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Comment by a4isms | Hacker News Reader

I am not a trucker, so I can't comment on the veracity of TFA's claims. But this rant reminds me of many similar things I've read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.

A lot of the things that matter aren't necessarily obvious to the designer or engineer who knows little about the nuts and bolts of every field. The usual remedy is to either follow a design process that incorporates user viewpoints, or to hire people with direct experience in the field.

Take the "wiping the mirrors" complaint. One design makes it easy to lean out the window and wipe the mirror by hand. Another design might make the mirrors retractible.

If I read a complain that retracting the mirrors was unnecessary complexity, I would think "Hmm, maybe, but then again it's a tradeoff because the narrow cab is more aero and increases range." I'd have a feeling that the designers knew this was an important use case, but this person complaining doesn't like their solution.

But it worries me that a number of use cases that seem quite obviously common even to a layperson... Are neglected outright. I don't get the impression that Tesla knew about all this and decided not to do anything about them, I get the impression that this is a company who thinks "design" is all about styling, and not about usability.

Somebody resurrect Steve Jobs.

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To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function-

> Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets and it's pin in the arse. Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it. (10)

This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. And while in normal cars they move units because features over functionality is acceptable, trucks aren't status symbols first. They do, at the end of the day, have to do the job they're designed for efficiently, and things like this are clearly just "trendy" not practical.

Not just efficiently, safely.

Cars kill 1,500,000 people per year (= a 787 full of passangers every couple hours). What's the big deal about safety? /s

In the US that number is usually below 30,000, and majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

>majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

What's your source for this? Most sources I'm finding say alcohol-impaired driving is involved in about 30% of US traffic deaths.

I didn't make the claim but I thought to look it up. From NHTSA's report, if I'm reading it correctly, 2021 had 42,915 traffic fatalities, of which 8,174 were related to alcohol. I think those numbers are estimated. I'm not aware if there's better data.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

My information appears to be a few years out of date - probably from the last time I had this debate here on HN. 2021 does appear to have been a particularly bad year...

Regardless, the numbers are very good for the US, compared to the rest of the world. iihs.org[1] indicates the US is averaging somewhere around 1.5 fatalities per 100 Million miles traveled.

Compared to the rest of the world... that's pretty decent. Most of the places with significantly high fatality rates are not the places that will be purchasing self driving electric vehicles anytime soon...

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

You are deluding yourself if you think the US is doing well on traffic fatalities. From the graph at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest... we can see that US car deaths/capita have dropped slightly (10-20%?) since 1995. Meanwhile, in France where the rate about matched in 1995 they have dropped by 3x, leaving the US rate at about 2.5x the French rate.

But at least we aren’t French.

Recent US Traffic fatalities:

2021: 42,915

2020: 38,824

2019: 36,355

2018: 36,835

2017: 37,473

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... the last time the US had fewer than 30,000 traffic fatalities was 1945

Alcohol is 100% orthoganal.

If every single driver were legally drunk at all times, poorly designed vehicles will still result in more and worse accidents then well-designed.

If every driver were drunk at all times, roads would be designed with that in mind. It's much harder to dangerous things in a car with better designed roads

Sure, but irrellevant.

The point is that the design of the vehicle, or anything, needs to be as good as possible regardless of anything else, and there is no overriding excuse not to.

It's not like the poorly designed controls are necessary for some other even more important reason.

If both roads and drivers were all excellent, the vehicle still needs to be as excellent as possible. If all other factors are so good that only 10 people die each year from car accidents, there is still no excuse for making vehicles less safe and make that become 20.

Alcohol, lack of alcohol, good roads, bad roads, speed limits, none of that matters.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death of children under age 18. The number of deaths has risen in the US even as it's fallen across the rest of the world. I have begun to wonder if phones are just a convenient scapegoat, even if the criticism is in the right direction.

I wonder if it's a combination of phones, car centric city design with wide stroads, and automatic transmissions. The latter two make driving very easy and boring, with long waiting periods at red lights, high speed between the lights, and you can keep your phone in one hand all along because there's no stick to shift. No wonder people are not looking at the road.

Wide stroads definitely don't make driving easy and boring -- stroads make for high speeds and constant opportunities for crashes

They absolutely reduce the number of variables requiring attention, except the problem and the source of danger is they only appear to. They make the way appear to be free of things to look out for, and so appear to require less attention. That's the "boring".

In reality of course, all the same kinds of unexpected events can still happen at any time. A baby can suddenly appear anywhere along one of those roads. But that doesn't mean the road does not encourage inattention.

Is there any real data on this?

It comes up periodically here and it makes some logical sense but I don't know of any regulatory efforts or push back and I'm certain someone would blame in-car screens if it was the cause of more accidents. Screens seem to keep getting bigger and incorporating more function.

