I can't stand touchscreen systems. Instead of a single physical switch to turn AC on or off it's two latency laden taps. Part of it's menu design but I can't help but feel like it's always gonna happen with touchscreen centric designs.

It's unbelievable how far behind the technology curve most car companies are.

We recently test drove a used 2015 Suburban with a touchscreen console. The MSRP for it in 2015 was almost 90k, and the touchscreen was laggy, unresponsive, and terrible resolution. 20 years ago I worked on a touchscreen point of sale system that was better than that shit.

Consumer electronics are designed to fail in 3-5 years. Cars aren't. If my 2012 Honda Accord started failing this year, I'd be really upset. If my 2012 iPad mini started failing this year... well, I wouldn't be surprised given it's age.

I don't want my car's firmware failing or even slow when my ABS system needs to kick in because of an icy road. We must hold automobiles to a higher degree of quality and consistency than consumer electronics and I don't believe these things are on par at all, nor should they be held to the same standard.

You think the features of car touchscreens will still be relevant in 5 years? The point them in because it adds planned obsolescence.

I really don't think it's planned obsolescence - it's just that automotive entertainment systems are subject to the same amount of testing as everything else in the car, which means your average media system is 5 years behind. I have a 2005 Land Rover Discovery 3 with a touch screen, and at 11 years old, it still works the same as on the day I bought it. That's what you want. Software and hardware which continues working fine for more than a decade.

On the other end of the scale we have Tesla, which clearly does very little testing of their media systems, and pushes updates over the air, so things get broken or changed with every update. But "hey, it's not a big deal, we'll just push another update in a month!" - that's absolutely not acceptable with cars.

For example: https://medium.com/@michaelmeier_90534/tesla-model-s-is-grea...

I would be absolutely furious if my car did this. I would rather have a shitty system that stays shitty for the lifetime of the car, than have a good system that gets broken through an over-the-air update.

I agree the tesla system is pretty bad, but software needs to be updatable. How many exploits do you think your 2005 land rover has?

Does it really matter if the vehicle is not connected to the Internet in any way?

I mean, if an attacker has physical access to the insides of your car, all bets are off and is now his vehicle.

They might not have the internet (although some do via various methods) but most will have Bluetooth which could kill the console in the best case. There has been cases of people getting access to things like the door locks and the brake system.

Remember it's not just the internet that makes you susceptible, it's any network.

The issue is that an attacker could gain access to the inside of your car only briefly, but leave a device that continues carrying out the exploit

And do what exactly? make the car crash? If you want to do that just cut a break fluid line, don't even need to open the car for that.

I mean, I take your general point, but I'm almost certain that 99.9% of people breaking into cars do it to steal them, not to install a virus that will track your location or make your car crash. Both of those can be achieved trivially without even opening the car.

That's poor design. My wife's new car has physical buttons for all the common functions that you might require to use while in motion:

- Radio on/off

- All radio controls on the wheel

- Heating/cooling, physical knobs

The touchscreen is treated as an optional, secondary interface, as it rightfully should be.

Just Radio?

I'm assuming people are listening to podcasts/Pandora/spotify/audiobooks just as frequently , not to mention looking at/listening to directions.

And it doesn't even have a siri/google assistant button? I'd consider that vital.

It would work the same for anything your phone provides if it's connected via Bluetooth. There's likely also a way to get to Siri like on pretty much all Bluetooth headsets.

Almost everyone is carrying a touch screen in their pocket, complete with internet access, navigation, music, audiobooks, everything. Car manufacturers should just solve the problem of how to plug in the phone since they'll never deliver anything smarter or more powerful anyway. And, yes, physical knobs for things that you might do when driving, such as adjusting sound volume. The rest of the effort they should direct at the thing which they are good at; building cars.

Equivalently, TV manufacturers should stop trying to make their TVs smart and leave this to 3rd party devices such as the Apple TV, Chromecast or whatever. Just make great image quality and make the smartness pluggable. Anyway, I'm digressing.

It is not because of the touch screen, but because the designer was probably an intern.

It probably won't be as big of a concern going forward as self-driving cars become the norm. For non-self-driving, I agree with you.

One thing I miss is my iPod Classic. I used to listen to music in my car and I would feel for the buttons to skip songs. Of course if I needed a newer playlist I would have to wait till the car wasn't moving (red light), now in my newer car I have bluetooth and thankfully it has buttons for skip in the steering wheel. My iPoc Classic is dead though, so I am forced to use my phone, which I wish someone would come out with a phone that had media buttons on the side or back, I get it, there's a touch screen and all, but when I'm driving I don't want my eyes off the road. That or a case that includes bluetooth enabled buttons for skipping through songs would be neat.

The iPod Classic didn't have buttons to skip songs...you used the sides of the click wheel (which, from a tactile standpoint, was better than buttons).

BTW, there are Bluetooth remotes available for the iPhone.

Never liked the iPhone personally, I use Android, but yeah that's a thought, bluetooth remote. Thanks!

Not to sound to pedantic but a click wheel is button.

> But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it.

This is a huge issue. I'm fortunate that my car's infotainment system is controlled by buttons & knobs; I worry about folks in e.g. Teslas who are forced to take their eyes off the road.

We had to purchase a new vehicle at the beginning of the year (it was becoming too expensive to maintain our VW camper van), and we purposefully chose a vehicle that did not have a touch screen for any of the controls. We drove several makes that included them, and it was distracting and difficult to do rather simple things.