I thought I'd miss physical buttons, too, but I don't. I really don't. It's very easy to use the touchscreen in a Tesla. Plus, you do have physical buttons available for climate: they are on the steering wheel (if you decide to chose that option).
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Can you safely operate the entertainment system while driving? With physical buttons, I can turn the volume knob or cycle through radio station presets without taking my attention off the road. With a touch screen, you don't get tactile feedback and modal dialogs or different screens can block controls, so you have to divert your gaze and attention to the screen. I haven't driven in a Tesla, so maybe they've figured it out.
Only if you use the steering wheel controls. Despite what others may believe, anything you need to do on the giant touch screen absolutely cannot be done safely while driving.
I wonder, is there actual evidence that physical buttons are better? I don't doubt that screwing with a touchscreen while driving is dangerous, but I have to wonder about the common wisdom that screwing with physical buttons while driving isn't.
Yes, distraction.gov has some research you might be interested in, based on studies of actual car crashes. Note that the key point is distraction, not necessarily touchscreens by themselves. The problem is that it's impossible to use a touchscreen without looking at it, which means you're not looking at the road, and are thus distracted. NHTSA basically says that if it takes more than a single quick glance to perform an action, it's dangerous. This is why most OEMs lock out the touch screen controls while the car is in motion.
Ha! most OEMs like which ones? I've never seen a car where the touchscreen controls are locked while driving. At most I've seen ones that either won't let you use a touch keyboard while driving, or that will let you do that, after tapping a warning message about that being dangerous.
Lexus vehicles used to do this, at least back in 2006, so that you could only operate basic functions but could not set navigation destinations, etc. It was a huge pain, but given the touchscreen-only interface it made sense to minimize distractions. With my current car in one of the best designed control wheel UIs in the industry, I can navigate the menus almost exclusively without looking at the display (given some practice).
I believe it's the law in Japan, or at least they all do it here (in addition to disabling the obligatory built-in TV). Most dealers will pull out the sense wire from the back of the console if you ask them to
2010 Toyota Prius limits what you can do on the touchscreen while in motion. For example, you can't use the navigation
Mazdas lock out the touchscreens when driving, forcing you to use the "commander" knob instead. And not all functions are available when moving.
Obviously it's possible to meet NHTSA's criterion of operation with a "single quick glance" with a touchscreen UI.
The fact that most manufacturers either do a poor job of making this happen or don't bother trying at all doesn't entitle you to condemn the entire technology.
That's a fair opinion, but I have to disagree. Do this test yourself: grab an iPad and then setup your phone camera to record your face. Now look forward, then do a fairly straightforward task on the iPad like thumbs upping a song in Pandora, then look forward again. Check the video and see how long your eyes were on the screen. Do the same for a few other tasks as well. Now calculate how far your car would have traveled during that time at freeway speed.
For me, it's between 1.5 and 2 seconds, or around 100 feet of travel. If that really doesn't seem dangerous to you then I suppose it's your life, but I don't want to be driving anywhere near you.
Touchscreens can meet NHTSA's guidelines if they are used for presenting information. However, it's very difficult to make them safe to physically interact with while driving, short of reducing what's shown to just a few giant buttons. And my original point was that Tesla doesn't even try on this front - the center screen is jam packed with information and small buttons that require quite a bit of attention to operate effectively.
> Touchscreens can meet NHTSA's guidelines if they are used for presenting information.
I think you mean displays, not touchscreens.
Honestly, if you can't afford to lose a second or two here and there, you're probably going too fast for conditions.
> This is why most OEMs lock out the touch screen controls while the car is in motion.
So that the passenger can't use them either? The car is not my baby sitter, I wouldn't buy a car that did stuff like that.
I appreciate your stance and also hate these kinds of safety features from a usability standpoint. However, keep in mind that they're not there just for you - they're there to keep the drivers around you safe. If you're messing with the navigation controls and smash into the car in front of you, a completely innocent driver is suffering because you didn't want your car to babysit you.
Also, for what it's worth at least two of the OEMs I've worked with are in the process of adding passenger-detecting tech to the seats and head unit so that if someone is in the passenger seat, the full touchscreen controls will be unlocked.
> If you're messing with the navigation controls and smash into the car in front of you, a completely innocent driver is suffering because you didn't want your car to babysit you.
No, it's not because the car didn't babysit me, it's because I messed with the controls.
I have lots of way to crash into people, the car can help me avoid it, by knowledge and help, but not by restrictions.
If you put in passenger detecting tech I'll be sure to activate it permanently if I buy that car (or not buy the car if I can't).
They already have passenger detecting tech anyway - it's a weight sensor, it makes the seatbelt light beep. I'll probably have to remove the seatbelt beeper though, since it would activate constantly thinking there is someone in the seat.
And this is why you should not add such lockouts - people will disable them, and remove safety features in the process. And in any case machines are not smart enough for them to be in charge, there are too many special cases and failures.
This is not evidence per se, but with physical buttons you don't have to take your eyes off the road.
I was going to say the same thing. I know where the buttons are, so I can just feel for them without looking away from the road. Can't feel your way around a touchscreen.
My Ford uses Fitt's Law to good effect. The big functions (phone, audio, navigation, climate) each have a button in one of the four corners of the screen. You can slide til you feel the bezel and press.
That still doesn't help with subfunctions like picking a radio station, etc. but voice control and steering wheel buttons pick up the slack. I still miss well-placed physical controls.
