I’ve been arguing this point since all my tech co-worker peers started mumbling about their teslas.
Here’s the thing: we keep missing the happy middle ground: user configurable buttons.
I don’t know why my current vehicle has track skip buttons on the center console next to the emergency lights buttons. I would love a fan-off button/hard touchpoint though. That one’s in the infotainment screen.
Also: buttons should have positive feedback so we don’t need to take our eyes off the road.
A world where we have buttons AND can configure most/many/some of them is the right choice.
This sort of thing looked cool and futuristic for about a year. But, now these full-dash displays look cheap and fadish, along with being impractical.
I’ve always said, if you cannot control 90% of your car with your eyes on the road, then it’s a bad design.
I can’t wait for the knob revolution. (Pun intended)
if you cannot control 90% of your car with your eyes on the road, then it’s a bad design.
Eh, I say it’s fine just for the most commonly used stuff.
The reason why touchscreens became so popular in the beginning is because cars were getting more complex with more features, and having individual buttons to control everything was beginning to require literally hundreds of buttons.
The ideal compromise is to put commonly used things – the sort of things you might use every day – into physical controls, but to leave all the more obscure features and settings in the screen.
What got more complex other than audio from your phone and a gps map?
Take the seats for example.
Nothing --> heated seats (1 button) --> heated/ventilated seats (2 buttons) --> heated/ventilated/massaging seats (3 buttons) --> heated/ventilated/massaging seats with multiple different massage modes (??? buttons)
And that’s just one thing, not even worrying about all the additional power adjustments seats tend to have these days.
(I’d still want physical buttons for the heated/ventilated seats … but, yeah. The rest of that, you can put in the screen.)
None of that needs a screen.
My seats adjust all kinds of ways without a screen.
I have heated and cooled seats… with buttons.
So again I ask, what changed that can’t be buttons?
Lots of stuff is much more easily done via a screen interface, mostly configuration type things. How sensitive the auto high-beams are, whether the unlock button only unlocks the driver door VS. all doors, remote start duration, steering weight, throttle sensitivity, etc.
I hate that my HVAC controls and heated seat controls are via the touch screen but plenty of the other stuff is fine to do through a touch interface.
My car had a touchsccreen feature but I just prefer to use the redundant physical dial and buttons instead.
One day I started getting very weird button press bugs, turns out it was the layer of touchscreen that got too hot and was interpreting pressure. Fortunatly you can disasemble the dash and unplug the touchscreen layer without affecting the screen.
I find it really cool that I no longer have touchscreen in my car. It was never needed in the first place.
Finally. I looked at fully electric cars recently but damn, almost all of them seem to be trying to hard to copy everything I hate from Tesla, not least the minimalism taken to far with over reliance on touch infotainment at the center.
what does that have to do with EVs specifically? this hellish design reality is all new cars, ICE included
