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aurareturn 13 hours ago [-]
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.
versteegen 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bestouff 12 hours ago [-]
You will never see those in the EU.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
We do see them here occasionally on US import cars. (NL) Tend to be older models like those long and wide models with benches in front and back and very loose suspension.
ndsipa_pomu 42 minutes ago [-]
Here in the UK, older cars are often exempt from various safety standards. Otherwise, recent imported vehicles have to comply with e.g. headlights dipping the wrong way which is common as we drive on the left.
Zanfa 12 hours ago [-]
I wish. Never used to really see any until recently. Looks like a brake light malfunction if you're not expecting it.
bigfatkitten 12 hours ago [-]
Australia generally follows EU for vehicle safety regs, and red turn signals were banned for new vehicles in 1973.
Bimos 11 hours ago [-]
Never see this in China and didn't know it exists before.
xtiansimon 6 hours ago [-]
> “…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.
When you can only see half of a car, the red turn signal lights also make it impossible to tell quickly whether the car is about to get into your lane or the driver's foot is on the brakes.
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
boomlinde 12 hours ago [-]
The whole thing would be a good example of dismantling Chesterton's fence, if the advantages of the traditional design of these things weren't obvious.
dist-epoch 11 hours ago [-]
No it wouldn't, because there is no obvious fence here.
You can't call any change "dismantling Chesterton's fence" - "Windows made the corners of the windows round, users hated it, obvious example of Chesterton's fence"
boomlinde 11 hours ago [-]
Having visible door handles is a safety feature. Having clear turn indicators with a distinct color is a safety feature. You have simply not examined what the fence is there for.
RachelF 12 hours ago [-]
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.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
Always on cellular data is fine, and useful for many things. They should just stop gathering and transmitting the data to the manufacturer. Cars above a certain price point need a tracker to be installed in order to get insured as well. Also not necessarily a privacy problem.
euroderf 6 hours ago [-]
What? I thought the auto industry had standardised long ago on yellow for turn signals. When did this red-blinker information abomination make it to market ?
wilg 13 hours ago [-]
Tesla several years ago returned to amber turn signal lights the US (and always had them outside the US).
pudgywalsh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
It's probably because they started mandating reverse cameras. Which is great, but any cars without screens suddenly had them. At that point, it was probably cheaper to put the rest of the functionality on the screen.
roncesvalles 13 hours ago [-]
The reason is cost savings. It's cheaper to modify software UI than it is to modify hardware UI.
cicko 12 hours ago [-]
There's no need to modify the hardware UI. It worked fine for decades.
spockz 8 hours ago [-]
I heard a very simple explanation from a car engineer involved with setting up the factory pipelines. Each button has a limited life time, each button has a particular chance of being doa, or a particular chance of being fitted badly, some fail prematurely.
All of this leads to an increase in “failures” in seperate steps of the manufacturing pipeline, assembly of dashboard, assembly of car, after the car is completed, after it is shipped to dealer, and after the new owner picks it up, during the lifetime of the car. Each of those moments occurs a significantly increased cost of replacing the button.
By simply removing buttons and knobs, this source of failure rate goes down and it appears cheaper. It is also the reason behind going from 4 buttons for the windows to 3 (left, right, and a toggle for front/rear)
According to him the monetary savings were significant enough to proceed with it. Personally, I wish they wouldn’t. But I believed the numbers.
hulitu 27 minutes ago [-]
> Each button has a limited life time
A button for a car is designed and tested to last 10 years. Software on the other hand...
pmontra 10 hours ago [-]
Hardware controls might cost more to develop (do they?) but on the other side they don't get any modification during the life of a car. No need to spend money in updates. Given the long history of those controls they are well understood by the car maker and by the car owners.
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
andrekandre 11 hours ago [-]
> cheaper to modify software UI
at some point, beyond aesthetics, sometimes a function is done and doesn't need tinkering anymore.... especially in something like a car that is 2 tonnes of steel and metal...
szundi 12 hours ago [-]
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maxerickson 6 hours ago [-]
BMW launched their unified iDrive controls in 2001 (to much controversy).
hulitu 42 minutes ago [-]
> Allowing Silicon Valley dorks to redefine the established UIs of... was one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years.
