One of the best features of switching from Android to an iPhone is the physical mute switch. Whenever I&#x27;m going into a meeting, I can mute my phone without taking it out of my pocket. With Androids (At least, version 6 from when I left) you have to take it out and go through all the separate volume menus. It was so refreshing to have the confidence that my phone wouldn&#x27;t vibrate or disturb others during a meeting.

The situation is more nuanced than &quot;touchscreens are bad&quot;; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.It&#x27;s fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn&#x27;t be configured more than once by any given owner.Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls. Really, you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.But yes, all controls that a driver would want to use while the vehicle is in motion should be controllable with hardware controls that can be located and operated tactilely.

&gt; Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad ideaTouch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls.The only time they&#x27;re an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.

Thank you, Honda!Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea (unless the vehicle is stationary, and even then...)

the industry: improve usability or save $0.20.  hmmm, touch choice.  good bye, hardware buttons!

BMW and Mercedes have always had physical dials to control the infotainment system.

Bout time this started happening.  Now, the rest of the industry just needs to follow suit.

I love the Command Center in my Mazda. I can switch modes, change content, many other things, all without looking at the knobs. Voice controls using Android Auto makes it even better, but I do not use it much since the knobs do a great job. I never use the touch screen.

Since peaking in 2015 Mazda is not growing. They are steadily losing market share over the last 10 years. They make attractive cars, but they bet on pretending that they are a &quot;premium&quot; brand and priced themselves out.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carsalesbase.com&#x2F;us-mazda&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carsalesbase.com&#x2F;us-mazda&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autonews.com&#x2F;sales&#x2F;mazdas-complicated-journey-premium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autonews.com&#x2F;sales&#x2F;mazdas-complicated-journey-pr...</a>

My Mazda3 has no touchscreen controls and I am very happy with that.

Yep, Mazda were the most vocal about rejecting the touch screen trend, and Honda and Toyota are losing a lot of customers to Mazda who have been producing the best cars in their class in the last several years so it makes sense that they are jumping on the bandwagon.

Link [1] to HN discussion around the Mazda announcement[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20200335" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20200335</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motorauthority.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motorauthority.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...</a>A more in-depth article last year on why Mazda is doing this.

I have a 2013 Accord with a touch screen (bought it used and it&#x27;s what came with it) instead of button controls. The latency on the screen is terrible and my father&#x27;s Acura RDX which does not have a touch panel is much more user-friendly. I would love if more manufacturers started to put more analog controls back into their cars, but kept the non-touch screens for info display&#x2F;backup cameras.

I&#x27;m in the same boat with my 2019 ridgeline. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Most days, I don&#x27;t even have to look at the touchscreen much less interact with it.

I just got a 2020 Civic.  There are touch screen control, but volume, music, climate control (up and down, not which vents), tuner, cruise control, and a number of other things are all physical buttons and knobs.  I mostly have Android Auto up with music and map going on the touch screen while actually driving anyway, so more physical interfaces are a-ok by me.

I&#x27;m curious to know if the buttons are in the base model or are an upgrade.

I have a 2015 Fit (Jazz in the not US), and it has the +&#x2F;- on the touch screen, but also physical buttons on the steering wheel. I guess the compromise is that the driver doesn&#x27;t need to use the touch buttons because they have the ones on the wheel, and the passenger can take their eyes off the road.

My 2017 Honda had a dial for adjusting the volume (it could also be pushed in to switch off).The issue with new Hondas is that switching off&#x2F;on the air conditioning, or air flow&#x2F;fan speed, has to be done via touch screen. They do have dials for temperature control and a button to bring up the Climate UI.

One of the major changes between the 2018 and 2019 Honda model years was the addition of a physical volume knob on the main touch screen. Evidently this was one of the biggest complaints  and they actually listened.

Funny coming from Honda. My parents own a 2017 (I think) Civic and the only way to adjust volume is by tapping +&#x2F;- on the touchscreen. It&#x27;s the most unusable volume adjustment I&#x27;ve ever experienced. It was completely unusable with a glove in the winter.So while most other companies only implemented touchscreen controls for secondary features Honda did it for the most widely used one. Now they are backtracking 100%, go figure.

It&#x27;s interesting, when I had my Windows phone and linked it with my 2014 Ford Fiesta which had Microsoft Sync, it was incredibly fast, responsive and a joy to use. Once you got the format of your queries down, it was super easy to use. They had a button on the wiper knob. Press it, wait for the beep and your&#x27;re off and running. It synced up instantly. As soon as your phone was connected via bluetooth, you were good to go.I had a text conversation with my GF back and forth for almost two hours, just by using the speech to text recognition capability of the Sync in my Fiesa, it was really amazing to me how well it worked.My 2016 Toyota Corolla has something similar and pairs with my iphone and its a total nightmare. it takes literally ten minutes for it to sync up. That&#x27;s after the phone has already been connected via Bluetooth. The command queries don&#x27;t often work, you have to repeat them several times, and then after three of four times of saying the same thing over and over, you finally just give up. I&#x27;m not sure if its just with the iphone, but it really does suck.

&gt;My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car&#x27;s audio system, they suckUsing Siri is more dangerous than driving and texting:&quot;Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-using-apple-carplay-impairs-drivers-reaction-times-more-than-alcohol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-u...</a>Touchscreens should be banned in cars. I bought my car without any for that reason.

Voice command is unreliable.Even human to human level, every safety critical application rely on voice commands has to implement very rigid and strong standards and rules on human speech.

My car has onboard voice controls, but, unlike Siri via the car&#x27;s audio system, they suck. Recognition is slow and unreliable enough that I never bother, and if I did, the cognitive overhead would be unacceptably high anyway. They&#x27;d have done better not to bother implementing them at all and instead just offload that work to the driver&#x27;s paired smartphone, which for a sedan that listed $32k new, it&#x27;s very reasonable to assume will be present.

When it comes to it, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s as bad. In a manual car one hand is often off the steering wheel and that&#x27;s not detrimental.

This is a great example of when &quot;perfect is the enemy of good&quot;.Humans have pretty good spatial reasoning (proprioception); the notion that touch controls should replace tactile well-spaced controls is dependent on the fact that both senses (sight, spatial awareness) are uncontested.I would argue the point that sight is already in-use and must not be interfered with, if there&#x27;s an alternative that does not use the same resources.I think of it like hardware acceleration and parrelelisation; the brain has a hardware accelerator for sight, but only one, and has a bunch of cores ready for other tasks, and those other tasks can happen in parallel.

Taking your hand off the steering wheel isn&#x27;t so bad.  It&#x27;s loss of attention, even for 1 second, that&#x27;s extremely dangerous.  Touch screens make you look away from the road.  Knobs and buttons do not.  However, jamming them all into the steering wheel may then cause the same problem, as if there&#x27;s too many things in the same area you&#x27;d have to look down to find what you&#x27;re looking for.

