Slashdot Mirror
Computers and Cars: A Maddening Experience?
Johnny writes "The nytimes has a review of the new BMW 745i iDrive system. The iDrive system combines some 270 functions, some accessable by voice, into one tactile feedback joystick mouse thingy. While maybe easier for computer junkies, the reviewer finds the interface 'maddening, especially at first' and wonders out loud what a car from Microsoft might be like, citing that the 745i offers a clue. Without a key, a floor shifter or really any buttons, this might be the future for cars, are the masses ready to wrestle with computers just to go to Wawa for milk?"
I think you get my drift. Driving a Microsoft car would be annoying and at the same time, dangerous.
At a recent computer expo (Comdex), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that get 100 miles to the gallon." Recently,General Motors addresses this comment by releasing this statement, "yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?" Below is a synopsis of the Microsoft Car: Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail, and you would have to re-install the engine. for some strange reason, you would accept this too. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But then you would have to buy more seats. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times faster, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5% of the roads. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades for their cars, which would make their cars run much slower. The oil, gas and alternator lights would be replaced with single "general car fault" lights. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
pronoblem
a WaWa is basically a 7-11 in the mid-atlantic states, and they seem to be everywhere (and I do mean EVERYWHERE). Some jokes regarding this include "You're from South Jersey if .... you know what a WaWa is, and can name the locations of about 10 of them," "You can give directions by where the WaWas are"
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Yes, the BMW iDrive is really nifty. I remember reading about it in a Popular Science, for the first time, about a year ago. I enjoy cars, and I enjoy gadgets. The new BMWs, equipped with the iDrive, combine both into a powerful beast, worthy of only the best drivers. Then again, don't all new BMWs fit this shoe?
I can't wait to test drive one. A maddening experience it may be, but I'm sure years of gaming will help me get the hang of it quickly.
I hope that they have a cli version of the interface. I'd be quite disappointed if I had to use the mouse and/or joystick. After all, if you saw a child dart across the road chasing his ball, wouldn't you want to just type in, "killall -9 movement"?
;^P
testing out my trending skills
There's another fairly balanced article and discussion about iDrive over at Kuro5hin that's worth checking out. The author has similar mixed feelings about the technology, and talks about how other car manufacturers like Saab and Audi are developing similar systems.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Lessee...need to move my seat back...ummm.
U-U-D-L-L-RF-D-L-U
dang..scissor-kicked the driver.
Oh well...might as well finish him.
D-D-L-U-LF-UF-D-U--D-L-L
Thwack!
Now I'm not saying cars aren't easy to use. However, one cant compare it to computers that easily. (the iDrive can be compared though). The main reason that the interface to cars has not changed in almost a 100 years is simple. Backwards compatibility, and consumer familiarity. Thats right.. It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is. After all, a consumer cant be expected to take multiple driving tests in order to get a license for each make of car. They had to standardize it so that a person who has driven one car can drive just about ANY car. They cant have licenses that say "Okay for Toyota, Chrysler, and Dodge only".
Its interesting how familiarity with the interface also happens to be one of the BIGGEST problems that linux faces when trying to enter the desktop market. People who have taken the effort to learn or attend courses on using computers learnt the Microsoft interface to software. When they come across a unix one, they aren't familiar with it, and cant use it as well.. regardless of whether its better or not.
The iDrive is like linux. Sure its harder to use in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you managed to get by without it.
Just my 2 cents worth.
- Tempestdata
Pessimists... you need to consider the advantages of a Microsoft car:
your car would seek out and destroy the competition.
the hood would be welded shut. No worrying about it ending up at the chop shop for parts.
its sheer size will trump any SUV on the road today.
- The electronic parking brake is unintuitive and dangerous. One of
the factors that make some cars safer than others is the ease of use of the
parking break in situations in which the main brake lines lose pressure or
the pedal snaps off. This causes the liability and collision insurance
rates to be slightly higher.
- A standard shift lever on an automatic transmission is considered a
safety feature, as both the position and the dash lights make it
immediately apparent to the driver that the car is in gear. The 745i has
only the light, and even at that, the light is stuck in the middle of a
confusing, crowded console. This also increases risk and thus insurance
rates.
- The fact that many Americans are afraid of technology and unable to
perform a task as simple as changing their VCR clock or installing a new
hard drive is a chilling reminder of the fact that valets, test drivers,
and other "guest drivers" of the 745i will be putting the driving public at
risk and increasing the owner's insurance rates.
- Since it is extraordinarily difficult to do something as simple as
turning on headlights or changing the radio station, the driver's attention
is likely to be diverted from the road.
