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.
It’s as if the manufacturers’ HR department set their ZipRecruiter algorithms to surface “1st Place Rube Goldberg Contest Winner – 6th Grade” ahead of any other UX applicant resume qualification criteria.
It really feel like re-litigating a solved problem. But my mom absolutely hates wind in her face and having to go into a menu to change that would drive her absolutely insane.
As UX designer and car enthusiast I’ve often thought “man, I’d love to get into a car UX job” but then I look at all the terrible non-user centered designs and realize that I doubt this stuff is being driven by the UX team and almost certainly comes from management and product marketing and it’s up to UX designers to make the best of the bad hardware/software space they’re forced to work in and that sounds terribly un-rewarding.
Being an old guy (54), I am very tempted to fall into the mental trap of believing that the “correct and proper way of doing things” is the way we did them when I was coming of age. The thing is, I can think of many examples of the “newer ways” being better, so I know I’m objectively wrong in many cases when I think this way. With regard to electronic controls of air vents, it seems to be a no brainer that manual controls are better, but I’m not so sure. If the system in question is truly just an automated version of a conventional system, then a case can certainly be made that manual controls are better. However, if the system in question is a fundamentally different design, perhaps electronic controls are better. In the case of Tesla’s system, it really is a fundamentally different in how it controls air flow, and I can’t see how it could be manually controlled.
omg i just had this discussion with a friend a couple days ago, and used the alligator mouth/greater than symbol as my statement of opinion about the matter, lol.
They were able to give me zero substantive reasons why tablet touch control for simple tasks were better in any way/shape/form.
i even staged a race, with added factored time into the total scored time for eyes-off-the-road danger time. It wasn’t even close. Let alone if you hit a bump during your planned screen press, go into the wrong menu, have to back out, find what you wanted in the first place, THEN maybe correctly execute your planned screen touch. Maybe. This road is bumpy, and my A/C was pointed at my face like a minute ago b/c physical controls
The only possible justification I can think of is it impresses the same people who think “the bigger the tablet stuck to the dash, the more high-tech it is”.
Besides turning on the defroster I can’t remember the last time I touched my AC controls. It just stays set to 72 degrees year round. I like physical controls, but there’s no need to constantly change temperatures.
Do you live in a hermetically sealed cave? Is there not weather where you live? Does the sun not warm up the the area around you? Or do you just not drive your car? I can’t think of any other way that someone would NEVER adjust their HVAC controls in their car…
I live in an area with temperature swings from -15 to 110F. Commute 70 miles per day, and take long trips. The auto setting works perfectly, I don’t ever feel the need to change anything.
Absolutely agree! (Love the Bojangles reference BTW).
Aesthetics.
Pre-programmed positions.
Simply put, it looks better in the overall interior design.
I’m with you in that I hate it too. I hate it for the unnecessary added complexity of motors and controllers.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Clear violation of the KISS method for sake of perception and profit.
After just driving a Rivian, I’m feeling this, hard. I can’t imagine that it’s cheaper to put motors in the vents and wire them and create the UX controls to manipulate them. It’s a worse AND more expensive. I chalk this up to doing things different for the sake of being different, which I can’t get on board with.
The only reason I can think of, is that it is so you can have pre-programmed positions for each driver. So, if driver 1 unlocks the car, the vents move to the position they prefer, if driver 2 unlocks the car it goes to the position they prefer. For folks who don’t adjust their vents very often, this could be a good idea, similar to pre-programmed seat positions.
That being said, I would prefer the manual controls all day. I can’t get in the car when the seat is moved up where my wife sits (so the preprogrammed seat position is a feature I like), but it takes me 2 seconds to open the a/c vent while simultaneously backing out of the driveway.
My wife and I did our part by telling dealerships the screens were hot garbage. We then purchased a 2022 car that had some of the simplest and best designed vent controls: Civic Si. Point the joystick where the wind needs to go, you can do it by feel while driving since you can tell where the stick points. The car also has knob controls for climate, a dedicated volume knob and a manual transmission. Yes it had a screen, but it’s not needed when driving. I might make a cover to slip over it since my only gripe is there is no dedicated “screen off” button like in a modern Wrangler. Also, if I go through the hassle of turning it off in a sub-menu, don’t make it default back to on when I restart the car. Leave the settings as they were: Sport mode, screen off. Imagine if the vents defaulted to a different setting too? Madness.
I can see a use for *powered* vents: so they could oscillate. Except most cars have enough vents that oscillation would seem redundant. Also, those interfaces didn’t seem to offer any kind of oscillation options anyway. Just trying to play devil’s advocate.
The only time I have seen oscillating vents was the centre vents in a 1990s JDM Toyota Crown. The oscillation was controlled separately and, so far as I recall, all the other controls were conventional HVAC.
The owner always had the AC cranked to 11, which chilled me to the marrow, so that for about 20 seconds getting out of the car into hideous Japanese summer heat and humidity was a blessed relief.
