A New Concept for Usable Touch Interaction in Cars | Hacker News Reader

A New Concept for Usable Touch Interaction in Cars

theturnsignalblog.com

25 pointscaskes40 comments

I have a 2000 BMW 318ti as a daily beater. I was adjusting the clock on it the other day and loved it.

It ticks over very slowly, 1 second is 1 minute when you hold the Minute(M) button down.

I just held it whilest driving and counted to the minute, and when I let go later and glanced it, it was right.

So satisfying. I think Mazda have announced that they aren't going for touch interfaces any more. Personally with more things becoming increasingly digital I find even more satisfaction in touching well made physical objects...

Touch interfaces in cars should be banned. They're 95% unusable without taking your eyes off the road.

Whomever first came up with the idea should end up mentioned in historical footnotes alongside Thomas Midgely Jr.: Inventor of leaded gasoline and freon/CFCs; a man who probably caused more destruction than any other living organism in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Midgley made lots of lives better, at least for a while. I don't think the same can be said of touchscreens in cars...

Any law like this should be careful not to ban touchpads.

I agree with the other comments here. Physical knobs and buttons are superior for cars. Until operating a vehicle can be done safely and reliably without driver focus (true autonomous) then we should really be focusing on physical knobs and buttons.

My car has a physical button that is customizable. Much like the radio station preset buttons, but it could be for switching to radio or cd or bluetooth. I think there were a few other options besides just media, but there were only like 5 or 6 options in total. I would love to have a wider selection of functions available to set for that button, and to have at least a handful of programmable buttons that could handle some simple tasks like switching to Android Auto, toggle between Spotify and my podcast app, activate voice, or setting the climate control to a certain setting.

In addition to bringing back physical interfaces, I think car designers should focus on improving NLP/voice recognition to the point where a driver shouldn't have memorize keywords or commands (too much thinking is also very distracting).

I'm surprised to see no mention of haptic feedback. I've always thought Apple's Force Touch was a gimmick on a phone, but in a car it could be very useful on a touch screen like what Teslas have. Imagine being able to run your finger over the screen to "feel" the climate control touch area then "hard press" it to activate.

The problem is that you wouldn’t be able to feel the haptic on a shaky car (running on a highway).

That doesn't discount it from being useful in most scenarios, though.

"Car on road and in motion" seems to cover most scenarios where operating the controls of a car would be something you'd want to do.

I drive a Tesla. I'm speaking first hand that this would be a useful feature. Most of my driving is not on a gravel road that's bumping so much I can't feel anything; it's on smooth surface streets and highways where a little vibration from the screen would be beneficial.

Solved problem: just use a physical control.

Haptic feedback is like art imitating life.

Looks good, but it's utility value is equal to or less than landfill.

I despise touch interfaces in cars and you should too. Every time you add a control that requires the driver take their eyes off the road, you kill people. Every time you have a control you can't touch without activating, you kill people. A completely blind passenger ought to be able to control the stereo and air conditioning.

I despise touch UI everywhere (at least in its present incarnation). The only things it's good for is saving space on a small device, or simulating the experience of having no nerve-endings in your hands.

The industry could sell another trillion mobile phones, and it still wouldn't change reality: (a) it's uncomfortable to hold your hand hovering in midair for more than a few minutes (b) fingers are opaque and block screen real estate (c) to use a finger with precision requires tactile feedback (edges, textures, nubs) (d) a hand can't comfortably and quickly manipulate a screen larger than about 10 inches.

I look forward to the day when I can use a touch UI able to feel and sound like buttons, keys, sliders, etc. Until then, I will favor devices that don't use it.

I just let out a wistful sigh at the thought of a smartphone with a big juicy d-pad below the screen. Imagine being able to scroll without your finger on the screen. I think we hit peak usability with the TH-55's rear-mounted scroll wheel and it's been downhill from there.

I agree! I did this project because car makers are addicted to touch screens. So if they are not going away soon, I wanted to see if I could design the least worst touch interface. In an ideal world the interaction is designed with a mix of physical controls, haptic touch interfaces, voice and more.

