alt Hacker NewsBe careful what you wish for everyone. My Toyota Wish (no pun intended) has an absolute cluster of a button cluster (pun intended) for air controls. To change where the air comes out, you have to repeatedly push the same button and watch the LCD to see what you get. There's a button for windscreen defogging but it ramps up the fan slowly over about 10s or so so you end up trying to set it manually instead which means the same repeat pressing and watching the LCD. If the fan is off but warm air is wafting in the vents, you have to press "auto", turn the temperature knob down to minimum, then press "off". Nearly every action requires looking for visual feedback on the stupid LCD screen.
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IMO the real sin there is the defogging, because that can arise when the driver needs immediate results and is already distracted by difficulty seeing or bad weather conditions. I'd prefer it be part of a row of "panic buttons" along with the hazard-lights and "all wipers to max."
In contrast, stuff like "airflow toward torso" versus "airflow towards feed" or "both" is stuff where you can either wait to feel it or else glance at the settings during a safer moment. This assumes, of course, they don't do something stupid like have the "current setting" vanish from the screen on a short timer...
We wish for hardware intefaces. Not screen/hardware interfaces.
The Wish more likely suffers from being a car where they shoehorned in a screen to seem more advanced for the time, while keeping the physical controls.
Nowadays screens are being used as a cost cutting measure. It stands to reason that if an automaker reintroduces more costly physical controls it’s going to be to address the issue of cumbersome controls. Hopefully, anyway.
My 2012 Honda (which is quite old by some measures) is somewhat similar.
It's got buttons. Lots of buttons. It has no touch screen(s).
Some of the buttons include: Multi-tap button to change HVAC vent configuration manually. Dedicated, separate buttons for front and rear defrost (with an LED on the button for each).
And the PWM control for the fan loves slow ramping, apparently as a design intent, which is dumb: It could provide immediate audible feedback to input but instead tends to just loaf around in response to user inputs.
But! It has an automatic mode that really does work pretty well almost always, maintaining comfort for different zones based on a temperature setting for each. So usually, I don't mess with it at all. When that doesn't work optimally (too hot? too cold?), the temperature is adjusted by knobs.
And it also accepts voice commands. Which sounds silly, and perhaps is silly, and I certainly do feel silly using that.
But when the front window starts fogging a bit on the inside on a cold night, I can tap the voice command button on the steering wheel (which is easy to find by feel) and say a command like "Climate control defrost and floor" and it switches to that mode.
I very seldom look at the stupid LCD screen, with its small and nearly-inscrutable blue-backlit hieroglyphs. I change modes with my voice, and I give the temperature knob a twist using muscle memory (though I could use voice commands for that, instead).
It's still perhaps not ideal (and I do have ideas for hacking on the CAN-B network for some hands-off automations to make it work better with even less user input), but it's pretty good.
And if Honda could use voice commands starting ~15 years ago, then any automaker should be able to do so today. The physical parts (the microphone, the CPU grunt, the CAN controls) are broadly already in-place; the rest is just software that can be copied infinitely as new cars roll off the line.