Nobody wants touch-screen glove box latches

I continue to be genuinely shocked that we don't treat touch screens in cars the same way we do as phones in cars (that is to say, it is literally illegal to use them while the vehicle is moving in most places because the distraction is such a danger). Moving away from tactile in-car controls has to be among the more boneheaded things we've allowed that industry to do.

GM also has electronic primary door release mechanisms in their vehicles. So if the car has no power, you can’t open the doors from inside.

Granted, because of regulatory requirements there is STILL A MANUAL RELEASE… on the floor, near the chassis sill (and might be driver-seat only). So you save money going to electronic releases, but still have to put a manual one in anyways.

The glovebox is merely annoying (though I can think of edge case situations where it could lead to your death), but with the door release, there are documented instances where it HAS led to someone’s death: https://jalopnik.com/texas-man-and-his-dog-die-after-getting...

I don't want touch screens in cars period and I can't stand this trend of using them. I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.

Someone in the comments pointed out that not only is this terrible, you can only open the glove box while stationary.

I thought GM had jumped the shark when they started leaving the reverse lights on when you park, just to make sure people or cars nearby don’t know whether it’s safe to pass you in the parking lot. This is a whole new level of stupidity.

This is a gem (emphasis mine):

"The touch-screen-actuated glove box is terrible because it’s one of those examples where carmakers have found that they have the technology to do something, so they do it, without considering literally anything about what they’ve done. Did anybody want this? At all? It takes something that has never been a problem, opening a glove box, and added cost and complexity to the construction, and added time and inconvenience to the process. No problem is solved, but a fuckload of new problems are introduced."

Here's the gist: carmakers, as many other businesses -this can apply to pretty much every product-, need more bullet points to be shown in advertising, so they use technology to add every possible feature, including those that are technically useless but still could add points of failure because of their bare existence. I think there's no way out until people is taught how this works very early in their life, and I mean children at school, so they can use their wallets when time comes. I can't see this coming anytime soon, however, as our economy totally embraces advertising the useless.

Well how are you going to make Passenger Storage+ a $2.99 monthly subscription if the latch isn’t software controlled?

Is a robolatch cheaper, compared to a manual latch? Is there a cost saving for the manufacturer?

Next: glove box pro. 10 daily opens; lights up; no content restrictions; 4.99/month

one tangentially related extremely irritating “feature” of Teslas is automatic updates, which not only disable the car while they’re going on, but often rearrange the UI so you have to figure out where the buttons are all over again. it’s a flat out disgrace. you get into your extremely expensive car, ready to go, but no the car isn’t available because some dev team somewhere a few thousand miles away decided to push an almost certainly unnecessary change to YOUR possession. I don’t like this concept on mobile devices and PCs, but I despise it for cars

Can we make the steering wheel a touch screen too? Like a digital wheel you turn with your finger to steer the car. Wouldn't that be just super duper? Couldn't possibly go wrong.

It's worth watching the other few dozen seconds of the Cadillac video; not only is the glovebox overengineered, but so are the other doors on that car. Then again, it is a Cadillac, so "luxurious excess" is not surprising, but I'm not sure how having to go through that awkward indirection could be considered a luxury.

That's not entirely true. There is a SW / mechanical/ test & integration team somewhere who was employed due to this feature that I'm sure very much appreciated this feature. There is a product manager who got to add a line item to their list of accomplishments and a sales team lead show get to draft instructional material to all the dealers, again justifying his existence.

... which is to say, this is all very horrible.

I'm not looking forward to buying another car, since I've been hearing of a lot of criminally negligent human factors engineering for at least a decade, combined with increasingly invasive spying on people in their own cars.

Is there any decent automotive company remaining?

The reason they do this is simple, money. It is much easier for a manufacturer to produce a single screen that contains all the functionality that can be adjusted on the fly using software. The alternative (and the way it has always been) is early in a car conception, to design the cabin with the buttons layout, design the switches, find a manufacturer, test the switches, test the layout, repeat, etc… Plus if they find a flaw in the cars button design / layout late in the process, it becomes even more expensive to fix. Nowadays, car companies have an excuse to use screens, not only does it save them money, but they can disguise it under « modernism ».