You're putting touch surfaces way too far for a normal driver to interact with. There's a reason why many of the automakers are using knobs/buttons by the resting position of the right arm to allow for interactions while in motion. My Mazda even disables the touchscreen while moving for this reason. With no proprioception on a touch surface you need to watch where your finger is going and that's a distraction. Not to mention gorilla arm fatigue.

You might also want to look at what Cadillac has just shown for their Lyriq EV:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/my23-lyr...

I wonder how it will perform while driving at night

Great point, I'd say it is the main drawback at the moment. I tried to test this using VR and it was not a problem then, but I must admit that I used a small hatchback as interior model. So I don't think it would work in its current form in a wide SUV

This is nearly identical to the infotainment display in a Tesla. Was the author only looking at 1 type of car?

Upvoted for potentially interesting discussion, but with the standard first question of how long we have to wait before the safety regulators ban the foolishness of using touchscreens for important driving controls entirely.

There are some very interesting display technologies for cars that have been at least the subject of experiments or small-scale applications. Imagine if the little HUDs, night vision systems, navigation displays and camera feeds that have been appearing in recent years could be combined, AR style. When you were driving at night, your main view could be enhanced with the night vision and danger recognition technologies. Essential navigation information, such as the required lane/path for your route, could be clearly visible right in front of you as you approached each junction, though subtle enough not to block your view of the outside. Displays from external cameras could be overlaid as appropriate depending on the type of driving or manoeuvres being performed.

There is so much potential in these kinds of technologies to make driving safer and easier. And yet manufacturers are going with touch screens and naff UIs, because shiny and, presumably, much cheaper for now.

To those doubting touch screens in cars, how do you explain Tesla cars amazing real world safety data then? Despite having most controls via touch screen they outperform other vehicles in avoiding accidents over ten-fold.

"Q2 2020 In the 2nd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.53 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.27 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.56 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

There are plenty of plausible explanations for those statistics where the comparison isn't a good one. The 479K figure given appears to be an average over the entire population of vehicles and drivers.

But what is the performance like for other drivers of expensive cars? Teslas aren't cheap, so it's a reasonable hypothesis that their drivers might be more likely to take care of them than the owners of a 20-year-old hand-me-down that is nearing the end of its useful lifetime anyway.

What is the performance like for drivers in other cars that have relatively good driver aid technologies? This might be correlated with more expensive cars, but more basic models typically gain a lot of the safety tech as well after a while.

What is the performance like for other drivers of the same ages and experience levels as Tesla drivers? Given the cost of the vehicle, Tesla drivers might tend to be older and more experienced than average, and both of those factors are known to be strongly correlated with safer driving.

Or maybe Tesla's own statistics are based on such a small population that they might not be representative anyway?

Or maybe Tesla's "registration" of accidents is flawed, and lots of minor incidents go unreported in Tesla's stats but some of them would be counted by NHTSA?

Or maybe Tesla's touchscreen controls are simply so complicated or annoying that many drivers avoid using them as much as possible?

As I said, there are many plausible explanations that would make that "amazing real world safety data" look a lot less impressive. It's impossible to evaluate that record intelligently based on just the data you quoted.

Don't you think the data from Tesla's computers on wheels could be more accurate than the second hand data (accident occurs, is written down, then provided to the government agency) used by the NHTSA and other researchers. Surely there is some loss here in unreported incidents that Tesla would not lose, making the NHTSA reports actually better than the reality potentially.

Could be? Sure.

Definitely is? Again, there's no way to tell from just the data you cited.

We don't know what Tesla counts as "registering an accident", and clearly it isn't a neutral observer here.

If I was asked to explain it, I would start by researching whether people who own Teslas might be safer drivers than average when they weren't in Teslas. Or whether, by virtue of other characteristics of the car, like handling, acceleration, and breaking, Teslas may be safer in general, regardless of their dashboards. I'd also question the source of the data and the methodology by which it was collected, just to be diligent. I wouldn't just start by assuming that having a touch screen made cars safer, though.

