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.
I don’t understand how all this shit is even legal. People spend stupid amounts of money and gas to drive fortresses, but at the same time ALL the incentives point them to take their eyes AWAY from the fucking road?
The infatuation with screens went beyond narcissistic and well into straight dangerous.
Honestly, its legal because there is no law against it. There hasn’t ever had to be until recently, and the legal bureaucracy is slow to act and easily swayed by big money.
Legislation is written in blood.
Stand by.
I’m not a car UX designer, but have had a Model 3 for a few years. Tesla has driver profiles — which, when working correctly (most of the time, thankfully), it recognizes the driver by their phone/key and sets a bunch of preferences — including vent positions — accordingly. Also, if the car is getting hvac pre-conditioned, it will aim vents at side windows or steering wheel to heat/cool those things. Using OTA updates, I think they even solved (or maybe just semi-solved) some frozen door and/or window issues by aiming the vents strategically. (But largely, it’s about driver profiles, I think.)
This seems to be like the right answer? As in the answer that explains why the people who made this choice made it, not the answer that convinces the angry mob that this it was the the right choice. Looking at some prior comments it seems like there’s two camps of interacting with the car here, a set it and forget it “vents what vents?” camp that the screens might work for and a I’ll-fiddle-with-it-myself-dammit camp that this really doesn’t work for. I know which one I’m in [fiddles with torch, goes to join mob].
Don’t fiddle with Torch; he has enough health problems already!
LOL…that really didn’t come out quite right in this context. And I was so proud that I didn’t write “fiddle-with-myself”. Um…sorry or you’re welcome, Torch?
The fact you’re using the term “UX” in terms of a hardware product tells me all I need to know. Not meant as a personal disparagement, but this dumb SV-ification of everything needs to be pushed back to when Silicon Valley meant actually doing new shit with silicon.
No disparagement taken. I used the term because Torch did — his article asked for the feedback of “car UX designers” (and I was explaining that I wasn’t one).
Meh, it just means user experience. Everything that has a user has a user experience. Spoons have a user experience. Some are better and some are worse (E.G. spork).
It’s all cost. Making mechanical linkages like that is costly and takes up a lot of space. Using cheap stepper motors controlled by a computer becomes enticing. Now, is it currently cheaper? Probably not. But that’s why it’s only expensive cars. Once production ramps up, we’ll all have to replace our vent configuration motors in our jaloppys and it will require us to remove the whole god damn dash. Grrrrrreeeaaattt..
That said, I actually have broken HVAC linkage in one of my cars…
That argument works for some controls, but not these. Those little plastic tabs and stamped sheet metal linkages are way, way cheaper to manufacture and install than a) a stepper motor; b) it’s wiring; c) the mechanical linkages it operates though; and d) it’s software. I’m probably missing a few items for the touch screen option, but the extra wiring work for just a single vent probably costs more than a whole car full of manual adjustments that get installed as drop-in modules. If I was a cost-reduction engineer working for Rivian, this would be Job One- it easy to implement, improves reliability, and will save a lot of money.
I don’t have real numbers to prove you wrong, but, do we really think these companies are purposely doing things more expensively? I don’t. Mechanical linkages are pricey to make and assemble and have real downsides in packaging. They’ve been doing it for decades in other areas: Power Locks. Trunk Releases. Throttle by wire. Drive by wire. Brake my wire. Door handles.
The math involved in making these decisions is far from straight forward piece price. A stepper motor may not be cheaper to buy, but if labor is cut the right amount, and over a ton of vehicles, its probably worth it. Or in the case of Rivian, you never have to stand up the labor to begin with. A lot of these components are also contracted out. Shipping a delicate mechanical linkage is more costly than a more directly connected motor. It’s not just part cost to think of. It’s the whole process of building the parts and the vehicle that goes into product cost. In fact, that’s the department, Product Cost Analysis, not Part Cost Analysis.