I&#x27;m not at all convinced that voice recognition are better or safer than well designed physical controls.

Taking one hand off the wheel is nowhere near as bad as taking your eyes off the road. With physical knobs, I can use muscle memory to reach out and adjust them without taking my eyes off the road.

Having it on the dash rather than the steering wheel also allows the passenger to operate the controls, which is probably the safest way to do it.

Steering is a &quot;good enough&quot; problem outside of extreme driving conditions whereas in driver attention every bit of eyes-on-the-road counts.

That&#x27;s actually the approach Ferrari uses:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.app.goo.gl&#x2F;KdEV4qWFEHouDEq28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.app.goo.gl&#x2F;KdEV4qWFEHouDEq28</a>

&gt;&gt; Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better?Yes. Most drivers are able to drive using one hand for a short period of time. 
Not so with eyes off the road.In fact, it&#x27;s a requirement in most countries where stick shift is the norm.

Some cars already do. My car has buttons on the steering wheel which allow you to navigate menus, control the radio, etc. As well as paddles to control over functions. The problem is if you are not on a straight road those controls become virtually impossible to use safely. Whereas if I quickly need to change the volume or even mute the radio I can do so one handed without even glancing at the volume dial on the radio and still steer the car safely.

Hand, not hands.Also my steering wheel has both. I can do everything by feeling without my eyes leaving the road.

Yes, taking one hand off the steering wheel is much better than taking your eyes off the road. Let&#x27;s be honest here, we&#x27;re not driving F1 cars so we don&#x27;t actually physically need to be with both hands on the wheel 100% of the time, but it can take only second of us not looking at the road and we could be hitting someone&#x2F;something and be dead (or we could kill that someone that we&#x27;ve just hit).I really, really love to drive, I think I&#x27;m one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there&#x27;s nothing else that comes close to it.

Having actually used voice controls in a car, it is worse than taking one hand off the steering wheel. It is also worse than a touch screen interface. It really is the worst of all options.Because they suck at recognition.I&#x27;ve noticed the mental effort I spend in trying to formulate a voice command that the car (or even phone) will understand is significant - and that almost none of my brain is being used for driving. The likelihood of it not recognizing what I said is not low. With tactile buttons, it&#x27;s almost automatic. I don&#x27;t spend any time thinking. I know where the buttons are, and my finger is good at finding it.On the few occasions where I&#x27;m not sure where my finger landed, I can still slowly move my finger to an edge and start counting. I can do this over several seconds. Often while doing this I have to attend to an event on the road, and it&#x27;s trivial to do so: I pause my finger search, attend to the event on the road, and then resume. So even if it takes 10-30s to find my button (very rare), it can be done with almost no loss of attention on the road. The same goes if I need to pause to listen&#x2F;respond to what someone else in the car is saying.Contrast that with voice recognition: If I have to pause to attend to anything on the road, the recognition system assumes I&#x27;m done talking. This adds more mental stress (maybe it will execute the wrong command? In any case I&#x27;ll have to start over).Now I&#x27;ll go further and make an even stronger claim: Even if voice recognition becomes almost perfect (better than humans), it will still be a greater cognitive load to use voice recognition. For me, changing stations on the radio or adjusting the volume or adjusting the climate control is pretty automatic. The cognitive load of finding the preset station is virtually none. Whereas just formulating the command verbally - even to another human where I wouldn&#x27;t worry about voice recognition - takes more effort. Perhaps verbal skills are tied to the vision in the brain and tactile senses are not? I wonder if any studies have been done on this.

I do not like button on steering wheels. I drive at 10-and-2 so unless I know where the damn button I&#x27;m looking for is, I have to move my hands to look under them on the steering wheel. I have a Ford where all the buttons are mostly the same.If you forced me to have them, I&#x27;d prefer something like a d-pad on each side because they are easy to locate without looking and intuitive to select. Critical controls should be stalks, IMHO. I can&#x27;t use cruise control in the car I&#x27;ve owned for six years without looking at the steering wheel, but I test drove a Subaru, which I haven&#x27;t owned for like 9 years, and immediately remembered how to operate the cruise stalk.

Voice controls are worse than texting:&quot;Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-using-apple-carplay-impairs-drivers-reaction-times-more-than-alcohol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-u...</a>

Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better?Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.

I&#x27;m hoping they take up some kind of googles or periscope like interface.

Honda cars already have built-in voice controls, plus Siri (and I&#x27;m assuming OK Google) if your phone is plugged in.

Yes but they&#x27;re uselessly complex. I&#x27;ve owned a top-of-the-line Ridgeline with voice control for over a year and I still don&#x27;t remember any of the sequences of specific commands it recognizes.Any car needs to be connected to a central server where the processing occurs. Useful levels of voice recognition just aren&#x27;t going to happen inside the car.

If they are as good as the ones in my Nissan, they are effectively worthless.

hondas have had voice controls for ~20 years. they&#x27;re in e.g. the 2004 acura tl. simple voice controls are cost effective and already implemented.

My 2007 Honda already has voice controls. Never use them.

Now would be a good time, there are very few of us who use the engine disconnect pedal these days.

I don&#x27;t know of any teenagers who re-wired that switch to cut off the license plate lights....no, none.

I&#x27;m still waiting for the convenient floor-mounted headlamp dimmer switch to come back.

Exactly - touchscreen offer no unique tactile feedback you can associate with an individual action. Also when the screen is multi use depending upon options then you really handicap the muscle memory and with that, cause distractions.However, I do feel HUD display tech is one area in which could do with some love as would compliment and be less distracting over a screen located away from the drivers view of vision.

I like physical controls better, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a totally realistic contrast. Neither touchscreens nor knobs necessarily demand you look. I&#x27;ve known lots of people who looked while using physical buttons, and I can do my common touchscreen tasks in my car (e.g. switch to Bluetooth, hit play or pause) without looking. I suspect most people will look in both cases.

not obvious to you. I suspect younger generations won&#x27;t have much of an issue with this, similar to how millenials learned how to utilize google search easily while it confounded their parents

Voice control is like trying to use a command line interface that comes without any documentation or completions.

In a car it&#x27;s even worse because you have to tell everyone in the car (or on the phone) to stop talking, give your command, wait for the confirmation and then everyone can continue talking.

Voice control sucks IMO, even though a lot of people now grow up with Alexa and similar and adapt to the technology. Why does it suck, just like some &quot;smart&quot; buttons? Because it&#x27;s not obvious what it can do. You have to learn the vocabulary it understands and its other limitations (tone etc.). For example, I tried to get my Tesla to text one of my contacts recently and failed. I didn&#x27;t know whether it just didn&#x27;t understand me or was unable to. Good UI are obvious and don&#x27;t require you to memorize secret capabilities.