All told, my actuary friend told me that the insurance rates for the first year that a driver owns a 745i are going to be astronomical. Rates for successive years are slightly lower, although the vehicle is generally regarded in the community to be a threat to life and property, and a lawsuit waiting to happen.The car is a real technology lover's paradise: active suspension, GPS, umpteen dozen little controls over everwhere. And yes, there is a key, but it's just a little puck that you insert into the dash. It has it's own little computer and calculates rolling security codes on the fly to foil car theives.
Now about the only thing I didn't like was the stinking iDrive system. It just plain sucks!! It way to hard to control things that I used to be able to push a button and do. Like surfing through three levels of menus just to turn on the defroster. Stupid.
The interface itself is ok, the button is hard to get used to becuase it is a joystick and wheel/button in one. And when you do something illegal it vibrates. Slick enough, but the interface is god awful.
Luckily this thing controls non-critical functions, I could see lawsuits brought if it controlled the gear selection or traction system.
Someone also told me that the software inside the iDrive is actually WinCE, can anyone verify this? If so, it would be truly a MS car after all.
BMW has a good track record of innovation, but I think this is a serious detour.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
"European Car" magazine reviewed the new 7 series in their February, 2002 issue.
They mention that in 1953, the BWM 502 had 26 control and indicator functions. In the late 90's, the 7-series had over 70 functions, with as many indicators, and over 35 control elements (buttons, etc.)
Something *had* to be done to reduce the complexity of the cockpit. While driving down the road you do not want the person in the car next to you trying to figure out which of the 40 buttons on the dash controls what. You can do it by feel with more simple cars, but cars as advanced as the 7-series will be simply too much.
Most reviews I have read (I am a big car buff, especially BMWs) all say that once you get used to the system (go out in your driveway for a Saturday), you can figure the system out fairly quickly, and that using it (once you have it figured out) is actually easier than a bunch of buttons.
Also realize this is the first generation of the system. User interface will only get better.
I recently drove a Mercedes Benz C320 with the navigation system and cell phone options. They were all combined with the stereo onto one LCD. Once I figured out the relatively easy interface, I was able to do more by touch than I have been able to with other cars using buttons.
Having one consistent interface made things much easier.
About the only problem I foud, and the only problem mentioned in most reviews, is the ability to do multiple thigns at once. You cannot raise the stero's volume at the exact same time as you adjust the passenger-side heat.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Car controls have changed dramatically through the years. The high-beams used to be via a footswitch. Windshield wipers only moved onto a stalk on the console very recently. Transmission controls have varied widely: stalks, buttons, levers, etc. True, the main controls (wheel, throttle, brake) haven't moved too much, but one might argue there aren't many variations possible if you a) want to steer with two hands and b) want to speed up/slow down with your feet. There were tillers on some early cars, but the public tended to prefer the wheel. Also, remember that engine controls in the old days were incredibly complex, letting you adjust engine timing, butterfly valve settings, and myriad other features.
I think we've seen plenty of change. Just try to drive a car from the twenties or thirties some time.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
the reviewer finds the interface 'maddening
I can see why, if the interface was designed by the same people who designed their website.
When I pulled up their site I got the worst mis-rendered disaster I have ever seen. I got a column of text wordwrapped at !!14!! characters. Some of the text was invisible on black background. I got random little lines all over the screen. I don't know if it's because I'm using Netscape. I don't konw it it's because I have cookies shut off. But I *do* know it's not just because I have JavaScripting shut off. How do I know? I tried turning it Java script on and reloading. It actually wound up rendering *less* of the page.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"press OK to open the air-bag"
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
...when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Wait...come to think of it, that's probably just how it would happen. But I guess I wouldn't need it then.
I hate cars that try to be smarter than the driver. Give me my old Morgan any time. I do miss it so. <sigh>
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Registration-free link
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I am in Ontario, and from the story's link had surmised that the official town mascot was now the hoagie. Maybe their goose is cooked...
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
On a recent business trip, I had the opportunity to drive a new 745i. All I have to say it what in the hell was BMW thinking? My first impression of the car walking up to it was, wow.....it's ugly. My next impression was sitting in the drivers seat and wondering how to turn on the headlights. (it was night) I kept thinking that this was absolutely like a Microsoft designed interface.
Any vehicle that has a user interface so non-intuitive that one needs to pull out the owners manual to adjust the mirrors, figure out how to shift, and turn on headlights is just plain bad design. And what is up with the parking brake?!!? Furthermore, I like being able to determine what gear I am in by touch, not having to look at a display someplace. BMW vehicles in the past have had wonderful driving experiences with intuitive placement of controls, but if this is the way things are going with BMW, I will be looking at Audi (the A8 is a wonderfully understated and competent automobile with a superlative driving environment.) BMW should know what they are doing and I can only hope this is an accidental release. (They got it right with the Mini afterall.)
