Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shortage

Re:Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shor... by DavidPeiffer on Saturday November 06, 2021 @08:25AM (#29129633)

Unfortunately I think it's more driven by cost motivations. As noted in the Mk8 VW GTI review [1], the interfaces are often straight up awful, this being a particularly bad design. They're the biggest source of complaints/issues shortly after buying, and three years later.

Additionally, distractions are already abundant in a vehicle. A crappy user interface, which most are, is a safety concern. At minimum, lag between screens loading should be extremely minimal. Staring at a screen for an extra second or two while it registers that you pressed a button and updates the screen is incredibly dangerous and has surely lead to some number of deaths.

Two years ago Mazda announced they were moving away from touchscreens, which was very well received on HackerNews. [2]

And I can't find the thread right now, but 1-3 years ago there was a really good discussion on here about an eye tracking study in a variety of car models.

Touchscreen-only interfaces in cars are kind of like electronic-only voting machines. Technical people who know about computers breath funny thinking about it and see issues left and right while large swaths of people really want it.

[1] https://youtu.be/XGbPHp6QfkQ?t=6m45s

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

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Re:Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shor... by q-big on Saturday November 06, 2021 @09:09AM (#29129918)

> Unfortunately I think it's more driven by cost motivations. As noted in the Mk8 VW GTI review [1], the interfaces are often straight up awful, this being a particularly bad design.

The car producer could save even more money if they released the non-security critical user-facing parts of the software as open source and let car enthusiasts fix the bad user interface.

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Re:Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shor... by DavidPeiffer on Saturday November 06, 2021 @09:25AM (#29130006)

I'd be good with that. I casually started looking at adding openstreetmaps in place of my outdated maps on my 2009 CR-V. From what I can tell, it's a proprietary system with proprietary formats. It doesn't look like it'll work, but I'd love to achieve it.

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Re:Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shor... by grvdrm on Saturday November 06, 2021 @12:31PM (#29131595)

As a recent Mazda buyer, absolutely love the Mazda approach. The physical interface makes sense to me. The buttons feel right and work with a near-perfect springiness.

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