> “Doing our research, when a driver would reach towards a touch-screen interface in any vehicle, they would unintentionally apply torque to the steering wheel, and the vehicle would drift out of its lane position,” said Matthew Valbuena, Mazda North America’s lead engineer for HMI and infotainment.
> “And of course with a touchscreen you have to be looking at the screen while you’re touching...so for that reason we were comfortable removing the touch-screen functionality,” he added.
You mean like in every car made before 2015? Do new cars really have that many more features?
With the touchscreen cars I've rented or driven for work I'd have loved to have a little bluetooth or serial connected control cluster that sat near to hand with basic radio and climate controls. Something I could operate by feel. Seems like there are enough bad touchscreen consoles out there to make an aftermarket kit viable but maybe I underestimate the technical challenges.
Maybe I'll just keep driving my junkers until voice control gets good.
The top level Settings menu in my 2020 Ford Explorer doesn't even fit on one page. It would end up looking like the cockpit of a commercial airliner if everything had to be mapped out to a physical control.
Every action doesn’t need its own physical control. Knobs and buttons can be multipurpose. My mazda3 has touchscreen but it’s disabled because I can navigate and control everything with a single “command” knob.
It isn't to say "All menu items are strictly button based" like the space shuttle or something. It means that the screen will not be touch-based.
This often means a large knob that one can turn, use as a joystick (up down left right) and push in for selection. This knob is used for navigating the majority of the console. There are some unique buttons and knobs for things like volume, climate, etc.
This is what my Mazda does, it's perfect. The big knob does exactly what you describe, where turning the knob scrolls. There's also a small dedicated volume knob that you can push in for mute and left/right to change tracks, and dedicated home and back buttons next to the big knob. All easy to use without looking.
