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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls:
Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz.
While most manufacturers are moving to touchscreen controls, identifying smartphone use as their inspiration - most recently seen in Audi's latest A3 - Honda has decided to reintroduce heating and air conditioning controls via a dial rather than touchscreen, as in the previous-generation Jazz.
Jazz project leader Takeki Tanaka explained: "The reason is quite simple - we wanted to minimise driver disruption for operation, in particular, for the heater and air conditioning.
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It seems to me that neither physical controls nor voice controlled operation are fundamentally incompatible with cars being both smart and connected.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday April 01 2020, @07:57AM (3 children)
Touch screens in cars are idiotic and dangerous.
I drive an "old" car where I can adjust the AC, headlights, wipers, radio, etc, without even having to take my eyes off the road. I can just feel the controls. The thought of having to buy a new car eventually with touch screen shit forced down my throat scares the shit out of me.
Recently I had to ride with someone using a shared company vehicle. The AC was controlled by a retarded touch screen, and between the both of us, we never could figure out how to make it work. The real kicker was the touch screen still had the plastic protective sheet over it - the stuff you are supposed to remove after you purchase the vehicle - and it had gotten nasty. I would have pulled it off, but those screens are so bright, that dirty sheet was protecting my eyes from getting raped.
Which brings me to the problem with moronic blue lit controls. It used to be a well known fact that lit vehicle instrumentation should usually be a dim red. They eye can see/read such controls, while not scattering excess light, impairing night driving. But some jackasses out there think blue-lit crap is cool. Don't even get me started on excessively bright LED headlights.
It is just sadly hilarious how consumetards think touch screens are "better" somehow. A while back I was flipping channels on TV and came across some recent sci-fi-ish show - whatever was going on in this show, the characters were using some fancy car that was supposed to be "futuristic" and "high tech" with all kinds of sci-fi-ish features. The only visible hints there was anything different about the car was some blue-LED glow below the car (like stupid decorative shit some redneck would install), and all the sci-fi-ish features were controlled by a Fisher-Price toy looking touch screen. When they activated one of the features, they had to scroll past a bunch of options, taking 10x as long as pressing a button would have. But we got to watch hypnotic scrolling, so it must be good!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:11PM
Car and Driver and a few other major auto review magazines and websites have been bashing the push to touch screens too.
I suspect for the automakers, touch screens have three purposes. First, consumers perceived them as high tech. Second, instead of having to make one dashboard button and knob layout for your little sedan and one for your midsize sedan and one for your compact SUV and one for your pickup truck, you just throw a touch screen in all of them. I wouldn't be surprised if mass producing the same touch screen for all of a product lineup was actually cheaper than engineering and producing those knobs and dials for each unique product. Third, starting some time in the past few years - 2017, maybe? - backup cameras were mandatory in all new US market vehicles. So if you need to stick a screen in the middle of the dashboard anyway, half the cost of your touchscreen system was already mandated.
The killer trade off between old and new cars is crash safety. Now first and foremost, buried in the fine print in most crash safety resources is the fact that mass is critical. A top crash safety rated 2020 model year Honda sedan won't fare as well in the majority of crashes with other vehicles as a 1995 Ford F-150 pickup truck because all the fancy engineering in the Honda can't offset a 1000 pound difference in weight. There are exceptions, like in rollover crashes or if you slam into a tree. But generally old and big is safer than newer and smaller. But if you're going to choose between a 2005 Toyota Camry and a 2020 Toyota Camry, or a 2002 Chevy Suburban and a 2018 Chevy Suburban, there are a huge class of collisions that will hurt or kill you in the older model but won't even scratch you in the newer one. So my suggestion to anyone that wants to preserve their privacy without sacrificing safety: get a job that lets you telecommute or move very close to where you work, and then get an old large SUV or pickup. The old Ram-3500 that travels 2,000 miles a year is better for the environment than the new Nissan Altima that travels 12,000.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday April 01 2020, @08:29PM
Regarding red dash lights: It astonishes me how much blue light is inside most cars these days, especially on the touch screen garbage -- it would be nothing to give the user the option to select a decent night time color palatte.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:21AM
First time I ever saw blue light inside a vehicle was my '78 F100 ... for the high beams indicator. Holy shit, good thing I was in the middle of nowhere first time I hit the switch. Had to pull over, root up some duct tape, and block it off so it would stop blinding me. (And just the reflection was still plenty damn enough.)
Same piece of tape was still there when we parted ways, 38 years later.
Every mechanic ever: Why is there duct tape stuck to your instrument panel??
Me: DON'T TOUCH THAT!!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.