Quirky is one thing (Porshe and Saab with weird places for the ignition key), but the 745i's interface is downright unacceptable, bordering on dangerous.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I remember another car with a similar system, perhaps Alfa Romeo. The problem with a "one knob control" is that
a) Many functions will be not directly accessible, but in a submenu. Instead of just turning up the heat you have to go Climate control->Temperature-> and then adjust. This puts some strain on the driver I imagine, much like handling a mobile phone.
b) Because of that, one needs feedback in order to know what one is doing. You will either have to look at a little screen (like in the Alpha Romeo) and take your eyes of the road (very dangerous), or listen to voice feedback and go through the menus that way (very annoying and slooow).
I much prefer old-style controls, so I can just blindly reach for the various buttons. No need to look at them even briefly. By all means improve the controls by laying them out well, or automating part of it, like for example the climatronic system. But please leave me with ordinary buttons and knows, don't make me use some daft menu. I am all for gadgets and such but this is plain dangerous.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Who said, "Every interface is learned, only the nipple is intuitive" ?
A bit off-topic, but amusing. Here's a little known but interesting fact. GT bikes patented (and trademarked) the "iDrive" name for its race-level full-suspension mountain bikes (and they're beauties!). BMW came up with the same iDrive name a few months later and thought they'd roll it into production. GT, of course, put the brakes on, but they came to a friendly understanding and now BMW licenses the iDrive name from GT.
;-) started with mountain bikes.
So the next time any of you especially wealthy ones are out cruising in your iDrive-equipped BMWs, just remember the name (like all things great
Just give me the basics, wheel, clutch, brake, gas, and a gear shift....
:) It has also caused some cars to have electrical gremlins..very hard to track down.
My Corvette has 5 different computers in it. They monitor everything. It has a central DIC, driver information center, for most things. It tells you all stats on the car as well as any warnings or problems. The good part is the Active Handling system. The computers in the car constantly monitor many things... lateral G's, accelaration, braking, tire slippage, etc. Unlike other cars with basic traction control is that the Vette will correct problems for you. If it senses the back end coming around it'll independantly brake a single will to bring the car inline. Very handy, and has saved me before when hitting loose gravel or water.
The bad part is that everything is computer controlled. Want to put in a good alarm system? Good luck.
MS-DOS: You get in the car and try to remember where you put your keys. Failing to find them, you climb on your bike and pedal over. You have to make several trips since you can only carry one thing at a time.
...
... the hell with it, I'm gonna stay home and play with the car ...
OS/2: It's a great car, it drives well, but it will only work on 70% or the roads in your area. After fueling up with 6,000 gallons of gas, you get in the car and drive to the store with a motorcycle escort and a marching band on parade. Halfway there, the car blows up, killing you and half the town.
WINDOWS: You get in the car and drive to the store very slowly; because attached to the back of the car is a freight train. Other than that, it's pretty neat; it's all run by pushbuttons, but it only goes about 35mph, you gotta warm it up for twenty minutes before it'll run, and it manages to hit 3 phone poles, a mail box, a stop sign, and two other cars on the way.
WINDOWS NT: It LOOKS really fast, like a Formula 1 car, and it's built so low to the ground that you can't take it out of the driveway. You get in the car and write a letter that says "Go to the store". Then you get out, and mail the letter to your dashboard.
WINDOWS 95: You call the garage to find out it isn't fixed yet, but you can keep the Windows loaner until it is.
MACINTOSH SYSTEM 7: You get in the car to go to the store. The car drives you to church, because the store has mysteriously exploded.
UNIX - You get in the car and type "GREP STORE". You screech off at 200 miles per hour, and arrive at the barber shop.
UNIX-WARE - Great deal, and looks really cool. Doesn't have an engine, though... Call Novell, buy an engine. No tires. Call Novell. No transmission. Call Novell. No clutch. Call Novell. No carbs. Call Novell. They don't support carbs anymore. Buy a fuel injector. No steering wheel
NETWARE - You have to hire a CNE to chauffeur you around, but he keeps wrecking the car.
AMIGA - You get in the car and tell it to go to the store. It takes you to a shopping mall on the moon.
TALIGENT/PINK: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montelban, who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his Learjet.
AIX - Cool. A cross between a BMW and a Hyundai pickup truck.
