I always wondered who enjoyed opening their car door at the gas station and smashing it into the cement pylons and who enjoyed standing in the middle of the highway when you’re putting some gas in an empty tank and now I know. Also that Sphinx likes it in the rear.
Well, in the case of EVs, you’ll never visit a gas station again (unless it’s to by beer and Funyuns). But you want the charge port on the driver’s side so that you can plug in as soon as you get home without having to walk around the car.
This is already proving to be a slippery slope toward bad design. Some manufacturers are also putting their climate controls on touchscreens, and even with massive amounts of screen real estate on the dashboard there isn’t enough room to show media, navigation, and climate controls all at the same time. You have to press an onscreen button to change the context. I don’t know how anyone can’t see that this is objectively much worse than the tech it’s replacing. Not just for usability but also safety - the more time you spend futzing with a touchscreen to adjust volume or fan speed, the less time you spend watching the road and operating the car.
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They can still include buttons - notably on the steering wheel - but they can also include programmable buttons (like a Stream Deck for the dash) so that you can have all the controls you want, how you want. And, when the wife takes your car, she can have the buttons she wants.
Also, distracted driving isn’t a new thing, and people who are still fiddling with their phone or touchscreen while driving are the problem, not CarPlay. You can have Siri read and send texts for you, for example. People who are distracted by CarPlay are using it wrong.
You can’t be shocked with that study. Of course those screens are distracting if you let them be.
Hell, I was distracted by push button presets and holy crap I’m old.
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Car touchscreens are a plague. Climate and basic media controls should always be physical buttons and dials. Even the built-in capacitive buttons and sliders on dashboards are terrible. Just worse in every way imaginable, except cost to the manufacturer. They are a hallmark of a cheap and poorly built car.
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Fun story: shortly after moving here in 1994, I went down to Richmond (the town, not the street) to get my Driver’s License. I passed my test and was heading back, but the car in front of me was driving slowly which was annoying. Then I realized that they had a newspaper spread out across the steering wheel.
I thought it pretty ironic considering I’d just taken my test, but I was still stuck behind this idiot and I needed to get back to work. Luckily for me, the problem sorted itself out when the car in front drove off the road and came to a sideways halt narrowly avoiding the roadside ditch.
So did you help LaRussa out of the car or just leave him in the ditch?
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Since the price of gas has shot up, and since my car uses premium gas, I’ve been buying gas at Costco because it’s reliably cheaper. What I’ve learned from the lines at the Costco gas pumps is that 50% of cars need the gas cap on the driver side, and 50% need the gas cap on the passenger side. Mine happens to be on the driver side, and more cars at the Costco seem to need the driver side pumps.
Sure they can, but will they? Most car manufacturers cater to the lowest common denominator, either due to cost or stubbornness. And how many will decide that programmable buttons like that simply don’t fit their pretentious design aesthetic?
I like CarPlay a lot, but not every manufacturer implements it perfectly, so don’t always blame the drivers. My Mazda’s infotainment screen is outside comfortable reach, and the touch layer on the screen shuts off once you hit 10mph; above that speed you have to use the clickwheel in the center console. Navigating CarPlay with that can be very frustrating and distracting. Yes, I have a dedicated volume/mute knob in the center console and I have some basic steering wheel controls for audio playback, but they only get me so far. For example, play/pause or skipping ahead/back 30 seconds in my music or podcast can only be done from the onscreen playback controls - if I use the steering wheel controls it skips to the previous/next podcast or track. A “cursor” highlights CarPlay buttons as I scroll through them with the clickwheel, but the cursor goes away after only a few seconds. There are no context clues about where the cursor was the next time I have to use it. Sometimes the cursor position resets to a random button between uses. Sometimes it moves unpredictably - the cursor usually moves clockwise or counterclockwise, until it simply doesn’t. This is especially difficult in Apple Maps which has a lot of selectable things on screen. And if it is confusing, frustrating, and distracting to a techie like me, it’s got to be even worse for others. (I will say that my CarPlay experience was much better on a rental car that had an always-on touchscreen and no clickwheel. But I would’ve hated it if I had to switch back and forth between CarPlay and climate controls.)
I am all for having more screens and making more useful information available to the driver at a glance. Where that information is shown and how the driver manipulates that information seems to be getting objectively worse. There is plenty of room for a happy medium between Analog Knob World and “OMG TOUCHSCREENZZZZ”. I’m just hoping that this explosion of car tech is similar to the explosion of the early web and that we’re currently in the mid/late 90s blinking-text-and-animated-backgrounds phase before it reins itself in.
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What’s missing are the long, suspended hoses that will fill either side of the car. Where the fuck did they go?
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Thanks Obama.
What your outlet is on the other side of the garage? Checkmate.
I know a few analog knobs. They drone on about records, mechanical watches, and headphone jacks.
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If people would just get the vaccine with the self-implanting brain probe, we could get on with the mind-controlled interface that we all want.
Run some wires.
Waldo Jr is flummoxed by the concept of plugging his phone into the charger. Having him re-wire the garage is a recipe for disaster.
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Then back the damn car in.
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This belongs here.
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So Apple had their biennial dog and pony show today. New shit debuted, and guess what…the iPhones got even fucking bigger while scrapping the “mini”. Guess I’ll have to head back to Android when this one gives up the ghost.