Disclaimer, this is from what I heard and using common sense, but in might be completely wrong.

Humans are just apes looking for the newest color of banana. We already know a lot about human machine interfaces and safety and human attention, and yet we throw that all away to offer and get the new shiny toy that merely changed something and usually for the worse. The older you get, the more you realize why older people are so cranky about certain things. As you gain age and experience, you become aware of the reality that humans simply will not change for the better in the collective, and that we remain driven by emotional needs rather than the reason we pride ourselves on.

I read on another forum that there isn't even a manual release somewhere. I understand for security it's nice not to but maybe hide one _somewhere_ so at least you have some backup option in an emergency?

This is going to cost lives. Most people I know have their safety vests in the glovebox. Imagine if your car breaks down and you can't get the darn thing open/on the side of a highway?

Contrary to the author's belief, grocery store doors do not open when you step on a mat. They open due to change in incident light on a photoelectric effect sensor above the door.

It makes me so happy to think the Nobel committee, which was dominated by experimentalists, when considering Einstein's contributions to science, could only bring themselves to award him the prize for grocery store door openers.

Leaving aside the question of whether touchscreens make sense inside a car at all, I’m not sure how a control to open the glove box which is not situated on the actual glove box help? I mean, you probably opened the glove box to put something in or take something out. Once it is open, you would almost certainly physically reach inside it.

Easily the single dumbest decision in the Model 3 IMO.

I like physical buttons for many things.

But just to play devil’s advocate here: the benefit of the glovebox being software-controlled is that it enables features like PIN-protecting the glovebox contents, or Tesla’s “valet mode” where certain car features (including opening the glovebox) are disabled when you hand your keys to a stranger.

At first I thought this is about some extra functionality, like having an additional way of opening the glove box, or perhaps even locking it. I thought it's harmless, since that action wouldn't be performed too often. I never thought this would be about actually replacing the physical latch.

The author answers their own question. It's in the marketing research! /s

  Did they do focus groups for this feature? Did they get responses like these?

  “I hate how easy and quick it is to get the glovebox open. Can you guys solve that?”

  “Is there any way to make simple acts I’m used to doing a real fucking chore?”

  “How can I be sure every single tiny fucking thing on this car will be an expensive hassle to repair in 10 years?

  “If the battery dies, is there any way to fuck me over even more than normal? Like, you know, hard?”

  “Can you just smack the shit out of me over and over again with like a slab of roast beef, or is there some electromechanical and software solution you can integrate into the car for the same effect?”

But how am I going to keep my glovebox items safe while my car is earning passive income as a robotaxi?

This is on the same level as designing doors that are supposed to open with a button but shame your passenger and supposedly damage your seals if they use the highly obvious and intuitive latch instead of the button that looks like a window control.

I don’t mind touch screen in cars for things that are not critical during driving. Things that you need during driving should be physical controls.

For things like glove box latches and door latches, just simple mechanicals please.

Tesla has the same. Irritating.

This is a great feature for a leased car, or a car rented out through the manufacturer. This is not for someone who owns the car.

Car companies, like software companies, want to go to a subscription model.

From (the) experience(s of many, many people), I've learned that GM makes mechanically terrible cars. Digitizing a handle that doesn't even require a lock tells me that they're simply bad at design and build across many domains. So my misunderstanding is, why does anyone with enough money to finance a new car, ever, buy GM? What do people see in their cars?

I hate a lot of the touch screen controls in the Tesla - like AC controls. But the glovebox is actually pretty nice. Being software controlled means I can require a PIN to open it. Also, there's no handle so it doesn't even look like a glovebox is there. If someone breaks in they probably aren't getting to any valuables in the glovebox.

Big-touch-screen-only interaction is one of the things that keep me from buying a Tesla.