LINUX - The developers have been here overnight and changed everything again. You wonder what the new cattle-catcher front end and rear gun turret are for. Car won't start. Hot-wire the ignition. No oil pressure. Add oil. Bad backfire, injection system needs adjusting. Check manual - nope, manual's three months out of date. Tune injectors by ear. Stereo is missing the left channel, tire pressure seems low, needs a good wax job
where is the "I feel for ya, but that's some funny ass shit" moderation?
The Bruce Schneir book "Secrets and lies" talks about one of the models of Porsche which had a bug where in which if the gas tank has less than one litre of gas and takes a real hard swerve, the subsequent accumulation of gas in the tank to one side, would confuse the onboard chip to believe that the tank is empty and thereby shutting down the car immediately.
I can imagine a couple of new born dot com millionaires who had no clue what the fuck just happened.
Rapid Nirvana
Why two? Because typically, you only have to frob ONE control in a car to accomplish your goal. Want to increase the fan speed? Slide over the lever or twist the knob. Activate the hazard lights? Push or pull the control, or flip a switch. And so on. The electric e-brake is a big mistake too, but I won't go into that yet.
The ONLY reasonable way to have a LCD interface in a car is to have a row of mode buttons; One for environmental controls, one for stereo controls, one for navigation, et cetera; And have all the controls for that mode available once you enter it. Personally I am a big favor of real buttons, but i know they're somewhat impractical here. You COULD easily have a row of physical buttons down the side of the screen with changing labels next to them, but you must NOT have the top and bottom buttons scroll the list up and down. The whole point of having "hard" buttons is that you can reach for them by touch and not have to look at the panel.
Voice recognition is a good idea, at least in a luxury car like this one designed to be quiet inside. With the use of a DSP you should even be able to make it work nicely while the radio is playing. But it doesn't solve this problem at all.
The fact that you have to enter a sub-screen of a settings screen to access some functions is just wrong. BMW should know better than that. Also, using a mouse-type interface is stupid; It should be a touch-screen, period. If you use a pointer, you have to watch the pointer, which is going to divert your attention from the road. Pure idiocy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hi! How are you?
I take you to this place in order to have your advice.
See you later! Thanks
http://m-a-t.com/msgates/
Be sure and click on the "related article" too, Menus Behaving Badly:
My beagle, whose job description is "scan roadsides for squirrels," is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.
In my last car, I had an aftermarket radio that I bought without thinking about it too much. Instead of a volume control knob, it had volume up and volume down buttons. They tried to make it clever, with one of those controlled-backlash features--that is, each UP press would take you up four units in volume, then each DOWN press would take you down a single unit.
It drove me bananas. I can't believe just how annoying and distracting it was to use that thing.
Plus, it had one of these deals where you can set eighteen FM stations and six AM stations--there's a row of six station buttons and another button that cycles you through FM-1, FM-2, FM-3, and AM. After about a month I finally got clued in and set FM-1, FM-2, and FM-3 each to the SAME set of stations. _I_ can't remember an arbitrary four-by-six array of stations and I don't think anyone else can, either.
Setting the clock for daylight savings time? Twice a year I would say "this CAN'T be that hard, I'm SURE I can remember enough from last time to figure it out. Let's see, you press and hold the TIME button for three seconds and then hold the station 1 button while you press the "volume up" button? Nope, not it." And twice a year I'd have to stumble into my house and try to find where I had left the manual for the thing...
What WILL Donald Norman do when EVERYTHING in the world is a badly-designed computer interface and there ARE no natural objects with plain "affordances" to point do?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
wait until somebody rear ends you one day because they were busy reading their 20 volume instruction manual trying to figure out how to put the window down.
Okay, if we are going to be relating convience store chains to operating systems, I'd like to point out that Wawa wouldn't be the Linux of them. It might rank around the Mac OS 6 level (with 7-11 ranking in at good ol' DOS). Sheetz is a far better chain than Wawa and would be the Linux of them...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
The BMW engineers desperately need to read The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. He knows a lot more about interfaces than they do. Computers are cool and all, but WIMP interfaces are hardly the pinnacle of good design.
Even in this day and age, many of us still decry the evils of the automatic transmission (me being one of them). There are reasons why a great many cars are still made with a stickshift, the main one being that those of us who know how to drive a stickshift find that the automatic transmission tries to second-guess the driver too much and ends up getting things wrong, or at least not as smooth as they could have been. Even those "auto-stick" things they put in newer cars aren't capable of shifting at different RPM speeds very well. The only coding analogy I can think of is comparing HTML coding in Notepad to HTML coding in FrontPage.
I think BMW is really shooting themselves in the foot with this idea. Sure, this technology will probably eventually catch on much like the automatic transmission did (I expect to see this idea flourish in the "family vehicle" market), but it will generally be detested by those drivers that like having an honest-to-God interface with the car instead of having to deal with a machine that assumes too much. And seeing as how BMW typically markets themselves to the sports car user...
