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Comment by JCharante | Hacker News Reader

Is it true that you can't use touchscreens in cars without looking at them? I don't drive so I wouldn't know, but my experience touch typing on my smartphone (and I don't use it very often) and as a cashier during high school who used a touch screen point-of-sales system would lead me to believe otherwise. Sure you can't keep track of its state the entire time, but you only need to glance at it to know what state/screen to operate/navigate from.

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As the owner of a modern car, PoS systems are in a whole different league than cars. In particular, PoS vendors actually care about making usage efficient.

In my car, if I want to increase the fan speed, I need to tap a small target, wait while the system lags out, and then tap a new target on a popup. Meanwhile, I’m trying to focus on the road at (effectively) infinity. It’s distracting and unsafe.

In my old, very well designed 1991 car, I could push the button to do this. It had two major benefits: it never moved and I could feel it. Touchscreens can’t replicate the feel of a button, but they could at least have the decency to keep controls in the same place.

This is my big objection to Tesla's "touch screen for everything" approach. I know Tesla fans love it, but in my modern car (a 2019 Honda Insight), if I want to change the fan speed -- or anything else about the A/C -- I touch a physical button or twist a physical knob.

You can change the fan speed (and much more) in a tesla via buttons on the steering wheel.

Yes. By pressing a scroll wheel to pop up a menu, then scrolling through the menu to select a mode, then pressing the scroll wheel again to select a mode, then scrolling once more to peform the desired action.

This may well be better than using the touchscreen, but it's still bad.

Yes the best way is to use voice control. You can tell the tesla to "set fan speed to 2" and it will do it. Voice commands are the safest imho.

But at least in my car I only need to select fan speed in the first menu then scroll do actually change it. This in a model x. But I was really responding to the "100% touch screen" statement.

I have never gotten my Tesla to understand a voice command like this. I could get music and phone calls, and that was it. The second-to-last update that supposedly made it better instead broke voice commands almost completely. Supposedly the update from a couple days ago is better.

In contrast, IIRC a 2007 Prius could do this type of voice command with no obvious difficulty.

That was my experience before the christmas update but after that it understands almost everything I say both in my south-western Norwegian dialect (if I set it to Norwegian) and my English.

The only bug I've found so far was when I said "open driver door" and it displayed "opening trunk" and it slammed it into my garage door!

I’m guessing my particular combination of hardware versions just got broken. I have MCU1 and the old Mercedes-style wheel. After the Christmas update, it couldn’t recognize anything. I think I got it to make a phone call once.

I'm going to say Tesla did this for no good reason. They could've added 3 knobs to the center console and nobody would have complained.

> Yes the best way is to use voice control. You can tell the tesla to "set fan speed to 2" and it will do it. Voice commands are the safest imho.

...if you are from English-speaking country or you know English.

Does Tesla understand every language in the world?

Or: how would my father change settings in Tesla? Would he need to learn one English phrase ("Tesla/Alexa/Siri/Whatever, open Google translate"), then speak in his native language, then somehow speak the translated text to Tesla's system?

Currently in his car, he does that by pressing a button. Done.

It does understand Norwegian (even dialect) just fine at least if the car is set to Norwegian UI.

A recent software update introduced Natural Language Processing and opened up pretty much every control that would otherwise require a button or dial.

I can literally tell it "Turn on driver seat heaters to 3 bacons" and it will set the seat heater to the max setting (1-3).

https://youtu.be/mV8h2doorrc?t=58

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/voice-command...

So no, I disagree that physical buttons are safer than an NLP enabled infotainment/dashboard display where I can turn on/off and adjust things using voice. Without taking my eyes off the road and hands off the wheel.

I replaced my 2015 jeep with a 2020 and luckily, it still has volume and air knobs! Sadly, they replaced the AC mode knob with a mode button. It kinda works, but the UI could be better for it. Pushing it displays a popup on the screen saying what mode it is now in. It should show the order of modes, then at least I could more easily memorize it lol.

I drive a lot and quick glance is usually fine I'd say, but touchscreens often require more than a glance because the UI isn't as static as a typical dashboard. You lose context between apps, and so you end up having to look a bit longer. But the worst part isn't the glancing to be honest, the worst part is that when you're driving there are all these little changes in the road that makes you miss your target on the screen. Maybe it's a little bump or maybe there's a tiny adjustment in the steering that does it, but you end up tapping the wrong thing so often you then have to go back and fix things, and that's where you get into trouble I find because now your attention is truly divided.

I like CarPlay, and found in the Mercedes models that had the little control wheel in the center console it worked well, because you had a physical switch to interface with CarPlay, but had the flexibility of the screen. I'm no expert, but I drive a lot of different cars and that so far is my favorite way of interacting with CarPlay.

I'd still prefer a simple dashboard with physical controls though.

My fingers have pretty much memorised the few things I sometimes change from the screen while driving in my tesla, but 99% of what I would use the screen for can also be done via the buttons on the wheel / voice command. I still glance over when I do hit the screen though to make sure I did it correctly.

I think with the latest update I can also control the active suspension via voice which is the only thing I still use the display for while driving except for hitting cancel on the navigation once in a blue moon. Cancelling navigation might also be available via voice command now, I haven't checked.

In any case, voice and physical buttons (on the steering wheel) is much safer than touching or buttons below the screen the screen regardless. At least I feel much more in control personally when I can keep my eyes on the road and not glance away / feel my way to a spot on the screen.

A point of sales system has the distinct advantage of not travelling at a combined speed of 60 metres / 200 feet per second.

Glancing takes a long time because your eyes don’t just have to flick to and fro, you need to actually refocus your vision, scan for and find the object or point you’re intending to look at, switch contexts, then do it all over again.

> you only need to glance at it

I think you answered your own question.

the button targets are much smaller on most infotainment screens. also, the vehicle being in motion makes it a lot harder to rely on muscle memory.

Obviously I can't say if this is universally true, but it is most certainly true for me. I have CarPlay, and I do my damnedest to control it with Siri. It always feels incredibly dangerous to use the touchscreen.

Because of the problems I have with Siri, I end up using the touchscreen much more than I'd prefer. My latest defensive habit is to queue up enough audio for the trip and not touch it again until I arrive.

I would definitely prefer hardware buttons.

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