There’s the simplicity of Toyotas that keeps me attracted to them. Although when battery dies, you can’t open the trunk in newer RAV4s. So they’re going to shit as well.

I would buy a dumb cheap electric car in a heart beat.

I bet implementing the glove box control in this way simplifies the tooling/assembly somehow.

I was so looking forward to the Rivian suv ever since the truck came out, and then saw the first video of it where it requires navigating menues to AIM THE AIR VENTS.

That Rivian was so bad I feel like it should be illegal. Who the F comes up with this stuff?

Reminds me of an aggravating feature (or really lack thereof) in my new Prius. It has wireless charging, but requires a cable connection for CarPlay.

I hope I never meet a Toyota engineer in person, because it would be hard not to do something criminal to them.

Presonally I didn't like the response time. Just like the DVB-T takes more time to switch between channels.

When controlling the light, temperature or others from touch-screen, I need to wait those animations and a slight delay after touch the trigger.

I don’t want touch screen anything that doesn’t also at least have a manual release. I will continue to buy junker cars and fixing them up. Thanks Dad for teaching me how to fix my own cars (and YouTube has filled in the gaps).

The sensible thing would be to make it optional: Have a manual release latch that can be electronically locked, if you want to.

Want fast access, you got it. Want to lock the glovebox, you got that too.

I can’t help but wonder if/when such things will be leveraged into having glovebox subscriptions, with the unlock functionality being disabled if the subscription lapses

People raise their blood pressure for nothing. You could have both a touch screen glove box release and a discreet manual release for emergencies. It’s just for aesthetics.

This is bad, but what Tesla has done is much worse, not least because they will probably lead the way for bad decisions industry wide, and anything "novel" they do is probably a sign of things to come from other manufacturers trying to be "hip".

There is no longer anything useful on the dash above the wheel. No speedometer, odometer, battery level indicator, repair lights, nothing. All of it is integrated into the infotainment unit on the dead center of the dash. Similarly, there are no knobs or real buttons anywhere on the center of the dash; it's all touch screen. All of it. I wanted to moan about it the entire time I was in the car, but I didn't want to just complain about my friend's nice new vehicle.

The F-150 lightning I test-drove similarly has all of the climate control and music controls stuffed into infotainment center with no physical knobs or dials to be found. If you read online, you will also find that its infotainment center is notoriously slow. Otherwise, it's a very nice truck.

Tesla is basically the Apple of EVs right now. Leading the way in some really interesting technology and features while causing potentially irreparable long-term damage to the health of the industry overall (think storage-tier pricing and the removal of all but USB-C ports/headphone jacks).

Edit: found this video in the Twitter thread linked in the article 1. Actually what the Cadillac is doing here (particularly with the doors) is aggregious. Tesla has added an additional step to opening doors from the outside (you push your thumb in first and then grab the handle) which is something you can become accustomed to in one fluid motion. At least it looks kind of nice and is only mildly less convenient than traditional handles. The push-to-release-pull-side-of-door-because-theres-no-handle mechanism on the Cadillac is absolutely braindead.

Seeing this video and multiple other new cars in person, I've also noticed a disturbing trend of changing the hatch opening mechanism. Before: manually open the hatch assisted by hydraulics which prop the door open until manually closed. Now: automatically open the hatch (slowly) on a button press and close it (slowly) on a button press. What's the problem here? Apart from being actually worse UX once the novelty wears off, the second mechanism is much more failure prone over the lifetime of the vehicle. The nice salesman at the Ford dealership actually told me off for trying to manually close the frunk on the Lightning because he was afraid I'd break it!

My honest opinion is that these changes all point in one direction but cut two ways. 1. Increase revenue by increasing standardization and eliminating many pieces from the manufacturing process (at the expense of UX/longevity) and 2. Mitigate the lost recurring revenue due to how much more reliable EVs are than ICEs by introducing new failure modes masked as modern features for plausible deniability.

1. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/sirCpkqvpE0?feature=share

I do! Digital pin protection and slick design without handle is an upgrade for me.

