We need something better than touchscreens in cars
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 wipers and the tyre-pressure monitor reset. Physical buttons are not just great; they are undeniably better and safer to use for fixed actions, that’s why even iPhones still have volume up and down buttons. At night, these buttons are softly backlit, like my laptop keyboard, so I can see their status and location in the dark, but they don’t blind me and force me to readjust my sight every time I glance at the dashboard. Also, finger smudges.
I want more of this, not less. I want the same ergonomics logic for music controls, for navigation, for communications. I want a button that is programmable to make a one-click phone call to my wife’s mobile phone. I want a button that always starts a specific playlist. Just like I don’t want MacOS to look and feel like iOS, I want my car to feel like a car, with its own personality, and not an iPad on wheels. Right now, when I look at car interiors from the 90s, I am jealous. I am almost smelling the leather and plastics, feeling the tactility of the dashboards, hearing the sounds they make. I am not sure how modern car interiors will feel in thirty years, let alone ten years from now.*4
To me, ideally, cars should behave like iPods and iTunes Sync: every time your phone connects to your car — wirelessly or not — playlists, albums, podcasts, contacts, saved maps, messages, and appointment locations should sync with those saved on the phone, and that’s it: let the car handle the software and the physicality of the interface. CarPlay should have the option for car manufacturers to run only as a syncing protocol for data, not a full iOS-like interface.
I guess Steve Jobs was misunderstood by car manufacturers when he introduced the iPhone:
Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface?
I mean, Here’s four smart phones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62 – the usual suspects. And, what’s wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It’s, it’s this stuff right here. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it.
If having a screen-only interface makes sense for phones, where the application can change drastically depending on the use case, it doesn’t sound like a relevant advantage for cars, where fixed control buttons and a constant user interface sounds like something you want.
When Steve Ballmer famously commented on the iPhone, saying that it didn’t have a keyboard and didn’t make it a great “email machine”, he was mistaken because the iPhone can be a great email machine too. But I see what he meant: keyboards are obviously more capable for serious typing. They are in the way if you want to watch a video or browse the web, however, a keyboard fixed in plastic is better if typing is the main purpose of the device, just like laptops have keyboards. Even today, a lot of people miss having a keyboard on their phones. In that sense, car dashboards should be more like BlackBerry devices, and less like iPhones, because a dashboard should have the best design for driving, just like a BlackBerry had a keyboard to be the best at typing.*5
In the same iPhone keynote from 2007, Steve Jobs also quotes Alan Kay’s famous “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Well, I believe the opposite is also true, at least in the car industry: People who are really serious about hardware should make their own software.