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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I would be downright excited to go out and by a Tesla if I was allowed to pay a bit extra and have physical buttons to control things.

I get that Tesla wants to save money, both in assembly costs and "lower cost = more potential buyers", but there has to be a large market of people who are willing to pay more for a more usable car.

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Could third party manufacturers release products that replace the massive LCD screen with an interface that has the same physical footprint but is like, half glass and half knobs?

The new Volkswagen ID.3 has the same issue. Would be great if it had some more physical buttons (although it already has more than a Tesla).

It's crazy that "electric cars" == "buttons are replaced by touch screens". VW makes non-electric cars that have a lot more knobs, but in their electric offerings they have to flock with Tesla with an all-glass UI, for some reason. I wonder if it's driven by market research or mostly fear-based: "We might look outdated compared to Tesla, let's just do what they do."

There are also some "physics" reasons for this - the source of electric current in an ICE car is usually a 1kWh lead-acid battery - obviously not always at 100% state of charge. Even if the designers wanted to put an awesome infotainment system into such car, the battery won't be able to power it for long before jeopardizing driving-related critical functionality. As an example - keeping Tesla's sentry mode on (screen on and cameras recording), drains about 250W - enough to completely kill a classic car battery in 4 hours

Electric cars, with their batteries in 30-100 kWh range, lift this constraint - so designers have a field day

AFAIK, even on Teslas, the infotainment system run on the low voltage circuit, powered by the same lead-acid battery used in ICE vehicles.

Maybe the latter plus they also want to have a ton of features, which gets hard to fit into a traditional button layout. But there's no reason an electric car has to be high tech either.

Yeah, the concept of "high-tech" has been conceptually bundled with the electric engine type. I for one hope those get disentangled because the limit for "high-tech" cars looks like a shitty idiocratic dystopia.

I would have already bought a Tesla or two if they had physical controls and no internet access.

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