I don’t really consider myself to be an obsessive person, with one small, almost trivial, exception: I can get pretty obsessed with things. Recently, one of the things I’ve been sort of obsessed with has been the very concept of controlling a car’s HVAC vent flow and direction from touch-screen controls. This started when I wrote an article about Rivian’s refusal to support systems like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and I went off on a little tangent about touch screen HVAC vent controls. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
The reason I can’t stop thinking about it is that even among the pantheon of controls that don’t belong on a touchscreen, adjusting airflow vents via touchscreen controls feels uniquely bad, something that, despite all of my ruminating and thinking, I can not come up with a single solitary good, rational reason why this system exists. As far as I can tell, all these systems manage to do is introduce complexity, more and more complex hardware, a less intuitive user interface, more dangerous operation when driving, and the loss of the ability to adjust airflow at any time.
On the plus side, they’re… more complex? Some people think they’re cool and high-tech? I guess? Honestly, I don’t know. I really don’t.
I suppose I really should show you one of these systems in action, so you understand what I’m talking about. They’re hardly an industry standard just yet, but their numbers are growing, which is why it’s so important to nip this shit in the bud.
Here, this is Rivian’s touch screen-based vent airflow system in action; it’s a good representative of these types of systems:
See how that works? Right there, on the screen on the dashboard, is a picture of the very same dashboard you’re looking at, and to control the direction of the air vents, you use your finger to slide the little icons on the screen in the direction you want the air to flow. Small motors take the signals sent from your finger moving across the touchscreen and then move the vanes in the air vents to direct the flow of air, which is visually represented on that screen.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Well, sort of, if you’re willing to overlook one of the most confounding and baffling leaps of idiocy in the whole of modern technology. Let’s just look at what’s going on here:
Okay, so on the dash itself we have the touchscreen, and on that touchscreen we have a drawing of the dashboard. The HVAC vents on the actual dashboard are represented on the touchscreen, in four locations, corresponding to where the physical vents are on the actual dash: left side, right side, and two in the middle. At least in the case of the middle two vents, the actual vents are mere inches away from the smaller on-screen representation.
To adjust the vents, the driver or passenger uses their finger to touch the little icon and slide their finger in the direction they would like air to flow. A motor then moves the HVAC vent vanes accordingly.
Now, the act of using fingers to move vents is almost the exact same as the physical act of just using a finger to move the vanes themselves, except in the case of touchscreen controls you’re sliding your finger over a smooth glass surface and actively watching that the collection of pixels that forms the vent icon moves the way you want it to. A real, physical vent control would have a little plastic tab you’d just move with a finger or two and you’d be able to feel the motion of the vanes and the airflow itself.
Again, the real vents are just a few inches below the touchscreen.
You’re effectively doing the same thing as just using your hand to move the vent vanes, only it requires much more visual attention, lacks direct feedback, requires software and motors and wiring and electricity, and provides the exact same end result, provided everything went fine.
Please, some automotive UX designer who has worked with these systems, explain this to me. Make it make sense! Why would a carmaker make this decision? Is the act of seeing something move indirectly because of actions on a touchscreen really that cool? We’ve had remote controls for TVs since the, what, 1950s, and, yeah, that’s pretty cool, especially because you’re across a room from the device you’re controlling, not, let’s see, inches away like you are when you sit in a car in front of HVAC vents.
I can’t fathom this. Is it because not having little tabs to control vent direction somehow looks cooler? Does it? Here’s a modern, high-tech car dashboard that has tons of screens but retains physical vent controls, the Lucid Air:
Is that really that bad? Are those little tabs so abominable? If you actually think so, then I’m not sure there is enough grass for you to touch in all of the British Isles or Kansas or wherever.
Let’s look at how Tesla does this, because they use a slightly different approach for their vent directing system. First, here’s the interface:
Tesla uses a pinching mechanic, which is somehow even more fussy and annoying than Rivian’s finger-slide system. Imagine trying to use this while driving, when you want to get air to stop blowing on your face or start blowing on your crotch – it would be hell. There’s no way you could adjust this while you were driving, at least not safely.
Maybe these systems allow you to reach vents on the other side of the dash that you ordinarily couldn’t? That’s something, right? I mean, I guess, but who gives a shit? If you’re not by the vents at the other side of the car, who cares where they’re blowing, and if another person is there, they can just adjust them however they want, whenever they want! So I’m not so sure that’s a real advantage.
Now, Tesla’s vent system doesn’t use physical vanes; it uses multiple streams of air that interact via something called the Coandă effect, which some have described as being “genius”:
Is it a “genuis” system, though? Or is it a shocking amount of useless complexity to achieve something that a 1979 Oldsmobile Delta 88 had already managed to do just fine with little plastic vanes? Again, what’s the advantage here?
Let’s walk through my big issues with touchscreen vent controls, just so whatever brave automotive UX designer that decides to defend this inane system can easily craft their argument. Sound good? Let’s go!
1. The user experience is significantly worse.
Yeah, it is! With physical vent controls you can actually feel the airflow, you can move your hand right to the vent itself, and move it physically to re-direct that air wherever you want. Often, there’s a little knob or wheel to adjust the volume of air coming out. All of these controls are immediately and physically understandable, and all can be operated without looking at them, instantly.
