Featured Model 3 has 310 mile range

Well don't buy a tesla. I don't know what you need to be doing while driving that hits the far side of the screen. A iphone is not for everyone, but apple would be silly if they tried to make the phone work for everyone. The same for tesla.

I rarely touch the lights of a car when they have an automatic setting. Turn signals, wipers, cruise control, autopilot are on stalks. You do need to adjust wiper speed on the screen, but hopefully its software will set them well most of the time automatically. Why are you turning your phone on and off from the car? Do you mean making calls? There is voice control or screen. I suppose a hang up button wouldn't be out of order, but I want to see whos calling before answering so I look at my screen anyway. Traffic too tough to glance at the screen, then its probably too tough to talk on the phone. There are track balls for the audio functions, again easily felt on the steering wheel.

 

Hmmm, do you see this behavior now with passengers changing settings on the center console?
Lights probably aren't on there, but HVAC, music and such are?
I have never had a passenger change controls, voice or buttons.

 

Bringing the wife's Model X in for service - a glitchy dash yellow triangle issue, lo & behold - lookie what's behind me in the "wait-for-service-to-open" line;


Admittedly my sense of humor is weird, but I'm resisting the temptation to get out & ask the owner, "how's that new car working out for ya?"
- that's how one's mind rolls - with a ½ dozen cars waiting to get in, in front of ya .... it's good to be the only game in town.

.

 

Germans impressed with minimalist engineering?! I hope they take it to heart. As much as I love German cars, they are some of the most over-engineered machines out there.

 

impressed, but will not make an impression.

 

now that they've reverse engineered it, does that mean no patents apply?

 

Didn't Musk release some of Tesla's patents into public domain a few years ago? Ostensibly to stimulate EV development.

 

yes - but they still 'em buy & tear 'em down
.

 

Do you remember when high beams were turned on by a foot switch?

The manufacturers stopped with that when they realized it was cheaper to have the switch on the steering column and run the wire through the same hole with a bunch of other wires.

 

my old mercedes had a foot switch for a wiper wipe.

 

One of my Cadillacs had a foot switch to activate seek on the radio. I used to step on it and then yell at my passenger to stop changing the station.

 

My Chevy Chevette had a foot switch on the far left. I hit that thing every single day, for many months, trying to figure on what the heck it did. Seemed to do absolutely nothing at all.

One day I got a letter in the mail from some woman in Germany. It was short and sweet - said "Cut it out!"



My apologies to comic Steven Wright.

 

In the world of menu-driven everything, I think manufacturers like BMW are still producing fairly sane interfaces. My friend just got a brand new BMW hardtop convertible and the dash controls looked so familiar and so many controls are done "right" as far as the perfect mixture of dedicated functions and multi-function controls defaulted to good sensible settings. Also the layout is great and not cluttered, the speedo and tach clocks are big and simple. Is this too much to ask? I guess so. In the world of cost cutting a single touch screen to do almost everything makes financial sense, but such UI is terrible for a vehicle. Cognitive load needs to be very low on most controls and most displays need to be in line of peripheral vision. As in analog speed clock with 70mph being at about 12 o'clock and the rest of the values in a circle. I do not need to take my eyes off the road to know my speed with such setup. If I have a smallish number written on a screen somewhere that's no good at all.

 

Average age of people complaining about the touch screen on this thread?

 

63

 

52

Age has nothing to do with touch screens. Age has to do with wisdom of having low cognitive load on controls in the car. If I want to change the volume on the radio, it's easier to reach for the knob and twist it. I do not need to take my attention from the task of driving the car. If I need to go through several sub-menus on the screen to get to the volume control, then that control is useless in the application of a car radio. I am exaggerating here to make point, of course, as most cars do have knobs for radio volume. but to change an HVAC setting in my Prius I need to row through menus. That's annoying and dangerous. Again, in my Gen 2 Prius most common HVAC controls are brought out to the steering wheel to dedicated buttons. Thank the gods for that! But if I need to direct the air somewhere specific, I am SOL and need to use a hardware button, then some soft buttons that have no tactile queues at all and require my eyes on the touch screen. No good while driving. It's really pretty simple and not at all an age thing. Though younger folk complaining less about the menu driven UI is probably because they were brought up with that and expect it and really do not know any better. Heck, they think it's perfectly okay to text while driving. That does not make it right or good.