Yeah I really hope other car makers follow because I fucking hate touch controls in cars with a burning passion. It’s idiotic and not safe at all.
Same goes for kitchens. Give me real buttons and knobs and not these abhorrent touch panels that refuse to work every third time. A good quality kitchen appliance is identified by high quality knobs that last for decades.
I pumped gas at a brand new Shell station over the weekend. The controls for the pump was one GIANT touchscreen (I’m talking probably 12 inches wide by 36 inches tall). It was fucking PAINFUL to use. Every touch took 2-3 seconds for the action to happen. Da fuck is wrong with a regular pump and regular buttons that just work!?
Because then they don’t have a display the size of a living room TV to shove ads in your face
It should be illegal to connect a touch screen to a computer that runs like a potato. Even computers in the 80s could respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks in real time.
In Canada it really sucks having to take your gloves off half the year. I hope this gets taken into account when touchscreens on gas pumps are considered.
What do you need a touchscreen for? You just take an appropriate pump (E95, Diesel), fill the fuel and pay at the register.
Biggest problem is that they cheap out on the tech parts. Nobody complains that an iPad has a touch screen, cause it works. But an appliance tends to have a crappy UI, running on a crappy touch screen, powered by a crappy CPU.
If they just used quality parts, it’d probably be fine, and the only issue would be expensive replacement for an entire assembly, instead of small, cheap parts that can be fixed.
A smartphone or tablet screen has the function to have multiple buttons and responsive functions on one and the same place.
A kitchen appliance doesn’t have or need that. Absolutely no need for digital or so-called “smart” gimmicks.
In general high quality things tend to have physical buttons and knobs as opposed to touch screen devices.
Instead of turning into e-waste after 5 years or less they can last for the next 30 to 50 years.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
I just tore apart a working thermostat that almost 80 years old now (to understand how it works) and in perfectly working condition. It uses the physical properties of the materials inside to measure temperature (a coil of metal expands and contracts causing a pendulum to move clockwise or counterclockwise). Suspended at the top of this pendulum is a small vial of mercury containing two electrodes. When the pendulum is far enough counterclockwise the Mercury slides in the vial and bridges the electrodes, turning the furnace on, when the pendulum is far enough clockwise the mercury slides to the right and no longer bridges the electrodes.
When you set the temperature on the thermostat you are changing the default position of this pendulum. Meaning that it has to move more or less distance for the bead of mercury to bridge the circuit.
It’s brilliantly simple and will continue to work essentially forever. The physical characteristics of the materials involved won’t change.
How many smart thermostats have become obsolete because their service providers stopped providing cloud services for them?
Same goes for pretty much every IoT device that people seem to be filling their homes with.
Touch screens especially don’t make sense in the cooking context, where your hands are likely to be wet / damp.
Touch controls for burners are very dangerous in my opinion. What if i spill oil on the stove and touch screen? Now the oil might stop me from turning off the heat and the situation could quickly turn into a fire.
Omg I feel that. The oven in my apartment has touch controls. When I’m baking stuff with lots of moisture inside, water evaporates and is expelled though a vent JUST BELOW the touch controls. The condensation makes them completely unresponsive. Smh
I was boiling pasta earlier and my fucking stove turned itself off and engaged the child lock because water splashed onto those controls. THREE TIMES!
I’ve had this piece of shit literally ruin dinner before. It’s amazing how it can be both really nice and really fucking useless at the same time.
I’m really on the fence when it comes to kitchens because a) you actually have time to look at what you’re doing – if you need to lower temperature suddenly the better option is to take your pan off the stove, anyway and b) touch controls are trivial to clean.
What I can’t stand though is scales manufactures being so cheap as to not even have capacitive buttons but re-use the front left/right feet as sensors for the interface. On the upside the thing was dirt cheap and actually comes with an USB-C port to charge its LIR2450 cell.
It’s idiotic and not safe at all.
