Obviously this will vary by manufacturer and feature, and it's getting harder as time goes on to remove this shit from your vehicle.
Am I wrong?
This cuts both ways. If the user can show one case of their rejecting the EULA without it being logged, they can then make the claim--correctly or not--that they repeatedly rejected it. If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted or rejected, proof of its movement would be sufficient to show repeated rejection.
More pointedly, willfully hiding information like this could backfire massively with the courts or law enforcement.
void handleEula()
{
auto eulaAccepted = readEulaAcceptedFile();
if (!eulaAccepted)
eulaAccepted = promptForEulaAcceptance();
writeEulaFile(eulaAccepted);
}
> If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted or rejected, proof of its movement would be sufficient to show repeated rejection.
If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted then it wouldn't move. If some functionality was enabled or disabled by accepting the EULA then you would have to show that the functionality was never enabled based on secondhand sources... which would be difficult. Proving something didn't happen is infinitely more difficult than proving something did. Many systems are not designed to handle that level of introspection.
All I'm saying is that the cute legal theory of "I rejected this N times therefore that one time I accepted it is invalid" falls apart for me when I consider that the user would have to prove they never did something, except that one time. Good luck.
Yet, that doesn't matter - all the user has to demonstrate in court is that rejecting a EULA causes it to come up again in the future, meaning that sooner or later it is going to get accidentally accepted.
Practices like this increase likelihood that the judge rules the entire agreement null and void for the entire userbase.
It falls apart for you, since you are the person trying to trick every single driver. It won't necessarily fall apart for a judge.
Particularly us geeky folk often seem to think that you can find a buffer overflow exploit in the literal wording of the law and the judge will have to let you go. That usually isn't how it works (although the odd case where someone successfully exploits the actual verbiage in the law tends to make headlines and make it seem like that is how it works).
Do you have proof they clicked it, and not their kid? Did they intend to consent, or click the button by accident/ spilled coffee on the touchscreen?
How can we trust your code at all, if all users say the rejected the contract multiple times, and you claim they accepted it and you are the one that stands to benefit from their acceptance, maybe you are lying? Maybe your system is unreliable?
Is it even legal to use the user's property - i.e. their car - to disturb their peace? If you were to post them a letter, you do it at your expense, but now you are doing it at their expense, they are paying to electricity and data to display those pixels for your benefit.
Sure, if the lawyers are actually trying to do things legally first and adhering to the letter of the law, I'm sure they're happy to have their efforts challenged. But I have never, ever, in my life encountered a lawyer who worked this way (and I have lawyers in my family, I've been to court, I've personally hired several, blah blah blah). I am not saying they don't know the law, but they use their greater knowledge of the law to their advantage. Their goal isn't transparency, it's submission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum
These were widely covered because most people just settled, and there were high hopes for something putting a damper on the lawsuits... from the page about the second case " It was only the second file-sharing case (after Capitol v. Thomas) to go to verdict in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) anti-downloading litigation campaign"
So 2 for 2 there were found in favor of the RIAA, for huge damages even after appeal.
More recently, even ISPs are getting hit hard: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/1-billion-piracy...
There's a much harder burden of proof for the RIAA when they sue people over simply downloading songs or albums when the user can easily make the case for fair use. I mean, how many albums, 8-tracks, cassettes and CD's did you buy of the same artist and album? I know I did it thousands of times.
The burden gets a lot easier when you can show the person was actively distributing essentially pirated music to other users - propagating what is by legal definition, illegal activity.
As I remember, at least some cases were complete BS. Some people hardly knew what file sharing was.
I think we're talking about two different things. Yes, the RIAA was running an intimidation campaign. By and large they didn't care about any particular case.
That's quite different than a plaintiff coming at a car manufacturer over sketchy click-wrap agreements.
Anyway, I don't care enough to comment anymore.
I guess it becomes their word against... well, nothing, you don't know what they did or didn't do.
For those who care enough to reject EULAs, they should take a few videos of rejecting the license and hopefully that would be enough to shift the onus to the manufacturer, who, as you said, has next to nothing.
