[sedatk]

More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.

That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

[scottyah]

Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons.

The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.

[Miraste]

There are zero touchscreen designs that are better than (physical, tactile) buttons.

You can hit buttons without taking your eyes off the road.

You cannot do this with a touchscreen.

There's no way to design or engineer around it, it's simply the wrong tool for the job.

[scottyah]

You cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth. Fiddling with radio controls is the most cited reason for accidents before cell phones.

[jjav]

> You cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth

You can't possibly make this argument in good faith. Obviously it is trivial to interact with physical buttons while blind, so it can always be done without taking eyes off the road.

[Miraste]

?

You most certainly can. That doesn't mean people do it 100% of the time.

[scottyah]

You're right- it was a generalization. I think the amount of actual dashboard-button-pressing without looking away is extremely low, probably 1 button. The rest might be usable a quick glance, but so is a touchscreen.

[Miraste]

I suppose that's true. I was thinking of my car, which has a lot of buttons on the steering wheel itself. They're easy to use without looking, since you don't have to change your hand position, and I control music entirely with those.

[Timon3]

That entirely depends on the layout and shape/size/feeling of each button. If they're sufficiently different I'd guess 3-5 buttons is reasonable.

[sedatk]

Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience.

BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.

[agloe_dreams]

> It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.

The article directly links to a study that shows this is also true of physical buttons. Regardless of the fact that buttons are tactile, people don't go feeling up their radio without looking, even if they can. Furthermore, the vast majority of infotainment input today is into phone mirroring systems like carplay.

This whole thing is compounded by the fact that Mazda's knob solution was actually worse while being marketed as better. While a touchscreen needs to be looked at to find a button, a cursor controlled by a knob needs to be watched in whole to navigate to the button. Your fine motor skills as a human allows you to directly press a button, physical or not, without looking at your arm to get near it.

[SoftTalker]

You're right in that with a physical control you still probably glance at it as you're reaching for it, but you don't have to keep your eyes on it the whole time unlike a touch screen. With a touch-screen there's no feedback that your finger is on the button and that you have actually pressed it. With a physical control, button, knob, or slider once you have your hand on it you can manipulate it without looking. They demand momentary glances, not seconds of constant focus.

[PunchyHamster]

Well, it depends on button and function. Rarely used functions will require looking, common ones (assuming button placement is sensible) will not, but even ones that require looking are still better because you skip going thru the menu to find it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself

They're dangerous for controls the driver would reasonably need to operate while driving the car. They're fine for more-complex at-rest configuration, or stuff a passener would care about.

[anon7000]

Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.

With the knob, you have a few issues:

1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.

2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.

3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.

Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.

[max8539]

With a knob, you always could stop what you are doing and look back at the road and then continue. With a touch screen, you need to find a button and touch it without looking at the road, or you need to do it from the start again.

[wvenable]

I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor.

I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want.

Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.

[max8539]

Yes, you still need to look at the screen but could pause this in any position of the selected item and continue after looking back at the road. I was driving an F150 with just a touch screen and it was much worse when I needed to find an item on the screen and try to touch it on a far-located screen in a shaking car.

[wvenable]

In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Tapping an icon on the screen is instantaneous. There's also some extra complexity in what grid of icons you currently have selected and how to move between them.

But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.

[jjav]

> That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

Absolutely! Twiddling with a phone while driving is illegal, for a good reason.

For the same good reason, having to interact with a touch screen while driving should be illegal (from that, it follows that it should be illegal to sell a car which requires using a touch screen).