reliable and familiar that won’t break the bank.
This is why car companies are not going to offer EVs that people actually want without government intervention. I remember GM leasing EVs back in the '90s to some acclaim. But they didn’t let anyone buy out their leases and they discontinued production by the end of the decade because most of their money came from service. And a bare-bones electric car has very few service requirements.
Manufacturers need the bullshit features because they need something important and breakable for consumers to come back with. Even if it’s just planned obsolescence driving another purchase, like it sounds like the article’s author is heading towards.
hietsu@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
This reminds me of the days of first mainstream touchscreen phones and how so many of my friends cried how terrible the touchscreen is to use in different scenarios, f.ex type an SMS without looking at the phone while driving. How superior the physical keys are. Did we get physical keys back, no, and neither we are going to get them back to cars at least in the extent they used to be.
The touchscreen is just so cheap way to implement stuff compared to actual buttons. You can dump most of the costly design and engineering work to the software guys, configure endlessly without any of it affecting the assembly line. Hopefully the backlash against touch controls still brings at least the very basic stuff back (indicators, heating, volume, drive…), and not in the worst-of-both-world form from hell that is the ”haptic buttons”.
noddy@beehaw.org 4 days ago
The problem with using touch in a car is that you’re supposed to look at the road, not at a screen. Whether something is easily controllable could be a matter of life and death. Something physical you can reach by muscle memory is safer in this context. So yeah the basic controls should be tactile and intuitive. Anyones grandma should be able to figure out how to turn on the wipers if the rain sensor didn’t do its job. Or adjust the fan quickly if the window fogs up.