No I wouldn’t say touchscreens are out, I would say augmenting them with physical buttons is about to get popular.
I’m gonna buy a Garmin instinct because I realized I don’t use 95% of my galaxy Watch’s “smart” features.
The answer is tactile buttons with displays behind them. Not sure why nobody is doing this in cars…
Because touch screens are cheap and put the onus of design onto the programmers of apps.
I think we’ll see multipurpose function buttons under the display, that change function programmatically depending on what the app is doing.
Like a streamdeck essentially?
Because they are expensive. More importantly, how often does the function of a button is changed? Top right corner button on android is usually a back button (arrow/ x) or a profile icon. How often does a bottom navigation in an app change? Dashboard is an app that rarely changes.
I will do you one better. The screen in the button goes out. If the button changes the display based on the context, what does the button do? Is software responsible to recognize it cannot display an action and do something? What does it do? Should the user be responsible to remember what does the button do based on the context? This article is about return to physical buttons because they are reliable. Do you see any button on your cars dashboard that is unlabeled? Do you remember looking up in a manual what a weirdly iconed button does? On any piece of hardware.
This is from users perspecrtive alone.
Lets do the manufacturer. Imagine that screen buttons have SKUs. Dashboards have SKUs. Screen buttons have versioned drivers. Screen buttons need power delivery. Data lanes on pcbs. And fuck else.
Now imagine that you have a physical button. It costs cents. It closes one lane. Maybe needs power for a led.
Who the fuck wants screen buttons?
Finally. What the fuck multiple screen buttons solve that a single screen that can be any number of any buttons couldnt?
Because sure as fuck they wont solve for context, clarity and reliablity.
Thank god! Touch screens on the stuff in cars are a huge pain in the ass if you have hands as big as mine and the icons are all tiny
It’s not that the icons are tiny, rather people driving usually operate by touch because their eyes need to be on the road.
I didn’t have a car for a few years and the one I had was 2003 (with a slight stint from a similarly-aged car during a couple-month time I had to drive). I now have a car again and I HATE that my heat/air and such are all flat against the panel (not a touch screen, though). I literally can’t adjust anything without looking in my current car. Thankfully, I avoid driving it whenever possible.
Cool, now bring back single cab light trucks with full length beds.
Id settle just for a truck that isnt very clearly pandering “im a big boy!” energy. There all way too fucking big for no god damn reason other than validation of ego. Bunch of weak fucking man babies need some million ton 3 lane wide truck just so they can pretend theyre a big strong man to themselves and everyone else, despite never using the truck for what its purpose is supposed to be.
I have heard that the reason for this is that trucks in that size range are less regulated by the EPA. Companies didn’t want to put in the research to develop trucks that met emissions standards, so they just make them really heavy for no purpose, evading regulations. Take this with a grain of salt, because I’ve done zero research of my own on it.
I’d buy an electric one. I don’t need to haul a trailer or anything huge.
YES! Where is my dad’s little Toyota Pickup? Closest thing we have is the Ford Maverick, which is still pretty fucking huge.
Was always a fan of the tacoma they were making before they increased the size of it, thing was kind of the perfect size. Roomy enough cabin, small enough to be drivable in a parking lot, enough bed for towing occasionally.
Indeed, Nissan should respond with their e-Power hybrid too. Toyota applied for a patent using the Stout name in South America.
Maybe a Ford Maverick or a Honda Ridgeline. The other trucks are just unreasonable. $80K for a Tundra, or $60K for a Tacoma? WTF!!!
RIGHT?? I want an 8-foot bed, dammit!
Should be illegal to have touchscreen controls in a car, it requires you to look at it to effectively control it, which means the car forces you to ignore the road to do anything.
They are more safe since people can feel the buttons without taking their eyes off of the road. I don’t understand why they thought it was a good idea to use touchscreens.
One word. Tesla.
It became the Apple of automobiles and everyone was rushing to copy them. Then came the fall of Elon and everyone is realizing how full of shit the company is.
It had nothing to do with being a good idea. It was just the more profitable idea. Tactile controls cost more to install than a cheap touchscreen with a dogshit GUI. Bonus being you have a proprietary part, the consumer can’t easily swap out later if they want. So you’ve baked in some nice obsolescence to boot.
