It's even more in regards to production planning. Building the production pipeline takes long and is inflexible as you need to ensure to pick suppliers which will provide spare parts for a sensible price for the whole lifecycle. Thus you limit capabilities very early in the design cycle.

A software based solution you can finalize last minute and with later updates add extra features. Thus if a competitor provides a feature you don't have to wait years for the next new design, but can deliver based on software development priorities any time, to any series you like (even add after delivery)

Might sound hyperbolic but this is clearly the softly smiling fascist menace of the corporate regime.

A gentle friendly assumption that we are all eager to partake in “euphemism for platform-serfdom”. Our desire to “connect/share/express/etc” is simply taken for granted.

And what if you just don’t want to? We’re sorry, but that’s simply not an option.

People look at me like I've suddenly sprouted an extra head when I say this, but I don't want any screens in my car at all.

I don't even really want much of an instrument panel, because that's all distracting clutter and noise. I'm now of an age where I need reading glasses to see what the tiny 20x2 LCD screen it does have is saying, if it's not telling me what gear it's in and what the current odometer reading is - mostly today it's been lying about the gearbox overheating or the bonnet being open, such are the ways of 1990s cars - and if I've got my reading glasses on to see things inside the car clearly it means I cannot see things *outside* the car clearly, and the things outside the car are what I need to pay attention to.

So, no LCDs, please, I don't want any lit-up screens when I'm driving.

My car has a mechanical ignition switch that, when you put a key in and turn it, withdraws a big metal pin to unlock the steering and turns a small rotary switch. First click for the radio and other accessories, second click turns on the ignition, and the spring-loaded third click cranks over a beautifully simple engine that started life as a Mercury Marine inboard (and auxiliary engine, in larger vessels), and is still pretty much in production today in small quantities. Simple, and I like simple. No "keyless ignition" for crooks to relay and get the car started and drive off in it.

Nothing needs to connect to the outside world in it, and indeed its Atari ST-era computers would probably be baffled by it. It'd be like plonking a steam train engineer down in the cockpit of an A380, they wouldn't have a clue where to start.

I don't want a connected thing. I love driving. I don't want distractions. I write all my best code when I'm driving because there's no distractions. No-one is phoning me, I'm not doomscrolling Reddit or HN, there's no expectation except keep it oily side down and on the grey gravelly stuff, and out of the grassy stuff (well - at least until I get to the grassy stuff I actually *need* to drive on).

No screens for me please.

Likely.

What does this sentence even mean? "if you want to connect, you have to make the magic work behind the screen". It crashes my parser. Good thing I am not reading hacker news while driving :-)

That’s all about money… they don’t want Apple to sell services to their customers when they believe it’s “their” territory.

Carmakers want SaaS revenue as well now.

They just want to sell their navi map updates like they used to before CarPlay was a thing.

> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance.

Somehow a small amber light (in the shape of a fuel pump) and a chime has worked for decades and there haven't been hordes of drivers stranded as a result. Something your grandmother could easily understand.

10-15 year old cars maybe give an additional small information message in the cluster easily dismissible with a steering wheel button.

No, the problem has been the mass importation of tech industry rejects into the car companies, as if the car companies haven't been quietly and successfully writing embedded software for 50 years, who brought their terrible habits with them. Like a need to "reinvent" UIs every six months.

Cars are safety-critical machines. They are not a place for "creatives" to experiment with UI design.

Sadly marketing drones think everybody wants a Tesla-style "everything is a screen" design whereas a 1999 Toyota pretty much had it right.

This isn't difficult. It requires no "innovation". Analog tach and speedo with idiot lights for critical alerts (there is literally an ISO standard for this) should be mandated by law. Substitute tach for a battery monitor in an EV.

EVs are the worst of both extremes. Either the entire interior is a touchscreen or you have something like the Slate, where there isn't even a radio. A room full of geniuses and what they come up with is a bluetooth speaker holder. Unbelievable, you can't throw in a DIN radio like a 1987 Datsun? Why can't EV manufacturers build a "normal" car?

> a little clumsily

s/a little/very/;

> What do you think the best implementation would look like?

We already had one! Dashboard indicator lamps have been an international standard (ISO 2575) since 1982.

> But it's also dangerous for a driver to run out of fuel on the highway if we didn't catch their attention.