Fully agree
13 hours ago [-]
nxpnsv 13 hours ago [-]
Reminder: You shouldn’t drive blindfolded, no matter how well you know your controls.
boomlinde 12 hours ago [-]
You shouldn't drive blindfolded, but have you given any thought to where your eyes should be pointed while driving?
nxpnsv 12 hours ago [-]
I agree with the point, i hate the touch screens, and i think you should be able to control almost everything without taking your eyes off the road. The blindfold made me think of some david blaine stunt.
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
Ironically the most hated car features right now (speed limit warning and lane departure alerts) are designed by government.
In fact they are hated so much people are deliberately buying older less safe cars instead.
hulitu 24 minutes ago [-]
> Ironically the most hated car features right now (speed limit warning and lane departure alerts) are designed by government.
That's what car manufacturers make you think. Who do you think it (paid) lobby for those features to be mandatory in new cars ?
mrtesthah 13 hours ago [-]
This is ultimately a matter of corruption and a failure of government to regulate.
Freedom2 12 hours ago [-]
There's commenters here who genuinely believe the hidden door handles have a non-negligible effect on the aerodynamics of these cars.
bdhdhduuyd 12 hours ago [-]
A 0.5-1% efficiency gain is not much.
otherme123 11 hours ago [-]
There are traditional door handles that are practically flush with the rest of the car (semi-hidden is the name I believe). If you are after aerodynamics, you could copy the gas door / cover from any car after 1980.
There are bigger losers in car aerodynamics. The worse one is the frontal section, that current models seem to ignore, making bigger and bigger cars almost for the sake of it. Then they have forgotten parts like the underside, that could be covered with something light and smooth for decent gains, but are instead an aerodynamic nightmare because nobody is looking there.
There are cars with Cd around 0.2 (Xiaomi SU7, Lucid Air, Tesla S, Hyundai Ioniq...). The Mercedes A-Class Saloon since 2018 and BMW 5 have a Cd of 0.22, and they look like normal cars, with normal door handles and normal mirrors, but carefully designs of the underside, air around the wheels and rear drag reduction. The Mercedes include active aero around the engine, shutting the grill when cooling is not needed. But they keep selling SUVS with Cd over 0.35, up to 0.45 with flushed door handles "for the aero". Please.
6510 11 hours ago [-]
You'd want things to go fast after the crash too. I've had fascinating conversation with people about safety measures in general. Many prefer to imagine it wont happen. Inspections are still real. They cant imagine them away.
userbinator 12 hours ago [-]
Agree, except the red turn signals --- they've been the standard here for at least half a century...
very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny.
Perhaps because they're too small and the LEDs are not diffused enough.
Red means Rear, and white means front, which is why reversing lights are white and front turn signals are (should be) yellow.
Bimos 11 hours ago [-]
> Red means Rear, and white means front
And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
vatsachak 13 hours ago [-]
It's almost like an EV should be regular car with a battery
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
At least Tesla was the first to make an EV that looked normal on the outside.
rsynnott 11 hours ago [-]
... Huh? The Nissan Leaf and Renault ZoE looked fairly normal. And the eGolf looked _so_ normal that people didn't realise VW made electric cars. (I'm fairly sure that the reason the id3 and 4 look a bit weird is a direct reaction to that.) Only seriously weird-looking early (current generation, excluding oddities from the 80s) electric car I can think of is the BMW id3.
frollogaston 11 hours ago [-]
Gen 1 leaf looked super weird like it was making sure you know it's an EV, never saw a Renault ZoE in real life but it looks like the same kind of weird, eGolf looked normal but was after the Tesla Model S. And the Tesla Roadster predated the Leaf, but I'm not counting it because nobody really cared about Tesla until the S.
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
rsynnott 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, sorry, yeah, the eUp (looked just like an Up) was the first modern VW one, not the eGolf. Design shown off in 2010, full production in 2013. Again, looked just like an Up.
