It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn't offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it's complicated to install.
Way prefer the Mazda / Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.
Nobody bothers to write sales copy saying "You can actually change the cabin temperature and the radio volume on this car"
Then you could delete the buttons you don't use, and make the ones you do use really big, with cool pictures, and funny sounds when you touched them.
HyperCard Adventures (hypercardadventures.com):
Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.
>went with completely touchscreen based cabin
Absolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.
Much easier to justify the extra cost of switches when you know your customers will happily pay a premium for them.
Ohhhh no no it is waaaay different because I make the lights that you don’t. Yes sometimes get stuck in traffic but not nearly as much. I can observe speed limits and still be way ahead of you because of the acceleration speed (quickness). Acceleration ability also means being able to keep longer follow distance in traffic without losing chances to pass safely when they open up.
And since you ask, you get that 10k or more back in gas savings. On top of that there are other benefits, some of them objective and monetary such as resale value ($), safety ($$$), environmental responsibility, longevity of the car ($$), fun, and speed. So, yes. You should test drive one and see what it feels like.
And that’s just comparing to gas cars. Comparing to competing electric cars would be a different list of benefits.
It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.
That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.
Agreed, this is the end game.
The original CTS (circa 2003) did this. It had four buttons and a rotary dial on the steering wheel that you could assign to the functions of your choosing. This was a groundbreaking usability enhancement at the time. They also had a dial on the ceiling for the sunroof where you just turn it to the position you want the sunroof to open to (ex. 50%) and then the sunroof would open that amount. It was brilliantly simple and elegant.
Unfortunately, Cadillac went in reverse for a number of years afterwards... dropping the customizable buttons, dropping the sunroof dial, making touchsensative (but not actually tactile) physical controls. Finally, this year they have gone back to real tactile controls!
BMW has been using assignable buttons for over a decade now. I loved having one button to go to my favorite radio station, another button to call my wife, another to set the nav system to navigate home. The buttons are also sensitive to resistive touch, so if you put your finger on the button without actually pushing it, it will tell you on the screen what that button has been assigned to. I think BMW does tactile controls better than any other car I've owned. Not that many BMW owners use them, but even the signal light wand is a delight for tactile senses.
There may be other automakers who do the assignable button thing too, would love to hear from anyone who knows of others.
I was a little disappointed in the controls in the new volvo I bought last year. They have a mix of touchscreen controls and a limited number of tactile buttons and knobs. They got really close to getting it right. They at least need to make the screen configurable so you can put your most used functions on the home screen.
Fiat-Chrysler got this right at least. Their UConnect system has a system bar along the bottom of the screen that is always visible and you can decide which buttons you want there (heated steering wheel control, surround cameras, etc). If I wanted to bring up the surround cameras on the Volvo as I'm pulling into a parking space, I'd have to swipe right, tap cameras, then switch the surround view, with slight UI delays in between each of these gestures -- not ideal when pulling into a parking space. BMW (and the new Corvette C8) have a dedicated tactile button for this, Chrysler lets you put that "button" on the home row of the touchscreen... both are much better solutions.
Hopefully the automakers are coming out of a learning phase right now and things are about to get much better as everyone has tried terrible touchscreens and learned why there needs to be more buttons.
Its like people who insist on working with dvorak in a company but much worse.
Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly interesting to learn about: https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...
They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option, I want that to be easy to access, not buried a few gestures deep. Chrysler nailed it, they let you rearrange the touch screen icons and have a bar along the bottom where you can put items that are always visible. They also have more buttons and dials.
Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.
For the past couple years, US law requires that they default to the backup camera when in reverse (which is dumb, but that's another discussion). At least surround view is only one tap from there. Other manufacturers still do this better by showing both the backup camera AND the surround cameras at the same time and the Volvo screen is plenty large enough to handle this since other manufacturers with smaller screens do it well.
It should do it in parking mode, but it doesn't! The car even switches to a top view illustration of the car to show you the ultrasonic sensor readings when you're close to stuff (ie. when you're parking) but it doesn't turn the surround cameras on!
The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is happening with SmartTVs today -- if I want a new TV that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel tier, my only option is Smart.
When I got leased a VW Jetta a few years back, you had the option of no-touchscreen.. but that was the lowest-featured car, so you have up 10 other things for it.
You can also find the same thing in MacBooks with the touchbar -- once it was out, your only real options were to buy it, or throw the baby out and buy nothing/windows.
You can't judge whether customers like them, because it's bundled to other far more valuable aspects.
Before laws mandated the use of seat belts, most people didn't use them. My mother bought a Volvo 122 in the 1960s, and people marvelled at the three-point harness.
But it's not like US manufacturers rushed to take advantage of Volvo making the patents freely available, and nor did Volvo take over the world by storm.
Some cars had alarms that nagged the driver if the seat belts weren't done up. I recall my uncle routed around this by looping the driver and "shotgun" belts -behind- the seats and fastening them.
Left to their own devices, large numbers of people prefer convenience and low price to safety. Only by regulation did the mass market adopt safer cars.
So I completely agree, no, people did not like wearing seat belts. They only did so when their option to forgo safety was removed.
p.s. I recall watching this PSA in Ontario. Everyone laughed about it, but soooooo many young men then went out and drove their muscle cars sans belt. Enjoy.
Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).
I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.
More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn't are.
This is false, full stop.
Also, whenever you are starting a sentence such as "In what circumstance..." and making blanket assertions, it's better to take a step back and question if other people's circumstances are radically different from yours. That's what good product thinking is about.
Not everyone wants to.
Geotagging pictures is a very important use case for a professional photographer, and relying on the user to provide GPS through another device is not advisable.
Also phone location services may not work very well without a cell signal, and not everyone takes photos only within range of a cell tower.
A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.
Cameras aren't really like that. Nowadays if you've actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you're probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.
[1] I'll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.
Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.
My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!
(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)
Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These "innovations" are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.
Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.
I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution.
There's still a physical dial for switching modes even though that's not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.
I won't go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that's unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.
So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just 'what I want' but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.
The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.
And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.
Sure, and you could do that with an SLR from the 90s too, as I recall.
Camera manufacturers are very innovative when it comes to capabilities and new features, but incredibly conservative when it comes to user experience and form factor.
> they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. ... The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen
I agree that physical affordances are very useful. But I don't think the cause of DSLRs having them is because current manufacturers believe buttons have superior usability. It's because SLRs have had those same controls since before touchscreens existed and today's self-selected DSLR camera audience specifically wants products with that "vintage" user experience.
My evidence is that today's cameras generally only have hardware controls for features that existed since before the digital revolution. Purely new capabilities (like file management) have not included corresponding new hardware controls. Likewise, hardware controls that are no longer that useful, like mode selectors, are still present.
To me, this implies that camera manufacturers are not just trying to provide a "hardware control" UX, they are specifically providing "the hardware control UX of 90s SLRs".