Actually this leads me to realize why some automakers like Ford integrate the screen into the rear view mirror, so when it isn't on, it disappears behind a one way mirror.

This law actually says that if a car can't meet a prescribed rear visibility threshold it needs a backup camera. Instead of make safer designs manufacturers just install cameras.

But I don't disagree manufacturers are using screens as an excuse to add superfluous bullshit they'll then use for data mining. See USC 2342 Unintended Consequences, Law of.

My favorite part of backup camera is manufacturers that put a warning overlay on the video telling you to watch your surroundings. An overlay that eats up some significant percentage of the screen occulting potential hazards you might otherwise see. I for one can't wait for the backup camera to display ads in the lower third. If they take up enough space manufacturers could make a mint selling personal injury and insurance ads.

However, I have it set to screen saver mode, and it is completely powered down until I put the car in reverse. It also wakes for certain things like displaying the temperature if I change it with the real knobs.

The Speedometer and Rev counter are physical needles. Newer models have replaced these with a central LCD, which means I will hang onto this one as long as I can.

There is no reason a car can’t have a display and be humane, other than stupid corporate design sensibilities.

Backup cameras were mandated as a result of cases of children being run over, because mirrors are inadequate to detect their presence.

Merging onto a freeway is scary in this thing, whereas in my 2003 car, there was a 360 view all around me. Like a lot of things, looks have become more important than function, even in something as safety-critical as a car.

Cars do not have large upright rear windows anymore because a sloping "fastback" design with a higher rear deck is more aerodynamic and gets an extra fraction of an MPG on the fuel economy rating.

Or maybe people just like to feel like their car is a rhino, but the same refresh also slightly lowered the roofline and the driving position feels lower too.

The other down side is that my wife always shouts that I'm going to crash when parking nose-in because the bonnet feels twice as long as it really is.

The "slope" back design seems to hit this sweet spot. Ease of entry, versatility, and capability while not appearing to be a "beast" of a vehicle.

I think that implies nefariousness that probably isn't there. It's more likely a combination of:

1. Marketing/sales wanting whiz-bang features to use in their pitches.

2. Copycatting competitors, also for marketing/sales pitches.

3. Customers that are often not aware of the downsides, have been conditioned to accept them (e.g. they'll all like that now), or are uncritically enthusiastic about shiny new things.

4. Lazy design thinking, of the kind that causes Mozilla to drop good features from Firefox.

5. Cost cutting, of the kind that causes almost all companies to consistently choose to make their products marginally worse over time (e.g. lets not pay for feature X, since the users can use a cheaper awkward workaround instead).

Personally, I think we should have some federal standards for car UX: a required set of standard physical controls for commonly used standard functions (e.g. car operation, climate control, audio entertainment) and plus minimum standards for screen UIs (e.g. touch sensitivity & accuracy, UX latency, etc.).

While I'm wishing, cell modems and other data transmitters should be required to be separately fused, and that the car should be required to operate without annoying error messages if that fuse is pulled.

There's a very slow, very week feedback loop that may be too weak at the moment to fight against this trend: the customers who are dealing with and worry about perpetual sensor failures and computer issues at 150,000 miles are not the same customers who are buying the car off the dealership lot. Meanwhile, the people with brand new vehicles are not worried about those problems, they're only slightly (and only long after it's too late) worried about the eventual resale value. I trust that my old Toyota and Subaru will still be dependable and repairable for many years, but I won't buy an old BMW or Mercedes because my family and coworkers have too many horror stories of expensive, exotic gadgets that have gone bad in mysterious ways.

But we're 40 years removed from the bad old days of the 80s and 90s when those imports were decimating the lethargic Big 3 in quality and cost, which is more like the time scale on which consumer attitudes like that began to be formed. 2018 laws regarding rearview cameras are really new in comparison to a cultural thing like that.

So we found a van didn't have those things but my wife insisted on BT and a backup cam. So we negotiated with the dealer and they were able to make a deal with us to have their shop install a backup cam and Bluetooth for cost, and we love the van ever since.