20% of vehicle crashes in the US are caused by motorcycles, and the 479kmi number includes those. The statistics have always been misleading for Tesla to use those numbers to compare vehicle safety. When comparing just luxury cars, Teslas have far more fatalities than other cars in the same price range.

Important to note that this data on the fatality rate was put together by a known short seller and is from before the model 3 was released which has the lowest probably of injury of any vehicle ever tested by the NHTSA. Also before many improvements have been made to both the model s, 3 and x software and hardware over the years.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-3-lowest-probability-injury...

Do you have a source about the motorcycles being included?

A friend worked on an automotive version of these physical pressbuttons with tiny OLED screens[0]. I thought it was a potential option for the difficult problem of putting reprogrammable/contextual UI into a vehicle, where positive touch interaction is inherently infinitely better than smartphone/ipad style touchscreens.

0: https://www.alliedelec.com/product/nkk-switches/isc15anp4/70...

Why not just physical buttons below (or next to) the screen, like they sometimes do (badly) on ATMs? They used to do this on the old Nokia phones before touchscreens too.

Would be cheaper than separate OLED displays on every switch.

You could even have assignable physical buttons on the steering wheel, with a HUD on the dash that shows what each button will do.

There's lots of different options and a touchscreen is the absolute worst one.

Can't say I've ever had issues with any of the touch screen systems on Fords, Mazdas and Tesla's I've own/ed

When driving touch screen is maps, all interactions come from the steering wheel or a voice command except for heating and thats pretty quick, its not like you dont have to look at what the dial is on for physical controls.

I could control the heating and other environmental settings in every car I've ever owned without ever looking at them. You could immediately feel which way a dial was currently pointing. The buttons were either in a clearly distinguishable pattern or marked with a ridge or other touch-friendly indication so you could tell which was which within a row.

I absolutely refuse to buy a car with a touch screen interface (unless it also has physical buttons). Touch screens like what are in Tesla are NOT good, for many reasons. Car companies should copy the idea of the electric car, but for the love of God, please don't copy their terrible touch screens!

Right there with you. It's one of three reasons why I refuse to buy pretty much any car manufactured after 2010, the others being the sheer size of modern cars (why is every car getting so much bigger?) and the increasing hostility to user-servicability.

Good ideas.

Why are we putting touch screens in cars while ignoring the fact that touchscreens are inherently more distracting. We're having the wrong conversations about car interfaces.

One reason is that having a screen is now required in the U.S. in order to comply with backup collision safety regulations.

It doesn't necessarily have to support touch, but once you've dedicated all that space and cost to putting in a screen, making it a touchscreen becomes a lot more appealing.

The true reason is that it's cheaper than mechanical switches, gauges, and wires.

You can’t software update mechanical switches and gauges. I think it’s reasonable to pick a vehicle that can receive over the air updates improving the user experience during the period of time when you own it versus one frozen in time with static mechanical controls.

I think it’s reasonable to pick a vehicle that can receive over the air updates improving the user experience during the period of time when you own it versus one frozen in time with static mechanical controls.

And who gets to decide whether a change is "improving the user experience"?

Hint: It's usually not the user in this scenario.

I'm just fine with having a car where I get to choose whether I like how it works before I buy it and then it stays that way and doesn't give me any unwelcome surprises. I doubt I am alone in this. Magically self-updating cars are about as good an idea as magically self-updating operating systems, with the added wrinkle that if something is broken or confusing after the update, people could actually die.

Updates are great. An update improving the ECU, fixing a bug, ensuring compliance with emission controls, correcting a cruise control anomaly after tapping the brakes, upgrading maps database, etc etc etc, are all very welcome.

I’d still like my car stereo, climate, beams, indicators and wipers controls to remain physical and be mapped on whatever new software. I will still change station and volume, I will still signal left and right turns (with the possible exception of BMW owners), I will still do a tactile search of my AC, find the big knob, rotate it a notch or 2, without keeping eyes off the road.

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