The Future of Car User Interface

Despite living in the most modern era of technology, we have to admit that the interfaces in all modern cars are unfortunately just awful. This does not make sense, really; given that car is one of the most costly things that we purchase for ourselves. The usage is massive all across the globe. It may have a power supply that can easily last for days but seriously why is it still one of the least ‘smart’ technologies today? Even a 2 year old tablet device ready for recycling will put cars’ stock interface to pitiful shame.

So far what we have seen is that the operating systems are really slow which usually are bug riddled and if there is ever a touchscreen, it has a low resolution, last-year and out of date kind of touch technology. Not to mention how dangerous they are. It is agreed that over the past couple of years, touchscreens have become standardized in new range lines and that’s awesome. But what is the problem? The manufacturers didn’t think going about it the right way. Instead of coming up with a new design around touch technology, they simply went mainstream and took all the physical buttons - once spread across the dashboards - and just crammed them all onto a touchscreen. What happened to sensible and spatial design or haptic? Don’t know, at least we have a new shiny touchscreen; yay! Not smart.

As a result of this, the simple actions which once required just a tweak of muscle memory for example, increasing the song’s volume – now require the driver to take his eyes off the road altogether. And in that process, let us not even talk about what could happen if the finger lands on the wrong button in the flat land of shiny glass! They say that voice control in car could be the solution here but that is yet one more place where the modern cars are badly lagging. Even if Google’s Voice Recognition is approaching a mind blowing accuracy level – poor drivers can still find themselves shouting angrily at their 2013 model car because it fails to understand which of the 8 possible commands they might be saying.

Finally for the good news, Apple as well as Google has begun to realize the huge gap there is to be filled here and have started working on how they can take the car manufacturers with their awful design work out of the whole sorry state. We don’t expect it to happen in a week but hopefully interacting with our so-to-speak modern cars will become a lot less of a hassle.