My point is that a lot of features can be put in the car after market and you don't have to deal with having to buy the whole upgraded package.

Personally, I will research used cars with top end factory trim packages, looking for models with either a DIN sized radio slot or readily available aftermarket upgrades.

By double checking for compatibility ahead of time you can then retrofit carplay, bluetooth, etc. into a "basic" car, for example: https://gromaudio.com/vline/index.html

I also prefer to shop for used cars because I see them as more "stable" than new cars.

What I mean by that is, major flaws in the model/year have been reported and ideally fixed (but are at least known) in the years since release. Common issues/symptoms and repair details are much easier to find online via forums, etc. after a car has been around for a few years.

I wish modern cars still followed that philosophy, but it's hard to find cars with DIN radio slots these days since all the electronics are so integrated into them. It feels like you'll be stuck in pre-2015 cars if you choose that. Not that pre-2015 cars are terrible, but it makes it harder to find low millage ones.

I also think about the environmental impact of buying a new car. Manufacturers try to sell you on the idea that getting a new car is better for the environment but I really wonder how much fuel you need to save over the lifetime of a car to make it worth the cost of building a new one, in comparison to just fixing and older one. Who knows, maybe it's better to keep driving a '80 olds than to buy the latest ford electric truck.

Anyway, yes, Subaru should be a possibility, but obviously research the specific model first.

Only within the niche HN-type tech crowd. Most people outside of this group want these features, even other techies, including myself.

It's the same discussion on any thread involving smart devices. People want this stuff, that's why there have been over 200M standalone smart speakers sold.

As far as why these things get bundled, that’s just how auto manufacturing works. Every unique configuration costs an additional overhead to the OEM. Bundling allows them to reduce this overhead.

I know that I, personally, love having a backup camera, but don't need or a screen for anything else, and would prefer physical controls for most things. Unfortunately that's not an option in most vehicles, so I am kind of coming to the conclusion that my next car will be an older model that's "dumb", since this is an overall better experience.

I don't think you could use the number of sales of cars with this kind of UI as evidence that people like it, since (the article mentions this) car manufacturers want to put it everywhere, regardless of popularity. It's got so many benefits from their side. It's not that I think they forced it on people, I think it was originally a cool novelty that people were excited about. But, after the novelty wore off, and a lot of people stopped wanting it in their cars, the industry had so fully committed to it that people just don't have the option to do without it these days.

Most everything else is just technological kitsch. This isn't that new though.

Stereo systems have had equalizers forever even though almost everyone is just going to make already mastered audio sound worse by filtering it. That is not the point really of an equalizer. It is just to have a series of useless controls that will never be used but looks cool when you first see it. Pure technological kitsch.

people want fancy bells & whistles in their vehicles right up until it makes them a maintenance nightmare—you want your car to just work, like they largely used to.

I find it much more true that most car software simply isn't very good yet on average. Let's say most existing implementations of touch UIs in cars don't add value and are cumbersome to use, for example - but that just means they're individually badly realized, not that it's not worth trying. And in reality, it's also a much more nuanced "depending on the use case and the situation" or "impacted by bad performance".

There are quality differences out there. And there's plenty of use cases in cars that benefit from a thorough software approach. This is an area with interesting problems to solve and plenty of innovation left to happen, and where hard and good work makes a mark.

The best automobile interfaces use knobs of different sizes and with different textures so that you can find them without looking. Buttons should be arranged in rows, so they are easy to find with a short look. Extremely common buttons should be located on the steering wheel. Etc.

Until screens can offer some kind of dynamic tactile experience, where you can feel what you're about to control, they can't be better than real tactile buttons and knobs.

Don't get me wrong, I love a big screen in my car for advanced features (360 camera, vehicle settings, navigation, music, etc). But the basics need to be tactile.

- Already in the pre-touchscreen, button-dominated area, plenty of more complicated use cases had terrible UX, and in many cases touchscreens have made them much easier. For example, do you remember how difficult it often was to program radio presets in 80s head-units? There were a lot of real clunkers there.

