Comment by grassfedgeek
1 day ago
I hope Elon Musk can take a lesson from Mercedes. Tesla went in the other direction: there are barely any physical buttons to remove, so they removed the stalks for signaling and even for changing gear! You have to use the touch screen to shift gears!
They have enough physical buttons.
Removing indicator stalks without steer by wire was a mistake. They fixed that by bringing back the stalks.
Touch screen for great shifting works better than you think. It actually works better than traditional gear shifters especially when you enable auto shift. It changes gears as needed. It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
> It's ok to want to stick to the past; but don't drag others back who want to move towards the future.
Did you read the article about how Mercedes-Benz is bringing back physical controls? So in your opinion are they dragging their customers back to the past? Or are they correcting a mistake?
They are doing neither. All German car companies are idiots. Years of lead compared to all other car manufacturers, threw away all of it with sheer incompetence and bureaucracy.
They saw less buttons on Tesla and tried to adopt it as a cost cutting measure instead of thinking of designing a better UX. Result is, laggy/buggy/buttonless bad ux that customers hated. So they are going back with a bad excuse. The mistake is thinking software+UX as second class in a modern car. But now they are correcting "touch screen bad" mistake. lmao.
I mean, it is no surprise. Germans in general don't know how to develop good software because to them everything is a design by committee (see CARAID).
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Tesla does a great job not having buttons. I think the real issue is that other car companies have bad interfaces that make physical buttons necessary. Tesla just has a great UI that does not need physical buttons.
Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.
I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.
Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.
Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.
You are absolutely right. See my other post before where I saw essentially the same thing. It is absurd how bad the German companies are; the only thing they know how to do great is the engine.
I never understand these people with their ac knobs... What are they doing that they need to change AC all the time during driving?
I set it to 21.5 with auto, and it is perfect for the whole car. Why do people need to constantly change ac?!!
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I disagree, taking my eyes off the road to change climate controls is bad UI/UX
Why do you need to change climate control at all let alone when driving? Is it because the car can't maintain proper temperature? Response time is lagging? Or what?
Also, you can just use voice control. Works better than physical buttons.
“great UI” and “burned to death because the door handle wasn’t” is a bold juxtaposition
Even a great UI requires you to take eyes off the road.
Not when the great UI is a button or switch that's where you know it is and does one thing only. Can even argue that a HUD doesn't require eyes off the road at all, but regular dash instruments are readable at a short glance.
Having to aim at controls on a smooth surface, let alone menu diving and things moving around, being hidden or otherwise depending on state is the problem.
Voice control exists.
No. They don't. They unleashed this touch screen plague upon the entire car industry because they were too cheap to engineer a proper control panel.
Bonkers. How can anyone agree to drive such a distracting car is beyond me.
Tesla sells twice as many cars as Mercedes...
Where'd that figure come from?
Tesla is dead company walking.
Let me expound: They've said for years they are no longer a car company, and they are acting like it. Their last UX experiments were several years ago and apart from the on-screen PRND, they had to walk them back (yoke steering wheel, blinker buttons).
Autopilot regressed in that you can't even turn autosteer on/off without stopping the car.
Model 3 and Y refreshes were lackluster, S and X are gone, Cybertruck which actually had some catching-up stuff (800 V, V2L) is a write-off and Roadster is what, 7 years delayed and nowhere to be seen and there's nothing else announced on the horizon.
Not a car company. All ready and ripe to merge with SpaceX.
No alphabro wants to learn from anyone else, they already know everything