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One of the things which attracted me to the Chevy Equinox I bought: it has the basic climate controls as buttons:
Heat, fan, temp, Ac, everything but heated seats
Hence why I bought a car with, according to all the reviewers, a “dated interior”. Just what I wanted: lots of buttons and knobs! There is an ‘infotainment’ touch screen, but I can ignore that.
Voice control should be only option. Physical buttons of radio and etc are same distraction
Physical buttons can be mapped using touch
In case you don’t yet know, touchscreens are mostly cost saving measures. They’re incredibly cheaper than physical controls, and so every company wants them.
There’s also quite a bit of reliable data on touchscreens negatively impacting drivers’ performance, as well as substantially increasing the likelihood of crashes. Which only the EU and China seem to care about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198226000382
Welcome to 2026, where China actually looks at academic research, and introduces safety laws, while the US disregards anything but billionaires’ profits.
In my opinion, touchscreens in cars are very cool, but only for navigation and minor features such as radio or ambient lighting controls. I know a lot of people might crucify me for calling radio a minor feature, but it’s not critical for the driver’s ability to drive safely.
I wish I didn’t have to look at or touch my phone for navigation. No clue why, with modern tech, I can’t communicate with my phone verbally star trek style to ask questions about upcoming turns, alternate routes, adding stops, etc.
Good solutions are actually possible (and available!), but for some reason almost no car companies adopt them. Or they do for a single model, never to touch it again.
I know at least one model of Skoda Fabia has a feature, where you can connect your phone (via cable or bluetooth), and it’ll take the phone’s Google maps and display them on the car’s bigger screen.
Not a perfect solution, but infinitely better than just using a phone or the car’s most likely outdated navigation. Entirely possible, but very rare.
Just to add to what others are saying, I live in canada, where we have to drive with gloves. All meaningful controls need to be chunky physical features.
Doesn’t that basically mean you can’t fully drive a car like Tesla? lol
Any vehicle that cannot be controlled while wearing gloves is grotesquely inconvenient in Canada.
Yep. You can memorize where knobs and physical buttons are, because its a field of tactile feedback that you can navigate by pure touch, and once you are familiar with it, without even having to think about it.
but a touch screen? Theres no tactile feedback, no nothing. Every time you have to do anything, you have to take your eyes off the road to read screens and navigate menus.
Honestly, I wish they’d make touchscreen interfaces illegal for everything but privately owned tablets/phones. It has no business being the way a driver interacts with a car, or a customer interacts with a store, or anything else.
Wait, how come touchscreens are cheaper than buttons?
It’s generally much cheaper to produce a tablet than it is to produce 30 physical buttons and knobs. Fewer wires are required too, and the same setup may be easily reused across many models.
https://www.bimmer-mag.com/touchscreen-vs-buttons/#Cost-Saving_Measures
My favorite thing is the cop cars that have an actual fucking laptop set up next to the driver. Nothing distracting about that, no sir.
It’s even funnier when you need to reboot the car while driving, because the browser crashed and the interface became unresponsive
Sorry some of us grew up on science fiction, and want life to be cool. I bet you hare the fart feature too.
Don’t forget, in a Tesla, you even need to use the iPad to adjust where the AC vents are pointing!
There is always the option to not buy a Tesla
But you don’t have choice what other people are driving around you.
That’s hilarious but I don’t know if you’re joking
Also needed to open the glove compartment. Not joking.
Not a joke.
Yeah but it’s not untrue.
And to put the car in drive or reverse
Bwahahahaha
Touchscreens in cars are a really stupid idea.
Touchscreen only is a terrible idea. I think it’s fine if you have play, pause, volume and mute buttons and have to use the touchscreen to enter your Spotify login details.
What if we got around login details or just used some sort of audio input?
Let’s not give them ideas…
I hate mine.
In the UK that would be a distracted driving charge.
Which is a hefty 6 penalty points, half way to getting disqualified from driving.
