Many automakers that had touch-heavy interfaces are moving back towards physical controls, both because of market demand and evolving industry safety considerations.

e.g. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-to... https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/17/ford-my...

I have no problem with touch controls in general, but replacing a volume knob I can find blindly with a relatively small pair of "Vol+" and "Vol-" touch targets is mildly infuriating. It's OK as the driver because there is an actual tactile control on the steering wheel, but downright unpleasant as a passenger.

I will admit that the touch screen in my new VW is fashionable and I love all the data screens -- but I have had near-misses due to having to stare at the screen to do stuff like hit touch targets for changing my spotify playlist. It has nothing to do with responsiveness either -- the screen has no perceptible lag, its all to do with lack of haptics / feel.

edit: I drive both an early 90s truck and a late 2010s car. I don't miss the touch screen when I drive the truck, I only miss Spotify / Google Maps.

My old one has a slider labeled "Heat" and "Defrost". Never had problems with that.

Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control.

> Tesla got this right with both the touch screen and the physical buttons on the steering wheel for things like volume control.

Perhaps there's an auto manufacturer or two that got it right. However, I've never driven a car with physical buttons that got it wrong. When I used to shop for cars in those days, I never had to consider if those buttons were compatible with me. Now when I buy for a newer car, it's an added headache to consider, and one that I've not seen add any real value. Going on a test drive really will not tell me enough about whether the interface is good. And worst of all, whether it is or isn't affects my safety.

You gotta give it some time, because modern physical control interfaces in cars had over half a decade to evolve to reach this point. With regard to touchscreen interfaces in cars, it simply feels like those are still stuck somewhere in the pre-iPhone era of touchscreen interfaces for phones in terms of usability compared to physical controls.

I sure have, the climate control in 2001 VW GTIs is a fiddly mess of small buttons with feedback from a tiny screen almost as low as the gearstick. It's the "high end" system but the lower-end knobs are so much better and safer.

And my touch screen, in general, is snappy enough.

I lost the ability to have my text messages read to me, or to respond by dictating them. For a short time there was a half-implementation from Tesla that was in no way comparable to CarPlay, but it stopped working for me a couple months ago and I haven't been able to convince it to start working again.

I also used to be able to select music to play, and it didn't require jumping through a bunch of hoops to find it. Now my choices is the streaming that Tesla includes, or Spotify, and the Spotify interface is awful. I bought a subscription and tried it out, thinking I could switch from Apple Music, but after failing repeatedly to get the Spotify in the car to see playlists I created on my phone, and growing weary of Spotify on my phone or computer defaulting to playing out in the car even when I had been inside for hours, I gave up on that.

I also used to use Waze, or Google Maps, or Apple Maps, depending on what I felt worked best. Thankfully the maps built in to the Tesla aren't awful, but the interface is not without its quirks.

Tesla could solve this by supporting CarPlay and Android Auto, but they won't, because they need us to have a reason to pay for the premium data subscription.

Out of curiosity, which Tesla? Because iirc there was a firmware update pushed out closer to the end of last year, which added that functionality (both having texts read and being able to respond by dictating), and I thought it went out for all Tesla cars.

The only reason I asked about the specific model you drive is because I know that some older Model S and X cars receive slightly different versions of firmware updates than newer ones like Model 3, but afaik the differences are usually related to autopilot/FSD features, not to UX features like this.

My car is a little psychotic, perhaps :-). Probably a coincidence, but I also can no longer get the dashcam to work. Tried an exotic solution first (Pi Zero emulating a drive, with WiFi uploading at home), but it wasn't reliable, so then I switched to just a regular USB drive (adapter + high endurance microSD card), which worked for a month or so, but has stopped working and I haven't been able to figure out why.

I'm hoping the newest update with the Sentry updates will fix that last problem, since apparently it can format the card now. Though I did hear something about the last release also screwing up sentry for some people, so who knows. I'm at 2020.16.2, so there's at least one more point release that I haven't gotten yet.

I've read in some recent threads that this method ended up resolving a lot of really weird and random issues like what you described.

That's not a super relevant point in response to me mentioning that my car has a touch screen available for passengers to change the volume and a tactile steering wheel control, and that I don't like it.

I am telling you that what you don't like in your car, I think that Tesla got it right. How is that not relevant? What kind of response are you expecting?

