It's incredibly frustrating to me that buying a vehicle with a pushbutton, working, reliable interface is becoming increasingly impossible to do. Why is UX so horrifically bad in the vehicle space? Is it poor management decisions or a shortage of good UX engineers? I get that lumping everything into the touchscreen can be a cheaper option to build, but I'd GLADLY pay for a different option. I don't understand it.
> Why is UX so horrifically bad in the vehicle space?
It used to be that vehicle radio units were entirely replaceable. There was a relatively healthy aftermarket, and quite a few shops that would actually do the installations for you. There used to be a lot more competition here, but I think with the general increase in quality of speaker systems combined with smart phones and the much higher level of system integration through the head unit effectively killed it.
Hence.. you get what you buy. In a sense, the manufacturer has a monopoly on your dash that they didn't traditionally have.
A lot of automakers are chasing Tesla's one screen design -- they're so envious of the cost savings there. Except the Germans, they're still putting in lots of buttons and knobs -- my next car will likely be German because they seem to understand what people actually want.
Have you driven a Tesla much? The general UX intent is that you're not supposed to need to interact with the screen while driving. Wipers are automatic, lights are automatic (both can be pulsed with the stalks of course). Virtually everything responds to voice commands ("Play Stairway to Heaven", "Navigate to Albertsons", "Set temperature to 72", etc...). All this stuff works really well.
I won't engage with "what people actually want" except to point to sales figures, I guess. Everyone likes different stuff. But the point is that Tesla is winning in this space because they're handing people an outside-the-box solution. Asking for "lots of buttons and knobs" is just demanding the older solution. That doesn't say the older solution is wrong, but it does argue that maybe you're failing to understand the new paradigm.
Are Tesla's selling because of the interior or in spite of it? I suspect it's more the latter, and it's the powertrain and charging network that are actually the driving force behind Tesla sales, not the interior.
Meh. I'm sure stuff doesn't work somewhere for someone. But... come on. Voice recognition is a long solved problem. Tesla's works as wells as Amazon's or Apple's or whoever's, which is to say sure, it makes an occasional mistake, but it basically isn't a problem except in arguments like this one on the internet. Mine works great. I love it and use it every day. I'm sorry yours doesn't, but at least you can sell your car for a profit and get one with buttons, so that's something.
It doesn't matter how well it works. I want a button. That way, I can adjust things without talking over passengers, and the kids cannot adjust things by talking to it.
If I have to pish a button to activate it, then it is strictly more work than pushing a button. If it filters out all but the driver using stereo location, then the passenger can't futz with it for the driver on long trips.
> I won't engage with "what people actually want" except to point to sales figures, I guess.
I'd say that a person's first purchase of a Tesla only signals what they think they want. If they buy another one after the first then I'd agree it is actually what they want, or at least they like the other benefits of the Tesla enough to outweigh anything they don't like.
I believe I fully understand the new paradigm. I had a 2018 Volvo XC90 and it's sort of a hybrid between the new and old paradigm. They have a fairly large screen (not as large as Tesla) and then a handful of buttons for functions that are fairly important if something is wrong with the screen (front window defrost, rear window defog, etc). I sold it after a year because I did not like it.
It also supported voice control for all of these features, as did my BMW before that, as does my current vehicle. Voice control sucks to varying degrees on all of these vehicles, and if someone in the car is talking or you're on a phone call, you can't adjust things with your voice. I'd rather just have buttons and knobs with tactile feedback that are always available.
But it's true, maybe other people don't want tactile controls. I mean, UX in general tends to disagree with this notion, but the iPhone beat the blackberry so it's possible that my in vehicle preferences are not what everyone wants.
> If they buy another one after the first then I'd agree it is actually what they want
Tesla is, I believe (and I'm too lazy[2] to try to look up where I read this) the most repurchased brand on the market today. The used market for these cars is literally priced above new vehicles[1]! Were you really not aware? Does that maybe change your opinion?
[1] Which is to say, on balance Tesla owners won't sell their cars even if they could make a profit doing so.
That's all great information for the case that people love their Teslas, I have no doubt about that. I'm still not convinced people are rebuying Tesla's because they prefer touchscreens over tactile buttons though. I believe there are plenty of factors that go into that loyalty decision. I'm sure some people do prefer touchscreens, and some don't -- but we don't know what that breakdown is.
Sigh. That link is not a "study", and it's not measuring safety. It's a single test of task completion time run by a magazine supported by advertising from legacy car brands (mostly Volvo, it looks like). It's designed to do exactly what it just did, get itself into conversations like this so people who don't want to believe that their advertisers' competitor[1] has a good product can continue to believe that.
