What about extreme violations of privacy? Let me know when that is “out”, too.
Yeah, so the thing is, any amount of trust that I had has already been completely destroyed. “We don’t do it anymore because it’s illegal, trust me bro” isn’t going to cut it. Does the bill include mandatory prison time for executives for violations, or just cost-of-doing-business fines? Will this be enforced by a government regulatory body that is not literally outnumbered 20:1 by car manufacturer lawyers?
If the car has any kind of network capabilities and 100% of the car’s software is not open source, I’m not buying it. Period.
This bill would not need to exist if cars were FOSS, or if cars were non-networked. Those are the only 2 solutions that I will accept. This bill is worthless to me.
Will the regulatory body be stacked with, and bribed by auto execs?
Does the Space Pope shit on Uranus ?
I didn’t read too far, but,
To restrict car manufacturers and other companies from selling consumer car-related data, increase transparency regarding data practices, and for other purposes.
already skips over collecting the data, so yeah. I would guess this bill just exists for the optics, and isn’t actually intended to challenge the industry.
I agree with you, the damage has been done. That’s why I’m looking at alternative methods of transportation, like an ebike or public transit. Hopefully your area has good infrastructure for that.
It’s nice to have principles, but in a few years you’re going to have to find a new way to get around.
I mean, a lot of cars have a genuinely phenomenal life span, if you don’t mind getting something that isn’t shiny and new you can probably get like a 2012 Toyota or Honda and drive it till the wheels fall off. My dream car is from the 90s and people still generally regard them as fairly reliable
Eventually it’ll be an issue, but that does leave a lot of time for nerds and hackers to find a way to gut networking stuff while telling the car it’s still intact. Dunno if we’ll ever see an open source car OS compatible with the systems in major manufacturer’s vehicles, but privacy workarounds feel like they could be pretty realistic
My dream car is from the 90s and people still generally regard them as fairly reliable
I would not want to share the road with modern oversized cars while driving a car with 90s crash safety
I drive a Miata as a 2nd car for weekend fun, but it’s not a real option as a daily driver if you value your life
Not to mention that it uses 8 liters of gas per 100km, whilst my daily driver averages 12wkh per 100km
Thats fair. A na miata is basically my dream car, I hope to someday daily one in spite of being from the 90s 😅
Lol cars last more than “a few years”, my current vehicle is 20 years old. I’ll easily get another 150,000 miles out of it, probably more. I already have a crate motor picked out to swap in when the engine finally dies. Or I could just “upgrade” to a newer year and still be non-networked.
Now I’m being a little silly, but at this rate of climate change acceleration, I’m starting to bet that my current vehicle is going to outlive capitalism anyway.
Touchscreens were never popular with customers. Manufacturers kept cramming touchscreens in cars and using them to control everything becuase they were being stupid with new tech.
Edit: I guess I should have been clearer. I was talking about as a replacement for tactile controlls in a car like the article is talking about. Reverse cameras and other things that are good to have a touch screen for make perfect sense but using your touch screen to control your Air conditioning in a way that you have to divert your attention from the road to operate sliders and buttons on a touch screen is dumb as hell.
Also the fact that touch screens are cheaper to build with how expensive battery tech has been in electric cars.
Cheaper to build and can be adjusted and patched as you go
Touchscreens are great to have, controlling Android Auto or Apple Carplay with physical buttons like you have to do in a Mazda is a nightmare.
The problem is when the touchscreen is used as a replacement for physical controls, instead of an addition. Stuff like controlling your climate control should not be exclusively controlled through the touchscreen
And don’t even get me started about VWs stupid decision to put touch controls on the steering wheel. At least they backpedaled on that decision pretty quickly
My wife and I drive almost the same model of Audi, separated by a couple of years. One still has physical buttons for infotainment and one has a touch screen, but both support Android Auto and CarPlay.
I prefer the physical controls for it, because I can glance at the screen and know “turn right two clicks and press down” to get where I want, and then look back at the road while I do it.
