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

In 2002, the first joint venture domestic Toyota car, and then FAW Toyota's millennium beginning, Park Shu's "Colorful Days" star, VIOS Weichi, made a decision against his ancestors: he gave up the advanced VVT-i engine at that time, but carried the first on-board GPS navigation system in the domestic market.

Chinese people's preference for big screens can be traced back as early as 20 years ago.

It was not difficult to make this decision at that time. Although the absence of the VVT-i caused a lot of regret in the auto media, consumers with real money are obviously more likely to be impressed by the proudly standing LCD screen on the center console-rather than a few baffling English letters hidden under the cabin cover.

In fact, not to mention 2002, is today 2022, really can not Baidu accurately say what VVT-i is, how to work, what use, there are only a few people. And GPS car navigation is very different, even if you have never touched the car, you also know that "there is a small TV in the car" is a rare and honorable thing.

Just like the afternoon when Macondo residents saw the ice, the first generation of Weichi showed the Chinese what the row of a family car is. Whether there is a screen in the car, how big it is and what it can do has since become an important standard for people to identify "high-end", and it has not changed to this day.

"location" and "area" in the early years, the central control screen was not as crucial as it is today, and the size is not as large as it is today. when the car interior is decorated with a 6-inch 8-inch display, there are generally three mainstream layouts, and the important reference is the air outlet of the central air conditioner.

Behind the air conditioning outlet is the ventilation pipe, both the surface and the back structure need to avoid the projection area of the screen panel, so the central control screen has only three options: above the central air outlet, below or in the center. Of course, there are differences between invagination, protruding and even folding, but the relative position of the air outlet is nothing more than these three.

The screen is placed above the air outlet, the position is closer to the windshield, the driver's line of sight deviates less from the road, which is conducive to driving safety and more convenient to observe navigation and other information. But in the non-touch era, operation buttons are no longer suitable to surround the screen, so we see the integrated control module pioneered by BMW iDrive.

Putting the screen under the air outlet is obviously not conducive to raising the height of the screen and has a negative impact on driving safety and driver fatigue. However, in the non-full touch screen era, the buttons arranged around the screen are the mainstream mode of operation, and the era of mixed use of touch screen and buttons is also closer to the occupants. This is probably the most common screen layout.

Putting the screen in the middle of the air outlet is a compromise, but it limits the space for the increase of the screen area, and the vertical air outlet also limits the interior design, with relatively few cases.

In fact, as early as that time, the central control screen was still a small 8-inch square, and "fighting for territory" was already a matter of choice. Today, this problem has been interpreted to the extreme. The ten-inch "iPad" and the three-screen or even four-screen scheme make the screen an endless Huarong Road.

The relatively traditional distributed multi-screen with the least change is actually changing the air-conditioning control panel into a new functional screen. Coupled with the non-exaggerated central control screen, LCD instrument screen, and the usually optional passenger entertainment screen / driver seat HUD, the so-called three-screen or four-screen scheme is essentially a natural development and continuation of the layout of the conventional central console.

This change does not change the basic regional relationship of the center console, and it is still necessary to choose the relative position of the air outlet and the central control screen. Audi and Jaguar chose the air outlet at the top, and the central control screen is closer to the function screen, but it also limits the increased space for each screen size, making it easier to operate and get used to, but it may not be sought after by the Chinese.

In fact, there are no more than three ways to significantly increase the screen size.

First, like Tesla, especially Model 3 / Y, the size of the central control screen is increased to the extreme. Second, like the ideal ONE, Zhiji 7, BMW I series, with multiple screens of similar size to form a multi-connected screen. Third, such as Ulay, Ford Mach-E, mainly rely on vertical screen or similar vertical screen to expand the display area.

Of course, these three methods are sometimes mixed, such as Mercedes-Benz EQS and Gaohe, which are equivalent to the combination of vertical screen and multi-connected screen.

