Por que no los dos?
Having auto climate with physical controls is peak. No adjusting dials, your car just gets the internal climate to the temperature you want and that’s it.
Absolutely. It’s easy to say that new technology ruins things, but all of this was new tech once. You could have just invented the potentiometer and made a control panel with nothing but them and it would be just as awful. It’s all about integrating the technology into the experience and designing in a thoughtful way.
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.
You can take my automatic climate control from my cold dead hands. Fuck this!
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.
Not sure about the UK, but I know Germany likes manuals because they last longer when you have a lot of hills and mountains.
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.
It’s about 5-10% more in the UK. The maintenance on a reliable transmission is fairly minimal but any mechanical problems are almost guaranteed to be a nightmare buried under a mountain of metal. I’ve been spared that trauma so far but I remember test driving a used VW Passat which clunked with every shift. Thanks for the test drive, bro.
I like electric, because fuel and maintenance is so cheap
how hard do you want it? how hot do you want it? where do you want it?
😏
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.
My dacia spring has it exactly like that 😁
You feel how you physically move the airways by rotating the wheel where you choose the air coming out
Sorry internet, I love the auto climate.
My dial has auto on it
Fuck that, give me a thermostat any day of the week.
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.
The nobs are cheaper, because you don’t need a motor changing the airflow, you just use the power of the human rotating the nob to adjust the airflow to go to the right spot
And you don’t need a cpu nor gpu
Waaay cheaper…
The CPU and screen are already in the car for other things. No cost there. And I don’t think you actually know how to make a nob.
Depends on the car…
Name a car without a cpu. Year and model. Removing cpus means you are removing much more than touchcreens.
Honestly. I prefer my current EVs AC. I have set it to 21 degrees when I first got it and I haven’t touched it since.
I don’t like “more cold” or “more hot” dials. I know what I like, 21 degrees and if the car can keep exactly that? I’m happy.
One of my older minivans had a digital thermostat and it was just about the only digital control in a car I can tolerate. Though, I am still doubtful if it was actually the temp I set it to. It’s not like I had a thermometer inside the car.
It’s really interesting that I agree with you, but so many people insist that they’re new and fancy tools are somehow making their lives significantly better. And obviously it’s an opinion question, it’s not like they’re lying, but I just don’t see the value that many of them do.
My car has climate control. I set it to 72 degrees once a long time ago and rarely have touched it since.
The fascination with dumb controls in a car is odd to me. It seems like people overshoot the “I want physical controls I can feel my way around without looking” and get into “give me the Flintstones car” lately.
One of my knobs broke and to this day, I can’t work out how to replace it. Where do you even buy them from??? 🙃
Used parts! Junkyards, eBay, whatever. Odds are you’ll be able to find a replacement unless the factory knob was super fragile or your vehicle is exceedingly rare.
If your vehicle is vaguely popular it’ll probably have a stl (think exported 3D shape) available. In that case I’ll print/mail you one assuming you’re in the US. If you’re not in the US hop over to !3DPrinting@lemmy.world and I’m sure someone will help you out.
Amazon, parts store, junkyard, find someone to 3D print one for you
Wreckers?
Yeah, there’s a pick-n-pull in Lakewood that I have recommended to people, even though I’ve never needed it myself.
