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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching the radio off has you reaching for a button somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.

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Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls:

I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk.

I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinct buttons. The only knob is for temperature. Any time I need to change air position or speed, I need to take my eyes off the road and find the button, and then tap it multiple times to get to the right position.

I also drove a friend's 201x Civic for a couple months, and the air controls were actually worse: tiny buttons, tiny display showing what settings are current.

Bring back Fisher Price knobs, please.

I have a 08 Yaris Hatchback...best controls ever. And yes those knobs make the clunk feel and noise....I love it.

The whole air system in the Yaris is great. I recently left my car sitting for a while, and a chipmunk made a nest with the cabin air filter material. I looked under the glove box, unscrewed three Phillips head screws to drop the blower, cleaned it all out and screwed it back in. No messing around with body panels or other parts that were in the way, no custom or odd-size connectors. A mechanically simple system, easy to access and maintain.

Thanks, now I can appreciate my 2013 VW Jetta TDI with its three fisher-price knobs for air control, which work just as you describe.

The 2017 Subaru I have has freewheeling software knobs for most functions and all of the info is displayed in the near-windshield display. Even when I have to take over from full auto control, it's pretty quick and close to my sight-line.

I don't get why we have buttons for climate. It's asinine.

Are you hot? Go ahead and press the down arrow 20 times to go from 80 to 60. Maybe it's not so bad if you switch your car to Celsius.

Or, with 50-year-old tech, turn a knob a quarter turn or a slider by 4 inches.

Renault have had controls on the steering wheel for at least 20 years now and it's still one of the best interfaces I've ever tried.

The first car I bought with my own money was a Clio and the ability to control the integrated radio system without looking at it or having to take away the hands from the wheel made that car my favourite place to listen to music.

As a matter of fact I miss it so much that nowadays I almost don't listen to music while driving anymore.

EDIT

for reference the whole music controlling part was like [1], the source button switched from FM radio/AM radio/CD player and it had a wheel on the back that skipped CD tracks or radio stations, according to the current source.

If I remember correctly the lower button ejected a CD in CD mode or changed from saved station to manual tuning in radio mode.

If you pulled both the volume buttons at the same time, it muted the radio and paused the CD player.

[1] https://www.proxyparts.com/car-parts-stock/information/part-...

There should be a company selling ergonomics improvement kits for cars.

You can buy little bluetooth remote controls that strap onto your steering wheel. They don't look great and you have to charge them. The charge thing is really annoying now that many cars turn off the power outlets when the car is off. I remember never really having a dead battery in my devices because they could just charge while I was parked either at work or running errands.

In many cars that's easy to fix. Just replace one relay with a jumper. Standard wire terminals fit in the relay sockets so it's not a permanent modification.

solar powered bluetooth remote

The market already exists: car improvement stuff on taobao is sold by tonnes: from the same independent DC-DC, and ECU interfaces to projection huds, and complete dashboard revamps

I still think the bash car dashboard was that of Honda Beat or Suzuki Cara — no dashboard, with just a motorcycle style gauge, and non-driving related controls almost wholely on steering wheel levers.

Any good links for projections HUDs?

My cousin had a Pontiac in the late 90s that would project the speed on the windshield.

IIRC, that dates back to when Hughes was still part of GM. A good HUD uses collimation to project data out in the distance. A crappy HUD throws it up at the same distance as your windshield, forcing you to refocus.

new bmw 540i has a beautiful hud integrate into the nav system ( rented one in the EU )

【车萝卜 HUD 抬头显示器汽车通用车载多功能显示速度转速时间】https://m.tb.cn/h.efAuVoU?sm=8ee47b 点击链接，再选择浏览器咑閞；或復·制这段描述￥XAN5YfMKXp2￥后到淘寳

【车萝卜2代汽车抬头显示器hud 汽车通用无线导航车载机器人】https://m.tb.cn/h.eU77dAA?sm=d1a047 点击链接，再选择浏览器咑閞；或復·制这段描述￥QASsYfMqMWi￥后到淘寳.

Carrobot is an actual projector, thus there are no questions about focus adjustments.

Other are usually just segment led or el screens, some with collimator, some without

I bought a stupid semi reflective sheet to put google maps on my smartphone under.. not good enough of course.

One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.

The Renault I have has a combination of buttons on steering wheel, that controller, physical buttons in the center panel, touchscreen and some touch elements outside of the screen.

If you want to call somebody, you have to use the touchscreen either on your phone or in the car and it's always a pain. Controlling other things in the car is fine - there are physical buttons.

