accepted by Siri. In Ottawa we pronounce St. Laurent Boulevard as the French do - "cent lorann", yet Siri only accepts the sourthern style American pronunciation of "saynt lawrence". This happens for a whole lot of place names in eastern Ontario given the bilingual nature of the national capital region.
Most of my current wants from devices, and mobile computing, overlap quite nicely with what aging communities need from their devices. Sunlight readable displays, buttons that are distinguishable by feeling alone (ever seen the button variety in the cockpit of jet fighters!!!), and the ability to customize outputs in a sane manner that isn't full of twelve layer deep menus of vague options that change with each software update.
My son thinks it is magic that I can reach into my bag and pull out exactly what I want without looking. He didn't exactly grow up on touch screens, but I think about how much more tactile my life was as a child compared to his. It is night and day.
Readit News
[0] This is the complaint I have with my wife's Honda Civic. If I want to do something as simple as turn on the fan but turn off the AC, it means navigating into a sub menu and correctly hitting one of several choices on a touch screen.
it's not like people can stop buying cars until the situation improves. joe q public can't be expected to start a grassroots movement and go lobby, he needs to get to work to feed his four kids, which means he's buying whichever car is available. it's also impossible to vote with your wallet when every [0] auto company places profit above safety/functionality.
[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...
Unfortunately for us, government has largely failed in its official capacities and responsibilities, nearly all of them, and so things will continue breaking until loss of life and limb becomes common, where no one can sit on the sidelines any more if they want to survive.
This is what happens when corrupt people are allowed to warp existing systems for personal gain, and cannot be removed except in egregious violations of law.
When they first came out in cars, most people wanted one. Even I did. Then I got one and learned how terrible it is.
As someone who uses a lot of greasy sunscreen lotion during long sunny-day drives: no, they still aren't. I don't want to talk to my car in the first place, and it probably couldn't hear me anyway with the music loud and the windows down.
The climate controls cannot be controlled that way. Really annoying and dangerous to have to tap about on a touchscreen to just turn the fan up or down. Sometimes I'll try to use the voice thing but it rarely works even when I do guess a valid command phrase. At least if I have to drive about with a bug in the car, I should get use out of it!
Other than Tesla, which car manufacturer is stupid enough to put climate control behind a touchscreen?
In my city we've had three pedestrian fatalities in less than a year and all the drivers were aged 79 or older.
But now, with Uber/Lyft/Waymo and all the other options, it seems much more reasonable to implement such a thing. Why do we have to wait for someone to cause an accident before we take their license?
I am in the middle of watching my own parents age, and it is eye opening. We have checks and balances in various systems exactly because there is a wide range of capabilities in the elderly. Where I live it is mandatory for drivers to be tested regularly once they hit 80, or at even earlier ages in the event of an accident or other precipitating event. This can include recommendation by doctors, social workers or even police. This works without needlessly discriminating against individuals.
But I agree that there should be a federally mandated set of commonly-used buttons while driving that have to be tactile - windows, HVAC, audio, etc.
Depends what you mean by managing audio - 90% of my audio interaction is adjusting volume and pressing the next/previous buttons. All easily done on my steering wheel buttons, though there are buttons near the radio to do the same thing (though they are capacitive buttons that are barely better than a touchscreen). I recently discovered that the "mute" button on the steering wheel is actually a "pause" button which is perfect since I rarely want to actually mute audio, but just pause it.
"A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program."
As a side note, the F-35 has a touchscreen interface that has been described as difficult to use when the jet is in motion.
What I found more surprising is that voice control isn't the solution, either. She is very reluctant to talk to Siri because it feels to her like there is an actual person there and she doesn't want to bother them. It would actually be better for her if you could choose a more robotic voice for Siri to make it seem more like a machine.
Not looking forward to getting older and having to interact with the brave new world that Big Tech will be bringing us. With some manufacturers you can't even drive a car without using a touchscreen -_-
Consensus was, it has to do with the moisture of the skin. Older people have drier skin, so worse touchscreen response.
