- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
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Replacing physical controls with touch buttons continues to be an incredibly dumb idea. Luckily several other manufactures who hopped on the trend are realizing it was a bad choice.
Is nobody gonna mention this horrible KITT steering wheel?!? That damn thing is dangerous.
Yeah round wheels are not a fuckin style choice. It’s so you can grab it anywhere in any situation. This steering wheel looks fuckin deadly
They are the worst drivers by infractions. Dead wheel is a culling tool.
You can’t even grab 10:00 and 2:00 on it. Looks like the closest you can get is 4:00 and 8:00
10 and 2 is actually no longer taught. 9 and 3 is the new thing
Or 8 and 4.
Keep those arms away from the airbag’s path
The only way a yoke would make sense is if it was drive by wire and could vary the ratio of the wheel dynamically depending on speed.
Oh, I think I would hate that. Variable turning seems so bad for intuition to me.
If poorly executed yes. If done right it may be really awesome. Just like your steering gets stiffer at higher speeds. But obviously I never tried it (although I bet you could rig a simulator to test that theory)
It’s a yoke because top tier race cars use yokes and Elon thinks his teslas are that for some reason. Completely disregarding all the setup and engineering race cars have that make a yoke the more viable option than a wheel…
They also don’t ship with the yoke by default anymore, the default is a regular round one and have been for a while.
I am a Knight Industries 2000 with a 1000 megabits of memory and a one nanosecond access time.
Ever seen what real life F1 car steering “wheels” look like?
They aren’t meant for public roads, just like Teslas.
Oh absolutely not. Just mentioning it in reference to the way the KITT yoke looks.
TBF KITT could self drive just fine so he didn’t need a very functional “wheel” heh.
I think that’s why Tesla designed it this way. They were relying too much on self driving and not a human driving it.
Those are way more sensitive so there is no need to turn hand over hand. The downside is that that sensitivity can be really hard to handle at high speeds.
Couldn’t the sensitivity be adjusted based on the speed? Doing a hard turn during high speed is a very bad idea anyways.
Yes it could and that is what Lexus is doing.
https://youtu.be/agMrewRJTow?si=_M55DbNd3I4uUvMu
But Tesla is not doing that, so there you still have to turn hand over hand even though you don’t have a round wheel.
I figured that it already exists, it’s not like that’s rocket science. Tesla not doing the obviously right thing is also not surprising.
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You mean those extremely dangerous, highly specialized cars that require a trained athlete to drive?
Not sure why you got down voted so much. Yeah those “wheels” look horrible. But I guess they are professional drivers. And all those buttons and knobs!!?
Likely assumed I was defending the musk mobile rather than just making conversation. I spose I should have been more explicit.
F1 racing is a way different type of driving than “normal” driving. Less need for lots of turning the wheel quickly and more need for controlling car features.
It’s great for Tesla, for one reason - modularity.
If your input/control has a physical button, that immediately needs independent wiring, assembly steps, A THOUGHT OUT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PLAN, another BoM item to build the car/widget, and usually markings that limit its use for other functions (present and planned).
Tesla can bury controls and change interfaces as much as they like on the main touchscreen, or even add new features. It’s still trash for driver usability except when parked for all the obvious reasons, but hey they get to ‘push’ new features over cellular networks as they’re developed. Y’know, instead of selling a complete product in the first place.
It’s great for Tesla, for one reason - modularity.
Not really as far as the touch controls on the steering wheel goes. The icons are static and can’t be changed, so their functionality is kind of tied to the icon.
As for configuring additional controls for them, it’s exactly the same as if they were physical buttons, it’s all a wiring harness going to the computer either way, what that computer does with the input signal is not any less configurable for a physical button. The limiting factor is the static icon, not whether it’s touch/tactile.
In regards to selling incomplete products, this is unfortunately not even limited to Tesla. All car manufacturers release several updates and bugfixes for new cars, they just can’t send them OTA, they need to get them in the shop. My colleague’s VW ID4 has been in the shop for no less than 3 SW updates to fix various bugs and add basic features such as battery preheating for DC charging, it fucking shipped without that!
As a user experience designer, we were having this discussion 15-20 years ago.
I’m so glad everything we brought up at the time was completely ignored. Warms my heart.
For those that don’t want to read the article:
Tesla is going with buttons on the steering wheel instead of a stick to the left of the wheel
Tesla is going with buttons on the steering wheel instead of a stick to the left of the wheel
Its even worse than that. The buttons are smooth surface (like a touch screen) with haptic feedback. These are truly a horrible idea:
If I had one of these Tesla cars I’d look into retrofitting the stalks back in.
If you buy a Tesla at this point, you deserve to be stuck with it.
Up the butt?
Holy shit that’s worse than how the article put it
If this catch on, maybe 3rd party Bluetooth/USB stalk will be a thing.
