Reverse these trends. They all suck and unsafe.
Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too. It's very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny. For you people out there who buy cars with red blinking signal lights, I hate you.
I'm surprised. But it shouldn't be up to Tesla; it's illegal and they never get on the road in countries with proper regulations.
The USA doesn't mandate red turn signals. They can be red or amber. Plenty of BMWs with amber turn signals. Although the current one has red turn signals.
I'd say on modern cars it's less bad, the turn signal is usually a strip, and the brake light is larger, joined with a 3rd brake light.
But on one of those old Ford vans, with incandescent red brake/turn signals with no/often broken 3rd light: you have to wait a second before you can determine if the person is braking / indicating.
Enforcement, no?
NY state has 30% tint law, but my Uber driver last night was more than that.
I’ve heard tint being enforced with other violations, but i believe window tint analyzers are in short supply or costly, and they have to share. Which leads to longer roadside detainments.
What makes them so difficult to test?
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
It's one of the reasons I refuse to own a new car. Zero reason to hide critical controls behind a touch screen.
My daily driver has all tactile controls. I can operate wipers, climate, radio, and all critical functions blindfolded.
In fact they are hated so much people are deliberately buying older less safe cars instead.
Fully agree
You can't call any change "dismantling Chesterton's fence" - "Windows made the corners of the windows round, users hated it, obvious example of Chesterton's fence"
https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_m...
Those turn and brake signals are nearly unreadable at distance now. Even worse when snow-covered.
which look like an arrow pointing the opposite direction to the one the driver is indicating for.
very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny.
Perhaps because they're too small and the LEDs are not diffused enough.
Red means Rear, and white means front, which is why reversing lights are white and front turn signals are (should be) yellow.
And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
[1] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/03/WS69818ec6a310d...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...
Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
1. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.
2. Press the red tab to remove the access door.
3. Pull the mechanical release cable forward."
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...
Instead, as I get older all I can think of is how horrible it would be to possesses some vague idea of escape but have to deal with a smoke or rising water while trying to discern the inobvious escape route to save you from the fancy grave you've dug for yourself.
Horror is a much less satisfying than schadenfreude.
carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle
This reads like satire.
> https://medium.com/@arunchidambaram/is-teslas-door-handle-an...
In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.
Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
The designs have come under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
If the power fails, how will the windows open?
I wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory, or just try and place a tariff on normal doors.
As long as they’re steam-powered.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.
Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.
So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.
Here's a different way of doing it: https://stwinglist01.blob.core.windows.net/media/NarBC_ny/8e...
General aviation manufacturers figured this out decades and decades ago. I really don't understand the Tesla engineer mindset.
Maybe Xi getting rid of generals in the party really helped many other high ranking officials step in line and step up in doing things for the people
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61xdWAXl2ML.jpg
...no electricity required to operate those.
door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
Except for those which still have chromed handles, I think this is the case for the majority of cars. It's not the colour that's the problem.
The door handles on my Y are blacked out and actually hard to find at night sometimes.
I don’t get Elons obsession with the black out look.
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
I wonder how long until people figure out that tapping the bumper of a parked tesla opens all the windows, letting people either steal the infotainment screen, or the whole car...
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
I don't think that's the case here.
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
The old-school pure mechanical lock can be converted into an electric one with just the addition of a solenoid to unlock and lock it.
They can be just as flush and aerodynamic without introducing more complexity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415744
I've dealt with the complexities of automotive mechanisms long enough to see many cases where it seems someone just wanted to make something extra fancy rather than solve the fundamentally simple problem. German designs were notoriously one of the worst in this regard, but others are catching up.
If the Tesla door handles were really because they care that much about aerodynamics, their cars would look more like the 1st Gen Honda Insight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Insight#/media/File:Hond...
I think Tesla looks for efficiencies wherever possible, and any alignment with aesthetic goals is an easy win.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
This sounds like a lot of overengineering - you need reliable low latency eye movement detection and a motor mechanism that can react that fast but withstand the air forces at highway speeds. Just to deliver a worse UI - imagine the complaints about how Tesla doesn't detect my eyes unless I look just right. But 6% fuel usage sounds like an enormous saving that would be worth some of your complexity budget.
But not sure that would be legal.
The fancy electric handles are just for show. They’re cool looking and engineers salivate over this stuff. But they’re a bad idea.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- non-round steering thing (model s/x yoke, cybertruck squircle)
- removing stalks
- touch-sensitive buttons on steering wheel
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
There are plenty of things they get right.