I think consent dialogs are one of the closest things to Newspeak that exist. In any spoken language, new words can be coined to express a desired meaning. In consent dialogs, there is no longer "Accept" and "Decline", instead there is "Accept" and "Ask me later". When presented with an upsell, the choices are not "Yes" and "No", but "Yes, sign me up!" and "No, I don't want to save money."
> A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restrictions which apply to the use of the software.
> Many EULAs assert extensive liability limitations. Most commonly, an EULA will attempt to hold harmless the software licensor in the event that the software causes damage to the user's computer or data, but some software also proposes limitations on whether the licensor can be held liable for damage that arises through improper use of the software (for example, incorrectly using tax preparation software and incurring penalties as a result).
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement
This seems ... fine.
Adding new Bluetooth connections is something I do more than one would think, because my car doesn't seem to allow Android Auto via a USB cable alone, and periodically it gets into a bad state somehow. The only solution I've found is to forget the pairing and start over. This has happened to me on multiple cars, two Hondas and a BMW, so I'm not sure whether it's universal or not. If for instance, GM cars didn't have this issue, I'd seriously consider one.
Obviously this is a software problem and not a touchscreen issue per se, but I associate it with the touchscreen and the generally poor standards of car tech these days.
Adjusting radio settings is something that I do quite a bit if I am going on a trip, because any given FM station fades out in a fairly short time. I could stream music from my phone, but I have a limited plan due to spending most of my time using wifi these days.
My car does have a reasonably clever and low mental bandwidth way of using the radio, though. There is a "scan" (touchscreen) button and then it changes through the stations reasonably slowly with a "stop" button in the lower left.
I don't understand your third point - it's supposed to be a mitigating factor? It seems like a good reason to "hate on touchscreens" to me, though.
Touchscreens and software bloat are not really central to what I dislike about modern car tech. It's the fact that the user experience has converged on personal computers, where things tend to stop working without any meaningful diagnostic or error and I end up spending 15 minutes resetting and disconnecting/reconnecting things to make it work when I really just want to get home before my food gets cold, etc.
As long as any given computer system is simple enough that the engineers understood it, it seems fine to me in theory.
What GP is talking is return to the design you described, possibly with more focus on car-equivalent of HOTAS and tactile controls.
I think there is proof your eyes spend more time off the road when using a touch screen compared to physical controls
Touchscreens force us to look at them with our eyes to use them.
I think nobody who prefers simplicity objects to that kind of tech. It's overcomplicated interfaces to basic services that we despise, like a volume slider that requires you to look away from the road and that's too easy to mishandle.
The problem with that dumb car is that it is missing that very convenient feature. So you want a dumb car but with feature X, because feature X is really great. But the other guy will not care about X and will think it is bloat, but Y is really important, while for someone else, it will be all about Z.
In the end, to satisfy everyone, you will need X+Y+Z, everyone will think it is bloated but you can't remove a single feature without someone complaining... As in, I want things light but don't remove my feature.
Unless it is custom made bloat is almost inevitable.
Power central locking doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.
> manual windows
Electric windows doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.
> no car stereo
Car stereos do not need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.
> no power steering
Power steering doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates. Hell it doesn't even require electronics.
> no thermostat
Thermostats are mechanical...
> no cruise control
Cruise control doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.
I do not expect to get that soon.
Really?
No microcontroller on that car[1]; it was a very reliable car too (bought it with 50000km, sold it with 270000km and only ever did services. Nothing broke in that time).
Bosch k-jetronic fuel injection, no microcontroller needed.
Push button, engage solenoid, who needs a microcontroller?
> manual windows
Push button, turn on motor, limit switch to turn off the motor when you get to the end. Microcontrollers make pinch detection and calibration nicer though.
> no car stereo
Tons of examples here, a stereo built today would most likely have electronics and/or a microcontroller because it's cheaper than an analog FM radio, but an old one will still work fine.
