They could go one step further and add braille support directly, it’s just nudges. Tactile feeling is the only reason they are back.
Yes, I’m aware there are no blind drivers. The point is not having to look at your controls and doing so with something that already exists.
Braille isn’t very good for quick discernment. It’s much easier to put differently-shaped buttons together or put buttons into different places.
Why not both? And blind people don’t seem to think so. Either way, better than what’s in the picture.
Out of curiosity, have you actually spoken to blind people about how useful they find Braille?
Feeling for a 2cm x 1.5cm button is way different than trying to read braille.
Now try selecting between each of the buttons 2cm x 1.5cm for a particular button without having to feel the rest or having to glance at it.
Literally just bumps that are even easier to make than the text on the buttons because they are just part of the plastic mold instead of additional paint jobs. Some people are just hostile to any basic improvement.
We’re talking about something most people’s minds are not used to interpreting, so I fear that this would just add a layer of mental load for most drivers that would be actually less safe.
… Feel free to speak for yourself …
You think most people are reading things with their fingertips?
You do realize that human touch can differentiate between .01mm? It’s why braille works so easily.
Imagine trying to both make the argument that braille is too hard to distinguish and that 0.01mm is easy to differentiate in the same thread.
Fucking YES
No.
Out the way, boomers.
Fucking finally.
Now make cars look like cars again. Last 30 years has been a parade of Jellybeans and Electric Shavers.
What I care more about is making cars… cars. Visit a dealership in the US and it’s 98% SUV/Truck and 2% sedans.
I just want cheap economy shitboxes back. User serviceable ones. Without an extra half ton of plastic and unnecessary electronics. Bring back wind up windows and normal radios. Vinyl seats. Hell, bench seats. Wind up windows.
The lowest tech car I could find was the Mitsubishi Mirage G4, and they told me it’s being discontinued this year! I think that leaves the Nissan Versa as the only subcompact entry-level vehicle on the market.
Which is beyond insane. People are broke.
I just got a leaf
My old early 2000s Ford focus that had manual windows and locks died a few years ago. I miss that car, but towards the end every door handle broke and only the back passenger door opened from the outside… which means I always I had to leave a window down(no key hole on that door) or climb through the trunk.
Unfortunately Ford decided to make car doors using a tiny piece of plastic that holds the wire that moves when you pull the handle. When that breaks the handle goes limp and does nothing. But you can’t just replace that piece of plastic… nope. You have to buy a whole new internal mechanism.
Like i said that car died finally, but I’m still salty about the doors. Those broke one at a time about 5-10 years before the engine went. Anyway, sorry about the rant. I loved my not electric windows and doors, but never expected that issue with it down the road.
Can confirm, I used to daily an 07 focus and it went through door handles like tires
Most “SUVs” are actually crossovers. Which are just hatchbacks, wagons, and non-sliding door minivans. Take an Impreza hatchback and lift it 3 inches, and suddenly it’s an “SUV.”
But yeah, sedans w/trunks are becoming a bit of a rarity.
Yeah, Subaru is getting rid of the Legacy sedan in 2025 and keeping the Impreza hatchback because the Impreza shares parts with their larger SUVs. The Legacy doesn’t, so it makes them more money to get rid of the car.
Modern cars are designed in wind tunnels. We’ll never get the cool designs back.
We had efficiency answered decades ago during the 70s fuel shortage. Big oil didn’t want to normalize cars like the Vega, Moodymobile, VW Rabbit, later the Geo Metro. They wanted us to burn more oil not less. And that hasn’t changed. Cars don’t need to be designed in wind tunnels.
Regulations on fossil fuels have become very strict in Europe and any manufacturer wanting to sell there is going to maximize aerodynamics. Not to mention the increased range for electric cars. Most people still view cars as utilities, they care more about how far it can go on one charge instead of cool angular designs.
We still have Hummers. Aerodynamics isn’t everything.
True, but those look like shit, lol
except at rivian. they have stated future models will have an all touchscreen dashboard
They can state all they want, if their clients don’t pay for it they’d sell their firstborn son to get the numbers back up
Vote with your wallet.
always have for the most part
Vote with your 6 ton 4000 VDC truck mounted electromagnet
Touchscreens can stay, but only for non-essential tasks like changing settings or entering addresses. Climate, media, and all other controls you usually use while driving should be tactile by mandate.
thank fuck
But we’ve still got a good 10 years of avoiding used cars. This era is literally landfill.
Never mind that even 3-5 years down the line, some of these systems will fail to connect/ pair with the latest gadget in your pocket.
10 years and counting
There’s so much bullshit in new cars that’s it’s infuriating, especially considering the cars call home with all kinds of privacy violating bullshit.
How about just generic opensource communications via Ethernet rj45? Then you just plug in any screen/computer including raspberry pi so you can have whatever system you want.
Won’t someone please think of the shareholders?!!
Particularly given the trend of ‘glue a tablet to the middle of the dashboard’. If you are going to do that anyway, bring up a modern successor to the DIN/Double DIN standard, where the mounting is standard and update to also include USB-C for standard power, audio, and data. Add some network profiles for standardized exchange of useful information (Car speedometer, car model, fuel/battery amount and efficiency profile, navigation information to drive dash/HUD, etc).
