$60000 is a lot to pay for a $35000 car. The insides look at like a nissan or a honda. At $60k the benz and audi do feel luxury as compared to this.
Luxury for me does not mean fancy stitching, special leather, a mechanical clock on the dashboard for no reason, software that doesn't get updated, exquisite wood grain in random places, lots of knobs, shiny trims, "dealership experience", or 4 years of free oil changes.
I think you'll see the definition of luxury change as our concept of mobility changes. Traditional markers of luxury won't matter anymore and that will leave incumbents who have traditional luxury as their core competence in a weird place.
I can understand when you laud Tesla for being emissions-free, or for high torque, or for figuring out how to cool Panasonic's battery packs properly. But pretending that it is a luxury car is just silly.
I don't want to take my eyes of the road to change my AC setting, to enable the rear window heating, or to change the radio channel.
Before people now come around to tell me I can have both: there's limited space in a car for that. If you place everything too narrow, you won't gain anything in terms of safety.
Yes there are tradeoffs to make, but it's a different set of tradeoffs - ones that we can adapt around given a better future for the system as a whole. That being said, you really have to live with it for a weekend before being able to judge it in full.
I think people are right - purpose built physical buttons and switches will always be superior at some level to software buttons, especially when driving. However, it's worth considering if there is the promise of a better future for the whole system by going down the 100% software route. Maybe it's a bit ahead of its time, but consider a semi-autonomous future where drivers mostly only assist driving and spend 90% of their time free to do other things (1). In the mean time Tesla gets better at delivering software updates to hundreds of thousands of cars in the wild, improving their software processes as a competitive advantage. Other car companies simply aren't doing this. In the future, every car company will need to do this and learn to get good at doing it.
(1) If you've tried Autopilot, you know it's good enough that engaging with the touch screen for extended periods is no problem at all.
For a car with a human driver, it's both a bound input service and bad for key driving displays. For a fully automated car with a human “commander”, it's not a bad idea, but then the centerline mount is probably not ideal.
The geek part of my brain is not the part that lights up when I’m driving.
What does that mean?
> Android Auto and CarPlay
You think that's a feature worth shelling out for, I think it's a crutch.
> What does that mean?
It means the speedometer is in front of the driver where it belongs.
>> Android Auto and CarPlay
> You think that's a feature worth shelling out for, I think it's a crutch.
On the Internet, opinions are pretty much free of charge, of course. Android Auto voice control is dramatically better than the voice control that comes in a Model 3, and Android Auto pre-caches map tiles along your route (and anywhere else you specify) while the software in the Model 3 never preloads anything so it's pretty much always showing blank tiles when in an area of no mobile coverage. Also when Tesla goes out of business or for any other reason decides to stop supporting and paying for the mobile data connection in the Model 3 owners are going to wish they had something more like AA or CarPlay that's upgradeable separately from the vehicle.