Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Original title: "entity button, is it time to restore?" "

Few people seem to realize that their so-called full-touch smartphone also has at least three physical buttons.

In the area of the central console of the car, the touch screen operation has invaded on a large scale, and the physical keys have been routed, which has become an indisputable iron law in recent years. Those who question who are the vested interests that prevent mankind from entering a new era are stubborn, and those who do not conform to the trend want to be the second Kang Peikai (Elop's predecessor).

New cars piled up in September, so much so that the annual update of the tank 300 was insignificant. Normally, the annual change is not worth the pen and ink, but what is a little special this time is that in response to the voice and demand of customers, the new tank 300 is specially equipped with a row of air-conditioning physical buttons and will provide modification services for old car owners.

Of course, the range of action is very small, but this should be the first example of a domestic mainstream model, the reverse movement from the full touch screen to the physical key.

Mobile phones have not wiped out the mainstream argument of physical keys today, whether die-hards or innovators, almost all agree on the premise that touch screens and physical buttons are a life-and-death conflict-as smartphones have experienced in the past. However, the reality is that the addition of physical keys to the tank 300 does not affect the central control screen at all.

Although Ben Hu has always regarded the simple and brutal direct analogy between cars and mobile phones as shit--, no matter how talented its supporters are-- since it has to be an analogy, it might as well be more comprehensive.

The full-touch screen mobile phone, which is generally regarded as the "car-machine development reference system" in the industry, has already matured and is almost a sunset industry. The lock screen, volume plus / minus three physical buttons are still stuck on almost every smartphone, and iPhone even insists on an extra mute lever.

Many mobile analogy enthusiasts in the auto industry may not understand that since the birth of the iPhone in early 2007, there has been more than one smartphone trying to kill physical buttons, but these attempts end up being ambitious and shit.

One of the most well-known is that China removed the physical volume key for Mate30 Pro Innovation in 2019 and replaced it with a touch screen virtual volume bar. As a result, poor practicality was criticized, and the design without physical volume keys ended up in a generation that no longer appeared on Huawei phones.

Not to mention the Meizu vase machine Zero, which removes all physical keys. Then extended to the broad field of consumer digital, Apple introduced Touch Bar for the MacBook Pro in 2016. As a result, the ESC key was set separately as a physical key in 2020, and the Touch Bar was completely abandoned when the mold was changed in 2021, returning to the normal physical F function keypad.

So, do we still have to use digital terminals to interpret the development of cars and machines? Sorry, even the digital terminal itself has just experienced an excessive full touch screen from "looking beautiful" to a normal, rational and balanced return.

In other words, even if it has to be between a car and a mobile phone, draw an equal sign that represents "direct analogy derivation without specific analysis of the problem". The smartphone has never given a "full touch screen can do everything" signal. Even if you have to say that a signal can be found, it should be the opposite:

Since, smartphones, which allow users to pay 100% attention without affecting anyone's personal safety, more mature and powerful tactile feedback systems such as X-axis linear motors, and a much more tense space contradiction between screen display area and device volume, have so far been unable to kill all physical keys, so why do you think the car-machine system should be like this?

The logic of smartphones does not give any support, and trying to find a basis will only be unhelpful.

After rejecting the brainless analogy, we can discuss independently what is the difference between the car touch screen and the full touch screen phone. The answer can be complex, but one of the decisive factors is simple: car cockpit design never requires maximum display area across the entire available physical space, but mobile phones do.

In human terms, the benefits of a full screen on a smartphone are far greater than turning the entire car console into a screen. Each additional inch of a smartphone within the size of the palm of the hand will bring about a qualitative change in the experience (so the remaining physical keys are all on the side), while the control screen in the car cannot fill the cockpit at first, and then the space occupied by a row of physical keypads. The impact on the screen display is also much smaller.

In fact, these are all very easy to understand.

Back to reality, it's easy to find that there is almost no interior design for a full-touch model that really has no room for a row of physical buttons. Even for a giant screen design such as the Model 3, if you add a row of buttons around the screen, even if you directly deduct the corresponding screen display area, the negative impact on the screen display and function is close to zero.

Of course, the intelligent degree and experience of the intelligent cockpit need a large touch screen as the basis, but when the touch screen area has reached such as more than ten inches, whether it is one and a half inches, 14 inches or 15 inches, it has no effect on the real experience of using the intelligent cockpit.