- There's plenty of newer use cases that would be hard or impossible to make easy with traditional hardware button UX, such as route and EV charge planning.

- Good software offers many possibilities to avoid interactions altogether, or make them single-step instead of multi-step. A good screen-based system will now often suggest interactions pro-actively and situationally at the top-level of the system and reduce interaction to a single multi-modal (touch/gesture/speech) confirmation on what used to be multi-step processes.

- Screens can offer tactile experiences - most recently with the introduction of screens that can do permanent haptic feedback via electrostatic friction coefficient modulation, emulating different surface feels as the finger moves.

- You already mentioned features such as 360 degree cameras: If nothing else, screens are great for showing information. Interactions aside, this alone has a lot of legs left and there's absolutely quality differences between good and bad implementations.

- There's absolutely nothing wrong with a good physical button (on the contrary - few things are more satisfying than a good, solid, weighty button) and having both for use in the appropriate situation. It doesn't mean there's no possible benefits from further investment into good car software.

I feel a lot of this is rooted in first-hand experience with bad systems - which I agree are plentiful, and just as awful as a bad, clunky, unrefined phone onscreen keyboard. Dare to imagine a good one.

Working on car systems means getting to own the form factor and the entire surroundings of a user, much more than working on software targeting rarely-changing phone and PC devices. It's an open field for software and hardware innovation and deserves a little more professional excitement and ambition to do it well.

I wouldn't rule out that tactile HVAC and Audio controls are always better than a touchscreen, but I have trouble seeing the benefit for some of those basic controls. I mean, let's take the volume control for example. It's a very simple linear concept, there are no branches in the options for volume. There are no sub-menus -- you either want it higher or lower. You always want that control in the same spot so it's easy to find and you always want it available so you can use it at any time. For those reasons, I have trouble seeing what a touchscreen can add to that particular parameter. A knob seems better suited by nearly every metric.

Touchscreens on the other hand, are great for controlling more complex parameters. Even a temperature control, while similar to volume, is actually more complex because the change is not immediate. You're setting a parameter that will be true in the future, and that is something where a dynamic display can be beneficial. That said, you still generally want that control to be in the same spot and always available so it's not an obvious win for touchscreens.

Then you add on the argument of what they are doing with the information, and if they can be trusted..

I absolutely hate my screens keyboard, and wish I could just buy a phone with a real physical keyboard. I get so angry trying to use this thing. It’s far less useful than a regular keyboard.

That's why people buy Teslas, they're a software company that makes hardware on the side. And participates in hacker challenges, offering cars to the winners.

No one actually wants cars with no computers, they just think they do because they don't realise how much computers do, like reduce the amount of wires by 10x, and output error messages on the level of a crappy microcontroller instead of maybe a flashing light if you're lucky

- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.

- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.

- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrics at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?

- Engine starter? Cars have starter motors since just after the hand crank ers, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.

- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him to isolate them so they only worked on their individual switches.

- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.

- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa.

- Where I live alarm systems are likely to get you a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.

- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. (It seems to me that the designers of these systems never anticipate what we drivers actually need. Perhaps they only test them in the most tame and predictable environments.)

All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes the car less reliable and more expensive to buy and fix. Moreover, they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles anf of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner that we could do with a more traditional car, often we could be stranded for days whilst waiting a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. What's more that's hellishly expensive.

You people are just gadget mad.

"in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km), but due to manufacturing improvements in the 2000s, such as tighter tolerances and better anti-corrosion coatings, the typical car lasts closer to 200,000 miles (320,000 km)"

Not sure why you think a load of extra moving parts is going to be more reliable than some solid state electronics.

Because cars can go anywhere including right outside tow truck range especially where I live. Here, being rescued can be days away. Then there's the adverse conditions, temperatures well in excess of 40° C and from my bitter experience, the electronics fail much more frequently under these harsh conditions than do the mechanics.

Then there's the issue of make-do. When one is hundreds of miles from anywhere, one can often improvise a mechanical repair whereas it's nigh on impossible to quickly sort out an electronics problem (unless it's trivial).

