I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.
I'm not talking about autopilot.
I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles.
For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock
Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both.
not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen.
but it needed more dedicated controls.
When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot.
It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right.
all other controls are on the touchscreen.
It really needs dedicated controls for important things.
And then the updated model S/X came out. wow.
there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times.
shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve
the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select)
Sometimes the car does not want to go in to drive/reverse for some unknown reason.
Not long after I first got my tesla, I was making a 3 point turn to go on to my driveway. I moved forward, then stopped, turned the wheel, pressed the stalk to go in to reverse, pressed the accelerator and WENT FORWARD, right in to my old car denting the door. There was no indication the car declined to go in to reverse apart from the icon on the screen.
Now, Tesla released an update so the car makes an audible noise when changing to drive/reverse and a separate noise when the car refuses your instruction. It's much better but annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to, especially when you just get in to it. I now out of habit press the gear stalk 4 or 5 times when first getting in to drive it.
>annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to
How the everloving F** does this even happen? I cannot imagine an ICE car "refusing" switching gears. I know electric vehicles don't manage driving direction through physical gears and linkages like ICE vehicles but this feels like an absurd regression.
Just to be clear, I prefer my Tesla to my ICE car and I enjoy driving it as much as my Kawasaki ZX10R..
The Tesla will refuse to go in to gear for genuine reasons, such as:
- refuses forward/reverse if the car is moving too fast in opposite direction
- refuses forward/reverse if the car just turned on and foot isn't on brake
I haven't worked out what the other reasons are though.
The vast majority are when I'm in a rush, I get in sometimes have to press the stalk about 4 times (in 2 seconds) for drive. It could be because my seatbelt isn't on yet, or the car needs a small amount or time to boot up. To be fair I'm moving off faster (even pressing the stalk down a few times) than my ICE car, and Tesla adding the Chimes really helped.
I wonder if this issue is behind all the reports of people randomly crashing into weird obstacles. Often it's claimed that they are confusing the break and accelerator pedals and one pedal driving is cited. But there's a bunch of other EVs that also have one pedal driving and they seem fine.
Mind you, my (much cheaper) EV will beep at me if I try to engage a mode and it refuses. Be it forward, reverse or park. But in the 'ready to drive' state it has never refused reverse or drive; I don't know why it ever would.
Holy cow! I have driven a Tesla handful of times and found the UX both terrible and dangerous, but this is a new one to me. Even with all of the other issues those cars have I'm shocked to learn that they will refuse to shift direction. I literally can't imagine myself ever owning a vehicle that would refuse basic commands by design.
The idea of a car "refusing" to do what I tell it to do infuriates me. I already have enough problems with various computer programs trying to second guess my decisions. I don't want my toaster, vacuum, or metal buggy telling me it knows better, too!
With the big difference of AUTO mode working for Hyundai while failing miserably for Tesla, because instead of using tested an proven technology the rely solely on their cameras.
For example look at the complains about the windscreen wipers not firing when they should and firing when they shouldn't:
IIRC they got in trouble in Germany for this already because certain controls were mandated by law to be a certain way and they flaunted it. I just bought a new car and a make or break decision for me was the control layout. Too many automakers jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Its fine for some things like android auto. But all touchscreen all the time was stupid in star trek and stupid in real life. Having physical controls for things like the lights, wipers and hvac is critical.
Even in Star Trek it wasn't this horrible. The touch buttons were mostly unchanged and in the same place. See the 'pilot' consoles in the first episode all the way to the last, they are exactly the same. No weird 'modes' or different screens.
It is not too farfetched to assume they had some form of haptic feedback (or something even better). They might as well feel like actual buttons to them.
> there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers
I didn't realize how important wipers were till last winter. I was on a 2-lane road at highway speed going into a turn. There had been light snow the previous day which was thawed on the roads, so it was wet and muddy conditions. A truck in the oncoming lane either hit a puddle or otherwise deposited a large splash of muddy water on my windshield instantly, and due to the turn coming up I had to see where I was going. I had about 1 second to find the wipers (it was someone else's vehicle) or I would have gone off the road or into oncoming traffic. That's not the time to hastily search for the wiper button on a touch screen!