Er, some mechanical linkages are expensive and difficult to package (like mechanical door locks), but these are not it. Your linkage to swivel the vents is like two little bars, something like one and five centimeters long. There’s no cam-over, multiple indexes, detents, indirect routing, etc. Just a linear motion on one pivot. And that assumes there’s even a linkage, and not just the knob-thing mounted directly to the vent, with a simple screw to open or close it. Even more so, these all come as a single package from the sub-tier supplier, final assembly is just popping the completed vent assembly onto the ECS tubing. Wiring up a motor is a lot more labor intensive on the assembly line, which makes it way more expensive for the OEM.
These stupid touch screen controls are a package manager decision, someone says “control everything on the central ipad” without thinking through all of the details an implications, an engineer is given a requirements sheet and told to go-do, and the end result is AC vents you can’t control without going three layers deep in the stupid infotainment system.
It just all depends on how the dash is constructed. Of which I truly don’t know. Packaging of EV’s is a whole different ball game as far as I have seen. Throw in safety. Throw in weight. I can’t truly say. I’m not trying to justify their weird decisions, just trying to make sense of the decisions with what I do know. They could very well be as dumb as we think they are.
Re: Wiring a motor. I would assume that comes assembled from a supplier. And we know suppliers have been pinched until they can’t be pinched further.
What? There’s no way a motor and the associated wiring takes up less space than a little tab.
It’s not about the tab, it’s about the packaging and assembly connecting that tab to the vents. Complex interiors with levers that stick out the dash and connect 6-12″ behind the dash is a complicated mechanism thats solved more easily with buttons and motors. Just like trunk releases have been a button actuating a solenoid to pop the trunk for decades now.
It’s like throttle by wire. Easier to package. Easier to assemble. Greater control. It becomes cheaper to implement as it becomes ubiquitous. And now it’s ubiquitous.
When the touchscreen dies, nothing in the car is going to be usable. Just because the can doesn’t mean they should to paraphrase the great Dr. Ian Malcolm.
“Now that’s one big pile of shit”- also Dr. Ian Malcolm, presumably talking about a touchscreen that includes HVAC controls.
Yes, that’s the big elephant in the room. There seems to be little to no redundancy. For what could be manipulated by hand, I highly doubt the linkage is strong enough to last being manually manipulated with the motors as resistance.
I also want to add this: A few times this summer, my cars touchscreen has thrown up an error that the temperature is to hot and that touchscreen controls are disabled until the temperature decreases. Fortunately everything has a physical control so usability is not impacted while the cabin cools down.
I think I am becoming a Luddite as I age. Clearly at some point in the future I will no longer be able to program the clock on the VHS player. 🙂
Some electrical tape across that damned blinking clock should fix it.
At least, that was the approach taken by an ex-girlfriend’s dad – a PhD in aeronautical engineering who spent decades working for Lockheed & Boeing after leaving the USAF. (When I suggested he plug the offending VCR into an un-switched outlet, he acted like I’d solved one of the world’s great mysteries.)
Having had a VHS clock clueless Lockheed engineer as a Dad myself I wonder if this was a side effect of being a Lockheed engineer.
By contrast, Boeing engineers’ VCRs eject the tape when you least expect it.
Premature tape ejection. Those poor engineers.
Maybe this is hubris, but I don’t think we’re being luddite’s. There ARE right and wrong ways to do something. The origin of Luddite’s was during the industrial revolution in England. Textile makers were sabotaging the machines that took their jobs. But, considering the benefit of not having to WEAVE RUGS BY HAND, that was a little ridiculous. Asking for safe, physical, controls over things is more realistic than being mad a loom makes rugs faster.
I suppose the benefit would be control of all the vents from the driver’s seat, although I’ve never needed to adjust the passenger side vents.
HVAC controls fall into the category of modern conveniences I’d love to turn over to some sort of AI and never think about again. Just make me comfortable. All I need is a temperature target control and (maybe) and defrost button.
