European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls

This is a win for consumers, touch screens are bloody awful when driving and take away far too much of your concentration

Touch screens should not be used for any controls needed to operate a car. You can't use them without taking your eyes off the road.

Touch screen, Vibration feedback/Color change or not, means that you have to look at what your hand is doing and not on the road.

A physical button means you can keep your eyes on the road and find the right button with easy.

So let's be honest. At this point, touch screens are chosen by car makers because cost and not design. So essentially, safety is less important than cost for the car makers.

It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.

But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.

Touch screens are so dumb.

• AC controls, control surface heating heating/cooling (steering wheel, seat etc)
• Volume controls
• Turns, wipers, lights
• Fog lights

Basically everything you might touch during the drive should be physical.

The main reason why I didn't want high end packages for our last car was, that I am a cheap bastard. The second reason is, that I think touchscreens in cars are one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.

Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as "backup"

100% agreed! I don't want to take my eyes off the road while driving. Just let me feel for the right button

Personally I think that the following car functions should be mandatory physical controls - wipers, indicators, hazards, side/headlights, door locks, defogger / defroster, electronic parking brake. forward/reverse/neutral/park. And they should be controls that have fixed position in the car (i.e. not on the wheel) with positive and negative feedback.

And fuck Tesla or any other manufacturer that wants to cheap out on a couple of bucks by removing them. Removing physical controls has obvious safety implications to drivers who are distracted trying to find icons on a tablet.

I used to think virtual automation and touchscreens were the coolest thing, until I started to do work designing an industrial process and considering safety. And ever since, I am completely in favor of physical switches and devices instead of virtual. So much more secure.

I'd rather have a keyboard mounted on the steering wheel and operate the car with bash aliases.

BuT tHeRe Is VoIcE cOnTrOl!!!

Yes but if I have two friends on board that are talking I won't say

"SILENCE EVERYONE! I WILL NOW ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE NAVIGATIOM DESTINATION THREE TIMES WHICH WILL ALL FAIL!"

And zooming the map on skodas with touch screens is just THE WORST.

Tesla’s on-wheel turn signal buttons are criminally bad.

Great news. I wish they would also deduct stars if the heating/cooling controls are not physical too.

So one time someone broke into my car and tried to crowbar the radio out. They destroyed the whole dashboard, but failed to get the radio (it was nice of them to still take the face tho).

What this resulted in all of the controls hanging out by their wires. Everything still worked, I just had to sift through the exposed wires, pick up the proper control and twist the dial or push the button. It was ridiculous but still miles better than touch screen for these things.

For more thinking about this issue for software/hardware makers a good read is "Enchanted Objects" by David Rose.

iirc. He says we're in a 'Glass Rectangle' phase, where makers are stuck on screens, Like Xhibit in Pimp my ride - we put 22 screens in your car. They know how to "screen" and they use it the solution to all problems. It's like an infatuation, where you just can't see another way. There are entire sciences of Human Machine Interaction that explain why these designs are messed up, and the designers are aware, and have chosen otherwise.

2016 Actor Antov Yelkin who played Checkov is killed by his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, pinning him to his mailbox and fence. Because it didn't have a gearshift. It has a thing that looks like a shift but is a joystick.

My father's Avalon has touch sensitive HVAC controls. They're not touchscreen, it's a panel of plastic that has little labelled sections that have grooves cut around them as if they are buttons, but it responds like a modern touch screen. The temperature control is used by sliding your finger along. It's SO GODDAMN STUPID.

I only have old vehicles and I'm actually shocked that these things are operated via touchscreen on modern cars - I thought they were just for unnecessary infotainment stuff...

Tesla's Model 3 uses a touchscreen for damn near everything. Some things are buried and require multiple presses in different places on the screen. It looks really good, but the actual purpose and the fact that humans driving at potentially deadly speeds need to operate it seems to have been placed a distant second to safety when the thing was designed. Given who is in charge of Tesla it's not much of a surprise.

