> The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles.
Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.
The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.
> It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.
My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.
> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.
Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.
I do like key-driven soft menus (like the steering wheel controls commonly used for HUDs or gauge cluster menus), but they get a bit unwieldy with longer lists. Some automakers (GM) address this by nesting all the options in a bunch of sub-menus, but I find this frustrating because I end up just having to search through a bunch of menus to find what I want.
Some automakers (Mazda, BMW) use a knob instead, which makes it a bit quicker to scroll through a longer list, but I have found myself overshooting and then having to back track which is sometimes annoying.
There's really pros and cons to whatever implementation is used. While I completely agree that any function that might be operated while driving needs to be able to be operable with hard controls, I also don't think it's a good idea to clutter those menus with a bunch of junk that you don't want or need while driving.
I think there's a good case to be made for 3 levels of controls:
* Things that must have dedicated hard keys: anything that must be adjusted rapidly for driver attentiveness, control, or comfort -- HVAC, audio levels and basic tuning, all lighting and vehicle controls.
* Things that must have hard keys, but can live in a shared menu: anything that a driver may want to adjust while driving, but is not essential for immediate use -- trip data, infotainment, non-critical gauge monitoring etc.
* Things that don't need hard keys and should not clutter any of the above interfaces: odd-ball configuration settings that a driver would not need to operate while driving -- key fob configuration, entry-exit preference configuration, software updates, integrations with external services, maintenance logs, etc.
Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.
The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.
> It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.
My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.
> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.
Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.