Some people tell us that the products of the car brands we like are not as good as before in recent years, because they have taken the "detour" of intelligence. Even more blunt: Tesla is to blame.
Indeed, in addition to new energy and assisted driving, the biggest shock Tesla has brought to the world is probably the "sense of technology".
Look at that whole screen, and it does pretty much everything you want in a car. Physical keys? Let them all go! The dots can give you, and the touch screen of my Model 3 can give you.
The "sense of technology" did go up, but the most familiar physical buttons on the car also said goodbye.
What is more interesting is that this "de-physical button" cockpit design is being recognized by more and more car companies. In the cockpit of various new cars, watching the familiar physical buttons become less and less, or even disappear, many people think that this marks the arrival of the spring of intelligence.
But let's think about it a bit, is it really good to do this?
GeekCar, as a medium that deeply cultivates the interaction of intelligent car cockpits, we have established our own intelligent cockpit evaluation system. Based on this iterative system, GeekCar conducted a detailed evaluation of the models on the market. In addition to the evaluation results, we have also accumulated some of our own opinions.
Today, I will talk to you about why we feel that in the current scene, it is unreliable to completely remove all the physical buttons in the car.
Why has the touch screen become a fragrant feast?
First of all, it is clear that for today's cars, the in-car interaction based on the touch screen is advantageous, and the addition of product power has come to a new dimension. This is also why today, when the industry is generally inward-looking, car companies are so eager to put one, two or even four or five screens into the car.
The first point is the amount of information carried. We are now very accustomed to interacting with digital interfaces, including but not limited to mobile phones, tablets, computers, and even electronic information screens in commercial places and self-service ordering screens in fast food restaurants. With more and more technology decentralization and large-scale mass production, assisted driving, real-time navigation, cockpit entertainment and other functions have been put on the car. We can't cram the physical buttons for every function into the square inches of a car's interior, accommodating hundreds of buttons, levers, scales, and gauges like the cockpit of an airplane. The amount of information that the network digital interface can carry is far from being comparable to the physical buttons that have been set up.
Photographer: Leonel Fernandez
The second point is the improvement of the sense of science and technology. The word "sense of technology" is a bit vain to say, and it is a matter of opinion to put it on the product, but I understand it. Who doesn't have a few tablets, smartwatches or TWS headphones aside from mobile phones? The rapid iteration of digital products is not a trap of consumerism, but a boost brought by technological upgrading to products. According to the IDC think tank, smartphones were rapidly increased from 2006 to 2014, and global sales increased rapidly from 82 million units to 1.301 billion units. In the years when consumers' acceptance of smart products increased rapidly, their willingness to consume intelligent products continued to increase. Just as electronic tickets in smartphones and wearables have largely replaced paper tickets for public transportation in just a few years, digital devices can achieve more and more things, and we can no longer continue to look at the new attributes of devices with old eyes.
Third, the role of car screens is no longer what it used to be. Here we are not talking about the variety of styling designs, or the difference between the LCD, Mini-LED and OLED experience, but the role of the screen. Car screens aren't something new in a few years.
The 1979 Aston Martin Lagonda Series 2 featured three LCD displays to display dashboard information, making it the first model to simulate real-world rpm, speed and vehicle information.
Image credit: Classiccars
The 1987 Toyota Crown, a Japanese-only luxury sedan, features the Royal Saloon edition (trench version) code-named MS137 with a CD-Based navigation system that also provides a color display. The system relies on dead reckoning for navigation and positioning. Although the accuracy of today's navigation and positioning system is really worrying, it was already a product of black technology in that era.
Toyota's CD-ROM navigation system
Image source: ndrive.com
Looking at it today, behind the hardware innovation, the power of software that cannot be ignored continues to promote. The underlying hardware determines the lower limit of the experience, and the system and software determine the upper limit of the experience.
Fourth, the scalability is high. For most of its time since its birth, the car has only been used as a tool to assume displacement attributes, with a single function and limited scenes. Like I said earlier, safety is at the heart of driving. The driver's attention needs to be focused on driving behavior. In the past ten years, on the one hand, we have seen the continuous extension of the entertainment function of the car itself, navigation, music, audio content, and video have not satisfied the appetite of car companies. On the other hand, more and more ecosystems, application markets and even games have begun to be put on the car. Over there Musk talked about getting the Steam platform and various AAA game masterpieces to his own Tesla, and here GAC played the king of fighters on the wireless controller of its own Aeon series.
Image source: GAC Aean public number
Fifth, the change in user engagement with the vehicle. With the improvement of vehicle intelligence, users are not only concerned about car safety, handling performance and comfort. The on-board screen can more efficiently transmit vehicle and road information to the cockpit in real time, enabling the driver to quickly make rational decisions and reactions. The vehicle status and settings are framed through the digital interface, and the vehicle settings that users can participate in are more and more detailed. These are incomparable to the era when only mechanical instruments and buttons were controlled in the car.
In this way, the cars on the original road are islands of information. Even the common combination of mobile phone + car mount only realizes the connection between people and the network in the driving state, and we can't seem to expect more in addition to navigation, playback and telephone.
