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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

This is true for many things, but mostly the ones you use often while driving. Windscreen wipers, temperature, volume, yes. Much of that, however, can be done on the steering wheel already.

What annoys me is that many manufacturers are still adding as many buttons as possible as some form of luxury. Seat memory buttons in the door that you only use once per drive max, can easily be added to a screen (or smart, through key recognition). This adds a much larger number of options too. There are other options like this too that would be much better suited for screens than buttons.

I wish that, in stead of picking 'buttons or screens' as the options for cars, manufacturers will start looking at the best choice for specific functionality in stead of continuing how they are right now.

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Agree strongly. For things like vehicle status or configuration, the touchscreens are far superior to the old method of strange things like holding down the "unlock" button on the driver door for ten seconds and then pressing lock twice to enable flashing headlights when remote locking the car, or messing with the fuse panel for the same purposes.

Configuration settings like "always try bluetooth first for audio and just wait for it to connect instead of falling back to FM radio" are too subtle to be done by switches, and seat adjustments seem like another easy one where better UI would make a big difference.

At the same time, I think if it could be done securely [1] then having an app-based configuration would be much better; like configuring a consumer router or similar. You just use an app or a browser on your phone to make all the necessary static settings for your car, and the car then needs very little interactive UI.

[1] Although most likely it cannot be done securely. Cars are too mission-critical to move very far down the security/usability tradeoff curve.

I have nothing against an interface with menus, but nothing can beat physical buttons for input, IMHO. Put 4 pushbuttons down each side of a screen, have a set of hierarchical menu options that I can memorize, and that's the best of both worlds. Those buttons near the screen are fine to have overloaded functionality.

For critical things like all the normal vehicle functions, they should have dedicated controls that aren't overloaded.

Oh, and a big damn volume knob that shuts off the radio/entertainment system.

Seat adjusters need to be available from the OUTSIDE, not from the screen… otherwise a tall person cannot physically get into the far to adjust the seat after a short person has been driving, unless they remember to reset it.

That's easy to fix. Just add a camera that looks at the person who is trying to get in, estimate their height and perhaps other things like their body shape and arm lengths from the image, and automatically adjust the seat. On the luxury models also add a weight sensor on the floor in front of the driver, and as they step in estimate their weight and adjust seat firmness.

I am of course joking, but sadly I would not be surprised if at least one manufacturer actually tried something like that if they decided to fix the problem of the previous driver not resetting the seat.

Many of them make the seat position selectable based on the key fob used to unlock the car - this is order qualifying in anything I buy these days.

Seats controls need to be accessible from outside the car, before it is started.

Key recognition is great, unless you took the wrong key, or swap drivers...

My seat control is a physical button—a giant bar that allows me to slide the seat in less than a second. Or in the newer model, giant bar for horizontal and giant lever for vertical.

My in-laws' Jaguar has preprogrammed settings on the door, that take about 5 seconds to settle.

I chuckle every time I swap cars with my wife and savor the four seconds saved.

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