The other factor that counters it is there is also a lot more automation. I have a 10 year old car and the lights are automatic, the climate control is automatic (I think my wife or I adjust it about twice a year) Things like hazard lights are used fairly rarely and I've never needed muscle memory for it.

Several studies have shown touch screen are less safe. Having tactile controls doesn’t prevent automatic wipers etc, it’s a pure UI choice as your generally run everything through the CAN bus either way.

The initial idea for the CAN bus was simply to save copper by having fewer wires inside the car, it was only much later that touch screens leveraged that system. Basically if you want a truck release from a key fob and a trunk release from a door you might as well have both talk to a computer which only runs connection to the trunk. At which point you can redesign the controls more or less independently because they don’t change how everything is wired up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

Hazard lights need to be accessible with zero thought so you can warn people the instant a hazard arises, without taking your eyes off the road during hazardous conditions. My car has them on a big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and that's the way it should be.

The reason for the touchscreens is simple... compared to all the design and manufacturing needed for a good console of buttons, it's cheap just to slap in an identical tablet unit in every car model.

From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching.

This is an 80/20 problem if there ever was one, maybe even 95/5. In my car I really want the audio volume, heater fan speed, and wiper control to be tactile. But beyond that, I can probably deal, and even the heater fan speed might be negotiable.

In my 2003 car, the fan speed is buttons, oh well. In my 2013 it’s a paddle and I like it a lot better.

The newer car also has a knob for navigating the touchscreen, which isn’t perfect but is way better than touching a screen. The older car has no touchscreen and I like that better.

I didn’t rtfa because it’s a Twitter thread, and I didn’t see any comments on this in the 250 or so below. What else really needs to be a tactile control on a truck?

(Edited for clarification. I said “touch-based” when I should have used “tactile”.)

Could you please explain more about why you would prefer those specific controls to be touch based? Is it to have the possibility of finer-grained adjustment?

For me, wipers and audio volume are controls I want to be able to access immediately and without taking my eyes off the road, as they sometimes need to be used with urgency. (For example, turning down high volume to reduce distraction or activating wipers to clear a sudden downpour.)

It's so you don't have to look at them to use them while driving. Screens offer no tactile feedback that guides you, you have to look, which is dangerous.

Right, tactile was the word I should have used.

I think "touch based" is used here to mean knobs and buttons, not a touch screen.

I think his wording is off, and he means touch based as in tactile feedback. Not touch as in a touch screen.

or when another vechicle splashes you with a mass of mud or snow from a puddle or slush pile from plowing, or snow blows off the top of another vehicle etc, suddenly blind, at highway speeds with other vehicles, maybe with no barrier seperating the oncoming lanes, and your wipers require navigating menus on a tablet???

Even non-critical controls still need to be tactile, and not change from one day to the next, don't move location or change behavior from updates, because even if you don't need them in a hurry to avoid crashing, you still can't be hunting around in a multipurpose interface while driving just to change which direction the air vents point. Not a hyperbolic example, the Rivian actually has that.

Teslas have a button on the stalk to run the wipers, and you can use voice commands, is there a company that requires menu nav?

I get anxious even thinking about volume touch control. Got a higher pulse and everything :-D

Even Tesla knows this is a bad idea. They have a volume dial on the steering wheel, for your thumb.

I think tactile controls should be those things you would want to change while driving:

* Climate control heating/ac/defroster temp up/down fans higher/lower

* windows up/down

* signal left/right

* windshield wipers

* volume up/down

* audio basics (next track/previous track)

This allows you to keep your eyes on the road and rely on muscle memory to make the changes quickly. It's an important aspect of auto safety. Things like gps route selection, loading music into vehicle or configuring playlists can be done with touchscreens as these are complex tasks that are unlikely to be done while driving.

That’s a tidy list. Thanks. NO2 boost? ;)

Do trucks have additional tasks?

He's a basic switch and gauge cluster:

https://weaverauctions.com/assets/auction/105/34610-9.jpg

It seems they could have a set of programmable buttons with LED surface, as I've seen in computer keyboards for years. As sibling comment points out this is an 80/20 situation.

As much as I enjoyed my recent first time experience driving a Tesla, the screen controls frustrated me immensely. I guess they expect you will be talking to the car to make changes soon anyway, but we all know that doesn't work great either.

Edit: not to imply you were defending the choice. I can see why it is understandable when trying to iterate fast.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qj7GYU-wedo

My 2013 BMW has 8 physical buttons that can be easily programmed to do whatever I want. It's awesome. Unfortunately this feature has been deleted from the newest models...