Maybe USB, but I’d certainly not want to end up having to re-pair my Bluetooth mid turn.
That doesn’t sound like it’ll be legal in a lot of countries.
retrofitting the stalks back in.
Tesla is going to sue you for 50000 :-)
Up for right and down for left. Yeah, that makes fuckin’ sense. Did they take their inspiration from the keyboard on the Apple 2GS?
It would have been smarter to zip tie the turn signal switch assembly from a 1980’s motorcycle onto the steering wheel. At least on a motorcycle switch left means left and right means right (and center is cancel).
Wtf, seriously? I’ve tried using media buttons on the steering wheel during a turn. It’s not reliable in the slightest, because it’s a moving target.
Does the non circular steering non-wheel never go past 90 degrees or something?
I once accidentally dialed 911 from my steering wheel phone buttons while pulling a turn. Surprised the shit out of me and the dispatcher didn’t sound like this was the first call of the type. This is a fucking terrible idea.
Tbf you are supposed use the signal before turning wheel
Covered in the article. In Norway you are required to signal when exiting a roundabout. It’s a fair concern.
Just in civilized countries, not only Norway.
Some countries don’t have roundabouts
And Australia, at least state of NSW made it mandatory
That’s law across the whole country
I’m pretty sure you don’t have to signal when exiting a roundabout in Victoria. We might be the outlier though. In Vic it’s also legal to U turn anywhere, unless a sign specifically prohibits it.
You may be odd, though the national law is no U-turns at lights unless there is a permissive sign, allowed to U-turn anywhere else unless there’s a restrictive sign
Be careful when driving interstate!
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In addition to roundabouts, there are plenty of freeway exists that loop around where you can be at an extreme turn and need to initiate a lane change. Or making a right turn into a gas station after a left turn at an intersection… lots of use cases.
You wish but it’s not drive by wire. You steel to turn in multiple times in sharp angles. Of the ratio were to change relative to speed it would make sense but right now it’s just plain dumb.
Not sure about the older teslas, but the cybertruck steering is way more sensitive, so you shouldn’t need to turn it more than 90°. And the buttons on the wheel are at least normal clicky buttons now, instead of touch sensitive areas. Which is less bad, but still pretty bad.
My old peugeot even has an extra stick behind the wheel for the radio control, and it’s the best UX ever invented.
What? You’d be hitting the turn signal when you’re going straight. Do you drive a BMW or something?
What about exiting a roundabout?
Very true, although in my experience you’re more likely to encounter someone putting on their blinker mid-turn as someone properly signaling a roundabout exit…
Or driving down a twisty road, which where I live is most roads.
Turns exist on curved roads too. So do lane changes.
Tesla’s reasoning for going away with a method universally used for signaling turn for decades is that it enables them to remove a physical part, the stalk, and it believes activating a turn signal will soon be unnecessary with the advent of self-driving.
Why the hell do billionaires keep laughing in our faces? I swear every time one of them or their companies opens their mouth, it’s like they’re making fun of us, the poor people.
“We care about your privacy” — (they don’t) “a turn signal will soon be unnecessary” etc.
a turn signal will soon be unnecessary with the advent of self-driving
That’s like not including a stick for the manual transmission, because the automatic one is just around the corner.
I wish I possessed this kind of optimism in my daily life :D
I enjoy driving stick, but stick will likely not last forever. We will not be able to burn fossil fuels for that much longer in the grand scheme of things. Electric vehicles usually have a single speed transmission, so there are literally no gears to change. Perhaps there may be an alternative fuel vehicle that still has multiple speed transmission, in which case stick could still exist, though how many car manufacturers would make them?
Probably no one, but there is nothing preventing from enthusiasts from hooking an electric drive motor up to a traditional manual transmission just to be perverse. I would.
What would the manual transmission do? Unless you literally mean it doesn’t impact the cars driving and is just there for you to move around. Electric vehicles are not changing gears, so there are no gears to hook up a manual transmission to
It would give you a manual transmission driving experience. Nothing more.
(There are no gears in an internal combustion engine, either. At least not in the context you’re thinking of. The gears are in the transmission. That’s why anyone in the Commonwealth calls it a “gearbox.”)
Even in petrol cars automatic transmissions are more common than manual for new cars now. Automatic has just become better and better, and there’s just very little reason to have a manual these days.
And worse is that people have been complaining about the lack of buttons and knobs for some time already.
it believes activating a turn signal will soon be unnecessary with the advent of self-driving.
Okay, but self driving hasn’t happened yet and still faces significant problems. Removing a turn signal for this is like smoking constantly because you think cancer will be cured in the future.
Plus it breaks one of the unspoken rules of new designs. You never take away functionality, you only add it.
