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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.