[ilyt]

Why you think manufacturers went into touch surfaces in cars much to dissatisfaction (that eventually caused some to back up) of customers?

Every button needs a bit of plastic moulded, a (good quality) button, backlight, often LED to signal whether it is on or off, and whole control block needs microcontroller to pack it into CAN bus and CAN bus connector to send.

Make whole thing a touch surface and you're saving buck or two on buttons alone and your plastics don't need to articulate (another savings).

Move that to the touchscreen controls, and as screen is already there, more savings!

[somat]

Strictly speaking a touch screen is massively more complicated than a set of buttons. you now have billions of gates that have to be produced at nanometer scales in some of the most expensive factories on earth. The price to develop and manufacture a touch screen is many times that of a set of buttons. The fact that it is a generic interface drives the cost per unit down quite a bit. it does not hurt that the incredible manufacturing tolerances that must be maintained almost force the automation of the process allowing costs to be even lower.

I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

[ilyt]

> The price to develop and manufacture a touch screen is many times that of a set of buttons.

It costs them $0 because consumers already expect a touch capable screen for infotaintment.

> I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

Yeah it's a dream. Anything touch is annoying to use when driving. MFD-like also have advantage of being able to be touch typed, once you know in which menu you are it's always same sequence, and as those are physical buttons it's far harder to miss-press something.

[MichaelZuo]

> It costs them $0 because consumers already expect a touch capable screen for infotaintment.

Bingo, it would be a much different calculus if most potential customers didn't expect or want touch infotainment systems.

[bayindirh]

> Strictly speaking a touch screen is massively more complicated than a set of buttons.

But, it's a commodity item, produced in many more numbers w.r.t. a A/C temperature/fan encoder w/custom shape. A bog standard Renault Clio touchscreen is comparable to a good (not high, not top) quality Raspberry Pi screen you can get from RS or AdaFruit.

The screens on Opel Mokka I drove (it has two, one for dash, one for infotainment) were extremely good at sunlight, but the dash one was so small, around 7" IIRC, to control costs. So, even if they don't pay for R&D of the screen itself, the industry is so cost sensitive, that they will cut costs relentlessly to be able to sell more of these things at a lower cost and with higher profit margins.

Also, these LCD dashes has a couple of hidden LED indicator lights around to communicate fatal things in a failsafe manner.

Car manufacturers do not bear the CapEx required to develop these screens, but bear the CapEx required for developing and prototyping physical buttons.

> I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

Industry is evolving on that direction now.

[paulmd]

kind of insane that a dollar here and there is significant on a $20k car (to premium vehicles like trucks/sports cars being $70-100k). but I guess $20k isn't the number that matters, it's $1 vs the profit margin of the vehicle which is of course much smaller.

[Cthulhu_]

But these factories scale. Second, it's only a single component that needs to be installed and tested, reducing labor costs and the number of components that could have an issue. It all adds up / someone's done the math.

[agos]

luckily software is free!