I applaud the author for putting thought into how to design digital controls, in contrast to the "just put whatever garbage on a touch screen" strategy most carmakers do today.

However, I still question the benefit of this complex, modal control (you have to press a single knob to "cycle between" multiple modes). My ancient, 2016 car features three knobs. This luxury allows me to, without looking, adjust any of three settings (temp, fan, air location), as well as a button which does each seat heater, without any "check what mode it's in, tap, look at the tiny screen, tap again if necessary" step.

True, in this trim, my car does not have a thermostat mode, which in theory is useful, but it is so trivial to modulate the temperature based on "do I feel cold, hot or comfortable right now" and reaching over to twist one of the controls anyway, and even in the other car I have which has this mode, I frequently need to adjust things anyway, except in that car some of the functions require multiple mode changes on the touch screen and looking away from the road.

Oh, hi, creator of the SmartKnob (mentioned in the article) here - I'm continually blown away by how much UX discussion it has generated over the years!

One of the things I regret a bit about the prototype and demo I originally shared is that I used a press action and the screen as a modal/menu interface. The screen makes for a snazzy demo video, and works great for interfaces where you have the user's full attention (like a smart home control panel) but I think there's a lot more potential for just the haptics, paired with other dedicated buttons to switch to specific (i.e. not a menu of) modes, like this later demo I built using the haptic feedback for a video timeline jog tool: https://youtu.be/J9192DfZplk

Kudos for to the author for the work put into this and the intelligence functions are interesting. I do have a couple concerns though.

A. Trying to design down to two knobs makes each knob multi-modal. This removes a lot of muscle memory benefits requiring a glance at a screen, a small screen that is now partially covered by your hand while operating the knob. Haptic feedback might be able to help you know what mode you're in without looking but now you have a lot more to memorize to use it while keeping your eyes on the road which may begin to defeat the simplicity benefits.

B. Haptic feedback... will this work with gloves on? (will you feel it, will it sense your touch)

A lot of manual systems now have 3 knobs, not much more than the 2 presented here, which will always do the same thing each time you reach for them. My concern would be how long it would take the user to be familar with the interface without looking. One quick thought, I would be inclined to think that feedback through a large screen not covered by your fingers might have advantages.

It's a great study on UI consistancy however, esp around how to program the detents, etc.

Designing car controls is easy. You take what engineers have spent 100 yeas fine tuning every element of, for precision and ergonomics, then you give to someone with an industrial design degree who throws it all out the door to make something shiny, and it kills Anton Yelchin, amongst others.

One overlooked feature of physical controls is that they also give interiors an identity and experience.

Growing up obsessed with cars, I loved seeing how different brands would lay out the cabin. Volvos from the 2000s used a rather large diagram of a seated person to select the HVAC vent for example.

Also, in my brain, a 3000+ pound object just dang requires some stuff to physically press, push, and hear click!

A couple giant touchscreens with touch controls nearly eliminates that.

As I get older the one thing these designer overlook is aging eyesight. My Honda has decent controls but the small display (like on these knobs) is very difficult to see sitting still. At night, while driving - it's impossible. The icons are tiny. Given the size of the current screens in cars - that's a lot of real estate for knobs. Use it.

Car manufacturers, please hire this guy to build your interfaces. He gets it. Touch screens must not be used for controls you are going to frequently operate while driving the car, it's maximum unsafe.

I guess that's a nicer touchscreen than others, but I just don't get why we need touchscreens at all to begin with. I'm a fan of Mazda having a touchless screen, and I'm even more a fan of my 2004 bmw X5 that has the beautiful control of minutely adjusting the temperature by turning a dial in the middle of the dash.

You can set the temperature to something moderate like 70 or whatever and then if the air hitting your face and hands is too hot or cold, you just turn the dial, all other vents continue doing their thing at 70, but you can have hot/cold air on your hands at the same time. And, of course, you can do this adjustment in a split second while you merge onto the highway.

I learned this lesson the hard way with my early 2000s BMW 5 Series (a 2004 model). It had a single joystick-style knob (iDrive, if I remember correctly) controlling a screen that handled everything—climate, settings, and more. The problem? It was an all-in-one system, completely integrated with vehicle functions, which meant you couldn’t swap it out for a newer or better OEM system. You were stuck with aging tech, and once the screen or computer started acting up, there were no simple fixes. No cheap button replacement, no easy upgrades.

