Total Pageviews

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Touch Screens in cars

Touch Screens in cars are a really, really bad idea.  Look at all the kerfuffle world wide about using a cell phone in a car.  At least with a cell phone, you're likely to be holding it up by the steering wheel as you dial or touch the green icon to answer the phone.  Or, shudder, you type in some destination into the navigator.  Some part of your vision still records what is going on on the road.  With a touch screen you have to take your eyes right off the road to operate them and it is not a one touch operation.  You have to do multiple touches to get to the application you want to use.
 Image result for image touch screen in car

Remember those old car radios.  There was a nob on one side to turn it on and off and to increase or decrease the volume.  There was another nob on the other side to tune in the stations.  Then between the two nobs were five or six pull-out, push-in buttons.  You pulled one out, tuned the radio and then pushed it back in again.  From then on if you wanted that station you just pushed that button.  Ditto with the rest of the pull-out buttons.  You had five or six different stations all at your finger tips, all without taking your eyes off the road.
 Image result for image old car radios

Or come forward a little to a more modern radio.  Up at one corner is a toggle switch which you can feel.  Once more no need to take your eyes off the road.  Push it quickly and the radio tunes up or down  depending on which side of the button you pushed.  Hold it down for 2 seconds until you hear a beep and it will run up or down the radio spectrum until it finds the next channel.  On the other side is a second tactile toggle button.  Push one side and the volume goes up, the other side and the volume goes down.  In all of this no need to take your eyes off the road.

A more luxurious system has all the tactile buttons on the steering wheel.

If we are all up tight about cell phones, how much more dangerous are touch screens.

And don't get me started on autonomous cars.  Besides the fact that I really like driving, they seem to me to be a bad idea.

Have you ever heard of a soft-ware program that couldn't be hacked.  Recently we have had the UK health system computers hacked and bank after bank.  If anyone should have state of the art protection surly it is these institutions.  Just imagine what happens when some warped 14 year old genius in his mom's basement manages to hack into the system and shut down one of the functions.  Whole cities come to a stand still.  And this could happen even if only a small percent of the cars are autonomous.

Worse still, have you being paying attention to the revelations of Snowdon and Manning.  The secret services have little or no inhibitions against causing collateral damage (killing innocent bystanders) and being human they also make mistakes.  Imagine they have decided that a certain car is carrying a terrorist they want to eliminate.  They send the car into a tree or over a cliff at high speed.  Or they targeted your car by mistake or perhaps they send the car into oncoming traffic and you just happen to be on the other side of the road.

In addition, with your car continually connected to the internet of things (G5), they always know where you are and what you are doing.  And don't give me that old saw that if you are not doing anything wrong you have no problems.  That is such a  discredited a argument that it doesn't deserve another paragraph. This really is a Big Brother scenario.

Have you ever heard of a computer program that didn't need patches and upgrades to fix glitches that the programmers didn't anticipate.  In the first death in a self driving car, the computer didn't recognize a truck coming from the side and thought it was a road sign.  We don't need programmers experimenting with our lives as we travel down the road at highway speeds.

What do I want in a car.  I want all the great engineering that is coming out in Electric cars but none of the bells and whistles.  And I want the lower price that comes with this.  I want any controls to be tactile, not touch screen.  And I want the pleasure of driving my own car.  This isn't for everyone but I bet there is a huge market out there for such a car. If I need navigation, I'll velcro my phone on to the dash board.

If you want to wow me, make all surfaces of the car generate electricity when they are in the sun.  No, I don't expect to be able to drive just on the power the skin of my car generates but it will be a nice little bonus and might get me home. when  I have forgotten to charge up when I should have.  Some years ago a home made electric car visited us here in New Zealand.  He pulled a trailer and the top of the trailer was covered with solar panels.  He said he could carry on driving at 20k/hr if it was a sunny day but his batteries were flat.

No comments: