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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

> But ("FSD" excepted) they spend more of their attention on what really matters: treating their vehicle as a modern electronic device.

Yet even Tesla does a rather bad job at this — they consider it to be a modern electronic device and ignore the wheels. OTA updates regularly change the UI in a way that is difficult and dangerous to learn when the wheels are spinning. Even when familiar with it, the very basics are hidden in menus and cannot be used without looking away from the road for longer than is safe.

Car companies: make your car software simple, reliable, and boring. You may well need to spend serious money doing this, but the goal should not be for it to be fancy or to feel extremely modern.

(With the latest update, turning off the seat heater is buried in a menu. I still haven’t figured out how to efficiently dismiss overlay apps that are covering the map. It used to be fairly obvious.)

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It is well worth any Tesla driver's time to spend two minutes reading the list of voice commands. Once you have a grip on the vocabulary and structure you can just tell the car to do what you want for dozens of common tasks. (Hint: It's a "seat warmer", not a "butt heater".)

That's the good news, the bad news is that I still haven't figure out how to turn off the stupid cowbell when I accidentally bonk the right lever too many times. If I die in a car accident, 50-50 chance it will be because I was trying to stop the stupid cow bell. I wonder how often they run a query on post accident telemetry to see if the cowbell was on.

> (Hint: It's a "seat warmer", not a "butt heater".)

File a bug report. Clearly there is insufficient personalization.

> It's a "seat warmer", not a "butt heater".

“Heat my ass” works fine for me.

Do Teslas seriously accept that? I guess that’s what being moved to Texas gets you.

I didn’t know it was a requirement to move to Texas to understand the English language.

TI uses Texas English in its software <https://books.google.com/books?id=e-gI2W-3JwkC&pg=PA49#v=one...>.

"Open the butt hole" works as well. Well, it doesn't turn on the seat heater, but it does open the charging port.

The idea that instead of turning a tactile dial I need to look away from the road to adjust temperature or volume if music, or I need to speak, is unacceptable to me. I consider ut terrible in terms of safety and UI.

My Tesla has two dials, one on each side of the steering wheel which allows for control of volume and temperature. There is never a need to look at the center console

> or I need to speak, is unacceptable to me. I consider ut terrible in terms of safety and UI

Speaking is terrible for safety now?

Noisy kids in the back.

People with speech problems.

Accent issues.

Driver gets annoyed, curses and looks at the dashboard touchscreen at the wrong moment....

In addition to the sibling coment, I also spend much more time distracted and listening to the response from the car to make sure it understood me that I would spend just turning a dial/pressing the button.

And I still have to glance at the screen to see that it did what I told it to do. Especially in the case of quite frequent failures to understand me.

“You need more cowbell. You gotta have more cowbell.”

That’s hilarious. I’ve never accidentally triggered it. But my son seemingly never gets tired of getting into the car early and turning on “fart on turn signal”.

Anything that gets him to finish getting ready and get happily settled in the car is a huge win in my book.

> It is well worth any Tesla driver's time to spend two minutes reading the list of voice commands.

It's not worth it. Not in any car. Voice commands are not a justification for shitty UX. Voice commands are not always applicable.

> Once you have a grip on the vocabulary

Why can't you see a problem with this? "Instead of using proper UX in the car, be a good trained monkey and learn these incantations that may or may not work"

> simple, reliable, and boring

Please. Not just car makers, but all important software functions

You can put the seat heater back on the main screen in the latest update. Drag and drop it onto to the app bar.

> regularly change the UI in a way that is difficult and dangerous to learn when the wheels are spinning

This is also a reason why knobs are better. I can feel for knobs and operate them w/o looking.

They indeed are. One of the main reasons I paid good money for a Keychron Q6 keyboard was that it has a volume knob. So much better/faster than dealing with moving the mouse to volume icon and scrolling.

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