Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface

People are using these gimmicky car displays on the tiny instrument cluster for changing lanes? I sure as fuck hope not. That just seems like extra data from their vision systems, which is also why cars randomly disappear in it or swerve wildly.<p>No, the Tesla implementation of this is lazy. Every other car with lane assist has a warning light in the corresponding side view mirror. This forces the user to look into the mirror, which also means a failure of the system to detect an obstacle is not a big deal.

I only skimmed the article, and I&#x27;ve only driven a Tesla (Model S) for a day, so my review&#x2F;comments might be incomplete, but <i>I almost completely disagree with this article</i>.<p>1. I love the size and quality of the touch screen. Nothing in other cars compares. Usually screens are small, low resolution, require forceful touch or aren&#x27;t touch. (Recent issues with screens failing in heat are a big minus, but I&#x27;m sure technology will improve soon.)<p>2. I barely use any of the &quot;buttons&quot; (or other controls) while driving. I almost always use the same temperature, and usually set it when I get in. Same with navigation destination. <i>Edit:</i> In any case, I think the big safety risk is using central controls <i>at all</i>, regardless whether they&#x27;re touch-screen or physical buttons.<p>3. Most controls that you use while driving should be placed on the steering wheel - things like music&#x2F;radio and cruise control. I don&#x27;t recall how it was in Model S, but many other cars have this, so I consider it a solved problem.<p>4. Reverse video camera, in most cars, automatically starts when you start reversing (I don&#x27;t remember reversing in Model S so maybe they didn&#x27;t do implement this yet). As this requires the car to come to a stop, even pressing some obscure button can&#x27;t be &quot;unsafe&quot;, at most a nuisance.<p>5. Some controls <i>are</i> important and are usually <i>not</i> on the steering wheel - things like <i>lock&#x2F;unlock car doors</i>, and the <i>4 blinkers</i> button. I think these would best be placed on the driver&#x27;s door, or alternatively on the top of the center console (above the screen) so that the passenger can also access them.<p>6. I don&#x27;t use lane assist, and I&#x27;m not sure whether having it is a great idea... people might come to rely on it and thus become worse drivers on their own. It&#x27;s often implemented as a light in the side mirror, which I personally dislike - the implementation is bad (false positives, or turns on when I&#x27;m not changing lane) and the light flashing at the edge of my viewing field distracts me from the road ahead, so I always want to turn it off. I think a useful UI would be, to change the sound that the blinkers make, if the car detects an obstacle on the side.<p>To conclude, I can&#x27;t wait until big touch screens are adopted by other car manufacturers and most other buttons are removed.

Own a TM3, so bear with my bias.<p>I find the whole haptic feedback issue a bit silly. First off I went from a Chevrolet Volt to a TM3. So lets start off with buttons.<p>Steering Wheel TM3, two omni direction buttons. Two stalks. Volt, 5 buttons to do the same purpose as the two on the Telsa, then four more buttons for extra functions on front, three lever like buttons on back of wheel.<p>Center Stack TM3 - touch screen, only the quick actions menu leads to one level sub mensu Volt - touch screen with four dedicated buttons and knob below. Menus and be many layers deep, some are four or five deep. HVAC below has thirteen buttons and two knobs.<p>The come all the controls on doors and seats. Some cars put some items in different places meaning for each car you need to adapt. However as I will state below, you never really need to use the majority of them so it does not matter.<p>Most cars are like the Chevrolet Volt, there are between thirty to fifty buttons. Now tell me how that is worse than a touch screen. Lets double down on this, how many buttons do you actually use during the course of a drive. Try this, put a sticker on each before a drive and remove those you use. How many can you reach for any not take your eyes off the road. Any radio or screen will do that regardless.<p>The kicker is, you don&#x27;t need to interact with the UI of the Tesla or the super majority of most buttons in any car these days because for the most part settings are set and forget. HVAC systems are set to maintain a temperature, radio stations or music is usually only volume tweaked plus many other items are automatic like headlamps and even wipers.<p>I was accustomed to my TM3 before I got home the day I picked it up. I can get accustomed to nearly any car in minutes as the most used controls are always where you expect them, from turn signals to horns to volume control over the radio. I will say this, the navigation on voice is superb in the TM3.<p>Are there flaws with the Tesla UI, sure. Namely you still must use your phone to change play lists. I know of no other brand with this limitation. I do think the horizontal display of the TM3 is superior to the vertical display for both information pickup and icon spacing. I agree the top icons can get hard to see when map features underlap and that needs to be tweaked to fade those map images

I really loved the Windows phone live tiles and the new windows start menu. Large tiles, demarcated with bold aolid colors, separated with proper whitespace.<p>That would be a good design for a Tesla in car screen. Large bold touch targets.

I had a chance to drive the Model 3, and it threw me off that users have to swipe up on the music player to view additional functionality. In fact, swiping on a touchscreen when your main focus should be somewhere else just doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense to me in general.

I really hate touch screens, more so in a vehicle. Physical buttons will be a deciding factor in my next vehicle purchase.

This wouldn&#x27;t encompass everything that&#x27;s been discussed here and in TFA, but perhaps the UI decisions were made to help discourage usage while driving?<p>The mobile-like interface, the far positioning and small buttons make it difficult to use while driving. I&#x27;m not saying that these are the proper UX choices to discourage screen usage while in motion, but perhaps that reason influenced the aforementioned choices.

I realize this is a Tesla tear down (and I agree with a lot of it, having driven different Tesla’s myself) but I would like to see a more comprehensive analysis comparing different other infotainment systems on the market because there are much better ones than Tesla’s.<p>For example, one of the biggest complaints of touch screens mentioned in the article is lack of haptic feedback. I believe Audi&#x2F;Porsche solved that really well in their latest models by using (multiple) touch screens that provide physical feedback upon pressing. In addition, half of the “buttons” have a fixed placement and can be blindly operated.

That&#x27;s a case study on how NOT to do a car dashboard...<p>Plus hell of a lot of &quot;change it for the change of changing it&quot; (e.g. regular gauges would be far better and more reliable).

I don&#x27;t really have a horse in this race (I&#x27;ve never driven a Tesla, but a few of the points in the article seem valid), but I think its worth remembering that the Nielsen Norman Group has a few clients amongst the large automotive companies (Ford and General Motors, if I recall correctly). This was more-or-less paid for by Tesla competitors, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. YMMV.

A problem that Tesla has is that the current UI is built for the model 3. The layout of that screen makes a ton of sense. It doesn’t work nearly as well with the S, because of landscape versus orientation.<p>It took me about 5 minutes to get use to the model 3s display - even without the binnacle. My Honda feels horribly cluttered on the rare occasions I drive it.

It works in spite of these legitimate concerns because the actual time it takes to visually acquire the target is measured in milliseconds, and drivers already know how to assess the road and determine that &#x27;nothing can happen&#x27; in the next few hundred milliseconds. If you&#x27;re in tight traffic with drivers jockeying for position, you don&#x27;t take that opportunity to skip a song. You wait until it&#x27;s settled.<p>We do this already when we eat or drink in the car, turn to look at a passenger during conversation, read a billboard, etc.

I really like physical buttons. I detest touch screen interfaces in cars.

this thread show how teslas are the new mac in terms of blind fanboyish buyers remorse denial.<p>people will defend the one button mouse just because.<p>&gt; study proving that the way information essential to driving (e.g. changing lanes, checking rear view) is scattered in several disconected features&#x2F;screens.<p>&gt; all threads are people defending that you should not fiddle with controls while driving, and because of that the article is wrong and the touchscreen is perfect.<p>get a grip people. at least pretend to have read the article.