undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmarvin7y ago0 comments

When cars eventually go self-driving, not having a touchscreen will be a big competitive disadvantage. Over-the-air updates of car software will be essential to adapt the driving/transportation experience, also for the existing fleet of cars, as the product matures and manufacturers can use people's experiences to make improvements. This does require part of the car's user interface to be software driven, and touchscreens are the best way of doing that. If the car is capable of safely driving without human input, most of the the safety concerns of touchscreens disappear. There's also the question of being able to configure the car to operate in fleet/rental mode, which would probably be challenging with controls that are less intuitive than a touchscreen. You're left with some UX considerations of sometimes needing longer time or needing to look at the screen for operating common functionality.

I'm not saying that tactile controls in general should be banned, and I'm probably also saying that most car manufacturers _absolutely suck_ at software and will elegantly botch any attempt at integrating a touchscreen.

Maybe Tesla has gone overboard and should add (software-controlled) physical dials for the systems that are used all the time and are never expected to change much, such as A/C, seat heaters, trunk & frunk and so on. But that's a comparatively minor UX modification.

The million dollar question is whether proper self-driving is 5 or 15 years away -- if it's the former, auto companies really don't have as much time to adapt as they think. Some customers might like a touchscreen-less Mazda if they can tack a safe self-driving system onto it, but they will have a hard time competing with companies that understand software and have good integration of intuitive touchscreen interfaces. Once (if?) proper self-driving is here, software suddenly becomes critical, and it's hard to control a complex software system through physical knobs. People will also want better entertainment systems integrated in the car at that point, and a touchscreen makes such modifications simple.

0 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

mxfh7y ago

Since autonomous in most cases also means car on demand, I think the car ceases to exist as seperate entity to configure, what's more import that there is a seamless transferable configuration based on your preferences once you rent any car, so that it becomes a nearly natural augmentation of your smartphone or whatever device you'll cary around with you sometime in the next 2 decades.

Meaning low friction in getting your audio/calls out over the speaker system and syncing of navigation with your other devices. And having car notifaction and interior lighting, audio EQ preferences synced too.

Any screens left in the car might be there purely for diagnostic or entertainment (think inflight entertainment and hopefully better) purposes, that need only minimal direct interaction.

rsynnott7y ago

That seems fairly irrelevant to _current_ cars, tho. If self-driving cars are a thing in a couple of decades (I'm somewhat skeptical, but whatever), then I'm sure that'll factor into the design of cars then. It shouldn't factor into the design of cars now.