Having owned a Tesla for over ten years now, I’ve lived the real pain of being at the mercy of the manufacturer who can completely change how your car works overnight. Annoying in Figma, dangerous in a Tesla.
Some comments dismiss this author as a new driver with a learning curve but Tesla has impacted muscle memory several times now. Why did they change this row of icons anyway? I don’t think they take the responsibility seriously.
Agreed. I was (barely) willing to tolerate a touchscreen interface for my car, as long as the UI didn't change ever. Without tactile feedback, I need the buttons to be in the exact same place every time so that I can develop the muscle memory to hit them without looking. When Tesla changed the UI layout as part of a software update, they eliminated themselves as a manufacturer I'm going to buy from. As the author of the linked piece says, "move fast and break things" is simply not acceptable for the controls of machinery that can easily kill someone if you make mistakes.
This is why my next car won’t be a Tesla (after driving one for the past 8 years). It’s sad, they get so many things right but they are dangerously irresponsible.
Yep, agreed. I'm on my third Tesla, and probably my last. The cars are still very structurally safe, but operationally they're getting more dangerous because of changes like the UI, FSD feeling actually worse than it used to (I had it on my Model 3, but I couldn't transfer it to my Model X, and it wasn't good enough on the 3, why would it be good enough on the X which actually had FEWER sensors?) and the absolute insistence than vision-only is safer than vision plus radar and ultrasonic. I understand that the radar they had was limited, but you improve the radar, don't drop it entirely.
Also, I haven't been an Elon fan since 2018 or so, but I was still able to look past his shenanigans when I bought this a few years ago, but he's gone straight over the cliff since then and keep falling, so this is almost definitely the last one I'm getting.
It continues to boggle my mind that this behavior of unpredictably changing controls on a dangerous piece of equipment is accepted. Does anyone wish that the manufacturer could unexpectedly change the controls and safety features of their table saw, hunting rifle, or home fuse box? Of course not, that would be stupid and dangerous. But somehow Tesla's marketing has convinced a lot of people that it's fine or even a bonus when it happens with their vehicle.
It's not an idle worry either, many people have talked about the dangerous episodes they've had driving when basic controls were suddenly hidden from them. I've personally experienced it as well, riding with a relative in their Tesla. It started raining on the freeway, the auto wipers weren't turning on, and neither of us could quickly find the manual controls while hurtling down the freeway because they had moved since the car owner had last used them.
> Some comments dismiss this author as a new driver with a learning curve
Which is a faulty way to think about it to begin with because good UX patterns should aim to be as idiot-proof as possible, especially for a CAR of all things. The KISS principle should apply here.
I've had my '23 Model Y for almost a year now and I still find the UX very severely lacking. For example if you want to change the speedometer display from kmh to mph - for crossing the Canada/US border - it's located in a weird part of the "Display" menu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbqibzYjkxE
I really like the 1+1=3 cognitive load analogy on the cost of adding a "single" click to something. One of the most aggravating things in the last 15 years is a seemingly industry wide decision to "declutter" menus by burying even very simple, common actions 4-5 menus deep, often with icons that have no discernible clear meaning until you click around for a while and figure it out.
A recent favourite of mine was trying to find the odometer reading on my humble Skoda - couldn't find it on any screen, nothing helpful in manual. I eventually realised that the odometer and the speed setting for the cruise control share the same area on the screen so if the cruise control is turned on then you can't see the odometer.
Because "modern" designers are often degenerates who have zero fucking clues about ergonomics. Their ideal design is an empty screen with a single light gray element on white background.
No, they are not. They are just wrong people hired for the jobs by ignorant management which has no idea how diverse can be design tasks. It’s like blaming React developers working on some Jira tickets without a full picture, which is not a website but a satellite RTOS. An experienced generalist would understand the challenge and may refuse to do it if they don’t have the knowledge, but most people would simply incorrectly assume that they can do it. Management on the other side should have done better.
