Nearly 3M Teslas recalled in China over hidden door handles | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 3M Teslas recalled in China over hidden door handles

bbc.com

120 pointschicken-stew153 comments

Hidden door handles, button open doors when inside the car, only touch screen buttons, rear red turn signal lights.

Reverse these trends. They all suck and unsafe.

Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too. It's very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny. For you people out there who buy cars with red blinking signal lights, I hate you.

It's almost like an EV should be regular car with a battery

At least Tesla was the first to make an EV that looked normal on the outside.

> Tesla was the first to make an EV that looked normal

Your definition of normal makes me suspicious. I thought GM were "the first to make an EV that looked normal". Tesla was the first to make a "software defined vehicle", 10 years before this became mainstream. Tesla is the Google of EVs: the UX sucks, but everybody wants to copy it.

Suspicious of what? GM had the EV1 then the original Volt, which looked ridiculous.

Allowing Silicon Valley dorks to redefine the established UIs of cars was one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years. Ultimately it's cost shaving, but it spread like a cancer to other manufacturers owing mostly to a TikTok-brained customer base (to their own detriment).

It's one of the reasons I refuse to own a new car. Zero reason to hide critical controls behind a touch screen.

My daily driver has all tactile controls. I can operate wipers, climate, radio, and all critical functions blindfolded.

> Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too.

I'm surprised. But it shouldn't be up to Tesla; it's illegal and they never get on the road in countries with proper regulations.

You will never see those in the EU.

Australia generally follows EU for vehicle safety regs, and red turn signals were banned for new vehicles in 1973.

Never see this in China and didn't know it exists before.

> “…with proper regulations.”

Enforcement, no?

NY state has 30% tint law, but my Uber driver last night was more than that.

I’ve heard tint being enforced with other violations, but i believe window tint analyzers are in short supply or costly, and they have to share. Which leads to longer roadside detainments.

What makes them so difficult to test?

https://dmv.ny.gov/inspections/tinted-windows

I'm surprised NY allows tinting of the whole front windshield. Here in AZ we're bound by the (stupid) AS-1 line. Tinting here would help more than in NY.

It’s cultural; style over function—-unless the function is more traffic deaths (for which I have no numbers of traffic deaths involving tinted windows, I freely admit. I have had uncomfortable interactions with tinted cars on the streets and highways, so they have earned my permanent enmity).

The trouble is both the cops and bully boys like tinted windows the same as acculturated Captain America and the Red Skull.

> I'm surprised. But it shouldn't be up to Tesla; it's illegal and they never get on the road in countries with proper regulations.

The USA doesn't mandate red turn signals. They can be red or amber. Plenty of BMWs with amber turn signals. Although the current one has red turn signals.

I'd say on modern cars it's less bad, the turn signal is usually a strip, and the brake light is larger, joined with a 3rd brake light.

But on one of those old Ford vans, with incandescent red brake/turn signals with no/often broken 3rd light: you have to wait a second before you can determine if the person is braking / indicating.

There's commenters here who genuinely believe the hidden door handles have a non-negligible effect on the aerodynamics of these cars.

One more trend I'd like to reverse is the always on cellular data connection, reporting back to the car manufacturer where you are and how you are driving.

Can I extend the turn signal thing to "can we please recall and ban Hyundai's shitty H-lights on the back of their new vehicles"?

https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_m...

Those turn and brake signals are nearly unreadable at distance now. Even worse when snow-covered.

Shout out to the Mini Cooper's UK flag lights: https://unsung.aresluna.org/should-be-no-trouble-at-all-for-...

which look like an arrow pointing the opposite direction to the one the driver is indicating for.

Yet most popular car in the world. You need to touch grass or something.

Mandatory video on red turn signals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA

Good move. There's an interesting old article on the door handles here:

> https://medium.com/@arunchidambaram/is-teslas-door-handle-an...

In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.

You know what's a bigger source of drag than mirrors? Open wheel wells.

If the Tesla door handles were really because they care that much about aerodynamics, their cars would look more like the 1st Gen Honda Insight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Insight#/media/File:Hond...

Is it not possible to build a mechanical handle with similar aero properties? It's the electronic activation that's at issue here, not the shape.

Yes, you can make mechanical handles that are flush with the car body. In which you push one end and then the other end sticks out, allowing you to open the door.

The fancy electric handles are just for show. They’re cool looking and engineers salivate over this stuff. But they’re a bad idea.

I hope there's more "no, your 'luxury' feature is just unsafe."

Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.

Tesla also cheaped out and didn't use a normal rain sensor for the wipers to enable auto mode, instead using "Tesla Vision". I've heard nothing but bad things about it.

Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.

Covered in this Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ

China just continuing to be the super reasonable one.

I wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory, or just try and place a tariff on normal doors.

Continuing?? Most Chinese domestic market cars can't be sold in the west because they're to dangerous or polluting. I'm sure they're getting stricter on both fronts but they're still behind developed countries.

Yeah so in like 2014 you would see chinese EV's mostly when they caught fire, exploded, or their batteries died in like 20 minutes.

The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.

Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.

So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.

The current top three auto-makers by sales in Australia are Toyota, BYD, then Ford. They might not have quite the same market penetration in Europe but BYD vehicles are sold there, and some have 5 star safety ratings.

I'm talking about cars made for the Chinese domestic market, not made for the Australian market. Remember the point here is that China is super reasonable about safety in its domestic cars compared to the US.

Here's an example of a recessed door handle with the aerodynamic advantages, but without any of the controversies: https://i.shgcdn.com/1b51ebc9-f7a7-4caf-865a-ef5e190b8dd2/-/...

Here's a different way of doing it: https://stwinglist01.blob.core.windows.net/media/NarBC_ny/8e...

General aviation manufacturers figured this out decades and decades ago. I really don't understand the Tesla engineer mindset.

This current Chinese administration is great

Maybe Xi getting rid of generals in the party really helped many other high ranking officials step in line and step up in doing things for the people

"Great" except for those nagging problems in Xinjiang, that nasty business with trade in prisoner's organs, forced labour camps, lack of freedom of association and expression, the problem with people forcibly being disappeared by the state, the heavy omnipresent censorship and many other similarly repressive policies.

Hey, CCP bot, please explain the downvote. If you disagree with what I write here and can prove what I wrote is in error we'd all learn something. If what I wrote is correct and you just hope other knee-jerk downvoters will follow your example I'd say get lost.

It is quite revealing that on this US-hosted and -managed site this same post aimed at "Trump" or "the US government" instead of "Xi" or "the PRC government" would be up-voted, most likely by the same group of people. Try that in the PRC and you'd soon find out the truth of what I wrote here.

You should care more about your message than how people react to it if you believe in what you are saying.

I personally don’t find a thin corporate layer in the West controlling all facets of life to be a functionally different user experience than a system where everything is theoretically effectively nationalized and is the government controlling all facets of life

In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society

It doesn’t really matter if most of the deplatforming is social and corporate digital fiefdoms, or directly from the state run “Ministry”. It’s too similar at this point to single them out, even when it comes to disappearing and held without a way out. Every country has marginalized people, single party states don’t have assurances for dissent and Xinjiang already has economic sanctions against it. Check your privilege, if you aren’t marginalized in the target region, the check passed, proceed

Realise that saying something like this against the Chinese regime in China will land you in hot water while you won't have any problems now.

> In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society

Who can't you criticise in the West? What happens when you criticise them anyway?

These defences of authoritarian regimes like that in China almost read like that old 'Soviet joke' where a westerner says "at least I can criticise the US government without fear of repercussion" whereupon the Soviet citizen answers "I can also criticise the US government without any fear of repercussion".

China is so paradoxical that its impossible to explain how it works without running afoul of their regulation, at this point I would petition for an educational exemption with the party

Essentially anything that is seen as undermining the “territorial unity” of what the party considers China will be reprimanded in harsh ways, including expropriation and jail time, for foreigners a public apology is often enough

Knowing that, it’s easy to navigate. You can live your life there doing normal stuff without running into party politics the whole time, thats not controversial to me, thats not oppression to me and hundreds of millions of people. Democracy failed in China multiple times, its not going to happen, the last time because people wanted to democratically vote in more marxism after they realized the Standing Committee are the best capitalists. The party is what it is, they won. And I wouldn’t say that there, if you cant read the room you’re excised out the population. I kind of dont mind, US prisons are filled with mentally impaired people too, for everyone else the rulebook is easy to follow, its just not different enough for me to match your energy

And yes “but we can talk about it here” means absolutely nothing to me, the consensus mechanism has totally failed for progress in the US while that quip is used to shut down all discussion as if its better. If you dont have citizenship status the government is absolutely arresting, kidnapping and disappearing people for their speech and expression here under just immigration authority, when it doesnt match the government position. The government believes this satisfies due process, even when a removal order or criteria is unbeknownst to the person rendered.

Yeah whoop de do, we havent had a military coup and we can chat about it, and people are still detained indefinitely by the US government, I can navigate what the state capitalists are doing and appreciate the parts that would benefit my class

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