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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

> What good is tactile feedback when you have no idea what you're adjusting without staring at the screen?

This is what people don't understand about touchscreen vs dial-based UIs. One is not safer than the other if they both require you to take your eyes off the road and look at a screen!

If car makers want to have a button control a feature, then they should simply make a button that controls that feature. Cars worked that way for many years. Buttons, dials, or trackpads that move a cursor or select items on a screen are slower than touch-based UIs, require at least as much driver attention, and are less ergonomic than just putting your finger on the exact item you want.

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Mazda still provides a lot of those buttons that other manufacturers don't - for things like HVAC/Music - let alone basic features like windshield wipers and gear shift which should never have gone behind a touchscreen IMHO (cough Tesla cough)

> Buttons, dials, or trackpads that move a cursor or select items on a screen are slower than touch-based UIs, require at least as much driver attention, and are less ergonomic than just putting your finger on the exact item you want

Mercedes does this really well. I was surprised.

You can use the screen as a touchscreen, or there's a dial thingy on the armrest that lets you scroll around the UI by flicking your fingers. Similar to keyboard navigation on computers.

The end result is a touchscreen you can use effectively when stationary and an easy-to-use control for when you're moving and need to deal with your arm moving relative to the car. And the sequence of UI selections are intuitive enough that after 20min you can do it almost without looking.

My understanding is they've been working on this combo for 10+ years. Newer models (since ~2018) have a full on touchpad instead of the wheel.

https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/tech/mercedes-mbux-in...

Unfortunately they got rid of all that in new models - e.g. the EQE has no more controller dial and all the buttons are now the cheap horrible capacitive buttons :/

I can operate basically anything by touch in the car other than the touchscreen.

This is what people don't seem to get...with a set of physical buttons, you can find what you're looking for just by feel, glance down briefly when it's safe to do so to make sure it's the button you want, then press it.

With a touchscreen, in contrast, you have to hover over approximately the location you think you want to press, and either hope you don't hit a bump before you have a chance to look down and make sure it's the right spot or look down immediately.

I put a touchscreen head unit in my car in 2016. If I drove more often I'd dump the touchscreen in a heartbeat.

The idea with the touchscreen controls is that the driver shouldn't really be using the touchscreen at all while driving except as a quick reference to the map.

You're not supposed to be using the screen to adjust your media while driving, there's steering wheel and voice controls.

You're not supposed to be adjusting the climate controls while moving, auto climate should just handle it. Why would I want to be distracted by needing to change the climate controls? I shouldn't have to adjust them while the vehicle is in motion.

I doubt that was actually the intention, and even if it was, we all know that's not how people actually use their cars.

Yeah, they drive while holding their phones on speakerphone while talking into it like they're about to take a bite out of a sandwich.

Other than volume and next track/station, just about any other media control is going to have my hand off the wheel for a bit and probably require me to look at what its doing even if its all just a bunch of buttons and knobs. Like what, change which folder I'm in? Change to a different playlist? Choose a different app entirely? None of that is going to be done by just feeling around the dashboard.

And as mentioned, I'd probably return any car that I have to adjust the climate more than once a quarter. Every car I've owned for over 20 years has been able to keep its climate consistent and comfortable without the need for me to make adjustments for months on end. Why would I want to be distracted making minute adjustments to the climate settings while I drive? Why would I want to have to change the mode or turn it to more heat or more cool or turn the AC compressor on or off while I drive? Shouldn't it just be able to figure out if the car is cold turn up the heat and if the car is hot turn on the AC compressor? Wouldn't it know the optimal way to cool itself? Shouldn't it be able to figure out the best fan speed to keep the climate as programmed ahead of time?

Honestly, why should I even have to tell my car to turn on the heated seats? I don't need to on one of my cars, it turns it on automatically when its cold outside.

> Every car I've owned for over 20 years has been able to keep its climate consistent and comfortable without the need for me to make adjustments for months on end

This doesn’t work when sometimes the sun is shining and sometimes it isn’t.

I think this is a very valid point. The car cannot detect that you are receiving sun rays through the windows. Making you feel much hotter than the ambiant air.

Sometimes you need to adjust the vent to blow in your face more directly, or set the climate control to cool the air further to offset the inconvenience.

> The car cannot detect that you are receiving sun rays through the windows.

I wouldn't get a car that doesn't have some kind of low emissivity tinting on it. Also, all my cars with screens could detect how intense the sun is overall. It can easily adjust.

It could detect it quite easily but this is the industry that thought they were doing you a favor putting a CD player in. There are so many awesome things cars could do but they don’t.

Not sure why downvoted.

For me, this is exactly why I do have to change the "climate control" target.

Last Sunday I spent 9 hours driving through on/off rain and sunshine.

The sun shining in adds significant radiative heat directly to my body. Climate control can keep the air temp constant(convection) but there is more to my personal comfort.

At least with Mazda, yes, the intention was to make driving safer. And just because some people make poor choices, doesn't mean manufactures should encourage poor choices.

If you’re distracted by adjusting the temperature you shouldn’t be driving at all.

as soon as you're taking your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel to look at or touch anything else you are distracted by definition, half a second is the difference between breaking fast enough to not kill someone in an accident.

The only people who shouldn't be driving are the people not aware of that fact.

Which people obviously do all the time to glance at their nav system just as in past times they'd have done to look at a map or written directions.

You’re supposed to look in your rear view mirror far more frequently than you would glance at your climate controls.

Taking my hand off the wheel and thinking about making the climate change changes my attention and focus, even if only slightly. It's better to not even have to think about it at all.

As the other commenter said, people who don't even notice when their attention changes probably shouldn't be driving.

That is a false binary. Drivers are inundated with distraction at every moment, from the rapidly changing world around them to idle thoughts arising inside their minds. A competent driver is situationally aware and chooses an appropriate moment to be intentionally distracted with a glance away to adjust the climate or radio.

The job of technology is to be extremely predictable and, ideally, multi-sensory.

> You're not supposed to be adjusting the climate controls while moving, auto climate should just handle it. Why would I want to be distracted by needing to change the climate controls? I shouldn't have to adjust them while the vehicle is in motion.

That auto climate thing does not work well for me. I end up messing with it so much because it can't keep me comfortable. The old style where I set it at some level between hot and cold and some fan level from 1 to 5 or whatever and it just does what I tell it works perfectly. Plus I can adjust it if I have to without looking at it.

Honestly, the broader problem that isn't directly car-related is that voice control doesn't generally work as an alternative to punching buttons (whether virtual or physical) and looking at a screen. You can reasonably do some fairly standard tasks using CarPlay such as answering the phone.

But you mostly have to have pre-setup entertainment options, for example. Not that this is really a new thing. People fiddled with radio stations while driving more than they probably should have back in the day.

And, yes, I do need to adjust climate controls now and then while driving although my vehicle does have fairly reasonable physical controls for that so it's not appreciably distracting.

Navigation systems themselves are something of a distraction although I'd guess that overall less so than glancing down at a map or directions on your lap.

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