And sarcastically speaking please oh please don’t add functionality to the obd connector like the ability to self diagnose and display a full report for any mechanic to easily use without the need for special hardware. That would be awful to have.
I find it insane that with modern computing and displays, they still just render a vague check engine light despite being able to easily display the specifics.
Ding ding! You got a flat tire dude! You can tell because I’m showing you this symbol “!”
Oh, wanna know which one? Just go outside and check it out buddy! It would be the one that looks flat.
You get all this great information for just $400 bucks! 100 per each tire monitor.
Dude, my goodness! Can they do worse?
That last but is almost NMEA 2000, which standardizes exactly that kind of information, but in boats. It’s old enough that they based it on CANbus, but there are many repeater products to add IP devices (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) to the network.
ETA: By which I mean to say, plenty of designs already exist in the marine market which could be used to bridge a car’s CANbus to consumer devices, if they wanted to.
Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?
did 80s VCRs even have OSD? we went from a top loading National to a hi-fi so basically skipped the 80s. and 90s VRC UX would be perfectly acceptable as far as I’m concerned.
They mostly didn’t have OSDs, they instead had indecipherable 7-segment and some fixed elements like ‘Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa’, with 2 or 3 buttons. The younger Gen-X/older Millennials got their reputation as ‘whiz kids’ in part by handling those interfaces on behalf of their mystified parents.
80s and early 90s designed the best dashboards. Change my mind mf.
You mean like the 1985 Subaru XT Coupe? God I love that cassette futurism look!
Steering wheel looks like a gun which fits since it’ll probably kill you
That is such a strange looking steering wheel.
Some of the most zany quirks and features of any car!
Get outta here, Doug Demuro! Go back to YouTube!
Funny part is it looks sci-fi to me.
This will never not be sci fi to me lol
The retro futurism of the 80’s was the best
While you’re at it bring back the Amber, its such a perfect color for the dash
It looks nice but I’m sure they lean towards cool colors because they’re better at keeping you awake.
Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?
SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN
Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?
IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE SUN
That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.
I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.
Never had an issue with them but then I live in Europe, where auto-adjusting/adaptive lights aren’t just legal it’s a requirement if you want to make the headlights permanent high-beams.
I wish adaptive lights were legal in the USA. Manufacturers like BMW have to disable the feature at the factory because their implementation isn’t approved for usage in the USA.
I saw this, but apparently the European ones don’t meet the US guidelines, and the Euro manufacturers aren’t yet redesigning and recertifying their headlights to meet the US guidelines. The two brands I was looking at (BMW and Porsche) both still have this feature disabled on their 2025 US models.
Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.
And for some reason my state still doesn’t have properly reflecting paint, so everyone drives with their high-beams on because otherwise you can’t see the lanes. The net result is that nobody can see anything because they’re constantly being blinded by oncoming traffic.
It sucks all the way down…
my issue isn’t really with the brightness, it’s the height. Don’t get me wrong bright headlights are annoying as fuck, but a huge ass truck behind me with their headlights literally higher than my back window is insane.
I don’t know the white point on some of the LED headlights is extremely taxing to look at at night.
My point exactly. The brightness is great, when it works in your favor. But when a modern car sits at such a height, where the low-beams shine directly over the top of my car, it’s obnoxious
That, and people don’t know how to adjust them, or are unwilling to. My parents’ cars have a dial to adjust the headlight angle for when carrying weight in the back of the car, or when towing, but they never touch the setting.
I miss that in my old car. When I’m drivng around in the city and don’t rally need much headlighting I’d angle them all the way down. When I’m in a dark area where there’s enough people that I can’t use my brights I’d just angle them up. My current car has stupid self leveling headlights so I don’t get any of that fun :(
Especially when people fuck with the ride height on their trucks. They almost always end up with the front higher than the back, relative to it’s stock setting. Then don’t bother to adjust the head light angle to compensate.
Then, on I need a massive light bar on the top of my truck. Never mind that I never take this thing off road or do any work with it. It looks cool and it’s bright and shiny.
Fuck off. Can we just tax these things properly and not v give them a lower tax rate since their classed as commercial vehicles. No one buying these massive boats uses them for more than going to home Depot once a year to buy some leaf bags.
/Rant
My car has adjustable headlight height and I love it. I put em all the way down because they’re stupid bright.
I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.
This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.
The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.
From personal experience in Europe, I can tell you that it sounds great in theory, but it’s horrible in practise. I get routinely blinded by headlights here and I feel like it has only gotten worse with the advent of LED headlights.
Not all manufacturers use adaptive headlights, and on some cars it’s only available as an upgrade whereas there’s a lot of people driving base models.
Interesting, I have those on my car and I actively avoid using them.
It can’t cope with anything more than a simple scenario (dim around car in front, deal with on coming car in other lane). If you also have pedestrians and vehicles on side junctions, then you burn their eyes.
So, I’d assumed it was a US feature (straight, wide roads) brought over here
I prefer the tactile controls over the touchscreen. While you’re at it, bring back manual transmissions too!
About. Fucking. Time.
Personally I’m excited for the Hyundai mobi system
