China’s impact on cars goes far beyond its explosive growth in the electric vehicle (EV) market. Not only a major automotive manufacturer, China is itself a massive market for vehicles, dwarfing Europe at least in terms of raw numbers. Consequently, a recent Chinese government move to replace digital technology with technology more easily operated using digits is likely to have a major impact outside the country.
Regulators at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have decided that a wide range of essential functions, including lights, wipers and, in the case of EVs, power off, will have to be operable using physical buttons. Hallelujah!
Touchscreens are a mixed bag. Smartphones are an obvious success, of course, but tablet computers have been something of a disappointment, finally resolving into a profitable niche but failing to make real inroads into general purpose computing. Yes, touchscreens have uses. No, they should not consume all matter as though they are the maw of a black hole.
Back out in the land of material reality, resistive touchscreens still dominate. Robust, they may be, but a pleasant experience, not so much. Jabbing fingers into a plate of glass while not knowing if the failure to register is a result of a dodgy sensor or a CPU overburdened with processes. No doubt there is a reasonable explanation, but, in my experience, devices like coin counters in supermarkets may as well be pulling double duty mining Bitcoin or running AI models. I don’t know about you, but when I am confronted with two ticket machines or ATMs, one offering a touchscreen and the other resplendent in buttons, the buttons win hands down.
This, of course, is why the first wave of touchscreens failed, such as Hewlett Packard’s valiant efforts in the 1980s. But even the shift to a better technology, capacitive screens, has not really made all that much headway in real life. Touchscreen laptops exist, but, on the whole, no-one seems terribly fussed one way or the other.
Except in cars.
My car is over a decade old at this point (making it, incidentally, the newest car I have ever owned) and is therefore free of glass slabs in need of a quick pat or rub. Recent adventures in hire cars, however, shocked me: the vast majority of functions, including all radio-related operations, are now routinely delivered through a slow, confusing and poorly designed screen interface that offers absolutely no tactile feedback and – here’s the rub – forces the driver to look away from the road.
The problem is a fairly obvious one.
There may be drivers who like touchscreens, though I’ve never met any. Yes, excitement and unrestrained technojoy certainly meant that they made an impression on debut, but the dazzling reality of lashing an iPad to the dashboard turned out to be nothing other than a cost-cutting measure. Generic screens are, after all, cheaper even than a traditional dive into the parts bin.
Happily, that corporate miserliness may now deliver us from slide-and-freeze crashes that are more worrying than a kernel panic. After all, any major automaker seeking to crank out vehicles will not only have to consider the Chinese market, but also respond to Chinese competitors in virtually every market. The lure of the ‘world car’, the same box being flogged from Tierra del Fuego to Tramore, is just too strong for mainstream car companies to ignore, so we can expect the Chinese regulations to ripple through most markets.
Novelty value
Customary things are not necessarily preferable, of course, but we need to be clear that cries to bring back switches are not merely a rejection of the novel. It is not at all the case that every older method of interacting with a machine is superior to new ones.
Though I have no desire to change it at this late stage, the telephone user interface (UI), which is to say, strings of numbers, is just flat-out bad. It’s getting worse, too: numbers are now increasingly quasi-random, whereas once upon a rainbow their composition was at least internally coherent.
We don’t realise how bad this UI is because it has been in existence for so long and also because of the workarounds that we have, in recent decades, layered on top of it. Indeed, phones were invented before user interfaces were even a concept and, therefore, the phone system, and how we interact with it, were designed around the engineering of networks.
In-car touchscreens were designed with UI in mind, but by the time they were deployed any pretence at developing meaningful metaphors for actions had been dropped, replaced by, at best, graphic designers showing off and, at worst, ‘cost engineering’. Screens won’t go away, of course, but forcing manufacturers to actually respond to material reality (something the market appears unable to do) will at least mean important functions are not dangerously hidden behind opaque interfaces.
While we’re at it, though, is there any chance we could bring back handbrakes?
Ltd