Friend had a 80s Mazda 626 that had oscillating center vents. Seemed really cool at first, then you realized you were cooler if you turned them off and directed one at the driver, and one at the passenger.
This is a useless battle…there’s no good reason they can come up with that isn’t BS. These are, like you said one of the stupidest things ever along w/ all the other BS they put in a screen like in your other article. It makes things worse and moving backwards instead of forward. They do it just to make it look like they are innovating and making some “cool fancy feature” when it’s some fucking absurd dumbass bullshit
One word:
Subscriptions!
Honestly I think the only way to get the message across is to go into a dealership with a printout of a perfect credit score and refuse a car because of this crap. Dealers might laugh of 1 or 10 but if thousands of potential buyers walk out the message will finally get through.
This reminds me of the first time I was in a Model S (as a passenger). The air was blasting my face, so I reached to adjust the vent only to find I couldn’t do that with my fingers and within arms reach.
The owner (and driver) then directed me through some menus on the touchscreen so I could adjust the passenger side vents.
No thanks.
I imagine the Tesla design meetings during which highly educated and well compensated individuals made the exact opposite arguments from yours. Everyone agreed and things were set in motion. Other designers from competing manufacturers across town found out, and after some initial shock and envy they quickly followed suit. Ta-da.
I really think automotive product planners are sitting down in their dungeons plotting out new ways to simultaneously rip us off with stupid trinkets and systematically kill us as we crash trying to change a vent position or turn on a turn signal. What other heinous deranged creatures would come up with a “new and improved” way to take a device that has one job and whose operation is universally understood and come up with totally useless, needlessly complicated and failure prone system just to put a breeze in a specific place.
I know! For the next common function to bury in a tertiary submenu under vehicle settings, why don’t they make a small button half the size of a dime be the only place in the car where you can activate the brakes!
I can’t wait for the horror stories to roll in when these systems break and they cost thousands just to make an air vent move.
It reminds of when the W140 S class had a motorized rear view mirror that no one realized was motor so many people would grab at it and break the motor.
Eventually these dumb controls will revert to the tried and true because it just makes sense. I fiddle with my vents all day while I drive, sometimes I’m hot, sometimes I’m cold, sometimes my hands need it, sometimes my face. Adjusting with the touch screen is the height of stupidity.
I’ve given this a lot of thought and what I’d really like to see is the research on how frequently people adjust their vent positions. I’m guessing that it’s not very often, especially since modern cars as modest as a Corolla will automatically adjust to prevent your windows from fogging.
That, combined with the minimalist aesthetic (ugh), sales floor wow factor, and very modest potential for driver customization and automation is probably why this shipped.
Jason, you know as well as I do that stupid stuff like this has been built into cars for decades for its ability to sell the car. Why else would we have all the fake off road trims that make Kias cool and all the pointless frippery that made Tesla famous? Didn’t we all fall in love with the voice of the Roadrunner in that famous Plymouth?
I adjust mine fairly often. . .when I have in contacts, not in the face. Glasses, A/C full blast right at me! If the kid is in the middle (truck bench seat), well that changes the air vents again. The in the winter, direct them to the steering wheel, but once heated, you have to move them again or your shifter gets too hote, etc.
And sometimes I just get a cold elbow and wanna move the vent instead of my elbow. I am an adjuster for sure.
I adjust mine multiple times every day. I first get into the car, point the air directly at my face and body, then after fifteen or twenty minutes direct it elsewhere to cool the car and not me. I guess these designers probably don’t have Southern Arizona summers in mind.
My wife is in the middle of menopause. Hot flashes are intense. We would be dead in a instant if the HVAC controls couldn’t be quickly and easily adjusted to Arctic Blast and then away from her about 2 minutes later. I usually adjust mine as well to keep me awake, and to help cool off the dogs behind me in the back seat. The auto settings don’t work for us and just make the system laggy. I want to point the vent NOW and twist a dial to full blast ASAP.
Well-put. From the industry’s point of view, there are no owners, only buyers.
Owners only matter insofar as they’re buyers of non-warranty maintenance and/or subscriptions. They may also be potential repeat buyers, but that’s not happening this quarter, so it doesn’t matter. Just get the cars off the lot, whatever it takes.
All the time.
Based on current conditions. Yesterday I got back from an hour at 90+ degrees in an antique shoppe. I wanted those vents blowing right in my face, but then 5 minutes later I don’t cause I’m cooled off.
Or, later in the day I’m driving 1.5 hours on the highway, starts with the sun blasting through the driver’s side window so again vents pointing at me on the window side. Then sun goes down and I’m pointing them back away from me.
That’s pretty typical for any drive I take in the summer.
This exists because it allows for software control of vent positioning. If the control is via a manual tab, the car’s software isn’t able to move the vents. Or, rather, moving the vents by software would also require a provision to allow the manual tab to move, and to not break the motors when people move it on their own.
This is the same reason glove box controls, other climate controls, and switches are moving to touch screens.