Touch screen-based vent systems are fussy and require a significant amount of focus on the screen to make work, and are just inches away from the actual vents, reminding you that you could just be moving the damn vents themselves. It’s slower, less precise, and requires more focus.
There are no user experience benefits to the touch screen system.
2. It’s modal
You know what I mean by modal? I mean with touch screen-controlled vents, your vent controls can just, you know, go away. Since the visual re-creation of the dash on the screen on the dash takes up so much room, it can’t be shown all the time, so to access the controls to adjust your vents, you must go through some layers of on-screen interface to make the controls appear.
Imagine if you had a car with physical vent controls that just blipped out of existence if you, say adjusted the radio or looked at your navigation or went into reverse or anything like that? You’d think that was some bullshit. A physical vent system lets you adjust airflow at any time at all, no matter what else the car is doing. Touch screen systems can not do this.
3. It requires more hardware, more software, more power, and introduces new points of failure.
Old-school physical HVAC vent air direction systems have one basic point of failure: the little plastic vanes or control doohickies could break. If they do, it’s obvious and generally pretty easy and cheap to fix. You can even usually still use the vent by shoving a finger in there and moving it around.
A touch screen-controlled, remotely-operated HVAC directional vent has code in the system software to make it work, a potential point of failure, one that could happen via an over-the-air update, even. There’s also motors to drive the vents (or drive the airflow to the vents, in the Tesla system), another point of failure, wiring to bring power and control signals to those motors, another point of failure, and all of this isn’t free energy-wise, as those motors do use some amount of electricity, which is something I’d think you’d want to conserve on an EV.
That’s a lot more hardware and possible failure points. For what?
4. It’s dangerous
Anything that requires this much focus on a touchscreen has potential to distract a driver, which can result in some dangerous driving situations. Cooled or heated air blowing at you is also often the sort of thing you’d like to change on short notice, in situations, say, where you came in a car all hot and sweaty and enjoyed the arctic blast of the A/C right at your face, but soon it gets just too damn cold and you want it off your face.
In a conventional physical vent setup, you just move your hand and move the vent. It’s instinctive and takes seconds. In a touchscreen system, you have to direct your attention to the center screen, navigate to the climate controls, find the controls for airflow adjustment, pay attention to where they are on the represented dash, target them with your finger, move them, feel for the result, and then hopefully after all this you’re more comfortable and not in a ditch or through the outer wall of a Bojangles’.
Please, automotive UX people, I beg of you, help me understand this! As David is fond of reminding me, the professionals who do the jobs of designing car user interfaces and controls are significantly smarter than me, and, let’s be honest, likely have better hygiene as well. I’m not ruling out the fact that I may be missing some very big, very obvious advantage to touch screen HVAC airflow controls that make it all make sense.
If you know what this is, again, please, reach out and tell me.
Because as it stands now, I see more and more cars succumbing to a trend that is actively making the experience of being in a car worse, and I do not want to see that happen. I can’t think of any trend in automotive controls that feels as woefully and painfully misguided as this, and I either need to try and make it stop, or, if I’m wrong, understand it. But I can’t just sit idly by.
So, please, smarter-than-me automotive UX designers, make this make sense to me. Help. And, if you can’t, then, please, help all of automotive-using humanity and let’s put a stop to this madness before it infects every new car on the road.
This is dire. Let’s do our part.
BTW, Star Wars is a fantastic lie. Any character in Star Wars can jump into ANY spaceship and know exactly where every switch is and what it does and easily fly any spaceship. If the arc of their societal trajectory was anything like ours, those ships would be fully all screens on the inside and be near impossible to even start much less fly. Every action would be buried in sub-menus on various screens throughout the cockpit. “Chewie, make the jump to hyperspace” would not be a simple lever. It would be tap on screen, scroll to drive modes tab, select drive modes, scroll to hyperdrive tab, select hyperdrive, select hyperdrive motivator (please enter coordinates), scroll to navigation tab, select destination, enter coordinates, select calculate trajectory, select confirm, tab back to motivator screen, select engage, tap OK to confirm, finally, tap GO.
Not just spaceships. How about rental cars? I keep my cars until they drop dead. When I get into a car that’s a year or less old, I need the owner’s manual to set the HVAC, turn on the radio or the bluetooth, use the GPS if it has one. And, when’s the last time you rented a car that had the manual in the glove compartment? Yes, I can download the manual once I find out what vehicle I’m really getting (as opposed to the “or similar” I reserved), but the manual is over 500-pages long. Some controls, AC vents included, should be fairly standard, so you can hop into a rental car (or a spaceship) that’s strange to you and head right out to your destination, be it miles or parsecs away.
The one that always gets me is the headlight switch where you have to twist one of the column stalks. I’m always like where TF are the headlights in this thing
Imagine you just set the A/C, through your screen, to ice cold to start a 5 hour drive and cool down the inside of the car. At the same time, Afternoon Delight pops on your infotainment screen and out of the speakers. You go to tap skip and you hit repeat instead. Just then the screen conks out, the nightmare scenario.