I always hunt down and hit the “factory reset” menu option on every car I rent, though. If you don’t, you never know what weird settings the previous users have changed.I also un-pair all the hundreds of paired bluetooth phones, if the reset hasn’t already done that. I often rent cars where the address book is full of names and numbers from previously paired phones.

The previous BMW one is pretty good and requires 0 configuration, at least in Spanish. I haven&#x27;t tried the new one and my accent is very clear though.It has few functions like call X or go to Y but in my experience, it doesn&#x27;t do that many things but makes them very well.

&gt; I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.They all suck and they’re literally not workable for rentals. Nobody will waste an hour configuring a rental car’s VA on departure.

This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute.Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?

That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.

Modern time developments: high tech high pace revolution for powerful and automated delivery of making the user miserable.Showing off without sense, basically.

You just gave me flashbacks to renting my first Audi and not being able to leave the lot for a good 15 minutes before I could figure out what the hell was going on. Audi sponsored the whole thing but it backfired because I would NEVER drive one again after that, or recommend to anyone - what happened to cars?Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it&#x27;s all located on one panel.

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner&#x27;s manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--allowing the car (me) to drive off the edge of the map--and didn&#x27;t allow me to move the map, to re-center by touch, while the car was in motion, instead presenting an alert saying that the action was unavailable while the car was moving. As I was driving in an unfamiliar city, this issue forced me to stop several times so that I could see the map surrounding the car, it was simply horrible.To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I&#x27;d think I had tamed the user preferences, the &quot;other&quot; set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons.Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect.Just give me a dedicated knob.

It&#x27;s started working pretty well on my Tesla. I can tell it to set the thermostat, turn on specific heated seats, play music, call or text someone, etc. It&#x27;s not perfect but it gets better every update and we get an update at least once a month if not more.

Voice control still isn&#x27;t there yet. Siri frequently thinks I&#x27;m talking to her when I say &quot;hey [kid&#x27;s name]&quot; — despite the fact that my kid&#x27;s name shares zero letters with &quot;Siri&quot;, either in English or in IPA.This is pretty surprising&#x2F;disappointing, considering that the &#x2F;s&#x2F; sound is pretty distinct, and considering that I did the &quot;hey Siri&quot; training when I got my phone.

Thinking of voice-activation in a car in lieu of analog manual controls misses the point - perhaps you weren&#x27;t advocating for it as a replacement, but the article above seems to.There are multiple points of failures for a voice-control only interface for a high-speed moving vehicle:1. Problems with NLP, and needing to adjust oneself to the proprietary format of this particular car&#x27;s voice recognition grammar&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;parsing&#x2F;etc. (discussed elsewhere in this thread)2. Loud location (driving by a jackhammer)3. Female voices [1]4. AAVE voices [2]5. Immigrant voices [1]Some argument can be made that 3-5 could be improved on with larger training sets. Given that we&#x27;re still working off of much of the same recording equipment that we developed in the early 20th century, this is only true up to a point in regards to #3, since it&#x27;s difficult to calibrate higher pitched &quot;noise&quot; out and keep higher pitched voices in when they&#x27;re at a similar range.Even assuming all the above problems are solved, there are still the cases of someone losing their voice temporarily due to illness, or someone speech-disabled but otherwise able-bodied, and the cases of a computer malfunction in the car itself that causes voice recognition to break. I was in such an incident myself quite recently, where a rented Mini Cooper&#x27;s onboard computer made it appear that the engine was overheating (red hot engine symbol) and that I must cease driving immediately lest the car explodes. After the car was off, the computer malfunctioned so severely that attempting to turn the car on only resulted in a light-up display of every error message the car had.All that to say - voice controls are not a suitable replacement for standard knobs and dials, and the latter should always be available as a reliable back-up method for operating a car.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;voice-recognition-still-has-significant-race-and-gender-biases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;voice-recognition-still-has-signific...</a>
[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;African-American_Vernacular_English" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;African-American_Vernacular_En...</a>

I love the big knobs and switches on my 2013 Honda Fit. They are big and chunky so it&#x27;s easy to tell the difference between the vent and the temperature on the AC. Everything about it is simple and ergonomic. Although I kind of wish I went with the manual instead of the automatic sometimes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cars.usnews.com&#x2F;cars-trucks&#x2F;honda&#x2F;fit&#x2F;2013&#x2F;photos-interior" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cars.usnews.com&#x2F;cars-trucks&#x2F;honda&#x2F;fit&#x2F;2013&#x2F;photos-in...</a>

Our 2008 Honda Civic (EU-spec) was similarly well-designed. Controls you were likely to use while driving (temperature&#x2F;windscreen-clearing, radio, hazard lights, etc.) were raised up closer to your eye-line[1]. It was a really ergonomic &quot;cockpit&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autocar.co.uk&#x2F;sites&#x2F;autocar.co.uk&#x2F;files&#x2F;styles&#x2F;gallery_slide&#x2F;public&#x2F;1621111519575581600x1060.jpg?itok=98GkS5IY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.autocar.co.uk&#x2F;sites&#x2F;autocar.co.uk&#x2F;files&#x2F;styles&#x2F;g...</a>

I drive a 2010 Honda Jazz (Honda Fit in the US I believe) and I love it.Not only does it indeed have buttons, but good buttons as well. Clicky where needed, rubbery where appropriate, with the righ amount of resistance etc.Just like the iPhone always has the nicest buttons of any phone. It&#x27;s a little thing that makes using it a pleasure.

Voice controls are a living hell with kids in the car.

Voice controls are nice. Except when you get a sore throat. I&#x27;m not talking about disabled people, people with funny accents (everybody speaks English of course and if they don&#x27;t, they at least speak one of the five other languages we proudly support) and people with non-standard timbre of voice, also.

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

&gt; &quot;Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature.&quot;That&#x27;s why there are so many high-end phones with lots of buttons.

If your metric is safety, control, and effectiveness, there is not an argument. Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature.

&gt; What if there are legitimate arguments for bothWhat if you made one?

What if--and stay with me for a moment--what if it&#x27;s good for different manufacturers to have different approaches to the problem, giving people the option to choose Honda for buttons or Tesla for touchscreens?What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it&#x27;s good that there&#x27;s both options available?

I do hope other automakers follow, because why should a head-unit should be considered safe to operate while driving, while touching a smartphone display isn&#x27;t.Both lacks the tactile feedback buttons are offering, both don&#x27;t work with gloves and both requires you to look at the display (and stop looking at the road) to know what action you&#x27;re making.

Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

&gt; a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.More likely that the executives above them who are watching what sells and what doesn&#x27;t are.

Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don&#x27;t really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla&#x27;s specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel&#x2F;stalk anyway.

&gt; Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen includedThis is false, full stop.

I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores.Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).

lower parts count as well. More commonality possibilities between vehicles are possible. the ability to add and remove features at different prive points without having to add&#x2F;remove as many physical parts is huge. They price compete on bolts and screws...removing a button is a huge cost savings when multiplied by youMunro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it&#x27;s wildly interesting to learn about: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars-apart-to-find-o-1787205420" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars...</a>

And customers apparently like them, when deciding what to buy.

