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What's your harmless/low-stakes conspiracy theory?
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Touch screens in cars are evidence that the auto industry is actively trying to increase auto accidents.
Nah, that's purely a cost saving measure. Shitty touch screens are cheaper than buttons.
Industrial grade switches (i.e.: buttons) are expensive because of very high quality control requirements, and add a lot more parts that can fail to a car. It is the same thing that happened with mobile phones. Going with touchscreen reduce a lot the number of parts to check and parts that can fail, even if usability is very bad for the end-user.
Is that true? I'm too scared to look up prices. Electronically, touchscreens are infinitely more complex, but I can believe economies of scale brought it down lower than buttons... I just don't want to believe that.
I've seen comments from auto manufacturers outright stating this. I think they also overestimated how much consumers care about touchscreens.
Routing wires for buttons is an absolute clusterfuck as well.
Pretty much no button these days directly controls something, it's routed through the BMS. Headlights may be one of the few that are switched without some type of computer in between, possibly power windows too?
And they're all on a PCB.
Even so, each individual button needs to be connected to that PCB separately, and will only have the function of what it says on the button, or possibly a couple hidden functions through programming.
Touch screens are essentially one connection for infinite buttons with different screens and menus.
Touchscreens can be made at massive scale and then repurposed in batches for everywhere. They’re always the same (roughly speaking). Buttons are individual components, you have to lay the whole thing out custom how you want it to be, you have to put all these fiddly little components together… just having a robot make a big square object along with 199,999 other ones is cheaper, even if technically the big square object is orders of magnitude more complex than the chunks of plastic and springs and buttons etc.
I think the assembling is the crucial part as you stated. I mean, buttons can also be manufactured in scale by a robot, but every button needs to be wired, the touchscreen only once.
Yup, that about matches my thought process when I made that comment. Economies of scale make the complexity irrelevant.