I think the saddest thing about modern American engineering and tech is that they would all be fucking psyched about Chinese tech and cars if they were born in China. Like, the only reason these people are so blinkered about China is because they were born in the U.S.
They are so sure that they can see past the propaganda, that they are just eating shit the whole way down.
pretty sure the saddest thing about modern American engineering and tech is that most of it is used for either military weapons of mass death or software tools of unimaginable surveillance and data collection
Nah, that’s just scary and pretty par for the course, not sad.
Military weapons of mass death that either don’t even work, they can’t field, or are ineffective!
They’re perfectly adequate at their job: Funneling money to Raytheon stockholders, and blowing up afghani villages.
can we stop this? you’re doing the thing fascists do where the enemy is weak and strong
did we forget how many people have been killed by American weapons?
I was thinking about stuff like those helicopters that crash constantly, the way so much of the US military is in disrepair, from that thread recently. It was just meant as a jab about how the US military is an inefficient machine that exists for profit, not winning wars. I guess that’s not “mass death” though, more like bombers and drones. Sorry.
I dunno if it’s DOIN A FASCISM to acknowledge given that the US is a country that’s party to genocide and so much more whose genocidaires are senile old men and big wet reality TV personalities, but y’know…
The weapons of the Amerikkkan military are extremely good at killing people and at generating shareholder value. They are not very good at achieving strategic objectives like opening straits or winning wars.
All of the “amazing” Chinese cars pictured in the article are full of touchscreen infotainment systems. China is cooked as well.
I am here to tell you that america communists are wildly out of touch with the consumption tastes of the average Chinese public.
Not that we aren’t right to be cynical about our own engineers achieving the same results as Chinese manufacturing.
Touchscreens are ludicrously dangerous interfaces for cars that have basically only proliferated because of techbro dipshits mucking about with things they don’t understand. Cars need fixed controls that provide physical feedback and which don’t require reading or light to operate. Like that’s not a matter of taste, that’s a basic “this is usable and safe” thing.
that have basically only proliferated because of techbro dipshits mucking about with things they don’t understand
I hate touchscreens too, but the reason they’re so prevalent is they’re cheaper than engineering and manufacturing a bunch of custom physical buttons and knobs
Don’t accept the capitalist premise that it’s normal to compromise safety for expediency and cheapness.
Also, you can reuse some of that engineering through a full line of cars.
huh? I’m not making a value judgement, I’m saying that as a matter of fact capitalists have compromised safety for expediency and cheapness. It’s not because of techbros fucking around or something.
Reuse is possible, but only to a limited degree. Setting up tooling is very expensive. Not as bad as body panels which are custom per model, but still pretty rough. You’ll see that when you look at the cost of buying replacement parts for even a parts bin GM car. Gauge cluster, button and dial assemblies, the interior trim that the buttons and dials go in, all surprisingly expensive when you think of how much tablet you could buy for the same money. There is a real profit motive behind the screens. Even in consumer/hobby electronics, my background, it’s the same: cases and buttons often dominate BOM costs (and require manual assembly).
You are being idealistic and giving into American exceptionalism.
However much you or I hate it, it is a matter of taste. Interfaces can be made to work intuitively, touch screen phones prove you do not need to have fixed analog buttons, and screen brightness is easy to program to adjust automatically. Our shit doesn’t work because tech bros are addicted to a million unneeded features and menus. If you are just looking for a style you can vastly simplify your interface and limit your options to what is strictly nessecery. Most Chinese people will not be driving these kinds of teched-out cars.
I think it’s ugly as sin, and I hope it is a passing trend, but that doesn’t mean this stuff is impossible to do well. It just means we can’t do it well.
Touch screens aren’t better or safe just because China is doing it. It may appeal to the Chinese market. Doesn’t matter; still bad.
It’s not a matter of taste. Physical feedback is qualitatively different than one that is purely visual. Driving is a visual intensive act, and even a brief look away can be dangerous, but a touch screen interface relies on visual feedback to navigate because you cannot feel the buttons. These senses work differently on a fundamental level
touch screen phones prove you do not need to have fixed analog buttons
Touchscreen phones and tablets are all horrible and notorious for not working right whether that’s in the form of presses not registering or registering in the wrong spot. Like think of all the design that goes into a decent keyboard, the way keys are differentiable without pressing them, how there are physical marks that tell you where your hand is touching it, and how all this combines into an input device that you don’t have to look at to use quickly and accurately (hell, my keyboard no longer has letter markers on half the keys because they’ve worn off over the nearly 20 years I’ve been using it, and this doesn’t matter because keystrokes are even more ingrained into my hands than literal written text is, but this relies on the tactile feedback of them).
