[eurekin]

Never understood any appeal of a screen inside a car:

1. Reflections make you tilt, just to make some pesky highlights go away. Even if they are angled properly, there's always something (like a sun reflected by a watche's face) what causes nuissance at any angle

2. Car can go from a tunnel to a sunny valley in few seconds. That's 5 to 8 stops of dynamic range difference, that a human eye is easily designed to handle. Auto adjusting screen brigtness is never as bright as necessary in sunny conditions. Even if it were, it would be a significant battery drain and an element, that heats the cars interior already unnecessarily.

3. You don't have pure blacks in many of them, so that annoying halo at the corner of the eye is often present. You can solve it with an OLED, but those are even worse in bright daylight

4. All of the usually mentioned tactile feedback facts - you can reach with your hand to a AC knob, feel it's current set by finding the bulge with a finger and gently turn exactly how you want them. Zero lag, no eye contact necessary at all (keep that on the road!), instant feedback. Nothing that any screen can ever give.

5. Biggest gripe of all - modality. I think that there were some high ranking studies done early in design exactly against this type of input for high risk applications. Modality is the biggest enemy of discoverability and throws extra delays into otherwise instant input.

6. If you use a LCD variant, they interact with sunglasses polarity filter and, at some orientations, can be blocked altogeter. As you often use sunglasses exactly, because you want to see the road the best, it's contrary to the main objective of the control again.

7. Refocusing. If you can use a tactile control, with a good feedback, you're freeing your eyes from the need to adjust it's lens to focus from far to near to far again. Not many people are aware, that this is even happening, and can lead to overestimating your ability to keep engaged attention on the road.

I'd pay extra for a zero screen variant in a jiffy. Had I ever need to use a screen, I would've put my phone in a holder instead.

[yoyohello13]

This is the main reason I haven’t bought a new car since 2005. I refuse to get anything with “smart features” or “infotainment” so I’m pretty much stuck until my current car dies. Then I’ll be forced to get something new, hopefully someone will manufacture a car with a sane UI with minimal features by then.

[r0fl]

To expand on #4

WINTER AND GLOVES!

Yes it’s a first world proven that I have to take gloves off to turn on my heated seats but buttons made sure stupid problems like this never happened in the first place

[eurekin]

Touchscreens can also leave fingerprints and those will catch light at any angle and reduce effective contrast

[jval43]

Counterpoint: the touchscreen in my car DOES work with gloves. Of course the knobs do too.

The screen is some different tech and not quite as responsive as an iPhone screen and does not do multitouch, but otherwise works fine.

[satvikpendem]

What car do you have? Usually lower end cars have resistive touchscreens which yours sounds like an example of, but higher end ones have capacitive touchscreens and those don't generally work with gloves, but of course gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens exist and have for many years now.

[satvikpendem]

There are gloves that work with capacitive touchscreens and have existed for 20 years now ever since the iPhone came out.

[jcgrillo]

Those kind of gloves are too thin to be of any use when it's -10°F out (early mornings are frequently at least this cold in my area). In the winter I'm normally wearing thick leather gloves treated with Sno Seal (a waxy, oily substance derived from beeswax) with wool liner gloves. Even if I could prevent them leaving a residue on any screen they touch, and even if they had some substance in them (that wouldn't wear off) that made them work with a capacitive screen, the reduced finger dexterity from all that material would make actually using that screen very difficult. Practically, what I actually have to do to use a touchscreen is take the gloves off.

[seanmcdirmid]

My screen goes into dark mode as soon as I hit a tunnel so in practice it isn’t an issue. I mostly don’t notice anymore, but I had my eyeglasses prescription redone and I can’t see the screen very well anymore while driving. Will need progressive driving glasses I guess.

Note if you give up a screen they aren’t going to replace it with analog controls. It’s just too expensive, instead you’ll get something that turns to control your AC, but it’s really converted to a digital signal immediately and it’s physical rotation won’t be synchronized with the state of your AC like they were in the old days. I also really hate capacitive buttons which are worse than unsynced dials and screens, it’s like a touch screen with a fixed function.

[eurekin]

Yes, my goes either-or quite abruptly and, while that's not really annoying, I notice it doing way too often, than I'd like to. It shouldn't be done in a binary fashion as well.

[seanmcdirmid]

I really don’t notice because it happens with the light change of entering a tunnel anyways. Since I’m in Seattle, it happens often, so maybe I just got used to it.

[randusername]

> you can reach with your hand to a AC knob, feel it's current set by finding the bulge with a finger and gently turn exactly how you want them. Zero lag, no eye contact necessary at all (keep that on the road!), instant feedback.

I really hate it when I go to tap some touchscreen button, there is a bump in the road, and I fat-finger something unintentional. But it happens every time I drive, turning routine interactions into safety threats as I must look at the screen to determine what went wrong and how to fix it.