I&#x27;d like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen.That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.

Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development.It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.

Automotive designers are simply catering to their perceived marketplace in order to realize maximum profit extraction.Most people who drive would prefer to be insulated from the activity as much as is legally possible. Fly-by-wire everything, touch interfaces, etc. This is how you achieve that objective. These &quot;innovations&quot; are obviously the antithesis of safe. But, we all know money is more important than safety, and most consumers are attracted exclusively to this kind of shiny bullshit.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think today&#x27;s DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it&#x27;s objectively more usable. It&#x27;s just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn&#x27;t exist in cameras before the digital revolution.So on my seven year old Nikon D3s I can use buttons to focus and change the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, WB, focusing mode and focus selection point all the while keeping my eye to the viewfinder. I would almost never look at the rear screen except to check the always-on histogram if the lighting radically changed. This means I can react instantly during a sequence of shots without even thinking about the menu system. It is not just &#x27;what I want&#x27; but a massive amount of directly accessible usability and configurability. Going into the menu system would almost never be necessary during a typical shoot.The D850 I recently upgraded to is pretty much the same. I use the live-view screen on the D850 when shooting video but use the viewfinder and buttons (as above) when shooting stills.

I think there&#x27;s too much selection bias for this analogy to be particularly strong.Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the &quot;SLR&quot; user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone&#x27;s camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago.I don&#x27;t think today&#x27;s DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it&#x27;s objectively more usable. It&#x27;s just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn&#x27;t exist in cameras before the digital revolution.There&#x27;s still a physical dial for switching modes even though that&#x27;s not something you actually change that often. Meanwhile you often have to dig into a menu or go through crappy buttons to do things like delete a photo.I won&#x27;t go so far as to describe it as fetishization, because I think that&#x27;s unfairly critical. But I do think a camera UX designed from first principles purely for usability would not have the same physical controls as a typical DSLR.

FYI the volume buttons work as shutter buttons when using the native camera app.

Does the iPhone not allow double-tap of the power button to start the camera?  Volume buttons should work as a shutter button to take a photo.

Yeah, that’s what I hate about taking pictures with their iPhone, the lack of a tactile button for taking the shot. It’s especially bad when you have to photograph without a view of the screen.(So that you don’t guess, I mean when photographing the back of my head or the inside of a tight crawl space when my cat got inside.)

I think because cars, although primarily a form of transport, are often also a fashion accessory, or a statement of who you are (or aspire to be). And touchscreens are very fashionable[1].Cameras aren&#x27;t really like that. Nowadays if you&#x27;ve actually bought a camera as opposed to just using the one in your phone you&#x27;re probably at least a little bit into photography, and in that context the function matters more than the form and style.[1] I&#x27;ll grant that cost, along with simplicity of reconfiguration via software, may also be factors.

The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.

Problem of course is that the interior of a Tesla has the aesthetic sense of a consumer electronics manufacturer, not of a precision automobile. It looks like a big fuckin&#x27; iPad stuck to the dashboard, almost aftermarket. It&#x27;s tacky, even if the interface on the screen is better than most.Way prefer the Mazda &#x2F; Honda direction of moving back to switchgear. It looks and functions better, it can be discretely repaired and replaced by a normal person, and so forth.

What kills me is when &quot;legacy&quot; automakers have dashboards with 40 buttons on them, of which you use may 5 regularly.  It&#x27;s especially annoying when the functions I use every day are buried in nested menus, but the button for setting the clock, sending a text, or satellite radio is right there front and center.

There is so much misinformation in your mind.Those supposed manufacturing issues are outdated rumors from the early days of the production lines when they were getting off the ground.&gt;went with completely touchscreen based cabinAbsolutely false. There are plenty of buttons and other physical controls in easy reach on the steering wheel and in other convenient and sensible places. As well as optional (you don’t need them) voice controls. It’s not “completely” anything based.

It would look much cooler if the display was in the middle of the steering wheel, and round, like a big old classic computer display.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hB78NXH77s4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hB78NXH77s4</a>

If this reason is true then it has the very characteristic stink of reckless endangerment....

They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don&#x27;t have source and install when building the car. There&#x27;s less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It&#x27;s a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer.It&#x27;s no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen based cabin with pretty much no additional cost. This is further confirmed by the fact that they didn&#x27;t offset the screen issue by installing a projected HUD display (which is these days available in most 20.000$ cars) - it&#x27;s complicated to install.

I just got a new camera, and the touchscreen wonderfully compliments the three dials I have. They have several physical shortcut buttons to back out of menus and to get to quick actions more quickly.Tactile feedback and quicker response time on certain actions is amazing, and just using the camera is a blast.My 2014 mazda has some touch functions, but the main radio controls and the entire climate interface are all still knobs and buttons. The clock is separate from the entertainment screen. I love it!

In the 90s and 2000s, cars had too many buttons and knobs. And 
 car reviewers started using that as a criterion to judge the dashboard. So less became better. OCD!

It started with the iPhone and the software-ization of all buttons. Buttons were seen as the enemy, inflexible blackberry relics of the 1990s. Tesla took this trend and ran with it, and many other cars, like my 2008 Prius, had already begun with their incredibly crappy touch-screen. Mine broke years ago and the audio is ENTIRELY on the front-right speaker. It can not be changed ever because ONLY the touch screen can change sound balance and touch screen&#x27;s broken. Welp, at least my co-pilot has ideal audio?

I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you&#x27;re taking photos, you don&#x27;t want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at hand and aware of what is happening around you. If camera designers know this, why don&#x27;t automotive designers, where the task at hand is a matter of life and death?

Car audio systems pose greater dangers than texting, pot<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techxplore.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020-03-car-audio-pose-greater-dangers.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techxplore.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020-03-car-audio-pose-greater-d...</a>

My spouse has a 2019 Honda HRV and I hate dealing with the touchscreen while driving. It&#x27;s cognitively very difficult to do the degree of fine motor control and visual attention the touchscreen requires while also driving safely. It&#x27;s actually a little terrifying.I remember reading an article a while back about some manufacturer, can&#x27;t remember which one, adding a clickable knob to control the &quot;smart&quot; functions. Since so much of what we use a touchscreen for is actually menu selection, that could cover most of what we need to &quot;touch&quot;.

I&#x27;ve been hanging onto my Galaxy S7 just because it has actual home and back buttons. Don&#x27;t know if anyone else still does that.

It&#x27;s good on phones because it allows them to become multi-tools. You can&#x27;t have physical buttons for every thing any app might want to do; with a touch screen they can make their own buttons.On cars it&#x27;s silly. Cars are not multi-tools; they have a finite set of dedicated functions. Even for functions that benefit from a large high-res screen (maps, music library browsing, etc.), the actual input requirements are narrow enough to work with physical controls. Just look at the original iPod.