If this was something like cruise control, where I could push a button, turn off the computer and do the driving myself... maybe. But even then there's no way you'd see a device like this in a manual transmission. And if it doesn't have three pedals, I refuse to use it.
OK, there may be some genuine safety advances that make the car more complicated, for example and air-conditioning system will help keep the windscreen from fogging up. But what functions do you need to drive a car safely?
BMW et al. can make running the stereo and other non-essential features as interesting as they want, so long as they don't mix them up with essential functions. People who get used to a particular UI aren't going to be the only people driving this car. Nor do we particlarly need a situation where you need a certification in a particular model of car before you can drive it safely.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
In my opinion, the worst flaw in automobile user interface design in history is that headlights stay on by default, even with the key removed, unless you explicitly turn them off. Does anyone have a good example why you would want a car's headlights to stay on (permanently until the battery runs out) after you have left the car and taken the keys with you? Please let the discussion begin.
:) I still see plenty of 2002 model cars with thier lights on in parking lots, so I know the problem is still not solved.
:)
Subarus are the only pre-1992 cars I've seen that do not exhibit this behavior. My next car will most likely be a Subaru, for this (among many other) reasons.
No doubt this car still does this, and now you have to go though 5 menus or so to turn them off rather than just rotating a dial.
It is obvious from the contents of the above post that the insurance industry's greed is to blame for the fact that in the high-tech decade of '00, our cars have seen few improvements over the mechanical controls that ran them in the 1960s.
And me without any mod points. Somebody please throw a +1, Funny or two at the parent of this post. I think it's hilarious.
I think this is funny. Slashbot tries to slur Microsoft because of the BMW iDrive, yet doesn't even realize that the iDrive uses Windows CE.
http://www.microsoft.com/insider/bmw7series.htm
The system was actually built by Siemens along with all the custom software and such.
Christ slashbot is so out of touch with the computing world it's not even funny, this thing has been in the news for the past year.
OK, what is Wawa and why would you go there for milk? We've got these great things called grocery stores here where I live and they have had milk for sale for as long as I have gone there. I often buy milk in large quanties (at a substantial discount!) and bring it home, where I place it in a personal cooling unit known as a refridgerator. The really great thing about this is that I can go get some and not have to wait for my car to boot up.
And seeing as how BMW typically markets themselves to the sports car user...
No BMW typically markets themselves to car users who have enough money to buy BMWs. And this useful piece of technology will certainly cost more than your average heater lever and hazard light knob, so BMW will market the iDrive cars to car users who have enough money to buy iDrive cars. And then these users will naturally deselect themselves as they cruise down the road trying to find the submenu for airconditioning. Which will naturally allow the population of car users without enough money for iDrives, but enough money for a standard BMW to grow, due to fewer natural predators. It is really a brilliant marketing strategy on BMW's part.
BTW, the UIs for autos were not standardized in their current form very early on. I got the explanation how to drive a 1920 Ford truck a couple of weeks ago. These were very strange to the modern driver. I'm not sure if anything besides the steering wheel was in the same place as it is on typical cars of today. I think there was a brake pedal, but it was rightmost. Other pedals did different things to the gears, but there were assorted levers involved in gear-shifting, too. So, it takes time for these things to get worked out. Nowadays, that means thousands of lawsuits while things get worked out.
> Without a key, a floor shifter or really any
> buttons, this might be the future for cars, are
> the masses ready to wrestle with computers just
> to go to Wawa for milk?"
I agree that this could be a problem.
In the maddening drive for car manufacturers trying to differentiate their cars, they're going to end up causing more harm than good.
The good thing about cars is they all generally have the same interface. So if you've got more than one car in the family or you're renting a car, you generally know how to use it without having to take a 3-hour class as suggested by BMW in the article.
With each manufacturer trying to come up with their own nifty interface, you're suddenly going to have lots of cars with wildly different user interfaces. BMW with their weird iDrive thing, Mercedes with their voice recognition, and who knows what Audi and Lexus will come up with.
Of course there are few chances for someone to rent a 740i as a rental, but if this sort of thing filters down to the entry level cars, expect chaos.
Cars aren't like computers, where a non-standard interface causes a major catastrophe. Click the wrong button on a computer because you're unfamiliar with what it does may, at worst, delete a file you didn't intend to delete. In a car, unfamiliarity with the controls can cause an accident.
Here's an example. After having all Japanese cars, I recently bought a German roadster. In my car the cruise control knob is right next to the turn signal, which is in turn mounted kind of low. When I first got it, the first few times I tried to make a right turn, I ended up engaging the cruise control. That was disorienting, to say the least. I eventually got used to it and it was just one interface problem.
