393
European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls
(arstechnica.com)
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
There are lots of functions that can benefit, just not ones you want to do while in motion.
I like touchscreen - I just don't like it at the expense of losing physical controls for the things that matter.
The first three are covered under "GPS or music."
I concede your point on the fourth and fifth. I did consider mentioning that sort of thing, but I was thinking more of reading trouble codes without needing to plug a computer into the OBD2 port as a convenience and figured it was too niche.
As for the sixth, I'd suggest that a clock nowadays ought to set itself via GPS, NTP, or radio signal; kmh/mph should be a non-issue because the speedometer should be analog and have tick marks for both, I'm not sure lane keep warnings need to be configurable, etc.
Of course lane keep warnings need to be configurable. Personally, I disable most of them in any vehicle I drive.
They give me notification fatigue and pull my attention more often to misinterpreted information than to an an issue that requires my attention. For instance, in construction zones where lines shift or there is a hazard on the shoulder so I hug the center line more. Or even worse, just because the computer lost track of the lanes for a bit.
Of modern driver aids, the only one I am a big fan of (when done well) is adaptive cruise control. The Subarus I've driven have been smooth in handling cars pulling in front of my when on cruise, but the last Honda I drove was very harsh in using regenerative braking.
I'm the kind of guy that doesn't want so much as an automatic transmission, let alone any fancy electronic nannies, but I admit I'd love to have adaptive cruise control too.