> One thing that might not be obvious - this controller is just below the steering wheel and you press it from the back side. It's almost invisible and it feels very natural.

True.

Another thing that might not be obvious is that they are fixed on the steering wheel, so they are always in the same position relative the your hands, just like the gear levers in a modern Formula 1 car.

The steering wheel is where most of this stuff should be all the time. The second you force me to reposition my hand, security levels drop off a cliff, since you get involuntary movement on the other side (as proven by this post) and likely take your eyes off the road, which is bad even for a split second. I know this for a fact, having crashed a car on a motorway as I was turning down the fan (controlled by an analog button, btw).

The best car interface, imho, is something like a rotary device or arrows buttons on the steering wheel (or back thereof) which can be used to manipulate an overlay projected on (or just below) the windshield. My current VW gets close, but the screen is in the lower half of the dashboard (way too far from actual view of the road), and the system can only be partially controlled by on-wheel buttons (the main control is a touchscreen in the middle of the car).

What about physical buttons for the more-used stuff (radio, AC, cruise control) and use voice control (along with physical buttons) for everything else?

Obviously, the voice control would need to havr some way to ignore the kids in the backseat, or can ask the driver / parent for permission for this to be a good idea.

It's a bit difficult for people who can't speak: temporarily or permanently; have significant speech impediments; don't speak the language the car is (currently) programmed for, are already talking to a passenger, etc.

The "obvious" problem is harder than it looks. Even searching in the navigation app gets confused by voice prompts from the same app...so you get things like "find closest gas speed station check ahead". And that's before you get various people involved, never mind any impediments.

And speach is not as easy as a button / knobb for muscle memory. In my old car I didn't have to think, just do. A touchscreen just can't compete in a car.

Have you ever driven a stick shift?

That's a single control that's located in a highly ergonomical position - you take your hand off the wheel, and the stick is just right there. Contrast to radio/AC with inadequate/zero tactile feedback. "Stop looking at the stick, it's not going anywhere" is literally one of the first things I had drilled into me when learning to drive. (The involuntary movement comes from looking away from the road: you drop out of the feedback loop for a moment.)

I drive manual normally - I don't think ive looked at the stick in probably 10 years. For the first week or two maybe, but since then I haven't needed to.

On the other hand, I still don't know whete my A/C knob is without looking.

No one looks at the shifter.

I'm European, I didn't even know automatic transmission existed before I was 30 :)

The gearstick is one control with a very limited set of never-changing options that you have to use all the time, basically the best you can get as muscle-memory goes. Despite all this, it's not used where hyper-attention on the road is really necessary, i.e. in racing. And where do we get gearshift controls in racing? On the wheel.

There are plenty of racing cars with stick shifts in them. Or are you thinking of a specific type of racing?

Wherever the car is built only for racing, like LeMans or Formula*, it typically doesn’t feature a stick.

I am 99% sure my Clio had it attached to the steering column, so the controls were always in the same place regardless of the steering wheel angle.

I actually found this made them easier to find, as they're always in the same place relative to the rest of you. Controls on the steering wheel by contrast (as found in, e.g., my current car) move as the wheel rotates, and for some reason I can never quite keep track of where they are.

(The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point. Good quality stereo, too.)

You're completely right, I remembered wrong, in my first Clio they were below the steering wheel, just like in this picture

http://www.burdigala-encheres.com/upload/biens/7186/191833.j...

> The Clio also had the horn button on the indicator stalk. The in-car UX was super on point

Yes, that was the Renault trademark :)

> Good quality stereo, too.

Probably one of the best for the price tag.

My wife recently had the chance to use 3 different car UIs.

Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.

Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.

Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.

My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress bar† or VTEC led depending on engine)), secondary behind the wheel (RPM dial, fuel, cooling liquid temp), tertiary left/right hand side (depending if you're brit/jap or the rest of the world; clock, head unit AC) of the driver, all angled properly towards the driver and minimising glare, all knobs and buttons can be actioned upon either without leaving the hands off the wheel or only leaving them for the shorter amount of time, Fitt's law everywhere, with big knobs/buttons for big things, small ones for small things. No gorilla arm effect anywhere, even the window controls on door armrests fall naturally under the hand and "dangerous" things are purposely made easy-but-difficult to reach (VSA switch, dashboard backlight). Oh, and the UI of that little screen is so well thought out, well-laid-out information and navigation across various more detailed info, with a notification system that pops an (i) in the critical area and actual info front and center (low fuel, low oil pressure, freezing conditions...). Even the various beeps have sensible meaning conveyed.

