I can fully operate my vehicle with decent competency and practiced skill, but part of that competency is the ability to adjust the heating/cooling and sound system without taking my eyes off the road for even a second. That's because I drive a car that's from the year 2010, and not just a few years later when my beloved tactile controls would have been all but certainly replaced by a flat, featureless screen that works like absolute piss in the winter and that would sport absolutely no haptic feedback.
If you don't own a car that has a touchscreen "infotainment" center, or don't really have a solid grasp on the severity of the problem, the issue is that vehicle touchscreens almost universally force you to take your eyes off the road to figure out what you're trying to do.
And it's not like the features that these systems offer are simply nice-to-haves — physical comfort can affect response time and concentration, and music can allow better road focus for those of us who have brains who don't do attention like most people's brains do. So, not super ideal to try to be fiddling with (and looking at) a flat featureless screen while you're trying to carry out a task that's inherently dangerous if you stop paying attention to it. But even aside from that, some more modern vehicles even have key safety features like windshield wipers (!!) and headlights (!!!) hidden behind touchscreen controls, too.
You often can't even access these features from the main touchscreen menu, either — you have to navigate into sub-menus to access these features, which is extra dangerous when you're driving at 70mph and something big and gross suddenly hits your windshield and you can't quickly figure out what quadrant of your tiny screen to mash to even begin fixing that problem, or when it starts to get cloudy and rainy and you need to make sure your silver-gray sedan doesn't become completely invisible to other motorists on the highway without veering into them in the process.
There are so many problems with touchscreens. Nobody is even close to getting them right!! But I'm not even sure that it's physically possible to get them right with the technology we currently have!! According to noted automobile benchmarking firm J.D. Power, not only do these infotainment touchscreen systems suck ass, they suck the most ass out of anything else in your average consumer car:
And if you need some hard data as to how unsafe this all is, infotainment touchscreens can severely impact a driver's attention on the typical order of tens of seconds, whereas "removing eyes from the road for just two seconds doubles the risk for a crash."
Not only are these systems dangerous, it's not like you can even avoid them any more. It's becoming almost impossible to find a new or even used vehicle that doesn't have a touchscreen to control vital features of the car. I wish I had some real statistics for you here, but I can at least anecdotally tell you that I've been car shopping with two people in the last 9 months, and for any car that was less than 10 years old, not a single one of them was available without a big stupid touchscreen where a bunch of physical knobs and switches should be.
I shouldn't have to tell you how utterly absurd this whole situation is. Physical controls of vehicle features have been working fine for literally one hundred years and car manufacturers are just now fucking it up real bad for some reason. Probably because the technology simply exists, and capitalism is a nightmare machine that makes middle managers think they need to keep innovating when parts of a product are already basically perfect.
(If you ever want a great video about when to cool it with innovation, watch Brennan Lee Mulligan absolutely hit it out of the park.)
Physical knobs and controls give you haptic (touch) feedback that you're doing the right thing without looking away from the road. I can turn a knob on my car all the way to the left, and then it stops, and then I can turn another knob all the way to the right, and it stops too, and that combination of feedback means that I am 100% confident that my car will begin blasting cold air as soon as it's able to, and I didn't need to take my eyes off the road to make any of that happen. Or how about the volume knob I can literally just slap without even thinking about it if I need my music to stop instantly so I can better listen for an ambulance or emergency siren I think I might have heard, or to listen for a train at an uncontrolled railway crossing?
Well, a lot of this anger is hopefully going to become moot over the next few years, because apparently people have been complaining about this a lot, and I guess it only takes a decade for executives to remember that customers exist:
If you don't want to read the article, here's the most important bit:
Right now, this mostly seems to be luxury brands of vehicles, which isn't great for us folks who are buying used everyman cars like the Honda Accord or the Toyota Camry, but I suspect that trickle-down features from luxury brands might actually be a real phenomenon for American vehicles, unlike trickle-down economics for American capitalism. Fingers crossed for the next 10-15 years of cars, because the last 10-15 are definitely going to be seen as a huge, gross mistake by motorists of the future.
I give you permission to stop reading this chost if you're tired of it now, since I've wrapped up my main point. But I have three addendums for those who crave additional context.
Addendum One: I actually do know of two major contributing factors for the ubiquity of touchscreen infotainment centers, and they are as follows.
- In 2014, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSF) announced that it would require all new cars sold in the U.S. to have backup cameras (and, of course, a screen to show the camera output on) starting in 2018. This was objectively a good rule, but lots of cars didn't have screens before this time... so, many manufacturers saw this as an opportunity to make other unnecessary changes in the light of a very necessary one.
- At this point in time, it is now considerably cheaper to add a shitty touchscreen into a car than it is to do proper tactile controls like knobs and switches. And wow, this sucks so bad!!!!
Addendum Two: The NHTSF has a ton of power to regulate vehicle safety stuff, and right now, they're absolutely holding their dick in their hands instead of taking any real action. I legitimately believe that this governmental organization (and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) are criminally negligent for letting things get this bad. They could act today, or at least start to act today, and they could save tons lives. But they aren't!! So they fuckin' suck!!
Addendum Three: Yes, I'm aware that we should all be pushing for big exciting public transit projects, and that none of this should be hugely necessary in 10-15 years if there is a just god in the universe, but I'm really pulling for the small victories here, since we've had so few of them lately.
the wildest thing about all this to me is simply that there is a rumbling that this era is drawing to a close. this never happens. when they start selling air conditioners with only one button you have to press 30 times to access 5 different settings, they don't usually go and put the usable controls back later. we've seen so many times that this doesn't get better even after decades of everyone being miserable. weird that this particular nightmare future thing might not be a permanent fixture for eternity