Ain’t capitalism great? Race to the bottom.
Tactile controls cost more to install
Not just more to install, but also more to design. Physical controls have to be designed so they fit the aesthetic of the car and don’t look out of place. On the other hand, a touch screen can just reuse a generic UI design across every vehicle made by a particular manufacturer, or even across different manufacturers if the same vendor supplies the same OS for all of them.
In my lurking time here, I have seen many comments on Lemmy that criticize capitalism, but I think it’s not as bad as it is made out to be on here. I earn money by working, can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to. The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Admittedly, it is possible that I am wrong because I have never studied economy other than the short lessons from required college classes my first two years. Do you have any objective sources where I can start to learn? I tend to be liberal/Democrat, btw.
You’re talking about free and open competition in a perfect competition marketplace. This is an ideal (similarly far-fetched as communism/socialism*) where there are low barriers to entry, and consumers have good information to make well informed choices. In this world competition bid’s down excess profits in the long run - essentially to consumers benefit. not the benefit of producers. wages are low but it doesnt so much matter becauases competition keeps prices low.
Capitalism wants to increase the return to capital , so it works against competition to create market power (by many means including legal system power and regulatory capture as well tacit or explicit corruption) both over consumers and over their own supply chain (e.g. employees). It inherits its legacy from rentierism and landowners who also like to monopolize land, ration it and have tenants bid up rents.
‘objective sources’, on economics? Good luck. economists are so bi-assed that most of them can spew shit out of two holes simultaneously.
- both communism and perfect competition probably work fine in a small closed community, where everyone pretty much has repeated interactions with everyone - visibility - and there will be other examples where they each work fine-ish, but on a large enough scale, anomynity and human nature come into play. The reality is human trust is excellent, but some people will abuse it when they think they’ll get away with it and that destroys it.
I earn money by working
But do you earn enough? Does the working class earn enough? The general consensus for most people is no. The vast majority of wealth that the working class produces every year does not make it into the hands of the people who produced it, but rather the oligarchs who already possess most of the wealth already.
I can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to.
These are not exclusive to only capitalism. People were trading money for goods and starting businesses for thousands of years before capitalism was around.
The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.
This is how it’s supposed to work in a merit driven free market economy, but that’s not how late stage capitalism plays out.
Many corporations are run by imbeciles and hemorrhage money, pursue short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability, treat their workers horribly, and rely on their monopolistic position in the market to survive rather than merit, competence, ethics, or quality. When they finally make an error that would normally bankrupt a company out of existence, they simply cry to the government for bailout money, and they get it every time because our politicians are bought and owned by billionaires and their lobbyists. This is the core principle of an oligarchy, which we are, and which capitalism always evolves into given enough time.
The rich get bailouts, the workers do not. This is a direct product of wealth inequality and regulatory capture that capitalism inherently generates.
The main argument against capitalism is that it leads to only a privileged few getting all the wealth, opportunities and freedom while the rest become wage slaves and debt slaves. It is the ultimate capitulation to artificial scarcity as if that’s somehow the best we can do as a species.
All the homelessness, overpriced healthcare and education, unaffordable housing, etc exists because of capitalism and it’s supporters look at this and say “good. fuck the poor.” or “this is the best we can do.”
I stopped being a libertarian because I was tired of the cynical capitulation.
The funniest thing is that the final stage of unbound capitalism means no estate and then, when they need help there will be nobody to save them.
The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.
Absolutely 100% false.
Free market economy != Capitalism.
Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.
Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.
Wouldn’t your comment equally apply to being a small business owner (let’s say blacksmith) under feudalism? As a good blacksmith, you will earn more clients and prestige, while poor blacksmiths won’t get repeat business. You might be able to expand your forge and hire more people to do the tedious work of making chainmail or whatever.
