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You might die on a hill if you attempt to control a car using a touchscreen.
I’m really thankful that Audi rolled back whatever they were doing and gave me knobs and switched to deal with. Like in fucking planes and space shuttles !
And fingers crossed all this common sense gets enshrined in law soonish.
Why not have both
What cooks my god damn goose isn’t the stupid screen I’m going to break one day. It’s that they run buses for other systems through the radio so you can’t replace it with what you want.
Yep, infotainment and HVAC should have different control systems entirely. If your radio dies it should not mean the death of your car completely. And I consider not having access to your government mandated cameras and defrosters a dead vehicle.
Why are you going to break it one day?
I take trips to Tallinn. Beautiful city. I use the car share apps there for convenience. Pick up a car and park wherever. I get to try out many different cars, if only for a while. I hate touch screens. One even was set with brightness to zero and I was unable to change it.
Dials and knobs for everything please.
I had a 1988 Pontiac 6000. I took out the radio/tape unit and replaced it with a CD player. My goddam cruise control was disabled after that. They’ve been running other systems through the radio forever.
love how looking at phone screens is (rightfully) considered bad while driving, but then they just put a big fucking tablet on cars.
I hate how they don’t give you a choice in the matter… Just give me basic controls, then sell a bespoke android tablet that mounts in the car. I thought car companies love to push extras?
But if it just mounts in the car they can’t tell you that you will need a new car because your built-in tablet doesn’t get updates anymore.
Except they could be pushing a new tablet every few years. Like you need this tablet to unlock full self driving
No no no, they only push “extras” that are already included in the car so they can charge more for doing nothing. This requires doing something.
I prefer voice controls to either, but don’t have a strong preference between physical or digital because I end up looking either way. Subscriptions on the other hand can fuck right off.
I think the looking I do with manual controls is a quick glimpse to put my hand on the control. After that, I can adjust while keeping my eyes on the road.
I find with digital that I stare at it during the entire adjustment period.
Subscriptions do need to die though. Especially car subscriptions.
Yup yup yup. I’ll die before I buy a car with a touchscreen. I’ll get my damn motorcycle license first.
My partners car has a touch screen, but knobs dials and buttons for all the climate features.
The touch screen is just the infotainment stuff.
That’s about as far as I want it to go. I don’t need a large format display in my vehicle. I don’t want my speed, turn signal indicator, and climate controls on a massive display that takes up 1/3rd of the dash. Their car has a 8" or so, infotainment display… Great for Android auto/Apple carplay, with navigation so I can get my directions without having to meddle with my phone, or a clunky phone mount wobbling around.
But that’s where I draw the line. Just give me the fancy infotainment screen, leave everything else the way it is.
welcome to my world
Having a touchscreen to operate your car with is a safety hazard compared to having buttons and knobs.
Even just the bright light from it is a hazard.
I turned down my dash panel for the “plus lights” night mode (my car is a 2012 Honda civic coupe, so night mode is literally whenever I turn on the headlights) because it was so blindingly bright I couldn’t stand it.
I was in car with a friend with a Prius… not a super new one, but with the central touch center of shit and it never got very dim… it was always just this distracting light in the middle of the car. I literally would not be able to drive that car, my attention would be drawn to the light because I like dark. But then it also reflects off the windshield and shit and just nope.
Having buttons and knobs to operate your car with is a safety hazard compared to having voice controls.
Depends how well the voice controls work. I have been so frustrated with AI assistants’ inability to understand simple instructions while I’m driving that it has become a serious distraction at times.
When I’m driving, all the people I yell at are knobs
My Mazda had a nice combination of touch screen which disabled itself when the vehicle was in motion and you could then use the rotary control instead. Was really nice and intuitive with entirely separate AC, heated seats etc controls.
I have a Mazda like this. I absolutely hate it.
I have a small built-in touchscreen on the top of the dashboard which is visible in my peripheral vision while driving. But it turns off touch controls while the car is moving. And the physical controls are in the center console behind my manual stick, on the passenger’s side. So I have to blindly feel around for my knobs and buttons while driving, or take my eyes completely off the road to look down at my center console.
It would be safer if I could just tap the screen quick while keeping my eyes facing the road, versus trying to search for knobs down next to my passenger’s thigh.
I also hate that this newer model removed the mute button from my steering wheel. I used to be able to immediately mute my radio by pressing that button on my 2010 Mazda. But in my new 2017 Mazda, I need to find the tiny volume knob by my passenger’s thigh and slap that knob. I still have volume buttons on my steering wheel, but I can’t immediately mute by holding the down volume button. So I need to go searching for that knob, which is more time I’m not looking at the road.
My Mazda has the same controls and I’ve never really felt like they’re hard to find. The button layout makes a lot of sense and the large center wheel is easy to find so you can use it as a reference point to find the other buttons easily (I pretty much just use the home and music buttons and that volume knob).
I had a rental Mazda and I have to say, that rotary control is the worst combination of tactile and touch interface I have seen to date. Maybe that gets better after using it for 6 months, but I can more or less memorize touch interface control positions in that same timeframe and without the distraction of figuring out which element the rotary dial highlight moved to this time.
I would rather have had full touch than that monstrosity.
I enjoy it on my Mazda, find it super easy to use and safer than a touch screen. To each their own.
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My car is a 2024, and thank fuck it has knobs, dials, and switches.
All I want or need is Bluetooth
I recently had the brief joy of driving a small car without power steering. I never realized how much nicer the feedback is. You’d think that it would be a nightmare to park but the size of the car meant that it was still easier on the whole.
It’s fine when the car is moving, not so great at a stand-still.
Dry steering is bad for your tires anyways
Being able to feel controls instead of having to look at them while driving is key, but some of you take this to Luddite levels.
