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...
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
> 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.
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.
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.
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] with.
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...
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
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.
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
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
> 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.
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 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.