> no power steering
On my 1978 vehicle. I believe this is hydraulic with a belt powered pump to reduce the user torque on the steering wheel. No electronics, certainly not a microcontroller.
> no cruise control
On my 1978 vehicle. No microcontroller there, just some vacuum linkages. Maybe a bit of electronics to turn things on and off, the switch certainly felt like an electric switch.
None of these things require a microcontroller. Because it's cheaper, almost all of them use a microcontroller on modern cars; thermostats on lower models would probably be the most likely to be a simple system without a microcontroller.
The extreme case (as you mention) is the moment you stick in a touch screen and a fair amount of intelligence. You might as well put a jillion features in there plus you save money on physical controls.
They used to be capable of building cars with numerous option packages in the 1960's and 1970's, it's pretty remarkable. The 1969 Camaro alone had probably a dozen different engines available from 3 families.
Cruise control doesn't have to have any electronics at all either, earlier cars had vacuum actuated cruise control.
I think an extremely small minority of people who want a "dumb" car don't want those features. I feel like you're just making up a strawman here. It's pretty clear (at least to me), that the people who want a dumb car are talking about things integrating with your phone or being displayed on a touch screen. I think anything that existed 20 years ago is not regarded as dumb by basically anybody.
But, you used to be able to order all sorts of stuff - or not order it. For example, you could save a few hundred bucks by not having a rear bumper, not having a radio, opting for manual windows and transmission, opting for no cruise control, etc...
There were a multitude of options and you could add/delete most anything you wanted.
These days, it's down to packages and colors. Often, you can't even mix packages and trying to get manually controlled windows will usually get you laughed at.
Is the stereo just an AM/FM radio? Does it have a CD player? A CD changer (how many people even buy CDs anymore)? Does it get satellite radio? Does it have AUX input? Does it have Bluetooth? Is there an interface to communicate to the the Bluetooth device (people driving around controlling their stereo from their phone is more dangerous than people doing the same on their car's touchscreen)? Can it stream music without a Bluetooth connection? Does it have Spotify? What about Apple Music? Does it offer handsfree control? And so on.
There simply isn't a universal definition of what a "dumb car" would be and not everyone is going to desire the same set of features.
Personally, I really enjoy that with our new van I can listen to a podcast/music through Bluetooth and pause/resume playback through a simple touchscreen without having to fiddle with my phone directly.
I'm not sure what your point is. I never said that no one wants these features. Obviously there are many that do.
US luxury cars in 1965 had all the features you mention. They were delightfully dumb and simple to operate. That's what I want now: knobs, sliders, and buttons that move and click when my finger pushes them.
I just want a car to ENABLE me in intuitive ways and that don't go obsolete before the tires need replacing.
I know exactly where, e.g. my fan speed knob is and I can reach for it confidently. Or I can take my eyes of the road so I'm not blindly groping around the touchscreen to find the increase/decrease button, assuming its even on the right screen and I don't need to go through several menus to find it. Cost doesn't enter my mind in this scenario.
It's not particularly difficult for the manufacturer. All the cars had the wiring for all the features since that's the hardest part to do after the factory, but doesn't cost much. Control modules and actuators can be added very late in the assembly line (sometimes even at the dealer prep) so you only get the ones you want to pay for.
I actually just bought a 2010 which has mechanical door locks, manual windows, and no cruise control. It's great. What's the problem?
I used to own a Datsun 720 pickup (built 1982) that matched this specification. It even had a manual choke; starting the truck without flooding the engine required a bit of skill.
It was the best vehicle I've ever owned. On the rare occasion it needed maintenance, I could do everything myself. I didn't even need a workshop manual, because it was all intuitive.
I think the only car I've driven without physical volume controls was a Ford, and that was nearly a decade ago, I get the feeling there's been a bit of a push back, at least in the UK.
Glass controls are optimal for precisely only one scenario, and that is when you don't know ahead of time what will need to be on the screen. That's why smartphones use them.
I did not know till you said how much effort Skoda is putting in.
My next car is in that line up...