I believe it to be a combination of dryer skin, poorer circulation, and calloused fingertips.
It’s incredibly frustrating. I didn’t really have a problem until this year.
I think the touchscreen was the least of her problems. A virtual keyboard with bigger keys would be nice. Not sure if that's an option on Apple though.
I'm not convinced she'll have much luck with the iPad, so if anyone has suggestions for an elderly person to stay connected, let me know.
My father's ET makes me terrified of gradually losing my own ability to interact with any technology as I become his age and as interfaces "progress".
I am always surprised the extent to which "accessibility" does not include people with poor fine motor control.
They behave unreliability when I use the fingers on my left hand. I play guitar, so I assume that callouses are the issue. Older folks often have calloused finger tips; it's somewhat inevitable.
I often make or repair things, as well as work in my yard. At the very least, this often renders fingerprint recognition useless for days or sometimes weeks at a time. Sometimes my finger tips get scuffed enough that it affects touch screen use, too. I wear gloves when I can, but that is its own issue. "Screen friendly" work gloves don't stay that way for long, and aren't great anyway.
I also live in a northern area, so for about half the year humidity is very low. Even drinking plenty, and using moisturizer, my skin gets dry enough sometimes to make screens unresponsive.
Of course, we also get actual winter here. Even the best "screen friendly" gloves I've tried have been mid at best, just as with work gloves. Certainly not good enough to rely on.
A rather expensive workaround is an Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro but it's out of reach for most people.
Android and other random touchscreens seem fine, but my iPad can be a nightmare. I have to touch things multiple times for it to register. The fingerprint reader on there also hates me.
Older people can have trouble double clicking, it's even more difficult for them to "click 5 times rapidly", and to remember exactly where they are in a UI that has almost no outputs.
Hopefully as Gen-X ages, we'll see more thought put into this problem.
You are correct though, they're not the target market. I would like to see some of the more modern conveniences redesigned though. Perhaps I can win the lottery and start a business for that need. Kind of like the bras and shirts with magnetic clasps for people with limited mobility.
I've never vaped and I run into complex button schemes regularly.
In 1980, imagine a model that had inoperable controls until the engine warmed up. Owners would hammer their dealership until it was resolved.
My take is that buyers are more timid when confronted by excess tech - and less likely to hold carmakers/dealers accountable for a crap product. I think that would feel like meth to an CEO.
I don't blame the touch mechanism as much as I blame all the UX designers that adopted Material design schemas and their descendents. Bad layouts, unreadable fonts, horrible color schemes and literally NO contrast between type and background. It's apparent that none of this was tested on older users.
Apple is just as guilty of this. If you switch your iPhone into high contrast mode with thicker font weights it helps, but it wasn't necessary back in the early days of iOS.
Naturally all of that functionality was thrown out when the Gnome project did a total rewrite that was "going to make everything better" and "fix all of the problems" they ran into in the first version.
The touchscreen is useful for less common and more intricate tasks like GPS navigation.
Deleted Comment
I'm going to mention again the 1967 interview by Studs Terkel of Ralph Nader in which Nader details a prior round of reforms, largely involving safety, and the automobile industry:
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>
Direct audio <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)
As much advances as have been made, the dynamics which lead to Nader's initial campaign are still intrinsic to the capitalist-market model, and the behaviours are highly evident not only in the automobile industry but the high-tech world and much of the rest of industry as well.
(The Studs Terkel broadcast and archive at WFMT/Chicago are both absolute gems of the current Internet: <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>. This is a compilation of forty-five years worth of near-daily interviews with artists, activists, politicians, and most of all, ordinary people, Studs's true subject and audience.)
But even giving my phone the dumbest of instructions will result in an agonizing back and forth where it doesn't hear me quite right and constantly has to repeat back things.
Heaven forbid you ask the phone to do anything useful like change a setting or pull up directions for you. You will be unceremoniously dumped out of the conversation and into some sort of hellish afterthought experience.
Localization is not a solved problem.