I have a sit-stand desk from Costco with capacitive height controls set under the glass top off to the right. The problem is not so much accidental human touches, but setting anything slightly conductive on the switch will trigger the height control, including things like computer mice and ceramic coffee mugs (as long as they have some liquid in them), exactly the sorts of things that a right-handed person might want to set on the right corner of the desktop.
The desk is otherwise great and was really inexpensive for what it is but it's a super frustrating design decision.
It's similar in my fridge. Instead of a temperature dial, it has touch sensitive buttons, so the slightest brush with a jar drops the temperature or puts it into fast-chill mode, which will freeze the vegetables in the drawers.
Touchscreens appeal to a lot of knuckleheads, but mainly the main reason they're so popular is because manufacturers can do the wiring once, then change the UI as much as they want without having to redo it. In other words, it's cheaper for them. One thing touchscreens don't do is perform better than physical buttons and knobs.
Soft keys/knobs have that exact same benefit, and people are quite familiar with the idea since it's ubiquitous in ATM interfaces. You get the software-defined functions and labels, without the touch screen. Quite popular with audio mixing consoles and tons of other professional gear, too.
Everyone always brings up this "it's cheaper" argument and I get it from an "only financial" standpoint.
But when was the last time and when is the next time you're going to change the behaviour of the "up" button on the steering weel to something like "switch to backwards gear" instead of "volume up" (the newest Volvo EX30 has touch buttons only on the steering wheel).
This argument is so dumb. This argument does not count for any replacement of knobs-to-touch-button, because there will (almost) never exist a use case for changing the behaviour of the button.
So IMHO manufacturers take something that worked and still works, replace it with something less error prone, simply to justify flexibility nobody asked for and noone will ever actually use.
As someone who's worked in auto manufacturing, moving buttons around happens all the time for all sorts of reasons. Different trims can have different buttons in the same place for example, or different cars using the same consoles.
It's not every button on every vehicle, but I have definitely had that conversation before when the hardware design is due to be finished before the product team is done changing things.
Sorry - but 3.5 mm / 1/8“ jacks / plugs are crap. They are prone to kinds of contact issues / noise, are not sturdy enough to withstand lateral forces like their 6.3 mm / 1/4“ siblings. Their pull out force is either non existent or plug destroying. Unless they are of the rare threaded type I try to avoid them (just as barrel jacks). Better get a (mini-)XLR or Lemo connector…
There is no space to put big acoustic ports in the small gadgets, so they are replaced with usb-c instead. And I've had infinitely less number of problematic 3.5" ports than for example usb type-c ports across all gadgets I've ever owned. I.e. zero problematic 3.5" and so far two crapped out usb-c ports (I mean mechanically crapped, so they do function, but cables need to be shuffled around until contact is made and they are no longer held in place in the port).
I've got headphones with 1/4" connectors. I like the sets where the cord is detachable, each headphone has a jack, one is 1/4" one is 1/8", and the included cord has 1/4" on one end and 1/8" on the other. Then you can plug into whatever.
I'm not cool enough to have XLR on any of my devices.
Wow… it’s like imagine those accidental mouse clicks I always make on my macbook pro’s touchpad when I’m typing, but instead the car starts accelerating with cruise control. Yikes!
Most touchpads can be configured to only register clicks when you actually press and get the click feedback. It should be the default. Swipes may still come through though.
Capacitive controls, touch screens, etc., are typically really bad UX. Perhaps we will see more innovation in the hardware space for high quality UX -- digital encoders combined with haptics, pleasing materials, etc.
A Tesla is an example of overuse of touchscreen and it feels like one's hands have been forced to wear large gloves that inhibit the usability. This combined with nested menus and an overall clunky UX is suitable for a prototype and rapid innovation of capabilities, but as the platform stabilizes the UX should include physical switches, dials, etc.
Ford, at least in the mach e, has kept capacitive controls away from the steering wheel. The wheel and stalks are clear, leaving only the lock/number buttons outside and the touchscreen. On the outside, even the open button is an actual button.
Usually cruise control refuses to activate below a certain speed, feels like it’s about 28mph in cars I’ve driven. If “many of the incidents occurred when drivers were parking”, this doesn’t line up.