I’d say a first gen Leaf looked fairly typical of small Nissan cars from that era, tbh; all their small cars looked a bit like that. And a Zoe looked pretty much the same as a Clio of like era. Interestingly, the Renault 5, their new electric car in the size category, is self-consciously weird-looking (you can get it in bright green as a standard option!), and seems to be doing very well.
Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
jerlam 3 hours ago [-]
> Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
ZeroGravitas 10 hours ago [-]
It's commonly accepted that the Leaf Gen 1 was weird because it was an EV, but in reality it's weird because it was a new generation of Japanese design. There are non-EV models Nissan released in Japan around the same time with the same design language that you could combine together to get something that looked like a gen 1 leaf, like the front of the first gen Nissan Note.
antisthenes 5 hours ago [-]
No more or less weird than some other Nissan cars, like the Juke for example, or the Cube (not very popular in the US).
kotaKat 9 hours ago [-]
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"?
Those turn and brake signals are nearly unreadable at distance now. Even worse when snow-covered.
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
Yet most popular car in the world. You need to touch grass or something.
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
By "current fad" (and waning) metric, sure.
Still a good 42 million or so short of, say, a Toyota Corolla.
baybal2 13 hours ago [-]
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Animats 12 hours ago [-]
It's not "recessed" that's the issue. It's "mechanical".[1]
China is requiring door handles openable from both inside and outside without power, and without any difficulty finding the release.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
I miss being able to simply wish folks ill and hope they get what they "deserve".
Instead, as I get older all I can think of is how horrible it would be to possesses some vague idea of escape but have to deal with a smoke or rising water while trying to discern the inobvious escape route to save you from the fancy grave you've dug for yourself.
Horror is a much less satisfying than schadenfreude.
diggernet 4 hours ago [-]
"You can open a rear door manually (if equipped) in the unlikely situation in which Model Y has no power:
Note:
Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
1. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.
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.
diggernet 4 hours ago [-]
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.
I think Tesla looks for efficiencies wherever possible, and any alignment with aesthetic goals is an easy win.
cherioo 13 hours ago [-]
What i hear is that electric door handle is more of a manufacturing cost-saving measure than an aerodynamic saving.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
Isn't it only the Model S that has those electric door handles that pop out on their own? And the cheaper Model 3 has hidden ones that you pop out yourself.
Shank 13 hours ago [-]
That's correct but the interior door handles are electronic buttons. When you pull the exterior handle, during the time when you pull the handle the car also lowers the windows so the door can open.
jerlam 12 hours ago [-]
Which is only important because someone at Tesla decided their cars must have frameless windows, despite it being a luxury feature that adds complication.
Normal framed windows don't need any special handling of the windows when you open the door.
ssl-3 12 hours ago [-]
There have been other cars with frameless windows that didn't have this drop-before-opening feature.
2nd/3rd/4th-gen F-bodies (Camaro/Firebird), for example: All of these cars had frameless windows. None of them did an automatic drop. (And a lot of these cars didn't come with power windows to begin with.)
jerlam 11 hours ago [-]
When Tesla windows are up, the glass tucks underneath the door trim, on both sides of the window. I'm guessing it's for aerodynamics and/or wind noise.
I'm not familiar with those other cars, but maybe they're only sealing from the inside of the window?
So it's both the frameless aspect and the desire to have a "luxury" car.
frollogaston 12 hours ago [-]
Same as a convertible or some coupes, right? Except for the inside being a button
Shank 11 hours ago [-]
Mechanistically, when the door is closed, the frameless window sits inside the body. I'm not sure how the design works with respect to other cars, but in Tesla, you "have" to lower the window mechanically before the door can open or it "will" break. If you use the emergency handles in the front and other mechanisms to open the door and the car has power, it will try to do this as fast as possible, but I think there is theoretical damage risk. Obviously if the car has no powered and it's on fire, you probably just want to leave and don't care about the windows.
frollogaston 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's pretty typical in 2-door sports cars. You don't want to let the battery die and have to do the mechanical open. Gets especially sketchy with a soft-top.
