zlacker

Disabling the distracting touchscreens is one of the things that Mazda does right. Pecking at the screen while driving is stupidly dangerous.

Pretty much everything you need can be done with at most a few steps of the commander interface which are easy to learn.

>>izacus+(OP)
I just rented a Mazda with one of those terrible rotary dials. Something as simple as finding the nearest gas station, which takes like 2 touches on a touch screen, takes several pushes and inaccurate turns of the dial. It turns a 3-second affair into a 30 second nightmare requiring constant distractions and squinting to see which button or field is currently highlighted. It's the worst car UX I've ever experienced, even worse than a Tesla. I'll never buy a car with a system like this. It's suicide.

>>solard+O1
just use your phone's integration with the dash and use siri or google ?

>>solard+O1
What are you talking about? It's like push down to select search box, select gas station icon (first in like, one rotation), press again.

If there's an active route, you rotate the dial twice quickly to select the search icon.

That's on Android Auto on my Mazda. It's very similar in the built-in nav system.

And in no case do you have to lean forward to peck for small touch boxes - the controls are naturally at your hand and each move has a tactile click.

Touchscreens are "souicide" as more and more distracted driving research shows.

>>lost_t+4r
The Google Assistant works well sometimes, but not always. The touchscreen is more precise for simpler (1-3 click) operations.

>>izacus+Rv
That entirely depends on what other interactions you've done recently. If you've moved the dial to any other control, you have to carefully scroll it back to the right place. The highlighting showing which control currently has focus isn't very obvious, especially once Android Auto starts showing two or three apps in split screen. If you want to mute the speech, change the compass heading, go to the Spotify section, etc, it all takes careful dialing.

The dial itself also sucks. It has both a rotary spinner that's too easy to turn and a 4-way joystick that's too easy to nudge. If you happen to drive across a tiny bump (especially with the stock shocks, which are really stiff), you can entirely lose your place and have to hunt for the highlighted control before you can resume. I have to lean forward because my eyesight isn't that great compared to before. It's not bad enough to stop driving, but not good enough to see Android Auto on that tiny screen, of which Maps is only like 2/3, and each button is tiny.

Touch screens don't really have that problem because there's not a control that has focus at any given time. You just poke whatever you want, regardless of current context.

Touch screens (like on Teslas) are worse than traditional buttons. But the Mazda spinner is even worse than touch screens. It is far far more distracting, IMO, and a life-threatening dealbreaker for me.

It's cool if you like them though... I just won't be buying a Mazda anymore, but that car (to my surprise) got pretty high reviews and nobody even mentioned the infotainment UX. Shrug. I'm just picky about these things.

>>izacus+Rv
Sorry but I agree with previous poster too - it's often many rotations, and you have to correct for misses if you overshoot, during which time your eyes are entirely off the road, for longer than just stabbing the touchscreen with a finger would take. Its objectively one of the worst car UIs I've experienced.

I daily miss items with the rotary controller in a way that I never do in any other car with a reasonably implemented touch screen for CarPlay/Android Auto (effectively almost every single new non-Mazda/Tesla vehicle on sale across the entire car industry). I know people who have refused to buy a Mazda that otherwise met their needs solely due to this issue - sectors like the CX-5/CX-9 etc compete in are staggeringly competitive nowadays and customers have a ton of options that all have working touch screens for carplay/android auto on the move.

The Miata, you just have to put up with it, given the cheap roadster market currently consists of the Miata and nothing else.