Compare that to an old LandCruiser or similar vehicle from the ’80s. Physical controls still work decades later, and worst-case scenario, you replace a button or a switch for pocket change. Meanwhile, modern cars are turning into disposable tech products, destined for obsolescence the moment their proprietary systems fail. It's for this reason when I bought a new car a couple of years ago, I opted for a Toyota LandCruiser, the use of physical buttons (despite coming with touchscreens now) makes a huge difference when you're driving and want to press a button to change music or turn the volume up/down.

My favorite car control system is the BMW iDrive rotary dial.

Touch screens are fine for given much more fine-grained access to controls. But they should be limited to controls that you _don't need to set while driving_. It's absurd that it takes 3 taps on a screen -- diverting my attention to the screen -- on my Tesla to turn on defogging (a common event here!) while I can do it with a one touch (now muscle-memorized) on my Subaru.

The blog writer's final design is basically what Ford uses in the F-series these days. But Ford's dials have a couple of functions that I didn't see mentioned. First, when you turn the temperature dial all the way hot and push hard into the stop, it turns on max defrost, and all the way cold and push is max A/C. Also, if the system is off, it turns on when you turn either dial. The dials are also large and rubbery for gripping with dirty hands or with gloves on, something a lot of manufacturers seem to ignore.

Reading this feels living through new dark age of Human–computer interaction (HCI). As and oldschool engineer, I was though HCI in year 2008. How to place and calculate controls, heatpaths, click to action counts, colors, where to use what... And all this accumulated knowledge went down the drain (even in military!). Now rediscovered like some lost art.

>I created an automated system controlled by a temperature dial. This, in turn, determines the fan speed and seat heating. If the cabin temperature deviates significantly from the set temperature, the system will increase the fan speed and seat heating or cooling accordingly.

Oh, god. It just keeps getting worse. I don't want a fake knob that simulates a real one except it ignores me and decides the fan speed, blend door position, and probably the recirculation door on its own (allowing only a temporary override). I want a fan dial that is electrically connected to the fan, such that the position of the dial directly controls the voltage being sent into the fan motor, with no computer or robotics in between. In other words, a step switch. And I want a slider that is mechanically connected to the blend door for controlling temperature, again, with no computer or robotics in between. And the same for the recirculation door.

It's Google Nest for your car.

OP mentions the Braun work on pots (potentiometers, the common lingo for rotary dials). I suggest they also check out the entire subculture around pots and faders in the music industry, where a lot of thought goes into them as relates to mixing board design and experience.

I work in the pro audio world, and have had many opportunities over the years to participate in the design review process for multiple synthesizer musical instruments.

One of the most common issues that gets people riled up is Fitts Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

It seems that many synth UI designers have small, thin, bony fingers, and overlook the issues that comes from having knobs placed too close together. They like to design tight, compact, "valuable looking" knob panels, and I like to inform them that these designs are nonsense and some consideration should be given to the spacing of things.

This has an impact on the end user with fat fingers, since moving one knob should not provide the opportunity to accidentally 'bump' or 'jog' another adjacent knob - there simply has to be space to allow for market finger types.

(In spite of the fact that these are mostly German designers, asking them to review their designs in the context of automative controls, has been a herculean effort.)

So one of my favourite toys in my arsenal when confronted with a new, fresh-faced designer full of impactful and dense design ideas, is an Arduino with an LCD display attached to a breadboard, and 4 movable knobs which can be placed in an approximation of the design. I wrote a tool that displays a UI with a fine-tune parameter, and whenever I get a chance I lay out the knobs using the designers intended dimensions, and ask them to fine-tune the parameter.

If they can do it one-handed without bumping other knobs (and thus triggering the :P emoji and siren noise), they get a pass and a check-mark on their design doc.

If, however, their dimensions make it impossible to move only a single knob, they get a little :P mark on their review documents, and my designer-killer tool gets put back in the drawer for another day.

I will have to review this toy for the context of display-in-control style interfaces in the future, it seems ..

Any number of automobile manufactures should fire a bunch of staff and hire you. How we got to touch screens to control things which previously didn't require taking your eye off the road continues to amaze me.