Phone manufacturers need to bring back keyboards

even on phones it&#x27;s &quot;bad&quot;, it requires high focus.. it&#x27;s was only good in the theory that smartphones would be used for prolonged dedicated tasks. how i miss blind use of buttons on old dumbphones

Not looking to start a fight but was a touchscreen really the cheaper option? I would be strongly surprised if that was the case.

It was never a cargo cult of being good... it was a cost cutting play that they correctly thought they could shove down consumers throats. Glad to see Honda acting on behalf of the driver again.

Still loved all my physical buttons which made input a breeze and didnt require constantly correcting my dang text, in a phone context, nah, he&#x27;s still wrong; maybe a hybrid is even better, but amorphous movement and inferring intent is not a great user experience as things get more complex.

Only correct in a &quot;whatever people buy is good, and people buy iPhones so everything they do is right&quot; sense. Hardware keyboards on phones still are faster to type on than even the best swipe keyboard, and they work through gloves (rather relevant now in these wear-gloves, wash-your-hands days).Of course, optimizing for WPM over other factors is not right for all customers. But a car is definitely not a phone, so.

Was he not coming primarily from a design perspective?Design =&#x2F;= usability?

You (or maybe the market) are misinterpreting Steve Jobs. In a phone context, he is correct.

I think there can be a balance between physical controls for actions that need to and will often be used while driving, and touch controls for stuff that you will most likely use when standing still.Controlling the temperature or music volume will be done while driving so they should be actual buttons that your muscle memory will reach with no mental effort or distraction. Adjusting the suspension settings or typing in a GPS address can be done via a touchscreen since it&#x27;s unlikely you&#x27;ll do it on the move and touch offers a better experience for this.

Whats interesting about Honda going with a dial, is that they designed, what I thought, was a pretty brilliant absolutely positioned touchpad for Acura. Have peopled used these, what is there feedback. It seems much more natural, intuitive, and fast compared to a dial.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ScWOFtlLCyI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ScWOFtlLCyI</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bcKa9apjOX8</a>

I think the MMI interface, in one specific generation (the one just before they introduced the touchscreen, where the four-corner buttons were dropped), has one big advantage: you learn the amount of clicks things are away.It&#x27;s been over a year since I had an Audi A3 with the system, but I still remember that going from anywhere to Android Auto would be pressing home, then just giving the wheel a big turn clockwise, then back one click counter-clockwise and confirm. You got used to the common operations, and you could do them blindly after a while. In a moving car, a touchscreen is almost always problematic because you need to see if your finger is going the right direction to compensate for car movements.

I mean, it certainly isn’t perfect at all. It has the down side that you are invited to stare at the screen. But if I’m disciplined, I can get away with a click-glance approach to adjusting things, which is still better than the multi-second hover I had to do with the touchscreen.

How do you feel about the MMI scroll wheel? I don’t feel safe using that either; it still requires eyes on the screen to see what you’re selecting. Even my passengers, who can give it their full attention, are routinely stymied by the process of pairing their phones for Bluetooth audio playback.At least I can get the volume and temperature knobs by feel.

Yeah, there’s probably an awful lot of truth to that. More software eating the world.

I always assumed companies were drawn to it not just because of the trendiness but because engineering and general development of these features are faster, cheaper, and easier to fix compared to dealing with physical parts (e.g. knobs, wiring).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-using-apple-carplay-impairs-drivers-reaction-times-more-than-alcohol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appleinsider.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;new-study-shows-u...</a>Using Apple Carplay is more dangerous than texting.

Audi may be doing some things right (I love the location of the audio volume knob), it doesn&#x27;t compensate for that ridiculous touch pad which you&#x27;re supposed to use to enter street names by writing the characters one by one with your finger... and many other UI warts.The best thing about Audi&#x27;s console is that fact that they support Apple CarPlay.

Never owned a Tesla, but always worried about this when I’ve been inside one.Elon says they drive themselves now though, so there’s that ;)

... I see your cargo cult, and I raise you Elon Musk and Tesla with gargantic touch screens in their cars. Aesthetically neat; realistically trouble.

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said).Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

I&#x27;m young and I love tech, but I&#x27;d rather feel for the volume control knob while I&#x27;m watching the road than stare at a touch screen and try to position my finger to hit an icon in a moving car. Those interfaces were just a terrible idea.In my brother&#x27;s old Prius it would randomly switch to a diagram showing how cool its power train system was&#x2F;energy transfer etc. Just what I need while I&#x27;m driving - a useless distraction which I have to close before I get access to the controls I need!(I don&#x27;t remember exactly how it worked though because I haven&#x27;t driven it in a while.)

I think that&#x27;s just the perception&#x2F;bias by the writer. It does not stand as a quote from industry source or manufacturer.

I haven&#x27;t seen any stats, but anecdotally, I remember watching TopGear episodes a decade ago where they would go on about how Hondas were boring &quot;old people&quot; cars.  Its funny because in my region on the US Hondas are very popular with young people hot-rodding them up.

Unrelated, but this line stood out, and now I have a question:&gt; Honda’s decision to return to physical controls will be popular with some - including, no doubt, its ageing owner base in the UKAgeing? Is there some stat showing Honda owners are older than owners of other models? Or that young people aren&#x27;t buying Hondas?

I have a Mazda from 2019 (not the CX), and I can do everything with a couple of knobs. Even the extra buttons you mention (volume up&#x2F;down in the wheel or quick access to media&#x2F;navigation&#x2F;radio in the center console) are redundant and nearly useless. Just a couple of weeks after I got the car, I have never touched the screen again.A&#x2F;C controls are completely manual. Mazda got it right from the beginning.

Yes, thank you. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was positive I read an article last year about how Mazda was doing away with touchscreens. I think someone just pasted the Mazda article above.

&gt; Honda has done what no other car maker is doing,Huh? The author is not familiar with Mazda - their latest models of the CX line (possibly others) have full control of the interface with a very functional physical knob &#x2F; dial along with other tactile controls.Also, the headline is a bit misleading - they aren&#x27;t removing touchscreen controls entirely - only removing them from &quot;some&quot; controls as their preface text indicates, which to be clear is solely A&#x2F;C controls.

As long as my fingertips cannot read touchscreens, touchscreens in cars are all inferior to physical dials and buttons.

All touchscreens provide zero tactile feedback or spatial info about its setting. Thus to use any touchscreen, you always must take your eyes off the road to look at it. Thus no matter how logical or attractive or fast the display, screens are always less safe than any tactile alternative control that lets you keep your eyes on the road.Also, for car devices that provide intuitive feedback on their activity (wiper motion, fan noise, air temperature from outlets, audio volume, etc), you don&#x27;t need a screen to confirm that it has changed.And since these devices are the ones that I change most often (and music), I&#x27;d much prefer to control them on the steering wheel or verbally, and never use a screen.