I don’t know that anyone can ever provide an “objective” source on capitalism. Anyone who writes on the topic has inherent biases. Here are a few: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/1608462471
https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Down-Manifesto-KOHEI-SAITO/dp/1662602723
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/doughnut-economics-paperback/
https://www.amazon.com/What-Wrong-Capitalism-Ruchir-Sharma/dp/1668008262
https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-No-Accidents-Disaster_Who/dp/1982129689
https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Despair-Future-Capitalism-Anne/dp/0691217076
Yup. “Capitalism” has become a punching bag for people who are frustrated about some form of government protectionism or lack of interventionism. If you ask someone to define it, you’ll get wildly different answers based on whatever they’re frustrated by. The real problem is cronyism, where the “haves” get special treatment from those in power so both sides benefit.
Example w/ Musk and Trump
As an example, look at Elon Musk buddying up to Trump. There are two explanations (probably more) here:
- Musk actually thinks Trump is the best thing since sliced bread
- Musk wants protectionism in the form of more EV tariffs, which will absolutely benefit his cash cow, Tesla
This all happens under “capitalism” because Musk is motivated to get more capital, but it’s happening through government, which ends up essentially as a government subsidy of Tesla (and other domestic EVs) using taxpayer dollars (in this case tariffs). It’s not a direct handover of cash, but when your foreign competition needs to charge twice as much as they normally would, there’s less motivation for your company to drop prices.
Capitalism is intended to be a system where the market is largely separate from the government, but everything is co-mingled and people point to the knotted mess as “capitalism,” when really it’s a mess of different political ideologies all messing with market forces. What we actually need is for more capitalism, as in less government interference w/ the market, so market forces can actually fix things.
Potential solutions to better use market forces
This means:
- less protection for corporations - rich people using tactical bankruptcies indicates a broken system
- fewer regulations, but higher penalties - regulations reduce the penalties for bad action to a fine, we need lawsuits and jail time
- fairer tax system - we currently reward capital gains far more than earned income, we exclude a significant amount of inheritance from taxation, and we have structures (trusts and whatnot) to further protect money from taxation; the tax system should be drastically simplified to reduce abuse
- enforce anti-trust more consistently and frequently
There’s certainly more we could do, but the above should significantly help correct the major problems we see today. Right now, it takes a massive scandal for a wealthy person or very large business to fail, and the above would dramatically reduce the scandal needed to cause one to fail.
“More capitalism” doesn’t mean screwing over the poor either. In fact, if you look at the Nordic countries, they’re actually more capitalist than the US ins many ways, and they have solid social programs. The difference is that there are clearer boundaries between government and the market, so you don’t end up with as much weird “collaboration” between companies and the government.
I personally believe in UBI/NIT (Universal Basic Income/Negative Income Tax) instead of most welfare programs (perhaps keep Medicare/Medicaid, but replace Social Security, food/housing assistance, etc) to minimize the disruption of natural market forces. That would be a very capitalist-friendly solution where the government and the market stay in their own lanes.
You seem to be a bit confused about what exactly capitalism is. Capitalism is the ideology of private ownership, specifically with regards to the means of production. It is contrasted with socialism, which is the ideology of public ownership of the means of production.
Capitalism is the ideology that allows for someone to own a factory, for example. It allows for them to possess it, in some nebulous way, and to therefore be entitled to the fruits of labor produced there. Even if they themselves did not work to produce those products. Capitalism is the ideology of private wealth accumulation and the ideology of class. It is the ideology of wealth inequality (as opposed to wealth equality where capital is shared equally among all). It is the ideology that creates markets out of supply and demand, specifically designed to collect as much capital as possible from people seeking products. Capitalism is protected by the state, which creates justifications for its existence and prevents the working class from uprising against capitalists. The state colludes with capitalists. They exchange political power for capitalists’ labor power. In this way, any party that is not explicitly anti-capitalist is necessarily pro-capitalist. To allow capitalism to exist is to protect it. In this way, capitalism is not just private ownership itself, but it is also the politics that protects such ownership and the states that choose to allow it.
Contrasted with socialism, the ideology of public ownership. Socialism is the classless ideology. Socialism is social welfare, including ideas like social assistance or UBI. Socialism allows for means of production, like factories, to be publicly and equally owned by all. It allows the fruits of labor produced in those factories to be shared by all. Like capitalism, socialism produces its own political ideologies. Socialism as a state of being requires some form of protection (much of the debate on the left can essentially be seen as “how should we protect an established state of socialism?”). As socialism is classless, and as its production is communal, it is open to encroachment by capitalists who will seek to establish private ownership and markets there. Most agree, some state or state-like entity must be established to protect the socialist society. In this way, any politics that are explicitly anti-capitalist must be socialist.
