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Touch screens in cars - a good idea or not? Increasingly - nope [1]

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Date: 2023-07-02

David Zipper writing at Slate says the auto industry has discovered something: drivers hate touch screens.

You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors. In a February interview with Fast Company, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “further research” is needed before addressing the obvious risks that oversized SUVs and trucks pose to those not inside of them. Happily, there is one area where we are making at least marginal progress: A growing number of automakers are backpedaling away from the huge, complex touch screens that have infested dashboard design over the past 15 years. Buttons and knobs are coming back.

emphasis added

Alas, the rest of the article is only for subscribers, but the gist of it is simple: drivers don’t like touch screens because it can be difficult to navigate through them, it’s even harder when bumps in the road send your fingers astray, and because its a real safety hazard when it forces you to take your eyes off the road. So why did so many automakers start putting in touch screens?

Because it was cheaper to manufacture than going with buttons, knobs, and levers, and it was a way to add more features with just software instead of hardware.

The shift away from touch screens is getting attention. The Good News Network makes an obvious point. While safety experts have warned of the dangers of texting on a smart phone while driving, and laws have been passed about smartphone use/abuse while driving, the use of touchscreens in cars has gotten less attention.

Despite what the name implies, a touchscreen relies entirely on the eyes to use owing to the lack of tactile feedback. As car makers began to take what was first just for the radio and nav tech and add more and more features, they became more and more dangerous to use in the car, while also becoming more and more necessary for anything other than a barebones driving experience.

There is something to be said for a barebones driving experience — if that means the driver can remain focused on actually driving the car, instead of trying to figure out how to get through the touch menus to get to the one screen they are trying to find.

U.S. News and World Report has a look at the problem, with set of slides showing the pros and cons of touchscreens. From Slide 7:

Research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that just two seconds of distraction doubles the risk of a crash. A 2017 study by the University of Utah and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety shows that using modern infotainment technology can distract drivers for as long as 40 seconds. Older drivers typically take significantly longer to accomplish complicated tasks, such as entering an address into a navigation system, than younger drivers. The study didn't just look at touch-screen infotainment technologies; it also included voice response and other infotainment system inputs, such as dial controllers. "This is troublesome because motorists may assume that features that are enabled when they are driving are safe and easy to use," said University of Utah Psychology Professor David L. Strayer.

emphasis added

The Byte — Futurism quotes from the Slate article mentioned up top.

Case in point, Porsche has phased out its all-touchscreen design of the Cayenne luxury SUV, Slate notes, adding some much-needed buttons back. The new 2024 design still features a central touchscreen, but at least now new owners will no longer have to suffer the ordeal of infotainment-based climate controls. It's a small victory, as the touchscreen craze has plagued cars for the past decade or so, blurring the line between automaker and tech company. Tesla, in particular, has been leading the charge, prominently featuring giant, tablet-like infotainment systems on their cars' dashboards that control almost all of the vehicles' functions, down to the windshield wipers.

There’s a rather obvious point to be made:

Thankfully, it looks like the industry is beginning to catch on, as consumers and car journalists have been throwing a big stink for years. Several other automakers have expressed support for adding buttons back, too, including Hyundai and Nissan. Meanwhile, Porsche's parent company Volkswagen confirmed last fall that it was dropping excessive touchscreen controls on its cars' steering wheels after customers voiced their outrage. Still, it doesn't look like all automakers have relented on needlessly giant and still distracting infotainment systems. But hey, what do you expect from an industry that has spent the better part of this century literally reinventing the button?

2017 Subaru Forester, driver's view

Some Personal Observations

This is photo of the dashboard of my current vehicle, a 2017 Subaru Forester. It has a touchscreen which provides access to many features, most of which I don’t use. There are some important things going on here which may not be immediately obvious, but show attention to actually making the car easier and safer to drive.

The three large knobs below the touchscreen control the environmental systems. They are large and easy to grasp, and light up at night. There’s a small display just at the top of the dashboard. It supplies a small amount of information in different formats as the driver chooses. Most of the time I leave it in a default setting, but can switch using the button just below the red button for the forward phaser bank. (Actually that’s the button for emergency flashers.) The screen is placed where it makes it easy to see what it’s showing while still keeping eyes oriented towards what’s happening in front of the car.

The bracket to the right holds my smartphone when I’m using the navigation app. It puts the screen where I can see it while still looking through the windshield. (I also get voice prompts from the app directly through my hearing aids via bluetooth.) By preference I don’t take or make calls while driving.

The steering wheel has buttons. The ones on the right are for cruise control. The ones on the left access some of the basic entertainment features and other systems of the touchscreen. I can use them to control things without have to take my hands off the wheel. The lever on the right side controls the windshield wipers; one on the left (not visible) is for turn signals and headlights.

There are analog displays behind the steering wheel for speed, engine RPMs, and a small digital display for other information, as well as the indicator for high beams and emergency warning lights.

There are some other controls to the lower left of the dash, and also in the area around the drive selection lever. They are not frequently accessed and usually aren’t needed while driving.

The touchscreen has a lot of features — but it also has some buttons to control a few of them like volume or tuning a radio station. I find it’s a little too easy to bump the wrong part of the screen, so I try to minimize using it. It's also the display for the backup camera, and when the car is in reverse it locks out all the other features of the touchscreen.

The controls are all grouped in a way that makes it easy for the driver to reach them, with more critical controls placed where they can be reached most easily. I looked at several comparable vehicles before settling on the Subaru Forester here in part because this IMHO had the best arrangement of controls, laid out around the idea of function over fashion.

These design criteria aren't new; the aviation industry has been making use of them for decades because Job One is flying the aircraft and anything that takes attention away from that is not good. So, there are things like controls for flaps that have a lever with a knob on the end shaped like a flap. Landing gear levers have knobs like wheels, and so on. Glass cockpits are getting away from that a bit — and that can lead to problems for pilots who don’t stay on top of what automated systems are doing.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

The Enterprise NCC-1701 D

For those who remember what it was like to see Star Trek The Next Generation when it first began showing, one of the features of the Enterprise D was how everything from the original series for controlling the ship had been replaced by touchscreen controls everywhere. Back in 1987, that seemed incredibly futuristic. The displays could be configured for whatever task was in hand — of course the ship’s computer could also be controlled by voice commands too...

Starship Voyager

By the time Star Trek: Voyager arrived in 1995, not everyone in Star Fleet was happy with flying spaceships by sliding their fingers around on a smooth surface. Lt. Tom Paris liked to spend time off in the Holodeck as Captain Proton, an adventure series based on the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers B&W serials from the 1930’s, including the ideas of what spaceships looked like in those days.

When the crew of Voyager decided they needed something a little more versatile than a shuttlecraft for some missions, they came up with the Delta Flyer — and Paris drew on Captain Proton when it came to designing ship controls.

..For aesthetic reasons, Paris designed some of the flight controls to resemble those from the holodeck simulation of Captain Proton; when Tuvok complained, Paris explained that he wanted to feel the ship and that he was tired of tapping panels.

Touchscreens will continue to appear in cars — but perhaps they’ll be more about actually making things easier and safer for drivers than as a cheap way of shoveling more distracting features into a car.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/2/2176643/-Touch-screens-in-cars-a-good-idea-or-not-Increasingly-nope

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