Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Former Apple Chief Designer Sees A Need For Buttons In Cars
Iconic modern Apple products are marked by minimalism, although the chief designer of many of those products recently expressed a need for physical controls in cars. Former Apple Chief Designer Sir Jony Ive spoke at The Code Conference alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook and businessperson Laurene Powell Jobs about the latter’s late husband’s legacy, among other things. The discussion, led by journalist Kara Swisher, moved to the topic of multi-touch interfaces and even lightly touched on physical buttons in cars, as Australian automotive website Drive pointed out, writing: I haven’t watched the conference, but it’s worth noting that The Verge‘s live blog of the conference includes a slightly different quote from Ives – a response to Swisher asking for his thoughts on how things are currently designed. The quote reads: “But we do remain physical beings. I think, potentially, the pendulum may swing a little to have interfaces and products that will take more time and are more engaged physically.” When the panel’s moderator – journalist Kara Swisher – asked if Ive was referring to cars, the former Apple design boss responded, “for example”. While touchscreens do have a place in phones, it’s generally not a good idea to operate a phone while driving. Physical buttons and knobs allow for muscle memory to take over, keeping the driver focused on the road. It’s more than just good cabin design, it’s good safety practice. […] Kara asks Jony how he’d design a car and he laughs. “You know I can’t answer that.” [Editor’s Note: I have to say that I love the buttons in my older cars. A knob for volume, a rocker to change the channel, a rotary dial for vent selection, an adjacent rotary dial for the temperature setting, a slider for dome lights – these buttons all look and feel different, and that means pressing them doesn’t require me to look away from the road. Some automakers have HVAC and volume/channel-change physical buttons, and some even have them on the steering wheel. Plus, many have voice-command. But there’s still quite a heavy reliance on the touchscreen these days; some of that makes sense, since infotainment systems these days have so many functions that they’d require scores of physical buttons to operate, but still. I agree with Ives that automakers could work to step up their physical-button games. -DT]
The Dodge Charger King Daytona Pays Tribute To An Icon
For the fifth runout special edition Dodge muscle car, the American brand is bringing back the King Daytona nameplate. I know what you’re thinking, “What on earth is a King Daytona?” Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. The original King Daytona was a 1969 Charger Daytona owned by drag racer Big Willie Robinson, a man who used racing as a way to build community after the Watts Riots. He has a pretty incredibly story and it’s worth writing a full article on him at some point. For now, just know that he was an absolute icon of west-coast drag racing. Fast forward to 2022, and the new King Daytona is a Charger Hellcat Redeye Widebody with the wick turned up to 807 horsepower, a pretty awesome number. On the outside, the King Daytona is extremely orange. Go Mango paint complemented by orange brake calipers keeps things loud, while a black tail stripe and satin chrome wheels add just the right amount of pop. On the inside, the orange accenting continues in the stitching and on a special badge in the console. Like other Last Call special edition models, the Charger King Daytona is more of an appearance pack than a performance pack. However, it pays tribute to a really cool icon of motorsport and I can totally dig it for that reason alone. If this is a Charger that speaks to you, get ready to hunt. Dodge is only making 300 examples of the Charger King Daytona, with allocation to be announced at a later date.
Tesla Sued Over Alleged False Advertising
Drivers continue to fight back against Tesla’s wild claims relating to advanced driver assistance systems. Reuters reports that a plaintiff is suing the carmaker, claiming the company made false promises of autonomous vehicles. Considering Tesla’s claims regarding solving the problem of autonomous driving, this lawsuit could have some proper legs. Calling Tesla’s bluff has been a long time coming and should the suit proceed, it could result in compensation for a vast number of Tesla owners. “Tesla has yet to produce anything even remotely approaching a fully self-driving car,” Matsko said. The lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco seeks unspecified damages for people who since 2016 bought or leased Tesla vehicles with Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features.
The Great Build-Out Of Charging Infrastructure Hastens
Automotive News reports that several states’ plans for implementing EV charging infrastructure have already been approved for funding under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program. The program aims to help fund the implementation of 500,000 EV charging stations across America by 2030. With new EVs announced in a seemingly constant stream, the right time to crack on with infrastructure development is now. Kudos to federal and state government for moving quickly on this issue so far. “Thanks to the commitment of state leaders who worked hard to develop EV charging networks that work for their residents, we were able to approve these state charging plans quickly and ahead of schedule,” said Stephanie Pollack, acting administrator for the Federal Highway Administration. “We are reviewing the remaining plans and are on track to finish the process by our target date of Sept. 30, if not sooner.”
