Dear Toyota: How about easing up a bit on the touchscreen lockout?
Late last summer I got a ‘10 Prius, and I love it. It handles great, is fun to drive, and getting 42 mpg kicks the shit out of the 17 that my eight year-old truck managed to eke out.
It also has a healthy dose of tech, which suits me fine (and is in sharp contrast to the truck, too). A lot of that functionality is routed through the touchscreen in the middle of the dash.
There’s just one problem; Toyota really doesn’t want you playing with it while driving. Most onscreen controls are disabled while the car is in motion.
I was struck by the pointlessness of this “safety” feature while making a call to an automated system today (which is done by voice, saying the name of the contact which was wirelessly imported from my phone, which is awesome) and I had to push a number on the phone.
Here’s how this would work if the touchscreen wasn’t locked out:
- Push the onscreen “0-9” button that calls up the number pad.
- Push the onscreen “0” button.
Clearly, too distracting. Here’s how it actually works:
- Push the onscreen “0-9” button (which for some reason is still active while the car is in motion) that calls up the number pad.
- Number pad is displayed, but all buttons are grayed out and inactive.
- Push the “voice” button on the steering wheel.
- Push it a second time to interrupt it reading a helpful paragraph of instructions.
- Say “send tones” *
- Push the “voice” button on the steering wheel to interrupt it reading another set of helpful instructions.
- Say “zero”.
- Push the “voice” button on the steering wheel (this may not be necessary, but I was in a rhythm).
- Notice the active “send” button onscreen, press it.
- Hope that the automated system on the other end of the call hasn’t timed out on you.
Safety!
I like how the voice solution to pressing a button on the screen is to push a button on the wheel four times, give two voice commands, and then PUSH A BUTTON ON THE SCREEN. This is a system that would have benefitted by a bit more thought.
* I didn’t know that there was a voice option for this. I pushed the voice button out of frustration, and it showed a list of available options onscreen that can be read, and “send tones” was one of them.