Unless VW lets you engage cruise control when you’re very slow?
Every car I've been in with Adaptive Cruise Control (which I think is standard on ID.4) allows you to activate the system at any vehicle speed but with a set minimum cruise speed (20+ mph in my experience). It's a useful feature in traffic where you'd want the car to keep distance with the car in front of it even below 20+ mph.
But combine that with lackluster AEB, poor detection of stationary objects, and capacitive buttons and its a real problem.
Most cars let you engage at 20mph going by my purchases since 2010. (Ford, Toyota, Kia all 20mph). The only weird one was my VW which let you engage at 25 then thumb it down to 20mph with the controls if I'm remembering correctly. I only know this because I'm a huge fan of this curvy 15 mile stretch of bayou road with a 20mph limit and its rare that a car hasn't let me engage it that low.
I can vouch for our Toyota letting me set it at lower speeds. Our city has a speed limit of 25 mph and there are long stretches of wide avenues where I’ll set it. Then I can spend more time looking out for kids darting across the street than worrying about speed control.
Same I've never seen a cruise control system that would activate/resume at parking lot speeds. Even with physical buttons that's an accident waiting to happen.
In the only VW I ever owned, which was a manual transmission Golf, you could engage the cruise control at any speed, right down to crawling at idle in first gear. I truly don't understand the American+Japanese style of demanding a high speed to engage the cruise control. They should work on the ergonomics until it is a more useful feature to keep your speed under 20 MPH in cities.
There are certain best practices on this website. Among them are complaining about Apple’s non-user-serviceable hardware, Google’s privacy implications, AI copyright implications, WFH, and physical buttons on devices.
If you express anything that could be read by a sufficiently motivated reader as critical of these complaints, even if only a request for clarification about something unexpected, you will be interpreted as being on the side of each of those topics.
Usually, this will be accompanied with some text from the HN guidelines asking you not to talk about voting patterns and some “this is not Reddit” talk. These are the constraints of this forum.
I work for a manufacturer of audio gear and we have a product with capacitive controls .. which we thought was quite nifty when released, but .. given the customer demand for a mode which completely disables capacitive control over the audio device features .. we have since learned is a very uncomfortable device to use for many people.
So much so that we had to release a version of the firmware that allows the capacitive controls to be completely disabled, and its become quite popular among the user base.
I think it makes sense for a lot of things - high-performance control surfaces that will be engaged by the user constantly and with intent - but for the one-off features that are only seldom referenced by the user, it can be a real detriment to user satisfaction, especially when accidentally/unintentionally activated.
We've learned the lesson and only plan to integrate capacitive features where its needed most - for performance-oriented devices.
I own an ID.4. I absolutely hate the capacitive controls. They can easily be activated accidentally, and you never know what happens if you touch a certain area. Some places/buttons are sensitive, some are not. It's a UX nightmare. Like volume buttons on the steering wheel, where if you try to feel for them without looking, you end up accidentally "swiping" and turning your volume up to the max.
For example, the whole touch cluster on the left of the steering wheel, just below the vent, is a disaster. If I want to check the temperature of the air that's blowing into the cabin, I end up accidentally turning off the lights, turning on rear antifog lights, and turning on defroster heating for the windshield. The next minute or so is spent trying to get everything back to normal.
Also, all of the software on the ID.4 is a dumpster fire, but that's a story for another time. I'd be ashamed to ship something like this.
It’s such a weird unforced error on Vows part. If they’d have just shipped the id4 with standard controls and CarPlay it would have been a huge hit honestly, since almost all criticism relates to software and controls. I also own one, and honestly if VW would just let owners have a normal wheel and window/ac controls for $500 I’d pay it.
Rented an ID, and also a Cupra (same design) a few times as they're some of the care share cares where I lived. Later when buying a car and living in a smaller city (no car shares there, a great concept I miss), the capacitive buttons were actually one of the reasons we skipped on VW. Had so much problems activating and adjusting cruise control, infuriating driving experience. Rest of the car was great, so too bad they ruined with such a small thing.