I don’t agree with it, but I can take a guess as to why - they are putting the cart before the horse - cars truly aren’t self-driven enough to take our attention away from the road. If they were, we’d have the time to tinker deep into menus or whatever.
As a driver I really want tactile feedback on my controls - even clear buttons on a screen require a half-second glance off the road which in bad weather is not a good idea. Needless to say, all forms of self-drive features give up in inclement weather.
They want to please everyone. Basically, what ends up happening is that new features get added but the company doesn't want to choose which buttons are more important than others. There is no one-size-fits all solution: every option makes somebody else's workflow worse. The most "neutral" and "logical" solution is to construct an ontology of button types and then materialize that in the form of nested menus. Hurts everyone the same.
I think this is a problem at the product-management level, where they cannot decide which user persona they want to prioritize. Could also be financially related, and other users complain when the company picks a side.
Tesla has the worst interface I’ve used in a car (it gets -1000 points for making the driver futz and swipe dangerously on a touch screen to angle the air vent), and it seems to keep getting worse - but the best driving fundamentals I’ve used in a car.
If I could take the lower half of a Tesla Model Y with a totally average Toyota upper half at the Model Y pricing I would buy that car in a heartbeat. Just swapping the infotainment unit to customizable Android Auto with CarPlay and I would consider it. It’s such a shame to have good engineering bundled together with bad opinions.
We test drove a Model Y in May. There were a lot of UI nits that annoyed me, but the thing that really stood out was the blind spot warning placement. Every other vehicle I've ever driven puts the visual indicator on the mirror somewhere. After all, you're looking in the mirror (or in that vicinity) when you need to know whether someone is in your blind spot. Tesla sticks it in the center console - so you have to completely swivel your head to see it. Very strange.
I deal with many cars on a daily basis and, for me, almost all the UX have become bewildering, especially in the last four or five model years.
One particularly vexing thing: the splitting of vehicle settings between the instrument cluster and center stack displays. At least Tesla puts it all on one screen. Audi, for example, has it spread across three screens.
Yeah, I just learned Mercedes puts several settings on a "Service" instrument cluster mode in my 2024 vehicle. I wonder if it's common with german car brands, or have you seen it also in Japanese, Korean, or American brands? Overall the Mercedes UI stuff does a fine job starting CarPlay and showing a backup camera, but the settings menus are confusingly hard to navigate.
how can you use the term "good engineering" when that same company sells cars with video cameras instead of mirrors and turn signals mounted on a rotating steering wheel?
I will call it what it is - techbro delusion. Silicon Valley deluded itself into thinking that it alone knows best and that more tech alone is the solution to all our problems.
Tesla's design choices are the perfect example of this culture permeating into a high-stakes world where real people can die.
Counterpoint: Tesla has the best interface I've ever used in a car.
I've used CarPlay and Android Auto in previous vehicles, the Tesla iPad experience is _vastly_ superior. Mapping, defaults, interactions, nothing is better in the phone apps.
I drive a Tesla S and a Tesla Model Y a few months out of the year, and both cars lag like 200ms on the first few keypresses when typing into the map search input, and swiping around the map or moving the media player overlay drawer up or down drops framerates down to 15fps or lower, which to me puts it on par with Android tablets in 2013. According to my Tesla app, the Y seems to be running the latest software from 2024, and the S is on 2022 software. Maybe they dropped support?
> I've used CarPlay and Android Auto in previous vehicles, the Tesla iPad experience is _vastly_ superior. Mapping, defaults, interactions, nothing is better in the phone apps.
LOL. No. Just no. And I'm on my third (and likely the last) Tesla.
Tesla's navigation is just crap. It doesn't work offline, its routing decisions are sometimes are incorrect, it's difficult to use, etc.
So many useless features and all the core stuff is harder to use.
I was so frustrated with my w213 E class Mercedes, I went back to a used fiat Punto.
Everything is much easier and better, it's less comfortable and my SO has hard time sleeping in it on long trips, but aside that it's much better.
