The UX designer, Jenson, cites interesting concepts like 1+1=3 and cognitive load. But forgets an even more basic concept: design for the common case.
The common case is the driver being the owner. Tesla has real world data about how many times the defrost button is tapped. Their UX decision to make the bottom bar customizable is smart.
I personally choose to only put the defrost button in the bar during months of the year when I use that button frequently and remove it at other times. Keeps it easily accessible when I need it and out of the way when I don't. Elegant, functional.
It might even be the case that defrost is in the bottom bar by default and the owner of the Tesla he drove had removed it, I can't remember right now what Tesla does for newly shipped cars.
Does a business have to be widely deployed or profitable to be real? The public and private capital markets say "no". If you were to ignore any business that isn't widely available you'd miss the beginning of both Apple and Facebook.
Waymo is a real business serving 50,000 rides each week delivering paying customers to their destination. If you haven't tried it yet, the product is amazing. Private, doesn't cancel, safe, and smooth. I will never take Uber again if I have the choice.
Profitability is my definition of "real business" vs. for example, a lot of SV unicorns: if the business cannot sustain itself financially from its core revenue stream, and needs cash injections from "investors" then it's a pyramid scheme, not a business.
How many humans are involved in this so-called driverless service? Waymo won’t say, but Cruise admitted [1] that about 1.5 people were actively monitoring and ready to take over control for every Cruise car. That’s not a sustainable business.
How much money is Waymo bleeding every quarter? Maybe the investors don’t care, but it’s relevant if you want to call it a real business.
One of the most surprising things about getting an EV four months ago has been how little range matters.
Since you always leave home with a full tank and it’s rare to drive more than 150 miles in a typical day any range over that is money I’d rather save buying a smaller battery.
The main place more range helps is with road trips. But even there I run into the human comfort limit before the range limit. My family needs food and restrooms more frequently than the battery needs charging.
If I were to purchase an EV again I’d ignore range and focus more on other aspects.
In western rural areas of the US, which use trucks heavily, there is no such thing as a reliable 150 mile typical day. And at the common 80-90 miles per hour, 150 miles is not a particularly onerous commute so that kind of routine travel is pretty common. Unfortunately, you have to allow for road closures that incur 100 mile detours in your plans — accidents, weather, etc. That has happened to me many times in places where there is no charging station for a very long distance.
Sure, for a city commute EV works great. If you routinely travel around the mountain west or similar, you’ll want an ICE if you value your safety. The variance in distance, travel time, and road conditions is quite high.
I have no frame of reference for miles and how far they are, however it sounds like you're saying that for most people - who live in suburbia and other high density areas - it's suitable. I'd agree.
For city driving this is true. Though I'm hesitating on some trips to eastern Oregon or Montana we've thought about, it would be easier if Tesla opened up its charging network to CSS EVs :).
One of my favorite parts from pg's What You Can't Say is The Conformist Test:
> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Here's one of my answers if I think of HN readers as peers: Tesla made the right decision by making most of their controls touchscreen-only.
HN guidelines suggest comments should get more thoughtful and substantive as a topic gets more divisive. If you disagree with me but acknowledge thought or substance in my comment I'd love to hear why instead of garnering a downvote.
The reason I believe Tesla made the right decision is that the physical buttons on the steering wheel and stalks cover the common cases. They've made many things automatic: lights, wipers, garage door, seat heaters (edit: lights and wipers also have physical buttons). Things that aren't buttons and aren't automatic voice handles well (e.g. "set climate to 72").
And finally, and I realize most controversially, while it's still important to monitor Autopilot the technology is already to the point where it's safe in the right conditions to take your eyes off the road for some number of seconds at at time.
The tactile interaction that a physical button gives means I don't have to wait for an opportune time when I can take my eyes off the road. I can operate any function in my 32yo car without ever taking my eyes off the road. Obviously it doesn't have any self driving features, but being able to activate the wipers in less than a seconds because my windscreen is suddenly completely obscured by the car coming the other way that splashed a puddle up, or lower the volume because something has happened that needs my undivided attention, or just adjust the heating/cooling without having to think or look away is always going to be superior.
I think this is one place where this debate goes off the rails. People don't switch cars frequently and haven't experienced or studied deeply both sets of interfaces. I completely understand why because I was the same.
I only recently switched from a 20 year old car. Wipers was one of my main concerns.
Tesla, contrary to popular belief, actually has a physical button for activating the wipers. It's one I rarely use because the automatic functionality for this works so well. There's a physical control to mute sound too.
Would you acknowledge that touchscreen controls have some benefits, such as adaptability?
Yes, being able to dynamically update and contextually change what is displayed is a benefit of a touchscreen.
I don't believe that should be relevant to mechanical features of a 2 ton weapon though. Entertainment/Nav system that aren't key features for operating the vehicle, sure, have at it.