There's also the classic glitch where your window doesn't go back up automatically, so you have to remember to press the window up button after or it'll go slightly down every time you get in. More of a 2000s thing hopefully not present in Teslas.
Rohansi 12 hours ago [-]
Is it really though? On a Tesla you have both the electronic button and manual door release from every door on the inside. You wouldn't need those manual releases if the doors weren't electronic.
userbinator 12 hours ago [-]
Strong disagree; it's not saving anything but the jobs of those who seem to really enjoy overcomplicating things so they can justify their continued employment.
The old-school pure mechanical lock can be converted into an electric one with just the addition of a solenoid to unlock and lock it.
I've dealt with the complexities of automotive mechanisms long enough to see many cases where it seems someone just wanted to make something extra fancy rather than solve the fundamentally simple problem. German designs were notoriously one of the worst in this regard, but others are catching up.
dist-epoch 11 hours ago [-]
They look way more complicated than the previous mechanical locks.
sillysaurusx 13 hours ago [-]
Would it help to add a surface behind the side mirrors so that it's more aerodynamic? I'm thinking something that stretches from the car body to the side mirrors.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
dmurray 11 hours ago [-]
How about a mirror that is only there when you need it? The car could detect from a combination of your eye movement and from its own monitoring of the road behind when you are likely to check the mirror, and pop it out then.
This sounds like a lot of overengineering - you need reliable low latency eye movement detection and a motor mechanism that can react that fast but withstand the air forces at highway speeds. Just to deliver a worse UI - imagine the complaints about how Tesla doesn't detect my eyes unless I look just right. But 6% fuel usage sounds like an enormous saving that would be worth some of your complexity budget.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
You could replace the mirrors with tiny cameras and screens inside the car, perhaps.
But not sure that would be legal.
yourusername 12 hours ago [-]
Audi e-tron has had this as a option for a number of years. But replacing mirrors with screen has a downside: it ruins your depth perception. Instead of focussing 30-100 meters away through the mirror you have to focus on a screen 0.5 meters away. Digital mirrors are very tiring for your eyes compared to mirrors.
jerlam 13 hours ago [-]
The tiny cameras show up a lot in concept cars, but illegal to have in the US. They've been trying to change the law for a while:
That’s what big trucks use. Because you can use wide angle cameras and actually see more.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
These days you could probably even stitch together images from multiple cameras?
Vespasian 12 hours ago [-]
That's also what trucks already do to eliminate dead angles and help the driver manoeuver in tight spaces
a96 12 hours ago [-]
Honda E is a production car with virtual mirrors. I think they're an option on Audi E-tron (R8? GT?) and Lexus ES.
robotmay 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah I test drove a Honda E. I don't know why but they somehow used a webcam from a 1999 laptop for the cameras. It was a shame as the interior of that car is gorgeous, but the range is absolutely appalling and those mirrors are awful.
b112 13 hours ago [-]
But this is part of the problem. A mirror just works, or is very visibly broken if not. We want to have less electronic stuff in cars, not more. So I hope this isn't legal.
ssl-3 11 hours ago [-]
> We want to have less electronic stuff in cars, not more.
I want better cars. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want less-electronic cars.
I'm reminded of how far we've come every time I go out on a cold wintry morning and the electric starter cranks the electronically fuel-injected engine for me, and the whole thing comes to life with utterly-perfect reliability.
I can then select a gear and proceed. No particular warm-up period is required; it's running smoothly straight-away. The electronically-controlled transmission shifts smoothly. The heated seats quickly warm my tuches while the automatic climate control seeks to warm the cabin and maintain a stable temperature without any interaction on my part.
No messing with an ignition retard, or a manual choke. No need to prime the engine by giving it a few turns with the ignition switched off. There's no hand crank with which to break a jaw[1].
It's pretty great, I think.
But there's still plenty of examples remaining of the 15 million Model Ts that Ford built, for those who really seek to limit the electronics to almost-nothing. (And steam cars, too! We must not forget the simplicity of the Carnot cycle, nor of the carbide lamp!)