(Prefer level II to level III automation tho)
1. The controls on the 2014 are obvious, easy to find, and my choices are readily apparent. In the 2017 I have to search for them and often guess their meanings. If I'm actively driving, I just give up because it's too distracting.
2. The controls are not as responsive. Sometimes there's a lag. Sometimes they don't respond at all.
3. There are bugs with the digital controls that simply don't exist in the analog versions. As an example in the 2017 the radio turns on every time the car gets started regardless of if it was on when the car was turned off.
UNacceptable.
And yet now the norm.
I'll do you one better - I'm hanging on to my 2004 Subaru WRX for these and similar reasons too :). I go through dealerships every year or two looking for replacement... and keep my WRX with happiness in my heart.
You could argue that’s because of familiarity. Obviously I like a lot about my car or I wouldn’t have kept it for this long! But truly, it’s not that I don’t think there’s room for improvement on my old car. There have been plenty of advances since its time that I would welcome if I bought a new vehicle: improved efficiency, safety features, practicalities like better external lighting, and so on.¹
For me, those benefits always seem to be outweighed by the horrible state of controls and displays and “infotainment” systems in new cars. They’re cluttered and intrusive and distracting. I’m not sure which is worse, touchscreens that take your eyes off the road, or cluttering the steering wheel with controls for a phone that it is almost never appropriate to be using while driving anyway in my country. Meanwhile, apparently I still have to take a hand off the wheel for a second or two to change gear or switch on various external safety lights. This should have been some sort of meme punchline, not real life.
Between poorly designed controls, the security and privacy problems that seem to be rampant in modern cars, and the sense that EVs might be the future but there are still some big unanswered questions, I expect it will be a few more years before I change to a new vehicle unless some practical consideration forces the issue first.
¹ I’m still waiting for the windscreen that automatically enhances the driver’s full view in low light or poor weather conditions and subtly highlights the required driving line through junctions as directed by the navigation system, but I reckon we’ll have that too before the self-driving flying cars are here.
The RAV4 we had for 4 years now - I'm thoroughly familiar with the UI, and parts of it are still completely non-sensible.
Like yourself, before COVID I traveled and rented cars frequently; there are some UI choices that are inherently poor or against my priorities/workflows and they'll never be right. I could list them, but now we'd be into rant territory... :-/
There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible.
IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
And going from lo to hi takes forever, too. At least the fan speed knob seems good enough. The touch screen in general is decidedly not great; it's better than my C-max (sync2) in many ways, but I really like how the sync2 was designed --- they clearly considered how to make it useful, but then implemented it in the slowest environment possible.
The console is awful. Truly awful. Push the volume button within a few seconds of turning the car on to turn the radio off? Doesn't even register. Even if you give it a minute to warm up, it is half a second of lag on a physical switch. The touch screen has a half second of lag and requires several presses to do something as simple as switch from the radio to bluetooth.
1) that there’s no CAN bus messages in Subaru cars that offer GPS time, and
2) that at least older models of MFD counts time by dividing 125kHz CAN bus crystal, where a sane choice would be to use 32.768kHz one.
It’s not just your car, the issue is in design. To hypothetically fix it a firmware hack would need to be built. I learned this when a friend of mine told his is always way too fast and often makes him upset for a moment that he might be late to work — don’t know he meant it justify flooring it but sounded like he was genuinely annoyed.
It's still an issue in the 2018 Impreza. I've gotten used to it now, but it's still frustrating. Especially if I ended the drive with a phone call. On phone calls I have to really crank up the volume (nearly max) whereas for music and other things I have it very low (10-15? The numbers mean nothing to me, not loud). So when I turn it on after a call I get blasted by NPR for about 5-10 seconds before the audio volume dial actually responds (sometimes it takes the early attempted dialing down but delayed, other times I have to try and dial it down again).
Other than audio controls, though, everything else is responsive, I don't notice any lag. It really seems to be an issue with their stereo system. Either it's not fully booted (and can't respond to controls yet) or there's some mediating system that transmits the controls which isn't booted up as quickly.
