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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

That center console is designed around self driving. If they had planned on the car being human driver for its entire lifecycle from the beginning, they would have put in a regular instrument cluster or a heads up display.

There's no other reason to put all the vehicle information so far away from the center other than planning on eventually phasing out human drivers.

Edit: to be clear, I believe that Tesla was way too optimistic on when self driving would be available, and that over reliance on the center console is a bad design.

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It was designed to be hyped and cheap.

Do anyone actually believe that any car massproduced today will ever be self-driving? (Without major modification).

I'm not bashing on Model 3, I want one. But I'd rather see it didn't have any self-driving hardware in it at all. It just isn't ready for that.

I too believe it's quite not there and won't be in a while, but sneaking the hardware on the running fleet allows to gather load of real world training data.

Are you suggesting that Teslas send a live running stream of all their sensor data while autopilot is on, including video, back to HQ and that data is then analyzed to find errors so the software can be updated? Because that's what getting value from all those cars driving around would imply.

Nice straw-man. The cars might send summarized metrics, maybe even video snippets of extraordinary events. That provides plenty of value while being a far cry from live-streaming all sensor data including video.

I'd still be pissed if my car did that without explicit opt-in, but it doesn't have to be nearly as bad as you make it sound.

I'm not sure what metrics it would summarize though. As I understand it, self-driving systems mostly use supervised learning for feature detection. If someone isn't flagging anomalous events/detections when they happen, I'm not sure what having summarized data is buying you for the most part. (Sure if there's an actual accident. But that is hopefully a rare event.)

No I am not _suggesting_ it, I am stating it. doesn't have to be a live stream either they can collect the data during servicing.

They call it shadow mode and it has been running since at least generation 2 hardware in 2016

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/01/new-tesla-autopilot-sof...

Self driving will work well when everyone uses a self driving car. The reason why ant colonies do not have any traffic issues is that they work together. Now imagine if all cars on the street would communicate with each other, knowing where each wants to go and when. I think the problem with self driving is the people on behind the wheel rather than the technology

> There's no other reason to put all the vehicle information so far away from the center other than planning on eventually phasing out human drivers.

Might be a little early to do this in a production car now, given the tech is still 10+ years away.

Which is why I don’t like that center console at all

I think the design of the TESLA is just meant to make you think "OOOOH it's so high tech, like an IPAD!" It's not engineered around practical use.

Not sure if you’ve been driving one for some real time, it is very practical, I wouldn’t go back to any of my previous car.

Lack of tactile buttons was the defining reason I went with something else. Its unintuitive and unsafe, for an actual driver human.

There really isn't a whole lot different about the location of the vehicle information in the 3 than other cars. A standard navigation system in a vehicle is in the same place. Same with the stereo and climate control. And the speedometer is actually closer to the driver than in a Mini. It is an extremely efficient way of putting all the data in one location, and I actually like it.

I can think of some.

Okay, name some good reasons why the driver should have to look away from the road to see their speed.

You already do on a 'normal' speedometer. The glance slightly down, vs slightly down and slightly right are no different. A HUD would be cool, but that is not common yet on vehicles.

The current position of the speedometer is a poor excuse for moving it further from where the driver’s attention should be: the road. The distance and context of where the driver information is displayed matters a lot.

My car has its entertainment display roughly where the display is on a model 3. I can tell you that looking at the speedometer is much much quicker than glancing over to the screen in the middle. Probably by an order of magnitude or two. Even checking the clock takes a dangerous amount of time compared to checking my current speed, the difference is that drastic.

Further more, the instrument cluster is designed specifically to be easy to read and driver oriented, Porsche’s habit of putting the tachometer in the middle comes to mind. The center console has to support many more activities, including entertainment, and is thus much more distracting by design. This is true on my car, and the center screen is much simpler than a model 3.

HUDs aren’t exactly exotic supercar material these days. The Honda Accord Touring (MSRP $33k) has one standard. Now that’s the top level trim for that model, but it’s also in a much lower market segment than the model 3.

It's a shame that HUDs aren't yet more common as they deliver a real safety benefit. Some GM vehicles have had HUDs for over 20 years now and other manufacturers are starting to catch on.

"There's no other reason to put all the vehicle information so far away from the center other than planning on eventually phasing out human drivers."

It's to the right of your steering wheel so you can see it and touch it with your hand.

The screen should not be essential to use to drive safely. No brakes, speed changes, turn signaling, etc. These should be tactile, so you can use muscle memory and focus on the traffic. Obviously any screen can also be distracting, so it's important that it is designed well and thoroughly tested.

Paying attention to your speed, means not paying attention to the road. No matter where the dial is. Checking your speed is not something you need to do to drive safely. A responsible driver can pick a safe moment to glance.

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