It's weird that car companies say they struggle financially, and earn only about 7% margin.

They stay in lanes, adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, backup and surround cameras, blindspot indicators, pedestrian braking, parallel park assist, side airbags much more common, and they get tested in offset crashes. But phone use while driving cuts back a lot of the gains.

They are safer, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and quieter.

This is mostly the EV6. Generally, I’ve been very impressed at how it seems designed by someone who will actually drive the car. Best car I’ve ever owned. Turns like a boat though.

It's polarizing because the 'no screen' side is no longer given an option on the market to express that preference.

I think the sweet spot is touchscreen car configuration, screen in direction of travel for status, and dedicated motor-memory friendly controls for car control functions.

That reminds me of the movie "2012" where they try to flee in a car (Bentley?) and nobody knows how to turn it on and everyone panics. Suddenly, someone from behind says they should all shut up and says "Start the motor".

Voice controls for common tasks? No way. In my experience, that means I can't use the controls while somebody is talking or the voice recognition will pick up a mish-mash of words between us. It also means there's often a delay between when you say a command and when it happens. Saying "Navigate home" is fine. I would not want "Temperature down".

Volume and cruise controls should be controls on the steering wheel. Climate controls can be in the console, but should be physical, as it's typically pretty easy to take a quick glance, then find it without continuing to stare at it, unlike a touch screen.

I'd say just give me a volume knob but there's almost nothing worth listening to on the radio anyway. I actually yanked the fuse on mine to keep it from draining the battery.

At least with climate controls give me tactile knobs. Of course someone I know got the new tachoma and they made the 4wd switch exactly the same as the AC/fan knobs which is just so fucking insane. It's like whatever process is used to design these interfaces seeks out the worst way to do it given the requirements.

Idk maybe I just want a dune buggy at this point. At least there's no design by committee corporate brain damage I can't rip out of that.

Ok, playing turn up the radio by autograph on Spotify

I'd rather have physical controls for all of those.

we had voice-activation for a decade now, nobody uses it - hence bigger and bigger screens :)

Terrible. Interaction loop is too slow. Not ergonomic.

You must be living in USA, right? In my country (Poland) you can't build your own car, because it'll never get the road permit

Tesla is the worst offender. I hate that my passenger has to close my map view to adjust climate or change music.

Get rid of these things they are for the car makers not the car users.

Older teslas were better (not perfect). You had nav and status on dashboard in front of you, dedicated physical controls for turn signals, shifting, wipers, autopilot, etc. Central display was for big nav map and configuration. There was also a "rim" around the display to rest your hand on when touching something.

They still screwed it up with software updates. Touch targets got smaller and harder to hit in a moving car. Grey on white controls were harder to see, and frequently disappeared until until touched. Even dedicated controls like the passenger seat heater would disappear when the passenger got up. Controls rearranged themselves.

They need to hire some masters of human factors like modern airplane cockpit designers. In a plane, a mistake is a lost plane + faa investigation.

And listen to their customers, because most of the mistakes are blindingly obvious to everyone.

Personally as an amateur designer I love the idea of working on a huge canvas. Turning a car into a Gundam cockpit or a store into

https://archive.ph/1k7Ui

or lighting up the whole sky on a cloudy sky with a laser sound like a lot of fun to me, but subjecting other people to this is another thing.

I agree. I do all of my charging at home but I still love the screen. I’ll go out for a coffee at lunch and catch up on my TV programs in comfort.