I'm not a fan of the removal of the stalks, but this deserves clarification.
On the 2017-2023 Model 3, there's a button at the end of the left stalk that immediately activates the wiper. It's basically a mist button, which is also common on most every other car I've driven. So you can always get the wipers to activate instantly without getting anywhere near the touchscreen.
On the 2024 Model 3, with no stalks, there is a steering wheel button on the right that serves the same function. Push for mist, hold for wash. Same as the button on the pre-2024 model.
Stalkless is probably still going to be a deal killer for me, but still.
Thank you for clarifying. I just felt like sharing because I had no idea that windshield wipers could suddenly be as safety-critical as the steering or brakes, despite 24 years of accident-free driving. (Of course if it's raining, you need them, but every time I've driven in the rain there's still enough wiggle-room with partial visibility to pull over safely)
The left scroll wheel can: play/pause/next/previous/vol up/down in Normal mode
If you press the wiper button on the steering wheel it can change wiper speed
Long press is a custom function
When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
The right one actives autosteer/tacc/fsd, adjusts follow distance and max speed
There's 3 buttons for left/right/high beam on the left, and on the right, buttons for wiper mode, voice, rear camera, and in the middle, horn.
Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped. Also do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
My God, they’ve finally made Marcus J. Ranum’s comment reality: ‘If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.’
Yeah I’ve always been suspect of these critiques of Teslas UI. Besides the climate control you don’t really need to tap on the tablet for anything critical to driving WHILE driving. At least that was my experience in my brief experience with a 3.
I’d still add maybe another physical dial for stuff like climate, maybe even make them programmable. But that’s for convenience.
I find the rare times you need to use xdrive on BMWs which is a physical dial + a few buttons just as distracting as using a tablet while driving.
not only is it on the touchscreen, it doesn't have a dedicated location, is hard to locate visually, then hard to hard to actually press (small target), all in a moving car and without affecting other controls.
also, turn on cabin lights? flash headlights off and on? sigh.
> When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
Literally do not care about a phone call when it is raining. Hopefully, it at least has coyote time on it so when you adjust the wiper speed it will ignore a phone call.
> Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped.
I've had to adjust while driving. I don't remember for what reason, but I know I've had to do it a few times in my hundreds of thousands of miles of driving.
> do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
When you need it, you need it. I was once driving towards a non-gated, non-indicated railroad crossing in my hometown. There was only a train about once a day that went through there, but that day, there was a train that should not have been there. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.
I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
> I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
absolutely not worth it. modern cars (ie, anything with abs and disk brakes) achieve maximum deceleration when you mash the brake pedal and allow the car to modulate the clamping force. using the emergency brake and putting the car in park just locks up the wheels. the whole point of abs is to avoid this. you destroyed your transmission to increase your stopping distance.
This was most certainly not anywhere near a modern car. Further, it was a gravel road, which is a case where I'm not sure ABS brakes work better, but I could be wrong.
the first key insight here is that brakes can generate much more friction against the wheel than the tire can against any surface you're driving on. this makes the tires the limiting factor for stopping distance, not the brakes. the only exceptions to this rule are very old (like pre-1980s) cars, cars that desperately need new brake pads, and brakes that have overheated from heavy use on a track or riding them down a long hill.
the second key insight is that tires generate the most friction when they are allowed to slip only a small amount. different surfaces have different optimal slip amounts, but you never want to lock up the wheels completely.
gravel does make a difference here. abs is typically tuned for optimal performance on pavement, so it's at least theoretically possible for a skilled human driver to outperform older abs implementations on gravel. the average driver panic stopping is very unlikely to beat abs though. being a lower traction surface, it's also much easier to lock up the wheels on gravel. there's no reason to use the ebrake and especially not to force the transmission into park unless you know for a fact that the main brake pads are failing.
I'm sorry to completely beat you over the head with this explanation, but what you describe is extremely unsafe and I really hope no one reads that and tries it themselves in an emergency. the emergency stop SOP for any abs-equipped car is 1) fully depress the brake pedal, 2) focus on steering the car away from the immediate hazard or at least in a relatively straight line.
