What about extreme violations of privacy? Let me know when that is "out", too.
Yeah, so the thing is, any amount of trust that I had has already been completely destroyed. "We don't do it anymore because it's illegal, trust me bro" isn't going to cut it. Does the bill include mandatory prison time for executives for violations, or just cost-of-doing-business fines? Will this be enforced by a government regulatory body that is not literally outnumbered 20:1 by car manufacturer lawyers?
If the car has any kind of network capabilities and 100% of the car's software is not open source, I'm not buying it. Period.
This bill would not need to exist if cars were FOSS, or if cars were non-networked. Those are the only 2 solutions that I will accept. This bill is worthless to me.
Will the regulatory body be stacked with, and bribed by auto execs?
something, something, open source car.
Some nerd running Gentoo on his car. Has to recompile everything every time he has an oil change.
Touchscreens were never popular with customers. Manufacturers kept cramming touchscreens in cars and using them to control everything becuase they were being stupid with new tech.
Edit: I guess I should have been clearer. I was talking about as a replacement for tactile controlls in a car like the article is talking about. Reverse cameras and other things that are good to have a touch screen for make perfect sense but using your touch screen to control your Air conditioning in a way that you have to divert your attention from the road to operate sliders and buttons on a touch screen is dumb as hell.
Also the fact that touch screens are cheaper to build with how expensive battery tech has been in electric cars.
Cheaper to build and can be adjusted and patched as you go
One of the biggest problems with touch is still that you have to take your eyes off the road (for quite some time). I have no issue if we are talking about some internal media center stuff and you still have some sort of haptic button on a steering wheel. But as soon as we are talking about AC, fans and everything you sometimes need to drive, I'm off.
Touchscreens are great to have, controlling Android Auto or Apple Carplay with physical buttons like you have to do in a Mazda is a nightmare.
The problem is when the touchscreen is used as a replacement for physical controls, instead of an addition. Stuff like controlling your climate control should not be exclusively controlled through the touchscreen
And don't even get me started about VWs stupid decision to put touch controls on the steering wheel. At least they backpedaled on that decision pretty quickly
I love my touchscreen, it’s great for media control, map, etc.
Mind you that is all it does, every other feature is behind a physical button. Which I also love.
Touchscreen for some things, physical for the rest.
In my 2021 Seat Leon the controls for defogging the windscreen and the heated rear window (both essential in Sweden) are placed on a cluster of touch buttons below and to the left of the steering wheel.
It is insane, you have to take you eyes off the road and lean forward to press them.
Also, to activate the seat heater, you need to access the climate panel on the infotainment, so you loose the view of any CarPlay navigation.
The car has dedicated touch surfaces to change the AC temp, but the main ones are next to the power button touch area for the infotainment, and none of the areas are illuminated.
I like my car, it is fun and comfortable, but the overreliance of touch controls is infuriating at times.
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
my issue isn't really with the brightness, it's the height. Don't get me wrong bright headlights are annoying as fuck, but a huge ass truck behind me with their headlights literally higher than my back window is insane.
My point exactly. The brightness is great, when it works in your favor. But when a modern car sits at such a height, where the low-beams shine directly over the top of my car, it's obnoxious
They are more safe since people can feel the buttons without taking their eyes off of the road. I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to use touchscreens.
That's true.
With a T9 phone, I used to be able to send a complete text message without ever taking my eyes off the road.
Now that I've got a touchscreen I'm swerving all over the place every time I try to text. It's way less safe.
Also, bring back gauges, instead of idiot-lights. It's nice to know when a problem is beginning (overheating, etc) before it becomes a crisis when you have no choice but to pull over.
Yay, I never left having physical controls for things like HVAC controls and volume.
Touchscreens are great for context-sensitive controls, but less so for things that should be accessible at all times and usable without looking.
I'm so glad I kept my car and weathered through this shitty phase of car manufacturing.
If only there was hope for weathering through the data collection, subscription-based features and the death of sedans though...
I asked a dealer for a dumb-car. No fucking auto 911 dialing, bluetooth enabled, GPS service horseshit, just a normal car and he shot me
Touchscreens can stay, but only for non-essential tasks like changing settings or entering addresses. Climate, media, and all other controls you usually use while driving should be tactile by mandate.
But we've still got a good 10 years of avoiding used cars. This era is literally landfill.
10 years and counting
There's so much bullshit in new cars that's it's infuriating, especially considering the cars call home with all kinds of privacy violating bullshit.
Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.
Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.
Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it's right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you'll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.
Yes please.
I don't know how much longer my button & dialled up 2012 shitbox is going to last. Being able to buy new without the crap is something to look forward to.
Then again, there's the whole 'car phones home/connected services' thing to consider as well. I like my car safe, but dumb as rocks otherwise.
Should be illegal to have touchscreen controls in a car, it requires you to look at it to effectively control it, which means the car forces you to ignore the road to do anything.
God I hope so
Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?
You mean like the 1985 Subaru XT Coupe? God I love that cassette futurism look!
Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.
I like that being a leading expert on buttons is a profession that exists in this world. You go Rachel Plotnick.
When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.
Or maybe being able to consistently and reliably operate the thing without taking your eyes off the road has something to do with it? Hmm... Yes, this is really hard to generalize.
Cool, now bring back single cab light trucks with full length beds.
I just want a coffee table book with pictures of these stupid executive's faces who approved the original all touchscreen versions that were becoming ubiquitous.
You could make money from that. Trace the execs, get nice shiny photos to the tech, write some good copy, and publish "The Encyclopaedia of garbage tech" so that people in the future can ridicule and possibly learn from their stupidity.
No I wouldn't say touchscreens are out, I would say augmenting them with physical buttons is about to get popular.
Touch screens are shit tor buttons. They can be hacked. They can be unresponsive.
There's a load of other reasons, but either or both are enough to realise that a physical button is much safer. Perfect example of safety being lost in technology. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
Fucking finally.
Now make cars look like cars again. Last 30 years has been a parade of Jellybeans and Electric Shavers.
What I care more about is making cars... cars. Visit a dealership in the US and it's 98% SUV/Truck and 2% sedans.
THANK JESUS H. VISHNU.
About fucking time.
But on the other hand, people seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.
If you look at gamers playing video games, they want to push a lot of buttons on those controls.
She talks a bit… weird?
All cars should function like a cockpit- each function has its own independent metal toggle switch that goes 'KAK when switched. I will fight you on this. We need someone to make an interior that does this; sells well, and then the golden age of independent buttons shall return!
thank fuck
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