If their cheap-asses had actually done something other than cheapest possible implementation for the majority of input devices it might have been ok. Having driven several cars with touch input for various features the complaints I have are all the same:

1. too many menus with unintuitive directories that put what should be top-level systems several layers deep. IOW, I want to turn on the AC. I shouldn’t have to climb out of the Sirius menu then down 2-3 layers to turn on the AC and choose the ventilation configuration and temperature.

2. Horrible UI design. Things that need to be tapped/touched are either too small and/or too close together. You shouldn’t need to divert your attention to focus on a 1/4” square “OK” touch element when this should have a touch area minimum of a square inch so you can hit it without too much concentration. UI’s are too cluttered.

3. closely related to #2 - awful sensitivity of the screen. Small buttons that are hard to accurately hit are worsened by touch screens that don’t register input. Now you’re trying to accurately hit a patch of screen that is refusing to accept the tap, so now you’re further distracted and frustrated trying to get you music stream to play or whatever.

I don’t hate touchscreens, they can be useful, but manufacturers have implemented them at the expense of actually driving the car.

Thank you Europe!

Not sure how related this is but in my field, designing industrial control systems, each seperate physical button is about $100 added to the cost over a touchscreen. We call touchscreens HMIs just to be special and sound smart. I imagine the numbers are very similar for cars but I don't have data to back that up.

The first time I tried using android auto in a rental car I hated it. The damn thing would disconnect constantly and there was no safe way to restart or reconnect it while driving, I had to pull over somewhere. The car's screen controlled things like the radio and AC so I had to constantly take my eyes off of the road to adjust anything.

Good! I hate how modern cars have so few buttons.

Well duh. Even when they were introduced, touchscreens in cars got a lot of pushback. I’d much rather flip a switch or turn a knob for things I do daily, rather than futz three levels deep in a car maker’s software. They put things in there that really should be simple pushbuttons.

Fucking finally. Thank you.

I mean, no fucking shit.

We want buttons

I think the title is a bit misleading. AFAIK, Euro NCAP have no authority to tell car makers anything, but they do indirectly affect how cars are developed because getting high Euro NCAP safety scores are important.

This seems like common sense to me.

"Back"?

There are people who'd entrust their life to a touchscreen?

I, for one, would like to see single-function, physical switches for everything that isn't specifically infotainment. I want turn signals to be a single switch, and I don't want any other features integrated into that switch, and I want each individual module to be easily replaced.

As someone who relies on GPS, a doordasher I kinda think it should be only for multi media and maps. AC and other controls should be nobs. Also steering wheel controls

Imagine changing gear without feeling which gear you have/changed to.

the 2010s was a mistake

Europeans are hardcore, we use plastic dummys to crash test our cars, theirs can talk!

Im.on board with buttons, and touch screens should be guesture only.

Wonder if capacitive touch buttons qualify as 'physical' buttons. If not, VWs are going to need to make a lot of changes.

Thank god touch controls is why I keep buying used cars pre 2017

I'm watching an episode of Bluey with my kids right now and they're playing Pass the Parcel and Lucky's dad is trying to stop the music on his phone but his touch screen isn't working lol.

It’s the rotary shifter knobs and the AC controls buried in touchscreen menus that kill me

I have a 2002 acura mdx. The old console finally gave away and now I can't control air ventilation in my car. The only physical button I have is auto and defrost. So I'm either full blast heat or off. I hate it.

Now actually do something about the touchscreens they bring with them

No one ever requested screens instead of buttons. It's probably some BS some CEO came up with and forced the engineers to implement.

Does car with touch screen has no button for warning ?!

Imagine someone told you your stove has to have levers to be a stove and your gearbox had to be manual and your phone had to have buttons and oh wait they did for several years

You know what would save many more lives than car physical controls? Mandating car mode on phones.

I guarantee this will never happen. Manufacturers picked touch screens and capacitive buttons because they are cheaper to produce. There is no way they’re going back to physical controls.