"Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls."
Having designed electronics, I absolutely appreciate how much a pain in the butt buttons are (maybe that's why they are called buttons!). It isn't just the cost... Each button requires mechanical design and tooling, graphics, manufacturing, etc etc. Plus no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" or tactical properties.
But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens!
Funniest button story.. one time we were working on a panel which includes a two way rocker switch to lift or lower a mechanism. Version 1 was backwards. Well, the electrical team swapped the wire harness to fix it, and the graphics team swapped the label markings. Version 2 was then also backwards (but flipped).
What do you mean by no one is satisfied with the feel?
I suppose you actually mean it is hard to get a strong majority?
One potential solution would be to make a modular system. You could even “sell” it as a “skinnable” DUI (driver user interface; why didn’t this acronym catch on???)
I think no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" in cheaper cars. The BMW iDrive controller feels fantastic to use, as does the Audi MMI (to a slightly lesser extent) (...before they canned it)
The bill for replacement when it dies, of course, will be 3000 dollars in parts and 1000 in labor.
And the new one will still be just as slow as Android tablets in 2010 were.
That surprises me. I seem to recall having read something about the difficulty Tesla had in getting their fancy screens and how much they cost. $50 for a tiny one maybe.
Even my friends group thinks that Alibaba is a valid source of parts for large scale manufacturing. I've just given up on having this argument. Good luck.
Part of having a working relationship with a vendor is that you can ask nicely that they don't sell your designs to competitors or market their own knockoffs. Not to mention you can call them up and say, "I need 10k extra of those next month" and they don't just laugh in your face or let it go to voicemail and pretend they never got it.
Don't know how recently you've been in the market, but the days when you could do that in automotive are long gone. Now you call a supplier and they're like "I might have something in a year, maybe" or "I have a few dozen, take it or leave it". The sketchy chinese vendors and the expensive specialty vendors are the only ones with any volume left in common parts, but obviously the former lack any sort of plausible automotive qualifications and paying the latter needs higher approvals than engineers can give.
One thing I’ve learned about vendors over a few decades of professional life and also little vignettes from my father’s job, is that most vendors only wake up when the checkbook is coming out or going back in your pocket. There’s a whole theatrical thing you have to do to be an effecting ombudsman for your company that is effective but that I resent.
I think we can see the Checkbook Effect in how Apple has navigated for the last fifteen or so years. And maybe a bit of the Stanford Effect (anyone can get in if there’s a building named after their family, especially if it’s still under construction).
Hey we want this part
oh we might be able to make 100k a year
Umm… we need at least five million
Gee, sorry.
What if we loaned you some money to build a new factory?
Teslas have 17" screens, and no one made an automotive-grade one at that size,
so it's no wonder they had problems sourcing it. But at scale, I could see the 7" properly automotive-grade screens being available for $50 when there are some availabile for less than that on Amazon.
They sourced screens that could not survive the internal temperatures of cars and just rolled with it from what I remember. It was like an industrial screen not one made for automotive.
> It’s more like using an iPad than using an infotainment system in a car.
And this is whole problem here, we shouldn't be doing it while driving.
We're trying to solve problems that haven't existed few years ago.
Touchscreens in cars in this form should just die
