Hacker News Reader

Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

one tangentially related extremely irritating “feature” of Teslas is automatic updates, which not only disable the car while they’re going on, but often rearrange the UI so you have to figure out where the buttons are all over again. it’s a flat out disgrace. you get into your extremely expensive car, ready to go, but no the car isn’t available because some dev team somewhere a few thousand miles away decided to push an almost certainly unnecessary change to YOUR possession. I don’t like this concept on mobile devices and PCs, but I despise it for cars

View on HN

Agree that they change buttons and UI too often, this should be a more gradual process, or they should offer a choice to move to new UI.

They do ask if you want to update now or wait + tell you that the car won’t be available for x amount of minutes.

Why even gradual?

It's a very software idea to ship things unfinished and fix them later. At best it's annoying, in a car it's dangerous.

I expect when I buy a car that the manufacturers have spent time thinking about the layout, and they've got it the best they can, ironed out the bugs etc. I don't want to come in in the middle of an iterative process. I don't want buttons moving, I don't want 'improvements', I want to buy an actual functioning car from day one. One that the manufacturer is happy to stand by from day one, and they don't feel entitled to 'improve'.

And updates could totally be cancellable... Nearly every device has an "A" and "B" firmware stored, and therefore if you need to drive away during an update they could just stop the update and reboot every device back to the old firmware that's already stored and you'd be good to drive in 10 seconds.

Honestly, then why buy it? This has been the case for years (a decade?).

Does the average person who has never owned a Tesla know the updates work that way? And how many of the Tesla owners still dislike it, but have decided that the risk (which could have been prevented by Tesla) is worth the reward?

“Average persons” don’t but $50-100k cars. Or new technology like Tesla was for many years.

I agree with the other commenter, as Teslas and EVs are still "crossing the chasm" and are primarily purchased by enthusiasts.

Also, who is buying such expensive cars without any idea how they operate?

in any other industry you could say that and I’d agree with you, but cars are an exception. cars are first and foremost a status symbol, and, compounding, they historically didn’t have computers inside them. plenty, plenty of rich humans will be buying teslas as either a status symbol or simply the next cool thing to own without any thought for the specifics of the management of updates of the OS

In what model of Tesla are the updates automatic? I've always been prompted whether I want to install an update, or schedule it to be installed at some early hour in the morning. I'm also told about how long the update will take (generally 25 mins).

But I agree about the horribleness of the UI changes - I still hate whatever the UI update was that went out like a year ago and haven't figured out why they actually did it.

Wow, that must be annoying. Imagine you're almost late to go somewhere, or you have an actual medical emergency and the car says nope, now I'm updating...

Seriously I would probably remove the antenna or the sim card for the car's data connection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com