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Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

> * They're taking a risk with the interior of the car, with the lack of gauge cluster and spartan design. To me this looks like what happened when the software industry switched from "as many UI buttons and features as possible" in the '90s to the simplified, "overall user experience" focus we see in modern software. And I want to support that.

I guess this is fine if you live in California, but a car that I can't operate while wearing heavy mittens is literally unusable to me for nearly half the year.

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The car doesn't require touching the screen to operate it.

The nav / media controls do, but those can be voice operated, too. And a lot of the media controls work from the steering wheel knobs (play pause skip back etc.), also.

EDIT: And all Teslas can have their climate control turned on remotely by the app / API, and can be safely warmed up even in an enclosed space (since there are no fumes).

I don't really consider requiring a touchscreen (be it in car, or on phone) for climate controls to be an acceptable replacement for a couple simple mechanical buttons and knobs. In the best case, it's less convenient, and it adds many additional failure cases.

The climate system has fewer moving parts than a typical climate control system, so if anything, it is removing failure cases. It is unique—there are videos on YouTube that describe how it works if you’re doubtful.

In practice, I rarely adjust the climate setting after setting it to the temperature / orientation I want, but I suppose everyone is different.

To me it feels a lot like when many used to claim they could never get an iPhone because they prefer a physical keyboard. But I suppose we’ll see how the industry responds over the next few years.

Yeah, it removes the mechanical failure cases, but I've never had that happen with any of my vehicles. OTOH, I'm pretty regularly in situations where I'm parked in cold temperatures without having cell coverage in a warm location where I can wait for the car to warm up. (And normally, I don't need to "wait" for the car to warm up, I turn car on, set blower to max defrost, clear snow/ice from windshield, and go. Once/if the windshield is clear, I turn blower down for some quiet, and turn off compressor to save on fuel/range, as appropriate.)

Hooking that all up to voice operation sounds fine though (though preferably customizable, so I could have a single command to say, turn on seat warmers, turn blower to max, set output to windshield) - I never use voice operation for my phone because it's obnoxious to so in public, but that's not a problem if I'm in my car.

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