To expand on that, it is because Tesla fundamentally approaches design like a tech company instead of a manufacturing company. For example, you see this with how they make changes to their cars. They don't have any real model year. Any car of one model can be slightly different from others of the same model from the same year. They could also be nearly identical to once produced two years earlier. It all depends. They just make changes to them whenever they feel like making a change.

The tablets are there for the same reason. Instead of spending years fine-tuning a dashboard design through research, they can throw a tablet in there and release whatever software they currently have. They will get feedback from people like this Twitter user telling them they have it all wrong, then they iterate and release a software update. Maybe that process eventually gets them into a better place like it often does for tech companies, but the bigger problem is that this approach completely fails when it comes to their other design choices. You can't push out a software update to change the angle of the windshield. And this lack of focus on the initial design is what leads to making the bad choices highlighted in that thread.

Physical buttons are far harder to produce and, once made, are set in stone until the car is recycled. Touch controls can be reprogrammed, updated, improved, etc, mixed with voice input, etc. Far more possibilities for improvement.

if only someone could invent a device with physical buttons that could connect to a device like a tablet or other computer.

Who said physical buttons cannot be mixed with voice input? Most physical buttons these days are just an interface to the CAN bus, where the function is performed (in software) in the BCM and can easily interface with the voice module.

"Improved" is an interesting term. How much improvement can you make to climate control buttons? Their function in most vehicles has not changed in 30 years and are largely the same aside from styling.

I feel like we just had this conversation two days ago, with the Amazon driver that has to use a touchscreen to open the cargo door in his new EV delivery van. Another ridiculous design courtesy of SV. Maybe the Juicero engineers found a new life at the EV manufacturers.

That's ridiculous. Multi-function displays/inputs have been a thing for decades. A physical button does not need to map to one and only one function. Just like MFDs in aircraft, physical buttons in a car display can perform different tasks depending on the mode of the display. I've had several car head units over the years with multi-function buttons.

Touch screens in cars are shit. Not only is there no tactile feedback but you can't place your finger on a button before pressing it like you can a physical button. To touchscreens a touch is a press so you better hope you touched the screen in the right place and your finger didn't move around because of a bump in the road.

When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.

Fast forward to now, even Android phones have lost all physical buttons for home/back/menu and now it is all just touch screens. This approach allowed changing button-controlled interface to gesture-controlled.

So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.

People spend a lot of time staring at their phones because of those touchscreens. Which is what the phone makers want. But automakers and fellow drivers -- not so much.

For the same reason, the US Navy announced it was moving away from touchscreen controls. When actions need to be taken quickly, muscle memory and tactile feedback are preferred.

https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/navy-reverting-ddgs-back-to...

I didn't know car drivers need to be really quick when taking actions like climate control or music volume adjustments.

If they are driving, yes, they do, because their attention needs to be focused on the road.

Changing climate controls never requires any kind of immediacy.

Just today I had to turn on my windshield defogger while driving lest I be unable to see. Have you ever driven a car before?

Yes, actually. Never in decades in had to do something about climate control urgently. There is always a pause when you can do it safely even on a touch screen. I used Android Auto quite a lot before Google broke it.

As I said, if we're talking about advanced cars, touch panels are more versatile, better suited for future updates, and all important functions should understand voice commands anyway.

> When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.

Several things to unpack:

1. Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone. When the iPhone was released there were few truly hands free calling systems in cars, many jurisdictions have laws against phone use in cars. This is a moot point.

2. Touchscreens on phones before the iPhone were shit. The UIs were primarily designed for a stylus. In the rare situation UI elements were even big enough to hit with a fingertip the resistive screens sucked and wouldn't properly register a touch. Physical buttons were necessary because the screens and UIs were not designed for touch. The iPhone changed that calculus.

> So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.

Except for functions like the defroster on Teslas which requires navigating nested menus on the touchscreen to activate. So you definitely need to use the touchscreen while driving if all the physical controls have been replaced by a touchscreen.

> Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone

This is absurd. I could not only dial, but also answer to calls and write whole messages on keyboard phones without ever looking at the device. They were tactile and the home key (number 5) was easily located by rubbing the thumb against the keys.

With an iPhone, the simplest of these tasks, taking a call, still requires me to look at the screen and aim for the right place where the button is.

Otherwise I agree with your points.

The average driving-age person could definitely not dial and text on a T9 phone and drive safely. You could have but the uptick[0] in accidents related to phone use in the early 2000s are a testament that this was not a common skill.

You're not wrong that a tactile keypad was superior for dialing without looking. Touchscreens were a major step back for anyone practiced at blind dialing/texting.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951952/#!po=25...

Controls that change based on mode are terrible for a vehicle. IE, a physical button that's programmable and doesn't always do the same thing, is no good.

Controls that change location or behavior from one day to the next, are absolutely horrendous.