Could happen. Use an IR imager to map hot/cold spots and direct airflow accordingly.
Yeah, but Jason with manual systems you have to use your right hand to adjust vents to your right and your left hand to adjust vents to your left, so that’s, like, twice as hard using one hand on a touchscreen.
I won’t try to prove you wrong, because you are right. Setting aside the problem of having to take your eyes off the road (which is a major fucking problem), there’s more to worry about than comfort. There are certain winter mornings where I have to quickly switch my defogger from heat to AC to dry out some moisture that comes out of the vent and fogs up the inside windows. I usually have to leave it on cold for around 30 seconds and then switch back to heat before frost starts forming on the outside of the windshield. I don’t want to jump back and forth between screens to do any of that. I want to keep my eyes forward so I can watch for any hazards before the glass fully clears. With click dials and buttons it’s not a problem even if I have gloves on. These are the kinds of controls that you need to be able to operate from muscle memory with maybe a split second glance to confirm you made the change you meant to.
All your points are valid, and I agree. HOWEVER.
Counterpoint: When you turn on the AC in a Tesla to cool it down before you actually drive it…. it points it at the steering wheel to get the steering wheel cold so you don’t have to touch a hot wheel.
That is…. pretty friggin rad.
And at the seats as well. Not to mention it remembers the vent settings for each driver so I set mine once and never touched the settings again anyway.
One one hand I say, who cares, move the vents yourself. On the other hand, every time I get in my wife’s van she has all the vents closed and then I start sweating (I’m a pig) and then I curse her inability to CHANGE THE FUCKING TEMPERTURE instead of closing vents.
Maybe it’s because I like my hands to be cool anyway (or just the positioning of the vents), but my Niro manages to cool down the steering wheel for me when I remote start it, too.
Counter-Counterpoint; When you turn on the AC in any car with manual vents to cool it down before you actually drive…. it cools the whole passenger compartment, of which, the steering wheel is part of.
Getting rid of 10-30 seconds of a slightly too warm steering wheel is not enough of a use case to lose functional movement of vents with hands.
Fair enough, but it’s still a cool detail. 😛
It is a nice feature, but it is a feature of a bigger flaw.
It’s like rolling your car at 100mph. For a brief glorious moment you’re flying.
I dunno I think I’d just deal with it up rather than sit and wait those few minutes.
Will occupants that are not aware of the touch screen controls break the motors on the vents if they try to adjust them manually?
But once broken, will they stay put the way you’ve left them, so that you can then manually move them to another position when desired and stay there?
If so, then that would be a feature! 😀
Because it’s something that the salesman can show the prospective customer in the showroom that seems impressive at first glance to buyers conditioned to think screens are always the answer to everything
Must be a cost issue then. And the ability to upgrade/ facelift the interior/ screen. JustsStupid.
The lead image is an AC vent from my favorite automotive interior of all time, the glorious first-gen Audi TT.
This is astonishingly dumb. It feels like someone in power couldn’t be talked down by their team of UX designers, because surely someone in UXD at Rivian or Tesla (or someone with half a brain) would have pointed this out.
To better convey how stupid that rendering of a dash on top of a real dash is:
Imagine you have a wallpaper on your computer mimicking your actual physical desktop where that computer sits on (books, coffee cup, your phone, etc.). Now, you can ONLY use the mouse or touch the screen to bring that cup of coffee towards your mouth, or open the book virtually so it opens in the real world.
That’s how stupid this all is. Everything is literally there, there’s absolutely no need to virtualize stuff that is at arm’s reach.
Didn’t we invent A/C vents with motors that could also be controlled manually in the 90’s? Why not both?
Plus, what problem is this actually solving? I mean, I guess it’s nice that I can now adjust the furthest passenger vent while I sit in the driver seat, but I can’t remember the last time I had to do that.
So we’ve made this complicated system of motors, having to navigate a menu or two (or more) on a touch screen… just for that? I don’t get it!
