I could do almost anything with the buttons in my car without looking away from the road. That's never going to be possible with a touchscreen.

How do you, say, check tire pressure? Setup a new garage-door opener? View your calendar for today? Do you have physical buttons for those things?

A car that does everything via physical buttons would be insanely hard to use. It would look and feel like, and be as hard to use as, a jet cockpit.

Obviously a car doesn't need to do any of these things, especially in the age of the smartphone. A good tradeoff might be:

1. Physical controls for everything

2. A separate mini tablet screen for an advanced CarPlay-like dock that connects to your phone.

Ideally the physical controls would do everything on the screen as well, so the advanced functions can be accessible while driving (if you absolutely need something there).

Those are not things you need to do while driving. There’s no reason why, say, garage door pairing can’t use a button like my 2006 Subaru does for the one time most people will do it in the life of the vehicle. Checking a calendar is distracted driving and should be illegal.

> Checking a calendar is distracted driving and should be illegal.

Tesla vehicles, as well as iOS and Android car UIs, have functionality for navigating to the next appointment in your calendar, if the appointment has a physical address. For a lot of folks, e.g., salespeople and service crews, this is a godsend.

And you can do that, parked on the side or the road, with a tiny LCD panel and buttons on the steering wheel. No need to add a screen for that.

Alternatively, you can use the app on your phone that you probably need as a backup key anyway to queue up your navigation for you while you're safely parked. You shouldn't do this while actively driving, especially if it needs a screen to work.

You use this before starting the journey, or after pulling over if the destination must change part way through the journey.

What? Put first location in navigation. Do sales pitch. Get back in car, put next location in navigation, etc.

You can set the whole thing up in advance in Google Maps. This solves a problem that was already solved.

My car, born from jets, has no tire pressure checker, no garage door opener, no touchscreen, no automatic transmission, and smack-you-in-the-back-of-the-head turbo lag. I honestly can’t think of a new car I’d trade it for (unless selling that new car to buy more old cars isn’t cheating).

I miss my old Saab... One of these days I need to pick up another one.

As a COVID project, I looked for a Saab to play around with. The cheapest I found was a 2009 crappy GM 9-3 for $11k.

I really miss my pre-Malibu 900s and 9-3s.

My understanding is that a 2005 or earlier (pre-Dame Edna) 9-5 still had oversight from the Swedish engineering and manufacturing team. For example, an austere Saab dashboard rather than a blingy Buick one. Not sure when that switch happened for the 9-3, but it would have been for whatever facelift happened around the same time.

2003 Aero is the sweet spot. GM sales “engineers” tried selling with all-options-standard that year, so they are all very well equipped. Any still running had the sump issue fixed long ago. Hard to imagine you couldn’t get a fettisdagsbulle for $5k.

It's amazing that they even had a "nightpanel" button to turn offvthe lighting for everything except the speedometer. That is such a cool feature.

A feature to get rid of features. No one who knows me is surprised my car has that.

> How do you, say, check tire pressure?

Cars have had these for decades. Usually a dash indicator pops up if it's low.

> Setup a new garage-door opener?

??? Have a physical garage door opener.

> View your calendar for today?

WTF? Pretty sure you shouldn't be looking at your calendar while driving. Also, it's on your phone, again, which you shouldn't be using while driving.

Not sure if you are being sarcastic but yeah, my car has a physical button for the garage door. I just hold it down for 5 seconds to set a new one.

Tire pressure I use a physical button to cycle through my cars diagnostic info.

And I have no idea why I would check my calendar on my car. Lol seems like a made up argument.

They make tire pressure gauges without touchscreens; even then, dashboards have indicators light up when pressure is too low. Garage door openers have buttons, and long-pressing often does magical things, like entering setup mode. And presumably, you have a calendar in a handheld device you carry with you everywhere; it's much more convenient then trying to carry a car in your pocket.

If you want a computer to check the tire pressure, then use a computer to poll the tire pressure indicator and report a fix error when it's too low. My 2006 Passat did that, and it didn't have a touch screen (or a backup camera). Cars have had sensors that report errors for a very long time, and this doesn't require any touchscreens.

> How do you, say, check tire pressure?

You shouldn’t do that while driving. If your tire pressure becomes low, the vehicle should alert you. Pull over and check it.

> Setup a new garage-door opener?

You should absolutely 100% not be doing that while driving. I genuinely don’t know how this could even be a question.

> View your calendar for today?

You absolutely should not be doing that while driving.

You haven’t presented any questions for things that are necessary tasks while driving.

I am OK with voice commands, though a common vocabulary for the important ones would be good (kind of like the way the main steering-column stalk controls are kind-of standardized), but the few weeks of familiarization with the touchscreen buttons is problematic, especially for anyone who frequently rents cars.

Physical buttons that cannot be located by touch are no better than touchscreen buttons, though the flexibility of touchscreen buttons probably opens up the scope for implementing them badly.

ICE vs Electric has nothing to do with buttons vs touchscreens.

The thing is: Tesla made essentially the first successful electric car, that is, an electric car people want to buy because they like it as a car, not just because it is electric.

In addition to being electric, Tesla also brought a lot of ideas that have nothing to do with the drivetrain, like big touchscreens, connectivity and "smart" features. Other manufacturers, seeing Tesla success, got the message: if you want to make a successful electric car, copy Tesla.

I think that's why we tend to associate touchscreens with electric cars: because it worked for Tesla. Also I think it gave manufacturers an excuse. It is a new market, they don't have to worry as much about making breaking changes.

We ditched our Tesla in favor of an e-tron because the Tesla controls were just not good. you should never need a touch screen for safety critical features like wipers. Also the whole touch screen can and did crash intermittently. The car will still works (e: when the touchscreen is down) but it is unsafe IMO. e-tron has traditional controls everywhere.