The original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
The original model s interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
the older UIs were easier to use (in a moving car). more old-school looking, but more contrast and bigger targets.
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
Covered in this Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ
It's very different from traditional wiper controls in older cars, where the slider/wheel has a hard stop at min and max, and you can pick the right setting entirely by feel.
The issue now is that the CCP is now a millionaire club, which means China will probably soon start to devolve into the US, but without a lot of freedom and privacy rights US citizens have.
The rest of the constitution is at parity with western ideals but its been undermined by that one clause, all nominally communist countries fall into the same dilemma
That, and I realize that a single party system is effectively a partyless system, rule of law would therefore be going through motions, but I like the direction things are currently going there
In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
It doesn’t really matter if most of the deplatforming is social and corporate digital fiefdoms, or directly from the state run “Ministry”. It’s too similar at this point to single them out, even when it comes to disappearing and held without a way out. Every country has marginalized people, single party states don’t have assurances for dissent and Xinjiang already has economic sanctions against it. Check your privilege, if you aren’t marginalized in the target region, the check passed, proceed
It is quite revealing that on this US-hosted and -managed site this same post aimed at "Trump" or "the US government" instead of "Xi" or "the PRC government" would be up-voted, most likely by the same group of people. Try that in the PRC and you'd soon find out the truth of what I wrote here.
There are bigger losers in car aerodynamics. The worse one is the frontal section, that current models seem to ignore, making bigger and bigger cars almost for the sake of it. Then they have forgotten parts like the underside, that could be covered with something light and smooth for decent gains, but are instead an aerodynamic nightmare because nobody is looking there.
There are cars with Cd around 0.2 (Xiaomi SU7, Lucid Air, Tesla S, Hyundai Ioniq...). The Mercedes A-Class Saloon since 2018 and BMW 5 have a Cd of 0.22, and they look like normal cars, with normal door handles and normal mirrors, but carefully designs of the underside, air around the wheels and rear drag reduction. The Mercedes include active aero around the engine, shutting the grill when cooling is not needed. But they keep selling SUVS with Cd over 0.35, up to 0.45 with flushed door handles "for the aero". Please.
You're obviously right, Ben, and GP is out of touch. Like a Chinese guy saying, "I wonder how long before the Americans figure out their LLMs don't hide the Kent State shootings". That kind of thing is not a problem here.
That's what car manufacturers make you think. Who do you think it (paid) lobby for those features to be mandatory in new cars ?
Translated with ChatGPT, it reads:
> Tesla (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and Tesla Motors (Beijing) Co., Ltd. will apply warning labels free of charge to vehicles covered by the recall. They will also use an over-the-air (OTA) update to upgrade the window-control software, adding a strategy to lower the windows after an accident, thereby reducing the safety risk. Because some vehicles are already equipped with the warning labels, those vehicles will not need to have the labels applied again.
Okay, so they'll put some stickers and update the software OTA. I mean, come on. What are we talking about here.
It is also just as hard to cancel the turn signal/lane change that FSD is attempting that you want to veto.
I have no idea what people behind you are thinking (or acting on while all this struggle is going on)
> In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
Who can't you criticise in the West? What happens when you criticise them anyway?
These defences of authoritarian regimes like that in China almost read like that old 'Soviet joke' where a westerner says "at least I can criticise the US government without fear of repercussion" whereupon the Soviet citizen answers "I can also criticise the US government without any fear of repercussion".
Essentially anything that is seen as undermining the “territorial unity” of what the party considers China will be reprimanded in harsh ways, including expropriation and jail time, for foreigners a public apology is often enough
Knowing that, it’s easy to navigate. You can live your life there doing normal stuff without running into party politics the whole time, thats not controversial to me, thats not oppression to me and hundreds of millions of people. Democracy failed in China multiple times, its not going to happen, the last time because people wanted to democratically vote in more marxism after they realized the Standing Committee are the best capitalists. The party is what it is, they won. And I wouldn’t say that there, if you cant read the room you’re excised out the population. I kind of dont mind, US prisons are filled with mentally impaired people too, for everyone else the rulebook is easy to follow, its just not different enough for me to match your energy
And yes “but we can talk about it here” means absolutely nothing to me, the consensus mechanism has totally failed for progress in the US while that quip is used to shut down all discussion as if its better. If you dont have citizenship status the government is absolutely arresting, kidnapping and disappearing people for their speech and expression here under just immigration authority, when it doesnt match the government position. The government believes this satisfies due process, even when a removal order or criteria is unbeknownst to the person rendered.