These to a fucking tea. And cause it’s a flat touch screen you can’t even feel your way around to the correct settings while looking at the road.
I’ll happily have no screen and old analog controls, and yes, I realise I sound like an old man yelling at clouds.
It really only makes sense for the map. I have a 2020 and it has the touchscreen but besides the map which you touch once before you start driving, everything else, AC, speaker volume is a simple knob.
Its understandably more expensive for the car companies - they have to make the machine that makes the parts for a retro dash, then install them - but fuck the car companies, this is about safety and ease of use.
I remember years ago seeing a video about a company that was supposably developing tactile touchscreens. There was a layer underneath the LCD layer that could be puffed out with some kind of fluid to form bumps where the buttons were shown. Nothing has come of this, unsurprisingly.
Having repaired some of the knobs on my dash, I assure you, they are less expensive than a TV. The AC knob is like 2 pieces of plastic and some bike brake style tension cables that hook to a leuvre somewhere inside. A touch screen is going to be a tabled screen and a motor on that leuvre etc.
Granted, I have a cheap little car.
Depending on your country, it might also make you liable. Not every judiciary system is like that.
On some Teslas, even the gear selection is done through the touchscreen. Fucking awful design.
there was a wife of a billionaire who drowned by accidentally driving a tesla into a pond on her estate, because of the touchscreen gearshifting problem. I’ll try and look up a source of anyone wants it
Was that Mitch McConnell 's sister in law?
the very same! Angela Chao
No. Way.
How is that legal?
Oh wait, it’s not a manual of course…
Yeah, you aren’t changing gears while driving, you’re switching between forward and backward, so you’re already stationary.
Unrelated, but my elderly uncle drove a minivan with an automatic transmission that he drove like it was a manual. He would start from every stop by putting the shifter into “1” and then “2” and then “D” and then back to “N” when he stopped. He was a former Navy pilot (A-1 Skyraiders) and I guess he just couldn’t accept the loss of control that goes with an automatic. It doesn’t seem like this could possibly have been good for the transmission, but I dunno.
Just like on my own EV car with a knob for backwards and forwards (and neutral) 😆 I was tired when posting that comment lol
Oh wait, it’s not a manual of course…
It’s a modern EV… It doesn’t even have a transmission.
All you’re picking is Park, Drive, Neutral, or Reverse.
Yeah, I was tired when posting lol, it’s the same on my own EV 😄 (not the gear on screen part)
If Elon decreed that the Tesla iPad would now also give the driver, say, a prediction market gambling feature or X-rated AI chatbot or something, there’s nothing any government would do to stop him*, because after all he is a visionary genius and was a trillionaire and you can’t argue with the invisible hand of the free market.
* the US and UK would wave it through, because you can’t hold up the inevitability of the future. The EU would grumble, though might fold under the threat of tariffs.
so true bestie
I participated in a driving simulation a while back. It was a real vehicle that had full motion, but was on hydraulic struts instead of wheels.
They were testing how phone usage affected people.
It’s texting that’s the problem. I murdered a few jaywalkers only while interacting with creating words. Not when on speaker phone and not when just looking at the phone.
Touchscreens aren’t really that bad when designed well.
Sir this a Lemmy.
We don’t do actual real world anecdotes here. Just circlejerking around headlines and twitter posts.
It’s not just texting - I looked at the console to see what song was playing and then rear-ended the car in front of me that had stopped suddenly.
.
Anything that distracts from actually paying attention to driving is a problem.That’s not new, looking at the radio has been a thing since the 80’s.
Yes yes, the three numbers on the dial.
The 80’s were when digital radios came out. Quite annoying. I’m sure there was the same complaints then as now.
Even if having to interact with a big touch screen while driving were truly safe, I don’t want to have to deal with that when I’m driving.
I call bullshit because you can’t adjust the ac or radio without taking your eyes off the road
No but I find it difficult to focus on the road and on a giant iPad at the same time @sexhaver87@sh.itjust.works
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