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> The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted

I cannot agree more. A lot of safety in driving comes from muscle memory and doing without needing to look so that focus is on the road.

No wonder Tesla fans are fan of self driving and afraid of human driving, the effing Teslas seem like a usability nightmare.

puts on tin foil hat

This might be a "feature": make cars so confusing to manually drive that humans become worse at driving, so that Tesla doesn't need to improve its driving software.

I don't actually believe this, of course, but it seems we're headed in that trajectory.

Tesla drivers have called this a feature not a bug for years and bragged that their vehicles can update over the air like a smartphone… while the physical knobs on my Subaru will only ever do what they were designed to do when I bought it.

Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.

I truly believe that UI in software must be done by an external consultant, on a one-time contract basis. Don't hire them full-time, they will fuck it up eventually. It is extremely limiting for a designer to work on the same app, same design every day. They will always try to bring in a new UI every couple years, just to maintain their own sanity. But it's not good for the product and its users. So let designers work on various different products.

> just to maintain their own sanity

paycheck, see my other comment [0] for an example

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30145176

>I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up,

How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.

I would say that most of the customers that buy Tesla more or less expect the UI to change with time. That's why they bought the car in the first place. - I know I do, love the fact that the car still feels alive and evolving after I bought it.

Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.

> The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.

Why? Just don't buy a Tesla or other cars that do this.

You don't have to outlaw everything you don't like, you can just choose not to patronize the people who do this. Vote with your wallet!

This works well until your last resort brand just follows the trend.

For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari. That's what it would mean to "vote with your wallet".

> This works well until your last resort brand just follows the trend.

For the most part, competition works well. If there are enough people who care about this issue, it will be worth it for a manufacturer to not follow the trend, to get those extra consumers.

If almost everyone else prefers this way, well, yeah, you're out of luck. But unfortunately, the world doesn't owe you anything. If you're the only one who cares about this, that's just unfortunate.

> For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari

General issues aside, I'm surprised you think this. Driving stick has been around for dozens of years despite the invention of automatic transition. And in many countries in Europe, it's actually much more common.

> competition works well

It works with a healthy support by regulators. I'd back that claim with the amount of cartel like behavior that gets disclosed every so often, and how hard the different nations are trying to come with solutions to the MS/Meta/Google/Amazon/Apple problems.

"Vote with your wallet" is the part that happens after the competition is alive and kicking, up to that point a lot needs to be done to have competition in the first place.

> driving stick

Auto transmission was seen as a luxury for a long time and a lot of EU country favor frugality. Now that hybrids and full EVs are seen as more eco-friendly the change will get a lot faster I think.

Stick shifts will probably stay the norm for many decades more in rural Aftica for instance, but otherwise I don't think it's long for the more developped world.

> You don't have to outlaw everything you don't like, you can just choose not to patronize the people who do this. Vote with your wallet!

How does that help when a Tesla wrecks my car because they were looking for the defogging button instead of looking at the road?

It doesn't, and that's a valid concern. But that has nothing to do with what I was talking about - banning automatic software updates. A manufacturer could just as easily make a terrible UI right from the start, no update required, and cause a crash that way.

What would help your concern out are safety standards. I have no idea what safety standards exist for car UIs, but I imagine some exist, and that updates have to comply with them.

> What would help your concern out are safety standards. I have no idea what safety standards exist for car UIs, but I imagine some exist, and that updates have to comply with them.

Not an expert at all but seeing what Tesla achieved so far, I would guess that there is at least some sort of grey area. I always thought for example that wipers control lever would be a mandatory thing but heck, looks like it is not. The same for the SOS button in a clearly visible and accessible place: I have driven a Tesla M3 just once and I came out from there thinking it was not present at all (turns out it's on the roof, at the center).

Because it's not necessarily obvious when you buy one that the "updates" will involve majorly moving the UI around rather than things like bug fixes.

Do they warn buyers ahead of time that it's going to happen?

Technically, I assume their TOS or equivalent made it clear that they can do this. If not, consumers can always sue, I imagine.

> Technically, I assume their TOS or equivalent made it clear that they can do this.

Yeah, it'll be written in obscure legalese and say something like 'we will ship updates to improve the driving experience' not 'one day you might be unable to work out how to demist your windscreen while driving at motorway speeds'

> If not, consumers can always sue, I imagine.

You say that like it's a trivial endeavour! And how can one 'vote with their wallet' when they've already bought the car? A car is, for most people, a multi-year, extremely expensive investment; voting with your wallet is useful advice when your local coffee shop changes their recipe.

I mean, there are "solutions" for this, e.g. brand. You vote with your wallet next time, by not buying from them again. If enough consumers are bothered by this, they will change, or else another manufacturer will try to capture that market.

I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).

> I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).

Perhaps I missed another part of the discussion - automatic updates are not universally good or bad; the problem is they are not always deployed in a way that benefits the user. I disagree that consumers massively prefer it when the item they purchased suddenly changes, particularly the UI - people build muscle memory when they use an interface, and significant changes undermine that, wasting time and effort and, in the case of a car, increasing personal risk. Think about the consternation caused by the introduction of the ribbon bar in MS Office (not an auto-update per se, but as good as that for many people for whom upgrades were mandated).

Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way, or solve underlying performance or security problems without substantially changing the product, are obviously usually a good thing, but that's not what this Tesla update is about.

> Think about the consternation caused by the introduction of the ribbon bar in MS Office (not an auto-update per se, but as good as that for many people for whom upgrades were mandated).

I mean, if that's what we're talking about, you're literally arguing against any change ever.

> Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way,

I'm not sure what you mean by sympathetic, but most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line. Rarely are they deploying a change to actively make something worse.

> I mean, if that's what we're talking about, you're literally arguing against any change ever.

I'm arguing against change for its own sake.

(edit: to be clear, the point about the Office ribbon was a counter to your claim that 'consumers in general massively prefer [auto updates]' when those updates make significant UI changes)

>...most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line

...and you can't see how those two goals can be misaligned? Stuffing the HN front page with ads would increase YCombinator's bottom line but it certainly would not make HN better for the user.

> The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.

Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.