> you should never need a touch screen for safety critical features like wipers.

I have Model S. The wipers are controlled by a traditional stalk on the left of the steering column. Is it different in other models?

We had a Model 3. You could do one spritz with a physical control, but then had to interact with the touchscreen.

Newer S and X models don't have stalks. There's rumors they'll drop the stalks on the Model 3 refresh.

You're right. I edited my comment.

Thank you for this. There is a very vocal minority on HN that cries bloody murder about touchscreens in cars. Anything that argues against the hivemind is often downvoted and dismissed without much thought or self-reflection.

It’s interesting that you say that because the people arguing against touchscreens are writing long thoughtful comments aligned with decades of human factors research, quite notably contrasting with proponents.

Which thoughtful comments? “Well duh”? Are there any comments looking critically at the original study or are they all just using the headline to confirm their biases?

Not really. You can say the same about about both sides. I prefer buttons and touchscreen. See the ioniq 5 for a good example of this implementation.

Tesla seem to be trying to Steve Jobs / iphone the car experience, and I absolutely don't want that.

And if having a different opinion to you means I'm of the hivemind, then so be it (frankly a ridiculous comment, but anyway).

The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind. Note that there is no nuanced discussion on this topic, everybody has already arrived at their conclusion. Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case.

> The point is your opinion is concordant with every other poster in this thread, aka hivemind

By this logic isn't everyone who is pro-touchscreens also a hivemind?

> Nobody is asking whether some people are fine with touchscreens in cars and why that might be the case.

Many people are demonstrably bad drivers who are over-confident in their ability and down-play the risk of distractions. When drunk driving was made illegal, people were furious and insisted they were fine to drive drunk and that it was perfectly safe: https://youtu.be/W_tqQYmgMQg

Touchscreens, while convenient and extensible, are demonstrably inferior to static physical controls for saftey-critical contexts.

Your dismissal of the study reads defensively - it’s not invalid because it shows that the vehicle you own is less efficient to operate.

> by pressing a touchscreen button that is always where you expect it to be.

That last part is key to understanding why this is a concern: Tesla has moved safety-critical controls unexpectedly[1], which never happens with physical buttons, and using those controls is always harder because a touchscreen doesn’t have tactile feedback. Try using even a familiar one with your eyes closed and you’ll realize how much harder it is to maintain attention on something else.

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43710/teslas-v11-update-blaste...

I understand your points.

I will add one more thing, touchscreens have the ability to allow you to customise location of "knobs and dials", according to your own idea of "what makes sense".

However, having one car with both, I cannot understate the fact that you can touch physical buttons and correct yourself without activating them or looking.

Haptic feedback on touchscreens, while allowing you to sense without activating those buttons, is possible. And I wonder why nobody is doing it.

My guess: that's because even with haptic feedback you only get a binary response to inform you that something was indeed touched. But with a physical button, you can feel the texture of material, its edges, its geometry, when is fully pressed, when is up again, etc.

When you have several touchscreen buttons/controls (or whatever) near enough haptic feedback is kind of confusing without looking at the screen. IMO, this can be easily checked in any mobile game with haptic feedback, the feeling is subpar to a physical controller.

Maybe the technology for a haptic feedback that can accurately give different stimuli to different parts of a touchscreen already exist, but never seen it before.

So.... what happens when someone decides it's a smart idea to replace all of those commonly used functions that had physical buttons on the steering wheel with more touch buttons? Let's even say, capacitive touch zones? :D

I do agree that a good physical button arrangement on the steering wheel is quite useful.

On my car, the layout is quite good, IMO.

* All of the audio is controlled through a D-pad on the left side.

* All phone/voice handled through three physically different buttons on the lower left, accessible without changing how my hand grips the wheel.

* All car-computer/cruise-control through a D-pad on the right.

* As a result, any "type" of command is specifically associated with one hand, and one area of the steering wheel in particular.

As I've learned through a number of long term rental cars, the physical button layout can be bad.

* Many have the audio spread across both hands.

* Many require one to break grip to even do simple audio adjustments (my car doesn't).

* They often overload each area with too many buttons and controls.

* The car GUI can also have many slow, confusing layers that one has to access to get navigate to get commonly used functions, like digital speedometer, estimated range, etc.

This isn't even getting to strange things, such as having the older generation UI completely present under the veneer of a newer, slower UI.

The car brand I have isn't faultless either - all of their newer cars exhibit the same bad habits. Some bad habits have been slowly walked back a bit in the latest 2022/2023 cars, but the damage is still present.

Sort of like bad ideas in Windows. The worst UI elements (IMO) in Win 8 were walked back a bit in 8.1, then successively more rollbacks via a number of Win10 updates. But the baseline is still worse in some ways vs 7 and before (e.g, start menu is less meaningfully customizable than 7, which is still less than XP, IMO). We see tiny hints of that with Win11 updates. I expect 11.1 or 12 to mostly remove the worst offenders.

I don't see familiarity being with the touchscreen buttons being the issue. The issue is that actually touching a certain amount of pixels on a disembodied screen, while driving, while the car is in motion, is actually annoyingly difficult. No matter how attuned you are with them. I owned a Tesla for several years, and it never got better. It distracts the driver considerably. Unless they drastically increased the size of the interaction points on the screen and/or improved the gestures used to interact, I just don't see touchscreens being a good primary point of interaction between the driver and the car (at least until the driver really isn't regularly "driving" anymore).

I've had three incidents with touch controls that would not have happened with physical controls. The fact is, it's much harder to keep your eyes on the road and be certain you've pressed a button when you have nothing to touch but a cold piece of screen. How do you know for sure you touched the right part of the screen and performed an action, without looking at the touchscreen and taking your eyes of the road?