Yes, it is. But the key word is "if". The product folks involved in making these UI/UX decisions were more concerned with whether or not they could (read: "chimp attract" for "feature parity" to "drive sales") than with whether or not they should (read: "should we be manufacturing two ton death machines that act like nannies?"). Where is the research that provides the answers to the questions "how likely is it that the driver isn't aware of how much fuel is in the vehicle?", "are our customers really as stupid as we think they are?", or even "what's the downside of training our customers to accept a more mindless state of existence while piloting giant metallic flesh-tearing bone crushers packed full of explosive hydrocarbons and squishy humans?"

> The general public though… uh oh!

You can come down from your ivory tower at any time. We have tacos down here and we all enjoy them.

To quote the late, great Lou Holtz, "they put their pants on the same way we do". I don't think there's ever been a time in all of my years on this planet that I've gotten into a car to go on a highway journey of any length and not looked at the fuel gauge. Oftentimes, my passenger will even ask me how much gas is in the tank. Glancing at the fuel gauge should be the first thing that any motor vehicle operator looks at when climbing into the captain's chair. Maybe I'm at that stage of life where I'm no longer capable of comprehending the manner in which the younger generations experience the world, but getting into an automobile and driving off without knowing how much fuel you have is like walking out the front door without confirming that your shoe laces are tied.

This constant othering of "the general public" without any research to back it up really grinds my gears, to use a contextually appropriate idiom. Please stop.

> What do you think the best implementation would look like? Seems it would still have to strike a balance

Others have explained how the old tech worked well. But let's assume new tech (touch screens), and see what can be done.

There are urgent messages and non urgent messages.

Non urgent messages can be shown when starting the car and requiring the driver to acknowledge them. low wiper fluid - non urgent. This could be a list requiring ack for everything. Recently on my BMW they got the smog check year wrong, and it kept warning me for months before I realized I could change the date for the alerts - same should be possible for low fluid - Ok, I acknowledge, but stop warning for next 14 days (or 2 months).

Urgent messages have to be blocking.

Low gas would be non urgent when you have 50 miles of gas left, but could become semi-urgent (more prominent) when you have less than 50. Also, this is where the tech could be useful. If the car has internet and knows there are no gas stations within 50 miles, or whatever the current range is .... it should make it super prominent. That knowledge processing, aka AI in modern era, would be so awesome.

But it requires design for usability, not one catch all solution.

My car has only a small dashboard screen with some information and when something is alarming it is colored yellow or red for significance and pops up filling the screen, then after a little while minimizes to a little warning icon corresponding to the issue matching the color. Or I can hit a close button on the steering wheel.

I have never been especially bothered by fact that warning for low wiper fluid was well getting somewhat less wiper fluid... I don't use much, but it never felt like critical lack of proper early warning.

Distinguish between what used to be red and amber lights.

For years, vehicles have had a little light that comes on when you are below about 50 miles of range. It's next to the fuel gauge. I've always heard it called the "walk light", which I presume is a reference to the fact that, if you don't do something, you may have to start walking soon.

My car has a little screen in the dash where it usually shows my range, or the current temperature - information that I check when safe to do so, but never very urgently. This is the perfect place for a warning about low wiper fluid.

As for forward collision warnings, ehhhh. Maybe that should beep loudly, but it should almost never be wrong! (A false alarm could easily mean I slam on the brakes and get rear-ended, so that has to be balanced with the safety advantage of the true alarm.)

Glad I asked, y’all are great, thanks

Those warnings just don’t need to exist. I have a car from 2002, it has none of those and it’s fine, totally fine.

There is a fuel gauge I look at to see my fuel level, when I’m out of wiper fluid it just doesn’t work (I have extra in my trunk so no big deal). I don’t need a noise to tell me there is a car in front of me, I’ve been driving this car every day for 15 years with no accidents so obviously a collision alarm is not required for safe driving.

How about we stop infantilizing people and expect some base level of competence.

Yes, you are right. All my power tools (from Makita, Milwuakee, Festool) have absolutely phenomenal UI - so there are still corners of industrial design where the dark patterns/attention grabbing product people haven't ventured. They should be brought back to car companies.

Start suing car manufacturers for the deaths caused when the driver's eyeballs were distracted from the road.

Call me old school, but I'd like a physical master switch to disable all of the systems you mentioned. I drive a lot, and often in rented cars, and in various countries.

- automatic braking - i brake gently and then do a limousine stop. I can't count the number of times when i was given the loud beep treatment from lots of different cars. I never rear ended anyone in about 1.2m kms driven.

- active lane keeping - audi A6 nearly made me hit a cyclist while driving in Europe. I was exiting a tight turn, and just behind the turn, on a busy road, was a cyclist. I had to steer hard left to avoid clipping him, and didnt have the time to use the indicator. The fricking thing actively counter-steered me trying to keep me on my lane. Incidentally no automatic braking at the same time. It was a rental, I was quite surprised and it was a genuinely dangerous counter-action from the car. No thanks.