That's a neat trick on Ford's part. Maybe car touchscreens need a different interaction language. Instead of touch being the primary action trigger, touch would only change the selection (and produce some tactile/haptic feedback as the selection changes) and a harder press (with its own distinct feedback) would actually activate the function. By dragging your finger around the screen, you could feel out the layout of the controls.
I wonder how many drivers actually learn their controls that well. Anecdotally (which I realize is worthless, I just don't have anything better to go on) I see a lot of drivers taking their eyes off the road to look at physical buttons, and I was even in a crash where the driver just drove off the road while fiddling with the radio.
It probably depends on the design of the physical buttons.
I've had cars where the physical buttons were sliders and I usually had to glance at them, especially when there were multiple slides parallel to each other (say for fan speed and hot/cold mix). That's because the part that I had to interact with would be in different places, depending on the current setting. It would require enough feeling around to make sure I had the right control that it would probably be more distracting than a quick glance.
My current car (2006 Honda CR-V) uses round buttons for many things. I do not need to glance at them. The fan speed control is always in the same place. The hot/cold mix control is always in the same place. The air routing control is always in the same place. So, if I want to change fan speed, for instance, I reach to the same fixed location every time, and then rotate the knob clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on whether I want to increase or decrease the fan speed. Unlike with sliders, the current setting does not affect what I have to do to find the control or interact with it.
It's not just remembering where the buttons are, it's the ease of using them. I don't have to remember the exact position of every button. I can feel for the button if I miss it, I can feel whether I'm fat-fingering other buttons and adjust, and I know when I've successfully pressed the button. This all adds up to me not looking at the dashboard.
In general aviation aircraft the important levers/buttons are all explicitly sized/shaped/coloured differently to avoid confusion. The last thing you want to happen is come in for landing, reduce your throttle and discover that you've accidentally pulled the mixture/cut-off to kill the engine.
Fortunately that's the kind of mistake you only make once ...
Heh, as if. In my plane, the flaps, spoilers, and landing gear levers are all inches apart, have similar colors, and similar shapes.
But yes, clearly they should be. But there's a pretty big difference between critical flight controls and controls for the music or HVAC.
Are you seriously asking if muscle memory is a thing? Because yes, it's absolutely a thing and anyone that's done much with interfaces would know this.
Doesn't that apply to touchscreen interfaces too?
It should be obvious that keeping your eyes on the road (you learn to use volume and HVAC controls by feel pretty quick) is less dangerous than looking down at a screen.
I'm wary of obvious things, because so often they turn out to be wrong.
You really don't believe that watching the road is safer than not watching the road?
I appreciate skepticism, but that just seems too extreme.
I'm really not convinced that having your eyes on the road and your attention on your fingers is safer than glancing away. I think it's probably right, but I'd like something better than just "it's obvious!"
What if you are not driving, but using auto pilot?
I usually engage Autopilot before operating the touchscreen, so that I can take my eyes off the road briefly.
My Dodge Charger has touch screen control for most functions (but not all). I have not found any trouble operating it while driving, but I'm sure there is a big difference between finding buttons on an 8.4" touchscreen vs 15" or larger.
I have a 2014 dodge charger. I absolutely abhor the touch screen for just about any function. It's painfully difficult to use without looking as too many buttons are close together and you have to really lean over to operate most of them. I feel it was poorly designed. (Just like having the cupholders behind the shifter) I cannot operate the touch screen reliably without looking at it and even while looking it's still difficult. I'm glad it still has physical controls for most functions although even those aren't very good (it's hard to feel the difference on some of the buttons).
Relatedly, does anyone have a sense of how far out we are from consumer-grade haptic-feedback touchscreens?
Seems like the obvious next step.
The BlackBerry Storm had a haptic system, but it didn't seem to catch on, and it also did not have separate buttons so was not as easy-to-use as a menu with conventional buttons.
>Relatedly, does anyone have a sense of how far out we are from consumer-grade haptic-feedback touchscreens?
Well, they had them in Star Trek: The Next Generation. While not actually shown close-up in the show, the technical manual explained that the flat touchscreens actually provided tactile feedback, and of course were reconfigurable.
How'd they do it? Simple: according to the technical manual, they used miniature force fields.
We're not very close to developing any kind of force fields right now....
On a more serious note, I believe there's been some research into using ultrasonics to provide some kind of tactile feedback. And of course lots of phones now have vibrating feedback.
Is there a physical button on the steering wheel to pause music playback? I often need to pause audiobooks or podcasts and I really miss it when I don't have a physical button to do this.
Yes, play/pause, volume, and next/previous track are all accessible on the steering wheel. There's also a set of menus on the instrument panel you can navigate entirely with steering wheel buttons, which allows you to control the sunroof, climate control, and other essentials.
What do the passengers do to control the climate for them?
Or how does the passenger change the music while you are viewing the map?
I really dislike there being only a single control centre. Good for the driver without passengers perhaps, but bad otherwise.
The climate controls are always shown at the bottom of the screen, independant from what else is going on. Also, most of the time the UI is split into two tiles which show different "apps". So operating one tile does not remove the map from the other. Also, you can display a mini-map on the drivers dashboard screen.
Agreed. I had the same hesitation. Like most things with the Tesla, you need to experience it to truly appreciate it.
I tried to reply to you but I'm on my phone and accidentally hit something else, to get back out I tried to hit the back button but that hit yet another link. Aren't touch screens fun!