More on The Poor State of Automobile Cockpit Interfaces
A while back I wrote that automobile dashboard design in modern cars sucks. I drive many different cars as I am frequently renting cars on the road and I concluded:
If car designers are getting rid of physical buttons in favor of multilayered menu systems because it saves them a bunch of money, fine. Bad trade-off in my mind, but there is at least a reason. But if they are getting rid of physical buttons because they think that modern users prefer navigating multiple screens to access commonly used functionality, this is simply insane. No one can top me for pure technophilia, but technical wizardry should not come at the expense of reduced usability.
No one listens to me but they do listen to Consumer Reports, and that magazine dinged the new Tesla Model 3's for exactly this problem:
"Another major factor that compromised the Model 3’s road-test score was its controls. This car places almost all its controls and displays on a center touch screen, with no gauges on the dash, and few buttons inside the car. This layout forces drivers to take multiple steps to accomplish simple tasks. Our testers found that everything from adjusting the mirrors to changing the direction of the airflow from the air-conditioning vents required using the touch screen."
Postscript: This is not really the point of this post, but how is this even possible in a small car like the Model 3?
"The Tesla’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup," reads the review based on tests on different Model 3s.
The problem is almost certainly in the control algorithm that apportions the "KERS" system vs the friction brakes.
Without even looking at the model 3, I'm sure it has friction brakes that can lock the wheels, which means it's theoretically capable of a single minimum-distance stop that is limited only by the vehicle weight and the tires. That minimum distance should be within the ballpark of its competitors and nowhere near as bad as a full-size pickup.
But for EVs regenerative braking is important for battery life, so the engineers will attempt to use regen for as much braking as possible. But the system has limits about how much power it can handle, effectively limiting braking force it can apply. Thus the friction brakes are a needed complement. The car must therefore translate braking force requested via the brake pedal into a decision about how much regen to do and how much friction braking to do. If you're too aggressive in applying the friction brakes, your battery life suffers; if you're too lax, braking distance suffers. We clearly see how Tesla's engineers made this tradeoff in the lousy braking times.