Hacker News Reader

I don't own a Tesla, but here's my pet peeve as a passenger:

When the driver opens their door, the driver's seat starts moving backward.

If you are sitting behind the driver, and have longer-than-average legs, this means your legs are now getting actively crushed by a motor.

If it's your first time in a Tesla, you are probably now panicking trying to figure out how to open the damn door, which inexplicably operates differently than every other car door in existence.

Not a pleasant experience. I've now learned to quickly and loudly remind the driver not to exit until I do when in this situation.

Motorised seats moving automatically can be very dangerous.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-57908134

Every car I've owned in the last few years has a setting to move the seat when you open the door so it's easier to get out. This isn't Tesla specific.

Idk about Tesla but every car I’ve had with this feature allowed you to disable with a physical or software selector.

Not only is it not on by default in Teslas but it's actually quite a bit of work to setup.

Most cars it's just a toggle. In Teslas you have to setup a new profile and manually set the steering wheel and seat to the exit position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94l43ILKRsA

It’s called easy entry and it’s very easy to disable on a Tesla. Far easier than the cryptic menus that most carmakers love to hide settings under.

It... it can't detect a stall current?

The seats in my 6 year old winter beater BMW will stop moving if they encounter resistance.

It's a two-door car so the seats move often too to accommodate my dog traveling in the back seats, I'd consider it a basic safety feature.

Edit: Just tested it again, the moment it encounters resistance it reverses direction for a second then stops

The amount of force it took is fairly low too, yet I've never had this failsafe accidentally trigger.

You'd think this stuff is table stakes for a mechanically advantaged system that can move hundreds of pounds effortlessly.

The current to move the seat with someone sitting on it is likely not all that different from the stall current as it starts pushing into someone's knees, particularly given it's likely geared down a significant amount so it can move slowly.

The current to move your seat likely does not change much while you are in it, and the occupancy sensor could help account for that.

In the case of automatic car windows everything from ambient temps to battery voltage is used to detect if there's an obstacle present.

And I think what makes it kind of unacceptable is you can get off the shelf modules that integrate anti-pinch features:

https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/...

It wreaks of NIH syndrome or just trying to shave off some cost.

A quick search shows Teslas even have rear seat occupancy sensors, so that alone should disable the movement if there's a person detected in the back.

This can be disabled in the Driver Profile settings on all Teslas FYI.

This is a completely optional feature. In fact it's off by default, you have to opt into Easy Entry and set up the exactly where you want the seat to go to. Many cars have this feature and it's 100% on the driver to make sure you set the depth to a reasonable level and to make sure you're not putting someone 6'3 behind you in the passenger seat when you know you have this feature enabled.

I say- it’s like they hooked a computer to a car. At first I thought “oh man, look! They hooked a computer to a car! Think of all the cool things you can do!”

A few months later I had learned how to reboot the drivers side door latch because of a software failure, somewhere… and I thought “oh yeah, right. It’s like they hooked a computer to a car.”

> I really enjoy the feeling of driving it

I am curious how much Tesla fans are impressed by Tesla-specific qualities of their vehicles vs, say, the exhilaration of driving an electric car. For many, Tesla was the first EV they have ever driven. I can understand thinking that your car is superior after associating it with the EV experience. For what it's worth, I don't own a Tesla, but I do drive an EV and it is the best vehicle I've ever driven.

My current daily driver is a Model 3. I think Teslas are a great gateway to the world of electric vehicles because they get people interested in the concept and introduce them to how driving an EV can be. I don't plan on my next daily driver being a Tesla due to Tesla's QC and fit & finish issues, but I am absolutely looking at other EVs like the BMW i4, Polestar 2, and even the Toyota bZ4X/Subaru Solterra.

I’ve also seen lots of posts from people who’d never owned a new car before and so of course the Model 3 is amazing. It is a great car, but not without flaws.

> Being told the built in 3G modem will have to be scrapped and replaced at my expense

This is exactly why I don't like to buy devices that are coupled to unnecessary electronic components or batteries. For instance, a high-end speaker or headphone can last decades. Make it connected and battery powered, it'll be in a landfill within a couple of years. Environmental disasters in the making.