I recall being in a convoy of four cars in central Australia when the computer failed in the one and only Volvo in the group. What an unholy mess that was. None of us could fix it.

Note, everyone in the convoy was skilled in electronics (we were all radio amateurs on a field trip) and almost everyone had a full-time professional job in electronics. We even had lots of electronics test equipment as well as various electronic components with us - semiconductors, resistors, capacitors etc., as they were to service our HF transceivers when they failed.

That's just one instance albeit one of the worst cases.

My car chucked a universal joint on the same trip and although very inconvenient, we fixed it on the spot. Similar repairs were made on the spot when my petrol pump was ripped clean off the bottom of my car by huge ruts in the road.

From what you've said, I'd guess you live in a temperate climate in the suburbs of a city and only a few kilometers from a service garage.

The fact is, electronics and harsh environmental conditions (high thermal cycling) are not good bedfellows. Moreover, most electronics faults are thermally related (caused by thermal stress). I know firsthand as I ran the electronics department of a large corporation for years, before that I worked in the prototyping (design) department of a large US corporation designing professional electronic (not domestic stuff).

First rule of design: 'keep it simple stupid'.

__

Edit: "1970s, the typical car reached its end of life around 100,000 miles (160,000 km)."

Uh? When I was younger all I could afford were cars with over 150k on the clock - and that's miles not kms - and I usually drove them to about 300k. The usual reason for getting rid of them was was rust - not because of mechanical problems. Sure, there were 'junk' cars around but you'd have to be mad to buy one.

One final point, around the time the Volvo broke down I was averaging 44,000 miles per year (~70,000 km/yr).

As for typical cars, that's why it's bad to base your theories on personal experience.

Should the computers and software be open and fixable though? Yes

- Brakes work perfectly well without computers.

- Airbags don't need computers, they work perfectly well by mechanical means.

- Power steering works perfectly without computers or any electrical stuff at all. Every car I've ever owned had mechanical power steering without any fancy electroics including my latest one. Why tamper with something that works perfectly well?

- Engine starter? Cars have had starter motors since just after the hand crank era, computers were still nearly 100 years away when starter motors were introduced.

- Automatic windows are a damn menace, they are reliably unreliable. When one failed - fortunately the driver's side - I had my garage man retrofit a traditional hand windup one. On the three remaining windows I got him isolate them so they only worked on their own individual switches.

- Mechanical intermittent wipers have been around since at least WWII. No computers or electronics to go wrong and complicate matters.

- Central locking on my last two cars has been a disaster. You obviously have never experienced a situation where the locking gets out of sync and some doors remain unlocked - unlock the others and then the unlocked ones lock and vice versa. It's a nightmare, any attempt to properly lock the car fails.

- Where I live alarm system are likely to get a brick through your windscreen - not from burglars but rather from annoyed residents who are fed up with car alarm noise.

- Automatic lights are another menace, you often can't control them, they switch off when you want to leave the lights and so on. The people who design and program their operation clearly don't use them except in the most tame surroundings.

All this gumph is unnecessary, it makes car less reliable and more expensive to both purchase and fix - and they're impossible to fix when you're in places where there's no service mechanic or garage (out on the open road for instance - I've some excellent instances from long trips 3,000 - 4,000 miles of cars in convoy on rough roads. Cars with all these unnecessary gadgets were, without fail, the first to break down. And they were a disaster because none of us techies could improvise in the usual manner as we could do with a more traditional car. Often we could be stranded for days whilst we waited for a tow truck to come from hundreds of miles away. Moreover, that's hellishly expensive.

You people are just gadget mad.

Most people have little idea what features they have, besides the obvious ones. Read through some of the features listed for a car - some aren't even explained.

So of course manufacturers are eager to sneak in anything to make a car seem "worn out" and in need of replacement sooner than later.

What's frustrating is there seems to be no shortage of willing buyers eating this crap up, apparently looking forward to replacing their vehicles in lockstep with their other consumer electronics.

