Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

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so i have an x and when it rains we do sometimes get some water into the back seat when raising the trunk... but to keep this in perspective... the car is like an iphone compared to your flip phone. 2007 was a long time ago so maybe people forget just how impactful that phone was when people first tried it out. That is the exact same experience I have had when first owning and S and now an X. A minor issue like water when raising the trunk on an exceptionally rainy day is just that minor when you compare it to the amazing feeling you get when the over the air update alert hits your phone and you start to wonder whether you'll get the latest update to detect stop signs. Or as I recall in 2014 - an audio up/down control near the passenger seat. Imagine if you were annoyed at the UI in your current car. With all of it's physical buttons that is it. You have no luck unless you buy a different car. In a Tesla if the UI is an issue they'll push an update and you'll have a new car without buying one. Let alone the buying experience of a Tesla vs anything else. Go online swipe your credit card... wait sometime and show up at a Tesla store and drive away with your car or they deliver it to your house. No haggling, no sleazy car salesman just a new car that gives you that feeling of an iphone in 2007 vs the old flip phone.... I am sure i sound like a fan boy... and I know my wife wishes i'd stop talking about it but it's pretty freaking worth it and nice.

I'll weigh in on the curmudgeon side. The knobs in my car were perfect from the day I bought it because they were optimized by engineers over decades. If there was ever a UI issue, it was corrected before I was born. Because the controls are physical I can operate them by touch and habit while focusing on the road. Years of driving have resulted in mental circuits that automatically detect stop signs and manage lane-keeping with zero conscious attention, just as easy as walking.

No-haggle direct manufacturer purchases are good, though. I can only agree with that.

Lots of things have changed in cars since you born and their interfaces have hardly been perfected.

Namely things to do with phones like navigation, music, or phone calls. Not to mention things like improved climate control or safety (like the sentry system.)

The knobs in the car represent a local maxima and your muscle memory is a sunk cost.

Why should I have to do most of the things that those knobs do? I’d prefer to let Tesla write the automotive software instead of trying to embed it in my hands via years of practice.

> Years of driving have resulted in mental circuits that automatically detect stop signs and manage lane-keeping with zero conscious attention, just as easy as walking

I thought the same thing when I had an S a few years back. This was just the adaptive cruise control + lane holding days, and I figured it'd be nice for sure but not game changing.

I was entirely wrong. Sure, driving without AP on wasn't hard, but turning AP on made road trips and commuting 1000x more pleasant for me. Driving without AP may be habitual and ingrained, but it still occupies a certain amount of mental capacity to hold the line.

Being freed from that wasn't just about getting more time to look at scenery, either. With fewer brain cycles spent on mechanically maneuvering the car, I could spend those cycles better monitoring other vehicles for potential hazards (crazy drivers, etc.)

Imagine if you were annoyed at the UI in your current car.

Don’t have to, the UI in the Leaf (at least in the first gen), sucks. But you know what would annoy me more? If my $50K+ car leaked water. That’s something the industry figured out over fifty years ago. I’ll take a shitty UI over over water invading spaces I won’t find out about until the rust and bad wiring show up.

Depends on the vehicle...Our C5 Corvette didn't get teh last minute deflectors and used to spill water on the rear speakers when opening in the wet.

They fix a lot of problems, but the customers demanding new designs every few years means we still keep fixing some of the same problems over and over.

I’m talking about water pouring out of the sunroof, and coming out of the dashboard

thanks but no thanks, software is a disaster. I'm in no rush to be the first set of guinea pigs to have a software update cause a car crash

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