Gets a scratch? Who cares. Someone bumps my car while parking? Who cares. Fuel economy? Much better. Maintenance cost? Much lower. Insurance? Much lower.
Everything is analog and easy to use.
I am more and more convinced that I will only be using vintage cars in the future, and all this digital stuff can die on the spot, and Tesla crap more than anything else.
I wonder if in a couple of years there will be a lot of old car conversion businesses around. Especially for the most common cars with the whole supply chain of ready made parts. The only real requirement from an old car I can immediately think of is for the car body to be fully galvanized. It would probably be best for smaller cars as the battery cost and electric drive train utility would be the biggest.
But eventually maybe my 2009 Renault Laguna could also be converted :P
I'll throw another anecdote into the rapidly filling bucket: A buddy of mine gave me a ride in his Tesla. When we arrived, I reached for the door handle and opened the door - a natural, smooth motion, at the end of which my hand found a handle that I could pull.
My buddy told me that that's the emergency release, and to not use that, because it can damage the car if used too many times, and had to show me the real door handle. (I have already forgotten where it is.)
It's probably good that in an emergency, my hand would naturally reach for the thing that would release me from the car - but on the other hand, it's wild that the natural muscle memory of decades leads me to a thing that'll fuck up his car.
I had a Tesla for a couple of years and then sold it.
I'd buy another EV. I wouldn't buy another Tesla, because of the UX. Lack of physical buttons and changing UI. The infotainment screen crashed a couple of times in a year, the car was fine but suddenly the only place for car status feedback was gone. Lastly, not having a console in front of you, and needing to look to the side to see things like speed limit just felt unacceptable.
Funny to read because Musk famously said "Any product that needs a manual to work is broken." It's a mantra that has guided my work in UX and my design thinking overall. It was even a quote I had on my personal website many years ago, back when Musk had credibility.
He also said to remove things until it breaks. That doesn’t work for ux imho since “well it technically still works” isn’t going to lead to a great experience.
Yeah, fairly sure that came from Jobs or someone well before Musk.
> The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.
I did a quick search and couldn't find any evidence that confirms the quote came from Musk. Its just one of those quotes that, whether or not he really said it, has been attributed to him. Seems like this sort of thing happens to quotes by famous people quite a bit.
I drive a Tesla Model 3 daily and agree to the critism about it's interface. On my last holidays I rented a Suzuki Vitara. Indeed it's much easier to find and operate the standard controls like for climate. Also cruise control with its 6 buttons took only a little learning.
The worst turned out to be CarPlay, a feature I always thought I'm missing with my Tesla. Occasionally it just didn't work, even though the phone was connected. So you get no navigation or you stop/start/wait until it works. And repeat that after every car stop situation. And when it works, forget about zooming or seeing anything more than the next step on this tiny display.
All in all I was happy to return to my Tesla again. But then I know all important controls from memory.
Anyway: Analog cars ruled indeed. I'd just use a simple phone holder too rather than anything like CarPlay.
Readit News
Some comments dismiss this author as a new driver with a learning curve but Tesla has impacted muscle memory several times now. Why did they change this row of icons anyway? I don’t think they take the responsibility seriously.
Also, I haven't been an Elon fan since 2018 or so, but I was still able to look past his shenanigans when I bought this a few years ago, but he's gone straight over the cliff since then and keep falling, so this is almost definitely the last one I'm getting.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-has-the-most-loyal-b...
Brought to you by the folks who took out a critical piece of the break and shipped it by accident
It's not an idle worry either, many people have talked about the dangerous episodes they've had driving when basic controls were suddenly hidden from them. I've personally experienced it as well, riding with a relative in their Tesla. It started raining on the freeway, the auto wipers weren't turning on, and neither of us could quickly find the manual controls while hurtling down the freeway because they had moved since the car owner had last used them.
Which is a faulty way to think about it to begin with because good UX patterns should aim to be as idiot-proof as possible, especially for a CAR of all things. The KISS principle should apply here.