The new Tesla Model 3 should be banned from the whole of Europe until they put the indicator stalk back. It is virtually impossible to safely and legally traverse a roundabout without it.
How do people indicate without it? Is the car supposed to automatically turn it on once it senses you leaving the lane?
It has little buttons on the wheel for left or right instead of a stalk. Problem is when you’re going through a roundabout you’re twirling the wheel around so it is almost impossible to to know where the buttons are at any given point in time. A stalk stays put, the buttons are anywhere depending on where the wheel is at. I think this video demonstrates it most clearly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBFxbKTEWu8
Do you fully rotate the Tesla wheel though? I know with electronic steering racks it’s possible to control the car like an F1 is driven so you never need to go hand over hand to make a turn. The steering is speed sensitive and at higher speeds the wheel is less responsive. Lexus is introducing this in the US on a model. Does the Tesla not have the same?
The video you posted has a circular wheel versus the thumbnail of the post has an F1 style wheel.
The wheel in a Model 3 has a typical steering wheel motion 1 1/2 rotations or whatever either way - you have no idea where the buttons will be at any given moment especially on a roundabout where you could be rolling right, rolling left and having to signal at the same time. Even if it were steer by wire and yoke like, the buttons are still moving around. So drivers have no chance of indicating safely or as the law requires. Basically all of this nonsense so Tesla can cheap out on a stalk which is probably a $10 part.
Which is why I think they should be banned or recalled in Europe.
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In the article it says they replaced it with force touch buttons but the driving instructors all found the buttons to be disorientating and dangerous on roundabouts whilst trying to turn the wheel. The stalk makes for a mich more fluid and less distracting method.
Tesla believe that no turn signals will be needed once they perfect self deiving cars (likely never…)
What the fuck is the point of an indicator after you’d already started the action. That light ain’t indicating any more about the driver than the fact that they bought a Tesla after 2022, and that tells you everything you need to know about them.
That’s just too late to signal…
Tesla’s reasoning for going away with a method universally used for signaling turn for decades is that it enables them to remove a physical part, the stalk, and it believes activating a turn signal will soon be unnecessary with the advent of self-driving.
Spit my drink up a bit when I read that.
Meanwhile Teslas are quickly building a reputation of being impossible to repair, so replacing an industry standard component that never breaks for a digital system is a great way to keep the title.
will soon be unnecessary with the advent of self-driving.
by next year, they said for the umpteenth time this decade.
Might as well get rid of the brake lights while they’re at it
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Yeah, it’s not designed with roundabouts, (i.e. road infrastructure designed with logic and common sense) in mind.
It was designed to cut costs and hope fanbois would think it was innovation. It’s so dangerous a change it should be banned in countries where drivers are expected to properly indicate while traversing roundabouts.
Cuz that’s the only place you want to signal intent to other drivers?
Well, in a roundabout how else are the other drives gonna know you turn right?
There are other places you signal intent. At every turn in fact
I didn’t realize Tesla’s even came with turn signals. They must be hard to find because they never get used.
I swear to god Tesla drivers are going for the worst drivers award.
Just let your fucking car drive itself if you cannot.
Tesla was all like “hold my beer” to the BMW club.
The Cybertruck definitely has them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B75R6sN0obE
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To be fair, they were just following the trend of BMW and Mustang cars
Tesla’s even
Odd too. Or did you pluralize with an apostrophe? If it’s the latter, you’re sentenced to repeat the third grade.
Imagine being this condescending about grammar on an international forum.
Words matter not if understand you.
Imagine crying like this because someone’s phone autocorrected.
Leak of Tesla’s next-gen Steering wheel:
What? Physical controls? It’ll be a touch screen.
No no, the steering wheel will be in the touch screen.
And it’ll be in the middle of the car!
And there will be a mode where you can rotate the touch screen instead. But it will still be in the center.
You can grip a lot more of it, so it would objectively be an improvement.
PLEASE, give us the sounds, too! :-)
Tesla fucking up traditional driving controls only make sense if their self-driving system is working so the driver has no need to touch the steering wheel except in rare case. How good is Tesla’s full self driving these days?
Full Self Driving is still in beta stage.
AI DRIVR has good content on Tesla FSD if you’re actually interested in knowing how good it is.
No, I’m actually interested to know. Are most Tesla owners activate self driving during their daily commute? Tesla doesn’t sell their vehicle here so the only times I actually see a Tesla are in car shows.
We’ve had news stories - and a friend’s coworker too - of people sleeping on the highway portion of their commute. The friend’s coworker did it daily for months, setting an alarm when it was probably going to be ‘street’ driving time so he’d wake up and be ready.
The friend’s coworker did it daily for months
That’s both extremely stupid and irresponsible but also quite impressive on Tesla’s part.