Meanwhile a touchscreen is a flat, featureless surface where nothing has a fixed position, any input may or may not work, and you have to watch it to see where it wants to put a button and whether that button is reacting correctly or prompting another input. Operating traditional controls that require a hand to be removed from the wheel, like for a car radio or the AC, is already considered a dangerous hazard that’s only tolerated because it has to be; making that at least an order of magnitude more distracting is a catastrophically bad idea.
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I hate them so much, but every American I know likes them so it doesn’t surprise me that Chinese people do too.
I want analogue switches!
Touchscreens are becoming very popular in the American car market as well. All the motorists are wrong.
I prefer physical controls too, but you have to understand that touchscreen car interfaces aren’t meant to be used while driving- ie, you’re supposed to set climate presets and use voice controls to replace the constant fiddling with buttons and dials. I hate speaking to gadgets and sure as hell don’t want to talk to my car, but this is where everything is heading.
Naw dog, there’s nothing saying you can’t use both physical dials and voice controls. False dichotomy. There should be physical controls that you don’t have to look at + voice commands, not touch screen that you have to look at + voice commands.
I don’t particularly mind that everything is gonna be a touchscreen at some point but I feel like it’s gonna break down more, especially the software.
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They’re terrible in a car (for at least some functions) because you have to look at them instead of relying on feel
edit: and screens tend to encourage nested menus so they just progressively worse.
The only thing that might save it is the size of the screens (mentioned in the article). The problem with most Western fully touchscreen “infotainment” systems is that they use tiny screens with laggy interfaces. Because the automakers don’t know how to make this stuff and contract out to the lowest bidder like they always have with stereo equipment, only now that stereo is also integral to the car’s operation.
If the car and the interface are designed from the ground up to be readable and responsive, I think there is a way to pull it off (again as mentioned in the article). Having physical interfaces for basic operations related to safety and things that are messed with frequently (volume, shifting, AC, lights, signals, wipers) is a must though because a 2d interface can’t fully take advantage of our 3d spatial awareness.
Making the touch screen bigger doesn’t change the fundamental problem that you have to look at it and away from the road to use it. If the road is in your peripheral vision for any length of time while you’re moving at high speeds, you are at risk. It may be slightly better because you can look at it for a shorter amount of time, but you shouldn’t have to look at all except in your peripheral vision and/or proprioception (physical sense of where your body is).
Agreed, I still think physical knobs and buttons should never be removed. I’m just saying that if there is going to be screen controls the screen needs to be big enough that all controls can be accessed on one screen and not through submenus.
Ever feel that frustrating moment where you try to click something on your phone and end up clicking one of the buttons near it, so you go back to try again and hit another wrong button, so you go back to try again and
Now imagine that while moving at 100 kmh trying to adjust the AC
Imagine trying to adjust the AC and the “wrong thing” you hit just made the music become deafeningly loud, and the only way to fix this is on the touch screen so you have to take your eyes completely off the road.
Imagine trying to turn on the blinker to make a turn and accidentally putting the car in reverse instead.
Imagine a car that literally does not have any way to control the door locks. It just doesn’t exist.
Imagine needing to find and enter a settings menu in order to turn on the headlights, defroster, or windshield wipers.
Imagine needing to use a keyboard search function in the settings menu to find things like mirror adjustment (which is also done on the touchscreen.)
Imagine having updates that change where these frequently used features are located so any imagination of “muscle memory” is impossible.
All of these are real problems people frequently experience in multiple cars made by multiple manufacturers.
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NGL this video makes me want one and I don’t even drive. The way he yelled “Geely I’m too hot!!” and the AC came on hahaha
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Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China
All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China.
The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.
He goes on to describe the same scenario at basically all the other western brands.
Can you imagine if the Soviet Union had operated this way? Just let the western brands in and then utterly demolish them with soviet industry prices and quality. You get the benefits of competition pushing your industry to do better while demolishing any argument that your people want or would prefer western luxuries to what’s available.
Closing to the capitalists was always a mistake when you could just let your own industries demolish and embarrass them.