I added Android Auto and Apple Carplay to my 2016 Audi via an aftermarket add-on module that ties into its native MMI system and it requires me to use the dial and buttons to interact with it. I also really like doing it that way for the reason you described. I can easily switch apps and navigate menus by counting clicks without taking my eyes off the road. Plus I can still use my phone for some of the more complicated interactions like entering in addresses that Google Assistant can’t decipher (only when the vehicle is stopped and in a brief and safe manner, of course)
Touchscreens are cheaper UI part too. It saved money and “looked cool”… Win-win for shareholders
Touch screens also seem like they would be easier to integrate with subscription services. Auto manufacturers are looking to make things like heated seats a subscription.
Cars have been getting steadily worse. There doesn’t seem to be any enforcement of recalls (has anyone satisfactorily had the Honda Civic 2016-2021 air conditioning resolved? How much did you spend?)
If they can take cars away from us entirely, and move to us renting self driving cars, that’s what they would really want to do. Pay for your radio, pay for heat and AC…
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN
Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?
IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE SUN
That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.
I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.
Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.
Never had an issue with them but then I live in Europe, where auto-adjusting/adaptive lights aren’t just legal it’s a requirement if you want to make the headlights permanent high-beams.
Also, bring back gauges, instead of idiot-lights. It’s nice to know when a problem is beginning (overheating, etc) before it becomes a crisis when you have no choice but to pull over.
Yeah I hate it when information is hidden in the name of minimalism. I’d rather have a plane cockpit UI than a bicycle UI, even if it means I feel like an idiot at various points when I discover new things I could have been doing the whole time.
The feeling like an idiot is how people learn.
Yeah, realizing I was an idiot implies I’m a bit less of one than I was before I realized.
My hybrid dash is anything but minimal. I have a zillion selections to show me a slew of random things. None of them are an engine temperature reading. So frustrating.
If it hasn’t happened already, it wouldn’t surprise me if useful instrumentation space is reallocated to advertisement space at some point. Though hopefully the consumer rage in response would end whatever company tries that first.
It’ll start as a feature. When you need gas we’ll automatically show you the cheapest gas stations around you. People will gobble it up.
I recently learned that in my car the same light is used to indicate that the parking brake is on and that the brake fluid is low. Nothing bad happened, and it’s getting worked on, but my first thought was that the sensor on the brake must be broken. It’s poor design, seemingly without reason.
I’m so glad I kept my car and weathered through this shitty phase of car manufacturing.
If only there was hope for weathering through the data collection, subscription-based features and the death of sedans though…
I asked a dealer for a dumb-car. No fucking auto 911 dialing, bluetooth enabled, GPS service horseshit, just a normal car and he shot me
Get any Infiniti with a 3g antenna. The network doesn’t exist anymore so it can’t phone home.
Yay, I never left having physical controls for things like HVAC controls and volume.
Touchscreens are great for context-sensitive controls, but less so for things that should be accessible at all times and usable without looking.
Touchscreens can stay, but only for non-essential tasks like changing settings or entering addresses. Climate, media, and all other controls you usually use while driving should be tactile by mandate.
Should be illegal to have touchscreen controls in a car, it requires you to look at it to effectively control it, which means the car forces you to ignore the road to do anything.
Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.
Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.
Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it’s right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you’ll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.
The term is «affordance»
Thanks. Damn autocorrect.
Suspected as much!
I use my four way hazard lights when there’s heavy braking on the freeway to make sure people behind me are paying attention. It’s a button on my dash and pretty easy to toggle.
Though is that something that touch screen cars really put into the touch screen!?
I don’t know Don, I’m sure he’s a fine guy, but I’ve read about all these kinds of rules (EDIT: emerging) much earlier - as early as 1940s, with airplanes and cars and other machines in production and in front lines that people had to operate for long hours under strain and make as few mistakes as possible.
Even USSR, not the Rome of ergonomics, had GOSTs for average ratio of errors an operator makes on a certain machine, machines had to be inside those numbers in tests involving people, or they wouldn’t get adopted into wide usage.
