Tesla Model X owner from China has attached a panel of physical buttons to the vehicle's main control unit for quicker access to some key functions.
Tesla Model X Owner Has Had Enough Of Minimalism, Adds Physical Buttons::Tesla Model X owner from China has attached a panel of physical buttons to the vehicle's main control unit for quicker access to some key functions.
Anytime I need to click on a touch button / non physical button I need to take my eyes off the road so I don’t click on other buttons wrongly… physical buttons in car is the way !
I want jackknife switches for every function, all wired to go chokBZAK and throw sparks at me every time I use my turn signal. Mad science maximalist aesthetics.
Simce when is a giant computer screen glaring in your face considered minimalism? I would argue the buttons return the car to proper minimalism.
So glad to see this!
Can we just yank all of those screens out of future vehicles?
I dont think removing the screen complete is the right way around this. Having something that can display maps and more information is good. But it should have never become the only thing.
You need buttons and easy access to functions that are always available in easy to remember places. So that you aren't spending attention away from the road when you want to change the fan control.
Fuck this bullshit touchscreen only nonsense, actual physical buttons are superior in a car.
As somone that lives in a dark sky rural area, the computer screen totally distracts and prevents your eyes from seeing the road where there are no streetlights.
It is like driving with someone pointing a flashlight in your eyes that you can’t turn down.
Personally I think a good tactile display could fix this but I would prefer a voice control that really works more than any buttons.
I've heard Teslas voice control is pretty good, but I have yet to be satisfied with any automobile voice control.
Ngl I want my dash to look like a fucking airliner. I love that my MINI interior looks like a personal space ship from a 90s movie. Give me moar toggles!
The question is, do you want them to toggle 'on' and 'off', meaning switching them on is like holding down the key, or send impulses in each position? (obviously with a master switch to reset then without triggering something)
2017 xc60 in my case, it's not exactly like that (I've got a couple of blanks this one doesn't have) but they still had it up to 2018 in the S60 and V60.
But it seems this is a split system so basically his and hers heat setting. And then the tiny knob in the middle controls the fan speed, or it can be set to auto.
It's a bit busy looking with all the buttons but it seems quite usefull and you only use a couple while driving anyway.
Yep, manual selection of where the air is coming out of is done by pressing on the different sections of the metal colored seat. Everything but climate can be controlled on the steering wheel too, including switching from radio to media to NAV and so on. Heck, I can enter an address for the NAV using the steering wheel controls!
This seems like a great idea to me. Touch screens are a terrible way to operate controls while driving. Some car companies have begun backing off from the trend and are moving back to buttons for some functions.
Touch screens are great for dynamic interfaces, but terrible for anything that involves feedback or a tactile experience.
My vehicle - though not a Tesla - still pisses me off that all the stereo controls except the power button are touch-based (even power appears to be a software-activated button as it failed once when the unit locked up). The saving point on my vehicle is that the steering controls (volume, prev/next) do still exist as physical buttons.
At the very least, they're should be a physical on/off, and physical dials/controls for volume and heating adjustments so a driver can change those without taking eyes off the road.
I fully expect that aftermarket buttons for dashboards will become a range of popular products, from things like this all the way up to a full dashboard replacement.
Before my Leafs battery melted (no active cooling, thanks Nissan) we were being offered 16k or so on the private market when it was 4.5 years old. Had gone from a max range of about 154 to 140ish in that time
It has a brand new battery now so that changes things, I'll admit. Newer cars will have longer lasting batteries in no small part thanks to cooling the fucking Things lol
That would be so cool! Not proprietary enough to sell the idea to automakers, but if the things on a dashboard could be switched out like the accessories of a desktop computer, we would quickly see what people actually want in their cars.
One of the biggest non-problematic problems I have with newer cars is the lack of physical buttons. I also really dislike the trend of everything becoming minimalist, so I 100% support these types of modifications so long as they can be safely implemented.
Minimalism can be nice, but Tesla seems to do this just for cost savings. Didn't they remove some "important" physical buttons from the steering wheel recently?
They removed all the stalks and the center horn button from the S/X and replaced them with capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel and screen. It's gone about as well as you might expect.
That seems just fucking dangerous. They are digital I am guessing? As a software engineer I really struggle to trust anything that another engineer can code 😅, at least for things that can kill me.
Programming your Tesla would mean that you upload software that your car runs. I think you can't do that, but you should be allowed to.
As it's a matter of public safety, and as part of a right to repair, all of the software that runs in cars should be open source, and should be able to be updated by the owner.
Do you really think the average Joe has the knowledge to develop safe software for a car? Some things are okay to be proprietary imo, maybe with open documentation but not source.
I still think it’s theoretically possible to do a touch interface right… but nobody has figured it out yet. Any interaction that requires you to navigate between multiple menus while driving is doing it wrong, but if you could get all the relevant buttons on screen, in predictable enough locations that people can click them while driving, it could work….
But at that point I’m not sure there’s much benefit to the screen vs physical buttons.
I must be in the minority. I hate loads of physical buttons with a passion. I had to get a rental recently and ordered a Jetta but the only car they had available when I landed was a Mercedes. I was pumped because I figured it’d be nice. I hated it. So many buttons all over the place with little hieroglyphs that meant nothing to me. Trying to find anything was impossible.
That being said, I never mess with the screen while driving. There’s nothing that I ever need to do that is so important I can’t wait until I hit a light or am in a safe spot, buttons or not.
Edit: This is so representative of Lemmy… simply having a different opinion or preference gets downvoted. The discussion on here is so much worse than Reddit was.
I don't think anyone wants that either. But there can be a balance of physical buttons you use while driving the car and virtual buttons to configure settings and other such things you don't do often and/or don't do while driving.
Things like turning on the headlights and wipers and shifting the vehicle should absolutely have physical controls.
Things like navigation and traction control should have virtual buttons.