That's just it, the tech is making the cars less reliable. Will all of these bespoke parts be available in 10, 15, 20 years? I would hate to have to dispose of a working car because the dead now obsolete chip on the bespoke LCD dash module shaped like the cars dashboard is no longer in production. I had cars who's odometers didn't roll 100k miles until they hit 15 years. I have a 2002 van that has 102k miles on it.

> Now as others have mentioned, these unwanted smart features might actually be required by law/regulation/tax-credit/legal-dept, so it's not bad programming/design but "design by committee" that's dooming our chances of a good dumb car.

None of that requires LCD dash boards, tablets, touch screens, phone home, internet, subscriptions, etc. Everyone is just high on the concept of rent seeking and perpetual cash flows. They hate the fact that you buy something and walk away from them. They want you on a leash like a dog and they've been doing a damn fine job leash training you and your children.

Opinion: Mandated lane keeping and other lane keeping/self driving safety garbage is papering over the failure of the human race to govern itself. The people who I see swerving all over the road are either selfish assholes who insist on playing with phones/speeding while piloting a 3000+ lb machine or people who should not be driving at all. Now we have TV commercials that show people diddling touch screens while driving. We have failed.

When's the last time you saw a broken-down car by the side of the road, and is this happening more or less often than 20 years ago?

Do you think cars require more or less upkeep and maintenance than 20 years ago?

Yes, cars do have some new components that have introduced new failure modes, and some of those may be doing worse than others. But as a whole, cars have improved.

The same? Cars 20yrs ago were already very reliable compared to say 30-40yrs ago. And breakdowns observed 20 yrs ago were mostly cars that were aleady old then.

If I see a broken down car now (which is rare anyway), it could almost be age from 30+yrs old to new. There doesn't seem to be a pattern with age. Adjusting for 20yr old cars having 20yrs more wear and tear, you would expect a pattern correlating with age. I wonder what todays cars are going to seem like in 20yrs?

Note: I'm not in the US or Europe, so my observations of the car population may be different to those that are. My cars have usually been 15-20 yrs old Japanese models, bought cheaply 2nd hand, mostly neglected, but still very reliable machines.

Yup. Just like my friends 2010 VW which went into limp home mode after he drove through a puddle a year after he bought it. Dealer had to replace some doodad to the tune of $500 for the part. He then bought a Mercedes in 2013 that started to kill the battery after a month because the park lamps refused to turn off. Mercedes could not figure out the issue even after swapping so they removed the park lamps. All caused by fragile electronics. Meanwhile I plowed the 2002 chevy van through a deep puddle once (being young and dumb) and it coughed, sputtered but kept going until it dried off and then resumed purring.

> Do you think cars require more or less upkeep and maintenance than 20 years ago?

Since I do my own upkeep including engine and tranny swaps (project vehicles), the upkeep is pretty much the same. Check/change oil, and check/top off fluids 4 times year. Then brakes and tires. Worst case check plugs and so on after 50k but those show up as misfires that are easy to feel. All the vehicles I have experience with are 1995 and newer with some 1980's trucks and vans thrown in.

You also have to account for a lot of wear and tear that came from fuel changes. When lead was eliminated the leaded cars suffered from premature ring and piston failure. And when we phased out MTBE we also suffered as alcohol was attacking metal and rubber components with oxidation causing failures. So these changes might make older cars seem less reliable but the fact is we forced them to be that way (for the better).

This will only get worse. Look at how many smartphones don't get security patches after 2 years.

Not everyone has the aptitude for good, calm driving. That might make them excel in other areas of life, just not at driving safely in traffic. Has humanity failed because we provided them transportation? No, but we have an open challenge to provide transport and allow these (really, all) people the freedom to mentally engage with something else that they deem more important than the chore of driving safely.

When you're done riding that high horse, could you come up with a plan to actually make it stop? Preferably one that can't be dismissed as papering over the failure of the human race to govern itself like self-driving features, or dismissed as an authoritarian power-grab like putting fifty times as many traffic cops on the road, or dismissed as a dream like leveling LA and starting over from scratch with a bike-friendly layout.

I had 20 plus rental cars last year and very few had tech features I would ever pay for.

