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Toyota Experimenting With Joystick Control For Cars
alphadogg writes "Today it's the stuff of video games, but Toyota is experimenting with joystick control for a new breed of compact cars and transporters. The world's biggest car maker built the technology into a couple of concept vehicles that were on display Wednesday at the Tokyo Motor Show. The FT-EV II, which got its world premiere at the event, is a compact electric vehicle designed for short trips. The car retains seats for four passengers despite being much more compact than most other cars, and packs drive-by-wire technology so it can be controlled with a joystick. The car's steering, braking and acceleration can be controlled by hand so foot pedals aren't needed, freeing up space to provide more legroom for the driver."
What happens when there's a power steering failure? I know it's not a common problem, but it is a problem which randomly comes up. At least with a steering wheel the driver can generally muscle the wheels to turn- I can't imagine a joystick acting as an actual lever to turn the wheels, but as more of an electronic device to turn on some motors which would handle this.
There are so many problems with this idea I cant even imgaine...
1) As somebody else mentioned, power steering failure is a big one
2) A car does not move conducive to the way a joystick moves, the throttle/break and steering need to be seperate.
or your just asking for trouble in a hard turn or emergency situation.
3) I guarantee you, steering fatigue will set in if a drivers only means for controlling the vehicle are with one hand.
4) I could go on but I think most of these issues are quite obvious.
The feedback is critical. The problem is, a force feedback on the joystick would probably make a bigger difference than on a wheel, since smaller movements would make larger turns. In that vein, it seems a wheel would give more fine-grained control. You may not be able to change the turn angle as fast, but you would probably be able to be more precise, which in most cases, I think is more important.
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In racing games it's usually considered far preferable to use a wheel over a joystick because honestly you really don't need to go from straight to 40 degrees that quickly. Ever. The car has traction limits.
Control > Twitch.
The only thing inherently worse about driving with a stick than with a wheel and pedals is that it's much easier to accidentally overcorrect, especially if you are unfamiliar with using an analog joystick (in other words you're either not pressing it at all, or you're pressing it as far to the right or left as you can). Well, there's also the stopping issue causing your body to shift and therefore bump the stick, possibly preventing you from stopping.
At low speeds, I don't see these as being much more dangerous than a conventional steering mechanism, especially if there is signal noise filtration (shaky hands? let's ignore that) and a rate-of-turn limiter that scales with speed (simulation of "wheel resistance").
The lack of a steering wheel might increase the risk of back and neck injury in an accident, however, due to the increased space you'd have to move in (even with an airbag).
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
The thing about a steering wheel vs. joystick is that the former translates a large change in angle to a much smaller change in wheel angle, while a joystick does the exact opposite. You could certainly engineer a joystick with similar characteristics, but it would take up a lot of room -- hence the invention of the steering wheel.
The minor corrections that we continuously, yet nearly unconsciously, make while driving would become burdensome when applied to a joystick. In a simulation like a video game, there are no road imperfections, steering dead zones, alignment, or tire balancing issues, and therefore mastering the joystick is quite possible (but by no means simple). Many games also employ variable stick-to-wheel angle ratios, so that a given stick angle at a low speed results in a larger change in wheel angle than at higher speed. These would likely be necessary for real vehicles, but they make it difficult to predict directional changes at a constant speed, and increasingly difficult with speed AND direction changes, since stick deflection must be increased or decreased as velocity changes.
Even absent such "assistant" technologies, without independent controls steering while changing velocity becomes more challenging, not less. Say you're braking around a turn, which is followed by a short length of straight road and a stop sign/light. With independent controls, you maintain more or less static pressure on the brake pedal, while allowing the steering wheel to return to its natural zero-angle position. With a joystick, you have to maintain that position backwards while deliberately moving toward the center X axis, which is a much more challenging proposition, especially with inertial forces.
Finally, the joystick necessarily either falls victim to one of two (or both) of the following:
1) gorilla-arm when mounted in front of the driver, due to the fact that the operator can't rest any weight on the control.
2) When mounted at or near the console, it requires the exclusive use of the the closest arm, which can also lead to fatigue. In a console-mounted position, it's hard to imagine a positioning system as effective as tilt/telescopic steering wheels to compensate for differing arm lengths and seat positions (which reflect torso and leg length).
The steering wheel may be an old design, but they got it right.
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