Not all touchscreens are same. There are few touchscreens that are good. Most Honda touchscreens are bad.

I buy cheaper cars, because I don&#x27;t really care about any of the high-end features that cars offer, and this has been one legitimate advantage, at least as of the last time I was shopping; cheap cars cheaped out on the display, so they still had physical controls for things like volume. I hope this trend takes off before I buy another.I think it would be possible to make a decent touch screen, but it seems like the only people who give even a quantum of a damn about latency are the video game folks. A UI with 95th-percentile or 99th-percentile multi-second latency is an active hazard on the road, even if it is normally acceptable, which itself is fairly rare and expensive.

there is a place for both kinds of controls. frequently used functions (volume, climate controls) should have physical buttons. infrequently used functions (like reset tire pressure monitoring) is best hidden in a touchscreen menu.

Or you know, knobs and buttons which don&#x27;t require any user on-boarding or discovery process.

I&#x27;ve said it before, I&#x27;ll say it again.Touchscreens CAN BE DONE RIGHT. (or at least better)I have an aftermarket JVC headunit in my 2003 VW. It has one button, that&#x27;s the &quot;Menu&quot; button on single press, or Power button when held.The screen itself is relatively intuitive to control without looking because of a gesture feature it has as well as button placement being useful.If I want more volume I put one finger on the screen and make a circle gesture in the clockwise direction. Down is counter-clockwise. The play&#x2F;pause button is in the very bottom right so you can find the button with feel. You can shuffle songs with another gesture (though I never use it).I really like my touchscreen. And every time I am using a work vehicle (Ford Explorers), or my wife&#x27;s GMC Sierra, I hate the controls because you have to look up to see what you&#x27;re doing. Thankfully their steeringwheel controls are generally good.

Ugh! Blue light should never be used at night.

If a car uses blue dash lights, that will stop me from buying it instantly and unquestionably.  Blue is extremely saturating to my eyes&#x27; receptors and uncomfortable to look at in darkness even for a moment.  Red is 100x more forgiving.

Another fad that should go away is blue light dashboards. They give horrible afterimages in dark conditions. BMW&#x27;s red-orange lights are so relaxing to look at in comparison.

I gotta say... I got a Fit in 2007, pre-ordered before they were available, and at 300k+ miles it&#x27;s doing great. The guy at the oil change place literally turned his eyes to the heavens and said that he couldn&#x27;t find any service to recommend. He&#x27;d never seen a car of such age that clean; it should surely be leaking something.I&#x27;ve heard Honda has gone downhill in the last decade, and my next car probably won&#x27;t be a Honda. But at this rate, my next car will drive itself. (Especially since I&#x27;m no longer putting miles on it at the rate that got me to 300k in a decade.)

Unfortunately we won&#x27;t get this car in the US. I love my 1st gen Honda Fit and plan to keep it pretty much forever, they&#x27;re such a great vehicle. Incredible gas mileage and they&#x27;re actually fun to drive with the short wheelbase. In tune with the article I put the only Carplay receiver with a physical volume knob in it and it&#x27;s perfectly easy to use.

Good. Touch screen controls are a good tool for communicating visual information while having some way to still give users some controls. Tactile controls are good tools for when the operator needs to visually focus on something else and feedback can be sensed in other ways. For cars, the only visual information it should show to the driver are either things that are controlled outside of a touch screen (speedometer, tach) or can&#x27;t be controlled while the vehicle is in operation anyway (oil temp gauge, etc). Everything else can be intuitively sensed by the driver&#x27;s other senses and the important part of the control is the feedback saying that you are in fact manipulating the controls properly.

Me in my bit older Mercedes, my gears, lights, whipers all go automatic, im left with radio control and temperature. Audios is easy, it on the steering wheel, so is answering the phone. Two knobs for warm&#x2F;cold and airco. No need for touchscreen.

This is a great decision by Honda. Touchscreens are a terrible UX when driving. Its difficult to be accurate with the touchscreen in a car when its moving, even as the passenger. Physical controls are much easier to control, less distracting, and we develop muscle memory for knobs dials and switches easily.As an example, I personally am not a fan of the extreme minimalism in Tesla cars. A fully touchscreen experience makes sense only after a car is capable of fully autonomous self driving. As long as a human is responsible for controlling&#x2F;monitoring the car, physical controls are better than touch controls.To be fair, touch screens are better for changing settings, monitoring the health of the car, and any other action that we do while the car is parked.

difficult to operate intuitively is exactly right.

The way my brains works, it’s hard for me to even read road signs when I’m driving (excepting simple ones like speed limits and one-word signs). Switching contexts is just really slow. If I try to use voice recognition I basically go blind for three seconds.

I recall Mazda doing this a while back. [1][1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20200335" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20200335</a>

What physical controls are an ABSOLUTE MUST for you?Leaving aside Legally mandated: Wipers, Headlights, Gear Selector, Brake, Accelerator, Horn, Hazards.Me: Required: Mute Music, HVAC temperature and fan speed. Strongly preferred: All audio controls, Cruise control.

Not all touch controls are created equal.I&#x27;m really happy with the interface in my Model 3 and I&#x27;ve found every other car interface I&#x27;ve used to be on the spectrum from terrible to okay (BMW, Mercedes, Mazda, VW, Porsche).I think you can probably do either well, but it seems like the car companies (other than Tesla) just don&#x27;t have this capability.

Great! I may actually consider a newer car for the first time in a long while.I rent regularly and the last decade or so of car UX has been pretty terrible.Some features are compelling, but distraction limits their effective value.Feels a lot like early smart TVs to me. Better experiences are had by turning all the crap off.With a car, the stuff is just there, often does not stay off, requiring constant attention to push out of the way, etc...An older vehicle, equipped with a bluetooth capable radio, smartphone with voice is better than just about all the new car goodies nearly always.Frankly, the metrics, mpg, other performance data and sound processing where present are great! I use them when present.The rest is just a mess.My other quibble is LEDs. The flicker used to prolong LED life and power use is very seriously distracting both in car, and outside to other drivers.In car, lots of bright things will often inhibit night vision. Displays, dash lighting, indicators all increasingly bright and many flicker.As a driver, a quick glance to and fro results in a field of dots. I have asked others about that and have done a few tests when road conditions and traffic present an opportunity.Older car dashes are not distracting much at all. Can run very dim too. Newer dashes distract far more. Won&#x27;t always dim, or worse, will dim, sans for one bright thing, usually a little display.The always on bulbs do leave a vision trail, compared to the dots from LED lights. For many, that trail appears to be processed in a less distracting way.LED tail lights are the big offender here.Over time, as I land in various airports, the conversion to LED has been completed. The pattern of speckles are crazy! Various colors, and modest duty cycle rates make for a mess.Any pilots care to comment?