This means I need to turn the volume up a ways to hear anything over bluetooth. This also means that between starting the car and bluetooth connecting I'm getting blasted by some random radio station at increased volume.
About the only time I interact with the touch screen is to control the apps I use (mostly maps and podcasts). Even the podcasts app rarely requires me to touch the touch screen; there are volume and back/forward switches right on the steering wheel. (And also on the console below the touch screen.)
Maybe that's switching back after 2017, or perhaps you use more of the controls than I do.
I hope to buy a similarly ergonomic vehicle when this one becomes unmaintainable.
(You kind of make an Ohm gesture around the volume knob with ring and middle for up down channel)
I am glad to see other's desire for analog cars align with my own views.
I have told everyone who will listen for a long time that I will never buy a new car because of these silly digital features that often include surveillance capability.
Neither of my Macs have one of these. This is why I'm asking.
And if you aren't looking you'll accidentally do things you didn't mean to, like press escape, or turn your mac off when trying to hit back space.
I also understand why car makers like digital flash: your 4 year old car doesn't support your latest iPhone, network, or peripherals, so you're motivated to buy a new one every few years.
(And of course, old car tech distracts your driving LESS, however that fits into the picture.)
I think we will never see cars with modular digital tech that can be updated. A car with replaceable digital hardware and software won't rapidly go out-of-date the way current cars do. They would cost far less to update than replace. So nobody wants it... except perhaps grownups.
It is a California "compliance car", which means it was just a modified petrol Spark, so it didn't have product managers trying to jam in unnecessary touch-based interfaces.
I just hope that all companies building electric cars don't move in the all-touch direction of Tesla.
Old SLR cameras had a ring around the lens for f-stop and another dial on top for shutter speed.
New DSLR cameras even now hide all that stuff in a menu on the touch screen, as if it isn't something you want to change ALL THE TIME - and develop instant muscle memory for.
Never mind us older folks, who often have vision problems with up-close viewing, which is a solved problem when you can spin a shutter or aperture wheel by touch. But not when you need no-glasses to view the objective, but reading glasses to view the fine print on the screen.
(although i've never understood why it has a tach since its a manual anyway... but i guess i can close my eyes and imagine my V6 ranger is a corvette...)
Most "pro-sumers" wouldn't bother to adjust what the auto-focus calculates anyway.
I was using those dials all the time as a 16 year old learning to use a camera. It's really easy - especially when you can set one of them to auto and just control the one you care about - plus so quick when they're on a dial.
But I can believe no one wants to do it now, it's amazing how much a bit of tactile feedback can make a task 100X easier, and something you can do instinctively.
I think that is the 'sumers. The prosumer gear is for people who actually want to play with all that stuff, but don't want to pay $10k for a pro body and lenses.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong and tell me where to buy one!
As with anything camera related, where to buy could be B&H, Adorama, Sammy's, or your local camera shop (if they still exist in your area).
https://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/dslr-came...
Who knew a few physical dials would be so expensive...
Don't approximately all DSLR have separate physical knobs for aperture and shutter speed?
Agreed that a DSLR without these would be nearly useless.
Almost everyone will want to pay $30,100 for the better product though, but the market can't differentiate on that.
(You can faintly hear it over annoying background music in this video [1].)
It felt better to drive than a Tesla, even though it was orders of magnitude slower. Unfortunately, last I heard they were trying to tone down the Landspeeder-esque “cabin noise”. I’m not sure if the current executive team at Electra Meccanica even realizes what they have.
That's not to say there'll be no software, or even that it won't be proprietary. But at least it's a lot nicer to buy a motor controller, a charger, a battery management system and whatever else you need from companies that know the parts have to be easy to configure and interoperate with other components from other companies, because if they aren't people won't buy them. Modularity is a wonderful thing.
(I just ordered the charger and BMS for a project I'm working on yesterday. I ended up opting for more expensive components because they're configurable by the end user, whereas the popular cheap option you have to send it to someone to reprogram if you change your battery pack configuration.)