This is the worst feature I have seen in a car. Or are there any that are worse?

Amen! Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

I like it. It means if someone breaks into the car they can’t get into the glove box. Also, with a Tesla, the car is never off so you don’t need to turn the car on again to get access to it.

Why not write to NHTSA or/and NIST?

Prob as bad as touch screen steering

Courage

All these problems are caused by the mindless American consumer. If you look at a hardware review for absolutely anything tech related, it will be some absolutely useless 1 paragraph of content surrounded by 3 paragraphs of non useful information, and then some type of sponsor insert, like a pitch, or an Amazon referral link to the product. If you shop for LCDs, there is not even one website from 2000-2023 that provides real reviews (even tft central never says anything bad about products that have pushed the envelope of lowering quality, because the author is naturally biased against that due to his conflict of interest along with not really knowing what he's talking about). The most contentful review will merely talk about how good the build quality of the stand of the monitor is. If you go on whatever forum for discussing some subset of technology, you will get banned if you point out 2 issues with some product, (due to the fanboy effect, not claiming a conspiracy here).

Continuing from that last sentence, a big part of the problem is that the Christian religion is all but replaced with a corporate equivalent. It's now plausible to claim someone is racist and homophobic if they don't like Apple products. This is a huge part of the issue. There is almost no criticism in media about technology. On any nerd social internet corner, you'll have a bunch of burger eating slobs who do exactly what I complained about: You'll explain that this toaster is bad because it smells like burning plastic and has holes in it that drop bread crumbs all over your counter which get blown around the kitchen. They'll respond by saying, "how dare you insult this prestigious company that only existed for 5 minutes, they are my favorite. I have never actually tried another product but this is the best because I bought it and it had a shiny thing on it and I felt so good after this purchase". Thanks to this social environment, it's basically impossible to get a good review of any product what so ever on the internet. 99.9999% of "Nerd culture" is actually just about buying stuff. Any time I want to buy something I expect to take days out of my time just to find a product that isn't severely crippled so badly that the mindless consumer will complain about it (on 1/20 review sites). Don't get me wrong, this isn't an internet problem. Most people IRL hold the same mentality.

Vehicles have all the garbage you'd expect for this demographic:

  - ECU with shoddy and fraudulent software (dieselgate, uConnect, unintended acceleration)
  - LEDs that flicker worse than a CRT (these are actually dangerous as at night you can't immediately tell the position of a car within a split second, which goes to show how much shits regulators give, "at least they saved a penny and some carbon emissions (TM)")
  - Terrible inputs with issues like being touch screen, horrible debounce, etc
  - Cheap, vain, lack of taste, glossy paint that easily sells to idiots who like shiny things and they'll even pay extra for it despite it being worse in every way
  - All kinds of dangerous half working gimmicks around "steering for you" which are especially easy to upsell to idiots
  - Spyware that phones home

A conversation that should have happened during the development of this car, but didn't:

"Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu? Because that would be inconvenient, unintuitive, and doesn't allow quick access?

Then why the fuck would you do this with anything?"

?

If you don't want it don't buy the car? I fail to see the issue.

I can fully relate to the criticism expressed, but does the article have to be that filled with expletives? I would argue that it could appeal to a far wider audience if the writer would be able to find a way around this crude use of a language. Less is more.

I understand that this is a rant about a niche feature but you know what we really should stop doing right now? We should stop producing giant piles of metal with four weels weighting more than 2 or 3 tons. No matter what stupid options they have, SUVs and big cars and trucks are a total nonsense. Sadly they are slowly becoming the norm. We should keep our vehicles under a ton so that we stop wasting so much of our precious energy moving these f-ing tanks on the road. Roads that we pay for and that are decaying faster and faster the more we keep buying them. Not to mention car accidents involving those monstrosities...

Most product decisions represent a tradeoff. The tradeoff the author doesn't mention is one of a clean look versus ease of use. The author also doesn't mention how frequently they actually open their glovebox.

From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.

A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.