Really annoying

[Blaze]

Thank dog the 6 Nations starts on Thursday.

And the Winter Olympics on Friday !

[Hotrodder]

Yawn................

[Pathca]

Is there anything you enjoy

[Hotrodder]

Quite a lot of things, just not sports or things that are thought of as sports.

Indian, Mexican, and Italian food. Sci Fi, Archeology, Antiques, Abstract sculpture, Birds, Sailing, Music (Blues, R&B, and Jazz), and working with my hands. A total petrol head since the age of 12 or so I have always done my own repairs and enjoyed custom modifying ordinary cars from end to end. A brief skirmish with radio electronics in my teens but cars (not supercars or modern computers on wheels) still hold my interest.

[RobertArthur]

Personally I don't enjoy the very annoying and also dangerous touchscreens in modern cars. I just had the pleasure of getting annoyed by this again, watching a television programme featuring a number of test subjects doing their best on a test circuit. From ordinary motorists to a garage mechanic and a lady who is used to driving very fast on race tracks. They all had difficulty with it, some started to drive erratically while searching for simple functions that used to be intuitive and easy to find. How to silence the constant bleeping of the lane assist system, it's driving me mad. How to raise the temperature? How to adjust the side mirrors? Immersed in many pages of text in a submenu. Even sitting comfortably at home behind your laptop you would prefer to think about your choise for a moment, so you don't click on something wrong.

Translated from an "heads up" article in the newspaper "Algemeen Dagblad" this text:

Away with screens: fewer buttons in cars leads to more accidents. Finding your way around a modern car is often quite a challenge. Many actions that you once performed automatically by touch now require searching through menu structures. How bad is that? Autoweek investigated this in collaboration with AvroTros Radar.

As cars become more capable, their controls become more complicated. That is logical and inevitable. It's fine to hide the colour mood lighting or massage settings in submenus, but increasingly even very basic functions, such as driving direction and windscreen wipers, are being incorporated into the screen, which distracts the driver from the road and causes irritation.

How bad is that? Together with consumer programme AvroTros Radar, Autoweek put it to the test. Radar provided six test subjects, AutoWeek four test cars, and with that we took to the track. Each candidate was given a number of tasks to perform while driving each car. All the tasks were things you regularly do in your daily driving: changing the radio station, turning up the temperature, silencing the ISA, that sort of thing.

Surprises: four cars and six very diverse test subjects resulted in 24 journeys. And a lot of surprises. Things that we considered to be very well hidden were sometimes quickly found by unprepared people. Conversely, it turned out that almost everyone longs for physical buttons. It also turned out that older drivers are often very adept at navigating complex menu structures.

unquote.

Last year one of the headlines in a Belgian newspaper: Operating touchscreens in your car is three times more dangerous than driving under the influence: ‘European regulations are needed’. A wake-up call, things begin to start moving away from the touchscreen as the holy grail in your car.

European regulations so far: a blind spot for distraction caused by touchscreens. Safety organisations such as Euro NCAP are now recommending that basic functions such as climate control and navigation be operated via physical buttons, as touchscreens negatively affect reaction times. What took them so long? Although there is no strict ban, the use of complex touchscreens is discouraged, and new requirements for assistance systems are expected, forcing car manufacturers to pay more attention to safe, intuitive operation, where a balance between screen and buttons is essential for good safety scores.

There is also much room for improvement in terms of layout, icon clarity (please: intuitive) and colour usage. VW scored highest in this regard among all participants in this Dutch test.

I am curious to see how (quickly?) the car industry will respond. And especially the governments (competent authorities?) , who want us to believe that they are constantly coming up with more regulations with the aim of better protecting the law-abiding citizen. No risks allowed, it's in your own interest.

Now it's time to relax and listen to some nice music....Cars and metal go hand in hand, what about some French metal to enlighten my mood?