If you watch old American sitcoms one of the guys, typically a dad, will always be fiddling with his car and tune and maintain it. That was a stereotype for a reason.
cicko 11 hours ago [-]
Sadly, it is (in the EU, at least). One just passed me on the highway.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
Sports car side mirrors are a deeper teardrop shape probably for this reason
ChoGGi 5 hours ago [-]
The recalled vehicles will have a warning label stuck on the interior door and receive a software update to automatically lower the windows in a crash.
The designs have come under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
If the power fails, how will the windows open?
hunglee2 13 hours ago [-]
this is a good move by China, hopefully its the end of the line for hidden door handles for EV's everywhere. Some things are cool but impractical; others are cool but dangerous.
vrighter 13 hours ago [-]
"they are difficult to open in case of power failure"
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
QuiEgo 5 hours ago [-]
The door handles on my early model 3 were chromed, and really stood out from the paint and were easy to find even in low light at night.
The door handles on my Y are blacked out and actually hard to find at night sometimes.
I don’t get Elons obsession with the black out look.
lelandbatey 14 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 13 hours ago [-]
You can install aftermarket stalks. They're actually quite good now, and are available for 3/Y, S/X. (don't know about truck) Some early models used adhesive (SEXY brand?), skip those.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
There are plenty of things they get right.
The original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
The original model s interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
the older UIs were easier to use (in a moving car). more old-school looking, but more contrast and bigger targets.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, everything about it seems trying too hard to be cool. My friend let me drive his new Tesla for a bit and I was like nah. Then a month later he was complaining to me how annoying it is to activate blinkers on it.
m463 13 hours ago [-]
it's also annoying to accidentally activate a turn signal (or horn before they moved that). Then it is hard to cancel it, because you have to determine which one is pressed, and unpress it. choose the wrong one and you are back to cancelling the other one.
It is also just as hard to cancel the turn signal/lane change that FSD is attempting that you want to veto.
I have no idea what people behind you are thinking (or acting on while all this struggle is going on)
jerlam 12 hours ago [-]
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.
To turn on the wipers you tap the button and scroll the wheel to select a speed. No touch screen required.
aaronbrethorst 13 hours ago [-]
whew, that's going to be a relief to the driver that hits an unexpected cloudburst while driving 80mph (130km) down the highway.
NoPicklez 13 hours ago [-]
And what would you do in any other car? You'd also maneuver a stalk which is almost no different from pressing a button
pfannkuchen 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah I dunno, I own one in the extremely rainy PNW and it’s fine. I was very apprehensive of using the touch screen for basic functions also but it turns out you don’t need to.
qwerpy 13 hours ago [-]
Reading and basic observational skills are required though. Apparently too much to ask.
matthewdgreen 13 hours ago [-]
Owner of a Model 3 here: I absolutely need to look at the screen to know what speed it's set to, or if I've accidentally turned it to "Off" or "Auto". The scroll wheel does not tell me this.
It's very different from traditional wiper controls in older cars, where the slider/wheel has a hard stop at min and max, and you can pick the right setting entirely by feel.
dllu 12 hours ago [-]
The windshield wiper controls are a physical button plus physical scroll wheel on the steering wheel. You don't have to touch the touchscreen.
frollogaston 13 hours ago [-]
The iPad controls are the main reason I never leased a Tesla, and also why I avoid being stuck behind one.
userbinator 12 hours ago [-]
They could've made exterior door handles that look exactly the same as they currently do, but without adding all this additional fragile complexity: put them on a pivot, so you press one end and the other pops up so you can pull on it...
door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
Except for those which still have chromed handles, I think this is the case for the majority of cars. It's not the colour that's the problem.
Vespasian 12 hours ago [-]
Hyundai is doing that at least in the Ionic 5
protocolture 14 hours ago [-]
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.
phs318u 13 hours ago [-]
> I wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory
As long as they’re steam-powered.
foxglacier 13 hours ago [-]
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.
runako 13 hours ago [-]
> dangerous or polluting
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
rsynnott 11 hours ago [-]
There'd be lots of PHEVs which don't meet Euro 7. I doubt anyone is bothering to try to meet it for anything not sold in Europe.