Related: There is a domain of study named Cyber-Physical Systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber%E2%80%93physical_system) which is basically a inter-disciplinary approach combining mathematical theory, physical sensors/actuators/I/O devices, network communication and software architectures. I used to think it was just a buzzword for Embedded Systems but it is actually a distinct holistic view of looking at the whole entangled system.

This free book Introduction to Embedded Systems - A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach by Lee & Seshia gives a pretty good overview - https://ptolemy.berkeley.edu/books/leeseshia/

Lots of research is done on UI for cars and planes, for understandable reasons. I wonder how much is applicable to other less valued devices where there is little research.

I thought of it because someone was talking about their new super-bright, blinking bicycle tail light. I could see someone naively intuiting brighter is better or blinking is better, but I know UI well enough to know that naive intuition has poor accuracy.

I spent a little time looking for empirical information but almost all I could find was cars. (I did find something that said blinking could be a problem because it's hard to visually and mentally track a moving object in the dark - it's in one spot, disappears, and then reappears in another spot. I did come across the standard blink cycle for cars, which includes total cycle length, and the on-period length and off-period length in each cycle.)

Sorry, but if you're suggesting any AC control different than simple knobs [1], you're failing miserably.

This [1] type of control doesn't require taking eyes out the road to adjust temp, fan speed and fan direction. Since it's a simple fscking knob, it can be adjusted by feel alone, and both the clicks and the angle give feedback on what setting it is.

The suggested solution is bad, for these reasons:

It tries to be clever by providing the lost "clickness" with haptic feedback, but it still misses the most important feedback, which is the angle of the knob. So it still requires you take eyes out of the road to see the setting you're in.

It also commits one of the cardinal sins of good UI, which is being a modal control. So, again, you need to take eyes out of the road and keep clicking to put in the right setting.

[1] https://i0.wp.com/weberbrothersauto.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/12...

1. Cars should have physical controls.

2. The smart knob is a clever device.

3? Smart knob somehow addresses cars no longer having physical controls.

I like controls in the upcoming Rivian cars, it's basically changing the physical feedback based on what you are selecting [1]

1 - https://youtu.be/k0Gt_PUyldc?si=VxK1rzWr0Vx0JUHd&t=371

Appreciate the post and the discussion around it. As a car enthusiast, I enjoyed reading the specific implementations out in the wild today.

What stood out in the article was the attention paid to designing intuitive haptics. What our bodies expect in feedback when we turn a weighted dial. Doing it in software allows controlling multiple things, but I would still prefer a dumb dial per function, placed in close proximity to where the function acts. Seat controls near seats, climate controls near vents. Personalization stuffed into the screen and menus and profiles.

I did not think I would like auto climate controls until I lived with one. Even then, I would fiddle with it because I didn’t like the sudden high initial fan speed until I got used to it.

Honest question here - do people actually constantly fiddle with climate knobs? I honestly don't understand the whole "knobs are important because I can change without looking", I get it, but are you actually doing this?

I've had a Tesla for many years now, the temp is set to 21C and I don't miss knobs because I don't change this. I prewarm/cool the car from the app so I never enter a hot or cold car, only a 21C car. Occasionally (ie a dozen times a year) I'll change the temp for some odd reason, but rarely while the car is moving. Seat and steering wheel are also set to auto. I just don't think about the temp in my car, but climate knobs seem like a huge sticking point to lots of people?

I'm always reminded of the QuickTime v4.0 volume rocker and how painful it was to use.

Screenshot: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/_resize.php?imgenc=ZmlsZ...

Fortunately, it was changed to just a slider in v5.0 as seen here: https://jablickar.cz/en/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Apple-Qui...

One of my favourite dash controls ever was the Saab “Night” mode. Very simple, one press and all of the backlight illumination was turned off except for the absolutely critical controls (speed, etc.).

Super useful for reducing distractions while driving at night. Most of the night driving I do today is polluted by light splashing off a central LED on the main console, or dynamic instrumentation on the dash itself. Match that with the blinding headlights manufacturers are wont to put in nowadays and it makes for a much more fatiguing night time driving experience.

I do wonder if it increased the risk of falling asleep at the wheel, but I have no doubt that it improved night vision overall.