Mazda started doing this a couple years ago. Glad to see it spreading.

&gt; While Honda’s decision to return to physical controls will be popular with some - including, no doubt, its ageing owner base in the UK - the predicted move towards more voice-controlled actions in cars could eliminate the debate around touchscreens versus analogue controls in the future.No, I will not be talking to my car.Knobs and buttons with tactile feedback were great and should be used for major functionality.My favorite fan controller of all time was a fan pull knob on a FJ40, which had physical clicks for each fan setting as you pulled it out:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.ih8mud.com&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;p13-jpg.509941&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.ih8mud.com&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;p13-jpg.509941&#x2F;</a>It was intuitive and deeply satisfying.

I bought a Kia minivan in 2018 just because it had the most real buttons and dials.

The dirty secret of the electronics industry is that the reason for moving to sensor buttons is cost.When first capacitive touch devices appeared around 2005-2006, everybody immediately noticed that you only need a single digitizer for the whole front panel of the device, or dirt cheap cap sens circuits for point sensors.For as long as the sensor is just a piece of polyimide pcb you can glue to anything, but a metal surface, things get really cheap without mechanical buttons, holes in the case to cut, and PCB to hold the buttons.

That&#x27;s why my TV is on a lightswitch!

My TV has capacitive psuedo-buttons even for the power button.   Of course it isn&#x27;t illuminated, since that would distract from the screen, which means that turning on or off the screen when the lights are out is literally a matter of making wild stabs in the dark.

&gt; Since DisplayPort can normally be passively converted to HDMIWhat actually happens is that some (but not all) DisplayPort sources can also output HDMI signals, so the passive converter only has to change the voltages and pinout. But if the source doesn&#x27;t output HDMI signals, you need an active converter.

Since DisplayPort can normally be passively converted to HDMI, your easiest option is probably to get a convertor and also an HDMI switch box. It&#x27;ll be external to the monitor but there are plenty to choose from that have physical buttons. There are even some with remote controls!

Dell Ultrasharp gives you shortcut keys that you can assign to any function. I have one for Displayport and a second for HDMI.

Do you have an idea of why dials and buttons are so expensive? That surprises me. The components aren&#x27;t particularly high tech.

I should probably elaborate on what I mean about &quot;lazy UI&quot;. For a touchscreen UI, the thinking seems to be that they view this is something they can fix later with an update because a touch screen is an updatable blank canvas. The effect of that is you end up skimping on UI design because it&#x27;s &quot;optional&quot;.Hard buttons force your hand more. You have to think about what buttons you want and how they&#x27;re going to work in a way you just don&#x27;t have to with touch screens. So you&#x27;re forced to do a level of UI&#x2F;UX design that you&#x27;re not with touch screens.

&gt; Touch screen controls strike me as not being about cost but being about incredibly lazy UIIt&#x27;s almost always about cost. Touch screens are shocking cheap thanks to smartphones driving the prices down and physical controls can be shockingly expensive per control.

I dunno, when it comes to configuring monitor settings, I&#x27;d trade a touch screen menu for any of the physical button configuration schemes on any monitor or TV i&#x27;ve ever owned.

The newer ones ditched the capacitive buttons for regular pushbuttons. Unfortunately being budget constrained (or profit motivated) the buttons are the cheap kind that move your monitor when you poke at them (and make creaky sounds of course, to compliment the creaky sound the monitor stand makes haha).Still, it&#x27;s an improvement.

Totally agree. I have Dell monitors, which are fantastic in every way bar one - they have invisible, capacitive buttons at the bottom right of the bezel. I literally have to put my face right up beside it and squint to have any idea where the buttons are.You can&#x27;t easily see where they are, and you get no feedback at all when you press on them, and it seems to be 50&#x2F;50 whether a press is registered. Horrible, horrible UX!

Any monitor manufacturers want to follow suit?What I&#x27;d give for hardware input source buttons. This is a ridiculous UX:1. Touch button to open menu2. Select &quot;Input Source&quot;3. Click up&#x2F;down (possibly multiple times) to find your source4. Click OK...when your monitor has TWO sources. Just give me 2 buttons: HDMI and DisplayPort.I don&#x27;t care that this would be marginally more expensive. I&#x27;d pay it.Touch screen controls strike me as not being about cost but being about incredibly lazy UI and a good example of worrying about problems you&#x27;ll never have like &quot;what if you have 10 input sources? That&#x27;d mean 10 buttons&quot;. But YOU DON&quot;T. You can&#x27;t add an input source with software after the fact.&#x2F;rantTouch screens make complete sense for phones. You&#x27;re looking at it. There is limited screen real estate. The second is why hardware keyboards died. It&#x27;s even why the Home button on iPhones died, which makes me sad because I loathe Face ID with a passion (compared to Touch ID).Touch screens require you to look at them. This seems bad when driving. Physical controls are tactile and you can learn to use them without looking. People seem to forget how important this is.It&#x27;s also why I prefer keyboards that split function keys into groups of 4 over the terrible design of putting them all together. Function keys are really too far to touch type effectively so you need a non-visual cue of which is which.Beyond that, every touch interface I&#x27;ve seen in a car is objectively terrible.Kudos to Honda for bucking this stupid trend.

Odd article as this isn&#x27;t new. Is it new in that other manufacturers have started and they have no plans to? My current Honda has a very comfortable interface, probably my favorite of any car I&#x27;ve driven.

I think Land Rover has made one of the neatest and most balanced yet useful interior designs with Land Rover Defender 2020. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carbuzz.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;land-rover&#x2F;defender" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carbuzz.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;land-rover&#x2F;defender</a>

The steering wheel and acceleration pedals should be made into touch screens. Physical interfaces are so old school.

Their touchscreen implementation is so horrible, that this sounds like the right move. This is the only thing I hate about my 2019 Clarity.

&quot;Somewhat&quot; is not really good enough given the stakes. You cannot &quot;feel&quot; your way through a touchscreen interface and you cannot rely on muscle memory. You will take your eyes off the road to see where the button is and &quot;aim&quot; at it. And a bumpy road just makes it worse because it only takes an accidental light touch to trigger some random function close by.Even a 17&quot; screen or great UI won&#x27;t fix the problems, they will just ameliorate them.The are functions that just fit better into a touchscreen experience, and some that should have physical buttons even if it takes regulation to make sure of this.

With physical buttons we can keep eyes on the road, one hand on the wheel and the other one looks for the right button. With a touch screen we have to look at the screen, hoping we made the right decision about what&#x27;s going to happen on the road. If there are laws against texting there should be laws against using touchscreens when the car is moving.

Touchscreens that are huge are somewhat less of an issue because tap targets are much bigger. But most non-luxury vehicles come with 7 or 8 inch screens, so tap targets are small&#x2F;clustered. Layer on that the fact that many screens aren&#x27;t capacitive (and instead require a certain amount of pressure from your finger&#x2F;fingernail), and things get even more annoying&#x2F;dangerous.