Not to mention completely useless in places where you need to wear gloves when driving.
wear gloves when driving
For example?
If it’s so cold that you wear gloves, then get your AC fixed because it should’ve been running by the time you drive off.
Hmm, that’s a strange comment you left. I’m not the person you responded to but:
When I get off work it’s just before dawn (coldest part of the day) and it’s frequently 10 Fahrenheit or lower in the winter (below freezing). I wear gloves in my car in the winter because cars don’t warm up enough for the heat to come on right away. I don’t want to walk through the cold into a cold car and grab a literal freezing steering wheel and hold on to it for 10 mins until the heat kicks on. My drive is about 35 min in good conditions.
I’m assuming you live in a warm place or don’t drive a car, good for you. Wish I had public transportation.
How about others leading?
From march 20
Good. Touchscreens are the most unsafe feature added to vehicles in decades. It’s honestly mind boggling how it was allowed in the first place.
Easy, because regulations don’t mean anything anymore.
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night, road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car, all around limo tints on literally every car, people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
And that doesn’t even begin to mention the drivers themselves, so fucking self absorbed, tailgating, cutting you off for fun to get to the same light.
I’ve literally had a stream of cars going around me on street roads and so many dumbasses just follow the stream that I literally cannot safety accelerate because they’re all cutting me off bumper to bumper.
You should start carrying a gun if not already. The conservatives have successfully rotted western society.
While you have some good points, it seems you may be missing one in that if you are constantly getting passed in that manner, you are causing a problem, regardless of what is posted. Most western law systems have a provision against impeding the flow of traffic.
Problem is when you get passed because other people aren’t driving legally. Even if it’s the flow of traffic, you’re still technically not allowed to break the law.
The government has literally prevented cars that prevent you from blinding another car on the road from coming to the US market. Cars come in with active LED arrays and they have to be disabled to sell in the US.
https://www.newsweek.com/nhtsa-roadblocking-headlight-technology-that-could-save-lives-1811354
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night,
Illegal in the EU, Xenon and later LEDs always needed automatic height adjustment (it doesn’t suffice to do it once because cars change angles continuously). Lots has changed in the last 20+ years, though, speaking of VW: How about high beams all the time unless there’s something that could be blinded, then switch them off locally but keep the rest bright.
road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car,
all around limo tints on literally every car,
Illegal.
people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
Illegal.
And that doesn’t even begin to mention the drivers themselves, so fucking self absorbed, tailgating, cutting you off for fun to get to the same light.
See the thing is that if you build your infrastructure in a way that requires people to drive cars you can’t just take licenses away from asshats.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Headlights that blind you in the day and literally block all vision of the road at night, road legal trucks which bumpers that START at the hood of my car, all around limo tints on literally every car, people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
pretty sure all of those are illegal around here, with exception of the giant compensators.
people disabling their rear lights for some idiotic reason…
That might be people with daytime running lights not turning on the lights. My car will turn on the headlights as soon as I take the parking break off (MT, an auto would likely do it when put in drive), but the dash and rear lights don’t turn on unless I turn the dial.
That’s not true though. This happened in their EVs regardless of price range. Even the Porsche Taycan which requires using a screen to adjust HVAC vents. Other than some steering wheel buttons the Taycan is all screens.
The Audi E-Tron GT (same chassis as the Taycan) oddly enough has more buttons. But that’s because VAG makes sure Porsche and Audi interiors are slightly different for different market segments.
It’s more about VAG thinking (like many automakers) copying the Tesla trend was what people wanted. The mistake made was not considering Tesla early adopters often being techy people who might not match broader market opinion.
I, too, am guilty of vag thinking sometimes; but what does that have to do with Tesla or Volkswagen?
VAG is common shorthanded for Volkswagen AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group
Replacing the buttons with a tablet has always been a cost saving measure on Tesla’s part that was marketed as “futuristic”, physical switches and dials made of plastic and metal as well as the underlying components will never be as cheap or as easy to wire as a simple touchscreen control. Other car companies followed suit, because Tesla made a method of reducing their own manufacturing costs hip, so many of them jumped on it.