"From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching."

I don't think so. I think it was worse, and indicates a deeper (and more depressing) inadequacy:

I think Tesla put the big screen (17" ?) in the first Model S as a signifier of high technology and modernity.

So far, so good ...

Now, however, as the Tesla itself came to signify the steps forward to an electric car future and modernity in general, designers of other cars copycatted the Tesla so as to evoke the same sentiment.

Meanwhile, actual interior design of automobiles has regressed significantly - and very often, dangerously - and we have one, and probably two entire generations of vehicle models to get through before it gets fixed.

In the meantime, get used to monstrosities like this:

https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/bmw-7-ser...

... and if that wasn't bad enough:

https://media.wired.com/photos/625f4ef8536da34b19a67a72/mast...

These designers are clowns. They should be ridiculed. Screens are a poverty.

I drive old vehicles, but a few years ago I got the itch and walked into a Toyota dealership. When I was told they don't offer vehicles without the screen I walked out and have basically refused to purchase anything with such a screen.

I've driven a few rentals with them and yes, they're not the most terrible thing ever, but they definitely are inferior to not having them. I really hope what you're saying will come to pass and we'll get rid of them or have a better version of their functionality because they are so obviously unsafe it's nuts to me they were ever put in.

I think Honda announced they would be getting rid of them, if I were to buy a new vehicle today it would most likely be them for that reason alone, despite me being loyal to Toyota up to this point (I just trust their vehicles).

To be fair, it seems that all the other manufacturers have decided to join in on that penny-pinching. :(

It's true that physical buttons are superior, but the upside of the screen is that the UI can be updated by software.

And it is nearly impossible to reliably tap a button on a touchscreen in a moving vehicle on even smooth roads (at least by me).

One technique is to dock some of your fingers against known reference points such as the corner of the screen, then you can stabilize the finger pressing the button and rely partially on muscle memory to locate the target button.

Yeah, this is the way. Still much less comfortable than a physical button, but not a great issue for power users either.

or best of both worlds and have physical soft keys down the side like oscilloscopes and other test equipment have.

Yes, that's the downside.

Why don't we have any physical "dynamic" controls yet? A "3D" touchscreen? Something like a ferrofluid [0] layer underneath a flexible display. It seems both technically possible, and a way for us to have our cake & eat it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid#/media/File%3AFerro...

Or something like the new Stream Deck? https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-plus

Actual buttons/dials that can be customised to what you want them to be?

You still have to look at the screen because you can just feel it with your fingers without looking at it.

Updating UI and potentially getting used to new layouts is really something that will improve road safety..

People, this isn't kindergarten or high school. Traffic is serious thing, not a playground

> This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle.

That’s a very confident statement to make without data to back it up.

Strong disagree. I see a huge number of benefits from the touchscreen in my Tesla. Continuous improvements to how the fundamental controls operate. New features that could only have been possible due to the controls not being hardware…

And generally speaking my vehicle seems to save me from human lapses in judgement even when I’m paying perfect attention so I’m not convinced about the argument that they purely increase distraction.

You have to take your eyes off the road for multiple seconds to turn the defogger/defroster on, as one example. Maybe there are studies to back it up too, but intuitively, this seems unsafe compared to turning a knob that you don't have to look at.

Are you able to perform a good majority of functions without taking your eyes off the road over 95% of the time? In my perfect setup I would have configurable buttons to map critical functions to and then a touch screen for non-important things. I have a very hard time seeing how a touch screen alone would be better than touch screen + a couple buttons.

Yes. Everything you need while driving is on the wheel or at a well defined corner of the screen (which big touch targets). And that too can be avoided if you’re willing to use voice control.

I'd love to hear how the car has saved you while you were paying attention.

- Changing lanes with someone in my blind spot just behind the B pillar

- someone changing lanes into me while cruising

- car tried to cut across from lane to my right to lane to my left. Got blocked from going to left lane and slammed brakes in front of me

- saw brake lights farther than I could in a snowstorm

It’s like having someone with 100% attention and 360 visibility watching your back at all times.

From: December 23, 2021

“Tesla hiring drivers for reliability, performance and homologation testing of Tesla Semi”

Source: https://driveteslacanada.ca/semi/tesla-hiring-drivers-for-re...

It’s a bit silly to assume they didn’t solicit feedback from real truck drivers. While developing a multi-billion product. But “Musk/Spaceman Bad” right?

The complaints in the linked thread are not about reliability, performance or homologation.

That’s just one of the many jobs they posted during the development of semi. They also have “real” drivers that put a ton of hours shuttling Tesla cargo from NV to CA and vise versa.

Not to mention the author is from the EU. Trucking in the U.S is vastly different. I drove in both regions during my time in the USAF.