[Polarengineer]

Reminded me of the late great Lemmy.
These new EVs are indeed very different. I am expecting delivery of a small EV this month and have been sent a series of videos explaining the functions of the touch screen. As the car is a basic model, I doubt that all the functions will be available, however, I intend to set them up to my requirement before pressing the pedal and stopping somewhere to eliminate any annoying actions. After that, I doubt I would need to touch the screen except for navigation, but then you always need to stop the car to set that up.

[RobertArthur]

@ Polarengineer, setting your system up to your requirements is one thing, the other thing is what happens when you start your car the next morning. Personal settings saved or everything back to the default position?

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

[Blaze]

Personally I don't enjoy the very annoying and also dangerous touchscreens in modern cars.

Thanks for your interesting post, RA.

Both our petrol VWs, 8 and 10 years old, have touch screens but, thankfully, also buttons, both below the screen (heating/air con) and on the steering wheel itself. Personally, I never use the steering wheel buttons, as I haven't a clue what they're for. OH is a fiddler while driving and sometimes I find the screen in front of the steering wheel with some confusing configuration which I don't know how to alter. Perhaps I should learn ....

We don't drive long distances any more, most of our driving is local except when we go off with our caravan. We can't be the only ones, so why would people like us need/want all these options ? As for having a car decide whether to action the windscreen wipers or dip the headlights .... I think I'm sound enough of mind to decide for myself ! Forget lane assist and cruise control which I don't use. Our Tiguan (our insurers called it a Papi car !) once made an emergency stop for no reason. Frightening but fortunately it hasn't happened since - dirt or a dead fly on the detector ?

As for GPS, a subject in itself, neither of us uses it. I check an address and am fortunate to have a virtually photographic memory for directions/maps.
However ...... there are roadworks/route barrée signs everywhere in and around Saint-Malo at the moment and they are driving everyone mad. Badly signed, no deviations marked, certainly no warning before you get to a route barrée sign. I doubt a GPS would be much use as the road blocks change every day just to keep people on their toes.

I can't help thinking that if car designers/manufacturers designed a simple car, comfortable but without all the fancy gadgetry which would be less expensive (!), it would be a best seller. The people who design computers and such gadgetry must realise that 99% of the population will probably only use a small proportion of its capabilities.

[RobertArthur]

What the creators of all kinds of traffic rules sometimes forget is that there are occasions when you actually need to break the rules, accelerate, driving faster than the speed limit in that particular area.

We had once picked someone up from Charles de Gaulle airport and were driving through one of those long, notorious tunnels in Paris. We were neatly in the right lane, right behind a large Mercedes. Something is wrong with that driver's behaviour, I thought. And I said to the driver on my left, a certain Denis, immediately put your foot down and overtake the car in front of us. But what about the speed limit, he asked? It doesn't matter, overtake now, it must have sounded like a military command, and he pressed the accelerator as hard as he could. A few seconds later, we saw in the rear-view mirror that the car suddenly came to a halt almost sideways on the road and there was a huge pile-up. Denis said: merci Robert...

[Hotrodder]

Personally I don't enjoy the very annoying and also dangerous touchscreens in modern cars.

Thanks for your interesting post, RA.
I can't help thinking that if car designers/manufacturers designed a simple car, comfortable but without all the fancy gadgetry which would be less expensive (!), it would be a best seller. The people who design computers and such gadgetry must realise that 99% of the population will probably only use a small proportion of its capabilities.

Absolutely spot on.........so there must be a reason why this doesn't happen. One suggestion might be that those designers/manufacturers are devotees of the "Change for the sake of change" mantra. Another might be that the accountants might be pushing the idea the idea that adding so-called "features" continually will cause the sheeple to become dissatisfied with their current car/computer/phone/TV/etc. and wave their credit card at the latest device in the hopes of consumer Nirvana. Or is it the marketing/advertising people doing a couple of lines of coke and coming up with new ways of using all of the above to sell us the idea to buy what they want to sell rather than what we want or need.