Of course, playing an AR live-action game like Pokémon GO is even worse
After all, safety is still the most core element, the basis of all behaviors in the driving state, and the interface of the mobile phone system and application is not designed and optimized for use while driving. So it's not practical to keep your phone as often in mind — at least not until autonomous driving at L4 or above is achieved.
After the Network, there is more information flow between vehicles and people. The most fundamental difference between the screen and the physical button is that the car screen acts as both an information output device and an information input interface.
Therefore, our conclusion at this stage is that the on-board screen is the inevitable development of automobile intelligence.
However, having said so much before, the physical buttons in the car have really completed its historical mission and are destined to be completely replaced by touch screens? Our conclusion is that not at this time.
There is a point that needs to be made clear to everyone: many people say that smart cars are not just an iPad in the cockpit of a car.
Such a statement is irresponsible. The interaction scenarios of in-car interaction and digital products are completely different. As we said earlier, safety and efficiency remain at the core of in-vehicle interaction until L4 level autonomous driving is fully realized.
If you stare at the car screen for a long time while driving and interact endlessly, what is the essential difference between this and the driving mobile phone that is explicitly prohibited in the Road Traffic Safety Law?
Objective conditions are different The picture is only indicative
Image source: tekportal.net
Simply and crudely calculated, a vehicle traveling at a uniform speed of 80 km/h travels a distance of about 22 meters per second. The car operates at this speed with a mechanical braking distance of nearly 30 meters. The complete braking process includes: hazards arise - hazards are discovered – decision to brake – operating the brakes (brakes) – brakes begin to function – the vehicle stops. The first four steps of the process, leaving the human driver with a reaction time of only a few tenths of a second, any shift in attention can lead to an accident.
In this way, it is not only the deadline at work that ends life, but also the momentary distraction during frequent interactions.
Since the screen has so many advantages,
Why do we still need physical keys?
In the current national standard "Technical Conditions for the Safety of Motor Vehicle Operation" (GB 7258-2017), there is no clear provision on which buttons must exist in the cockpit of the car. We believe that at the moment, some of the physical buttons in the car still need to be retained.
The first thing that comes to mind is the buttons that are used frequently in the car. In fact, the concept of "high frequency" not only corresponds to the high frequency of use, but also puts forward very high requirements for accurate operation, such as the most commonly used categories of volume adjustment, air conditioning, and ADAS.
Since it is repeatedly emphasized that security comes first in interactive scenarios, how can distraction be measured? We think it is a visual behavior performance represented by line of sight shift. In a broad sense, the longer the line of sight offset time during operation, the lower the safety factor.
Let's go back to a typical buttonless scene and look at the effect.
At GeekCar's Smart Cockpit Intelligence Bureau and Your Smart Cockpit Works? In the two columns, we have all done a review of the ideal ONE of "Daddy God Car" and accumulated a considerable degree of understanding.
The ideal ONE cockpit has a total of 4 screens: instrument panel, multimedia screen, co-driver entertainment screen, car control screen. The interaction modes that drivers use when driving are: voice interaction, screen touch, and multi-function button interaction on the steering wheel.
In the HMI experience measurement for testing human-machine interaction, we noticed the feature of the ideal ONE vehicle system: blind exercise to adjust the air conditioning temperature and air volume. The specific realization method is: in the middle area of the car control screen, you can adjust the air conditioning temperature; left and right sliding corresponds to adjust the air conditioning air volume.
When we set the task "Adjust the air conditioning temperature to 23 degrees with the central control", we calibrated several special positions in the cockpit and measured three indicators with an eye tracker: 6.24 seconds to complete the task, 4.21 seconds in total scanning time, and 1.95 seconds in a single scan.
Bring the time of the three indicators into the fitting curve: get the score of each indicator: task completion efficiency 73.60 points (better than 73.6% of the tasks on the market), 63.02 points of single scan time of the car (better than 63.02% of the tasks on the market), and 64.94 points of total scanning time (better than 64.94% of the tasks on the market).
The final score for the task of "adjusting the temperature of the air conditioner" was 66.48 points, and the test result was cautious operation.
Although the ideal ONE is equipped with a blind exercise function to adjust the temperature of the air conditioner, from the process and results of the test, it seems that if you want to accurately adjust the temperature and air volume of the air conditioner, the blind exercise is almost meaningless. There are a few problems with this:
Problem one, you need to scan the car control screen without button area. The layout of the screen is a type of back, and the screen is swiped in the functional icon area around the screen, and the air conditioner cannot be adjusted. This leads to the user wanting to use blind exercises, they need to look down at the car control screen and confirm that they have found a button-free area before adjusting the temperature.
Problem two, it is difficult to adjust precisely. When the user performs the longitudinal sliding operation, the value of the air conditioner is also "silky" changes, it is difficult to accurately adjust to the desired temperature value, it is easy to adjust too large or too small, and it needs to slide back and forth to correct, resulting in the user's gaze to gaze at the instrument within a certain period of time. If you add sound, vibration feedback to the blind exercise gesture, or display the temperature in front of the windshield with the AR-HUD, perhaps the user can adjust the temperature precisely without looking at the meter.
Let's look at another typical problem.
In the HMI experience measurement test of the Xiaopeng P7, we noticed that the button for the quick adjustment of the air conditioner was placed in the middle of the sidebar, which was intuitive and the design was clearly biased towards the driver. However, the icons in the sidebar are generally small, the arrangement status is numerous and dense, and there is no obvious distinction between them, which obviously affects the convenience of operation. If you catch a bumpy road, then you may have to aim well by accurately touching the icon with your finger.
Xiaopeng P7 central control screen
Note that this is not an isolated case. Such problems are also common on some center-control screens, such as 8- to 9-inch cars.
When we compared the results of multiple new forces with models from traditional car companies based on the same set of mission systems, the results were surprising.
In the face of the common operation of adjusting the air conditioning air volume and temperature, the vehicles that can achieve the demand with the lowest attention expenditure are those models that retain the shortcut physical buttons.
For non-high-frequency but important functions such as unlocking the trunk and switching vehicle driving modes, we believe that relying on physical buttons to achieve the way is better than operating the vehicle interface.
The reason is simple, well-designed physical button feedback is the guarantee of the operation feel. In terms of meeting the needs of the touch, delay, pressure and other hand feelings, the virtual button has no advantage at all. Analogously, many console and computer gamers will satirize the behavior of mobile gamers holding their phones to play games as "rubbing glass".
On the other hand, not all users choose to compromise when faced with the poor feel of the virtual buttons.
In Japan, some users installed third-party buttons launched by peripheral manufacturers to enhance the feel of mobile phones/tablet games on tesla's central control screen, which perfectly solved this problem. After all, with a real sense of touch as feedback, it is closer to the way we are familiar with the operation.
When it comes to the biggest benefit of physical buttons, in addition to the slightly personal preference and obsessive-compulsive needs of hand feel, it is probably the devisive operation after the formation of muscle memory.
See watermark for image source
Huawei has tried to replace high-frequency buttons with virtual buttons on its own mobile phones.
Huawei's Mate 30 Pro mobile phone, launched in September 2019, has a staggering 88° curvature on the side screen of the "hyper-curved OLED ring screen", but there is no common volume +/- button on the left side of the fuselage. Instead, quickly double-tap the screen side border in the upper middle position on the left and right sides of the screen to call out the quick action of the volume control.
This operation mainly relies on the finger to press and hold the screen border up and down to achieve volume adjustment. As the virtual slider moves up and down, there is also a noticeable vibration nearby to enhance the feel of the operation.
Volume operation of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro
Image credit: sea.mashable
In the year of normal use of this phone, I can clearly feel that the design is very responsive, the delay is negligible, the efficiency is not low, and it is fully capable of the needs of daily operations - except for occasions that require fast mute, it will still be a little awkward.
I still have to say that relying on traditional physical buttons to achieve volume control is more in line with habit and intuition than this kind of novel design. For example, when we need to confirm that the phone remains silent in some cases, we just need to rely on memory to "grope" until the volume key is pressed all the time, without pulling out the phone and occupying vision and attention to complete the operation.
Back to the point.
In fact, it can be seen from the trend of in-car interaction that the interaction designers of car companies have made a lot of explorations in order not to rely on physical buttons to achieve blind exercises of commonly used functions. But we should also admit that before the new and more stable and reliable interaction method is landed, the status of physical button interaction in the car, especially when it comes to driving safety, is still irreplaceable.
The revolution has not yet succeeded
The industry is still struggling
Of course, as we said at the very beginning, fewer and fewer physical buttons in the car are becoming a trend. While car companies are busy "killing" the physical buttons, they have not forgotten to let the interaction evolve in a better direction.
For example, Niuchuang's self-touring NV model has six linear micro-motor motors installed under its own 15.6-inch central suspension screen. When the user operates, the micro motor on the screen transmits haptic feedback to the user through various ways of vibration.
Niu Chuang NIUTRON Free Home NV
Image source: NIUTRON official website
In last year's "Intelligent Cockpit Intelligence Bureau" column, the 2021 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan also appeared tactile feedback design. When the user operates the portrait 12.8-inch OLED screen, the screen gives just the right vibration feedback.
For the first two months, the ideal L9, which had satisfied the industry's appetite with several picture spoilers in a row, also announced the existence of 3D TOF (Time of Flight) sensors in the cockpit at the first spoiler. This means that in the ideal L9 real-world car scene, gesture recognition and somatosensory interaction may also be included. As for whether the suppliers behind them are Tier 1 such as Continental, Visteon and Delphi, or domestic start-ups with great potential such as Polar Fish Technology and Untouched Technology, they still retain a considerable degree of mystery.
The industry's exploration of interaction has never stopped, how can we deny the possibility based on individual stereotypes alone?
Finally, let's return to the original point of this discussion: since "making screen interaction as easy to use as the physical buttons" is so difficult to achieve at this stage, why do car companies still want to completely "kill" the physical buttons?