Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Thing is, it‘s not just Tesla. Old economy carmakers are taking a page from the playbook by now to skip to the front line — and it‘s exactly the wrong one.

Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.

The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.

Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.

The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.

It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.

And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.

Wasn't the ID3 the car that VW pushed to the European market prematurely to avoid getting fined for not selling enough EVs, and which has been plagued with stupid bugs like this? https://insideevs.com/news/451790/vw-id3-multiple-bugs-mind-...

What is auto-hold? Cruise control?

When you come to a full stop, the car remains standing after letting off the brake. Also prevents rolling backwards on uphill start. That’s auto hold.

And OP is calling that critical? That is in no way a critical driving feature. People drove cars just fine for almost 100 years without it.

I've owned over 20 different vehicles and none of them have had auto hold. Just hold the brake on!

Put it in neutral or use a handbrake. You are blinding those behind you. Especially annoying in the rain.

Auto-hold is helpful with automatic gearbox. I find it helpful in a car but driving almost any pre-2010 manual car requires mastering the clutch and hill start.

I’d not call auto-hold critical, neither would I call the “defogger” critical for that matter.

The only two critical things in a car would be in my book: working brakes and tires in good condition. Everything else - meh. If it has a minimum 3 wheels and a steering wheel, I’d drive it.

> Put it in neutral

I think you mean park

Putting it in neutral and letting off the break on a hill would end very badly

If you drive automatic, yes, park is a better choice!

Blinding them with my brake lights?

This is a strange take on it, defogging is rather critical unless you have a rag handy, you have to see.

Wipers - rather critical. Engine - very critical. Seatbelts - rather critical of you value your life Fuel tank that holds fuel - very critical.

Auto hold is far from critical and I have only encountered it on large trucks back when I was a truck driver.

I get your point, but I skipped the details there in order to not water down my story there.

In my city, I‘m just using car sharing anymore and they just have ID.3s. Now, half of them come with the feature on, the others off.

If you let the brake go at the traffic lights because the exact same model of car you took on the other way had auto hold activated, but this one doesn’t and the car suddenly starts moving towards the car in front out of the blue, believe me it feels quite critical.

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