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I’m genuinely on board with most of this, but it reads like satire.

On topic, it is wild how dated even brand new car consoles feel. Luxury brands do a bit better, but it’s still worse than my phone. Where do I sign up to overhaul vehicle UX?

Last time I got a new car the dipshit at the dealership was trying to get me to pay more cuz the car I wanted had a touchscreen. I told him I'd pay more if he'd take it out and put in one with buttons. Car consoles are such a gimmick...

Yeah, but unless you get the screen, you get a shitty sound system and no heated seats.

EDIT: Man I definitely replied to the wrong comment. Feel free to downvote me to hell.

Yeah, that's my least favorite part of how buying new cars works. The dealerships have cars on the lot with various semi-arbitrary combinations of options, and if you want some other combination then the process of buying a car gets more complicated and expensive.

Well, it's not like that just happens. It's a deliberate strategy to enable price discrimination. Calling it "semi-arbitrary" makes it sound like it isn't carefully planned. The whole game is to get everyone to buy either a budget or a luxury model and avoid selling a middle-of-the-road product for a fair price.

I have read so many times where car enthusiasts complain that they can't get the options they want with a manual transmission. Well, it's perfectly logical - when one aspect of a product is the deciding factor for a subgroup of customers, and the seller knows it, it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else. It's nothing personal, just optimization of the business.

> I have read so many times where car enthusiasts complain that they can't get the options they want with a manual transmission. Well, it's perfectly logical - when one aspect of a product is the deciding factor for a subgroup of customers, and the seller knows it, it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else. It's nothing personal, just optimization of the business.

I do actually think this is a special case. most people in america can't drive stick and don't want to learn either. for most cars that still have manual as an option, it saves you $800-1200 on the base trim of the car. so I imagine there's a weird bimodal distribution where one group of people wants manual just because it's the cheapest version of the car, while you also have enthusiasts who are willing to purchase a lot of the options (at least the performance related ones). either way, cars with manual transmissions are a fairly low volume market in the US. they can be pretty hard to move.

Oddly, I hear more groaning about not being able to buy manuals every day here. It sees more of a metro vs rural thing. Metro folk only want autos because traffic, and rural folk like the control, and feel of manuals more on smaller roads. Living near mountains manuals are hugely popular as they allow much safer driving by engine braking, while many will overheat their brakes.

Other than a few fleet style trucks, most manual options in the usa are performance models.

> Oddly, I hear more groaning about not being able to buy manuals every day here. It sees more of a metro vs rural thing.

Maybe, but in the city I live in, I hear more and more grumbling about the lack of manual transmissions over time as well.

...it's more profitable to give them the worst of everything else.

I doubt that, the margin on the luxury options has got to be higher than on the base model.

It's probably more that they don't want to be stuck with a car on the lot that has a manual transmission and all the other luxury options maxed out, that they end up having to sell at a substantial discount to move (because most of their customers, particularly the ones willing to spend on the luxury options, want an auto box).

You write "I doubt that" but then you appear to be explaining why you agree with the quote.

What I doubt is that, considered in isolation, the sale of a manual car with all budget options is more profitable than the sale of the same manual car with additional luxury options. Sorry if that is a misinterpretation of your comment.

For me the worst of it is that a lot of the nice features are only available bundled with leather seats.

I will never buy a car with leather seats. I get sweaty and sticky when I sit on them.

Why can't I get a car with the features I want and nice cool breathable cloth seats?

> I will never buy a car with leather seats

Autogefühl [1] is a great YouTube channel for finding out if a new car is available with non-leather seats.

They also made an interesting video a few days ago [2] saying the leather industry is trying to pay YouTuber's to recommend leather seats in their car reviews.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/autogefuehl

[2] https://youtu.be/nP_CvLlaFlI

Seriously. I have gone so far as to get junkyard seats from a 'lesser' trim to upgrade the leather seats in used cars. When new they are okay, but seem to last 4-6 years before looking hopelessly worn thanks to the cheap quality used even in luxury cars nowdays. Gone are the days of full-grain that patina'ed instead of disintergrating.

There's a surplus of dead cows floating around. Gotta do something with those hides, what better than make it a 'premium' product in the auto/furniture industry.

I'm a fan of cloth or vinyl myself.

I agree, too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter.

Funny thing is...in the past the only leather seats were for the driver (servants) and cloth was for the rich passengers.

Kinda like how lobster is now "fancy" food.

What do you find complicated and expensive about custom ordering a car? Most dealerships are totally willing to order whatever you want. You get exactly what you want at the price you want. (Within the limitations of the options)

When I went to buy my first car, years ago, I opened the shiny brochure and asked "Can I get X with Y and maybe Z?", and was told flat out "No, we don't sell option X at all." Just because they advertise it doesn't mean you can buy it.

Shitty sound system and no heated seats anyway :/

Have you tried the new Audi A7’s interface? Pretty great, especially with CarPlay.

Seriously? The one with TWO touch screens?

If you can honestly make a claim that you can consistently and accurately change climate control on the bottom screen without taking your eyes off the road I will... well I don't even know. Disbelieve? :-/

https://www.caricos.com/cars/a/audi/2019_audi_a7/images/25.h...

Good lord, they went for that crap, too?! Damn!

On the other hand the new-looking Q5 I got as a loaner couple months ago had a perfectly fine physical button interface, with a little touchpad on the MMI comsole you could use to scroll around (and apparently even write). That was quite good.

Wow they really doubled down (hehe). I wonder if it’s even driver oriented - my biggest pet peeve is a screen that’s low.

Super easy, the buttons are big and easy to touch and provide haptic feedback.

That's another issue. It used to be that even the most basic car (like the cheap Geo Metro) still had a pretty decent user interface. Now it's: "well, if you don't like the crap at the low end, have you tried the latest $75K luxury sedan?"

Bmw has the best in business, they left climate, track, volume controls as separate physical buttons and their console is incredibly quick to respond and feels fluid like a phone. New Audi’s really made a bad decision to use two screens without physical buttons, both of the screens are little laggy too.

I took a ReachNow from the airport and got one of the new 3-series and WOW. The dial in the center console beautifully splits this difference between touch screens and old-school tactile interfaces.

2015 Mazda 3 here. Has touchscreen but I usually forget that, and never use it. Dial is nice, like BMW. But... Laggy, buggy computer. So bad.

Fortunately Mazda seems to be listening. 2019 loses the touch panel entirely and relies fully on knob and buttons! In videos, the screen looks super responsive. So at least not all hope is lost with every manufacturer...

BMW uses the Qt GUI framework in its center console AFAIK. Ford Sync 3 does, too. Those are some of the better and more responsive car GUIs. Disclaimer: I offer Qt services. And... I actually prefer cars without any screens for my own use.

Screens are important in cars, for backup camera, bird view camera (incredibly useful), for everything else I use the head up display, I still don’t understand how more companies don’t adopt it, I can’t drive without it anymore, incredibly useful and does not take eyes off the road

The new Chevy (Volt) HVAC interface has three separate toggles for panels, feet and defrost, and you can toggle any combination of them you want.

It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

The last Chevy Volt.

I mean, I assume it is shared across many Chevy product lines, but I haven't done an exhaustive study. If it only existed on the later Volts and then disappears forever with their discontinuation, that makes the loss even sadder.

Paul Graham had a tweet relevant to this recently:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1122803944206544897

--- The two axioms that explain your experience with devices that contain software (except Teslas):

I. It takes extraordinary effort to make software that's not horribly difficult to use.

II. Companies whose main focus isn't software don't expend extraordinary effort on it.

Arguably the reason Tesla is an exception is that it is actually a software company. ---

Measured in money and man-hours, car companies actually spend mind-boggling amounts on software. They largely just haven't figured out yet how to do it right. They also think that they are special as in better when they are much, much worse at software than other industries.

This sounds amazing. And all of that (even the physical controls, in a sense) is really more about interfacing with the onboard computer systems, which arguably aren't part of the car itself, but something extra built on top of it.

For most cars that aren't Teslas, the head unit is designed independently of the physical control surfaces of the dashboard, because they want the head unit to be a thing you pay extra for via some navigation or entertainment option package.

I hope in the future the head unit won't be a separate thing that coexists with a potentially standalone dashboard. Like Tesla, but with physical controls alongside nice displays where appropriate, even with touch surfaces.

Cars are going through something similar to what happened with DSLRs when displays (and sometimes touchscreens) started to become common. Some companies fully embraced having a big touchscreen and very few physical controls and some companies grudgingly added a non-touch display but retained almost all of the physical controls. The best camera designs (IMO) ended up being ones that tried to find a happy medium between those extremes, not by combining half-assed physical controls with half-assed touchscreen controls, but rather by really thinking about the least compromised, best overall experience.