Sounds like BMW and Audi are disabling 3G too, and they have NO upgrade path for many cars.

https://www.audiusa.com/us/web/en/inside-audi/innovation/aud...

https://www.mybmwi3.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17401

Not limited to those brands either, but I suppose this impacts the user experience in a Tesla more where it heavily relies on a data connection.

I wonder if, just like there are portable FM transmitters that you can plug your iPod to and tune the car radio to, if there'll be portable 3G "base stations" that your car can connect to, and on the other side the base station would have a 4G/whatever antenna to talk to the infrastructure.

Transmitting in that band sounds like a good way to get your local RF authority coming round with the men in suits (for good reason).

It could maybe be done by replacing the antenna with some kind of direct output that emulated a 3G tower perhaps, big job though.

doors refusing to open, or more scary, opening while driving.

I guess that's what happens when you have an entirely "software defined" car --- software bugs, because they're more common than hardware ones, can cause far more problems. Do Teslas have the two-stage latch that I thought was a mandatory safety feature?

After sitting through hundreds of pre-flight briefings on planes, that explain how to exit in an emergency (and given some briefings myself), I'm surprised that Tesla does a sloppy job of showing people how to open the doors of their car, when it is on fire.

Spoiler alert: the normal door handles don't open the doors.

Plot twist: the back doors have a completely different (and concealed) opening mechanism than the front doors.

Surprise ending: you have to teach the backseat people how to unlatch their doors, after you just trial-and-errored your way out the front door(s).

> Worse battery life than expected, despite being a cautious driver who babies that battery pack.

Can you elaborate on this? To me, this is 90% of importance of owning an electric car. If the range is significantly worse than expected, then the customer is being taken advantage of, since that's where most of the manufacturing cost lies.

I don't know, but it seems like range estimates assume the best case. Things like driving style, climate control, local vs highway, wind, elevation changes, extra weight in the vehicle, the age of the battery, charging habits... These all can affect range, sometimes significantly.

Range anxiety is, in my opinion, the #1 issue with EVs right now. It will be helped by bigger batteries and more convenient charging.

For me the one killer feature of Tesla that isn’t brought up often enough is the UI display and that they actually keep the car updated and push out improvements. Similarly to how you see other manufacturers being able to assemble a better car (for now IMO), I trust Tesla on the software front because I’ll be damned if I’m buying a car with a crappy stock Android OS or similar until proven otherwise.

> people were idling with full batteries, blocking my use

How? If you’re at full and the Supercharger is at high capacity they start paying idle fees. I mean I guess someone can sit there for no reason but that’s a surprising story to me.

> How? If you’re at full and the Supercharger is at high capacity they start paying idle fees. I mean I guess someone can sit there for no reason but that’s a surprising story to me.

Because the idle fee is less than some parking garages cost? Or less than the convenience cost of moving the car?

the idle fee is $1/minute

That's a gamble/risk.

It's only 50c/minute if the supercharger is not fully occupied when you park.

If you're in some of the bigger cities, you can easily be approaching $30/hr for prime parking. And the idle fee is only for the period in excess of the active charging.

Tesla also just massively increased charging prices: https://carbuzz.com/news/tesla-supercharging-costs-have-quad...

If there were spaces open then GP wouldn't be having this problem. And $60/hour for parking would be outrageous anywhere in the country.

Yes. Also the fee kicks in after a 5 minute grace period. You’re looking at $55/hour easy. Wouldn’t be surprised to see escalating idle fees in the future ($1/minute the first 15, $2/minute next and so on)

and that they actually keep the car updated and push out improvements

...also known as fixes for stuff that should've been caught before you were sold it. The whole "update culture" that has permeated into everything is a horrible abomination. It justifies leaving flaws unfixed before release, under the premise that "we can always fix it later", and indeed that's what appears to have happened --- except, in a lot of cases, it never gets fixed.

But these aren’t just bug fixes which, unlike other manufacturers Tesla does fix over the air, they are new apps, games, and other features. I don’t expect a product to ship with every possible feature and never be updated. Do you not update your OS on your laptop?

I think this is a distinction between traditional software and safety critical software. The minimum viable quality is much lower for the former. The expectation in the latter is that it has gone through rigorous quality checks to reduce uncertainty. This is distinct from the ability to be updated, as both types should have the capacity for updates.