Dear Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
Unless you have specifically read up about the labor rights of Luddites you really dont know what you are talking about when you throw the word Luddite around (I know I didn’t)
“[T]he Luddites did indeed understand the advantages which mechanization would bring,” Raymond Boudon, a sociologist at Paris-Sorbonne University, wrote in his Analysis of Ideology, citing the work of influential historian Lewis Coser. But “their machine-wrecking was an attempt to show the owners of the new textile mills that they were a force to be reckoned with, that they had a ‘nuisance value’. By acting in this way, their main objective was to gain concessions from the employers.”
The Luddites weren’t technophobes, then. They were labor strategists.
“This strategic interpretation of the Luddite movement is confirmed by the fact that the workers often destroyed only those machines which were turning out faulty goods,” Boudon wrote. “It was still true, of course, that a worker who went on strike could easily be replaced by somebody from the army of unemployed people willing to be strike-breakers, at a time when nascent trade-unionism was harshly suppressed. Since machine-breaking brought the factory to a halt, it was not only a functional substitute for striking, it was also much more effective.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-labor-technophobe/
Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves. Their struggle has been tragically warped into a caricature when it is more relevant than ever.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right
Welcome to lemmy. AI bad. Cloud bad. Screens bad. Tesla terrible. Ad-based monetization the literal devil. Paywalls, the devil’s brother.
Do any of those things have redeeming qualities?
AI has uses when it’s not being rammed down peoples throats or used to plagiarize content (personal assistant/home automation type stuff is the first that comes to mind - I’d like to eventually set up a locally-hosted LLM based alternative to Alexa to control my house so I’m not relying on an internet connection for everything).
Cloud is an essential part of a robust backup strategy, and makes it easier for the average person to create a web presence.
Tesla, being an EV company, is still an important interim solution to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ICE vehicles until (hopefully) better public transit infra is built so people don’t need to use cars as much. Not to mention it was the kick-starter for other vehicle companies to make EVs.
Ads and paywalls: People gotta eat. You want to consume content that someone produces as their job? Pay them. If you won’t someone else will, thus advertisements.
Absolutely.
- AI can write boilerplate code and test cases with a failure rate so low that it saves a significant amount of time. It’s also good summarizing text, like a 1 month old back and forth support ticket. Probably other uses too, but those are the ones I use a lot.
- Cloud is a huge accelerator for any company that doesn’t want or can’t afford to hire dedicated experts. Plus for workloads with big peaks and valleys it is actually much cheaper.
- Screens show navigation, provide entertainment and allow changing complex setting much more easily than other UIs. (turning volume down is not a complex setting)
- Teslas have incredible performance per dollar (in a straight line) and are very fun to drive daily. Also their software and charging network are great. And are cheap to maintain (and to buy used).
- Ads allow content to be consumed without monetary exchange while still paying the workers creating that content in money instead of exposure.
- same for paywalls, journalism is very important for society and good journalists deserve a good paycheck. Paywalls allow to have well paid journalists without billionaires sponsoring (manipulating) and allowing people who don’t like ads to still have access to their work.
Get out of here with your nuance, don’t you realize you’re on the Internet?!
In all seriousness, thanks. I think what a lot of people tend to forget is none of these things are inherently bad. They’re just often misused and/or overused, typically due to the insatiable capitalist profit motive.
The main issue with these is their proponents have a lack of nuance.
I’d like to keep the Reverse Cam alongside the knobs personally.
My 2019 Kia seems to give the best of both worlds. I’ve got a small I think 10" display for reversing camera and Android Auto/Apple Carplay/radio and physical buttons and knobs for climate controls, volume, etc. the display is just big enough to be useful for maps, and Kia’s UI for the screen on the display is really nice with almost entirely white on black so it’s not distracting nor too bright at night and it really blends in when you aren’t looking at it while being there and ready for you when you are
same but that also just brings up another rant about modern cars. mine has surround view cameras -so you can see a birds eye view when parking. it’s really nice. but then why do I have to suction cup a dash cam right next to the built in camera and run a USB cable around my car? please just let us plug in a USB storage device and use the built in cameras as a dash cam.
On the other hand I can see why allowing arbitrary USB devices to be plugged into a safety-critical system wouldn’t be a good idea, particularly one that doesn’t get easy security patches.
USB video class is far from arbitrary
You’re not wrong, but in my case and presumably others there already are USB ports and relevant drivers for both playback of media files, and funny enough for applying security patches or other updates.
In practice I think the concern becomes most USB storage devices are not intended to be constantly written to, while vibrating from the car, and it would definitely destroy data and cause support complaints. But it’s still annoying all the hardware and most of the software I want is there and wouldn’t take that much more to do what i want… but instead if they ever do decide to let us use the built in cameras as a dashcam, I expect it will require replacing my entire car with a new model
In these heady days of internet porn, this sounds like such an innuendo
There’s an easy way to make everything sound dirty.
Just add a place name to any noun. Wheelbarrow isn’t much, but an Arkansas wheelbarrow? Sounds filthy.
St. Louis bagel…
Yeah, it works.
The Auchtermuchty Stepladder will change your life
Auchtermuchty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auchtermuchty
I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t something you came up with by random keystrokes.
Whaur the fuck did ye think The Proclaimers came fae?
I don’t want to drive a smart phone or have it drive me. Give me a car with a pre iPhone dash and Bluetooth and I am happy. I am hoping there will be a market for old people cars with real controls when the vehicles we drive now are no longer maintainable.
Backup cameras are required by law since I think it was 2015? But the trend of gigantic screen with no physical controls seems to be in a “will they/won’t they” kinda situation right now with some manufacturers flirting with the idea, some trying it then reverting, etc.
