If the Tesla 3 represents the future of car UX, I will drive my old VW Passat until the sun explodes.
As a casual technophile, I’ve been following the coverage of the new Tesla 3 — the mass-market priced, electric alternative to gasoline cars. In other words, the car of the future!
But based on early reviews related to the enormous touchscreen and its problems with the software and future implications for centralizing all car functions in one huge tablet, I’m convinced that the car UX of the future is going to suuuucckkk.
Before I dive in, a couple of caveats. First, this isn’t a Tesla 3 review. I haven’t driven one and this isn’t a car review publication. Second, this goes well beyond what Tesla is doing with their car, because quite frankly most auto manufacturers have been embracing the touchscreen trend for quite some time and most of them are bad — our second car, a Subaru, has a touchscreen interface with awful UX (which is a great topic for another day).
From a design perspective, I totally get the appeal of touchscreens. They look sexy, futuristic — the cutting edge of the most advanced technology. Just sitting in a car with multiple touch screens and adjustable ambient lighting awakens the inner child in me who believed by the year 2018 I’d be traveling through hyperspace in a starship, rather than stuck in traffic in a 5-year-old Volkswagen.
Engineers love touchscreen interfaces because they offer infinite functionality while tweaks and patches can be applied through software updates. It would be spectacular if not for the fact that any touchscreen in a car by necessity has to be used while driving a car. Meaning, anyone piloting what could be a 2-ton battering ram capable of going speeds well over 100 mph, is best served by looking at what’s in front of them and little else.
In an analog car — with physical knobs, levers and buttons you don’t need to tap through layers of menu items to get to such a simple function of adjusting your mirrors. People with an average capacity for muscle memory can generally accomplish most basic car tasks without taking their eyes off the road, even if it’s an unfamiliar car — it just takes a few drives to get the hang of things.
Yet in this brave new world of slate displays, it isn’t so simple. According to a critical review of the Tesla 3 in the Washington Post:
Two layers deep in a menu to adjust your side-view mirrors? God-forbid you hit a bump along the way and move your fingers a few centimeters on the display. Who knows what you’ll click instead? The only foolproof way to adjust your mirrors is to focus completely on the screen, which presents another set of problems altogether. It’s not rocket science that distracted drivers aren’t good drivers, but also there’s a lot of science behind that.
Rather than restate the obvious about touch-screens, distractions and car safety, I want to envision a future where our cars slowly turn into smartphones (i.e, a device built and constantly re-engineered to demand more and more of your attention).
Imagine someday owning the “car of the future!” It’s controlled by a single, massive touchscreen. No more analog buttons or knobs to get in the way of your driving experience. Instead, all core functions of the driving experience come from the glow of a massive tablet in the car’s console.
As you drive your “car of the future!” you realize the cabin feels a bit warm. When you tap on the tablet to turn down the A/C you have to swipe away a text message alert from CVS telling you “your prescriptions are ready.” It partially covers the input to the sub-menu for climate control. A bump in the road moves your fingers away from the A/C button and the car in front of you cuts you off. Frustrated that you can’t multitask between driving and turning on your A/C, you spend a few seconds focused on the road ahead and wait for a quiet opportunity to dig into your tablet’s menu to turn on the air conditioning. As you are about to finally turn on your A/C, the dash lights up and auto-tweets an award trophy for “driving 500 miles.” Someone high up on the business side of the car manufacturer heard about the concept of gamification and insisted trophies be bundled in the latest model, despite protests from the software engineers.
The next day you arrive late to work (the third time this month) because your dash console froze in the middle of a firmware update. The last one made it impossible to sync with the bluetooth in your phone and when you called the dealer, they reminded you that the car hardware and smartphone are a few years old and you probably should just upgrade. The latest software update didn’t even give you any new features — it just addressed a critical security flaw after hackers exploited yet another vulnerability in the OS. To make matters worse, you think since the latest update came out, the screen feels a little slower too.
Exasperated — because all you want is a car that works, you mindlessly scroll through the display’s menu, looking for answers, perhaps options to revert back to the old version of the OS but you keep having to swat away alerts to re-authenticate your username and password for the car OS, Facebook and a handful of driving apps. There’s a persistent request to complete a survey on your car user experience that you can’t totally remove until you complete it.
Maybe I’m just a cranky old man who hates his iPhone, but does this seem far outside the possibility of what driving in the future will be like? I haven’t even gotten into the app bloat that will get bundled on the next car you buy or other terrible ideas like integration with mobile gaming.
Yes. Mobile gaming in your car. I know what you’re thinking, they wouldn’t do something as stupid as to turn the car’s display into a big ass Candy Crush machine, would they?
Yes. Yes they would.
Mobile gaming harvests attention, and with attention comes advertising. Yes, there will be advertising in the car of the future. If you think that it isn’t past the capacity of Silicon Valley to build lower-priced car(with special offers) and that idiots won’t line up to buy it, then allow me to introduce you to my Amazon Kindle that has a homescreen ad for the latest James Patterson thriller.
For now, I want to hold out as long as I can. The perfect driving experience has buttons, knobs, switches and levers. I want to focus solely on the road without any superfluous distractions and the last things I want to deal with in my car are firmware updates and software crashes. If the current state of smartphones signifies the future of automobiles, then I will drive my analog car until the sun explodes.
Or the car explodes. Probably the car will first. It’s a 5-year-old Volkswagen after all.
