Episode 412 – Strange Car UX – 8/17/17

9 thoughts on “Episode 412 – Strange Car UX – 8/17/17”

1. A few years ago i bought a nissan by mistake, it had a speedo in the middle of the dash, classic minis has a big spedo in the middle of the dash and … i’m gonna say citroen BX’s have a speedo in the middle of the dash.
   it’s not at all distracting after a while

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2. It was a This American Life episode on magic, of which (as you may have assumed) Ira Glass was a junior practitioner in his youth.

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3. I have a 2016 with Lane Assist (Part of their Eyesight package.) and it has none of the issues that Will is describing. However mine uses two cameras that are on the upper center counsel and they are in the direct path of the windshield wipers. So as long as your windshield is relatively clean it works without a hitch. I will probably never have a car with out that type of assistant again.

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4. *Subaru Legacy

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5. It was funny listen to them talk about movies.

   I just went to see Annabelle: Creation this weekend and was surprised as I saw a father walking his 2 kids (probably 7 & 5) into the movie to meet his wife who was holding a toddler and sitting with a 10-11 year old girl. Also they left their trash everywhere.

   Also about movie pass, I was wondering how exactly do they block reserving seats. Most of my theaters require reserving seats when you buy the ticket so I would assume if it’s a popular movie I could just run over early and buy the ticket in advance.

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6. you know what never gets talked about is the software.

   PS4, iOS, MacOS, watchOS, without BSD none of them would exist. its kind of ridiculous how little credit the BSD people get. especially considering the current political climate, it might be interesting to point out that trillions of dollars of economic growth in tech companies are owed to a publicly funded university (University of California, Berkeley) agreeing to release free and open source code to the internet back in the 1980s.

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7. Talking about cars with ridicules UIs:

   I’ve found recently that a lot of new home appliances are replacing straightforward controls for over complicated and confusing capacitive control panels. The other day I nearly put bread in a oven ventilation hood to toast it because it looked vaguely like a toaster. Cars aren’t the only place where controls are getting unnecessarily confusing.

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8. Bad ideas keep coming around. since most people don’t see that many cars its easy to think that bad UI is a rare thing, but I’ve seen all kinds of mayhem when working on cars. Most people don’t know that the shift pattern layout is an unofficial standard, and there was a time when each manufacturer would do their own thing, making driving different vehicles hard enough that some fleets would list drivers by what brand they were allowed to drive. So if you drove a Ford, you couldn’t take a shift for a Dodge driver, since there was a good chance you’d wreak his truck. Even late 80s early 90s cars have odd designs. I’ve seen “digital” enviro controls that were unreadable in the sun, my favorite is mirror adjustment controls that cannot be reached while looking in the mirror from a driving position. My understanding is that having more stuff center makes it easier to deal with swapping for left/right drive, I think toyota yaris’ were like that for a while. And it you want funny/painful, watching Jeremy Clarkson try to use BMW sat-nav is always good. Its possible that Tesla just has different ideas about how those controls are used, and maybe there are enough enviro sensors in the car that they feel you won’t need to adjust it often.

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9. Nothing funnier than James May driving the Mercedes with the dog-leg shift pattern in an episode.

   Also since we’re on the subject of weird RHD-LHD quirks – has anyone ever noticed that an originally RHD car shifts a little funny when in LHD configuration (or vice-versa)? In an LHD configuration a Tremec T56 originally from an american car has a nearly straight line 2-3 shift. Where as a lot of the Japanese transmissions need a bit more of movement to the centerline to hit third properly. However the T56 doesn’t feel right in a RHD configuration. Maybe just me.

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