The Flush
Whelp, time to drop the lid on today’s edition of The Morning Dump. It’s Thursday, which means that the weekend is right around the corner. While it seems like a surge in EV market share could happen any year now, I’d like to know when you plan on adding an electric vehicle to your fleet. Personally, I don’t see myself picking up an EV for quite some time. I mostly rely on public transit around town and use my car for road trips and other events where I want to drive rather than be stuck in urban traffic. Because of my unique use case, I don’t see an EV fitting in with my needs until something with heaps of range ends up suitably depreciated. Don’t even get me started about those kids on my lawn. I’m hoping to get another 8-10 years of driving fun from the Fiesta and I fervently hope by that time there will be some pretty decent choices for an affordable daily EV. It’s not as fun to drive double the speed limit on windy mountain roads as my old Audi was, but those days are mostly over with a carsick prone toddler in the back seat. Every automatic ICE car I’ve driven since has felt terrible, the wife even sold her BMW since she hardly ever drove it, as she liked driving the Bolt more. Doing math, with today’s gas prices, that’s $40CDN/month to drive 2200km. I ain’t complaining. Helps offset the my gas pig 2012 Acadia. If only there was some sort of useful tool on the internet where you could parse out the conversions from metric measurements to units that you are more familiar with. Not knowing when we can buy a home, it sure when we could ever buy one, unless the infrastructure improves and advances to the point of charging an EV with similar convenience to an ICE car. If some yahoo wants to use their touchscreen on their phone while they’re driving, and they cause an accident, that likely cannot be prevented. They should be charged or sued accordingly. But auto manufacturers should not be enabling/encouraging this behavior. The common things drivers need on a regular basis tend to be physical controls on the stalk or steering wheel already: volume control and track/radio station selection for music, cruise control settings, turn signal stalk, wiper controls, and in some cases, a way to scroll through different gauges/readings that might on the display behind the steering wheel: current cruising range or fuel efficiency, outside temp, engine temp, tire pressure, etc. Climate controls, and any redundant media controls on the dash should be single usage (i.e. not combined and certainly not a menu on a touchscreen) buttons or levers or something for not only passengers who may want to change something, but also for the driver, in the event that something on the wheel is not working. Things like auto braking, auto cruise, auto headlights, etc, should only be allowed to be set when the car is not moving, and I can see why those should be in a menu, because that’s too many buttons to put on a dash. Ideally, these sorts of things should be set to the driver’s preference (and a second driver as well) once and stay that way, barring some sort of electrical issue that resets to the default ‘on’. (Of course, the default for these should be off, but that’s a different complaint of mine). If someone isn’t using Carplay or AA and wants to use the built in nav, I’ve observed that most systems already don’t allow users to enter a location unless the car is in park. This might be the only case-usage that makes sense for a touchscreen (a digital keyboard), because scroll-wheel entry is time consuming and an old style touch-tone phone keypad is never going to be a thing again. I’d argue, though, that most people use their phones. Or, in my case, my far more accurate and up to date Garmin GPS unit I use for hiking and cycling. I mount that instead of a phone. My phone is plugged in and on mute in the center armrest/storage. Probably not a very popular take but I think hybrid vehicles, both plugin and non-plugin, make a ton of sense in rural areas such as mine. Especially during this transition period to what appears to be Electric only. If this is a shock to anyone in the industry they need to walk themselves out the door (perhaps with a handler because they must be blind). One of the reasons we settled on the vehicle we did (an XT4) and not another from the same manufacturer (an XT5) is because there were actual tactile buttons for much of the features. It’s maybe one or twice a week that I ever actually have to use the touch screen (which I avoid to prevent smudges/glare). Cadillac honestly baffled me with their cars in the mid 2010’s. They had a center stack that appeared to be suitable for buttons, but used what felt like capacitive touch points. Sure there was topology to it that let you find what you were looking for, but there was no tactile feedback to actually let you know you struck home. And just like touch screens they used gloss surfaces that smudged up and looked terrible after a little use. So in our case we were replacing a 2012 SRX (the last year before they went to the capacitive buttons) and looked past a XT5 because of that horrible design decision; despite the fact my wife loved her SRX and the XT5 was by and large a direct continuation of it.
