Hyundai and LCD Fatigue

Hyundai announced the other day that it will be reversing course as regards the smartphoning of cars – at least insofar as regards dashboard controls. Instead of a giant smartphone display – with tap/swipe-only controls – Hyundai will be bringing back buttons and knobs to control such things as the AC and heater settings and stereo so that drivers don’t have to take their eyes of the road to control those functions.

The latter is italicized to emphasize an interesting incongruity that has manifested over the past decade or so – the time period during which smartphone-emulating displays began to appear in cars and very quickly became standard equipment in every new car. People were told it wasn’t safe to look at their phones while driving – and many states passed laws making to illegal to do so. But – somehow – it was “safe” to look at the phone built into the dash.

Of course, it wasn’t. It isn’t. One cannot feel the app on the surface of either the phone or the phone-like glowing screen built into the dash. It is necessary to look and while you’re doing so you aren’t looking at the road. It is also necessary to look longer – because it’s difficult to accurately swipe/tap the right app in a moving vehicle. Your finger moves with the motion of the car and if you’re not making fine corrections you are likely to tap/swipe the wrong app, which is aggravating and that increases the distraction factor.

Some of the more elaborate interfaces are layered – or tiered – or whatever the right word is. Meaning there’s so much stuff buried in the screen you have to scroll through multiple screens to find the control you want before you can control it. This is unavoidable with phones because the surface area is small and so only so many apps can be made to appear on the screen at once. And that is part of the reason why laws have been passed making it illegal to peck at a phone’s screen while driving.

The bigger screens in cars aren’t an improvement because even though the icons can be made larger and so your finger more accurate, there’s still no tactile feedback on par with the intuitively accurate feel of a knob or button that you don’t have to look at to correctly operate.

But buttons and knobs cost more to install than a screen that just plugs in. And more icons for more things can be integrated into an LCD display, encouraging the displaying of lots of arguably extraneous and distracting but marketable kitsch that can be used to “surprise and delight” – a car biz marketing term – the new car buyer who has never seen such wonders before. Hybrids, for instance, have “real time” displays of the ebb and flow of the engine’s power and the electric motor’s assist. It’s interesting when you first see it – if you’ve never seen it before. But once you have, it quickly loses its power to “surprise and delight.”

It also gets old trying to make what ought to be – and up to recently have always been easy to make – adjustments such as the volume of the stereo or the fan speed or the temperature settings for the AC/heat. LCD touchscreen interfaces do not make it easier to make these adjustments.

They make it cheaper for the manufacturers to build cars.

But just as people soured on other developments of the past several years – such as “masks,” for instance – people seem to be souring on LCD touchscreen interfaces. They want their buttons and knobs back – and Hyundai says it hears them. Simon Loasby, who is a Hyundai vice president, said it thusly the other day:

“So our philosophy is to keep the eyes on the road and keep your hands on the wheel, and then you could very quickly look at what are your frequent-use interactions. There aren’t many . . . but you want them to stay as physical buttons because those are things I want to adjust without looking away.”

He described the LCD interfaces that have become impossible to avoid in new vehicles as “just a distraction.” Which of course they are. But – at last – someone in a high position at a major car company has said so, out loud.

Loasby also says the smartphone-like LCD screens in future Hyundai (and presumably, Kia) vehicles will get smaller rather than larger, which is – to borrow the president’s favorite word – huge.

It would be even better if they went away altogether – for they are cheap and tacky looking as well as annoying and distracting. They have furthered the dreary homogenization of car interiors – of dashboards – which have come to look like the screens of the latest iPhone or Samsung hand-held device. That is to say, all the same. But cars are more than devices – more than appliances.

Or at least, they were once. And maybe will be again.

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