I think it's time for an independent UX ratings agency that assigns an objective score or ratings code. There could be a few different basis measurements such as ease of self-discovery, speed, simplicity, honesty (lack of dark patterns) and reliability.
I'm sure metrics like this are studied to death by those actively in the UX field itself, but we don't have an established ratings agency that publishes them. If I'm buying a car, I'd like to know that it's rated F and know what to expect, just as if I see a movie is rated R.
> That's mostly a positive thing for buttons on the center console
No, it isn't. It's just fashion, like high heels. Not to mention that it's mainly a cost-saving measure.
Your fingers want a spring-loaded button that has some travel and resistance before activating. You can feel the button without looking at it, and rest your finger on it before deciding to activate.
BMW had a wonderful mashup of these technologies for the radio memory buttons on 2014 era infotainment modules. The buttons were proper real buttons, and they could be mapped to any function on the HMI, radio station, settings menu, GPS destination, etc. But you could also rest your finger on them without pressing and the capacitive touch would activate, showing you a preview of what was mapped to that button before you pressed it. It was a physical implementation of a mouse hover. We've really gone backwards on automotive HMI since then
I had a clever boss (circa 2002) who generated interesting ideas all the time. He came up with, why don't we just tack clear, plastic/rubber bumps onto the glass of the touch screen to create tactile buttons. He proof-of-concepted it and it worked.
My "portable" AC has capacitive buttons. One time I covered the top with something to eliminate the intense glow at night.
The next day, the thing went completely haywire and would rapidly switch between modes without being touched.
Short story short, capacitive buttons suck and putting them on a steering wheel was a terrible decision.
And the worst thing is that everybody complained when VW did this years ago. VW then claimed to have listened and promised a change, but kept on using them.
For that reason alone I would never consider VW for a future vehicle. Something is pretty messed up there.
I'm complaining about this on every post here, it's really tiring. Why don't they learn. I hate capacitive controls on pretty much everything.
As a German I'm aware we're falling behind on many fronts regarding technology and innovation. So obviously our automotive industry also was late with taking EVs seriously, and instead of trying to be innovative and deliver a solid product it's mostly "let's copy tesla and try to one-up them". So you get crap like this because touch controls are so modern wow.
A lot of vehicles put the push buttons for cruise control in the same spot so I think they just followed that convention without thinking. Also a lot of vehicles have a rocker or switch to activate cruise control or turn it off entirely and I bet they replaced that with a pcap button as well.
The original design functions as an interlock where you have to turn cruise on on standby and then set speed separately, but pcap buttons make it so much easier to accidentally activate that it no longer serves its intended purpose.
> the left side spoke operates the adaptive cruise control system, and mistakenly brushing against the "resume" button could re-engage cruise control to whatever speed it was last set, causing the car to accelerate
Why does the resume button exist at all?
In my 2018 Toyota if you break while having cc on then cc is disabled, end of story.
And if I turn it back on it's set to my current speed. It's not adaptive though. But still, if you break it should be gone. No coming back to the previous hidden state.
I am surprised that someone could not come up with this on their own: because it is more convenient than bringing the car back up to speed, getting it where you wanted it, then hitting the "CC" button again. Hit the brakes, then press the button and let the car bring it back to speed. It's not life changing, but a nice convenience feature. And it's been in cars for at the least the 50 years that I've been paying attention, probably longer.
The button that always mystified me was the "cruise control ON/OFF" button. Hit the ON button, but you still have to set the cruise control. Umm, why isn't it just ON all the time? Some cars had it, some didn't. I have never come to a reasonable UX/engineering reason for this.
I don't think that car should be accelerating for any reason other than pressing a gas pedal. Definitely not after the driver manually presses the break.
Maybe the on/off button (I have it as well) is just additional safeguard against accidentally enabling super dangerous feature, which is defetead completely if it doesn't turn off on breaking and can be resumed.
Looked into it a bit, and I don't see anything that indicates the Auris has a different control scheme than the standard. It looks like it does actually come with a resume function which can be used after breaking:
> Pulling the lever toward you cancels the constant speed control. The speed setting is also canceled when the brake pedal is depressed.
> Pushing the lever up resumes the constant speed control. However, resuming is available when the vehicle speed is more than approximately 40 km/h (25 mph).
