Tesla has the worst interface I’ve used in a car (it gets -1000 points for making the driver futz and swipe dangerously on a touch screen to angle the air vent), and it seems to keep getting worse - but the best driving fundamentals I’ve used in a car.
If I could take the lower half of a Tesla Model Y with a totally average Toyota upper half at the Model Y pricing I would buy that car in a heartbeat. Just swapping the infotainment unit to customizable Android Auto with CarPlay and I would consider it. It’s such a shame to have good engineering bundled together with bad opinions.
We test drove a Model Y in May. There were a lot of UI nits that annoyed me, but the thing that really stood out was the blind spot warning placement. Every other vehicle I've ever driven puts the visual indicator on the mirror somewhere. After all, you're looking in the mirror (or in that vicinity) when you need to know whether someone is in your blind spot. Tesla sticks it in the center console - so you have to completely swivel your head to see it. Very strange.
I deal with many cars on a daily basis and, for me, almost all the UX have become bewildering, especially in the last four or five model years.
One particularly vexing thing: the splitting of vehicle settings between the instrument cluster and center stack displays. At least Tesla puts it all on one screen. Audi, for example, has it spread across three screens.
Yeah, I just learned Mercedes puts several settings on a "Service" instrument cluster mode in my 2024 vehicle. I wonder if it's common with german car brands, or have you seen it also in Japanese, Korean, or American brands? Overall the Mercedes UI stuff does a fine job starting CarPlay and showing a backup camera, but the settings menus are confusingly hard to navigate.
MB has had several settings available only in the cluster menus for a few years. Things such as door auto-lock on/off; daytime running lights (which, bizarrely can only be set on or off when the engine is turned off); easy-entry seat adjust and a few others. I don't know why they don't put these on the center screen menus—the slow and annoying animated carousel-style menus—along with all the other settings. These may be a holdover from the days and/or when they had no center screen menus or even a center screen at all but I think they can retire the practice now.
how can you use the term "good engineering" when that same company sells cars with video cameras instead of mirrors and turn signals mounted on a rotating steering wheel?
I will call it what it is - techbro delusion. Silicon Valley deluded itself into thinking that it alone knows best and that more tech alone is the solution to all our problems.
Tesla's design choices are the perfect example of this culture permeating into a high-stakes world where real people can die.
Counterpoint: Tesla has the best interface I've ever used in a car.
I've used CarPlay and Android Auto in previous vehicles, the Tesla iPad experience is _vastly_ superior. Mapping, defaults, interactions, nothing is better in the phone apps.
I drive a Tesla S and a Tesla Model Y a few months out of the year, and both cars lag like 200ms on the first few keypresses when typing into the map search input, and swiping around the map or moving the media player overlay drawer up or down drops framerates down to 15fps or lower, which to me puts it on par with Android tablets in 2013. According to my Tesla app, the Y seems to be running the latest software from 2024, and the S is on 2022 software. Maybe they dropped support?
> I've used CarPlay and Android Auto in previous vehicles, the Tesla iPad experience is _vastly_ superior. Mapping, defaults, interactions, nothing is better in the phone apps.
LOL. No. Just no. And I'm on my third (and likely the last) Tesla.
Tesla's navigation is just crap. It doesn't work offline, its routing decisions are sometimes are incorrect, it's difficult to use, etc.
Tesla's navigation is based on Google Maps. It's very good. It -does- work offline, and it's trivially easy to use. The voice instructions are clear, the large screen and context-sensitive portion in the binnacle are great. I love that you can navigate home with a downswipe on the "navigate" button. It's effortless.
> It -does- work offline, and it's trivially easy to use
It doesn't. It can't show the map tiles, and its offline address entry can't always resolve the address.
> The voice instructions are clear, the large screen and context-sensitive portion in the binnacle are great.
Yes, Mr Musk. They sure are. I didn't even _had_ to use voice commands with any of my previous cars. Because why would I? It's just easier to use the controls.
If I could take the lower half of a Tesla Model Y with a totally average Toyota upper half at the Model Y pricing I would buy that car in a heartbeat. Just swapping the infotainment unit to customizable Android Auto with CarPlay and I would consider it. It’s such a shame to have good engineering bundled together with bad opinions.