FWIW: You don't need to go to Sweden to find that stuff anyway, Car & Driver and Motor Trend both hate Tesla too (and for the same reason: Tesla doesn't advertise).
If there are safety effects measurable with Teslas, we'd be measuring safety effects. There are millions of these cars on the road. They are safe. I know it, you know it, the time for hand-wavy hypotheticals is long past.
You need something more. Even Ralph Nader started with real accident statistics on the Corvair.
Saving $100 worth of knobs on a $100k vehicle can't be the motivation.
They're probably far more envious of the ability to put the air conditioner behind a monthly subscription vja remote software update, or render the entire vehicle useless with a 'security' update that makes 10yo cars too unresponsive to use
It is, because even saving 1 buck on a 100k car that is sold less-then-what-peiple-think margins hundred of thousands of times is a good thing. Heck, even at higher margins it is worth doing. Welcome to the world of mass production of physical goods.
Have you not seen the interior of a Porsche Taycan? German makes are definitely moving in the same direction because it actually is what people want. They just move slower.
Cadillac went away from tactile controls in 2012 and they reversed their course in the following generation. People think it is what they want, until they have to live with it. The automakers are happy to oblige since virtually every dept loves them for different reasons.
My Volkswagen ID.4 (German-built) doesn't have a single actual button in it. All touchscreens, capacitive simulated buttons, voice control and even gesture control. But no buttons, and the only knob is for the mirror adjustment.
My previous version Porsche (958) has a button for newly every function. Its very similar to a small plane and it 100% allows me to focus on the road and whats important without looking at the change of function.
Kind of. The interior of car from 15 years ago with mostly buttons and a tiny screen is much cheaper than a Tesla with a massive screen and powerful computer.
Of course if you're going to have a massive screen and powerful computer anyways (because people want that), yes, you can save in not having buttons in addition to the massive screen.
But the massive screen is not cheaper than old school cars.
Yet the cars are more expensive than ever. Nah, it’s a bet by the management that people don’t actually choose a car based on the polish of the infotainment system.
Maybe not, but I've done the opposite. The BMW, Subaru, and Fords I tried had terrible interfaces and I ruled them out. In particular BMW's i-drive seems to be hated by many.
Tesla on the other hand has buttons for many things, horn, turn signals, activate the windshield wipers for a moment (I use auto that handles most needs), engage cruise control, set following distance when using cruise control, high beams, pause music, music volume, etc.
Sure seat heaters, interior temp, ac, defrosting etc require touch screen use (or leaving them on auto), but those are emergencies and not much different than having to hit one of 8 buttons/dials on a center console. Especially since most are single touch, not touch -> select menu -> hit button.
While I find the above not annoying I really love the 15" screen that devotes the majority of the screen to things around the car (lane markers, cars, motorcycles, traffic cones, trucks, pedestrians, etc) and the map (with traffic). If the car sees a problem it blinks that object red, which I find helpful. Sure if I want I can get an inch for the current song. But generally I feel more situationally aware with a nice big nav screen up. On more than one occasion I've seen motorcycles splitting lanes behind me because of motion on the screen before I notice the noise or see them in the mirrors. I also really miss the current speed limit on the screen when I switch cars.
I also really like being able to say "play pink floyd", or "navigate to ...".
The logic is that removing buttons would make the cars cheaper as they have historically had buttons up until very recently. I imagine it did, by several dollars, but it was overwhelmed by the increase in other features. Now with touch screens they are able to iterate even quicker and add more features of dubious quality, but it looks better in comparison checklists.
People like sitting higher up, or do not like being seated lower, or so much lower, than others.
It might also be safer to be in a higher up car in the event of a collision.
Pretty much all the families I know with young kids and toddlers has a full size SUV. Every time I ask why they did not get a minivan such as Odyssey or Sienna, every response is they like SUVs and do not want to sit lower in the minivan. Even though the minivan has better fuel economy, seats more people with more legroom, and has more cargo space, the answer is still SUV is cooler than minivans.
I even see families who live with elderly parents prefer to drive two SUVs (or 1 SUV and 1 pickup truck) somewhere with 3 to 4 people in each, rather than have one minivan to be able to transport all 7 or 8 at the same time. And these same families growing up went everywhere in minivans because it was the most economic way, but now that they can afford SUVs, that is what they choose to use.
I've been slowly writing a near-future science fiction story where everyone drives around 15 feet above the ground and has to enter their car on a ladder, because over 50 years vehicles slowly crept up in height and nobody wanted to be the "low car" on the road.
It started out as a joke back in 2010, partially inspired by "A Nice Morning Drive" (http://www.2112.net/powerwindows/transcripts/19731100roadand...) from the 1972s. It is no longer very funny -- Ford killing its sedans a couple years back was a sad wakeupcall.
Have you heard of jean yanne’s l'apocalypse est pour demain? It is a story about a society where people live in their cars 24/7. It is very interesting but I’m not sure if there’s an English translation
I know two couples who both started out with small efficient cars. And then had to upgrade because they could not fit a stroller in the back. It feels like car companies just want to have skews that are intentionally compromised to push people into the next tier. When most people just need a compact sedan.
The corolla/civic buyers seem to be on a longer planning horizon than the RAV4/CRV buyers. It's tough to compare sales apples to sales oranges when new car buyers on average buy sedans on 10-15 year schedules and SUVs on roughly 5 year schedules.
That planning horizon differential alone is enough to explain why car manufacturers would be greater incentivized to iterate on SUVs faster than sedans and include more features. Iteration and feature differentials will contribute as much to sales choices as "sit higher up" will, acting as a reinforcement in the cycle/spiral towards larger vehicles.
Car manufacturers aren't incentivized enough to lengthen their own planning horizons or otherwise better accommodate "sensible" sedan drivers, and it becomes very easy to pretend they don't exist and chase the short-term profits of the faster cycle time (especially when pushed by quarterly-earnings focused shareholders).
My Prius can fit a large stroller and still have room for shopping in the trunk. As much hate as it gets, it's actually surprisingly roomy inside. Under the trunk floor there's a removable compartment that I use to store a 100pc tool kit, first aid kit, fire extinguisher and spare washer fluid. And under there is even more space. People who do LPG conversions store the tank there, so no loss of trunk space.
On road trips, my wife and I would fold down the rear seats and sleep in the back. I'm 183cm (6ft) and there is plenty of space. You can fit 2.4m lengths of wood if you need trips to the hardware store. I guess full plywood sheets would need the hatch open, but there wouldn't be much overhang.
A year or so ago I tried a RAV4 and it felt much smaller inside. In the rear seats I felt much more squashed.
You're also not able to visibly broadcast that you're "doing parenting right" to all the other rich parents when you drop your crotch-fruit off at summer camp and that's the key feature that a hell of a lot of people are buying for.
I'm very jealous of the US car market where there's a lot of AWD sedan options.
Here in NZ we have the Camary, Mazda 6, Lexus IS etc but none of them are available in AWD. Only crossovers, SUVs and Utes (small pick up trucks).
I've actually been toying with the idea of getting a Subaru WRX. I'm not a a boyracer or anything, but it's about the only japanese, AWD sedan available here. Feels like a weirdly practical choice (good cornering, better handling in ice/heavy rain/gravel).
EDIT: wow even modern Rav4s fail the moose test - a car which I'd call pretty mild for an SUV, even wagon like.
That blind spot houses a curtain airbag that has significantly increased safety in crashes. Engineering is managing tradeoffs. Safety is now a mandatory standard. We can have small a-pillars at the expense of safety.
As with any blind spot, one just has to move their head...
The data I can find with a very quick google shows that higher vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians and so the move towards SUVs and trucks has put pedestrians at higher risk .
Side curtain airbags are probably a bigger plus to the safety of reasonable people who are wearing seat-belts and not crashing into shit head on at high speed than frontal airbags since the latter is just the last stage of a bunch of tech whereas side curtain is doing most of the heavy lifting in its direction.
I think it is because A)Good UX is hard and there is a shortage of people who have experience a mixed hardware/software UX. B) Car companies are rather old fashioned in setting their priorities. They haven’t caught on yet at management level that the modern car is a different beast and needs different priorities when designing and engineering. C) A car company is big. It takes a long time to change, and a lot of people are really sceptical and don’t believe the future needs to be different.
Funnily enough, given the… mixed results Apple's UI team has been putting out recently, it remains to be seen how "ergonomic and reliable" the UI actually ends up being.
It reminds me of cell phone interfaces back before the iPhone. I had high hopes that Carplay would motivate the vendors to put some effort into their own interfaces but sadly that doesn't appear to have happened.
Depends on the car and the person. I have back problems and almost no office chairs are usable for me. I can easily drive 10 hours in my car with no issues. Sometimes, my back feels better after a drive that long.
I wouldn't say this is universally true. Lexus and Volvo tend to make amazing car seats. I say this after driving 2000 miles last week and not feeling a thing in my old Lexus GX.
I just had a Kia Sportage as a rental car, and it wasn't too bad: it had buttons for everything you need (dials for climate control, buttons for seat ventilation), and still a pretty big touch screen for navigation. So there are still cars that don't use the touch screen for everything.