Note how the criterion is defined. Not formalities like the shape of something or the layout conforming to some vague definition, but the results of an actual test on people. Of course, though, there were also a myriad GOSTs as to how the specific controls may look, a GOST for every detail one could use in a device.
Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.
Have you considered the shareholders though?
Cool, now bring back single cab light trucks with full length beds.
Id settle just for a truck that isnt very clearly pandering “im a big boy!” energy. There all way too fucking big for no god damn reason other than validation of ego. Bunch of weak fucking man babies need some million ton 3 lane wide truck just so they can pretend theyre a big strong man to themselves and everyone else, despite never using the truck for what its purpose is supposed to be.
YES! Where is my dad’s little Toyota Pickup? Closest thing we have is the Ford Maverick, which is still pretty fucking huge.
Indeed, Nissan should respond with their e-Power hybrid too. Toyota applied for a patent using the Stout name in South America.
Was always a fan of the tacoma they were making before they increased the size of it, thing was kind of the perfect size. Roomy enough cabin, small enough to be drivable in a parking lot, enough bed for towing occasionally.
I have heard that the reason for this is that trucks in that size range are less regulated by the EPA. Companies didn’t want to put in the research to develop trucks that met emissions standards, so they just make them really heavy for no purpose, evading regulations. Take this with a grain of salt, because I’ve done zero research of my own on it.
I’d buy an electric one. I don’t need to haul a trailer or anything huge.
I think any truck gets a pass. Even a Honda Civic raised an inch or two, slap a bigger greenhouse on it, and send it on it’s way as a CUV.
I suspect the growth spurt has more to do with “tax loophole trucks.” I might be wrong on both points.
Maybe a Ford Maverick or a Honda Ridgeline. The other trucks are just unreasonable. $80K for a Tundra, or $60K for a Tacoma? WTF!!!
RIGHT?? I want an 8-foot bed, dammit!
I just want a coffee table book with pictures of these stupid executive’s faces who approved the original all touchscreen versions that were becoming ubiquitous.
You could make money from that. Trace the execs, get nice shiny photos to the tech, write some good copy, and publish “The Encyclopaedia of garbage tech” so that people in the future can ridicule and possibly learn from their stupidity.
Having worked with people in that industry they don’t care. They always just want to shake things up then move to next thing to say they did something at their old job. Then forget all about it once they did the next thing.
Thank Tesla.
woody_harrelson_wiping_tears_with_cash.jpg
Touch screens are cheaper, that’s why they did it.
I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.
Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there’s many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.
The book cover would be a photo of Musk 😆
Plenty of responsibility for elmo, but don’t remove shared blame from the many layers of individual greedy cowards beyond that who used this as convenient cover to approve changes in their own org’s designs. Anything to make their extra pennies and not pass any of those savings on to the consumer (also so much easier to enable subscription car features, can’t make a physical button disappear over the air)
No I wouldn’t say touchscreens are out, I would say augmenting them with physical buttons is about to get popular.
Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.
I like that being a leading expert on buttons is a profession that exists in this world. You go Rachel Plotnick.
I’m just shocked that’s a cinema and media studies professor. I’d’ve expected human factors engineering or psychology, especially at such a psych school
Professors don’t always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .
Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?
You mean like the 1985 Subaru XT Coupe? God I love that cassette futurism look!
Funny part is it looks sci-fi to me.
This will never not be sci fi to me lol
The retro futurism of the 80’s was the best
Some of the most zany quirks and features of any car!
Get outta here, Doug Demuro! Go back to YouTube!
80s and early 90s designed the best dashboards. Change my mind mf.
Touch screens are shit tor buttons. They can be hacked. They can be unresponsive.
There’s a load of other reasons, but either or both are enough to realise that a physical button is much safer. Perfect example of safety being lost in technology. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
The worst is all the ones that cheaped out and put a resistive touchscreen. Making it 10 times worse.
And they dont work with gloves when it’s cold.