In your honest opinion. Do you think they just developed the semi without gathering/soliciting feedback from real truck drivers?

Musk's whims clearly took precedence over any sort of received feedback.

That a very opinionated yet empty statement. Please elaborate and share your experience driving long haul semi trucks in U.S. interstates and city streets.

flight yoke

Can you point out where? This looks pretty circular to me: https://www.tesla.com/semi

I am responding to the challenge that Musk doesn't ignore all sense and advice and feedback and established best practices in favor of simply what he thinks is cool.

You know Elon Musk didn’t design this truck, right?

Perhaps, but SpaceX interfaces share the same issue: focusing on looks at the cost of usability, so I would think that either he's involved in this quite a lot, or he built both companies to have similar cultures. For example, the first mockup of Dragon v2 control panel presented to the public [1] looked all sci-fi, but as someone who actually knows how spacecrafts function I can tell just by the look that this was unusable. They were forced to switch to a much more pragmatic design [2] during the development, probably because folks from NASA shared some real-life experience and had their own requirements written in blood. Still touchscreens, but only where it doesn't matter (hard to have tactile controls in a spacesuit anyway), with a handle to hold onto under acceleration and to provide a basepoint for muscle memory, and buttons under protective caps for critical commands.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/sWHPfFR.jpg

[2] https://i.imgur.com/RZ7ucEu.jpg

So what you're saying is that his company posted a mockup then listened to people with real life experience through the development process and produced a good actual product?

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

I rented a Jeep today. It has most functions on a touch screen. But above 60mph (I think) the controls all lock so you can’t touch anything.

They probably did it for safety but it feels so dumb. I’m on a highway trying to turn off Bluetooth and then FM but I can’t. All screen functionality locked, no workaround.

That's probably a restriction on the rental that's just an option if you own it. My 2013 Ford allows me to limit several things over 55mph for drivers using my second car key.

I'm not a designer but one principle I've adopted in most things I purchase is to minimize complexity. My goal is always to optimize for "least willpower consumed". Because I know that if its not easy to do, I'll just skip it after a long day.

If I was making something for professionals who might use the tool for long, tiring hours, I'd probably want to give them the least bit of complexity possible. At the end of an 8 hour shift, how many truckers will have the energy (or rather, spare willpower) to press a button, wait for the mirrors to retract, clean it, and press the button to get it back into its original position? Compare that to the much simpler single-step current process (grab cloth, clean mirror).

The fewer clicks, the fewer steps, the fewer movements something takes, usually, the better.

My general design process:

1. Design it myself. Get my ideas on paper before I'm biased.

2. Review designs. See how other people did it.

3. Talk to experts.

4. Integrate ideas and build it.

Most of my clever ideas turn out to be dumb at step #2 or #3, but a few pan out, and those have been important. In many cases, there is some kind of fusion too.

It seems someone missed steps 2-4 here.

That sounds intriguing. Can you talk about some success (and failures)?

No, since that would tie back to my identity. I use throw-away accounts online. When I upgrade my web browser, this account will disappear and a new one will appear.

I have the level of fame where you almost certainly wouldn't recognize my name, but where most people (not just on HN) have heard of one project I created from scratch (to give an analogy, very few people would recognize the inventor of the Nerf gun, the Super Soaker, the touch screen, a popular TV show, or the iPod, but if you said "I'm the inventor of the ____," they'd know who you were).

It takes about 30 seconds with Google my successes and failures to figure out who I am.

I attribute that success to:

1. Being willing and able to talk to a large and diverse set of experts (and not just recognized ones; in the above example, an expert might be a trucker, rather than just a truck designer, and you want to talk to both, not to mention people who hire truckers, people who ship things, etc.). Finding something like an "expert trucker" is probably harder than you'd imagine; "expert trucker" isn't the same as "random trucker."

2. Being able to swallow my ego, ignore my ideas, and follow their advice.

Most of my success was based on gluing together ideas that other people / products had in innovative combinations, and in being somehow effective at scouring the universe for good ideas.

Sometimes I actually do a slightly similar one. I do 3. 2. 1. 4.

I also sometimes skip point 2. to avoid any bias and follow their own pitfalls instead using my own creativity from the raw material of point 3.

But your workflow is great. :) It's the same than Apple or Ford when they created the first cars. Like their famous quote: if Ford asked first to experts what the next transportation will be they would have said faster horses. It had to start from a visionary first and not experts.

Heck, even most of what Microsoft designs/builds/releases is after-the-fact mind boggling un-user-friendly, and they are mostly working on their own and hugely deployed products with many years of real world experience already under their belt. And they still screw it up regularly! I don't readily know what one would call this phenomenon. Is it as serious as technical cancer? Dementia? If feels like a disease that is spreading to so many companies rather far, and fast. Perhaps the good news is that it should result in more competition, I think. Tall growth getting hit with beetles, ideally leaving behind fertile ground for something else?

