Posted by citelao 3 hours ago
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
Not quite true because automakers can satisfy the rear-view camera requirement with very cheap screens, e.g. integrated into the rear view mirror.
It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have fixed purpose, they don't change depending on whatever mode something is.
It is an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible purposes.
I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.
Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.
1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be
2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons
Resulting in two problems:
1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks
2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related
It seems to me that many of the problems that people report related to touch controls are more to do with how they are laid out than the fact that they are touch controls.
Floating screens make this harder, especially as they get larger and further from the driver
Tesla has also been guilty of some particularly awful designs on later models, like requiring the driver to navigate to a submenu to turn on the wipers (which I know they changed in an update, but still should have never done to begin with)
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