It's because of screens that I looked for a slightly older model when I recently purchased a vehicle. Ended up getting a 2009 BMW 328. The design on the inside is wonderful, and screen-free.

The computer is simple to use and gives you all the functionality you would have on a screen.

I now want to keep this car going as long as possible, in the hopes that this awful trend will change, and there will be options like people are describing here.

It reminds me of phones. The newest phone was willing to buy was a 2nd gen iPhone SE. It's the only new phone in a small form that has decent internal hardware.

I see it as part of a bigger trend that goes against excellent design. Is this some sort of marketing vs design thing that causes this?

you could have just bought a new 911 GT3 and deleted the infotainment unit.

For years I've just wanted a car with the equivalent of a 19" rack with some standard power + other interfaces.

They kind of make them for police cars - center consoles with mounting holes plus different height cover plates.

But I suspect the future consumers will get will be app-based because the connected car might be a data harvesting revenue stream.

sigh.

It used to be this way: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7736

I remember buying aftermarket “din 1” size radios for my dad’s car in Europe.

In practice you still needed to suss out whether it was metric or imperial din/ddin and find a mounting kit, wiring harness, and trim specific to your car. It still wouldn't fit, of course, so you'd have to file it down / twist it until it did, and then you'd find out that your wiring harness didn't interface well with the amplifier / dash sounds, so you'd have an audible static hiss at all times and a maximum audio level at conversational volume except for the assorted alert beeps/dings which played loud enough to make your head spin. I think it's exceedingly generous to call that a standard.

No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?

You always wanna replace the factory amp when going aftermarket tho. And the euro din spec is hardly used anymore, just get the ugly larger frame that works with all the jap din spec. A good local installer will cost you a little bit more, but will save you time and grief.

Din standard is actually quite nice and I miss it dearly. The new intergrated audio/climate/navigation will look dated in a decade anyway.

While the future is pretty hopeless for cars, you can still convert many trucks to use double-DIN radios.

I'd settle for just #1 and a 3.5mm TRS aux in (which was the standard for about 10 years prior to the new touchscreen phase).

I'll give a little praise for Toyota here though. The 2015 Corolla had a row of terrible low-quality touch buttons on either side of the touch screen[1] but the latest model has replaced all of those back with real buttons and two real knobs[2]! Maybe the tide is turning...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/A63ESpX.jpg [2] https://i.imgur.com/9FQF7oh.jpg

I would also like hard physical disconnect from the car's essential motoring functions and from it's auxiliary and entertainment functions. You would think that would be a no-brainer but it has been demonstrated how many new cars can be shut off or have essential motor functions remotely changed by hacking in through entertainment/media systems. Not sure if it is because of ignorance, penny shaving, or intentional implementation, but I don't see how I can trust a car that some punk on a laptop can disable or crash at will using simple scripts someone could post online.

I like CarPlay. Updating an app or upgrading phone is effectively updating the head unit in the car. And my climate controls are all physical dials with detents that I can use without looking at them. Ironically, the cheaper cars have smaller screens and physical controls.

My ideal car has buttons, dials, and no computers at all aside from very small microcontrollers.

This is great until your insurer steps in and starts using installed UI/UX as another factor on which to start varying rates after different UIs cause (or correlate with) accidents at different rates.

The good news is that if they are profitably factoring that information into their premiums, they also probably have a pretty good idea of what sort of driver you are.

We have pretty similar preferences. Here's mine:

My ideal car:

- buttons and dials I can feel with my hands without looking for climate/volume/etc. controls

- Car has a radio or something, which should be enough.

> - mount on the center console where I can put my own touchscreen device if I so choose (iPad, Android, phone, etc)

That's probably never going to happen. Devices on mount are a securiry nightmare during a crash and car manufacturers don't want the associated liabilities.

I think that is the direction that German manufactures are headed to.

Sounds like a ‘Homer car’. Keep it simple.

It is simple - get rid of the touch screen, and whatever APIs the touchscreen was using, expose them to me.

It is not a big deal when your car can drive itself well enough while you are messing with it for a few seconds.

Sounds absolutely terrible. Android auto exists and is pretty good. Add Tasker and it covers your example use cases.

Isn't Android auto the API described?