I use resume all the time - the first example that comes to mind is that cruise control won’t stop at a red light (obviously), so I’ll brake to a stop, then all I need to do is start taking off again and hit resume. No need to think.
I guess that's very convenient. What if you needed to also press the gas pedal after resuming it to bring the car back to the set speed? Would that be too much trouble? You'd get benefit of deciding how fast you get back up to speed.
Most cruise control systems let you do this already. I know I can accelerate harder than the system does by itself and it’ll just let me do it, then drop back to its usual program once I stop.
I wouldn’t like it if I had to consciously stop at the intended speed though, that defeats the entire purpose.
"Resume" has been a feature of cruise control since the dawn of electronic memory. The Motorola MC14460 integrated circuit and the even older and hilariously complicated Zemco CompuCruise had resume features.
I have a sit-stand desk from Costco with capacitive height controls set under the glass top off to the right. The problem is not so much accidental human touches, but setting anything slightly conductive on the switch will trigger the height control, including things like computer mice and ceramic coffee mugs (as long as they have some liquid in them), exactly the sorts of things that a right-handed person might want to set on the right corner of the desktop.
The desk is otherwise great and was really inexpensive for what it is but it's a super frustrating design decision.
It's similar in my fridge. Instead of a temperature dial, it has touch sensitive buttons, so the slightest brush with a jar drops the temperature or puts it into fast-chill mode, which will freeze the vegetables in the drawers.
I have the same desk from Costco. I'm so glad there's a lockout button on the side of mine. My cat would trigger it constantly otherwise.
Samsung dishwasher with capacitive controls on the front panel and no way to restart the wash cycle. Infuriating.
Not a designer or a manufacturing engineer so perhaps I don't understand the minutiae, but things we know that just work:
Switches Buttons Dials Knobs
and 3.5 mm jacks
Touchscreens appeal to a lot of knuckleheads, but mainly the main reason they're so popular is because manufacturers can do the wiring once, then change the UI as much as they want without having to redo it. In other words, it's cheaper for them. One thing touchscreens don't do is perform better than physical buttons and knobs.
Soft keys/knobs have that exact same benefit, and people are quite familiar with the idea since it's ubiquitous in ATM interfaces. You get the software-defined functions and labels, without the touch screen. Quite popular with audio mixing consoles and tons of other professional gear, too.
Everyone always brings up this "it's cheaper" argument and I get it from an "only financial" standpoint.
But when was the last time and when is the next time you're going to change the behaviour of the "up" button on the steering weel to something like "switch to backwards gear" instead of "volume up" (the newest Volvo EX30 has touch buttons only on the steering wheel).
This argument is so dumb. This argument does not count for any replacement of knobs-to-touch-button, because there will (almost) never exist a use case for changing the behaviour of the button.
So IMHO manufacturers take something that worked and still works, replace it with something less error prone, simply to justify flexibility nobody asked for and noone will ever actually use.
Transferred to SWE, this is just overengineering.
As someone who's worked in auto manufacturing, moving buttons around happens all the time for all sorts of reasons. Different trims can have different buttons in the same place for example, or different cars using the same consoles.
It's not every button on every vehicle, but I have definitely had that conversation before when the hardware design is due to be finished before the product team is done changing things.
My people have a saying, "cheap shit"
> Knobs
And make the shape distinct enough that you can tell by feel!
Sorry - but 3.5 mm / 1/8“ jacks / plugs are crap. They are prone to kinds of contact issues / noise, are not sturdy enough to withstand lateral forces like their 6.3 mm / 1/4“ siblings. Their pull out force is either non existent or plug destroying. Unless they are of the rare threaded type I try to avoid them (just as barrel jacks). Better get a (mini-)XLR or Lemo connector…
There is no space to put big acoustic ports in the small gadgets, so they are replaced with usb-c instead. And I've had infinitely less number of problematic 3.5" ports than for example usb type-c ports across all gadgets I've ever owned. I.e. zero problematic 3.5" and so far two crapped out usb-c ports (I mean mechanically crapped, so they do function, but cables need to be shuffled around until contact is made and they are no longer held in place in the port).