I've had my '23 Model Y for almost a year now and I still find the UX very severely lacking. For example if you want to change the speedometer display from kmh to mph - for crossing the Canada/US border - it's located in a weird part of the "Display" menu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbqibzYjkxE
Deleted Comment
Why? Seriously, why?
As a driver I really want tactile feedback on my controls - even clear buttons on a screen require a half-second glance off the road which in bad weather is not a good idea. Needless to say, all forms of self-drive features give up in inclement weather.
I think this is a problem at the product-management level, where they cannot decide which user persona they want to prioritize. Could also be financially related, and other users complain when the company picks a side.
If I could take the lower half of a Tesla Model Y with a totally average Toyota upper half at the Model Y pricing I would buy that car in a heartbeat. Just swapping the infotainment unit to customizable Android Auto with CarPlay and I would consider it. It’s such a shame to have good engineering bundled together with bad opinions.
One particularly vexing thing: the splitting of vehicle settings between the instrument cluster and center stack displays. At least Tesla puts it all on one screen. Audi, for example, has it spread across three screens.
I will call it what it is - techbro delusion. Silicon Valley deluded itself into thinking that it alone knows best and that more tech alone is the solution to all our problems.
Tesla's design choices are the perfect example of this culture permeating into a high-stakes world where real people can die.
I've used CarPlay and Android Auto in previous vehicles, the Tesla iPad experience is _vastly_ superior. Mapping, defaults, interactions, nothing is better in the phone apps.
LOL. No. Just no. And I'm on my third (and likely the last) Tesla.
Tesla's navigation is just crap. It doesn't work offline, its routing decisions are sometimes are incorrect, it's difficult to use, etc.
So many useless features and all the core stuff is harder to use.
I was so frustrated with my w213 E class Mercedes, I went back to a used fiat Punto.
Everything is much easier and better, it's less comfortable and my SO has hard time sleeping in it on long trips, but aside that it's much better.
Gets a scratch? Who cares. Someone bumps my car while parking? Who cares. Fuel economy? Much better. Maintenance cost? Much lower. Insurance? Much lower.
Everything is analog and easy to use.
I am more and more convinced that I will only be using vintage cars in the future, and all this digital stuff can die on the spot, and Tesla crap more than anything else.
But eventually maybe my 2009 Renault Laguna could also be converted :P
Between the cost of of batteries, power trains, etc it's just cheaper to buy a brand new car imho.
https://x.com/CarManToday/status/1822163384340521085?t=1aqVH...
My buddy told me that that's the emergency release, and to not use that, because it can damage the car if used too many times, and had to show me the real door handle. (I have already forgotten where it is.)
It's probably good that in an emergency, my hand would naturally reach for the thing that would release me from the car - but on the other hand, it's wild that the natural muscle memory of decades leads me to a thing that'll fuck up his car.
I'd buy another EV. I wouldn't buy another Tesla, because of the UX. Lack of physical buttons and changing UI. The infotainment screen crashed a couple of times in a year, the car was fine but suddenly the only place for car status feedback was gone. Lastly, not having a console in front of you, and needing to look to the side to see things like speed limit just felt unacceptable.
> The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.
(It didn’t last; since MacOS X or possibly before macOS has supported a decent set of emacs-y keystrokes as part of the UI)
I drive a Tesla Model 3 daily and agree to the critism about it's interface. On my last holidays I rented a Suzuki Vitara. Indeed it's much easier to find and operate the standard controls like for climate. Also cruise control with its 6 buttons took only a little learning.
The worst turned out to be CarPlay, a feature I always thought I'm missing with my Tesla. Occasionally it just didn't work, even though the phone was connected. So you get no navigation or you stop/start/wait until it works. And repeat that after every car stop situation. And when it works, forget about zooming or seeing anything more than the next step on this tiny display.
All in all I was happy to return to my Tesla again. But then I know all important controls from memory.
Anyway: Analog cars ruled indeed. I'd just use a simple phone holder too rather than anything like CarPlay.
So it's basically not CarPlay itself, but its implementation?