Buttons and Knobs Are Coming to the Tesla Model 3 and Y | Hacker News Reader

Buttons and Knobs Are Coming to the Tesla Model 3 and Y

thedrive.com

10 pointstomohawk18 comments

> The aftermarket is stepping up to deliver buttons and knobs to augment Tesla’s touchscreen-only controls.

For a second I thought Tesla had gotten a clue.

They sold 1.3 million vehicles last year without buttons totaling $71B in revenue with a 28.5% gross profit margin. They’ll be fine and appear to have sufficient clue.

https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/GZR0GS_TSLA_Q4_2022_Updat...

Consider the possibility that this is solely due to their dominance in battery tech, and despite rather than because of their uh… creative UX.

I can attest to this. Only bought a Tesla because of the batteries and supercharger network. Once the supercharger problem goes away, I’ll be buying a different brand EV

Right, which means it’s an immaterial concern until it’s causing customers to go elsewhere. Until then, the customer clearly doesn’t care enough to not buy the vehicle. Demand > supply. That’s all that matters. Opinions don’t drive financials, sales do. I understand this is an inconvenient truth for those with strong opinions on the topic.

I mostly was saying this as someone who strongly considered buying a Tesla but was sufficiently underwhelmed with the test drive experience that I went with a different make. But maybe you’re right, they don’t need me as a customer.

I don’t want to buy the vehicle because of touchscreen buttons. I can afford it.

You’re basically saying “he’s rich, so whatever he’s doing must all be right all the time”

No, I’m saying you don’t have to cater to the whim of every possible customer, as long as there are enough customers who will consume your product supply potential without gripe. There is a difference.

This is no different than having a SaaS product and ignoring small, vocal minorities of customers. You grow fast by accommodating the mass market. You die by entertaining the minority’s demands. Let the people who don’t care for your opinionated product go elsewhere and max your revenue, margin, and volume (whatever that intersection is).

I am not saying consumers demanding physical controls are wrong, just that a) they should shop elsewhere if they want that and b) Tesla is wildly successful without offering it. I genuinely don’t understand why that thesis is contentious.

Consider the possibility that physical buttons may be something existing tesla owners may not mind or even may like. If so they would have more customers, not less.

The lack of buttons in the Model 3 are my biggest gripe with the car, and the single biggest reason I'll never buy a car with only a touch screen ever again. My son drives the cheapest Kia on the market, and not only does it have well designed and placed buttons and knobs, to use them never requires I take my eyes off the road.

I can't even turn off the heat seaters in my Model 3 without looking at the screen. Even then, hitting a finger tip sized zone while fighting bumps and road vibrations means you hit everything but the button you want.

Things can have bad aspects and still be commercially successful. Commercial success is not an all-out counter to criticism of manufacturer decisions, and should not be the only driver of such decisions.

I admire their ingenuity, but the fact that this requires a round trip from the device to my phone to the cloud and back to the car (and consequently, requires that both my phone and the car have cell service) renders it basically a non-starter for me.

This looks a bit nicer, but a product called "S3XY Buttons" has been around for a while that does similar things but uses the obdII port instead.

How does that work on the Model 3? To my knowledge, it doesn't have an OBD2 port.

Apparently there is an easily available plug connection with the needed bus access behind a panel that you hook into with an adapter.

For being such a high tech car, its unfortunate that there isn't some sort of API that can be used to directly control things, even if its just things like the climate control, etc.

As a side note, my 2019 Subaru Crosstrek can't seem to show the backup camera, and deal with me turning the physical radio volume dial down at the same time. I think the computer in a car should be up-gradable.

This is one of the reasons that CarPlay is a base requirement for any new car I buy. I want to delegate as many smarts as possible to a device that can be replaced.

> The Ctrl-Bar doesn't send commands to the vehicle directly. It instead connects via Bluetooth to the driver's smartphone, which must be running the Tesla app

What kind of insanity is this?

It's almost like they want it to fail so they can say "see, no buttons is better."

Every time I get in my model 3, I have to manually reconnect my phone over Bluetooth. About a third of the time, the Tesla app crashes.

Edit: I mistakenly thought Tesla was releasing this. They aren't. Doesn't change what I said, though it makes a bit more sense now.

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