I can imagine what it'll be like if you can't work the iDrive dial-thingy.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Cars have changed many times. I have driven cars from the 30's and it isn't that much more complicated if you already know how to drive a car with a standard with partial or no synchro on the manual transmission and with manual choke. If you can't do that, what the heck are they doing letting you drive an 1800 kg hopefully-guided missile?
Turning cars into things idiots can drive has very much turned the roadways into the home of the idiot. ABS, automatic transmissions, cruise control (this one not so much), traction control, etc. are the kind of things that have lowered the bar of driver competence. And they give illusions of capability that aren't always accurate. ABS works better under some conditions than standard brakes, but not always. In slush or gravel, it actually has longer braking distance (as O.P.P. studies discovered). For some reason, vehicles got from A to B for years without a lot of these features and yet we have them now. Computer control is another example.
Take your example of the dimmer switch. Remove the floor switch (not too hard to replace) and put it (linked to the windshield wipers/etc) on the control yoke (not as easy to replace) and this is an improvement? And what happened to automatic headlight dimmers like those used by Cadillac? The auto-industry has had any number of good ideas that for mysterious reasons have vanished, and a lot of hairbrained ones that stuck around.
Once upon a time, car manuals listed technical specs like compression, gear ratios, horsepower and torque curves (not just single rpm quotations), bore and stroke, etc. Now, you get told about the cup holders. Need I say more?
And I found it interesting that a some of the head safety guys for NASCAR and CART utterly disagree with some of the current design practices for cars. They _know_ about high speed collisions with other cars and with concrete walls, and they have a rather different philosophy on how to protect the passangers than most car manufacturers.
Car manufacturers are in business to make money, not necessarily to make the best car and sometimes that means gizmos, even if they are a bad idea. If it were otherwise, someone can explain to me why a ten year old F150 supercab with a 2.5 ton truck 4 speed and a carbuerated 351 gets better MPG than a standard cab F150 with a 5 speed with overdrive and fuel injection and a 302? New ain't always better.
This iDrive idiocy sounds a lot more like a GM "innovation" than a German one. Jesus, my 635 is about the simplest goddamn car ever designed. I'm a little surprised that BMW -- a company supposedly devoted to the art of driving -- would produce such an elephantine, Microsoftian nightmare.
It bodes ill. Happily, I'll never have a buck and a quarter to drop on a 745 (or a 760), so it's not likely to bother me except it the abstract.
Best,
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Never mind having to bundle up when it's -35C.
I wouldn't let Bill Gates manage a WaWa.
I don't know about you, but I don't trust half the people I know (mostly the programmer half) to design a decent interface to the front door, let alone a one-ton hunk of metal that I might one day be hurtling down the road and have to figure out. The very thought makes me shudder.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Who's next? Brian Kerningham???
Yeah, the new cars are hideous. I personally feel that BMW peaked, designwise, in 1989, but that's just my 635csi pride speaking.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I haven't driven one, but one pulled up behind me on the expressway this afternoon. Black. Like a spaceship. I thought Hotblack Desiato was trying to overtake and pass...
Who did what now?
And someone's probably already made it, but...
Gives new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death"
and to "System Crash".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's basically been proven that the average person drives better drunk than while trying to operate a cell phone, and that's a pretty simple interface. Now BMW is coming along and giving people more reasons to take their eyes off the road? WTF are they thinking?
:-)
I'm all for adding cool features to cars, but let's try to keep it in the realm of the practical, mmmkay? Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble. Having to navigate a complex GUI just to turn on the wipers or the rear defroster = bad idea.
And not all computerization is a good thing-- although the antilock braking system in my '94 Grand Am has saved my ass a couple times over the years, a few years back I was lucky that it did not CAUSE an accident-- the chip that controlled it died in such a way that occasionally I would hit the brakes just to stop normally, or to slow for a turn, and the pedal would go straight to the floor without slowing the car!! Luckily, I quickly discovered that when this happened, lifting my foot from the brake and then stepping on the pedal again would engage the brakes-- and I got that problem taken care of damn quickly, within the car's original warranty period. But every now and then I'll think about how that simple problem could have had very unpleasant or even fatal results, and I'll shudder a little bit.
On the plus side, if someone in their shiny new 745i plows into you because they were fiddling with their iDrive computer, at least you'll be able to sue with confidence that they can pay up.
