A new Chinese regulation will require cars to use buttons for safety-related functions, instead of putting them on a touchscreen.

The regulation calls out 19 vehicle functions which must have physical controls inside the vehicle, with additional requirements about size and usability of the buttons.

Those functions include:

Turn signals
Hazard lights
Horn
PRND gear shifter
Driver assist function, if present
Windshield wipers
Windshield defroster
Power windows
Emergency call system
Power off switch for EVs
  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    39·
    1 day ago

    You have to shift gears with a touchscreen?? WHAT??!?

    Oh, it gets worse.

    In theory, you weren’t even supposed to have to do that, because the car would decide for you which direction you should go. (Probably based on simple object detection – if an obstacle is directed forward, you must want to go backward, right? And if no object is detected forward, default to forward.) And the touchscreen controls were only there for the ‘rare’ occasion when you’d need to override the car’s automatic decision.

    • burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      10·
      15 hours ago

      I had a friend with a tesler try to justify that to me like “yeah it usually works”. It’s just… They invented a problem that didn’t exist.

      So did the 50 ways new cars decided to make stupid levers and knobs and buttons to bop it twist it pull it to shift and mess with a known interface for no reason. The automated one is another level of stupid beyond that, though.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        3·
        11 hours ago

        So did the 50 ways new cars decided to make stupid levers and knobs and buttons to bop it twist it pull it to shift and mess with a known interface for no reason.

        Well… I can see getting rid of the traditional big lever in favor of something else – that big lever takes up a lot of space in the dashboard or center console that could be used for other things, and a lot of the replacements are much more compact, saving space. But manufacturers haven’t yet come to a consensus about what exactly that replacement should be, which is why you’re seeing such (potentially confusing) variety these days.

        (But I’m sure that if a vehicle is your daily driver, you’d quickly get used to whatever interface it used and it would begin to feel fairly natural. The problem would come in for people who often need to change cars, like people who often find themselves driving short-term rentals. Then it would be very annoying to keep changing the interface for shifting the transmission.)

        And that’s all ignoring that we’ve already had a solution for a long time that frees up dash/console space: