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Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

Every time I take someone for their first ride in the Model 3, it’s the AC controls which wow them the most. Living with it is different, but it’s a great selling feature of what you’re selling is “Why hasn’t anyone else done it that way? - this is the future”

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...and this is how we end up with people driving through fire trucks. I haven't sat in the 3, but I did drive Model S and also played with the e-Tron's controls while waiting for an oil change (which ids pretty much the only advantage of an electric car I could possibly think of). Controlsd in both are very "neat". As long as you are sitting on a showroom floor. The very thought of actually trying to live with either while driving makes me pine for my very first car, a rusted through Chevy Citation that I paid $300 for.

Just because it is a good selling point for a certain subset of population that likes new and shiny and does not mind mowing people over in the process does not make it a good thing.

Car controls are a good use case for voice control (as long as it's guaranteed to be processed locally and recordings are not being sent to the car company).

The Mercedes EQC has voice control, but they need to move to a different triggering phrase. They're using "Mercedes" currently and that has too many false positives, particularly when someone is trying to review the car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JTew1D5Tk8

I'm not sure, to be really useful in general case it would have to understand a good number of languages (what if you rent a car on vacation abroad and find that you can't control anything unless you learn the local language?), work in noisy conditions, understand accents, and apart from navigation entry (although that usually serves as an exercises in zen and meditation, as you're trying not to put your fist through the dashboard as it tries to navigate you anywhere except where you actually want to go) it is much faster to turn the knob than expressing what you need in spoken word... Makes for a nice marketing video though.

I’d prefer a physical knob too, but with adjusting temp controls, I don’t find myself fiddling with it while underway.

That's certainly a valid approach, but most people (me included) actually want to adjust the climate control while driving, for various reasons.

Really, once I was quite happy with a car that had roll-down windows and no a/c, but when we are talking about a premium-priced car in 2019 expectations are somewhat different.

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