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Comment by kevinconroy | Hacker News Reader

At CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem.

We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.

You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).

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Ideal car UX: click wheel with a few dedicated function buttons on the steering wheel and a transparent display on the rear view mirror. You can send the royalty checks to my secretary.

I'd rather have a HUD above the speedometer myself, this way you just have to glance down to see any relevant information.

How do you feel about using voice commands?

They're great if you operate your car in complete silence. Personally I'm usually listening to something.

In mine, it just pauses the audio when I trigger the voice control then resumes after.

Again, that sounds just awful. Why do we put up with this when we had a UI that worked perfectly, with no interruptions to music or family or taking our eyes off the road? Why are we putting up with these compromises? :<

So you're saying you had good voice UI without muting other streams? Or you're saying you could listen and type in those commands while listening (and driving)?

Because I would rarely want it to be the latter - especially knowing how dangerous it is.

I'd be interested to see human factors research to see if it helps. Still, if you've got kids in the back seat who are asleep and there's background road noise from a highway, you don't want to yell "Carbot, turn down the A/C". Turning a knob isn't that hard.

As a new parent this is something I hadn’t considered. I use Siri quite a bit in our car with CarPlay and haven’t noticed if it bothers our child but I’ll be more aware now. Thanks!

Plus when the kids are awake they're going to spend the entire ride yelling "Carbon, roll down the windows!" just for the lolz.

I would like to travel with my wife and kids.

It is insane to me that we are coming up with these impractical user interfaces with implausible limited use cases, when... we had interface that works! I'm refusing to let go of my aging Subaru, because any rental I've tried is impossible to drive without taking your eyes off the road or a myriad other safety and practicality compromises

> I would like to travel with my wife and kids.

Ah, the old school voice command system.

"Turn on wipers"

"Playing weezer"

It might be good if voice control was perfect but it'a long way from that and still offers little benefit over buttons and knobs.

In most situations, I find voice commands to be very annoying and inconvenient. Particularly in a car.

Plus, given that most voice recognition is done in the cloud these days, if something has voice control then I am immediately very suspicious of it.

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