Just because the controls are still mechanical doesn't mean they haven't been improved. Far from it. The reason why they're still mechanical is that first of all that mechanicals are reliable and a proven solution. This isn't software where crashes are acceptible, so there is, rightfully so, hesitation to move to something else. Secondly, mechanical controls transfer vibrations through them that allow the driver to feel what the car is doing. That is lost with by-wire controls. So really, there's no desire to move away from mechanical controls.
There has, however, been plenty of innovation where its warranted. Air bags and ABS are obvious safety innovations that are on almost all cars these days. How about efficiency improvements like CVTs and variable valve timing and lift setups seen in engines today? Or better yet, hybrids and electrics? What about Ferrari's new automatic clutch? There is plenty of innovation in cars these days.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
So how long before someone slaps Embedded Linux + Apache on, hooks it to a cellphone, and lets the world log in?
If that happened, what would a Slashdotting do to the car?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Yeah, those bolis were good.
:-)
My biggest gripe with Wawa is the wildly inconsistent hoagie quality. I'm not a demanding consumer who lists a hundred toppings and blows up if one is missing-- I ask for a little mayo, and a little lettuce. Sometimes they will come out perfectly, but more often to the person making the hoagie, "a little mayo" means, there should be so much that the rest of the stuff in the sandwich shoots out of the bread when I take the first bite. And "a little lettuce" usually means that I can pick up the sandwich, shake it for five seconds, and wind up with a hoagie *and* a huge side salad.
~Philly
Some of us aren't big star wars geeks that must know everything in advance. I hope that's just a joke.
Did everyone forget the iCar?
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Walking is NOTHING like crawling. It is not an extension of crawling. However I can be persuaded to thin otherwise if you can point to research that shows walking is an extention of crawling.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
For all of us enlightened(and bad spellers) in the Delaware Valley and other close areas, We all know that once you walk into a WaWa you never ever ever ever want to go back into a 7-11 or cumberland farms or any other lame convience store ever again! why you ask?
1. Fresh sandwiches made to order 24/7
2. CLEAN STORES! no dirty 7-11 mold here
3. usually friendly staff at all times
4. Much better selection of stuff you need(TP at 4 am that wunt cut your butt open!)
They're just so much better and nicer then anything else out their.. and from what a friend told me that worked at one(makin da hoagies!) they actually pay decent for a chain store job! This would be one company that i would like to see be a national chain.
CVT was first done by DAF (dutch car company) in the 1950s. used 2 belts driving spring loaded "cones" (the load on the belt would drive the cones apart, and the spring would return them, thus varying the gearing ratio)..
:)
my grandad used to have one..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I can't agree, I really like the current (E39, E46, etc) makes and the stuff that's on the horizon is really nice as well, especially the new six-series and 5-series. It's definately superior (design wise) to anything comming out of Detroit, and pretty much rocks the new offerings from Mercedes-Benz (S and SLK)
I have never seen a more pointless demonstration of a product than the Flash demo ("experiment") of why an ergonomic system is better than a non-ergonomic one.
,. for left/right, or the vi keys, etc), the difference didn't make that much difference to me.
It consists of a series of questions, with possible answers arranged in a 3*3 square. You use the cursor-key like controls on the left to highlight the right answer, then click on select to submit your answer.
The demo comes in two parts - the non-ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are randomly laid out, and the ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are conventional. You go through ten or so BMW-related trivial pursuit style questions, non of which are particularly hard, but all of which require _some_ thought. When you go through it the second time, ergonomically, the same questions are asked, but the answers are in different positions. The demo then comes up with the elapsed time you took for each section (which happenned to be wrong for me).
The problems with this are obvious:
Firstly, it's biased -- the first time through, you are spending time thinking about the questions. Second time through you know the answers.
Secondly, it's got nothing to do with iDrive. It could be a good demo of the value of good ergonomics, but rather than demonstrating the good ergonomics of the iDrive, it asserts that the iDrive has good ergonomics.
Thirdly, the two interfaces offered are not neccessarily any more ergonomic than any other interface -- they are just more familiar. Given that I am used to using different navigational interfaces (az for up/down,
Finally, given that I was interacting through the use of a mouse, the interfaces weren't that different to me anyway...
BMW has lost its way. Bring back the early 90s.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Looks like my next car is going to have to be a second-hand one.
"To the extent not prohibited by law, in no event will BMW or its licensors be liable for any lost lives, injuries or damaged property, or for special, indirect, consequential, incidental or punitive damages, however caused regardless of the theory of liability, arising out of or related to the use of or inability to use the vehicle, even if BMW has been advised of the possibility of such damages."
Oh and no, we won't let you sue us whilst crashing through a pedestrian crossing whilst trying to find the "Start -> Environment -> Temperature -> Driver's side -> Footwell -> Make hotter" menu.