Yeah whoop de do, we havent had a military coup and we can chat about it, and people are still detained indefinitely by the US government, I can navigate what the state capitalists are doing and appreciate the parts that would benefit my class
The trouble is both the cops and bully boys like tinted windows the same as acculturated Captain America and the Red Skull.
Also many cars detect occupancy and selectively trigger airbags, so depending on what the regulations are exactly, if none of the seats detect anyone is inside the car, and the car is turned off, and the car is not moving, probably safe to keep the window closed.
Like this is already a potential problem we had, if someone could write your car off by simply kicking it, or body slamming it, causing the airbags to deploy (which is often a write off)… but it’s not a real problem because the threshold for deployment is high enough that it would require a crash that would probably ruin the car anyway.
All of this leads to an increase in “failures” in seperate steps of the manufacturing pipeline, assembly of dashboard, assembly of car, after the car is completed, after it is shipped to dealer, and after the new owner picks it up, during the lifetime of the car. Each of those moments occurs a significantly increased cost of replacing the button.
By simply removing buttons and knobs, this source of failure rate goes down and it appears cheaper. It is also the reason behind going from 4 buttons for the windows to 3 (left, right, and a toggle for front/rear)
According to him the monetary savings were significant enough to proceed with it. Personally, I wish they wouldn’t. But I believed the numbers.
A button for a car is designed and tested to last 10 years. Software on the other hand...
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
> cheaper to modify software UI
Normal framed windows don't need any special handling of the windows when you open the door.
2nd/3rd/4th-gen F-bodies (Camaro/Firebird), for example: All of these cars had frameless windows. None of them did an automatic drop. (And a lot of these cars didn't come with power windows to begin with.)
Your definition of normal makes me suspicious. I thought GM were "the first to make an EV that looked normal". Tesla was the first to make a "software defined vehicle", 10 years before this became mainstream. Tesla is the Google of EVs: the UX sucks, but everybody wants to copy it.
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
I’d say a first gen Leaf looked fairly typical of small Nissan cars from that era, tbh; all their small cars looked a bit like that. And a Zoe looked pretty much the same as a Clio of like era. Interestingly, the Renault 5, their new electric car in the size category, is self-consciously weird-looking (you can get it in bright green as a standard option!), and seems to be doing very well.
Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
I'm not familiar with those other cars, but maybe they're only sealing from the inside of the window?
So it's both the frameless aspect and the desire to have a "luxury" car.
There's also the classic glitch where your window doesn't go back up automatically, so you have to remember to press the window up button after or it'll go slightly down every time you get in. More of a 2000s thing hopefully not present in Teslas.
Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a28120245/car-... (2019)
I want better cars. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want less-electronic cars.
I'm reminded of how far we've come every time I go out on a cold wintry morning and the electric starter cranks the electronically fuel-injected engine for me, and the whole thing comes to life with utterly-perfect reliability.
I can then select a gear and proceed. No particular warm-up period is required; it's running smoothly straight-away. The electronically-controlled transmission shifts smoothly. The heated seats quickly warm my tuches while the automatic climate control seeks to warm the cabin and maintain a stable temperature without any interaction on my part.
No messing with an ignition retard, or a manual choke. No need to prime the engine by giving it a few turns with the ignition switched off. There's no hand crank with which to break a jaw[1].
It's pretty great, I think.
But there's still plenty of examples remaining of the 15 million Model Ts that Ford built, for those who really seek to limit the electronics to almost-nothing. (And steam cars, too! We must not forget the simplicity of the Carnot cycle, nor of the carbide lamp!)
[1]: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/the-accident-that-started-i...
If you watch old American sitcoms one of the guys, typically a dad, will always be fiddling with his car and tune and maintain it. That was a stereotype for a reason.
I think we're definitely in a better place these days.
And I'll be thinking of this, and all of the money that I didn't dump down the throat of a carburated engine, the next time I get out my special bendy-ratchet (that articulates in two different places) and single-purpose crowsfoot socket to change an O2 sensor that has finally gone wonky after hundreds of thousands of miles. :)