A passenger playing a game on the screen which are also where your only instruments are located seems like an unnecessary added distraction so I’d say they made the right call.
I think this is the most important fact to note here. If the primary instruments were on a separate display, this would not have been as severe of a concern.
It's another reason why having a single touchscreen as the interface of a car is a horrible idea.
I've seen a lot of newer cars where the instruments are all in the center instead of immediately behind the wheel, and I always thought that design was less usable and more distracting --- a glance downwards is easier than one sideways and down.
Fast forward a few years and the Raspberry Pi was released. My first RPi project was to built a new in car entertainment system. I used Go v1.0 (at that time even methods weren’t supported) and built a media player with text to speech. The entertainment system had 6 buttons:
1. Previous artist 2. Previous album 3. Previous song / replay song 4. Skip song 5. Skip album 6. Skip artist
The media centre would then use text to speech to read the artist, album and song details out over the speakers before playing the tracks.
This system was designed so I never needed to take my eyes off the road and it worked amazingly.
Unfortunately I’m not an electrical engineer so the device was ugly and started to fall apart quite quickly. I think it only lasted < 1 year. But I learned a lot from that experiment: there is a lot of missed opportunities for innovation in the car entertainment domain.
I'm still annoyed by this when texting while driving and having to look at the screen.
Downvote all you like, your moral judgement is not gonna change what I do.
I loved the T9 keyboard in my right hand and steering wheel in the left. I'm good at steering with my left knee (unless we're talking slow speeds and bendy road) so taking my hands off is not an issue - the issue is taking my eyes off the road, constantly switching between road/phone/road/phone, which is annoying as fuck.
>I think this is the most important fact to note here.
I think the fact that you are encouraging the "driver" to actively be distracted and not paying attention is a much larger issue than if the speedometer is visible or not. Nobody pays attention to the RPM gauge in automatics. Maybe they look at a fuel gauge, maybe. For a Tesla, the fuel gauge is the battery gauge, so no need for that one either.
Ensuring the "driver" is not paying attention though, that's never a good idea.
Makes me think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TCeR_SWZM0, just adjust Chandler's line to "0-60 in 3 seconds, top speed of 160mph, 500 mile range!"
If you are a customer of a company, you're paying for what that company thinks is best for you. Whether they're right or not is another thing entirely.
In this case, Tesla decided that what's best for you is a car with a touch screen with no tactile feedback that serves as the car's only interface for everything: current speed, tire pressure, potential collision warnings, HVAC status and controls, an app that makes fart sounds, and so on. The list of what it's used for probably has over 100 possible items, with one of those items being "play games."
All of those features, including that last one, are features Tesla decided are best for its customers.
Giving their customers a choice to play games or not while driving wouldn't even be up for debate if they never shipped software with games in the first place.
Increasing a vehicle's safety isn't disrespectful and doesn't undermine responsible adult behavior. Adding features that invite drivers to be unsafe seems far more disrespectful. No one dies because their passengers can't play video games while driving on a vehicle's only interface.
I think that "respecting responsible adults" is also just silly. Why make laws that punish drivers for texting and driving? Can't we just allow people to be responsible? History has made it crystal clear that when given the chance, people will choose to not be responsible often enough to be disastrous.