The issue is that I realized I wasn't going to stop in time while depressing the brakes, but just barely. That was when I pulled the e-brake and put the car into a spin, trying to burn energy. By that point, I was probably only doing 20-30mph. Thus I came to the train tracks almost parallel, but skidding along the road. My goal, as I was doing it, was to clip the train and get pushed along vs. shoved from the side. Then put the car in park to hopefully absorb as much of that impact as possible since I figured I might either die or lose consciousness. I wanted to be found on the road, instead of in the swamp on either side of the road.
I was incredibly lucky that day, there is no doubt about it, but, I also did a lot of insane driving during that point in my life. I knew how to handle that car in a variety of conditions from rain, gravel, snow, and ice and any mix of them.
Did I make the right decisions during those fleeting seconds? Possibly, possibly not. One thing I did have, was options. Options are something that has been taken away over the years through weird UX choices.
You don't seem to understand the point of ABS brakes. The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels. The reason ABS brakes exist is because when the wheels are locked, the car is sliding as opposed to rolling, which causes the car to skid instead of turn when you turn the steering wheel. Average drivers tend to struggle with this and end up spinning out of control.
So ABS brakes pump the brakes rapidly as a compromise between controllability and stopping distance, which allows the average driver in an emergency to just "stomp and steer" instead of having to learn how to control a skid, which is a more advanced driving skill. But they do this at the expense of stopping distance, which is longer than if you just locked up the brakes.
Putting the transmission in park was still unnecessary and probably useless. It's not designed for that force, so it didn't absorb any energy or help the car stop faster; it just blew up.
> The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels
That isn't true. Dynamic friction for a tire is always less than static friction, as soon as the tires are sliding your stopping distance is going to get longer. A good driver used to be able to threshold brake better than a basic ABS setup, but that hasn't been true now for years. Modern ABS computers are quite advanced.
> The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels.
Very much untrue and it's a subject covered by school physics textbooks.
The wheels may not lock up simultaneously(often don't) and that is the reason why ABS will monitor wheels individually. And, if you are doing that, might as well do it all the time, and that's traction control.
ABS decreases stopping distance and increases controllability. It's a win win. These days you can't really do any better than ABS, "average" driver or not.
I'm not sure this is true. Yes, steerability is the main benefit of ABS, but I think bringing wheels from a slight roll to skid absorbs more energy (through deformation of the rubber) then just skidding along would under the same time frame. I.e. ABS does marginally decrease stopping distance -- at least on asphalt -- compared to plain skidding friction.
> I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.
Something has to be very wrong with your car if this is required. The emergency brake is just an element of the regular brakes, and the parking pawl is laughably flimsy (it shouldn't engage anyway, it should just skip loudly over the detents if you try to throw the transmission into park while moving).
All you should ever need to do is stand on the brakes. Try to put that pedal through the floor. Don't waste time reaching for transmission levers or emergency brakes, keep both hands on the wheel to maintain control and use your foot to provide maximum stopping power. If your regular brakes are the limit, something is very wrong. Your tires should be the stopping limit.
One side of the steering wheel has buttons for driving functions: cruise control, following distance, lane assist, etc. The other side has audio controls for radio channel selection and volume, voice input, start/end phone call, and a customizable button that I set to record a voice memo.
Behind the wheel are a pair of regenerative braking paddles that work much like the paddle shifters on some gas cars: left paddle increases regen, right paddle decreases it. That left button comes in handy on the rare occasion when I may want to slow down in a hurry without lighting up the brake lights. (I will leave it to the reader to speculate on why I may want to do that) The drive mode button (eco/standard/sport/winter) is below the horn button.
Two stalks for headlight/turn signal/etc. and wiper/washer control.
Dual screens: one in front of the driver with driving info: speed and speed limit, how much battery you're using or regening, etc. A touchscreen in the center for infotainment stuff.
Below the center screen is a dual mode touch panel for climate controls or radio/map/nav controls. I just leave this in climate mode. Physical knobs at each end of this panel that change roles for the two modes. The left side of this panel has front/rear defrost, recirculation, and auto climate which remain there in both modes.
