[robertnealan]

Before buying my car I test drove a Mercedes that had what I assumed was a touchscreen. Upon trying to tap it the person working at the dealership said none of their cars have touchscreens because they don't make sense to operate when driving, and instead had a easily reached dial in the center console that controlled everything on the screen. Seems to be the case with any other German car I've been in.

Takes some getting used to compared to just old fashioned knobs & buttons, but far and above better than all the cars we test drove with touchscreens.

[yardie]

It's the worst of both worlds. Rather than having dedicated dials for each function, or a touchscreen, you have a single dial and loads of menus to work through. Want to change the radio station first you have to make sure you are in the radio display context and then scroll through the stations until you find your desired station. Meanwhile, you're constantly taking your eyes off the road to work this dumb wheel.

[perl4ever]

I've had cars with either, and I'm kind of ambivalent on BMW iDrive vs Honda touchscreen, but my main complaint with everything I've driven is the way Bluetooth will not connect reliably. Sometimes you have to restart your car or your phone to get it back, and once that didn't work and only unpairing it and repairing it worked. This is really, really, basic and I sometimes feel like screaming because when I was younger, whatever the flaws of a radio or CD player, at least they consistently worked every time you switched them on.

[yardie]

I've heard Ed Sheeran's A-Team every time I start the car because the Bluetooth receiver thinks it has to play something and it's going to start at song 1 of my library.

[usrusr]

The main benefit (or supposed benefit, if you insist) of the big encoder knob system is that decision and action are decoupled: you can have a short glance at the narrow/deep menu, then take your time doing the next steps of finger work with the eyes back on the road. This is incredibly slow compared to interfaces designed for full attention, but the impact on driving ability is very low. It's kind of like a garbage collector that sacrifices throughput for shorter pauses.

Touchscreens on the other hand lure the eyes into guiding the hand through the selection process, particularly when you lack a haptic reference point because the screen isn't handheld. And then the eyes are already focused on the screen when the next menu page shows up, so it's tempting to continue right there. I guess there must even be some threshold in UI slowness beyond which touchscreens are not quite as bad for safety as faster ones because one would quickly learn that there is plenty of time to focus on the road while the glacial computer's cogs are turning.

Even physical per-function controls are worse once the number of functions gets too high. Volume up/down is easy, but how do you {insert any of the hundreds of functions that you can make safely discoverable, in time, with a slow menu}? Interrupting the process of scanning a wall of buttons with tiny symbols on them for a context switch back to traffic and then continuing the scan without generous re-scanning on resume is a skill that few people would ever develop without explicit teaching, so most would simply take their chances, keeping their mind in the scan. Throughput might still be higher than a deep menu, but the effective pauses are way too long (a quick glance up just to stifle the worst fears while the mind is still on the screen/scan does not count). I would not even be surprised of the annoying inclusion of some frequently used functions in the menu wasn't just penny-pinching or a misguided interior designer striving for cleaner lines, but a deliberate decision to train users in the interface system.

[JohnFen]

> but the impact on driving ability is very low.

Are there studies to back this up? Because it sounds like that UI has a much higher cognitive load, which can be as bad as having to take your eyes off the road.

[Bluestrike2]

Mercedes also has a touchpad that hovers above the command wheel, along with the a tiny little touchpad on the steering wheel for your thumb. Just in case you wanted additional options, though neither work with Android Auto (for 2017 models, at least). The lack of a touchscreen is probably the second most annoying part of Mercedes' Android Auto experience, next to AA's lack of support for the ultrawide display.

Interestingly, Mercedes is sort of simplifying things with the MBUX interface[0] they unveiled with the A-Class: they're adding a touchscreen, ditching the command wheel for a trackpad, and have much improved voice controls. The early reviews were all pretty positive.

0. https://www.thedrive.com/tech/23816/daddy-mbux-testing-merce...

[m463]

I've used these such as bmw idrive and I think it takes far more attention to navigate menus using a wheel than either dedicated function buttons or a touch what you want touchscreen. Selecting a nav address is kill-me-now tedious.

I tried a nissan with nav and it had a pretty useful mixture of the two. It had dedicated function buttons for say radio or map or volume up/down/power (most duplicated on the steering wheel), but the touchscreen was used when that made sense, like selecting a nav destination from a list, or typing a destination with the on-screen keyboard (allowed when stopped only).