Fuck that, give me a thermostat any day of the week.
But I don’t think seat warmers came with cars with these controls?
This works well and it’s not a hill I’ll defend but automatic control of temperature is better when it’s done well. In the UK we have a culture of driving cars with manual transmission and I’ve never understood it when automatic transmissions exist and are pretty good. People wanna feel like they are in control of stuff.
Well, as a kid I thought by the time I’ll do my driver’s license there will be no more manual transmissions around.
Turns out, automatic is just still way more expensive to buy AND, as I recently learned, crazy expensive in maintenance.
Not sure about the UK, but I know Germany likes manuals because they last longer when you have a lot of hills and mountains.
how hard do you want it? how hot do you want it? where do you want it?
That has 5 moving parts, while a touchscreen has none. It’s much easier and cheaper for the manufacturer to install the touchscreen. But instead of passing the savings to you, they probably keep it or pass it on to investors.
But the touch screen comes with a price you pay for the UI development which is not a small amount. So while installing it might be cheaper, in the end I would argue it’s more expensive.
The screen could well be more expensive than the dial parts, but installation would be cheaper, so we’d need the numbers. The thing about software is that it’s very expensive to make but selling price is as low or high as you need it to be.
Exactly.
Each of those knobs needs an injection mould, each switch behind it a supply chain. Iterating on digital design is far cheaper as well.
It’s far cheaper to use what are effectively 10 year old tablets in the cheaper cars. Since LCDs are being mass manufactured for other things that likely get a nice economy of scale.
Be nice if those savings were passed on…
Or worse, they charge extra because the touch screen is a luxury product.
That depends on what badge they put on the hood. They might market a screen as luxury, but the fact is I much prefer dials myself so I’d consider dials to be luxury and I’d actually pay more for dials.
It’s -5C/23F outside, you hop in the car, winter boots and thermal layers. Your climate control’s lowest setting is 16C/61F. You have two options: personal sweaty sauna or drive in your winter jacket with frozen hands.
Other options: blast heat with windows down. Full AC, just get it over with.
I always just freeze while the car warms up. Driving with a jacket on is an absolute no-go. I see so many people do it and I don’t understand how, it’s restrictive and you will inevitably start to bake when the sun hits you.
It’s difficult to take thermals(wool under-layers) off/on for a regular car ride. Just let me set temps down to 5C or something even if the AC couldn’t achieve that in California.
You’re opposed to stripping butt naked in the parking lot?
Por que no los dos?
Sorry internet, I love the auto climate.
My dial has auto on it
I almost agree with this, but I prefer just one more advancement over this: the thermostat kind. I like to just set the temperature so I don’t have to keep adjusting it.
Nothing fancy, no touchscreen bs, just simple knobs. I was perfectly happy with the thermostat feature in my old 1997 Pontiac Grand Prix GT.
My new car is a 2025 model, but it’s an Indian made Japanese Kei car so the interior is super basic. and it has large, infinitely spinning knobs for temperature and fan strength, and a digital temperature readout. I really like them.
When the temp was cold in the morning but now it’s hot, I spin those dials like wheel of fortune to the left and immediately set the AC to cold and fast. No repeated button presses.
The only downside is that it doesn’t have one of those knobs for music volume.
Not only do those knobs sound awesome to use, but I could see them being cheaper and more reliable as well.
Instead of being mechanically connected to whatever custom parts to direct air flow, it can just be an off the shelf encoder sending a signal to a processor that already exists.
I’ve got an old car and it’s still like this. I don’t look forward to the day I have to get a new car.
Yeah like, all I wish my car had was Bluetooth capabilities but besides that I love my older car.
Swap the radio its pretty easy and only costs like $50. I got an old Japanese import that has Bluetooth that connects to my phone as I enter the car. Its also got USB to play music from and charge from.
Good call, I definitely had the thought but never pulled the trigger on it because I never found a specific replacement that I liked. I’ll have to look into it again when I can afford it!
I was considering upgrading to something with a screen and maybe gps, but couldn’t lock a model down.
We had to buy a new (used 2022) car after we ran out old car into the ground. The touch screen controls temperatures. There wasn’t a single variant of the car that didn’t have a giant ass touch screen. It makes me really uncomfortable when the screen no longer works.
There’s also some other things that piss me off.
But Some of the pros (and why we accepted that trade off):
- all wheel drive
- fancy sensors when someone is in my blindside
- it opens when it senses the key is nearby.
- heated seats with controls. (Used to bring hot packs because it gets cold here)
- cameras for the rear
- it does that cool thing where it breaks if it senses you might collide. I hated it at first but I’m old now and it saved me once from collision.
Either way, fuck cars and if public transportation was better here, id use that.
I would be really uncomfortable with a car where I had to touch a giant’s ass to make it go.
Kia doing static controls for entertainment and HVAC is a big part of why I bought one.
Oh, there is. I love having a set of controls separate from the passenger side.
The next thing will be: I can’t toggle my AC because AWS is down.
your seats overheat and get stuck in the most forward position
You’re lucky if it lets you start the car.
Are you? I think I would rather a car that doesn’t start than a car that doesn’t have breaks
Or perhaps, I can’t toggle my AC because I forgot to pay my subscription fee.
You joke, but I literally came across this. I HATE that I had to connect my window unit to the net, but we have a lot of brownouts in the area, and it allows me to restart the AC if I’m away, or else my pups would cook during the summer if it didn’t turn on. The AWS outage hit, and I couldn’t log in to the app that controls it to turn it on. Luckily, it’s not peak summer and it didn’t get too warm by the time I got home.
There exist air conditioners with power outage recovery, and they’ve been around for decades. It’s usually labelled “automatic restart” on the spec sheet. This was already a solved problem before the Internet Of Shitty Things, and it seems that in your case some rat bastard went around and deliberately unsolved it.
Whoever that person is, we need to find him and give him a smart kick up the rear.
If the brownouts don’t last long, you could maybe solve this issue with a moderately priced UPS to keep the AC unit from powering off during the brief moments when power goes out.
I’d have to spend more on the ups than the ac unit. Sometimes it’s brown outs, sometimes full blackouts. As much as I hate connecting it to the web, it’s free vs at least a couple hundred for a high enough wattage ups to run more than a minute.
Instructions unclear: AWS is doing fine, but my AC won’t shut off until I renew my BMW+ subscription.
You are joking, but I’m pretty sure a few cars could not start or got bricked because AWS went down.
Luckily for me, I don’t even know what ‘AWS’ means.
Amazon Web Services, are huge data centers that many companies rent to run their services.
The other day one of those AWS data centers had issues and temporarly went down so many services didn’t work, also because of this many heated beds stopped working properly and over-heated.
Plus the Ring doorbell, plus probably lots of people got locked out because of smart locks.
It’s sad to see how easily people are fooled to depend on huge greedy corporations.
To me it seems insanse that a server crashes somewhere and the door lock or door bell doesn’t work.
A smart house should do everthing locally
Everything after THIS was a mistake.
1985 Nissan 300ZX
85 Subaru XT
Oh, that was my first car. Sometimes, the display changed to something weird though, like this:
One of my best good mates in school had an 84 200 that we dubbed Tron cause of this awesome setup. Great share, thanks!
So fucking cool.
looks like something from cyberpunk
Only missing a night picture with the red LED backlight on
Yes the temp sensor is a worthy addition to the formula. Imagine fiddling with your 80s/90s A/C running on ye olde R-12 to get the temperature right lol.
Agree with the addition of a low and high setting. I don’t care what the target cabin temp is, if I just got into my car after braving some crazy wind chill I want to be air fried for a bit.