First time hearing negative income tax but sounds like an idea i had after a nice walk after the edible kicked in lol
It’s basically UBI, but with income caps. So if you make above a certain threshold, your benefits reduce and completely disappear by a second threshold.
The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.
citation needed
That’s true.
With a T9 phone, I used to be able to send a complete text message without ever taking my eyes off the road.
Now that I’ve got a touchscreen I’m swerving all over the place every time I try to text. It’s way less safe.
Don’t text while you are driving. What the fuck?
Woosh, hopefully?
Who was driving the car then?
Self driving cars have still not arrived yet.
Jesus took the wheel
Stop fucking texting and driving.
Yes, please just text and drive, fucking is too distracting.
“Babe, hold on, I need to send a text,”
I prefer reading an erotic book. And well…you know where the other hand goes that isn’t holding the book.
Cheap tech that looks expensive, that is why we have touch screens. Also harder to repair for the customer to do. A physcial button is easy to replace and quick.
There’s a kind of people who think they don’t need to know an industry to know where it’s heading and where the progress is.
Mobile computers being thinner and replacing buttons with touchscreens are from that kind of delusions.
Now built-in chatbots with voice recognition and synthesis are all the rage. If you remember that “elevator in Scotland” sketch.
Ullluvunn!
You know what I would really hate? Automatic diagnostics on my dashboard. Nah. Please make those as LED blinks where the mechanic has to supply his own LED, Jerry rigged to the obd connector. And make it so that only one guy in Minnesota has the manual. Every mechanic has to contact that guy. Then the mechanic has to interpret the LED Morse code manually. Oh yes this would be so useful. And to add a 3Ghz motherboard with only access to Apple music. Totally awesome. Make the display show a video of “all I want for Christmas is you” I’ll certainly be making use of that.
They need a professor to tell them what Liz Lemon did in one lunchtime https://youtu.be/vyZkHjgzGRM?t=83
The article doesn’t mention which cars unfortunately
Also, bring back gauges, instead of idiot-lights. It’s nice to know when a problem is beginning (overheating, etc) before it becomes a crisis when you have no choice but to pull over.
I recently learned that in my car the same light is used to indicate that the parking brake is on and that the brake fluid is low. Nothing bad happened, and it’s getting worked on, but my first thought was that the sensor on the brake must be broken. It’s poor design, seemingly without reason.
Yeah I hate it when information is hidden in the name of minimalism. I’d rather have a plane cockpit UI than a bicycle UI, even if it means I feel like an idiot at various points when I discover new things I could have been doing the whole time.
The feeling like an idiot is how people learn.
Yeah, realizing I was an idiot implies I’m a bit less of one than I was before I realized.
My hybrid dash is anything but minimal. I have a zillion selections to show me a slew of random things. None of them are an engine temperature reading. So frustrating.
If it hasn’t happened already, it wouldn’t surprise me if useful instrumentation space is reallocated to advertisement space at some point. Though hopefully the consumer rage in response would end whatever company tries that first.
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
my issue isn’t really with the brightness, it’s the height. Don’t get me wrong bright headlights are annoying as fuck, but a huge ass truck behind me with their headlights literally higher than my back window is insane.
My point exactly. The brightness is great, when it works in your favor. But when a modern car sits at such a height, where the low-beams shine directly over the top of my car, it’s obnoxious
Especially when people fuck with the ride height on their trucks. They almost always end up with the front higher than the back, relative to it’s stock setting. Then don’t bother to adjust the head light angle to compensate.
Then, on I need a massive light bar on the top of my truck. Never mind that I never take this thing off road or do any work with it. It looks cool and it’s bright and shiny.
Fuck off. Can we just tax these things properly and not v give them a lower tax rate since their classed as commercial vehicles. No one buying these massive boats uses them for more than going to home Depot once a year to buy some leaf bags.
/Rant
That, and people don’t know how to adjust them, or are unwilling to. My parents’ cars have a dial to adjust the headlight angle for when carrying weight in the back of the car, or when towing, but they never touch the setting.