To put it harshly, today's so-called intelligent cockpits might as well bubble x and take pictures of themselves. The car and machine intelligence has entered the bottleneck. Is it really the one and a half inch screen area that is missing? Get rid of all the physical buttons and give you a bigger touch screen, and then what can these smart cockpits do today?

Purely fictional life-and-death at this point must repeat the beginning of the words, physical keystrokes and touch screen operation, has never been an either-or alternative relationship. No one who opposes the full touch screen wants to replace every inch of the 14-inch touch screen with 10086 physical buttons. The layout of the car cockpit is far from tense enough to choose one of the two.

Do not be held hostage by the mainstream war of words on the market, as if recognizing that there is no room for physical buttons on the full touch screen, and as if calling for physical buttons means abandoning the big touch screen. There is no tension between the two modes of operation, either or pressure, we are not talking about "large touch screen or entity keys", but "large touch screen (whether or not) plus entity keys".

Speech recognition is often reflexively seen as a reason to give up physical keys. But also with reference to smartphones, who will hold the lock screen button and yell "Hey Siri help me lock the screen" instead of pressing it? When the co-driver answers the phone, you can't summon a voice assistant to mute the stereo in 0.3 seconds, and when the back row is napping in the music, you can't use your voice to get the car to turn down the volume without disturbing the other person.

Voice assistant is sometimes a powerful supplement, but it is not the ultimate solution.

So the question is, since all the existing non-touch screen operations, voice and even gestures cannot replace touch screen operations in all scenes, under the objective background of reintroducing physical buttons with little impact on large screens and intelligence, is it necessary to reset some physical buttons as appropriate?

This is the proposition we are going to discuss.

The benefits of introducing physical buttons must be measured. It is conceivable that compared with the touch screen operation, the physical button is not easy to misoperate in driving bumps, can achieve blind operation to reduce attention transfer, and has theoretical advantages in terms of convenience and driving safety.

In August this year, the Swedish media "Vi Bil ä gare" published a test result, in which they asked some vehicles to drive at about 110km / h, recording the time it took the driver to complete a series of functional operations during the period. This test is not specific to the full touch screen, and some models also have physical buttons or physical touch buttons outside the touch screen.

As a control group, the Volvo V70, an old car without a touchscreen system, took only 10 seconds for the driver to complete four operations with only physical buttons. The vast majority of new cars with touch-screen systems (not necessarily full-touch screens) take 20 to 30 seconds, and the MG Marvel R with the largest touch screen is also the worst, with 44.6 seconds.

This is not the first time a similar test has been done. A 2020 study by the British charity IAM RoadSmart showed that drivers' response delays to road conditions increased by 57 per cent and 53 per cent respectively when using Apple CarPlay and Android Auto touch screens. The two general systems, CarPlay and Android Auto, are selected to avoid the difference between different vehicles and machines to interfere with the test results.

More cautiously, IAM RoadSmart found that the completion of an operation actually takes 12 seconds of the driver's attention, while the driver's subjective perception is only 5 seconds. According to the test results, taking out your phone and texting while driving is safer than using a car touch screen, and people's intuitive misgivings about the safety of the touch screen are not unfounded.

Compared with physical buttons, touch screen is bound to consume more energy of the driver, occupy the attention of the road, and the adverse impact on driving safety is objective. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that we have to give up the intelligent future brought by large touch screens for the sake of absolute security.

In fact, only limited design of physical keys for some of the necessary functions can greatly flatten the risk of touch screen operation and reduce the attention deviation of the whole vehicle to an acceptable degree in actual driving. And physical buttons can not be arranged at will, it is necessary to find out the most reasonable functional settings scientifically in order to improve rather than reduce security.

For consumers, from the point of view of income-loss, adding a small number of physical buttons has little or no impact on the area of the central control screen and the intelligence of vehicles, while the gains are greatly improved in the safety and convenience of daily high-frequency operations.

The new tank 300 is the first case of a full-touch screen that goes against the current, but if you look at today's model library, from traditional car companies to new forces, from fuel cars to electric cars, the interior decoration scheme of touch screen + buttons is actually not uncommon, the difference is only the number of physical buttons, the category of coverage function.

Full touch screen often occupies the high ground of sound volume, which makes people mistakenly think that this is the status quo and popularity.

