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Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

The revamped Model S and Model X still have big central touchscreens (now in a landscape orientation, rather than the previous portrait-oriented screen), but Tesla went even further by eliminating the turn-signal and gear-selector stalks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will simply "guess" which way the driver wants to go based on sensor data and navigation maps. Tesla is expected to include backup controls as well, leaving drivers to use the touchscreen for selecting drive, and steering-wheel controls for turn signals.

That is terrifying, and this sort of thing is why I don't seriously consider Teslas now I'm looking to buy an EV.

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I have no idea how it could possibly guess, the whole point of turn signals is you use them before any other action.

On top of that, at least where I live, you must use your turn signal to indicate changing lanes at least 100 feet before making the change. The car cant possibly know what I'm thinking.

The “guess” part is about forward or reverse. Turn signals are still manually activated.

Imagine if in the show knight rider Michael Knight would have had to fiddle through menus on a touch screen to activate "turbo boost".

Sometimes tactile button and switches can't be replaced by touch screens.

It really is annoying that Tesla requires you to make these compromises.

Before I believed all model 3 cars should have at least the option of a dashboard to show status in the direction you are looking.

I thought the Model S/X would be higher cost so they wouldn't try to cost-reduce everything like the model 3.

Signals are most important when the intention they communicate is counterintuitive. Guessing is a poor approach.

I love all the judging and guessing of a feature nobody has the faintest idea how it actually works.

It's not just that feature, though. I wouldn't (in fact, didn't) buy a Tesla because of the whole attitude to the control system: let's put everything on a single screen in the interest of aggressive design minimalism. Their approach to self-driving scares me witless. I hate the childish easter eggs and the gimmicky doors. I love the EV technology, but I really dislike the car they've wrapped around it. That new feature is just another example of the general approach.

I ended up with an EV that is just a normal car that happens to be electric, and it's great. I'm in the market for another EV now, and despite the fact that the Tesla X is technically the best solution for what I want to do (towing) it's not even in the running because of all the rest.

This is exactly the free marketing Tesla expected with releasing the renderings with the yoke.

There are also renderings with a traditional wheel buried in the HTML.

The outrage drives dozens of articles and a hundred million clicks, making the car the most talked about new vehicle for the next several weeks.

“You won’t believe this one ridiculous thing about the new Tesla!”

Mission accomplished. I would bet $100 that the Model S ships with a physical way to activate turn signals on the steering apparatus.

Aside from turn signals, I think they will try to do away with the physical stalk to “gear shift” and it will ultimately be an improvement.

As-is the right hand stalk is overloaded with functions for cruise and autopilot, on top of gear shifting, which makes the current incarnation sub-optimal in several specific usage scenarios. So it doesn’t surprise me they are looking to change how it functions.

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