The Range Rover gets the digital climate controls right Digital trends

Over the past few years, car companies have focused much more effort on infotainment systems and car technology in general, creating sleeker interiors and a more modern experience. But for many, that means pushing a lot of controls, including climate controls, onto the screen.

This is usually a bad thing. To be clear, I’m not entirely against digital climate controls, but I am against poorly executed versions that require more than a few taps to change settings. It’s not only inconvenient, it’s dangerous, forcing drivers to take their eyes off the road to activate the air conditioning when they could be reaching for a touchscreen that they can control without even looking. do

But there are some companies that do digital climate controls right.

What makes a well-designed digital climate control?

There are a few things that make great digital air conditioning controls, but they really boil down to ease of use. Controls should be as simple as possible and require as few taps as possible to change.

This also means that these controls must always be on the screen, even when using software like CarPlay and Android Auto. After all, physical controls don’t move depending on the software you’re using, so why should digital controls?

One of the big problems with this is that there are multiple controls involved in changing the temperature of the car. There is fan speed, temperature and air selector. It sits above the controls for things like windshield defogger, heated and cooled seats, and more.

Who does it right?

Not many companies have cracked this code yet, but I recently noticed that Range Rover is on the right track. All you have to do to change the temperature in your Range Rover is to swipe up or down from any screen. There are controls for both the driver and the passenger on the appropriate sides of the screen.

But even the Range Rover could do better. It is very easy to change Temperatures of the air conditioning controls, but as soon as you want to change things like fan speed or choose which vents to use, you’ll have to poke around more. It’s fair to prioritize temperature over other controls, but most drivers still change things like fan speed regularly. Fortunately, you still get quick buttons for things like activating the windshield defogger, which is useful.

Of course, this is all still relatively new for car companies that generally continue to develop poorly designed software. To be fair, most cars these days have so-called automatic climate mode, which means you should be able to set the desired temperature and leave it at that. While many drivers still prefer to change the climate manually, these automatic modes get better at automatically changing the temperature and fan speed as needed to provide a more comfortable car interior.

what next

Let’s be honest, the genie isn’t going back into the bottle, at least not anytime soon. Companies are working to design more modern car interiors, and it looks like that means buttons and dials are on the way. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But I hope that automakers can settle on simpler, more intuitive, and safer controls before they rush to fix something that isn’t broken.

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