Lane assist with adaptive cruise are the only notable features for long drives. I did enjoy the red dash notification Toyota has. Totally caught me off guard the first time however, I tried out the ABS.

The other thing I'd like to see more or less mandated is blind spot warning. I especially like the kind that is visible to other drivers. I don't even have it on any of my cars, LOL. I just like to see it on other cars that I'm passing.

Lane assist I am ambivalent about. I had AP, it was okay. It does not drive as defensively as I do, however, which meant that it increased my tension on long drives rather than reduce it. I do like good adaptive cruise however. That means no phantom braking :).

It takes some getting used to, but once you learn to back via mirrors you won't want to twist around anymore. You do need to check behind the car beforehand because you cannot see directly behind you and thus might hit something on the ground. However you get much better visibility to things that are moving from the side to behind you, and that in my experience is where the danger is most of the time.

I do favor backup cameras though. They show you things you would miss either twisting to look backwards, or looking in the mirror.

I predict that 50 years from now there will be more functioning cars from the 1960s than from the 2020s. With the combination of quickly obsoleting technology that won't be fixable and overly interconnected electronics that become impossible to diagnose after a while, there's not much hope for current and future cars to be anything but disposable.

Old mechanical cars though, can be kept running essentialy forever by just someone with access to a machine shop and some patience.

Sure there are one-offs and some drop-ins available, but they'll never get dialed in the way cars do after a year or two of mass production.

The car that makes me cry a little every time on the what-could-have-been topic is the Honda CRX HF. 54 MPG in 1988. Most cars can't match that today over 30 years later.

If Honda was allowed to do a modern version with some use of carbon fiber for even more lightness and all the advances in fuel injection tuning and engine manufacturing, surely we could have a ~70+ MPG CRX by now.

of course both my cars have power windows. the Honda interior is nothing to write home about but the BMW's all leather and wood. neither has heated seats, but I don't really need them where I live, and if I did, I'd just buy them on eBay.

it'll get harder in future, of course, but for now, if you want to skip all the excess computation in modern cars, all you have to do is know a little bit about cars. it's not rocket science.

what I'm really looking forward to is when electric vehicle aftermarket conversion kits become more common. you can find them for certain models already but it's very early days.

I wonder how much all the screens have contributed to the increase in accidents in the last couple years

When shopping for minivans, they all "have" comparable features. But

Manufacturer A base model has no advanced safety features; you need to buy $10k of leather seats and chrome highlights to get them.

Manufacturer B offers a $2k safety pack to any and all levels.

Manufacturer C simply has those same safety features across all levels.

Similarly, features such as Android/Apple Car/Auto play; or Sirius XM; etc. The bundling strategy is completely different across manufacturers.

For us, the last three practical family cars we bought (as opposed to cars of desire:), were hugely influenced by which manufacturer had a bundling/segmentation/feature strategy that worked for us.

However, it's not a new phenomenon, manufacturers and dealers have done this with "luxury" or "sport" features for a long time. This has usually meant adding stuff like alloy wheels, different interior trims, better speakers etc. The difference now is the huge amount of complexity that modern "smart" features bring.

However, I'm willing to bet the O2 sensor was actually giving the correct read and was working fine, and the source of the issue is probably well upstream of the O2 sensor.

No check engine light though.

You can have all that when you buy a "good" base and get your features on the aftermarket. For the definition of "good" also consult your mechanic, he should know which cars are easy/nice to work with. I've been looking at reliable 4x4s that I can trust for daily off-road use in the outskirts of the Sahara and I currently favor a UAZ (20k Euro) base and modifications for 5k Euro (more gas tanks, proper seats, navigation and entertainment system).

The quality of tactile representation and response on the knobs/buttons are not as good as my old 89 caprice was. But that's true of all cars today.

I did have to spend 5 min setting up some little adhesive wire straps to bundle the little cables out of the way, but total cost was maybe $25-35 for the USB power adapter and Bluetooth rx. Granted, it wouldn't have been necessary if so many phones didn't ditch the dedicated audio output, but at least it wasn't an expensive workaround.