Nobody has headphones with those connectors. Sounds like Bluetooth is for you.
I've got headphones with 1/4" connectors. I like the sets where the cord is detachable, each headphone has a jack, one is 1/4" one is 1/8", and the included cord has 1/4" on one end and 1/8" on the other. Then you can plug into whatever.
I'm not cool enough to have XLR on any of my devices.
Genuine Lemo connectors are about $40.
XLR connectors are huge.
But yeah, you're not wrong, just tilting at windmills. I look forward to the demise of barrel jacks in particular, but USB is what will replace them.
Wow… it’s like imagine those accidental mouse clicks I always make on my macbook pro’s touchpad when I’m typing, but instead the car starts accelerating with cruise control. Yikes!
Most touchpads can be configured to only register clicks when you actually press and get the click feedback. It should be the default. Swipes may still come through though.
Capacitive controls, touch screens, etc., are typically really bad UX. Perhaps we will see more innovation in the hardware space for high quality UX -- digital encoders combined with haptics, pleasing materials, etc.
A Tesla is an example of overuse of touchscreen and it feels like one's hands have been forced to wear large gloves that inhibit the usability. This combined with nested menus and an overall clunky UX is suitable for a prototype and rapid innovation of capabilities, but as the platform stabilizes the UX should include physical switches, dials, etc.
Buttons and knobs in a car are fine, they do not need innovation.
The more you can operate it without looking at it, the better.
> Buttons and knobs in a car are fine, they do not need innovation.
I agree. I was using the example of Tesla (Ford also does it) making UX worse.
Ford, at least in the mach e, has kept capacitive controls away from the steering wheel. The wheel and stalks are clear, leaving only the lock/number buttons outside and the touchscreen. On the outside, even the open button is an actual button.
Honestly, it's impressed me.
Usually cruise control refuses to activate below a certain speed, feels like it’s about 28mph in cars I’ve driven. If “many of the incidents occurred when drivers were parking”, this doesn’t line up.
Unless VW lets you engage cruise control when you’re very slow?
Every car I've been in with Adaptive Cruise Control (which I think is standard on ID.4) allows you to activate the system at any vehicle speed but with a set minimum cruise speed (20+ mph in my experience). It's a useful feature in traffic where you'd want the car to keep distance with the car in front of it even below 20+ mph.
But combine that with lackluster AEB, poor detection of stationary objects, and capacitive buttons and its a real problem.
Not my Corolla 2023 (IIRC). I do not know the minimum speed but it does not engage at lower ones.
Most cars let you engage at 20mph going by my purchases since 2010. (Ford, Toyota, Kia all 20mph). The only weird one was my VW which let you engage at 25 then thumb it down to 20mph with the controls if I'm remembering correctly. I only know this because I'm a huge fan of this curvy 15 mile stretch of bayou road with a 20mph limit and its rare that a car hasn't let me engage it that low.
I can vouch for our Toyota letting me set it at lower speeds. Our city has a speed limit of 25 mph and there are long stretches of wide avenues where I’ll set it. Then I can spend more time looking out for kids darting across the street than worrying about speed control.
Same I've never seen a cruise control system that would activate/resume at parking lot speeds. Even with physical buttons that's an accident waiting to happen.
Huh, I've never had it not be like that. It's great for bumper traffic.
In the only VW I ever owned, which was a manual transmission Golf, you could engage the cruise control at any speed, right down to crawling at idle in first gear. I truly don't understand the American+Japanese style of demanding a high speed to engage the cruise control. They should work on the ergonomics until it is a more useful feature to keep your speed under 20 MPH in cities.
It's a mixed bag. Toyota absolutely implements a minimum speed. As does Subaru (for non-adaptive cruise control). Ford, in contrast, does not.
Okay, I have to ask: why on earth would someone downvote this?
There are certain best practices on this website. Among them are complaining about Apple’s non-user-serviceable hardware, Google’s privacy implications, AI copyright implications, WFH, and physical buttons on devices.
If you express anything that could be read by a sufficiently motivated reader as critical of these complaints, even if only a request for clarification about something unexpected, you will be interpreted as being on the side of each of those topics.
