What about extreme violations of privacy? Let me know when that is “out”, too.
Yeah, so the thing is, any amount of trust that I had has already been completely destroyed. “We don’t do it anymore because it’s illegal, trust me bro” isn’t going to cut it. Does the bill include mandatory prison time for executives for violations, or just cost-of-doing-business fines? Will this be enforced by a government regulatory body that is not literally outnumbered 20:1 by car manufacturer lawyers?
If the car has any kind of network capabilities and 100% of the car’s software is not open source, I’m not buying it. Period.
This bill would not need to exist if cars were FOSS, or if cars were non-networked. Those are the only 2 solutions that I will accept. This bill is worthless to me.
Will the regulatory body be stacked with, and bribed by auto execs?
Does the Space Pope shit on Uranus ?
I didn’t read too far, but,
To restrict car manufacturers and other companies from selling consumer car-related data, increase transparency regarding data practices, and for other purposes.
already skips over collecting the data, so yeah. I would guess this bill just exists for the optics, and isn’t actually intended to challenge the industry.
I agree with you, the damage has been done. That’s why I’m looking at alternative methods of transportation, like an ebike or public transit. Hopefully your area has good infrastructure for that.
It’s nice to have principles, but in a few years you’re going to have to find a new way to get around.
I mean, a lot of cars have a genuinely phenomenal life span, if you don’t mind getting something that isn’t shiny and new you can probably get like a 2012 Toyota or Honda and drive it till the wheels fall off. My dream car is from the 90s and people still generally regard them as fairly reliable
Eventually it’ll be an issue, but that does leave a lot of time for nerds and hackers to find a way to gut networking stuff while telling the car it’s still intact. Dunno if we’ll ever see an open source car OS compatible with the systems in major manufacturer’s vehicles, but privacy workarounds feel like they could be pretty realistic
Lol cars last more than “a few years”, my current vehicle is 20 years old. I’ll easily get another 150,000 miles out of it, probably more. I already have a crate motor picked out to swap in when the engine finally dies. Or I could just “upgrade” to a newer year and still be non-networked.
Now I’m being a little silly, but at this rate of climate change acceleration, I’m starting to bet that my current vehicle is going to outlive capitalism anyway.
Touchscreens were never popular with customers. Manufacturers kept cramming touchscreens in cars and using them to control everything becuase they were being stupid with new tech.
Edit: I guess I should have been clearer. I was talking about as a replacement for tactile controlls in a car like the article is talking about. Reverse cameras and other things that are good to have a touch screen for make perfect sense but using your touch screen to control your Air conditioning in a way that you have to divert your attention from the road to operate sliders and buttons on a touch screen is dumb as hell.
Also the fact that touch screens are cheaper to build with how expensive battery tech has been in electric cars.
Cheaper to build and can be adjusted and patched as you go
Touch screens also seem like they would be easier to integrate with subscription services. Auto manufacturers are looking to make things like heated seats a subscription.
Cars have been getting steadily worse. There doesn’t seem to be any enforcement of recalls (has anyone satisfactorily had the Honda Civic 2016-2021 air conditioning resolved? How much did you spend?)
If they can take cars away from us entirely, and move to us renting self driving cars, that’s what they would really want to do. Pay for your radio, pay for heat and AC…
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN
Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?
That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.
I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.
Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.
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.
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.
It’ll start as a feature. When you need gas we’ll automatically show you the cheapest gas stations around you. People will gobble it up.
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.
I’m so glad I kept my car and weathered through this shitty phase of car manufacturing.
If only there was hope for weathering through the data collection, subscription-based features and the death of sedans though…
Get any Infiniti with a 3g antenna. The network doesn’t exist anymore so it can’t phone home.
Touchscreens can stay, but only for non-essential tasks like changing settings or entering addresses. Climate, media, and all other controls you usually use while driving should be tactile by mandate.
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.
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.
The term is «affordance»
Thanks. Damn autocorrect.
Suspected as much!
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.
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!?
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?
No I wouldn’t say touchscreens are out, I would say augmenting them with physical buttons is about to get popular.
I just want a coffee table book with pictures of these stupid executive’s faces who approved the original all touchscreen versions that were becoming ubiquitous.
You could make money from that. Trace the execs, get nice shiny photos to the tech, write some good copy, and publish “The Encyclopaedia of garbage tech” so that people in the future can ridicule and possibly learn from their stupidity.
woody_harrelson_wiping_tears_with_cash.jpg
Touch screens are cheaper, that’s why they did it.
I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.
Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there’s many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.
Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?
You mean like the 1985 Subaru XT Coupe? God I love that cassette futurism look!
80s and early 90s designed the best dashboards. Change my mind mf.
Touch screens are shit tor buttons. They can be hacked. They can be unresponsive.
There’s a load of other reasons, but either or both are enough to realise that a physical button is much safer. Perfect example of safety being lost in technology. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
The worst is all the ones that cheaped out and put a resistive touchscreen. Making it 10 times worse.
And they dont work with gloves when it’s cold.
Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.
I like that being a leading expert on buttons is a profession that exists in this world. You go Rachel Plotnick.
I’m just shocked that’s a cinema and media studies professor. I’d’ve expected human factors engineering or psychology, especially at such a psych school
THANK JESUS H. VISHNU.
About fucking time.
except at rivian. they have stated future models will have an all touchscreen dashboard
They can state all they want, if their clients don’t pay for it they’d sell their firstborn son to get the numbers back up