The hardware isn't being updated remotely to add new features or functionality, so I don't see why the interface for controlling those things should need the benefit of being able to be changed.
"Keep It Simple, Stupid" has been an adage for a long time for a reason.
I don't own a car. I rent one when I need one, which isn't often. So I'm not used to any particular method or interface.
I absolutely hate touch screen controls in cars. They are unsafe to use when driving, and they control things like air con you need to operate. They are also really poorly designed in most cases. I've often given up trying to figure out how to how to change something. Pretty much never have a problem with physical controls.
> Autopilot the technology is already to the point where it's safe in the right conditions to take your eyes off the road for some number of seconds at at time.
How do you determine which seconds are actually safe to take your eyes off the road? If this can't be answered definitively, the answer is you should never have your eyes off the road. And if your answer is, 'I've done it heaps and I was fine', that's simply survival bias.
I'm not sure I'm understanding you when you say "definitively". Do you mean if I can't be 100% sure about my answer?
The answer to your question is: the same way you determine when it's safe to cross the road on foot. When there are no cars in sight I'm 100% sure it's safe. When there are cars in sight, I'm not 100% sure but I still cross because I've developed judgement about the situation and the risks are acceptable.
I'm not sure, as a road user, how you've not encountered traffic situations that changed from perfectly normal to dangerous very rapidly. Sometimes an obscured vehicle could pull out, or a child, or some other obstacle, can pop out of nowhere even on an otherwise quite suburban street. The examples are too numerous to mention, and certainly many would be capable of confounding an AI.
How do you feel about the lack of a physical latch to open the glove compartment? I just LOVE having to go through a fucking menu tree to accomplish a task that’s been effortless and discoverable for the last N decades.
I can tell we're going to disagree but I love the clean look of the dashboard. As a result of Tesla's product decision I've moved anything I use on a regular basis to the two large consoles. They put the glovebox button at the top of the menu tree and this product decision tradeoff hasn't bothered me.
Since it bothers you, I'm genuinely curious, what do you store in your glovebox other than I'm guessing car registration?
I keep my gloves in the glovebox. Also toothpicks, napkins, tire pressure gauge, books, flashlight, laptop, extra hot sauce, keyed lugbolt socket... anything and everything.
Do you have or have you considered a car where the glovebox opens via touchscreen control? And if so, does this car have alternate storage, i.e in the center console?
Saying "this will be controversial" doesn't make it not wrong and merely a reasonable difference of opinion and any criticism dismissable because it was predicted.
> Things that aren't covered they've made automatic: lights, wipers, garage door, seat heaters. Things that aren't buttons and aren't automatic voice handles well (ex. "set climate to 72").
This is my problem with this argument. I want a good alternative for when voice or automated features go wrong (as they so often do). I don't want the fall back to be a shitty touchscreen. I want the fall back to be something that is safe to use when driving.
I love Hey (https://hey.com) for its "screener" feature. It supports custom domains but not Gmail migration.
The screener keeps new senders out of your inbox. A rich set of keyboard shortcuts helps triage new senders into one of a few categories including simply blocking them. You can choose to block at the address or the domain level.
I used it for a year and liked the concept well enough at first. But the filtering by email addresses makes it difficult when many companies use the same email address to send both transactional and promotional emails.
And the lack of SMTP makes migrating off their service slightly less clean as well.
Most product decisions represent a tradeoff. The tradeoff the author doesn't mention is one of a clean look versus ease of use. The author also doesn't mention how frequently they actually open their glovebox.
From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.
A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.
Your argument basically boils down to you don’t really use your glove box and prefer the slightly cleaner aesthetics. In your case you might argue for a car that doesn’t have a glove box. But if the glove box is included it should be intended for use. To not be able to access it by the passenger while driving, or while the car is off can be very frustrating for people who like to have a glove box.
All the comments on this thread seem to ignore a basic simple truth.
On long road trips with passengers, they often use the glovebox to store things.
When we go on road trips the kids rotate sitting in the passenger seat. They store their books, kindle, phone, etc there as it is a very convenient storage space easily accessible to them.
Yes that is what I am currently using. Every couple days the stream stops functioning and I have to reboot it. Stream playback with every conceivable FOSS video player I have tried is never 100% smooth and always has some kind of microstutter, regardless of the codec, resolution, framerate, bitrate, stream protocol etc. or number of viewers (and I have tried every combination of them all).
Wyze cameras are cheap and work pretty reliably for me. They don't support onvif. I'm sure it's because they want you to subscribe to their paid services that analyze the video feed.
I want the quality and cheapness and reliability of wyze with onvif.
I've been using an Amcrest AD410 doorbell camera with HomeKit Secure Video via Scrypted for about a month and I haven't had any trouble with it at all.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-has-the-most-loyal-b...