RichardLake 12 hours ago [-]
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.
nxpnsv 13 hours ago [-]
They’re pretty much dominating new electric cars in a lot of places now
victorbjorklund 13 hours ago [-]
Seems like old information. Pretty sure most new Chinese cards are electric.
defrost 12 hours ago [-]
Shades of I. Y. Yunioshi's Asian roundup.
protocolture 12 hours ago [-]
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.
baybal2 12 hours ago [-]
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rambojohnson 11 hours ago [-]
dogshit design. an uber driver picked me up from the airport a few weeks ago, was coming back from japan, jetlagged to all hell, only to find... no door handles. had to get her ass out of the car to open the door for me because I just could not be bothered with this anti-design nonsense. I'm tapping the door like an ipad like some idiot and nothing was opening. dogshit design.
yieldcrv 12 hours ago [-]
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
orwin 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, limiting military power access to political power was a great move. 25 years ago, and limited military waste. This is also why I don't believe China will invade Taiwan anytime soon, removing military families removed most of the jingoist part of the CCP.
The issue now is that the CCP is now a millionaire club, which means China will probably soon start to devolve into the US, but without a lot of freedom and privacy rights US citizens have.
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
I’m wondering if a reinterpretation of that national security article in their constitution could weaken its use to control all facets of life
The rest of the constitution is at parity with western ideals but its been undermined by that one clause, all nominally communist countries fall into the same dilemma
That, and I realize that a single party system is effectively a partyless system, rule of law would therefore be going through motions, but I like the direction things are currently going there
Leonard_of_Q 12 hours ago [-]
"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.
Leonard_of_Q 11 hours ago [-]
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.
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
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
6510 11 hours ago [-]
Someone with an old and a new car drove the old one into a canal. The doors didn't open because the water was up to the window. He cranked open the window to let the water in, eventually the door opened. He stayed perfectly calm. The funny part was that he didn't know what would have happened if he took the other car. That thought scared him more than the dive and continued to bother him for years.
globular-toast 12 hours ago [-]
Article shows a picture of and then starts talking about exterior door handles, but then:
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
bpodgursky 13 hours ago [-]
From a more accessible article:
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
nubinetwork 13 hours ago [-]
> that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision
I wonder how long until people figure out that tapping the bumper of a parked tesla opens all the windows, letting people either steal the infotainment screen, or the whole car...
left-struck 13 hours ago [-]
To detect impacts cars typically use sensors that require the entire car to experience significant acceleration, tapping the car definitely won’t do it.
esperent 13 hours ago [-]
What about body slamming it?
left-struck 12 hours ago [-]
No, you’d need to have the centre of the car exceed well beyond 9.8m/s^2 for a few milliseconds for airbags. I don’t know the exact figures but basically you’d need to smash another car into the car, at which point it would be easier to just break the window.
Of course they could make the window impact detection thing as sensitive as they want, but why?
Also many cars detect occupancy and selectively trigger airbags, so depending on what the regulations are exactly, if none of the seats detect anyone is inside the car, and the car is turned off, and the car is not moving, probably safe to keep the window closed.
Like this is already a potential problem we had, if someone could write your car off by simply kicking it, or body slamming it, causing the airbags to deploy (which is often a write off)… but it’s not a real problem because the threshold for deployment is high enough that it would require a crash that would probably ruin the car anyway.
bpodgursky 13 hours ago [-]
Even in the US it's nearly impossible to steal a Tesla. In China with their omnipresent surveillance it would be suicidal to try.
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Western societies are relatively high-crime for their development. My uncle just leaves his motor-scooter's key in his helmet and leaves the helmet on the vehicle. Millions of people live in Taipei. "I wonder how long it will take people to look in helmets and steal what's there". Turns out pretty long. Been over a decade now.
You're obviously right, Ben, and GP is out of touch. Like a Chinese guy saying, "I wonder how long before the Americans figure out their LLMs don't hide the Kent State shootings". That kind of thing is not a problem here.
bdangubic 13 hours ago [-]
it would be easier to climb mount everest barefoot than steal a Tesla in China
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Before I bought a car, these articles would come out every now and then "X recalls 500 million cars over blinking light on dash" and I'd think that was crazy. "They just refund the owners of the car? But what if they don't want to give them up". Then I bought one and it turns out everyone gets these recalls all the time. I'm sitting at my desk and there's a Subaru Emissions Recall WRA-26 right now next to me. And the Tesla recalls are just an OTA update?
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
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.
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.
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
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
You can't call any change "dismantling Chesterton's fence" - "Windows made the corners of the windows round, users hated it, obvious example of Chesterton's fence"
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.
All of this leads to an increase in “failures” in seperate steps of the manufacturing pipeline, assembly of dashboard, assembly of car, after the car is completed, after it is shipped to dealer, and after the new owner picks it up, during the lifetime of the car. Each of those moments occurs a significantly increased cost of replacing the button.
By simply removing buttons and knobs, this source of failure rate goes down and it appears cheaper. It is also the reason behind going from 4 buttons for the windows to 3 (left, right, and a toggle for front/rear)
According to him the monetary savings were significant enough to proceed with it. Personally, I wish they wouldn’t. But I believed the numbers.
A button for a car is designed and tested to last 10 years. Software on the other hand...
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
Fully agree
In fact they are hated so much people are deliberately buying older less safe cars instead.
That's what car manufacturers make you think. Who do you think it (paid) lobby for those features to be mandatory in new cars ?
There are bigger losers in car aerodynamics. The worse one is the frontal section, that current models seem to ignore, making bigger and bigger cars almost for the sake of it. Then they have forgotten parts like the underside, that could be covered with something light and smooth for decent gains, but are instead an aerodynamic nightmare because nobody is looking there.
There are cars with Cd around 0.2 (Xiaomi SU7, Lucid Air, Tesla S, Hyundai Ioniq...). The Mercedes A-Class Saloon since 2018 and BMW 5 have a Cd of 0.22, and they look like normal cars, with normal door handles and normal mirrors, but carefully designs of the underside, air around the wheels and rear drag reduction. The Mercedes include active aero around the engine, shutting the grill when cooling is not needed. But they keep selling SUVS with Cd over 0.35, up to 0.45 with flushed door handles "for the aero". Please.
very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny.
Perhaps because they're too small and the LEDs are not diffused enough.
Red means Rear, and white means front, which is why reversing lights are white and front turn signals are (should be) yellow.
And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
I’d say a first gen Leaf looked fairly typical of small Nissan cars from that era, tbh; all their small cars looked a bit like that. And a Zoe looked pretty much the same as a Clio of like era. Interestingly, the Renault 5, their new electric car in the size category, is self-consciously weird-looking (you can get it in bright green as a standard option!), and seems to be doing very well.
Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
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.
Still a good 42 million or so short of, say, a Toyota Corolla.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
[1] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/03/WS69818ec6a310d...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...
Instead, as I get older all I can think of is how horrible it would be to possesses some vague idea of escape but have to deal with a smoke or rising water while trying to discern the inobvious escape route to save you from the fancy grave you've dug for yourself.
Horror is a much less satisfying than schadenfreude.
Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
1. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.
2. Press the red tab to remove the access door.
3. Pull the mechanical release cable forward."
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...
carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle
This reads like satire.
> 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.
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...
I think Tesla looks for efficiencies wherever possible, and any alignment with aesthetic goals is an easy win.
Normal framed windows don't need any special handling of the windows when you open the door.
2nd/3rd/4th-gen F-bodies (Camaro/Firebird), for example: All of these cars had frameless windows. None of them did an automatic drop. (And a lot of these cars didn't come with power windows to begin with.)
I'm not familiar with those other cars, but maybe they're only sealing from the inside of the window?
So it's both the frameless aspect and the desire to have a "luxury" car.
There's also the classic glitch where your window doesn't go back up automatically, so you have to remember to press the window up button after or it'll go slightly down every time you get in. More of a 2000s thing hopefully not present in Teslas.
The old-school pure mechanical lock can be converted into an electric one with just the addition of a solenoid to unlock and lock it.
