Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better?
Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.
Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.
Humans have pretty good spatial reasoning (proprioception); the notion that touch controls should replace tactile well-spaced controls is dependent on the fact that both senses (sight, spatial awareness) are uncontested.
I would argue the point that sight is already in-use and must not be interfered with, if there's an alternative that does not use the same resources.
I think of it like hardware acceleration and parrelelisation; the brain has a hardware accelerator for sight, but only one, and has a bunch of cores ready for other tasks, and those other tasks can happen in parallel.
Yes. Most drivers are able to drive using one hand for a short period of time. Not so with eyes off the road.
In fact, it's a requirement in most countries where stick shift is the norm.
Because they suck at recognition.
I've noticed the mental effort I spend in trying to formulate a voice command that the car (or even phone) will understand is significant - and that almost none of my brain is being used for driving. The likelihood of it not recognizing what I said is not low. With tactile buttons, it's almost automatic. I don't spend any time thinking. I know where the buttons are, and my finger is good at finding it.
On the few occasions where I'm not sure where my finger landed, I can still slowly move my finger to an edge and start counting. I can do this over several seconds. Often while doing this I have to attend to an event on the road, and it's trivial to do so: I pause my finger search, attend to the event on the road, and then resume. So even if it takes 10-30s to find my button (very rare), it can be done with almost no loss of attention on the road. The same goes if I need to pause to listen/respond to what someone else in the car is saying.
Contrast that with voice recognition: If I have to pause to attend to anything on the road, the recognition system assumes I'm done talking. This adds more mental stress (maybe it will execute the wrong command? In any case I'll have to start over).
Now I'll go further and make an even stronger claim: Even if voice recognition becomes almost perfect (better than humans), it will still be a greater cognitive load to use voice recognition. For me, changing stations on the radio or adjusting the volume or adjusting the climate control is pretty automatic. The cognitive load of finding the preset station is virtually none. Whereas just formulating the command verbally - even to another human where I wouldn't worry about voice recognition - takes more effort. Perhaps verbal skills are tied to the vision in the brain and tactile senses are not? I wonder if any studies have been done on this.
"Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface."
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/03/20/new-study-shows-u...
I really, really love to drive, I think I'm one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there's nothing else that comes close to it.
If you forced me to have them, I'd prefer something like a d-pad on each side because they are easy to locate without looking and intuitive to select. Critical controls should be stalks, IMHO. I can't use cruise control in the car I've owned for six years without looking at the steering wheel, but I test drove a Subaru, which I haven't owned for like 9 years, and immediately remembered how to operate the cruise stalk.
Also my steering wheel has both. I can do everything by feeling without my eyes leaving the road.