This isn’t “I’m tweeting and using social media and thwarting the attention sensors“ it’s “I know my attention is going to be divided between maintaining my lane and adjusting the temperature/picking a new station so I’m going to take steps to avoid drifting out of my lane into other cars”

I prefer touch controls both as a driver and a passenger. I even use a Halo keyboard (effectively just another screen, with no "real" buttons) on my laptop. It takes some getting used to, but eventually becomes second nature -- and then you open up huge new areas of functionality that aren't possible with physical buttons and knobs.

http://www.thebenzbin.com/early-car-starters

(I do miss the ability to jump-start a car using a crank lever.)

What if you're driving solo?

And there's still room on the steering wheel for knobs for the most common controls, and voice control is often available.

Tactile controls can become so thoroughly integrated in muscle memory that well-designed tools and machines (including cars) feel like an extension of thought. Think "volume up", it just happens automatically from thought to fingers to buttons.

Compare that to a multi-word speech command that requires perfect diction and phrasing over a span of five seconds. That's five seconds of distraction, longer if the command has to be repeated, vs milliseconds for the button.

Or he wouldn't be rated to fly the airplane.

In an airliner, the critical controls are all uniquely shaped, so the pilot knows by the feel which is which.

I think the most common commands can all be mapped to buttons on the steering wheel, which similarly is as close to possible as "negligible reduced driving capacity to use" without the tediousness of voice control.

But I do think the theoretical safety benefits of physical buttons that are not on the steering wheel as compared to touchscreens for features beyond the ones commonly used while driving are probably overstated.

When the controls are in fixed positions, you only need to look at them a few times, before you memorize their positions. It also helps if they're shaped differently, like knobs and dials in addition to buttons.

Using the example of a radio, I used to be able to do just about everything without looking, with the exception of direct tuning (but that's what presets are for), in my older cars with traditional head units. Now that I have a touchscreen head unit, there's almost nothing I can do without looking. Basically, I can control the volume from my steering wheel, and that's about it.

The controls on your phone are in fixed positions most of the time; do you use your smartphone without looking, the way you probably used your feature phone?

No, because with touchscreens come heavy-weight operating systems like Android, which have unpredictable input delays. Without looking, you can't tell if your touch input was correctly registered (vs. ignored because the OS decided to hang for a second), and if there's any mode switching involved, you can't tell when the UI has updated to allow you to press again.

I'm not against touchscreens as a matter of principle (though I come to appreciate the ergonomics of physical controls). But their overall responsiveness is, in general, much worse than those of physical controls.

With a touchscreen, there's really no way to know where your starting point is when you reach for it blindly, so you have to look. I suppose you could use the edges, but that wouldn't be so easy on a large touchscreen.

With an old car radio, you can reach for it, know what you touch first, and know where everything else is in relation to it, all without looking, ever.

Anecdotally, I've been driving a Model 3 for two years now and I have zero problems with the touch interface.

Even if you design the logical interface such that all 2-d screen mappings are consistent regardless of context, there is still the problem of tactile feedback. Physical affordances can provide varying shapes, materials and actuation methods which can immediately distinguish them from each other without the need for visual confirmation.

I first experienced this on a Prius back in the mid-2000s, where the touch-screen was in one of several modes (climate, radio, navigation etc) and even if one can remember where the controls are, it's necessary to look before touching. That car had more physical buttons than is generally the case now and was still difficult to operate.

> "The increase in reaction time when interacting with either system using touch was higher than previously measured forms of impairment, including texting and hand-held calls".

It's a small sample size N=20 but their conclusion was that interacting with these touch infotainment systems created a reaction time degradation that was 4x worse than the reaction time of a drunk driver (80mg of alcohol per 100ml).

They followed up this study with a call for urgent shifting in the auto industry to voice controlled infotainment systems.

[0] "Interacting with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay when driving", R Ramnath, N Kinnear, S Chowdhury, T Hyatt, March 2020.

https://trl.co.uk/reports/interacting-android-auto-and-apple...

If auto marketing/product managers are not responsible enough to correct this than it clearly is up to Road Safety authorities to regulate.

Mazda did the right thing, other auto manufacturers should know better. We are truly risking drivers' and pedestrians' lives here.

Definitely not true. My last car had all physical buttons, and I could easily, by feel, use all of them with one hand while keeping my eyes on the road and the other hand on the wheel. When you've been driving a vehicle for years you get very used to its controls. Plus, on a lot of these cars some of the most common radio controls (like volume and change frequency) are right on the wheel beneath your thumbs.