I miss that in my old car. When I’m drivng around in the city and don’t rally need much headlighting I’d angle them all the way down. When I’m in a dark area where there’s enough people that I can’t use my brights I’d just angle them up. My current car has stupid self leveling headlights so I don’t get any of that fun :(
I don’t know the white point on some of the LED headlights is extremely taxing to look at at night.
My car has adjustable headlight height and I love it. I put em all the way down because they’re stupid bright.
I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.
This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.
The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.
From personal experience in Europe, I can tell you that it sounds great in theory, but it’s horrible in practise. I get routinely blinded by headlights here and I feel like it has only gotten worse with the advent of LED headlights.
Not all manufacturers use adaptive headlights, and on some cars it’s only available as an upgrade whereas there’s a lot of people driving base models.
Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.
And for some reason my state still doesn’t have properly reflecting paint, so everyone drives with their high-beams on because otherwise you can’t see the lanes. The net result is that nobody can see anything because they’re constantly being blinded by oncoming traffic.
It sucks all the way down…
SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN
Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?
IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE SUN
That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.
I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.
Never had an issue with them but then I live in Europe, where auto-adjusting/adaptive lights aren’t just legal it’s a requirement if you want to make the headlights permanent high-beams.
I wish adaptive lights were legal in the USA. Manufacturers like BMW have to disable the feature at the factory because their implementation isn’t approved for usage in the USA.
I saw this, but apparently the European ones don’t meet the US guidelines, and the Euro manufacturers aren’t yet redesigning and recertifying their headlights to meet the US guidelines. The two brands I was looking at (BMW and Porsche) both still have this feature disabled on their 2025 US models.
Back in the 80s, Don Norman popularized the term affordance. Humans need something to push, pull, turn or otherwise interact with. We are physical beings in a physical world.
Driving vehicles is potentially life-endangering. Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.
Take the emergency blinker. You know where it is, you see it all the time - it’s right there in front of you! But when a real emergency happens, you’ll be fumbling for the button, concentrating on the situation at hand. Now imagine that button on a touchscreen.
I’ve noticed this with modern standards. They just don’t have the same experience because nothing is actually linked. It’s all electronic. I miss the feeling of the linkage as I moved through the gears. Feeling the disc touch as you let out the clutch. There was a magic to that. Now it has the feeling of setting on your hand for too long.
This always happens, with change you have things you don’t need and things you need, and things you consider and things you don’t consider, and things you had and things you will have. Of these there’s a combination of things you had, you need and you don’t consider. Which means you will not have them, while needing them and not considering them.
Correct good feedback is in that area.
I can’t imagine driving a stick like that. If it’s all electronic why bother with being standard as well?
I use my four way hazard lights when there’s heavy braking on the freeway to make sure people behind me are paying attention. It’s a button on my dash and pretty easy to toggle.
Though is that something that touch screen cars really put into the touch screen!?
I don’t think I’ve seen a car with the hazard lights button on the touch screen… Even the Teslas have a physical button for it. I imagine this must be a legal requirement, at least in some countries.
I don’t know Don, I’m sure he’s a fine guy, but I’ve read about all these kinds of rules (EDIT: emerging) much earlier - as early as 1940s, with airplanes and cars and other machines in production and in front lines that people had to operate for long hours under strain and make as few mistakes as possible.
Even USSR, not the Rome of ergonomics, had GOSTs for average ratio of errors an operator makes on a certain machine, machines had to be inside those numbers in tests involving people, or they wouldn’t get adopted into wide usage.
Note how the criterion is defined. Not formalities like the shape of something or the layout conforming to some vague definition, but the results of an actual test on people. Of course, though, there were also a myriad GOSTs as to how the specific controls may look, a GOST for every detail one could use in a device.
The term is «affordance»
Thanks. Damn autocorrect.
Suspected as much!
Just because the technology is there and cheaper does not mean that humans can push aside their physiological limitations in a critical situation.
Have you considered the shareholders though?
Can we return to transparent cases for Consoles and Tech next? I’ve always thought a touchscreen in cars were pretty scary since you have to take your eyes off the road.
I love those limited edition consoles!
I wish Valve would release a clear shell steam deck!
They had a limited edition that came with one.