If anything it reminds me of all the arguments on slashdot when iPhone was announced that it would never take off because full touchscreen phones without a physical keyboard were a gimmick.

Is the difference here is there is already long running expectations? The iPhone was charting a brand new course across undiscovered seas, how trucks drivers interact with their vehicle is an experience with literally generations of data.

That's how it looks with the benefit of hindsight.

In 2007, there were plenty of people who thought the iPhone wasn't charting a brand new course across undiscovered seas. They thought it was an expensive, overly engineered toy. They thought the smartphone market of Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices was already mature.

Keyboards go back a long way, and the iPhone was widely panned as "not a professional device" because "how could you type email on it?" After all, we all had experience with just how bad on-screen keyboards were. It was so bleeding obvious that Steve was an idiot.

But then people actually used iPhones. While not as good as a physical keyboard, Apple's soft keyboard was vastly better than anyone anticipated. So good, in fact, that everyone basically forgot about physical keyboards and started typing their email on iPhones.

A big part of it was two things:

1. Apple put an actually-good LCD in the iPhone (Apple's LCDs get brighter and dimmer than the competition)

2. Apple used a capacitive touchscreen (that didn't suck).

I think the key thing is "is Tesla going to install good or shitty screens?" My guess is good screens--so I kind of laughed when the trucker complained about Mercedes touchscreens being too bright at night. Just like Apple's good screen enabled things you couldn't have before in a phone, I think Tesla's will too.

They can show blind spot cameras, for example. That may mitigate most or all of the impact of the center driver position on visibility. The same cameras can potentially show a better view than the mirrors (who cares if they're hard to clean when you only have them installed for legal compliance). So the giant screens enable Tesla to offer a Semi with vastly better aero than the competition.

"good screen" isn't enough in this case. They should invent something that doesn't exist now.

The problem isn't just the quality or sensitivity of the displays (though that could also be a problem). The problem is that any interface designed for drivers that requires you to stare at the interface and not the road is a bad idea. Any control that you are likely to operate while the vehicle is in motion needs to be something you can find by touch alone. A fixed, physical button.

Even more to your point: We even have tons of data already on touch screens in vehicles.

They repeated exactly the same mistake early EV cars did, Prius, i3, Leaf, all ugly, quirky or just impractical for completely unrelated reasons to being an EV. Trying to reimagine what a car is, instead of just taking a good old proven chassis and slamming an electric drivetrain inside.

Yes, there are enablers and constraints in EV platforms you both need to and should make use of, like more floor space, frunk, aero. Tesla finding the right things to change out of that pool is what made them successful. Today most other manufacturers have come to their senses and we today have great selection of good and non funky EVs on the market. This semi on the other hand is the i3 of trucks, judging by the Twitter thread.

Slashdot is the Jim Cramer of tech. (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”).

But then we also had the cybertruck that seems stuck because of its design, or the hyperloop. It wouldn't be Elon's first dumb idea.

Or the tunnels..

Fat fingering an instagram post rarely causes an accident which can delete a family from existence in half a second. The argument against touchscreens in vehicles is sound, not just contrarianism.

The Tesla semi design is the exact opposite of the iPhone's keyboard removal. It's larger but still less useful and flexible because its use of space is so inefficient.

The smartphone's lack of a physical keyboard is a tradeoff that works well for most users who tend to consume a lot of media content and rarely write long texts on it. According to that truck driver the Tesla semi is not a tradeoff but a downgrade without any upsides.

Here's that Slashdot thread: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/07/01/09/1857231/iphone-app...

People appear pretty excited on average. Most of the naysayers seem to be metahumor about the community's bad take about the iPod.

Phones are toys, cars are tools. Completely different design requirements.

My phone is a tool that I use to communicate and store information.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: There are STILL lots of real UX issues with touchscreens.

- Answer the phone without looking at it

- Start sending a text message without looking at it

- BLIND PEOPLE

Etc, real concerns do exist.

Devil’s advocate: the buyer and operator of the trucks may not care what the driver thinks. Most of these complaints don’t seem to hit at the truck’s profitability for its target market.

That's a weird position to advocate from. I mean, it's the traditional soul-sucking capitalist position: who cares about the user as long as it makes money?

Gross.

Unless the inconveniences inconvenience the decision maker, it wont influence the decision.

This is human nature and agnostic of political or economic model that human exists within.

Well, empathy, social issues, etc, may or may not cause an inconvenience…

> That's a weird position to advocate from.

So weird -- it's the devil!

Comparing corporate decision makers to devils is unfair and bigoted against devils.

