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European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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having touchscreen and physical options is the best solution?
My Peugeot e208 has both of them parallel to each other and that was the main reason i decided for that car instead of something like a tesla.
There is no way i'll be tapping through some iOS like app interface to change the temperature while going 150km/h on the highway...
With a Tesla, you wouldn't have any problem like that. Just tap while going 220 km/h, problem solved.
You mean if I crashed it wouldnt matter anyway?
I just wanted to be helpful and suggest how to avoid tapping on a touch screen while going 150 km/h on the highway. Crashing is an option too, but I was told it has certain side effects.
By the way, I H A T E Tesla and touch screens in cars.
More options are always the optimal solution for the consumer, though in this particular case I'd say they don't necessarily need to have exactly one physical button and one touch screen button for each thing. Mostly just the things that a driver is most likely to toggle on the road.
It's not unusual for cars to have a couple different ways to control things. Like how the volume control on the sound system can be on the dash but also behind the steering wheel.
But again, doubles of every single function is probably overkill.
No, that's not true. Too much choice creates decision fatigue and can be exploited to create a confusopoly.
You do need enough options to ensure a competitive market, but beyond that, at some point the marginal utility of adding another option ad infinitum becomes negative.
Having doubles of the controls is a terrible idea. It's more expensive, unnecessary, and a failure point. Why put a command tree for the climate control in the infotainment control if there is a knob next to the screen?
Exactly. Touchscreen can be a positive because you get dynamic and contextual menus, and the sort of rich user interface that people expect from modern devices.
But for the most common functions, nothing beats the tactile muscle memory of physical controls that are always immediately present when you need them, and can use with your eyes still on the road.
So the best is to have both.
I would argue that maybe with the exception of GPS or music -- and that's a very dubious "maybe" -- anything complicated enough to need dynamic and contextual menus doesn't belong in a car in the first place.
There are lots of functions that can benefit, just not ones you want to do while in motion.
I like touchscreen - I just don't like it at the expense of losing physical controls for the things that matter.
The first three are covered under "GPS or music."
I concede your point on the fourth and fifth. I did consider mentioning that sort of thing, but I was thinking more of reading trouble codes without needing to plug a computer into the OBD2 port as a convenience and figured it was too niche.
As for the sixth, I'd suggest that a clock nowadays ought to set itself via GPS, NTP, or radio signal; kmh/mph should be a non-issue because the speedometer should be analog and have tick marks for both, I'm not sure lane keep warnings need to be configurable, etc.
Of course lane keep warnings need to be configurable. Personally, I disable most of them in any vehicle I drive.
They give me notification fatigue and pull my attention more often to misinterpreted information than to an an issue that requires my attention. For instance, in construction zones where lines shift or there is a hazard on the shoulder so I hug the center line more. Or even worse, just because the computer lost track of the lanes for a bit.
Of modern driver aids, the only one I am a big fan of (when done well) is adaptive cruise control. The Subarus I've driven have been smooth in handling cars pulling in front of my when on cruise, but the last Honda I drove was very harsh in using regenerative braking.
I'm the kind of guy that doesn't want so much as an automatic transmission, let alone any fancy electronic nannies, but I admit I'd love to have adaptive cruise control too.