But, Tesla tablets were designed with the belief that this cost saving is possible because of the delusion that full autonomous self driving is possible with existing hardware through software updates. When self driving didn’t happen after a decade of trying, people realized how inconvenient and dangerous it is that the only way to adjust the AC, stereo volume, and sideview mirrors while driving is through a tablet with no tactile feedback. So now, we are finally seeing that trend reversing.
Especially when the buttons move around in the GUI after an update so you accidentally press the wrong ones, or end up having to search the menus while driving.
Perhaps this could change when we have mainstream tactile displays, but until then buttons will always be better.
I think using a car tablet is equally as dangerous as texting and driving. Voice control would actually be better for adjustments while driving.
Realtime non-cloud voice control is still unreliable. Gonna be a while before that can replace physical buttons.
Indeed and it seems attainable now, if it weren’t for the expensive hardware and massive energy required for general pre-trained transformers. Don’t want my car to call home just to run a neural network on Azure, it needs to run locally.
I don’t think autonomous driving had anything to do with the initial choice. It might be a reason now, but I don’t think it was the initial driving factor.
You left off it being marketed as clean and minimalistic. I think that’s different enough from futuristic. Some people love that aspect, some outright hate it. (Edit and I mean this in a looks fashion, not a functionality one)
Also, Tesla’s button replacements actually do work more or less reliably. The other manufacturers decided to save money by adding a potato instead of a potent CPU that powers the screen in the middle of the console.
In practice though Tesla has buttons for the controls you need while driving.
Cruise control/lane keeping/cancel is a lever
Indicators, flash high beams is a lever
Park is a button
Windscreen wiper single wipe is a button, same button is window wash
Set speed is a scroll wheel, volume is a scroll wheel (and a touch control on the passenger side)
Navigation is on screen keyboard, but you should stop to change navigation, or have a passenger do it
Climate control heats or cools towards your target temperature, heated seats and steering wheel are automatic or touch screen, but you know you need them before you get in the car
What more would you want physical controls for?
I had huge reservations towards Tesla’s control system, but in reality, I got used to it in a week. And I’m loving how clean and sleek the dashboard is otherwise. What I don’t understand is the car makers who include a huge tablet AND a dozen gadgets around the dashboard. That’s worst of both worlds.
The fact that they needed to receive a lot of complaints to reconsider makes me wonder - do they even do any kind of usability testing for their products? Anyone who even sat in a car with only touchscreen can tell you the experience is not comfortable.
And I don’t think it’s just about the price of physical buttons. Buttons are a selling point right now, they could charge a small premium (not in the thousands but ~$200 certainly.
Or follow the BMW plan and put buttons in the cars but make them subscription only.
It’s probably a cost issue. Running one wire harness to a touch screen is a lot cheaper than running a wire to every button in a car.
Is the button panel not a separate unit? I’d imagine it would have a connector to plug into the cable that runs back to whatever control system, instead of it being a bundle of individuals.
Even if it’s a subassembly there’s gonna be more connectors in it, and probably more wire since it will need to run to the various buttons.
When you’re making tens of thousands of vehicles every penny counts.
I wonder if it’s a planning issue. Buttons you have to actually plan out. Touchscreen? Plop it in.
Oh they KNEW what they were doing and just didn’t give a fuck.
We need a People of Walmart equivalent for this bullshit. Start finding the designer/engineer/manager responsible for this garbage and shame them publicly.
How does this stuff pass any kind of Accessibility regs?
Besides cost, we should probably at least entertain the idea that we are a vocal minority. I’d be completely unsurprised to find out that the majority of people hardly ever touch the controls that got moved to touchscreens and, if they do, they don’t really care - they can set them before they set off, or do it while driving and wobble all over the road, but hey everyone does it so what does it matter?