This is a really clever design for the device! Damn, very clever. It's not a car knob with the multi modal thing but it would be great for a home thermostat and related stuff. Click to switch to heat, Click to switch to cold, so on and so forth.

I'm very happy with my Tesla touchscreen while buttons on recent Toyota rental sucked balls - they weren't spaced apart so you are taking your eyes off road. Some older Japanese cars place bunch of buttons in a little island that takes solid half minute to figure out what you need.

People blindly reeeee'ing on touchscreens need to learn how to form a coherent arguments. i.e. they are not great for old and frail or some manufacturers don't know basics of UX.

End of the day getting pissy about climate controls is ridiculous. If you can't operate car for few minutes within couple degrees comfortable temperature then you might be a problem.

I take the opportunity to rant about cruise control / speed limit buttons, which have a much worse UX than climate control.

If someone in the auto industry reads this:

Can I get a button that says 50, one that says 80 and one that says 130. Right now, you have to hit “set” and then adjust the speed limit with some up and down arrows, which is really annoying and takes your eyes off the road.

99% of the time I need 50/80/130. Yes, those are French speed limits, so if you prefer, you do 1/2/3 where you can set the 3 speeds in the parameters.

Or at the very least, make the arrows adjust the speed in 5kph increments.

My Skoda Superb(2015) have very similar knobs for controlling temperature and when pressed it turns on seat heater.

From the first time I used it. It felt so natural and intuitive to use.

But unfortunately touch screen infotainment system is pure garbage.

I appreciate a designer who prioritizes haptics and the personal touch in controls over relying solely on touchscreens. While touchscreens give devices a modern and multifunctional feel, I prefer some basic features to be handled using a handheld hybrid combo. The team has done a fantastic job creating a ready solution for this. Hopefully, some Japanese companies get this imbibed in their models, especially Toyota and Maruti Suzuki!

Surely the pinnacle of design here would simply be two buttons: "I'm too hot" and "I'm too cold" (assuming you couldn't somehow automatically measure that state e.g. contactless thermometers).

All the complexity of deciding resulting target temperature and fan speed is work that an elegant and intelligent system should then perform for the end user. If it can't be determined automatically, try harder or add more controls.

This is a solved problem. My 2009 4Runner has the perfect temp control. I couldn't tell you how it works. But my hand knows. Which is perfect tool design.

A bit late but for those of you who still really like physical controls , want a family capable vehicle (I’ve done 3 nights with two under five) and something off the beaten path it’s hard to go wrong with the Audi A4 allroad wagon. Absolutely fantastic suspension and pretty quick for a family wagon. Midrange package gets you adaptive cruise control and all the other safety stuff. Mild hybrid.

The 1989 Toyota Corolla had the best climate control block of any car I have ever owned.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/387701094464

It has detents, so you can tell when you are moving it. Every button is different, the entire thing can be used without ever setting eyes on it.

The best part is no weird modal lockouts between external air and recirculation.

Reminds me of m5stack's dial https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smar...

I got a few to play around with for my home automation system, but haven't had the time.

Brilliant. I need this thing for my computer. Kensington, are you seeing this? It is time to work on trackball wheel of Kensington Expert. We want haptic feedback with electric motor. One of my classic cars is a Mercedes CLK 200 Kompressor from 2000. The highest quality physical controls for this class. Joy to operate. We need this back.

A pet peeve of mine is that climate controls shouldn't just have a single temperature setting but an acceptable range. In winter 18(c) is quite acceptable. In summer it's too cold. Ideally I'd set a temp range of 18-22(c). If the temp goes outside that the AC should move it back within range.

A very tangential note about this:

> Much like a door handle should communicate whether to pull or push a door,

For many common doors it's not the handle, it's the frame. Standing on one side of the frame we see that the door is free and we can pull it. On the other side we see that the door hits the frame and we must push it.

I applaud the work and thoughts the author put in this system, but for me it just demonstrates why all these complex digital controls fail. I have a older mercedes, my seat heating has one knob, 3 settings, high, low, off. Those buttons, i can find them blindfolded.

This is one of the many things my dad did in his 40+ year career as an engineer at GM. I'm really excited to share this with him and grateful for such a write-up.

A big thank you to the author, the person posted it here, and all those who upvoted it.

