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tw04yesterday at 4:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

Tesla removed as many physical buttons and controls as possible to reduce cost and called it revolutionary. Their faithful parroted it because they loved Tesla.

Other manufacturers tried to copy it, and when any normal person had to interact with touch everything - the real opinions of how absolute garbage it was came out.

Having a big screen to display navigation and audio is awesome. Removing things like physical vents, volume control, gear selection, turn signal stalk - those are all idiotic decisions made to maximize margin on every car sold and COMPLETELY user hostile.

I'm just pleasantly surprised the germans listened to their customers.


Replies

NetMageSCWyesterday at 6:55 PM

The problem is like much of copying they put in the screen and took out the buttons without realizing how important the UI becomes when you do that. Tesla optimizes and improves constantly and while they’ve made mistakes, other manufacturers just leave the terrible UI in place for five or ten years and leaves everyone who purchased stuck with cheap, unresponsive screens and UI.

It is ridiculous that an Android potato can be more responsive than many cars screens and UI.

goosejuiceyesterday at 6:27 PM

Common argument on the internets, but meh, I think most of it is totally fine and I prefer it to my other car with buttons galore.

I do enjoy physical controls for things that are constantly being used while driving for safety purposes and all of that exists for my model. Dropping stalks was too far imo, but for a car maker that wants to remove the driver it's not surprising. Mine has two stalks and I think that's the Goldilocks version. The auto shifter is surprisingly good though.

Everything else in the Tesla is completely fine where it is. Even if I do need to reach for something there's always voice. Saying I'm hot/cold or take me to X or play my playlist or whatever works completely fine. If it's not, just adjust it when you stop like you should be doing anyway.

Plenty of things to dislike about my car but this isn't one of them. The only button, or a thing a button replaced, that is missing on my car is the manual door release in the back which is a pretty egregious omission that does make me a tad angry. I'm going to have to drill a hole in my door for that one.