I’m not sure if it’s age, a long history of blows to the cranium, a past of questionable drug choices, or a present of too many of whatever chemicals are in Diet Coke that everyone is trying to tell me will kill me, but I think I’m losing the ability to distinguish dumb ideas from less-dumb ideas. I’m bringing this up to you now because I just had an idea whose idiocy I cannot quite determine. So, to settle this in the most reliable, least-intrusive way possible, I’m going to tell all of you all about it and you can tell me what you think, because, just between me and you, everyone else is an idiot. You know I’m right. Anyway, now I need you to consider this idea:What if most of your car’s controls were accessed via a little model car mounted on your dashboard?
It seems both like a good and idiotic idea to me; almost like what a child would come up with. But then I think about the mess that so many car dashboards and instrument panels are, with switches and controls laid out via, it often seems, the same way that you lay out the location of a couple dozen M&Ms by dumping the bag out onto a table. Sure, you get used to most of the controls, but for so many the location is still awkward and forgettable and, oh, maybe it doesn’t have to be like this?
So, what if we tried something like this:
What if, and work with me here, there was a little simple model of a car on the dashboard, mounted on a little swiveling and tilting base. The little car would have sub-surface lights that would illuminate to show what areas are able to be interacted with, like doors and windows and trunks and so on. You want to unlock a door? Tap it. You want to roll down a window? Swipe your finger on the window you want up or down. Open the trunk? Give it a tap. Is your brake light out? Look on the little car – its lights will mimic the outside lights on the car, brakes, turn signals, headlights, whatever. Want the rear foglamp on? Tap it. Want it off? Tap it again. Need to pop open the fuel filler or charge port door? It’s right there, just give it a tap. Easy!
Is this skeuomorphism taken to an absurd extreme, or does it actually make some kind of intuitive sense? Touch a tire to see how much pressure it’s reading. Hold your finger on the hood to see or hear a status report on the engine, and when your next service is due. There’s no layer of abstraction here, beyond scale–just interact with the literal part of the car you want to do something with.
Now, sure, this could be done virtually, on a touch screen with a 3D virtual model of a car. And yeah, that might work, but consider this: I want a little, physical model. Why? Well, because it’d always be there, never lost into some byzantine hierarchy of menus for one, and, even better, you can interact with that car by feel if you need to.
You can still have a screen for infotainment stuff and HVAC and other things that don’t make sense on a little car model, but for a lot of things, why not make them work via the easily-understandable interface of a little physical car? I’d love to hear what you think, because, again, I just don’t know anymore. Maybe we need to build a prototype and try it? Are there functions this interface could lend itself to that I’m missing? Fine-tune adjustments when parking? Suspension leveling? I’m open to any suggestions!
It has to be better than opening a glovebox from a touchscreen, that’s for damn sure.
It works for the things which can be in 2 different states, like a trunk opened or closed, blinkers on/off.
Now do front light. How do you differentiate between front lights, high beams, fog light? You either set the controls apart, but since I don’t use fog and high beam a lot I will mix them up when I do need to select them. Or you do some weird double/triple tapping stuff.
Don’t get me started on intermittent/fast/single wipers or windows opened a half inch.
It sounds a bit fiddly. Might be more intuitive to scale that model car up to 1:1 so you can sit in it and operate normal sized buttons.
A couple thoughts on this.
* the little car should be mounted on the column, like in those Citroen GSes
* Volkswagen would make you open the little car’s door and press on a little column mounted stalk inside to actuate the them signals
* touch and swipes on the doors, windows, and other movable parts to open them is brilliant
* a nicely optioned parent car would let you change the little car’s trim and body colors on demand with clever fiber optic lights
* the main car’s stereo would have a speaker inside the little car
* the little car talks
* you can spin the little wheels endlessly with no ill effects e.g. when traffic is boring
* yanking the little car back hard activates nitro boost
* passenger seats have their own little cars
> I’m not sure if it’s age, a long history of blows to the cranium, a past of questionable drug choices, or a present of too many of whatever chemicals are in Diet Coke that everyone is trying to tell me will kill me, but I think I’m losing the ability to distinguish dumb ideas from less-dumb ideas
Chainsawing lead acid batteries out of a changli is both a cause and consequence of that state of affairs.
Volkswagen did this virtually for their driver assist systems in the Mk 7 Golf. Jason however, hits on a point that VW missed: you have to make it obvious which sections are interactive, otherwise it just looks like a weird graphic of a European street.
I would hope that the lighting on the model would also reflect the actual car status, much like Tesla shows the tiny car in the screen with its turn signals on. I would hope more people would remember to turn on their headlights if they knew the model should be showing them too
Kinda neat concept (because model car) but nah, not too great of an idea to use while driving (although would still be better than a screen!)
Jason, it’s not the diet Coke, it’s the lead poisoning
So…
It’s winter. I’m getting ready for work. A light blanket of snow has covered everything overnight.
I casually hit my cars remote start, to warm it up, as I make my coffee for my morning commute. Coffee ready I hug my wife, pat the dogs, head out the door.
Hop in the nice warmed up car, reach for the scraper, hand full of coffee rested on the dash for balance.
Reach over too hastily to turn on the rear defrost.
Suddenly my morning is ruined.
I spill my coffee.
The trunk pops open.
The windows all roll down.
The wipers start up and grind to a halt on the iced up windshield.
Funny thing about a warmed up car covered in snow. Tiny avalanche hazards abound.