About half of U.S. truckers own thier own rigs, europe has fewer owner-operators. Do you want to start by throwing out half the domestic market?

Pretty much, yes? I mean, EV trucks are going to start out limited to fixed routes with known charging facilities. They require more expensive capital outlay and have probably-cheaper-but-very-different maintenance regimes that will benefit from commonality more than "just another diesel tractor" would.

So I'd say yes: absolutely sell to the fleet market first. Individual truck owners will come along (likely from the used market) as the facilities evolve.

As a counterpoint, check out the review of the Amazon truck by Rivian by a delivery worker, that was posted here on HN just this week. It turned out being a good experience for the driver. If UX issues are big enough that they can potentially affect productivity, then corp headquarters will care.

> As a counterpoint, check out the review of the Amazon truck by Rivian by a delivery worker, that was posted here on HN just this week.

For those who missed it like me, it seems to be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33890585

Your critique makes sense, it reminds me of an electric truck startup called Edison that was started by a former truck driver: https://www.edisonmotors.ca

Basically the exact opposite approach, they started by bolting together mostly commodity parts. It's not pretty in a consumer product sense but for industrial users I get the sense that sleek is not good if it comes at any cost to serviceability, durability, parts commonality, etc. I don't know if that specific company will go anywhere but I like the approach.

Considering that the original lead for the project was also the lead for the Cascadia, I don't think its fair to say that they lacked people with industry knowledge.

I've driven truck for 4+ years.

Side mirrors: I have _never_ cleaned the mirrors by hand. That happens when I'm refueling with a squeegee on a long pole that they have at truck-stops. I will tell you that those mirrors will vibrate like hell and be difficult to see clearly out of. That far away from the chassis and with only one point of contact will make it vibrate a lot.

Gatehouses: that is a very valid point, but most guardhouses (I mostly just have experience with Ford/Chrysler/GM) make you get out of the truck and go open up the trailer. You don't even roll-down the window to talk to them.

Weigh-Scales (aka Chicken-Coops) where Highway weight inspection happens: Most just use a speaker on a pole at window height, but other places (like USA/CAN border crossing) you have to pass paperwork back & forth to agent, so this would be difficult.

Entry/Egress: these are valid points but the need to enter/exit from the passenger side has only happened to me once. My biggest use of the passenger seat: That's where I kept my cooler for food/beverages.

And that brings me to my list of observations that make this tractor seem like a non-starter (from things i noticed watching the '10 hour drive' video):

(1) The monitor on the right-side of the driver. Some of the time it was a map/GPS, but most of the time it was displaying text that the driver leaned over/turned his head to read. This might have been dispatch notes, or vehicle diagnostics or something else. HELL NO, not even once would I ever drive something that required that much attention away from the road.

(2) Food/Beverage options. Most drivers that I ever saw used a LARGE 24oz-36oz insulated mugs for coffee. A lot would pour an entire pot of coffee into their mug! So most trucks had 'over-sized' cup holders. The 'nicer' trucks I drove also had shelves with guard rails (it always reminded me of boat-storage) in areas that I could put food that I could eat while driving. I didn't see that same kind of space. The less-nice trucks would force me to use the passenger seat. This truck did have lots of area, but there was nothing to prevent things from sliding around.

(3) Load/Log paperwork: Usually kept in a clip-board (mandated by law if carrying hazmat material to be stored in drivers-side door pocket). Once again door placement and lack of shelves play an issue here. I often kept mine on the passenger seat. This material is rarely touched while driving, but there is a considerable amount of paperwork that needs to be done each time the truck stops. Related: Notepads. About half the companies that I worked for required that I log the vehicle mileage (and time) when crossing state lines. There might be adequate space for this. Notes were needed to be written down quite frequently.

(3) Range to refuel ratio. I drove a 600 mile radius centered around Detroit. I would goto Quebec, Missouri, Tennessee, and all points in between. Each time I needed to 'fill' the fuel tanks would take ~30 minutes. That 30-minutes would give me ~1800 miles of range (VERY rough estimate, I never got close to empty). I would often get fuel at either designated locations (like at the company lot)or when I was OTR I would do it before I stopped for the night (as needed). Even if Tesla built out a super-charger like network for the trucks I can't imagine having enough time to make 3x more stops, with each stop taking MUCH longer.

This isn't for OTR though, as most truck routes are shorter in nature. They aren't gonna touch long haul for a while. Though they do apparently charge up very quickly.

I agree there are a lot of negatives though. Not a truck driver but the ipad light seems like it would be very annoying and then reading instructions while driving, especially where you have to turn your head away from the road is really bad.

Ultimately I think people are too worried about the interior. It's not gonna be that hard to move seats over if needed.

