Vehicle interiors are becoming giant screens. Automakers are making their infotainment touchscreens larger and larger, and they’re also putting in fully digital instrument clusters and separate touchscreens for climate controls. This is all well and good, but do we need screens on the steering wheel, too?
Hyundai presented a virtual cockpit study this week to show it’s working to innovate its interiors. With an i30 serving as the base vehicle, Hyundai previewed what touchscreens could look like on future steering wheels.
These two screens are pretty massive, each taking up an entire side of the wheel, but it’s a cleaner look than the hodgepodge of buttons you normally see. Also, the touch controls change depending on the driving situation and the information shown in the instrument cluster. Drivers can customize the layout of the controls, with up to five touch buttons per display.
This development follows Hyundai’s previous work on virtual cockpits. In 2018, Hyundai was already working on haptic feedback for steering wheels, once again on the i30. In partnership with the Wurzburg Institute for Traffic Science in Germany, the automaker has been studying driver distraction associated with virtual cockpit technologies. It says, “For all use cases, the results of the study clearly show that Hyundai’s new cockpit is significantly below the limits of the globally acknowledged motor vehicle safety associations AAM and NHTSA.”
“We chose the i30 to demonstrate that innovations are not limited to higher-segment vehicles,” said Regina Kaiser, HMI senior engineer at Hyundai Motor Europe Technical Center, in a release. “Hyundai intends to prove that innovations need to be achievable for a broad customer base.”
On the new study vehicle, Hyundai also reworked the digital instrument cluster to give it a 3D look. Instead of using one display, Hyundai stacked two displays, one behind the other, separated by a distance of 6 mm. One part of a graphic is shown on the front display, and the other is shown on the rear display. The area where the graphics overlap provides the impression of an object in space.
The virtual cockpit is still in the early prototype phase, so don’t expect to find steering wheel touchscreens on your new car anytime soon. But the automaker says it can easily adapt the displays to fit several vehicle models and segments. Check out the video below to see the new controls in action.
Source: Hyundai
The post Hyundai Envisions Steering Wheel Touchscreens appeared first on Motortrend.
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