“what problem is this actually solving?”
Some executive’s bonus?
Speaking of the convenience of adjusting something nor ally out of reach, Mercedes made an amusing decision in the last batch of R107 SLs. There’s a joystick to adjust the power passenger-side mirror, and it’s properly heavy duty. But the driver side mirror is manual. There’s a handle on it that directly moves the glass. Because it’s right there near your hand, so you don’t need a motor. This is on a cost-is-irrelevant car.
I would truly hate this, especially the Tesla pinchy method. The only real benefit is that they could be individualized to each driver.
This is all that happens to me when I hear about touch screen vent controls.
If you are so enamored by techy stuff that you would buy a car based on touch screen vent angle controls, please just walk everywhere. We do not need you on the road.
I think a lot of these things rely on the sort of person who sets things once and leaves them forever. I’ve had Tesla fans tell me that the HVAC and vent controls on the screen work well because they always leave them on the same settings. As someone who fiddles with settings and vents pretty often, I know they will not work well for me.
The funny thing, to me, is that making it manual would result in pretty much zero extra effort for the people who defend the choices, but would be better for the rest of us.
I was about to post something very similar. My car doesn’t have automatic climate control, but even if it did, I’d be fiddling with the temp and fan just as much as I always do. I’m not the set it and forget it type either, and having to make all my adjustments through a touchscreen would be absolutely infuriating to me.
I remember in the old days, the felt around the vent (round ones) controls would wear out and the vent control wouldn’t hold it’s position. Or the plastic would wear out and the flaps would just point to the floor.
Now we have glichy software and servos dropping dead.
In truth, I can’t remember the last time I changed my manual vent directions. I set them up years ago to where I like the air movement
I spent a relaxing afternoon refelting the eyeball vents on my NA Miata shortly after I got it, I’d take that over dead servos any day of the week.
Yeah, but you can’t even get matches anymore. There’s 1 Sheetz I know of locally that still gives out books of matches. I had to break down & buy some feeler gauges last time I adjusted a set of points
Crap: this was meant in reply to Chronometric below
A small corner of a cardboard matchbook would usually provide enough friction to fix a saggy vent. 7 hours of expensive technician plus an unobtainable part to fix the automated ones.
Oh man, I can only assume it’s a way to justify putting a medium-sized TV in the center of car’s dash. Maybe they’re drawing from the mobile phone industry’s trend of making bigger screens (for more app real estate or whatever). I don’t know.
But I do know that, in the middle of rush hour traffic in the blazing heat of the summer, I don’t want to take my eyes off the road to adjust the vents and airflow in my car. I definitely don’t want clichy gesture controls like pinching and swiping.
And the same goes for the controls for the sound system. It’s already so intuitive and easy to just reach over, find the physical buttons with your fingers and adjust while you watch the road.
If I ever found myself in a situation where the HVAC and sound controls on my car suddenly became inaccessible because that screen died, my fury would explode like a thousand suns.
You don’t need to justify something the buyer is already conditioned to desire. Every year, just in time for ‘The Super Duper Bowl”, everyone seems to need a new, bigger TV. More is more.
The worst is not being able to angle the vent yourself, that is just insane. I tend to keep it on one automatic temperature setting but I’m changing the angle constantly. I wouldn’t buy a car that didn’t let me just grab it and move it around when needed.
I think some manufacturer needs to top this mess off with a big old cherry: have the actual vanes physically move via vacuum.
-I thoroughly enjoyed the biannual Moving of the Zipties on my 300D and just think others will likely want to experience the ritual of switching between heat & AC.
I have a W123 and I have to move the golf tee blocking the vacuum line to the climate control. It is either fan or defrost.
As much of a pain Miserable Benz and vacuum servos were, Jaguar and Rolls Royce were far worse. Little servo motors in nasty hidy places mounted with fussy, small nut and bolt hardware with metal structure blocking access.
The more stuff there is to have break, the more stuff there is to charge people to fix.