Electric car thread

[kgwilson]

My MG 4 has a row of physical buttons to turn major things on & off. It also has a 10 inch infotainment screen to manage detailed stuff. I have never heard of any EVs having issues with touch screens. These have been around since the 1980s & with a large screen work really well. The screen demister has a single physical button. The air conditioning/heater/fan has another. When pressed the whole screen is all of the controls for this & the touch buttons are really large. It is easier to operate that any rotary or slider controls I've ever used in a multitude of cars before. There are also voice commands for everything though I don't use this by choice though the car will tell me things that are important like when the battery is getting low.

 

Yes some car manufacturers have reverted back to some physical buttons mainly due to complaints from owners who have not embraced the technology or the poor design of the system. I have programmable physical buttons on the steering wheel that can be set for a bunch of different functions & they have 5 options (up/down/left side/right side and press). I have one set to radio/music, satnav, aircon for example & can run all the options from that one button. Some functions cannot be used when the car is moving as a safety feature, eg satnav unless using voice commands. 

 

Comments/complaints about use from owners has led to upgrades & these are just software changes all done free. 

 

There is a very large transition happening and some things will not find acceptance from some conservative people. All they have to do is try to accept the change and persevere and most will eventually grow to like it. I do like the drivers screen directly in front with speed/odomoeter battery, power ACC etc rather than the Tesla model of a large centre screen & nothing directly in front of the driver. 

 

The woman in my car has a cultured but not posh English accent which I find very easy to understand.

[old man emu]

9 hours ago, kgwilson said:

directly in front of the driver. 

You've hit my objection right on the head with that. The driver should have all relevant information within the forward field of vision. not in a position where that field needs to be turned to the side by a turn of the head.

[octave]

9 minutes ago, old man emu said:

The driver should have all relevant information within the forward field

In most EVs I know of it is in front of you.  My heater and demister switches on my old Ford Focus are not directly in front of me.

 

Here is a picture of the primary display for a BYD

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

It's not just EVs that have LED and similar tablet type displays in front of them.. most new cars to these days. That really is not the issue. A speedo cable can snap on an analogue system and you have the same issue - I have had it happen on a Saturday arvo and no speedo until Monday morning. 

 

I would hope there are no controls on that screen. Sticking yuor hand between the spokes of the steering wheel is not a good thing. 

 

On the controls, using touch screen doesn't give you a sense of magnitude of change (e.g. temperature, etc) without looking. Well, at least for some time, anyway. Also, early model Teslas were infamous for the depth of menu setting one had to go through to get to whatever function was required. 

 

Muscle memory will only go some way.. as it does on analogue or tactile type inputs. How many times (in an old 4 or 5 on the floor, or even a 3 or 54 on the column) have we crunched the gears or almost stalled the car going into the wrong gear. However, the physical/tactile approach allows us to correct without reverting to looking at the gears (unless we really stuff it up and have lost spatial awareness of where the gear is).

 

So, the Atrick household vehicle mix is chaning. Daughter just wants an old banger (UK speak)/bomb (Aus speak) of a car as she will be in a house in the next academic year, won't have a driveway, and will not want the hassle of a nice car getting road rash from an inner urban environment. Good on her. So it will be a petrol Ford Fiesta (most likely); manual, a/c, power steering and otherwise minimal. 

 

Mrs Atrick is in for a little shock... She is getting an EV - Probably an MG4 to replace her mini.  She doesn't know it yet.

[nomadpete]

I hope I didn't sound too 'conservative' - that term has negative political connotations these days.

 

I do prefer tactile interaction with controls. That won't stop me playing/learning other kinds or locations of controls. Of course I'll adapt.

 

But I hope the other automated facets of new vehicles gets very thoroughly tested.

I spent a lot of my career testing and commissioning complex automation and I know there will always be users who can bring about unforseen results.

 

A bit like MrMusky's unplanned post launch disassembly of his rockets.

[Marty_d]

I agree Peter - part of a previous job was system testing changes to a large organisation's primary database before they were deployed.

For five weeks at a time we'd try to break it by doing the stupidest things humans could do to it.

After deployment, when the programmers had applied fixes to any weaknesses we'd found, inevitably some moron still managed to break it.