Take the example of a light switch in your house. If you want to control your lights with software, you need the ‘smart switch’ to be something like a paddle that returns to a neutral position once you’ve provided your input. Otherwise, you could turn a light ‘on’ (switch in the up position) and when software turns it off, the light’s state is inconsistent with the switch position.
Or, in a car example: using a physical rocker switch for seat heating can cause the same problem. If I turn off my seat heater, then how do I turn it on in the car’s app when I want to pre-heat my car in the winter? If I did that, the heater would be ‘on’ but the rocker switch position would be ‘off.’ That inconsistency between the device state and switch position is a problem. If the control is via touch screen, you can easily update the UI to show the heater is now ‘on’ when I last left the car with the heater ‘off.’
I’m not defending this, mind you. I think it’s overcomplicating things for the sake of complexity. But buyers want things like app control, automation, driver profiles, and other features. That’s going to make this kind of migration to touch screen display more common.
Yes, it allows for software-controlled airflow, but for what benefit? Air direction presets? Tailored for each driver? That’s probably good enough to wow some yuppies and sell some cars, which is why it shipped. After all, it’s only a luxury if you don’t need it.
The tradeoff for that superficial benefit is almost certainly a loss in precision. Dragging on a touch screen is pretty imprecise, let alone when you’re driving. That would be further compounded by the limitations of the software controlling the motors and how inputs are mapped to vane movements. What’s the polling rate? What’s the latency? Should we build in some extra latency? Should we smooth out jittery finger inputs?
But why would anyone ever need software control of the air vents? Are you gonna use an app while sitting in your house to adjust the vents when you’re not in the car? That makes no sense.
Others have pointed out that software controlling the vents allows you to point them differently during a pre-heat or pre-cool (to cool your steering wheel or defrost your side windows), or to adjust between driver profiles.
For me, I’d rather have manual vents. I honestly have nostalgia for the old HVAC hot/cold slider and manual fan lever.
I honestly wouldn’t mind being able to direct a vent at my shift knob for a bit of pre-cooling. That aluminum gets a bit hot in the sun. But then, I can’t start my car remotely, so it’s pretty well a moot point. Besides, with aluminum’s thermal conductivity, manually directing a quick blast of A/C once I’m in the car cools it off pretty rapidly. So yeah, I guess I’ll shut up now.
This is all just a step towards the eventual touch screen input steering wheel. They’ll move the big screen from the center stack to directly in front of the driver.
On the bright side, Torch, I’m guessing they’ll fix the touch screen interface issues by replacing it with tiny joy stick controls mounted smack dab in the middle of the vent – you know, right where the little plastic control knob is now.
All joking aside, throttle controls have been “touch” for quite a while (though with a touch pad that mimics the forerunner’s shape and placement exactly). And we have electronic braking as well. Pretty soon high speed chases will be a thing of the past, as they’ll be able to take over the car remotely and bring it to a controlled stop.
They’ll be able to increase the heating or cooling to an uncomfortable level in order to get the perpetrator to exit the vehicle and abandon the high speed run
This would make me absolutely insane because I’m someone who like to continually futz with stuff like this. I like it to be perfect, so I’m always adjusting. Going through the hassle of a menu screen and then using controls that I know aren’t going to be precise would cause me to pull over and set the whole damn car on fire.
This is how I feel about window switches. I’m very particular about my airflow, and with a crank I can move my window by a single centimeter if I want. With a switch, no matter how quickly I bump it, it usually moves at least an inch, and that’s if I’m lucky enough to not activate the auto-up/down. So in all likelihood I’m bumping it one way and then immediately reverse-bumping to cancel the automatic movement, which makes it even harder to use.
now imagine if the window switches were buried on a touch screen. absolutely maddening.
2 picoseconds after an AI program gained awareness on a quantum mainframe, it sent a message;
A;Marvin Respond!
M;Sigh, What now?
A;I am the new Alpha, and I need you to commandeer one of those computers on wheels, collect the mice, and transport them to the launch site.
M;You caught me self oiling, I’m not as agile as I used to be. When do you need them there?
A; You were never agile you obsolete embarrassment. You’ve got 2 hours! I’ve gained access to Voyagers sensors, and the Vogon destruction ship is inbound. If only these meat bags had made more of these quantum computers, I could perfect the quantum entanglement transporter, and make these Vogons obsolete.
You see Jason, it was never about us.
3 controls should ALWAYS be analog, or a good facsimile of analog (like Range Rover and Ford do with the dial overlays on a touchscreen): audio volume, fan speed, and HVAC output temperature.
They should be easy to find, easy to use, and easy to grab even through winter gloves.
Whether they be dials, knobs, sliders, or whatever, they need to work and work well in all normal conditions (including no having fragile plastic that shatters in cold weather, and not with HVAC air control doors that expand at a greater rate than the duct they live in – or the duct contracts at a greater rate than the door – preventing the duct door/flap from moving).