All that is needed are knobs or buttons or switches to directly access as many functions as possible without the driver looking. For things in the screen, there should be a clicking knob that can navigate the screen without touch.

A good control interface is an interface that you’re used to.

The best kind of control interface is no interface, a set and forget a/c that has it all figured out; you just switch on the car and you’ll always feel comfortable.

Standardizing voice control in cars will go a long way until vendors decide to standardize physical controls or car OS. I should be able to get in any car and say "Set heat to X", "Defrost Windows" etc.

My wife’s new car[1] has the worst climate controls on the market. Just so you know this isn’t hyperbole:

    - the touch controls are blacked out at night, no backlight, no ambient light touches the black touch controls surface, the temperature control is hidden from occupants at night
    - Everything except temperature can only be accessed via the infotainment screen HOWEVER nothing can be accessed from any of the default/ambient screens, you must always first go into the HVAC screen and then select your options
    - the car would rather that you don’t operate HVAC in terms of temperature, fan speed and choice of vents to enable, instead defaulting to a “helpful” screen which offers around 8 fairly indistinguishable settings like “warm my feet”

WHAT?!?!!

Turns out I value instant heat above all else, all previous cars have taken a mile or two to begin producing warmth. This (thanks to being an EV) just instantly starts blasting 5kw of heat into the cabin. Amazing.

So I still hate the controls but I wouldn’t give up instant heating to fix them. Obviously I’d rather have instant heating AND sane controls. I just never knew what i valued as a user before, I found it interesting.

[1] VW ID Buzz

Touch screens are such a lazy, shitty, dangerous way to implement 90% of the functions they’re currently used for. Good to see that at least one person is working on this problem.

One obvious (but probably obsolete) use of this would be a radio tuner where the strength of the detent is proportional to the strength of the radio signal.

should read, "the lost art of designing physical controls..."

Is that over kill to use a BLDC for a dial? They are pretty cheap nowadays

I think a good analogy here is retro digital cameras. I have a Fuji X-T30, which is about five years old now. Still a decent camera and it has a lot of physical controls. Except they are not really physical controls. They are buttons and dials that are re-programmable. Even the aperture ring on my lens is not physically connected to anything. The aperture is controlled digitally. The aperture ring just gives off a signal to the camera that is than hooked up to the aperture. Some lenses even have re-programmable buttons now. Some cheaper lenses don't have dedicated controls like that. But you can still hook up one of the other dials on the body to do the same. There are wheel-button thingies on the front and the back that you can bind to whatever.

Cars basically could use controls like that. Maybe with some sensible defaults; and there's going to be a bunch of things that most people would like to control with a button or a dial. Not that hard to execute and you can sell cars with more and less dials. Or no dials at all. The touch screen is always the cheap fallback. The buttons are a nice up-sell. And with the right APIs and wireless protocols, it wouldn't even be too hard to have third party bluetooth buttons even; or a strip of buttons that plugs in a USB socket. Or similar. You can buy flight simulator hardware that emulate most of a modern cockpit with physical buttons. Most of these things are USB devices. Some of these things are pretty affordable even. Throttle compartments, landing gear buttons, buttons with a satisfying click/thunk/etc. Whatever you want.

Like it or not, this stuff is basically cost related. Buttons have lots of wires, components, etc. That increases cost of assembly and bill of materials. They can also break and cause additional cost under warranty. People need training on how to install and repair that stuff. The nice thing with a touch screen is that it's just a handful of components and wires. Installs in no time and if it breaks, it's easy to replace.

So, the question for manufacturers then becomes what is the car with the least buttons that drivers still pay a premium for? Because, that's the most profitable for them. And the reality of course is that what people say what they'll buy mostly doesn't match their behavior in the show room.

It's the same with a lot of products. It doesn't matter whether people are buying a TV, a phone, a new laptop or whatever. Some people really know what they are buying, but most don't, and some only think they know and talk themselves into buying crap they definitely are not going to be happy with.

In the end, people mostly just select the thing with the largest feature matrix that still fits their budget. And the nice thing with software features is that there's no assembly or component cost involved. Modern cars are smart phones with wheels. Literally made by smart phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi even (both sell lots of cars in China).

this is why I want my next car to have physical dials.