Parenti discussed in Blackshirts and Reds how people in the Eastern bloc were seduced by Western consumer goods. The real and perceived superiority of Western treats is a form of soft power. China will not make the same mistake as them.
The Soviet Union censorship was at a time without social media and university students finding out all the details in person. The underground radio stations and western music being played really leveled up the mystique of western goods, and the only people traveling to the west were more likely to be PMC or boojie in attitudes.
Now you have kids living in working apartments from Shenzhen and Lanzhou going to schools like University of Oklahoma going, “this is it?!?”, and sharing their complaints on WeChat
The USSR walked so China could run 🏃♂️
The supporting technology is different today. It’s easier to run centralized operations and productions than it was in the 20th century.
i’m extremely pissed that
convinced everyone that the aesthetic of the future was putting a big ass screen for all the car controls. dogshit. asking everybody to drive into each other and die. chinese automakers could be innovating extremely retrofuture tactile controls that do all this cool shit, but no, we just have this nonsense.
That shit should be outlawed and the marketing people who forced the engineers ti make this should be sent to siberia
Looooooooooooooooooong Taaaaaaaaaaaablet
The big “infotainment” screens in cars genuinely give me the heebie jeebies, I can’t stand looking at them. It doesn’t help that reading text in a moving car as a passenger makes me motion sick.
Maybe the one big screen is a surrogate for the 3+ smartphones each and every Chinese DiDi driver I’ve ever seen seemingly has.
He did say one of the cars run HarmonyOS so yeah that might be more capable than Android Auto.
I think the Xiaomi SU7 still has physical buttons in addition to the screen. That’s what they show in their promo videos anyway. That car looks so good.
Edit: yup, it has a bunch of physical switches and even a volume knob, Xiaomi keeps winning.
though that looks like it has some kind of all-in-one physical interface with the buttons and dial on the middle partition, and also stuff on both sides of the steering wheel
the screen looks awful but it doesn’t seem like you’d use it as a touch screen while driving
Is that a WiFi router on the dashboard???
A handful of cars have these weirdo dash pods now, they usually contain massive speakers, a bunch of sensors, or both at the same time.
Forget electric cars show me the
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If accursed Albion can do 30 miles China can do 100
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Cope in the articles comments section
Riot police brutally bashing unarmed college students in the background Aha! The cracks in communism are finally starting to show.
and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch.
But at what cost!?
Usually $10-20K
Probably didn’t waste enormous time and resources on ‘self-driving’ AI
Those cars are undoubtedly impressive, but I hate the interiors. Screens should be integrated into the center console and nowhere near the gauge cluster.
I tend to agree; I think BYD’s latest Seagull strikes the balance well, though it could do with more buttons and dials
We could always do without the 13 inch laptop screens being directly below where the driver is supposed to look……
Ngl that interior looks like shit. Looks like a 2010 car except for the large screen.
I haven’t driven a car newer than 2009 (mine is from 1993) so I have no idea, but considering how cheap the seagull is for an electric, this is the best you’re gonna get for a techy car these days.
Just checked the price and holy shit is it cheap (slightly less than $10,000), that’s an incredible price for a full electric car, that’s how much the cheapest ICE cars cost like 5 years ago.
I still don’t like that one. I generally am not a fan of ipad glued to the dashboard. The 8" screen in my Infiniti is basically the limit of what I’ll tolerate. I love screens outside of my car, but I’m a hater when it comes to being in the car
I actually like digital gauge clusters. Being able to see the exact speed you’re going displayed as a big number is so much better than having to guess based on the position of a hand overlaid on some tiny numbers.
Also, imagine being unable to configure the positioning of elements, see the instant fuel consumption, or change between mph and km/h.
I like the hybrid designs. I just don’t like when they replace the whole cluster
Oh, you think these are affordable? Have you forgotten the $10,000 “China Bad” fee?
Wouldn’t want one here anyway, our charging infrastructure is shit. Literally all owned by lord bazinga. Meanwhile in Shenzhen there are more ev charging stations than there are gas stations and 258 dc fast charging bays at the airport.
Amerikkka is done, planned economies are just superior. We will never admit to it, but we’ve already lost on the two major manufacturing technologies for the 21st century, evs and renewables
At least we have shitcoin and AI
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That xiaomi car is sick. Nothing remotely close to available here at that price point
