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Comment by krab | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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).

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.

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.

No one looks at the shifter.

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.

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.

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