Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface
Own a TM3, so bear with my bias.<p>I find the whole haptic feedback issue a bit silly. First off I went from a Chevrolet Volt to a TM3. So lets start off with buttons.<p>Steering Wheel
TM3,  two omni direction buttons. Two stalks.
Volt, 5 buttons to do the same purpose as the two on the Telsa, then four more buttons for extra functions on front, three lever like buttons on back of wheel.<p>Center Stack
TM3 - touch screen, only the quick actions menu leads to one level sub mensu
Volt - touch screen with four dedicated buttons and knob below. Menus and be many layers deep, some are four or five deep. HVAC below has thirteen buttons and two knobs.<p>The come all the controls on doors and seats. Some cars put some items in different places meaning for each car you need to adapt. However as I will state below, you never really need to use the majority of them so it does not matter.<p>Most cars are like the Chevrolet Volt, there are between thirty to fifty buttons. Now tell me how that is worse than a touch screen. Lets double down on this, how many buttons do you actually use during the course of a drive. Try this, put a sticker on each before a drive and remove those you use. How many can you reach for any not take your eyes off the road. Any radio or screen will do that regardless.<p>The kicker is, you don&#x27;t need to interact with the UI of the Tesla or the super majority of most buttons in any car these days because for the most part settings are set and forget. HVAC systems are set to maintain a temperature, radio stations or music is usually only volume tweaked plus many other items are automatic like headlamps and even wipers.<p>I was accustomed to my TM3 before I got home the day I picked it up. I can get accustomed to nearly any car in minutes as the most used controls are always where you expect them, from turn signals to horns to volume control over the radio. I will say this, the navigation on voice is superb in the TM3.<p>Are there flaws with the Tesla UI, sure. Namely you still must use your phone to change play lists. I know of no other brand with this limitation. I do think the horizontal display of the TM3 is superior to the vertical display for both information pickup and icon spacing. I agree the top icons can get hard to see when map features underlap and that needs to be tweaked to fade those map images