So now I have an interior and trunk full of half melted snow that fell in like a collapsing glacier through the rolled down windows and popped trunk.
You better believe I’m gonna hate this feature from that day on.
This is a stupid idea!
Terribly terribly stupid.
Great vignette there!
> This is a stupid idea!
> Terribly terribly stupid.
Done! Now available standard in all 2025 Audis.
While an actual model would be distracting, I have driven a few cars that featured a little picture of the car on a dash screen. That would be useful for indicating various conditions – low air in a tire, door improperly closed, etc. A physical model would be cute though.
I vote nope, while it is definitely hands-on, it is even even worse than driving by tablet and that is saying something.
Do you envision it accessing the CAN-bus through the diagnostic port or will you let your underlings figure out the implementation, you being the “ideas man”?
Somewhere in my junk box, I have an Apple “no button” mouse it cost me $3 with the matching keyboard at Goodwill, bought because it looked cool. The concept was a bad reactionary idea, but nobody said no to Steve Jobs.
I feel like maybe a better, less radical approach of this would be to put it on the center console and make it not swivel, but also make it so they’re all conventional buttons. They’d still be in the general shape of a car, but it would be a lot more reachable and a lot less confusing. The only thing you’d have to worry about is how large you should make it, at some point it’s just going to be an obstruction. But I think it could work if you thought it out enough.
It sounds like the beginnings of something good, though I have to agree that it would be pretty distracting. I’ve never been very good with gesture based inputs, so simple buttons and indicators in gauge cluster work best for me. Though this would be a great way to indicate a problem that might be otherwise hard to describe to someone who isn’t car savvy. Here’s one for you that I came up with a few years back. An indicator light on the car that shows you are following someone else and would like to not get separated. A convoy light if you will.
As much as I love scale models, I have to say that this idea “is a no from me, dog.”
Let’s look at the controls and indicators one-by-one:
It’s too bad because it sounds fun. I just feel like the novelty would wear off pretty quickly.
I don’t think those first two would be all that much of an issue. Saab got by just fine with having the window switches on the center console for years, and my Mazda 2 has the door locks located between the seats and it’s never been an issue.
You never operate the power locks from inside the car? Where do you do it from? Are you just a millionaire who’s privileged enough to have always had cars with a key fob, and always working?
I don’t think I’ve ever locked myself in a car. Maybe I need to travel to rough areas and just sit in my car waiting for trouble?
Is it a dumb idea? Yes.
Would it be fun? Also Yes.
This.
Do we need this in our cars? No, but if it was there we’d all play with the model car.
Can I use it to turn off the stability control by flicking the back of the car sideways?
Making every car at a car show, “This is my real car… this is my toy car.”
but then where would the hula girl go?
sorry, I had to!
Hope she has a pre-airbag dance stage.
She’s driving the little car
Hell No! It’s bad enough most are trying to turn all new vehicles into subscription service smart phones. Now you propose an arcade game interface? Et Tu ? The newest car I had to purchase under duress from my daily getting totaled is a 2010 with under 45k. miles. Any future purchase will be older, and spicier.
2010 really is the sweet spot before cars became too loaded for their own good.
While this seems like a solution looking for an answer, I have in the past mused about excavator controls that are a little excavator on the dash – if you want to extend the bucket just move the bucket arm on your dash. This would be a great solution for a casual operator who isn’t in the machine all day, but my guess is full time operators would hate it. Now if only there was a switch to quickly switchover to/from the John Deere setup for those that learned on one or the other setup.
It strikes me that this could be a distraction on par with texting while driving, not to mention that it puts a lot of important/potentially dangerous controls within reach of the passenger.
That said, I think you’re burying the lede. The really great idea here is the revival of Gordon Keeble.
Picture this; you’re freewheeling’ down the highway and your five year-old decides to play with the toy car on the dash …
My first thought.
If your five-year-old has free rein in the car to crawl all the way up to the dashboard while driving at freeway speeds (or when the car is in motion at all), then there are already some pretty severe safety issues at play that are unrelated to Torch’s toy car control system.
I don’t appreciate the way you’re judging most of our parents.
Fair point replace driving down the freeway with car is on in the driveway or in a store parking lot.
Assuming you’re in a safe area, then it would mostly be lol’s for observers, probably not so much for the parent/owners
Who am I to talk I accidently (column) shifted the family wagon out of park & in to neutral with my foot when I was a kid. Thankfully no one (or the car) were hurt. So clearly no need for a toy car on the dash to cause kid car trouble.
I mean, OEMs do this with power seat controls, don’t they? Why not a similarly conceptual raised shape for the top half of the car, in the center console with buttons in the relevant places? Perhaps that’s not the whimsy you’re looking for…
Make it translucent, so you can see that an indicator light is lit on the far side, without rotating the little car.
Also if a tire is low have it light up.
I don’t know, Jason. I like weird ideas, but this seems like the kind of thing that would get super annoying very quickly. I do like the idea that it would show the status of all the lights and door locks and stuff, but I hate the idea of having to reach over, rotate the model, and tap a door to unlock it.
Also, you describe it as being the model of “a car,” but if this were to catch on, it would have to be a model of “that car,” or it would feel tacky and generic. It might be tacky no matter what, I’m not sure.
I’m just here for the Gordon-Keeble logo on the steering wheel.
Hey, Jason, what are the chances that TotalSally can hook us up with some? You know I’ll order a couple at least!
I did not think the effects of lead poisoning would be apparent this quickly.
I’ll take drug induced brain damage for 200 Trebek.
DAILY DOUBLE