Wipers turn on with Cruise Control, won’t work on auto

[parsec]

a hard pill to swallow when driving the most advanced - in every other respect - car in the world.

I'm trying to think what car you might be referring to. Having designed and built an electric car and a couple electric boats, I can't see much in the Tesla that is particularly advanced. The GM EV1 was considerably more advanced, for its day. Today, The Hyundais and Kias are electrically more advanced, with 800V instead of 400V systems. Mercedes has the first Level 3 automation car, while Tesla struggles with level 2. The tesla ergonomics are even worse than those in my 2014 Chevy Volt. So are you referring to the Toyota Prius Prime? If so, I'd have to agree... it's a pretty slick little car.

 

[jkdman123]

I always try to overstate my positions a bit. Otherwise, they seem kind of dry.

Or excessively clinical, such as "Studies have shown that using a touchscreen is 30% more dangerous than texting while driving. "

Any statement like that is immediately suspect as it doesn't take particular tasks into account and makes a blanket conclusion. Typing an address in the navigation box certainly has the possibility to be worse than texting on a phone. Touching ONE button on the touch screen? No way, no how.

 

[parsec]

I was a pilot for 31 years. 'Multi-tasking', or the appearance thereof, came natural to me as it does most pilots who need to operate the aircraft, look for something on the ground, and talk on the radio simultaneously. And I can confidently tell you that touching ONE button on the touch screen is not more distracting than trying to compose a sentence, and type it into a much smaller touch screen all while trying to maintain situational awareness enough to safely drive.

I have flown a little, and developed a short course called, if I remember, Human Factors in Flight Safety for Fokker. In it, we talked about the research on the "appearance" of multi-tasking, actual multi-tasking not being something that humans do well. I just read the pretty good Wikipedia article on multi-tasking, and the research still seems to indicate that humans don't do it well.

Consider this: even more complicated than just forming a sentence is verbalizing that sentence. But we talk and drive all the time. Also consider the fact that there are no buttons on the touch screen, so "touching ONE button on the touch screen" is an impossibility.

That is, in a nutshell, my gripe with touchscreens as an input device for vehicles. They lack the tactile feedback of buttons and knobs, and one needs to look directly at the screen to attempt to touch a selection. (such as speed 3, instead of speed 2 or 4.) Knobs can easily be found, after a quick familiarization period, by muscle memory, so eyes need not leave the road.

The otherwise simple act of increasing the temperature when a knob is available becomes more complicated and time-consuming... and therefore less safe, because although we are often able to time slice adequately, there are times when we are not. (There are many notorious plane crashes in which the attention of the pilot or copilot becomes focused on one thing, and no time is given to simply flying the airplane -- the everglades landing gear failure comes to mind. ) With a knob, there is no need to look to find the knob -- muscle memory gets you there. There is also far lower need for precision: when your hand finds the knob. it becomes anchored to the knob, rather than moving around with every bump. Most car manufacturers are retreating from touch screens for several good reasons, and are spending extra money for knobs and buttons, to improve safety, because studies have shown that cars with touch screens are more dangerous.

96.4 percent* of all fatal accidents result from the inability of one driver or another to adequately time slice. Speeding is not a root cause of accidents. The root cause is the inability of the speeding driver to process information and react quickly enough to avoid collisions.

My Tesla gives me visual indications every day that it, too, cannot multitask. The objects it "sees" jump around on the screen, because processing time is too slow for the car to accurately locate things in space, given its crippling lack of appropriate hardware. Locating things in space by cameras alone is resource intense and imprecise, because attempting to judge the distance and relative speed of an object of unknown dimension by monitoring changes in the visual angle subtended is inherently imprecise. It is far better, faster and less resource intense to use radar or lidar, but new Teslas have neither, (Imagine how much money airlines could save if planes no longer had radar altimeters but instead were equipped with the optical rangefinders from 1960's rangefinder cameras. (The latter is probably a little more accurate than Tesla's vision system.)

Incidentally, the smaller touchscreen of a phone is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There is no need to look at the screen, because the thumb does the typing with muscle memory. Further, if one needs to actually see the screen, it can easily be positioned at an optimized distance, rather than the fixed distance of the Tesla's touch screen, which for older people (all that I have sampled) find hard to read because of too-small characters, too far away.

Oh, and lest we lead people astray, when operating an airplane during cruise (when you might be looking at a chart) there is almost nothing to do. You fly in straight lines and planes are remarkable stable, requiring very little pilot input even when the autopilot is not engaged.

* I made that up.

 

[jkdman123]

First of all, of course I wasn't talking about a physical button, I was talking about a virtual one. I'll amend my statement to say you only have to touch one small area on the screen to turn on the highest wiper setting. And no modern phone has physical buttons either, so that's a wash as far as feedback goes. I don't know where you get this muscle memory thing for a touch screen. I make many typing mistakes just sitting in a chair and typing a text. You also keep harping on being able to put your phone in your field of vision. That's not really a game changer. You still need to make sure to proof the text as it's typed (and possibly make corrections). This is still highly distracting. Much more so than touching a single area on the Tesla touchscreen.

And I wasn't talking about cruise flight. First of all, I flew many aircraft that had no autopilot and no stabilization, so it was all you, all the time. Also, I did a significant amount of low level flight that required even more spatial awareness as there were many obstacles to hit. And it's still my considered opinion that touching one small area on the screen is not as distracting as trying to type out a full text on your phone.

 

[parsec]

First of all, I flew many aircraft that had no autopilot and no stabilization, so it was all you, all the time.

You have my admiration. I know almost nothing about flying helicopters, but in attempting to fly one in a simulator, found it to be at least twice as difficult as flying an airplane. Fixed wing flying is hours of boredom punctuated by the occasional second of stark terror. Without stabilization, flying a helicopter seems like a constant struggle just to fly straight and level.

Perhaps if I had your skills, I'd be happy with the Tesla's ergonomics. But I am not alone in finding touch screens -- and especially those that are so far out of standard line of sight -- suboptimal for control inputs. The second generation Volt was applauded by many for going back to real knobs and buttons.

Sorry to have drifted away from the original topic.

 

[lumpie]

Then why buy the car?

I didn't know it at the time.