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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Physical buttons I’m fine with. It’s the capacitive/swipe buttons. They’re far too easy to accidentally activate, since they only require a touch, and they’re in the one spot of your car that you touch the most often.

    Critical functions, so things that effect how the car cars, should never be on touch buttons. There is too much wiggle room with them consistently activating when you expect them to. If you want to put non-critical components on touch buttons, so things like radio, AC, locks… Fine. I don’t prefer it, but at least you’re not creating a hazard. Acceleration, deceleration, steering, braking, and safety should NEVER be on a capacitive sensor.


  • The point is, your car shouldn’t be state changing suddenly. It shouldn’t be accelerating when you’re expecting it to coast or cruise. Unless something is wrong. Which I guess there is, there are capacitive slide inputs on the steering wheel.

    This issue is only a couple of levels of abstraction removed from Boeing’s mcas system. A poorly implemented feature no one asked for that isn’t explained properly. Trained pilots can’t react to their planes suddenly operating in a way that they don’t expect. You expect a layman in traffic to?

    It’s easy to decry individual responsibility, and say only the most fit should be able to drive. What about the responsibility to the manufacturer? It’s clear enough that there’s a design flaw with this system. More drivers need to be aware, but why the hard-on for defending a clearly bad implementation of a feature? What’s at stake for you?


  • Can confirm, my car has the following cruise control buttons:

    On/off - res/+

    Cancel - set/-

    The on/off button arms or disarms cruise control entirely. With it armed and no speed set, set/+ will set the current speed as the target speed. With no speed set, the only other button that does anything is the on/off button, which disarms the system.

    With a speed set:

    On/off will still complete disarm the system

    Cancel will remove the set speed, but keep the system armed

    Tapping the brake will pause the cruise control

    Res/+ will increment the speed by one mph, or resume cruise at the previous set speed if cruise has been paused

    Set/- will decrement the mph by 1, or if held pause the cruise control until it’s released.

    One of set or resume will set the current travel speed as the new cruise speed, if travel speed is higher than cruise. I think it’s res.

    For the most part this works fine. I don’t use the resume function, like you said it can be a bit harrowing if you’re not certain exactly what speed is set, and my car is over a decade old - it doesn’t have that feature. But, critically, it’s not a fucking CAPACITIVE BUTTON, and I’ve never accidentally hit it once.


  • Sure, I totally can’t see someone swiping on their steering wheel, say, shuffling across it to… I dunno, turn it? And either jetting forward because they just bumped it from 55 to 75 over the course of a turn, or suddenly slowing, probably without brake lights. Swipe on a steering wheel has got to be the worst car idea I’ve heard in a while, and I’ve heard some bad ideas.

    Again, unless I’m misunderstanding the controls, which I am open to the possibility of. Please, if this is the case, let me know.