We need something better than touchscreens in cars – The Jolly Teapot<br>We need something better than touchscreens in cars<br>I live in the Greater Strasbourg area, and nearby, 30 kilometres away or so, there is a certain small-volume car manufacturer that understood years ago, before it was cool, that touchscreens in cars tend to age poorly. I love what they do instead of putting every command behind a fancy touchscreen: they try to give each of the main commands its own physical button, without relying on a capacitive piece of glass, as if we were still living in the first 120 years of the 140-year-old car industry.*1

There was no such screen in their previous flagship model (2005–2015), resulting in an interior that ages quite well compared to other interiors from the same era (imagine the resolution of these screens). Their recently-retired model, despite being released in 2016, doesn’t offer a single touchscreen either, and in the upcoming model, the screen only appears when needed, for instance, for GPS navigation. I’m not even sure if it’s touch-enabled.

Why are such “simple” straight-to-the-point dashboards now synonymous with either brand boldness or retro design rather than best practice in driver interfaces? When did we all just sort of accept this as the de facto standard, even if touchscreens in cars suck? How much money do car manufacturers really save by centralising as much as possible into a single screen that tends to look the same across different brands and different models? How important is it for their sales and marketing departments to be able to highlight the fact that their cars are able to display the same familiar icons as the phones of their customers?

This rant is not about being able to play songs from Apple Music or Spotify in your car’s stereo. This is not about the connectivity allowed by modern cars and the features it enables: this is about the look and ergonomics of it all. Why does everything have to be controlled via a big, luminous, colourful screen? Why does everything have to be displayed with a phone-inspired UI? When did Apple CarPlay and Android Auto become the face of most modern car software, and when did most car companies give up on that part?*2

When did we, as customers and drivers, get duped into thinking that good car interfaces had to involve giant touchscreens?

Part of the answer is obvious: most car manufacturers are terrible at software, and they suck at user interfaces. Meanwhile, people have built natural habits with touchscreens over the past twenty years.

For years people hated entering an address in their car’s GPS, so when something like Apple CarPlay became available, it felt like a breath of fresh air, it felt like the future. Car manufacturers noticed, and now they have the possibility to rely on iOS and Android to do most of the work regarding navigation, media, and phone connectivity. All of that while saving money by effectively externalising these features, at the cost of a dependency on ubiquitous and long-term-supported smartphone operating systems. All they have to do is include a nice screen, be “compatible” with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, let you charge your phone while driving, and call it a day. And drivers seem to love this.*3

The problem is that if touchscreens are fine for some specific things in a car, this is not usually the case when actually driving. You know, that thing you do with a car and don’t do with an iPad? There are obvious safety concerns around the idea of people digging through menus and screens while operating a two-ton metal machine on public roads, but I want to complain about the quality of the experience most of all, which, as a software aficionado, I find to be infuriating most of the time.

Why and when did we all collectively seem to settle for this? Why do we spend so much time complaining about MacOS and accept the mediocrity of car software as if nothing can be done, ever?

Every time I want to play a specific song in my car (and when I don’t want to use Siri or when it doesn’t work — I’ll let you know which of the two is more common) I realise how terrible the experience is. Having to deal with five or six touch inputs at various locations on the screen, with questionable contrast and iconography, doesn’t really work when you’re using a moving, hovering hand while paying attention to traffic, does it? But it has nice candy-like colour icons, it looks like our phones, it feels “modern”, and we don’t really have to learn how to use it, we comply, and we forget about it.

By contrast, changing temperature in my 2020 Kia Rio is as easy and reliable as it can get. I just turn a big knob. It has a nice feeling. I can tell from its physical orientation at which temperature it is set: between a “not heated at all” (blue area) and “warmest” (red area). It doesn’t lag. It doesn’t freeze. It doesn’t confuse me. If the AC is on, a separate button is lit up. The same goes for the ventilation speed, the window...