This is a win for consumers, touch screens are bloody awful when driving and take away far too much of your concentration
Not really a “win” for anyone since it’s nothing but a suggestion:
Euro NCAP is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mand
I do agree with you, though why not just not buy cars which have touch screen controls? You don’t need legislation to filter your purchases.
You do though. Without legislations, cars wouldn’t have safety features by default like crumple zones, airbags etc. Without legislations, companies could do whatever they want to pad their bottom line. You need laws to define what is and isn’t acceptable, especially when it comes to safety.
I feel like I’m the only one here who is driving a car and not a spaceship. What’s there to interact with while you’re driving? Key multimedia buttons are already on the wheel.
Some Teslas have their windscreen wiper settings on the touchscreen.
That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard today
I think the latest models also have the gear selector (or whatever they’re called for automatics / EVs) on the touch screen, so you need to swipe up to put it into drive.
So… the entire car is bricked if that screen malfunctions and the car is not usable by those with poor motor skills in their right hand?
Or left hand for right-hand drive cars, but yes.
I watch the CarWow channel on YouTube and they review a lot of EV’s, and the host struggled with it - it would take him several attempts to get it into drive as he’d swipe up but not all the way so it would never actually engage. I guess in that case a software fix could be applied to make the control more sensitive but it’s still fucking stupid to have it there in the first place.
Also for more WTFs, on that same channel, they do these challenges where they drive a bunch of EVs on a route and see which one goes the furthest, which has the closest range to what the manufacture claims it’ll do and what happens to the vehicle when it runs out of battery. There was an instance where the Tesla ran out of charge, but they couldn’t open the recharging port because the little door is electronic.
It’s actually one of my biggest gripes …. Washer and single wipe are on a control stalk but wiper speed is on touch screen.
I think the theory is that wipers are automatic so you don’t usually need to control them manually, but that automation doesn’t work very well or maybe the rain sensor doesn’t work very well
The problem with automation is usually that while it can do 90% of the cases well, and that’s where it brings value, for safety critical stuff, like critical car components, there needs to be a way to quickly and easily override it.
In the 1994 Ford Mondeo I used to drive, if a truck with a poorly secured load and a questionably awake driver was barreling down the highway at 110-120 in a rainstorm, if I wanted to get the car ready to pass, it was one move to click the wiper into “wipe for your life” mode before the truck started to powerblast the windscreen with water splashing up from the tires.
I’m not sure if I could do that in a Tesla, especially since if it does it only when it would already be needed, that’s too late. And the thing is, even if the automation did work, how do I know 100% it does work when I do something that would be dangerous if it did not work?
Touch screens are great in cars! For one purpose. The navigation. The touchscreen should only display navigation and function as a keyboard to search it, and only while the car is stationary. Everything else should have a physical control, at bare minimum as “backup”
Touch screens are great in cars!
No, no they aren’t. If I have to stop to use a control in a car, it’s bad design.
So far
151823 people have shown they don’t know how to drive.Ok, lets hear your idea for how to navigate while driving. Please don’t say voice control, because voice control rarely works as needed.
Passenger does it? Have a sensor to see if there is a passenger, then allow it.
You’re rightfully getting downvoted because having a passenger is not at all a given and before the days of navigation systems you had to handle physical maps at the next red light or pull over, but there’s a kernel of truth to your statement:
A passenger who can actually navigate is a godsend. I learned how to do it properly during my draft time (civil defence) and a proper navigator takes so much load off the driver it’s not funny any more. Incomparable to a computer navigation system. The driver is getting instructions exactly when necessary, confusing situations get called out and clarified, and when the driver makes a call “can’t drive left here” it’s the navigator’s responsibility to re-plan. You can actually focus on the road because the navigator takes on full responsibility for the route. It’s how you can get fast to a place in an area unknown to both driver and navigator, and with “fast” I mean with or without sirens, without that navigator backup sirens would generally be pointless, no brain cycles left to care about routes when you’re “breaking” rules of the street and dealing with apparently deaf and blind drivers left and right.
The average passenger, though, is magnitudes worse than computer navigation. And I don’t just mean people who need to rotate the map to not get disoriented, I mean practically everyone.
I was getting down voted because apparently everyone thought I means have a passenger do the navigation?
I meant that the driver should NEVER do navigation whilst driving because that kills people, there is no discussion there. So you either pull over, set the navigation computer and continue, or if you have a passenger, that passenger can do the navigation computer while you are driving.
This is not controversial, this is basic driving
And of course, we can rely on the universally true mutual exclusivity of always having a passenger when we need to navigate, and never needing to navigate when we don’t have any passengers. As constant as the north star, that one.
If you need to do navigation, you stop your car. If you have a passenger, he or she can do it while you are driving. It’s not that hard