I almost never drive by myself. Things that lock out my girlfriend from using them are very annoying to me. Android Auto does this on some features.It&#x27;s not like it stops people from just using their phones anyway.

It&#x27;s great if you don&#x27;t have to use the touch screen in the Tesla while it&#x27;s driving, but it shouldn&#x27;t even be possible to use it with the car in motion.

I&#x27;ve been turning the dash light intensity almost all the way down for 30+ years. They&#x27;ve always been too bright. If the Tesla is as bright as you say, it would literally be undriveable for me at night. (No screens or touch in either of my 18-20 year old vehicles)

The backlit display on the Tesla 3 is wayyyyy too bright for night driving, even at its lowest backlight intensity and in night mode. It is like they intentionally ignored all available human factors research. Tesla is not alone here. Many automakers these days have too-bright interiors for night driving.

What I always get from these discussions is that people fiddle with their cars settings a lot more than I do.  What are people doing that requires immediate attention?  The only thing I am really tempted to use the screen for while actively driving a Tesla are to adjust the temperature and turn on defrosters.  Everything else is handled with physical controls or can wait until I am stopped.

The Volt had the worst of both worlds, though -- touch controls that weren&#x27;t even a screen.I own a Tesla 3 as well, and I mostly agree-- I have 0 need to adjust most controls manually, the auto stuff works really well.But I don&#x27;t think voice controls are a good &#x27;fix&#x27;. I still wish the car had a physical glovebox button and physical wiper controls.

I remember i have read this a year ago.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tesla-big-touchscreen&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tesla-big-touchscreen&#x2F;</a>A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User InterfaceAnd it was discussed here before:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19968970" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19968970</a>Im curious, have any of these problems been fixed?<pre><code> - Soft Buttons That Demand Attention
 - Poor Target Design
 - Target Size
 - Accidental Touches
 - Map Always on Screen</code></pre>

I will defend the screen in the Tesla 3, the simple fact is that you really never have to use on your typical drive and yes muscle memory works for simple UIs like what the Tesla employs.Compared to 40+ buttons in my previous Volt AND a screen. Many cars have that many or more buttons and this is easier? Where screen&#x27;s become distracting is when the UI is shit, having more than one or two clicks to do anything, and worse duplicating features there are physical buttons for but naturally distract the driver who thinks they should use that screen.From automatic headlamps, climate control, and wipers, I really have no reason to interact with the screen except as glances while I do the standard look around while driving.My favorite test... put a sticky on every button and only remove one if you truly had to use the function. bonus points for not having to remove the sticky to find out what the button did.edit: spelling error

Voice control maybe works for folks in silicon valley but it is very lacking in quality for smaller languages or even non-existent

I for one will be really glad if this sparks and industry wide trend to go back to buttons and shift levers rather than buttons or levers that aren&#x27;t actually good.

Welp, looks like Honda&#x27;s back in the running for my next car!

It seems like the middle way would be:Build your console with a big hole in the middle. Mount the buttons to the insert, figure out your UI and adjust the button placement, so really most of the last minute design is producing a new mounting bracket for the electronics and physical controls.The biggest problem I see there is that you are very limited in button placement without resizing the panel. But if you pick a clever panel size to console hole ratio you could buy yourself some flexibility. For example, an almost square panel could allow you to rotate it and move some buttons from vertical to horizontal.

I think what Tesla did was cost cutting by putting everything in one  big screen - no need to think about hardware knobs and buttons - have the screen UI and update it remotely if it is not intuitive.

Good. Those damn things were clearly never tested on real roads with bumps.&gt; &quot;Oops you fat fingered the main menu icon while you were 5 layers deep! Guess you have to start over!&quot;Physical controls have their place, and in a car is one of them

Is there a name for this phenomenon where manufacturers build harmful features into their products purely for the technical credibility? It&#x27;s the same with motion smoothing and televisions -- the experience is massively degraded, but the technology is impressive, so presumably sales will increase.

&quot;You lost me at &#x27;under $30k&#x27;, I&#x27;m trying to figure out how to credibly raise prices, not lower them&quot;, Head of Strategy, Automaker XYZ.

Toyota GT-86. Starts around 27k, three flavors (Scion FR&#x2F;S, Subaru BRZ). Excepting some radio controls, all button (has steering wheel volume, tuning, etc.) And as a bonus, it&#x27;s a six-gear rear wheel drive.Eject button sold separately: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wHL5Xnc.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;wHL5Xnc.jpg</a>

You&#x27;d probably be better off with a snowmobile there, too

The latest-gen Goldwing has a fancy non-touch screen, stereo, CarPlay, GPS, Bluetooth, dual-clutch transmission w&#x2F; automatic mode. Screens are invading all segments of motorcycles with varying degrees of functionality.

Last year I bought a motorcycle (Honda CB300R) and it was a revelation.No touch screens. No stereo. No GPS. No Bluetooth. No automatic transmission. No cupholders. Basically no &quot;modern car features&quot;. And it&#x27;s a much, much better road experience than any car I&#x27;ve ever been able to afford to drive.Get rid of all the distractions at a price point under $30k with an engine that doesn&#x27;t feel sluggish and maybe I&#x27;ll consider buying a car again.(Necessary disclaimer: I live somewhere where it&#x27;s sunny and warm the majority of the year and where car parking is nigh impossible. Maybe I&#x27;d feel differently if I lived in rural Canada.)

That&#x27;s only one control though. You can still accidentally touch something else while you fish for this control. I&#x27;m sure most users would prefer dials that provide touch feedback.

Let me give you another perspective - I own a Suzuki SX4 S-Cross that comes with a fluid, super responsive and intuitive touchscreen with voice commands in it, which can also be controlled from the steering. You can do stuff like ask to call someone&#x27;s phone, or read a text message or ask you to give directions.But the real highlight is the UI + UX. It&#x27;s super intuitive in that the volume controls, although touch, are always in a fixed location and you just drag over towards the edge of the screen up or down. In addition, you also have steering mounted controls to control the volume. The whole screen is divided into 4 quadrants and clicking anywhere in those quadrants will take you to either of the main screen (Eg. Navigation or FM Radio). It doesn&#x27;t take long to get used to remembering which quadrant is for which. Also, for safety, you can&#x27;t use some core features of navigation while driving the car. It will ask you to stop first if you want to say, type for a certain address.I have never seen such fantastic UX in such mid-tier cars. To me, it seem&#x27;s Honda&#x27;s move is backward - perhaps it could be solved by simple UX..which Suzuki and Bosch (the supplier of their infotainment units) have already solved?I find it super convenient because I don&#x27;t even need to take my eyes off the road...while enjoying the convenience of a touch screen.A picture (or video is worth a thousand words):
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HvERUKfjufg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HvERUKfjufg</a>

Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls