Gentlemen, a short view back to the past. Thirty years ago, Niki Lauda told us ‘take a monkey, place him into the cockpit and he is able to drive the car.’ Thirty years later, Sebastian told us ‘I had to start my car like a computer, it’s very complicated.’ And Nico Rosberg said that during the race – I don’t remember what race - he pressed the wrong button on the wheel. Question for you both: is Formula One driving today too complicated with twenty and more buttons on the wheel, are you too much under effort, under pressure? What are your wishes for the future concerning the technical programme during the race? Less buttons, more? Or less and more communication with your engineers?
The article touches on cost as a reason automakers eschew buttons, but I recall an interesting comment with another reason: design schedule. Changes to software can be made at any point in the development schedule of a car, however late changes to physical buttons are very costly, potentially requiring new contracts, re-tooling, re-testing, cascading interior design changes etc.
I work in the software side of in industrial manufacturing. In one of the products I worked in we didn't want to have a screen and buttons at all and do everything through blutooth-based smartphone app, partially because of this. Some clients demanded it so we added an optional touch-screen addon charging extra, the software in this screen is basically the same as the blutooth smartphone app (but not using blutooth).
The amount of hardware problems and bad design fixed or worked-around in software is significant. If a new product is released and it is not using an existing software platform as another product it will most likely be incomplete at release. Even configuring the existing platform for a new product can be incomplete at release.
I think this stems from upper-management underfunding and underinvesting in software. Most of them are mechanical engineers and don't really understand software at a deep level, tied to the fact most complex machines (like cars) are essentially a distributed system with dozens of little underpowered computers that makes building software for them harder than your average web cloud application.
Software systems for hardware are hard from the get go, but don't have scaling issues that can't be fixed with bigger chips. Web cloud software is much easier (especially with cloud provider services), but scaling them to millions of users can get harder (the complexity comes in later).
Oh and don't get me started on the underpowered chips that the procurement teams are pushing down our throats. 64kb of RAM is not okay for a system that needs to push hundreds of megabytes per month to the cloud.
Procurement is always trying to cut costs for v2 and the chips are usually the big ticket item that can make into their KPIs, so it is always a fight between engineers and procurement.
Physical buttons are the reason why I bought A4 B9. I had the opportunity to drive A6 and Model 3, but I couldn’t understand why most of the controls were screens.
After driving a couple hundred thousand miles and knowing that at least in Germany you are not allowed to use your smartphone while driving (isn’t that just a screen?!) I’m slowly starting to think that we may have reached the top with interior car tech.
I can't begin to tell you how bad and annoying the software is in my 2015 Honda Odyssey.
Honda... I'm at about 98% of the straws of the camel's back on deciding why I should never contribute to Honda's business as a customer, ever again.
It's as though Honda never tested this vehicle nor drove it for a few days. Nor drove it until things started breaking and software made stupid decisions.
- Sliding door doesn't work? Oh! Guess what-- Now you can't open the gas cap because the software can't communicate with the sliding door! Yay! We'll just take extra special care not to let our software let you open the gas cap... we don't want that non-responsive sliding door to accidentally hit it. And you, customer? You're too dumb to do that on your own, we'll be your nanny.
- Oh, you installed a rear cargo trailer? Sorry! You'll just have to endure the loud constant warning-beep on reverse! And no-- we'll provide no way of turning that off :) Because we care so much about your convenience and comfort. And no-- Don't expect us to ever expect you might install anything our rear view camera warning-beep-system might detect, on your back trailer hitch. No one ever installs things on the rear side of the vehicle, duh! ...The customer is stupid, Not us, the car manufacturer! We'll make extra special care to be extremely stupid to ensure you can never be quite as stupid as extremely stupid!
Perhaps they discovered all the bugs and threw their hands up because of operations/finance/sales/marketing deadlines, and said "Haha... screw it. Just sell it. To hell with the customer!"
The one which got me was when I took our elderly Subaru in to the dealer for a combination of recall and maintenance work a few years back. They gave me a loaner which normally works as a sales encouragement but in my case the experience was terrible. CarPlay should have been an easy sell - the one we own lacks it - but that meant using a slow touchscreen to close a dialog every time you start the vehicle, and then it crashed because the 10k tracks in my music collection is apparently more than the designer ever considered possible, which meant another modal dialog to dismiss before actually using anything. When I dropped the loaner off two days later, it was such an implausible relief to go back to a vehicle with fewer features but 100% of them working reliably and instantly.
This is still somehow better than the Microsoft mess Ford shipped in the same era where it would crash and reboot, so I could only pair it using Bluetooth.
My 2021 Toyota has a screen and I hate it so much.
- When I start the car it takes a minute for the software to boot so radio and stuff is unresponsive
- I get a popup warning to obey the laws and drive safely that stays up for 30 seconds. Why in the hell do I need a reminder for this?
- If its cold enough it warns be to drive slowly because the roads could be icy... yes I know Its 30 degrees out, I didn't need this warning.
Touchscreens for some things (navigation, rarely accessed configuration) are fine but they absolutely should not be required for basic driving tasks or while driving.
My CX-9 has a combined dial + joystick for navigating the menus / navigation system. It's located on the center console.
I doubt the driver should ever be working that display while driving. But I do find that controller more comfortable than reaching my hand out to the touch-screen display. Maybe that's just a quirk of my physiology.
For me not zero screens, but multiple small special purpose ones (w/o touch), besides lots of physical buttons. Ideally my car should look like a space shuttle cockpit.
This is not even regulation, just a rating company saying this is unsafe, which I completely agree with.
Maybe there's a US pendant that could say the same. Consumer Reports or something. Lobbying for regulation might be hard, getting CR to subtract points might be easy enough.
Laws in the US require all cars have a reversing camera. That in turn requires all cars have a colour screen. That's quite expensive, but necessary to meet the law.
When you already have a screen, putting car controls on it costs basically nothing.
I doubt a black and white screen would meet the law - they're terrible at showing photographic content. A greyscale screen might, but a greyscale screen isn't really a standard component in the 4+ inch size required to meet the law and likely wouldn't be any cheaper than a color screen. The law isn't super precise about resolution etc, but if you can't clearly see a dummy child while glancing down, then it is illegal.
I believe it's important to maintain balance in everything... to prioritize both safety and user experience in design, ensuring that vehicles are equipped with intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces yet minimizing distractions for drivers.
You can buy buttons and knobs for Teslas, not sure how good they work but they exist as accessories, and you can map a lot of functions [1] on them.
> "cars will need to use buttons, dials, or stalks for hazard warning lights, indicators, windscreen wipers, SOS calls, and the horn."
That's 6 functions, and from what I understand of the accessory website, they can have 8 buttons per "command module"...
I wonder if Tesla just gave a pack of these with the car and let people stick them where they want, it would count as "providing buttons" for the purpose of the Euro NCAP test.
(Most likely Tesla would make their own)
I mean a button is a button, does it have to be hardwired or can it be wireless?
Not the first time Tesla did that, they mentioned how for legal reasons they need to ship the cybertruck with side mirrors but made it easy for people to remove them.