Usually, this will be accompanied with some text from the HN guidelines asking you not to talk about voting patterns and some “this is not Reddit” talk. These are the constraints of this forum.
I work for a manufacturer of audio gear and we have a product with capacitive controls .. which we thought was quite nifty when released, but .. given the customer demand for a mode which completely disables capacitive control over the audio device features .. we have since learned is a very uncomfortable device to use for many people.
So much so that we had to release a version of the firmware that allows the capacitive controls to be completely disabled, and its become quite popular among the user base.
I think it makes sense for a lot of things - high-performance control surfaces that will be engaged by the user constantly and with intent - but for the one-off features that are only seldom referenced by the user, it can be a real detriment to user satisfaction, especially when accidentally/unintentionally activated.
We've learned the lesson and only plan to integrate capacitive features where its needed most - for performance-oriented devices.
I own an ID.4. I absolutely hate the capacitive controls. They can easily be activated accidentally, and you never know what happens if you touch a certain area. Some places/buttons are sensitive, some are not. It's a UX nightmare. Like volume buttons on the steering wheel, where if you try to feel for them without looking, you end up accidentally "swiping" and turning your volume up to the max.
For example, the whole touch cluster on the left of the steering wheel, just below the vent, is a disaster. If I want to check the temperature of the air that's blowing into the cabin, I end up accidentally turning off the lights, turning on rear antifog lights, and turning on defroster heating for the windshield. The next minute or so is spent trying to get everything back to normal.
Also, all of the software on the ID.4 is a dumpster fire, but that's a story for another time. I'd be ashamed to ship something like this.
It’s such a weird unforced error on Vows part. If they’d have just shipped the id4 with standard controls and CarPlay it would have been a huge hit honestly, since almost all criticism relates to software and controls. I also own one, and honestly if VW would just let owners have a normal wheel and window/ac controls for $500 I’d pay it.
Rented an ID, and also a Cupra (same design) a few times as they're some of the care share cares where I lived. Later when buying a car and living in a smaller city (no car shares there, a great concept I miss), the capacitive buttons were actually one of the reasons we skipped on VW. Had so much problems activating and adjusting cruise control, infuriating driving experience. Rest of the car was great, so too bad they ruined with such a small thing.
I think it's time for an independent UX ratings agency that assigns an objective score or ratings code. There could be a few different basis measurements such as ease of self-discovery, speed, simplicity, honesty (lack of dark patterns) and reliability.
I'm sure metrics like this are studied to death by those actively in the UX field itself, but we don't have an established ratings agency that publishes them. If I'm buying a car, I'd like to know that it's rated F and know what to expect, just as if I see a movie is rated R.
> That's mostly a positive thing for buttons on the center console
No, it isn't. It's just fashion, like high heels. Not to mention that it's mainly a cost-saving measure.
Your fingers want a spring-loaded button that has some travel and resistance before activating. You can feel the button without looking at it, and rest your finger on it before deciding to activate.
BMW had a wonderful mashup of these technologies for the radio memory buttons on 2014 era infotainment modules. The buttons were proper real buttons, and they could be mapped to any function on the HMI, radio station, settings menu, GPS destination, etc. But you could also rest your finger on them without pressing and the capacitive touch would activate, showing you a preview of what was mapped to that button before you pressed it. It was a physical implementation of a mouse hover. We've really gone backwards on automotive HMI since then
I had a clever boss (circa 2002) who generated interesting ideas all the time. He came up with, why don't we just tack clear, plastic/rubber bumps onto the glass of the touch screen to create tactile buttons. He proof-of-concepted it and it worked.
My "portable" AC has capacitive buttons. One time I covered the top with something to eliminate the intense glow at night.
The next day, the thing went completely haywire and would rapidly switch between modes without being touched.
Short story short, capacitive buttons suck and putting them on a steering wheel was a terrible decision. And the worst thing is that everybody complained when VW did this years ago. VW then claimed to have listened and promised a change, but kept on using them. For that reason alone I would never consider VW for a future vehicle. Something is pretty messed up there.
> "Capacitive buttons require only the lightest of touches to register a button push."