The center console has physical buttons to turn the EV on or off, a physical R/N/D knob, and physical buttons for parking camera/auto parking and a couple of related features.
At the front of the center console are dedicated buttons for driver/passenger seat heating/ventilation and steering wheel heat. Oddly, these are touch buttons in my GT-Line but physical buttons (better!) in the lower-end Wind trim. In Australia the GT-Line keeps the physical buttons here.
Behind the steering wheel next to the door are physical buttons for panel illumination level, charge door and rear hatch opening, and a couple of other things.
The driver door has traditional buttons for mirror adjustment, lock/unlock, windows, and child lock.
After driving gas cars all my life, the first time I got in an EV6 it felt very comfortable, like a real car and not a science experiment.
Anton Yelchin was killed due to traumatic asphyxiation when he thought he parked his Jeep and got out of the car and it then rolled into him and crushed him against a gate. Arguably the blame falls on GM for building one of those stateless shifters that always pops back to the center.
Its not just Tesla. Recent Jeep models have a digital speedometer with no analog backup. From an engineering perspective these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain. Surely the speedometer is not the make or break cost item on a car?
The analog speedometer it replaced has been digital behind the scenes for ages. The cluster is just sat on a CAN (or similar) bus and controlling a servo for the analog gauge. The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone (and indeed when it does fail, it’s obvious).
> The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone
It sure is. I'm old enough to have had several cars with speedometer malfunctions due to that stupid little plastic gear at the transmission. One more nuisance I'm glad we don't have on newer cars.
> these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain
Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.
Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.
Why do cars need to be patched OTA? Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped? I never needed an ECU update on a car before? And my infotainment rarely needed one to the point where the handful of times it did get a firmware update it was handled during servicing just fine.
> Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped?
We OTA spacecraft. We update planes’ software as part of maintenance. We have never written software once. We just accepted the bugs and defects as part of the product’s basket of tradeoffs, marvelling when the occasional manufacturer got it right in the first manufacturing runs.
> never needed an ECU update on a car before?
There were always weird bugs associated with models that you learned to deal with, or a tendency towards certain failure modes. In extreme cases we recalled.
> We update planes’ software as part of maintenance
We don't OTA plane software updates.
> We OTA spacecraft.
Because we can't realistically bring them back and there's an incredible amount of work that goes into make those updates flawless. Spacecraft are not a mass produced consumer product driven by profits and are less likely to have corners cut.
Sure. We still update the software. The tool which airlines use to create update blobs is even online [1].
> Because we can't realistically bring them back
We couldn’t always OTA spacecraft. Back then we just lost them.
The point is in even high-stakes games we don’t write flawless software. Now software in cares is doing more. There will be bugs. Pretending there won’t is delusional.
What we can do is minimise safety-critical bugs by forcing standardisation and certifciation in those components, even if that slows down innovation, and ensuring timely patches. That’s easier with digital than analog, which in turn makes manufacturers more willing to admit they made a mistake.
They don't need to be patched OTA. It's ridiculous. The terrible product design practices from other parts of life have unfortunately seeped into automaking.
The analog gauges have been digital for a long time; there's a signal processor that decides how far the gauge should move and a motor that actually moves it.
While it is important for cars to have speedometers so that drivers can learn to judge their speed, with a little bit of caution, a journey during which the speedometer fails can be completed both safely and within speed limits.
On the Volvo 240, the analog speedometer tends to get sticky after you've done a couple hundred thousand miles. Sometimes it will reset if you just hit the dash hard enough, sometimes you just have to guess the speed based on the RPM and gear and experience.
In the near future we will ask ourselves how people back then were doing this virtuoso thing called "driving" and be deeply grateful for the autopilot technology which Tesla was pioneering.
I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products.
you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists
I'm not talking about autopilot.
I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles.
For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock
Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both.
not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen.
but it needed more dedicated controls.
When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot. It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right.
all other controls are on the touchscreen.
It really needs dedicated controls for important things.
And then the updated model S/X came out. wow.
there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times.
shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select)
Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.