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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

Just bought a Tesla so kind of new to the whole touchscreen thing. The big thing I noticed is the bulk of what you need to use while driving is either on the steering column or exceedingly easy to get to on the touch screen. Wipers, cruise settings, basic music controls, are all right there. Climate control is right on the bottom and easily adjustable.

The thing which does bother me is it can be a rabbit-hole getting at some of the other features. If you want to enable seat heating on the back seats? It’s about 3 clicks in which is bad.

Since the car has pretty damned good drivers assist technology it’s very easy to let the computer do the driving while you poke at the screen. Which... is not good.

I love the autopilot. But it is very easy to lean on when you shouldn’t.

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The single worst feature with Tesla is it takes at least two taps to turn on wipers. During that time, it has just started raining, which is a dangerous time to take your eyes off the road. And you must take your eyes off the road because the taps are in two different locations on the screen, and there is an animation involved, and after that animation you must decide which speed setting to tap on. All this time your eyes are not on the road. There is an Auto setting there, but Tesla's rain-sensing tech is unusably bad. I never use Auto. All my other luxury cars with rain-sensing I've always used Auto, but not Tesla.

There are other ways to trigger the wipers:

- Half-press the button on the left stalk to trigger the wipers once. Fully press it to do wipers with fluid.

- Press the voice command button (right scroll button on the steering wheel) and say "turn on wipers" or "increase/decrease wiper speed".

It's not as nice as physical controls, but it's much safer than futzing with a touch screen while driving.

> - Press the voice command button

Star Trek was an outstanding achievement on so many levels and for so many decades. However it did burden us with the idea that voice controlled computers would be a good idea. They're not and for many non-obvious and non-trivial reasons. But the idea is pernicious and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

In fact I bet there's a very similar essay like this one about voice control. Several, posted every few months for the last two decades.

/rant

Voice interfaces are fantastic in specific realms. Controlling complicated things when you don't have the bandwidth to control it with your hands is ideal. Also text messaging and dictation.

Outside specific realms, they are far less useful.

I would argue that all falls off the cliff in terms of usability when we consider the rest of the world in terms of multiple languages, accents, creoles, and dialects.

Seen this skit? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAu-DDlINs

So, maybe voice control is great for local work, but as soon as we consider the rest of the world, IMHO, its profitability and usefulness nosedives.

Every interface is going to have limits and constraints.

Visual interfaces are great for people who have excellent vision and precision control. A friend of mine had a weird stroke which affected his cognitive functions and he lost the ability to read. He could see fine, speak reasonably well, had cognitive abilities... he just couldn't read. He ended up using voice controls and speech for everything on his computer.

If we let the things which affect individuals limit what interfaces we use, we'd quickly end up with nothing.

Ideally, we have 2 or more ways of doing anything to try and deal with the limits of individuals and the software/ hardware we interface with. Having both audible controls and visual controls as they do on the Tesla is ideal.

Your argument is flawed. The density of appreciable variations in speech patterns in English speaking countries is far greater than the differences in abilities to navigate visual interfaces in the same population.

Doesn't hitting the button on the end of the left stalk turn on the wipers for you for a short period? Should cover any dangerous just started raining scenario. Maybe it's gotten better over time but the auto setting seems to work fine for me

Just tap the end of the stalk. Or auto works well. I’ve never manually adjusted them and it’s rained damned near every time I’ve driven it (Oregon, February).

Sounds like how happy people are with the auto setting varies greatly.

> If you want to enable seat heating on the back seats? It’s about 3 clicks in which is bad.

IIRC, you can use voice commands for that particular case. "Turn on the right rear seat heater." There's definitely other use cases that still aren't covered by voice commands, at least the last time I tried. I can't exactly recall what those cases are, though. I should check the latest user manual, in case there's an exhaustive list of all supported voice commands...

I'm sorry, but why doesn't the person in the right rear seat have a button to control their own seat heater, without interrupting whatever conversation is going on? Can they at least operate their own window still?

As for "why," your guess is as good as mine. The entire design of the Model 3 eschews buttons in favor of the screen interface, so this likely is another example of that. In practice, I usually ask passengers before we start driving if they'd like their seat heated, if it's cold enough outside that it's a reasonable question to ask.

Window controls do remain physical switches, in the standard configuration (e.g., the driver can control all four windows, and each passenger window has a nearby switch as well.)

Voice controls do a help a lot in many usecases, but are still slower than a physical button in many others.

Most of the time “Slow” isn’t the problem, the important/ urgent controls are on the stalk.

Yea that's what I said - you need to have important/urgent controls physically on the stalk because it's faster than voice commands. What am I not getting? Slow is clearly the problem - that's why they're on the stalk.

I’ll have to try the voice controls more, that would be perfect. It’s not entirely intuitive to talk to your car, but maybe if I do it for a while it’ll work.

The comment just above yours tells less rosy story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26280823

Shrug

I’ve owned the car for 2 weeks and it’s rained nearly every day. Turning the wipers on has been a non-issue. If they don’t automatically turn on, tap the stalk (not unlike on any other car) and they are on for 4-5 seconds and the control is up on your screen. Tap the speed you want. But auto works so well its something that has never bothered me.

Why this guy hit a tree or whatever is beyond me, I’m not a Tesla expert by any means, but it seems to me like tapping the stalk or saying “Wiper on” doesn’t require looking away from the window..

The new Model S has no more stalks for turn signals and wipers and shifting. So at least some of that is being moved to the touch screen, or touch buttons on the wheel.

There are buttons on the yoke for turn signals, wipers, high beam, horn?, and their voice control. These are in addition to the dial controls on the existing cars. So seems like nothing is being offloaded to the touch screen.

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/tesla-model-s-redesign-look-p...

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