- smart cruise control. Nice when it works. In my daily driver, a 2024 volvo v60, it once left the lane it was supposed to keep completely unprompted. Good thing I was holding the steering wheel firmly. No thanks.

- lane change alerts - nice when done right. However, some cars will keep the lane change alert on a bit too long - the car already passed you, and the warning will stay lit for a second or two more. Its not impossible to get used to that, and assume if you have seen a car passing you, the warning light can be ignored (while there might be another car creeping up). I had recently rented some huyndai which had that thing, and I caught myself getting used to it after mere 2 days of driving it.

- rest breaks - i think i had this on a rental huyndai. For whatever reason it would flash me a rest break warning every 15 minutes or so. No clue why, I wasnt driving for more than 1hr, and was completely rested. It was distracting me with that stuff for most of the journey. No thanks.

I genuinely like ABS, ESP and thats about it. Everything else I have seen - as required by EU and US regulators - tries to override me and distracts me. As I am getting older, I am less and less tolerant of distractions.

When the car actually drives itself completely, I think they will be safer than human drivers.

All of these half measures are pretty concerning to me. I think they let drivers feel more comfortable, despite paying less attention, and I think their failure modes may often be much worse than the (human-driven) crashes they purport to prevent.

Anecdote: I once had a rental car with alane-keeping assistance system that would nudge the wheel slightly. On the interstate, upon cresting a hill, I saw that there was a vehicle stopped in the shoulder, and I was concerned someone might step out into the travel lane. I already knew that there were no vehicles behind me in either lane, so I steered gently into the passing lane to give ample space to anybody who might step into the road.

However, in my haste, I had not used the blinker, so the lane-keeping system intervened. Imagine my surprise when the car decided to nudge me back towards exactly the dangerous situation I had been avoiding!

Luckily, nobody stepped out into the road. But if they had, this lane-keeping system could have killed them.

In comparison, even if the left lane hadn't been clear, the hypothetical accident there would have been a comparatively minor fender bender.

Resume Driven Development is why fundamentally people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are crucial to ensuring the enshitification is kept in check.

Elon Musk may be a bad example in this situation, because he's actually a fan of removing the extra controls and the physical buttons, but at least their UX is far-far better than any of the legacy manufacturers.

The solution is A/B testing and then looking at the resulting crash statistics. Weekly reports produced by the connected BI system should use excrutiatingly precise language like "number of {people,children,dogs,expectant mothers} {killed,saved} under <PO>'s <new idea>". A real Trolley Web Problem 2.0. /s

Yeah, my volvo also wants me to do questionnaires when driving. Insane.

When I am buying a new car, I now always try to rent one, and specifically the current model year, for a few days and do various types of driving. My V60 used to spend some time in the garage and I got various new models as replacements. The new one, for instance, has a choice of two behaviours when it thinks you are above the speed limit:

- beeping - or, in order to speed above what it thinks is the limit one needs to release the throttle and press it again

The main problem of course is that its very often mistaken about the speed limit.

Another problem. The thing recently got a new major version of the infotainment system. On my 2 year old V60 it is now noticeably more laggy, for instance when bringing up the AC panel its at least 1.5 seconds before it comes up. Now what is more likely - that I will press the button and regain focus on the road, or that I will press the button, and be distracted for a second or two longer?

> How does that even make sense from a cost POV? They put in unnecessary servo motors for that? What made them think consumers wanted this?

China. That's the elephant in the room.

Cars aren't designed for the Western markets any more. We tried that and lost marketshare against the Chinese on their domestic market (the only one in the world that still has growth potential), and the primary reason market research determined was that Chinese manufacturers cram their cars full of gimmicks.

So, we design our cars for Chinese bling-bling demands now because it's too uneconomical to have distinct supply chains and we get all the BS that you can't sell a car in China without.

"So, that's attractive as a slogan but it's 100% incorrect in practice. Non-road UI features like backup cameras and blind spot warning alarms save lives. Period."

The "on the road" extends to mirrors (or screens that have replaced it) - I assumed that was obvious.

> you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.

the_homer.jpg

> Engineers should be delegated to the worker-bee level and you should just get some gear heads and some soccer moms to design to UI.

This, but unironically.

Have you tried that, or is it just a random thought?

The answer to "some drivers are bad, and look at their phones while driving" is not "let's give them a different screen to look at". It is to take away the driver's licenses of people who are stupid enough to look at phones while driving.