So they put them where they'd be brushed accidentally. On the steering wheel.
This is so ridiculous. I'd like to see exactly who decided that was a good idea. Was it engineers, or was it design/marketing/management?
I'm complaining about this on every post here, it's really tiring. Why don't they learn. I hate capacitive controls on pretty much everything.
As a German I'm aware we're falling behind on many fronts regarding technology and innovation. So obviously our automotive industry also was late with taking EVs seriously, and instead of trying to be innovative and deliver a solid product it's mostly "let's copy tesla and try to one-up them". So you get crap like this because touch controls are so modern wow.
A lot of vehicles put the push buttons for cruise control in the same spot so I think they just followed that convention without thinking. Also a lot of vehicles have a rocker or switch to activate cruise control or turn it off entirely and I bet they replaced that with a pcap button as well.
The original design functions as an interlock where you have to turn cruise on on standby and then set speed separately, but pcap buttons make it so much easier to accidentally activate that it no longer serves its intended purpose.
Accountants, when they saw how much cheaper they are.
> the left side spoke operates the adaptive cruise control system, and mistakenly brushing against the "resume" button could re-engage cruise control to whatever speed it was last set, causing the car to accelerate
Why does the resume button exist at all?
In my 2018 Toyota if you break while having cc on then cc is disabled, end of story.
And if I turn it back on it's set to my current speed. It's not adaptive though. But still, if you break it should be gone. No coming back to the previous hidden state.
Why does the resume button exist at all?
I am surprised that someone could not come up with this on their own: because it is more convenient than bringing the car back up to speed, getting it where you wanted it, then hitting the "CC" button again. Hit the brakes, then press the button and let the car bring it back to speed. It's not life changing, but a nice convenience feature. And it's been in cars for at the least the 50 years that I've been paying attention, probably longer.
The button that always mystified me was the "cruise control ON/OFF" button. Hit the ON button, but you still have to set the cruise control. Umm, why isn't it just ON all the time? Some cars had it, some didn't. I have never come to a reasonable UX/engineering reason for this.
I don't think that car should be accelerating for any reason other than pressing a gas pedal. Definitely not after the driver manually presses the break.
Maybe the on/off button (I have it as well) is just additional safeguard against accidentally enabling super dangerous feature, which is defetead completely if it doesn't turn off on breaking and can be resumed.
What model? My '98 Sienna had resume functionality that I used all the time, so I'd be interested to know when and why they removed it.
I find it most useful for highway driving to resume my preferred speed after passing a slowdown.
Auris Hybrid
Looked into it a bit, and I don't see anything that indicates the Auris has a different control scheme than the standard. It looks like it does actually come with a resume function which can be used after breaking:
> Pulling the lever toward you cancels the constant speed control. The speed setting is also canceled when the brake pedal is depressed.
> Pushing the lever up resumes the constant speed control. However, resuming is available when the vehicle speed is more than approximately 40 km/h (25 mph).
Page 315 of the 2018 Auris owners manual:
https://www.toyota-europe.com/customer/manuals
Thanks. Although I really was safer not knowing that.
However "resuming is available when the vehicle speed is more than approximately 40 km/h" seems like a probably sufficient safeguard.
I use resume all the time - the first example that comes to mind is that cruise control won’t stop at a red light (obviously), so I’ll brake to a stop, then all I need to do is start taking off again and hit resume. No need to think.
I guess that's very convenient. What if you needed to also press the gas pedal after resuming it to bring the car back to the set speed? Would that be too much trouble? You'd get benefit of deciding how fast you get back up to speed.
Most cruise control systems let you do this already. I know I can accelerate harder than the system does by itself and it’ll just let me do it, then drop back to its usual program once I stop.
I wouldn’t like it if I had to consciously stop at the intended speed though, that defeats the entire purpose.
In my 1984 Honda, the resume button brings me back to the speed I was set at before I hit the brakes.
"Resume" has been a feature of cruise control since the dawn of electronic memory. The Motorola MC14460 integrated circuit and the even older and hilariously complicated Zemco CompuCruise had resume features.
The most infuriating in this story is that VW had promised to remove some/all touch buttons from the cars and instead it was a big fat lie.