Most people do use mozilla. It's used for all the popular browsers (mozilla, galeon, netscape, and maybe konqueror and nautilus?) and even Internet Explorer identifies itself as "Mozilla compatible" when you visit a website.
;-)
Maybe my website is just not targeted at people who use internet explorer? I've not installed the "We detect you're using IE, please upgrade to mozilla" script yet
"Actually, it would be quite easy to do this in most towns - a ten minute bike ride, maybe"
I remember in anchorage, finding that I couldn't physically get from one side of town to the other without using a small stretch of motorway (or whatever the US equivalent is)
Of course, I only found this out after cycling off the exit ramp, looking back, and spotting a well-hidden "automobiles only" symbol. I was expecting a room-sized reflective sign like at home.
There are some places just not designed for bikes, nor for walking!
Actually, if you have mastered a pencil, a using a pen would be intuitive
/dev/bike stored in your brain which can be used to ride any type of bike. If you get a suspension bike or a motorbike, then /dev/bike is changed, rather than creating a new one for the motorbike.
However, if you've mastered a tennis raquet, using a squash raquet would not only be non-intuitive, but would cause you to forget how to use the tennis raquet.
The brain can only store so many models, which act like device drivers in a computer. Once you've learned to ride a bike, you effectively have a
sPh
Folks,
While everyone is talking about how complicated BMW's iDrive system works, I think if you want a car that has lots of electronic controls try a Toyota Prius.
I've driven the Prius and many of the instrument functions are electronic, especially if the Prius has the GPS navigation system installed. Even the radio in many ways works through the LCD touch screen on the dash. Fortunately though, the climate control system uses conventional controls.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Switch to a browser made this century, preferably one that's a little more standards-compliant.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
There is a really important difference between cars and airplanes that makes cribbing cockpit design from aircraft a really BAD idea:
Airplanes typically operate well removed from any obstacles or other aircraft. As such, they can tolerate having the pilot's attention brought inside the cockpit for extended periods of time.
An aircraft can be flown entirely on instraments, never having to physically view the world outside.
A car - especially one driven on a conjested freeway - requires that nearly 100% of the pilot's attention be directed outside the cockpit. A momentary lapse of attention can result in striking another car, running off the road, or missing an exit.
If you've ever endured a freeway "brake check" where 4 lanes of traffic go from 80 MPH to a dead stop in a matter of seconds, you'll know what I mean.
It is essential then that cars have user interfaces that require the bare minimum of driver attention to operate. If a driver has to concentrate on the interface in order to verify what it is doing, it is pure and simple a bad design. This makes anything that demands navigating a menu while under way is not well thought out.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
There are still plenty of major advances in automobile technology being made every day. Just look at Honda, for example. (They've always been leaders in technology anyway.) How can you say that the 80MPG Insight is not a breakthrough technology? Also, a major refinement of existing technology, such as the S2000's 9000RPM 2-Liter 4 Cylinder F20C engine that has the highest specific output of any production NA engine ever is pretty much the same type of advance as the processor speed wars.
A 7-series BMW is really not a very valuable car. While I would agree with you if we were talking about some type of classic Bentley, or something special like a Ferrari 456GTA. I might even have a problem with someone putting their dog into a 750iL. (Actually, no, on second thought I wouldn't.) A BMW 745 is strictly fungible goods -- no need to baby it at all. In fact, babying your BMW 7-series is pathetically bourgeois behavior. You'll end up looking like those poor saps with the "garage queen" Lexus IS300's. Please, muster some self-respect.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Do not break existing interfaces.
Integrate established methods and skills wherever possible.
Innovation at the expense of functionality is counterproductive.
The US air traffic control system redesign project had to be scrapped after spending billions because of the horrendous usability issues it ran into, causing confusion among air traffic controllers -- it completely ignored their established ways of working. They are still using slips of acetate that are stacked on a board because its much safer for passengers and the controllers can work with all the information they need at their fingertips.
Aircraft carrier control towers still use a miniature mock-up of the flight deck and the controllers keep track of what's happening with tokens or models of the aircraft and equipment and personnel on the deck. Why? Because it works.
I am also reminded of how a new X-ray machine had to be redesigned because it completely disrupted the way that X-ray technicians work and actually made their jobs more difficult and slower to perform, which was the exact opposite of what the new machine was supposed to do.
The driving layout IS intuitive because it is so ingrained and established in our culture. Well before people reach the driving age, they know how to drive. Their skill and ability to drive is another matter.
Users shouldn't have to 'complain' as you put it. Designers should stop for a moment to think about what they are doing and if it truly helps the user. The 745i control is a driving hazard.