Around 10 years ago, I started looking into buying a new car. I couldn't believe the number of cars that switched to touch controls even 10 years ago. It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving. I refused to buy any car that replaced physical buttons with touch controls 10 years ago and I still have this rule today.
Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights. You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights. Furthermore, the same car will have yellow signal lights in the front and side. So yellow signal lights in front and side, red in the back. Just make it all yellow for turn signal!
> It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving.
It is likely that neither safety nor ease of use were part of the automaker's "thought process".
It is much more likely that a first misguided "designer" created the first touch panel control and somehow sold it to "management" as being "futuristic" and/or "ahead of the competition". And once the first car model arrived with one, the rest, like firefox to chrome, felt the need to play the imitation game for fear of being seen as not as "trendy" or "futuristic" as that other guy. I.e., purely the "fashion trend" aspect.
Then, as they proliferated, the reduced BOM costs from removing every other previous mechanical control was reverse justified as the reason for continuing to add them to ever more car models.
My understanding is that the real driver is in being able to decouple the design of the controls from the rest of the interior design. I read somewhere that being able to design those in parallel with fewer dependencies makes a significant different in getting the car into production on time.
Yep. Putting as much of your UX as possible in one place makes product development a LOT more efficient. It doesn't always make the product better, though.
There are other reasons of course - planned obsolesence is a big one. Why would they want cars to work after the primary owner is done with it? With software-everything they can lock the car to the first 3 or 4 owners, and then remotely kill it.
It doesn't even have to be actively disabled, just stop providing the replacement head unit as a part because "we don't have that software anymore".
There's a simple selling point to touch panels that most people here seem to be missing: it decouples the software/firmware from the hardware.
Car manufacturers want to be able to change cars after they are sold. This can be in the positive via OTA updates that fix firmware issues or in the negative by providing "subscription" features that provide a passive income beyond the initial sale. Tesla has been paving a path here with its grandiose claims of "full self-driving" and industrial manufacturers like John Deere have been experimenting with bringing smartphone-style DRM and rent-seeking to motor vehicles. Replacing as many "hardcoded" physical controls with flexible and fungible virtual controls is a logical part of the transition.
Why bother producing five different physical "editions" if you can just produce one and then downgrade it in four different ways by gimping the firmware or disabling controls in the UI? This way you can also upsell the features later or put them in a subscription model.
It's the same reason why headlights are white and taillights are not (unless reversing, in which case the tail becomes the head temporarily, and thus white reversing lights.)
I know Technology Connections complains about it all the time, but I don’t feel like he’s even made a case, he just asserts over and over “and we ALL agree it’s awful” as if he asserts it strongly enough it will become true.
Why is it a problem? How is a red blinker actually measurably worse than an amber one?
I have never had any sort of issue interpreting a blinking red taillight as turning? With red, you can more easily tell the direction of travel and the aesthetics of a single color are far nicer. I frankly don’t see the problem.
Commenter a couple levels up says you can’t see red blinkers in the sunlight? I don’t think that’s true on any measurable level, amber is a far closer match in hue to sunlight than red.
"A 2008 US study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggests vehicles with amber rear signals rather than red ones are up to 28% less likely to be involved in certain kinds of collisions,[81] a followup 2009 NHTSA study determined there to be a significant overall safety benefit to amber rather than red rear turn signals,[82] US studies in the early 1990s demonstrated improvements in the speed and accuracy of drivers' reactions to the stop lights of vehicles ahead when the turn signals were amber rather than red,[76][83][84][85][86]"
Whoever wrote that section of the Wikipedia page either didn’t read the cited documents or heavily cherry-picked.
The cited document for that “up to 28%” actually states that a first analysis found amber lights leading to a reduction in being struck “between 3 and 28%” Quite a range of uncertainty.
The very same document also states that in their second analysis they found no correlation between signal color and odds of being struck.
Another one of the cited documents goes so far as to say
> Richard Van Iderstine: We have studied the crash involvement of vehicles having yellow rear turn signal lights versus red ones. With our data, we have found it challenging to prove that yellow is better than red.
Based on the actual text of the citations I’m inclined to believe there’s very little difference.
And I don’t see how there could be. The only practical difference I see between a red signal and amber signal is that the signal might ever so briefly interpreted as a brake light activating before the first cycle completes. The course of action of the driver behind in either case is to slow down, so it’s a distinction without a difference in action.
So a red light turns on. What does it mean? For the next 0.5 s you don't know. Maybe it will turn off, maybe it won't. In the meantime, you have delayed your braking action and decreased your margin of safety. Or you have started braking for no reason, endangering people behind you (and yourself).
> It boggles my mind just how car makers thought it was safer/easier to have touch in a car while one is driving.
Does anyone actually think that though? Or was it considered “good enough” in light of its other benefits like reducing costs, reducing BOM, eliminating part design work, reducing wiring complexity, adding flexibility and customizability, (potentially) increased reliability, making it easier to jam the multitudes of controls and options a modern car has into a more usable and understandable interface, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, when I bought a new car, one of the selling points was the manufacturer was one of the few to still offer physical control and navigation of the touch screens (in fact the touch functionality is completely disabled at any speed faster than 5 mph). But I don’t think “safer and easier to use while driving” has ever been the driver for touch interfaces in cars.
I would the main driver was economics. It would be easier and cheaper to manufacture one big screen in the middle compared to a bunch of physical controls with wiring.
Also makes it easier to change things later in the design if you do not have a bunch of physical controls to move.
Do not forget the massive "tablets are the future of computing" hype because Apple released a thing. Touchscreens were super cool by association. It was all pretty stupid. I say that as someone who creates mostly software for touchscreens... using keyboard and mouse because they are much better input devices. You just need the space and the budget for them.
> Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights. You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights.
I'm also starting to see really thin - single narrow LED strip - turn signals that are barely visible next to the much larger headlight nearby.
are you me? I did the exact same thing in roughly the same timeframe. Went to a toyota dealership, when I realized all the vehicles were touch I asked if I could get one without and they told me they don't do that anymore.
I walked out and just continued driving the corolla I had (still have it to this day). When I needed a minivan I purchased an older honda odyssey and fixed it up.
> You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights
I can't say that I've ever had trouble seeing the red turn signals in the sun. Being able to see them in the sun from a few hundred feet away is legally required in most, if not all, states.
Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights. You can barely see the red light in sunlight and it's harder to tell the red light from brake lights. Furthermore, the same car will have yellow signal lights in the front and side. So yellow signal lights in front and side, red in the back. Just make it all yellow for turn signal!