It's so good I wanted to write an actual article just about it. Touchscreen dashboards just make zero sense when you thoughtfully experienced that.

(The same-year US market one (which is a completely different car) for that same generation is similar but really not as good. Sadly They later moved to a more traditional design on the new ones)

But it's unusual and scares people, like OMG there are so many buttons, this looks like an airplane cockpit.

https://s3.caradvice.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Honda...

(if you get the GPS option the screen takes place of the clock/head unit display)

† not a gamified tally like they did with the Insight and CR-Z, but a real-time thing.

†† not a ridiculously small heads-up air fighter thing like Peugeot does that gets unreadable depending on light conditions

Nice! Honda have always put some great effort into their designs. I had an Accord Euro Luxury '05 some 14 years ago, and it was such a pleasure to drive around. Still regret selling it. It was the first semi affordable car on the Australian market to offer stability control and full set of airbags (as long as you got the luxury model).

I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.

I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.

Not in the CR-V they didn't. The entertainment system is an underpowered Android tablet.

Lots of questionable decisions like the keyless lock system not locking if the tailgate was closing as you walk away, there being no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on, and the engine cutting out as you try to drive off if you started it via remote start.

Your "no way to turn the car off but leave the radio or AC on" complaint doesn't make sense to me, as the AC compressor is powered by the engine's accessory drive belt, which won't turn if the engine's off.

Otherwise, those sound like fair complaints. I'd add that Honda tried to go to a touch-based volume control in 2015/2016 and it was universally panned for its poor responsiveness and requirement that users take their eyes off the road to adjust radio volume. Can't win'em all I guess.

Yeah, I wasn't sure about the AC. My actual use case is it leave music playing over Bluetooth or Android Auto.

The volume control is fairly good in the 2018 model. There's a dial on the head unit, and a strange-but-fairly-effective touch sensitive volume control on the steering wheel.

I imagine the fan could still work?

Yep, the fan will work, but you won't get cold air.

I am a designer, have a degree even... Yet you used lots of jargon I never saw before. Can you point me some books and reading? I really need to fix my sorry education...

Not a designer by a long shot but I admit to be very interested in the matter. Here are a few books I found quite fascinating.

Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis

Design for Hackers by David Kadavy

That interior makes me think of a Cirrus airplane. Very cool. Cirrus has done some pretty amazing things with the button layout and overall UX for glass panel small aircraft.

I have one! I love the interior desing and the rpm is like floating! And the AC control is just stupid easy because the auto works very well not like on a BMW were you need to set the speed of fan for auto?!? If is auto whay i need to do anything? That's why Civic was "red dot: best of the best".

Unfortunately, I bought the cheapest wrangler I could (no power windows) and it still came with a touch screen. It is the biggest piece of crap. It won't default to Bluetooth. It will default to the radio, loudly, with an undismissable safety agreement that blocks all interaction for 5 seconds. The only loophole I've found is an aux cable, which it will default to. I would much prefer a radio.

Mazda is guilty of this, too.

Compare the HVAC control on the base model Mazda3: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xqIAAOSwlv9aU8Hh/s-l1600.jpg

With the HVAC control on the higher trim lines: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Xdav_EsJ3bQ/maxresdefault.jpg

The older/cheaper interface is WAY easier to control. Changing vent operation or fan speed on the new interface always takes way more button pushes and time until it's in the state I want.

I have a 2013 Leaf and would rather swap the battery somehow than upgrade because the newer ones all have less tactile controls and more worthless, brittle, privacy invading fad driven bullshit.

Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.

i bought a VW Golf Alltrack (vw golf sportwagon). instead of an Audi Allroad because of this. the audi controls were more clumsy and less useful despite the car being an extra $20k. the audi was also not available with a manual transmission and the hatch opened slowly, insisting on an always-on electronic assist. quite disappointing.

I HATE that always on electric assist. It is both expensive and annoying. Gas springs cost $20.

IMO, only pickup trucks really know how to get this stuff right now, and that's mostly because there's so much space that the buttons can be giant.

> somewhere between the not-ashtray and the backside of the moon.

This makes me crazy. I used to drive a '99 Mazda b2500 (basically a Ford Ranger). I could reach any of the controls without even leaning forward. In a newer f150 that I used to drive for work the reach for the volume knob seems to be about the same distance as the reach to the passenger window crank in my old truck.

Real low-end cars don’t have a thermostat at all, so you’re constantly fiddling with the HVAC controls to maintain comfort. It’s the mid-range cars that get it right :)

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