For a single super-large horizontal screen, when the size increases to a certain limit, it is often necessary to compress the air conditioning outlet area down. Otherwise, the large screen too high will block the field of view, moving down may encroach on the horizontal leg space, far away from the driver's position and is not convenient for touch operation.

Wei brand mocha, smart genie # 1 can also design the screen above the air outlet, while dark blue SL03, polar krypton 001, Xiaopeng P7 and so on further compress the air outlet volume, mostly using hidden air outlet similar to Tesla.

The horizontal span is larger, which also makes the safety touch on the upper right side of the screen much more difficult during driving. For this reason, Deep Blue has designed a main screen that can be rotated left and right to take into account the use of both the main driver and the passenger.

The multi-connected screen limits the display area of a single screen, especially the limited vertical height; for the horizontal triple screen, if you want to take into account the main and auxiliary operation of the central screen, the driver on the right side of the screen may not be able to reach it.

Because there is no co-driver screen, the BMW I-series tilts the central control screen to the driver in a flexible way, while zero running turns the central screen into a ladder-like bulge, which solves this problem to some extent.

Each screen layout has its own advantages, limitations and tradeoffs, and there is not an absolutely perfect car screen layout.

Physical buttons, limited restoration car companies do everything they can, more or less to make some compromises, just to increase the total area of the screen inside the car. However, in the face of more than ten inches of super-large screen, "what on earth can be used to do while driving" or "which applications are qualitatively improved by a few more inches" is still an unsolved problem.

One of the fundamental reasons why mobile screens have been increasing in size, shrinking borders and increasing screen share over the years is that there is almost nothing we can look away from smartphones today, which is not only non-existent on cars, but even the other way around.

The second reason is that if we recall why 5-inch mobile phones were too big, but today we often feel that 6.7inches are not enough, open some mainstream App that are commonly used in daily life, and take a screenshot to see how much area on a page is occupied by useless banner, live broadcast frame, loan entrance, and red packet pendant.

The in-car screen is in a completely different situation and cannot be linked to the growing trend of mobile phone screens. Smartphones prefer to abandon physical buttons for the sake of a larger screen size, which is a conflict between the hard volume index of "to put it in the pocket" and "the screen as big as possible". The bigger the screen in the car, the better, but is it really so urgent that there is no room for even a row of physical buttons?

Obviously not. Mercedes-Benz's new S-class home screen is equipped with a row of physical buttons, which, if removed, will certainly further expand the screen area, but to such a small extent it will hardly have a perceptible impact on the amount of information displayed.

What's more, do smartphones really give up all physical buttons? Those high-frequency and fast operations, such as unlocking the lock screen and the volume, still exist in the form of physical buttons after the full touch screen has been developed for more than a decade. Even the temple of large-screen science and technology lovers actually follows the principle of "not going to extremes".

Back to the big car screen, people pursue a larger and larger screen area, but there are no matching application scenarios and application requirements-neither can they devote a lot of attention to the driving time period (which occupies the main time of using the car). There are no ecological applications that have to rely on on-board screens.

As a result, the benefits of a larger car screen are often directed to achieve fewer levels of menu UI. However, awkwardly, one of the major reasons for the increase in the middle level and occupying the area of the car UI is that many high-frequency functions have been forcibly integrated into the UI to become virtual buttons. With high-frequency and urgent functions, it may be necessary to restore physical buttons to a limited extent.

After the car-mounted large screen nearly fills the cockpit in various ways, the display area has increased much faster than needed in real applications, and the super-large screen area cannot always be prevaricated by non-moving scenes such as "watching movies while parking and charging".

In the real sense, the car screen has become a smartphone-style so-called mobile terminal, and it is almost the only possibility to realize fully autonomous driving as soon as possible, otherwise, relying solely on parking and co-driver entertainment, it will never cover the personal travel process of the driver's seat. this is not enough to support a so-called "terminal". If this vision is too far away, it may be necessary to think about how to move from "big enough" to "more convenient".

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

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