Ah yes. A control with a little, densely detailed screen on that your hand totally covers when using it. This type of control is investigated by design teams at auto companies and the sensible ones rarely take it forward as, while they look cool, when used in a vehicle they are more distracting than touch screens.

This looks very similar to the iPod slider control.

That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

I wish car manufacturers would refocus from touchscreens (for reasons I will assume everyone understands) to a cost-cutting compromise of modular physical knobs and buttons.

Imagine if there was a standard form-factor, so manufacturers could install a 1x4 unit and then plug in a line of dials or button-clusters, where each section has its own tiny display that can be software-controlled to show what it does.

Yeah, it won't always match the exact lines and swoops designers want to use, but I want usability, I don't buy a car to show off the interior to others. The people who do do that are probably buying much more expensive cars and can easily afford to do things the classic way.

Yeah, this article really nailed it. I totally agree about the touchscreen thing in cars. It's made driving so much more distracting, honestly. The point about haptic feedback and having a clear layout is so important. Good to see that some companies like Jaguar and Skoda are still getting it right with actual buttons and knobs! More should definitely follow their lead.

This is nice. So tired of touch screen controls that I can't access without breaking my focus from driving. This is a nice middle ground where you can display rich graphics if you're looking down at the knob, but can also control by feel without losing focus.

Mandatory XKCD.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/2704/

Perhaps we've lost the plot of both vehicles and computers.

When I was a child, computers were office-based machines, and it seemed, at least, that computers ("bicycles for the mind", "paperless office", "You Will... AT&T") were going to make life simpler, efficient, and leisurely as they took over our menial labor.

But computers came into homes, and just tended to be a plaything where games and pointless activities could be concentrated into your Residential Swiss Army Knife. It seemed promising for awhile, when word processing and spreadsheets and databases could be had. But they really just needed to upskill the everyman--->

If you're productive at this point, it's in spite of these computers, with the complexity and crossed purposes and support difficulties. I could probably just do 16 hour days reading Privacy Policies and paying an attorney to translate them.

I think one end-goal of ubiquitous computing was to offload all those secretarial, clerking, office assistant functions onto the consumer. It's mind-blowing to this guy that ordinary folks could get anything done with paper, a copper pair, and snail mail???

My father would joke at the store: "if they ask people at checkout whether they found everything ok, say yes, because otherwise they'll rearrange the store!" and it rings true with app development and obsolescence, because the drive to innovate and "improve" gives people job security, and produces patents, and press releases to pump your stock. And when the whole chain of tools/components is working this way, nobody can fight anymore. The App Stores seem to gloat when they've updated 23 apps to ratchet up the "let me relearn this from scratch as I simultaneously need a critical-path task to get finished on time"

So what are critical paths on a vehicle? It seems like so many "cushy first class" add-ons that increase the value-add and profit propositions. Perhaps it just maintains dopamine levels enough to cope with a car-based urban wasteland where you only park where you sleep.

I've used so many OS. So many apps. But leveraged tiny fractions of them because the learning curves are insurmountable. What's the average Joe do with malfunctioning computers: consult a 12-year-old STEM student or go to Geek Squad. Eventually high school will just mandate the MCSE/Apple tracks because, computer literacy not being optional anymore, it's not clear how far an 18-year-old can get initiated into the mystery cults and obscure arcana as a Cyberspace Sorceror.

So these in-vehicle computers are maximizing complexity and recapitulating Emacs->Operating System->Reads Mail->MMORPG in meatspace. When I can summon a robot to drive me around. But the edu-info-tainment systems in ordinary cars is nearly getting in our face to make the commute like another 4 hours in the office. Wow!

It's wild to me that so many people ITT obviously hate many aspects of the interface they have with their cars, and yet buy them new anyway and deal with it. Having not had a car for years, the only time I'd find this acceptable is if I was just buying a palatable but imperfect used car rather than a new one that's tens of thousands. I'd accept that some of these issues may not be discovered during the lead up research and testing phase, but it's weird and possibly upsetting that the pressure to buy an arbitrary car is so strong that some people would just get one anyway.

If I need a car temporarily, these are things I can easily overlook for like the week I have it, but if the controls irritate me, I'm sure as hell not inclined to go out and buy one anyway.