From the point of view of car companies, it is impossible to miss and pursue physical buttons as much as possible. Interior design can be easily simplified, and the ergonomics required for physical buttons can be handed over to UI design; movable parts can be greatly reduced, and the supply chain and after-sales Vipor blossoms; in line with today's consumer preference for technology, it is simply not a pleasure to get a reputation for attaching importance to users' opinions.

Touch has always been a good way to reduce costs, including touch screen and touch buttons. Honda has designed two sets of interior central control designs for Feido. The domestic version is our familiar high-end touch screen, and the buttons on the outside of the screen are also touch keys; while the overseas version is what we think is a rather quaint physical button + knob.

This difference is, of course, how global car companies deal with consumer preferences in different regions. However, when the price positioning comes to higher-end models such as Civic and Zhiji, the domestic version uses the same physical buttons and knobs as the overseas version to match the touch screen. It is conceivable that the cost of the two operation modules is higher or lower.

The most "conservative" (as opposed to the current mainstream full-touch screen trend) hybrid solutions such as GAC MOTOR GS8, under the central touch screen, are extremely restrained by setting only two physical switches (excluding emergency flashers): automatic air conditioning and front windshield to remove fog. The existence of these two physical keys, and the central touch screen well water does not interfere with the river water.

These two entity function keys are obviously the decision after weighing and screening under the extremely limited space. The air conditioning switch is operated at high frequency, and the windshield defogging is obvious: when the wind blocks the fog, it is best not to distract the driver from looking for the fogging switch in the touch screen system.

In recognition of the consensus that the display area of a large touch screen needs to be retained to the maximum, the layout space of physical keys is usually less than 10 in a row (excluding floor, retaining bar, skylight, etc.). So if you want to extract some functions from the touch screen system and assign them to entity keys, you should mainly consider two aspects when selecting functions:

One is high frequency, such as air conditioning switch, volume adjustment; the other is urgency, such as mute button, air conditioning defog, and so on. Needless to say, the former has a higher frequency of use, the cumulative benefits of convenience brought by physical keys are greater; more importantly, the latter, although the frequency of use is not high, the reaction time left to drivers when needed is very short, which is more likely to cause panic and mistakes, that is, the advantage of single convenience brought by physical keys is greater.

In the above-mentioned test and study of "Vi Bil ä gare", the Volvo C40 and Dacia Sandero, which perform best except the old V70, are only about 3 seconds longer than the 10 seconds of the V70. Both of them belong to large touch screen + a small number of physical key operations, and the design of touch screen system UI is relatively simple and clear.

Drivers who have never driven a vehicle with physical buttons for a long time, whether full or partial, may not be able to understand the inconvenience of operating on a touch screen alone. nor do they realize how much extra attention they are distracted from full-touch operation. But this does not mean that the corresponding inconveniences and risks do not exist.

It is precisely because there are still some problems with the full touch screen, people have been looking for ways to make up for it. For example, touch vibration solves the problem of confirmation feedback, such as sliding operation part solves the positioning problem, but as long as the science fiction touch screen technology that can create tactile difference does not exist, the advantage of physical keystroke requires less attention, that is, the advantage of blind operation will continue to exist.

It seems that since Toyota introduced Weiqi more than a decade ago, choosing the first large-screen navigation rather than VVT-i as a breakthrough, the screen-expensive tone has been deeply embedded in our genes. The next mobile Internet and smartphones confirmed this preference over and over again, and the genes moved as soon as they saw the screen.

But the trend of a single full-touch screen that has been going on for years is loosening. Adding physical buttons is all a hassle for car companies, unless there are enough users to make calls that cannot be ignored. Then the tank 300 actively adds physical buttons and proactively advertises, which can prove that the real demand for physical buttons is gathering again, so that car companies have the incentive to take action.

The world will not always go one way, otherwise it will not be brainless all the way blindfolded all the way to the end. Of course, the general trend of touch screen and cockpit intelligence is irreversible and unnecessary, but at least at this stage, it is worth discussing and thinking about abandoning physical keys and relying only on full touch screen and voice.

Of course, we are not talking about going to the other extreme of atavism: cutting off the big touch screen and all-round keystrokes, but the intelligent cockpit, which is regarded as politically correct, full-touch screen and keyless cockpit, is it necessary to "welcome" a small number of physical keys to participate in it; will the more diversified and complex mode of operation of the central control screen be more in line with the overall interests of consumers' pursuit of intelligence and security and convenience?

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: autocarweekly (ID:autocarweekly), author: ao'hu

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