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People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I absolutely refuse to buy a car where the only thing in the dash is a single big touchscreen. This is a really cheap and lazy way to design a car. It's not fancy or futuristic. It's turning an engineering problem into a cheap software problem.
If electric vehicles 10 years from now don't re-engineer buttons, dials and knobs into their cars I am just going to walk 30 miles every day.
The touchscreens are cheaper, that's the main reason they are becoming common. Honda has already realized they are an issue, and has been going back to physical buttons.
The horrifying part is that often physical buttons are mere affectations now anyway, and instead everything is still controlled by the central computer system. Like I was comparing Hondas to Subarus and while the latter had physical buttons where the former had touchscreens, whenever the computer is busy then e.g. the volume knob still gets entirely ignored. I still like it better, but it is not really better, instead it just "looks different".
As far as I'm concerned the man point is tactile feedback. I don't want to have to take my eyes off the road to switch between screens and find the right menu item to turn on the AC while I'm driving.
Not only do I not want to sort through menus, I don’t like the thought of every other driver in the other lane having to sort through menus if they get too hot or cold.
In that case then, yes Subaru has you covered. They do seem extremely well-designed to me. Like my mother was saying do not get a car with a light-colored interior b/c it can distract you as the sun shines on it while driving, and my brother was saying do not get a car with a dark-colored one b/c dropped items can get lost extremely easily, but Subarus have the best of both worlds, with light coloration down below and dark coloration up above. There are SO many aspects like that, which I very much appreciate! It is all plastic, so like not a Tesla or anything like that (which I consider very much a good thing imho), but the overall look & feel & design aspects to it are very well-made. Like the tactile knobs.
I think you need buttons and the screen.
I can just use the volume knob on the steering wheel with my thumb to control volume or mute music, but if I'm parked and want to listen to a specific song it's fine that I go poking around on the touchscreen to do that.
I can use the 'mode' button to switch to the radio or Spotify, but if I want to set up Spotify with my account details I need to use the touchscreen.
The touchscreen lets you easily expose rarely used, complicated functions. Things you need to do while driving need to be buttons.