They can be just as flush and aerodynamic without introducing more complexity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415744
I've dealt with the complexities of automotive mechanisms long enough to see many cases where it seems someone just wanted to make something extra fancy rather than solve the fundamentally simple problem. German designs were notoriously one of the worst in this regard, but others are catching up.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
This sounds like a lot of overengineering - you need reliable low latency eye movement detection and a motor mechanism that can react that fast but withstand the air forces at highway speeds. Just to deliver a worse UI - imagine the complaints about how Tesla doesn't detect my eyes unless I look just right. But 6% fuel usage sounds like an enormous saving that would be worth some of your complexity budget.
But not sure that would be legal.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a28120245/car-... (2019)
I want better cars. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want less-electronic cars.
I'm reminded of how far we've come every time I go out on a cold wintry morning and the electric starter cranks the electronically fuel-injected engine for me, and the whole thing comes to life with utterly-perfect reliability.
I can then select a gear and proceed. No particular warm-up period is required; it's running smoothly straight-away. The electronically-controlled transmission shifts smoothly. The heated seats quickly warm my tuches while the automatic climate control seeks to warm the cabin and maintain a stable temperature without any interaction on my part.
No messing with an ignition retard, or a manual choke. No need to prime the engine by giving it a few turns with the ignition switched off. There's no hand crank with which to break a jaw[1].
It's pretty great, I think.
But there's still plenty of examples remaining of the 15 million Model Ts that Ford built, for those who really seek to limit the electronics to almost-nothing. (And steam cars, too! We must not forget the simplicity of the Carnot cycle, nor of the carbide lamp!)
[1]: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/the-accident-that-started-i...
If you watch old American sitcoms one of the guys, typically a dad, will always be fiddling with his car and tune and maintain it. That was a stereotype for a reason.
The designs have come under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
If the power fails, how will the windows open?
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
The door handles on my Y are blacked out and actually hard to find at night sometimes.
I don’t get Elons obsession with the black out look.
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.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- non-round steering thing (model s/x yoke, cybertruck squircle)
- removing stalks
- touch-sensitive buttons on steering wheel
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
There are plenty of things they get right.
The original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
The original model s interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
the older UIs were easier to use (in a moving car). more old-school looking, but more contrast and bigger targets.
It is also just as hard to cancel the turn signal/lane change that FSD is attempting that you want to veto.
I have no idea what people behind you are thinking (or acting on while all this struggle is going on)
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
Covered in this Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ
It's very different from traditional wiper controls in older cars, where the slider/wheel has a hard stop at min and max, and you can pick the right setting entirely by feel.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61xdWAXl2ML.jpg
...no electricity required to operate those.
door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
Except for those which still have chromed handles, I think this is the case for the majority of cars. It's not the colour that's the problem.
I wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory, or just try and place a tariff on normal doors.
As long as they’re steam-powered.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
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.
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
The issue now is that the CCP is now a millionaire club, which means China will probably soon start to devolve into the US, but without a lot of freedom and privacy rights US citizens have.
The rest of the constitution is at parity with western ideals but its been undermined by that one clause, all nominally communist countries fall into the same dilemma
That, and I realize that a single party system is effectively a partyless system, rule of law would therefore be going through motions, but I like the direction things are currently going there
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.
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
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
I wonder how long until people figure out that tapping the bumper of a parked tesla opens all the windows, letting people either steal the infotainment screen, or the whole car...
Also many cars detect occupancy and selectively trigger airbags, so depending on what the regulations are exactly, if none of the seats detect anyone is inside the car, and the car is turned off, and the car is not moving, probably safe to keep the window closed.
Like this is already a potential problem we had, if someone could write your car off by simply kicking it, or body slamming it, causing the airbags to deploy (which is often a write off)… but it’s not a real problem because the threshold for deployment is high enough that it would require a crash that would probably ruin the car anyway.
You're obviously right, Ben, and GP is out of touch. Like a Chinese guy saying, "I wonder how long before the Americans figure out their LLMs don't hide the Kent State shootings". That kind of thing is not a problem here.
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
I don't think that's the case here.