Being able to sleep (or not paying any attention to the road) is the entire reason I would get a self driving car (assuming it’s safe to do so). But aren’t you required to keep your hands on staying wheel when engaging full self driving? And I think the car has camera to monitor driver attentiveness too. Can you really fall asleep during commute like that?
They say it’s beta but beta would imply that it’s at least somewhat close to ready, which it clearly isn’t even after being in “beta” for a long ass time.
What do you mean it clearly isn’t atleast somewhat close to ready?
Even if it were ready, what proportion of buyers spend the extra $12k to get self-driving?
If FSD was truly autonomous, or an excellent level 2 system?
Truly autonomous, at 12k, it would have unlimited demand. Production would be the only restraint.
Edit: Tesla might even prioritize sales with FSD or only make FSD cars at that point and rake in the profits.
About 1 in 5, though recent changes to price and the widening of the full self driving beta will have changed that since the stats were released in 2022
Tesla say it crashes enough to deploy an airbag about one fifth as often as human drivers (once per 3,200,000 miles versus once per 600,000)
So safer than the average driver, presumably less safe than a safe driver
Be wary of cherry picked data.
The average human driver has a car that’s five years older than the oldest model 3. This means five years more age on various safety equipment, five years more primitive collision avoidance systems, cars without stability control, etc.
The autopilot system only engages in ideal circumstances. Poor visibility, poorly marked road, bad weather, all scenarios that are high risk that autopilot wont touch that also cause a lot of human accidents.
I’m talking full self driving beta, not autopilot. FSD works on bad roads, car parks, any weather it can see in, including moderately heavy rain. It won’t work in heavy fog, but I won’t drive in that either. Autopilot has a long history of only working on highways which upped its safety, but also a history of working hands off and at any speed.
Also note that the initial beta was only open to the safest, most responsible, drivers according to Tesla data (Tesla have a lot of data on their drivers, many opt in to sharing everything in the hope of hurrying better automation) so the cars were very well supervised
I’m really hanging out for insurance data once this system is out of beta
Even with FSD, I don’t think we can be anywhere close to a comparable cohort.
To expand on the safety equipment, I wager the average driver with their 12.5 year old car also doesn’t have regen braking. So while 99% of Teslas likely have near pristine brake systems due to age and regen braking, the average driver is more likely to experience “surprise, your brakes are out!”
Also, particularly based on my time with rural folk with cars in the woods, I’m highly doubtful that no matter how aggressive FSD may be, it won’t be as daring as some dubious human operators in that “average” cohort.
Also, I’d wonder how Tesla would treat an FSD deactivation by driver intervention. If a crash is unavoidable and imminent, I’d imagine an aware driver might manage to yank the wheel in time to deactivate, but still get in an airbag deploying crash.
There’s also some potetntial slush around “accidents that activate airbags”. Different models have different sensitivies.
But all this falls second to a primary concern: never trust what amounts to marketing data from any company compared to something like NHTSA data.
Would be interesting if someone could do the legwork to manage “like for like” to tell safety due to: -General age of car in general -Regenerative braking versus standard -Stability control, collision avoidance, automatic braking and so forth -Like for like driving conditions -Data for Teslas including human operation, autopilot and FSD. Particularly if human operator, but FSD was on less than 10 seconds before impact.
“surprise, your brakes are out!”
That really doesn’t happen from wear. Brakes only surprise fail on long descents where the driver doesn’t use engine braking. If brakes fail like that you have the hand brake/e-brake
EVs of course use regen braking almost always in that situation - though they can’t when their battery is full - my car expects to arrive at the coast at 20% battery, at the top of the coastal mountain range it’s at 15%, but at the beach it has regenerated to 20%
The rest I generally agree. We need better data, especially better data from someone other than Tesla.
I am more concerned about why the Witcher 3 is featured on the car’s screen. Does it double as a PC?
Edit: Spelling
Yea, fof models X and S, they have a discrete GPU and can run steam.
… What?
With what OS?
I thought that was cloud streaming.
Tesla has the highest accident rate of any car brand. And Tesla intends to remain number 1 in that regard
Rapid acceleration, with your eyes pointed a center touch screen. What could go wrong?!
They are unsafe in every situation, not just on roundabouts.
they are the most advanced company in cost-cutting. They will put everything in 10 sub menus on the screen instead of costly buttons. And the people are confused, they see big screen they think cool. But having metal physical buttons and crowns with haptic feedback is just on another level 🤤. Especially those crowns where theres a silent click that you feel with every turn. Feels so fricking good damn.
Can we just ban them entirely? Horrible cars.
Yikes, that is incredibly dangerous. Hopefully, they get recalled to fix that issue. No turn signal stick is going to cause a lot of accidents if people are unfamiliar with the car or are spinning the steering wheel and pressing the wrong button (or no buttons, because it’s too difficult).