On mirror vibration, my personal experience is that a lot of it is contributed by the diesel engine, at least on the freeway / at idle. It is really obvious when you're cranking it. The proximity of their mounting point to the engine bay doesn't help either. IMHO the axle-mounted motors are gonna suffer less from this particular cause, but maybe the bad roads will make it worse regardless.

A related point is "E-mirrors". The regulation is not there yet in the U.S., but apparently they are in Europe [1]. I think they have the potential to be _more_ safe than traditional ones, despite the glare issue at night --- for example taking advantage of the low-light HDR capabilities. Also, their FoV don't shift around as the driver's head does; this may be both a pro and a con.

[1]: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191214-mirrorcam....

Also, had they made the driver's seat slideable left-to-right (e.g. with 3 locking positions) it would solve the problem of not being able to hand something over the left window ;)

this rant reminds me of many similar things I've read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.

I've had similar experience with silly old web development.

I spent a week sitting down with actual users of the web site that I was so proud of and watched them use it. Oh, man did that hurt.

All the "telemetry" in the world will never prepare you for actually watching real people at work and talking to them.

It completely changed the way I build web sites.

The Tesla designers should spend more time in truck cabs, shadowing actual truckers. Based on this Twitter rant, it should be illuminating.

> Somebody resurrect Steve Jobs

He would have hidden the ignition keyhole below the steering wheel because of the ugly aesthetics

It's ok, it lights up for 30s after the door opens. Oh you need to find it but were in the cab for longer than 30s? Just open and close the door again, dum-dum!

And others emulating them. I would like a Rivian for several reasons, but I can not accept the cab, especially the suv. It's the stupidest least functional least convenient least utility thing imaginable for a utility vehicle.

It's a rolling Apple "one button" joke.

IDK, when I see threads like this hit high rankings on HN, I don't even have to click through to know that it's a rant — it wouldn't make the front page if it was like "Sweet, this looks good."

Parts of the thread are just nonsensical; for example, I've seen many other threads and business analysts concerned about whether an electric semi-truck is even viable at all. Meanwhile, this thread explains that "All major truck manufacturers offer [sic] electric trucks for years now." Wow, maybe everyone else is wrong and doesn't know anything about truck sales? So I did the bare minimum of research, and... The Mercedes truck he claims has been offered "for years now" is in prototype phase and has never been released; the Volvo class 8 semi was only released in October of this year and has less than half the range of the Tesla; the Scania was also only launched this year and similarly has less than half the range... He even cites "Nikola" as a manufacturer that you can buy a truck from. Nikola! The infamous company that was convicted of securities fraud for faking their electric truck last year! Apparently as of this year they finally managed to deliver a whopping 48 trucks, all of which were promptly recalled for safety issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation

Meanwhile, the snow considerations from the dreaded "angled windscreen." In the thread, the author posts a few pictures of trucks with completely vertical faces. Is that representative of semi trucks? Well, let's go ahead and look at a picture of the Volvo electric class 8 semi that the author was touting... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/18/first-drive-the-volvo-v...

Uh-oh. It's got way more horizontal faces that the Tesla! And look at those giant mirrors placed 5+ feet in front of the cab... How will the driver wipe them without leaving? Whoops. Or, maybe that's not actually the death sentence for the truck that the author claims?

And then there's the "place to put a mattress." But — the Tesla Semi is what's known in America as a "day cab." Day cabs do not have places for mattresses, and it's generally illegal to sleep in one: https://ratings.freightwaves.com/day-cab-vs-sleeper-cab/. If you're on a route that requires sleeping, you need a sleeper cab. And yup — the Tesla Semi isn't one. But neither is any other day cab.

Rants like these are usually pretty boring TBH: if the product is actually terrible, no one will buy it (and thus the author won't be angry about it). The anger betrays their certainty that the product is actually more attractive than they'd hoped, and than they're claiming.

Maybe the problem is that he is being critical of something made for Americans being European. American semis would be super stupid here, as well as European trucks might be stupid there, but then again Brazil is as large and less dense than the US and prefer EU style trucks.

> if the product is actually terrible, no one will buy it (and thus the author won't be angry about it). The anger betrays their certainty that the product is actually more attractive than they'd hoped, and than they're claiming.

"People loudly disagree with X, this proves X right" has never been a convincing argument.

Just for one example, you have to know that the people who buy industrial equipment don't always communicate with the people who will be expected to use that equipment. "My boss is gonna get seduced by this shit and I'm gonna have to deal with it" is a perfectly legitimate concern.

For another, you've read enough tech news to know that people find terrible design annoying even if they don't expect to ever have to use it themselves, especially if it falls within their field of expertise.

Why is this surprising. After all it’s the company that eliminated steering wheels and door handles.

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