That is definitely not true. Volume on the left, tuner on the right, and of the five preset buttons, WFBQ is the one in the middle. You could feel for all of that without your eyes leaving the road. What might have happened is that you came of age after utilitarian radios. For example, I had to give some serious looking in order to find a DIN2 radio that had CarPlay and a physical on/off/volume control. Or just a physical on/off button, not some software button buried five menu levels deep. Such jackassery used to be the exception, not the new rule.

Climate control? Heat control on left, blower the middle, and position (where it blows) on the right. Or some combination thereof. Our utilitarian Mercedes Sprinter RV has it right. Other, less utilitarian vehicles: meh, not so much.

I could go on. But I've never been required to let my eyes leave the road for functionality until the last ten years or so. $DEITY help you if you need to switch Bluetooth devices while driving our Leaf: seven screen touches to pull that off, with plenty of opportunity along the way to make a wrong choice. No wonder it won't allow you to do it while moving.

Share.. Please! I still haven't found any.

I have 2004 wrx with 2din slot but haven't found anything with ergonomics of the manufacturer old setup. I have so much room, yet all I can find is huge screens with tiny or no buttons... :(

See that big honkin' knob on the left? Volume and on/off. It's glorious, especially when driving a 5400Kg vehicle. Bought it last year, or year before, so there might be an updated model.

EDIT: check out Crutchfield's other radios, too. There's a brand they sell call "Boss" (never heard of them, either), and every model of theirs has a big knob for 1/0/Volume.

https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-news/mazda-getting-rid-... https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/08/a-lesson-for-autom... https://www.automobilemag.com/news/touchscreen-needs-go/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/should-gestures-and-spe... https://jalopnik.com/touchscreens-in-cars-have-been-a-failur...

I've seen so many of these go by that I had to do the very same search that you could have made instead of asking for sources.

Asking for sources when a trivial search at your fingertips will yield them can come across as rude and lazy. Please make a better effort in the future.

In comparison my car has physical buttons and dials. If I want to adjust the temperature while driving I don't need to look away from the road, I just grab the dial and turn it a few clicks, same with sterio volume. I know approximately where the dials are so I can reach in the general area and know what I'm doing with out looking because there is something physical to grab.

With touch controls, as soon as you've touched it, you've activated it.

And touch screens have very few ways to verify your position by touch, since it's a large flat screen. Controls with a plethora of knobs and sliders have all kinds of terrain that you can use by touch to verify your position.

Aside from others' comments that one needn't look at buttons & knobs one has memorized, also:

1) one does not need to look as long at buttons and knobs as a screen to locate the desired control, because they do not change position. One also never needs to navigate a menu to perform a basic task. The closest most come is having a button that cycles AM/FM and channel presets.

2) it's possible to combine the fixed-location advantage of buttons and knobs with visual and tactile differentiation that reduces or eliminates the need to look at the controls even further. Some cars do this, but a really great example is the Nintendo Gamecube controller, which was clearly designed by someone who'd watched a young child try to remember what all the buttons on earlier consoles (SNES, N64, Playstation, perhaps) were used for. Size differentiation, most-used buttons in the most-accessible positions, larger, and highlighted by color, less-used ones smaller with diminishing vividness of color the less-important they were. A clear hierarchy of importance differentiated by color, size, shape, and feel. Auto makers don't ever fully embrace this because it results in a UI that doesn't look they way they want it to, but for maximum safety, they should.

A very, very consistent touchscreen UI could use some of this to great effect to reduce the harm that they cause, but they'd have to almost never screw with placement, appearance, or behavior of UI elements, all of which would need to be perfectly consistent and just about never change, which in practice probably means never receiving updates because there aren't a lot of teams that can resist fiddling with looks & behavior (this is a problem that plagues all web and frequently-updated software, and if you don't think it's a big one or causing some serious irritation and reduced-utility in computing in the wild then try watching someone who's not extremely "computer savvy" use their computer or phone for a while). They'd also need to radically simplify their UIs and work very hard on reducing latency and improving interaction accuracy (touch, then nothing happens for a second or two, is extremely confusing to non-computer-nerds, and it's 100x worse if it's not consistently precisely that unresponsive—sometimes instant, sometimes 1s delay, sometimes 5s delay, is the absolute worst way a UI can behave)

I never look at those buttons, and I switch stations all the time. In fact, the radio is my standard example of where touch screens fail and are hazardous.

Just like with a phone that has physical buttons - I would dial numbers without looking at the phone.

In the car I have that doesn't have a touch screen, I don't think I ever look for any button - be it climate control, emergency lights, etc.