"I’m having a hard time understanding how “I forgot to change gears and then hit the gas” can be classed a UX problem. Sounds like PEBKAC."
On the one hand, it is easy to point to this as user error and you're not wrong.
But older cars have a significant tactile difference in operating different systems in the car. Shifting a gear is very, very different physically than pushing the button for your hazards. Your body moves in very different and operates these controls very differently.
This distinction was made clear to me years ago when we bought a 2013 Mercedes wagon - the physical action to: shift to park, turn the car on, turn the radio on were all nearly identical - just a button press. In fact, the buttons themselves were almost identical.
So, although I never actually did this, there were a number of times when I got relatively overloaded, cognitively, and I pressed the power off on the radio in an attempt to shift to park. Or I pressed the park button a second time in an attempt to turn the car off.
I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Absolutely.
For example, in a manual VW/Audi, you have to push the stick down, then way over into R.
It's one of the nicest feeling gestures, makes your intent extremely clear, and is impossible to do by accident.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Airplane cockpits are designed like this, for obvious reasons.
It's really a hardware/ergonomics problem. The gear selector in these vehicles goes back to it's original position after you select a gear. One major problem with these new shifters is that it's very easy to select the wrong gear. Likely what happened is the driver was trying to go into reverse but pressed a little to hard on the gear shifter and caused it to go into drive instead.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.
Driven many cars with these “click” type shifters, including recent Volvos, thought I would hate it before trying but after one drive it’s actually very convenient and never saw it as a hazard.
You can’t press too hard to accidentally go the wrong direction. Up is R and down is D. Distinguishing up from down is very easy. Changing direction can only be done at standstill. Pressing too many times does nothing, except toggle D and B, that have same behavior from intent at parking point of view.
What might happen though is you thought you were in N but are actually in gear, as you accidentally clicked twice instead of once. But if you want to go N you should really just press P instead.
I think what they are implying is that car with so many safety features should be able to handle this situation. Volvo has lot of "collision avoidance" safety features, so one would expect that they could handle this as well.
This is common feature in other cars - I rented mazda few years back and it did automatically stop when I almost reversed into another car.
That's actually what I meant. It's unfortunate because the car already has everything it needs to handle this situation. I admit it was an idiotic thing from my part to do, but still, you gotta expect better from a 56K car whose main selling point is safety.
At that point, the driver really is to blame though. Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably; not to save himanity from themselves despite the ongoing insistance by governments that somehow the industrial sector should take on the onus for technically enforcing whatever measures that some bureaucrat sets their sights on today.
This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying.
Yes, I know I'm responsible. I do not want/need car/manufacturer to be responsible, I just want technology to help where it could.
> Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably
This maybe is your opinion, but that's not how it works. There is plenty of manufacturer's who manufacture things which are not affordable and plenty of people buy it. Pretty much any industry has luxury segment which also tends to be most profitable
> This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying
Humans are imperfect. Stress, distractions, tiredness etc could make anyone to make mistake, even yourself. Why would adding safety features be horrifying?
People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.
Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.
The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.
This Volvo like I said, is absolutely wonderful on the road, and the safety features it's got even in the base model are a godsend and make the car feel like it has a mind of its own, in a good way. It saved my butt from so many accidents that I never even noticed, it sees danger before it even happens, it's amazing.
So my point from the beginning was, if a car is capable of detecting/anticipating and dealing with danger at 100Kmh, it sure as hell should be able to prevent dumbass me from reversing into another car by mistake.
Its' not some impossible ask here. My 16k yaris beeps then brakes the car when going forwards into an obstacle. Why cant a 56k volvo do the same in reverse? It definitely has this technology, I think its mandated now, but seems to me OP is saying volvo didn't bother putting it on the reverse side of the car. Which is a little bewildering that a car manufacturer might consider a reverse collision impossible, and makes you wonder what other common sense safety things they've screwed up as well, or opted to knowingly not include to improve their bottom line.
If there were zero UX feedback as to which gear the car is in, it seems entirely possible for the problem to be the software and not pebkac. In a thread discussing that the manufacturer's UX is horrible, blaming the user seems out of place. Of course the user bares some level of responsibility but the UX of a vehicle clearly affects drivability of a car. Eg BMW's widely derided iDrive UI.
