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Comment by redindian75 | Hacker News Reader

model 3 has voice control "turn on wipers" "set AC to 68" "drive home" - at the press of a button, the music fades and it listens like "hey Siri"

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That sounds like a poor solution to a problem of their own making

As an owner it works great. Windshield wipers have a sensor for automatic control, and if you want to manually adjust, voice recognition is highly accurate these days. I switch between my Prius and Tesla all the time as my wife shares the vehicles, and I much prefer the Tesla controls. But I'll get off of your lawn if you'd like.

Anecdotally the owner I’ve asked about it said it sucks. And he’s a native English speaker. How’s it do with accents?

Maybe it’s been improved with hardware upgrades? His is around a 2017 I think.

An update came out around November of last year that vastly improved auto high-beams, and somewhat improved automatic windshield wiper performance.

I mean the voice control features specifically. Didn’t hear anything about the auto high beams and wipers which could imply they worked better than the voice recognition.

I'm a native speaker, maybe I have good enunciation. I'm amazed at how accurate the voice recognition is. It almost never makes a mistake, even with obscure location names. It displays on the screen what it thinks you said and even updates it as more heavy duty ML requests come back with better results.

I imagine it works as well as the famous voice-activated elevator in Scotland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

I'm usually listening to audiobooks. Right now Tesla doesn't support any audiobook reader, so voice commands momentarily mute the book without pausing.

Next issue is the quality of voice recognition. It just sucks.

Oh, and wipers are a pure fucking BS in Teslas. They removed a $5 infrared precipitation sensor, and it STILL doesn't work well.

I don't own Tesla, I have a strong Punjabi Accent when i speak English. Many bigger companies phone trees based on voice "commands" are useless for me. It never understands me. My Ford Sync voice controls too struggle to understand me. I prefer buttons.

Like Zail Singh with Reagan, you will just have to teach it Punjabi :)

At least it's hands free unlike the pile of shit that is Subaru Outback's infotainment. Takes upwards of 20 seconds to change any settings after the car turns on because it lags so bad.

Jesus Fuck is the Subaru infotainment system just an absolute nightmare. I love Subaru cars. I have owned several.

My most recent (23 Impreza) was the first with full-blownsies infotainment. It is just an absolute shitshow.

Slow, laggy, buggy, hard to understand menus. It randomly turns black and takes a minute or two to turn back on when starting driving. If you get in turn the car on, and put it into a gear without waiting for 20-30 seconds, the screen and therefore radio will be completely unusable for anywhere from 30 seconds up to five minutes afterwards.

It is just awful. Awful.

It will probably make production costs cheaper in the long run to avoid as many buttons as possible, unless legislation forbids it due to safety concerns. I’m on team Hyundai in this case, but if you want to produce the cheapest possible car, you will have to reduce the amount of components that needs to be installed.

Teslas aren’t particularly cheap, of course.

They do look cheap once you step inside.

To me, this is definitely a major safety hazard to rely on voice command. If you just get splashed and in a stressed out voice you ask for wipers and your car might not understand you.

Absolutely. Not to mention the needless inaccessibility.

It would def draw a pause if I were driving a Turo rental. It's great to have the option of voice. But I can actuate the wipers much quicker with a hand stalk than I can speak it.

The way to do it is to press the wiper button (press in on the stalk button) to swipe one and then it gives you options for manual wiper speed selection via an on-screen control.

So I use a touchscreen to adjust the wiper speed and delay? In the worst kind of weather where I really need it?

Sign me up!

This is a huge improvement over my 2008 Kia where I twist the stalk and don't have to look at it and I can keep my eyes on the road.

OTOH, my old Kia doesn't have Full Self Driving. Ah well.

> my old Kia doesn't have Full Self Driving

Don't worry, neither does Tesla :)

in every other car on the planet it is the right stalk down. They had to go and reinvent this.

I am absolutely not defending Tesla at all, and do genuinely believe they do things that are incredibly stupid in auto design.

But - at one point, when the shift was the right stalk, wipers were controlled via a switch, knob, or other mechanism either on the dashboard or on the left stalk.

So. It's not like changes haven't happened before.

They were still physical controls that offered tactile feedback and never moved so you could always operate them blindly.

Also my parents are older and something in their skin makes them routinely almost invisible to capacitive touch controls - heck I still have trouble from time to time getting displays to register reliably.

I loathe touch controls and will never buy a vehicle that only has touch controls. Luckily all my current cars are in excellent condition and I pamper the crap out of them. If I'm lucky I'll be able to be buried in them :p

actually the wipers have a physical one-shot button on the stalk.

Yeah, hilarious how people are complaining about wipers when they literally have a 1-shot button on the stalk to trigger a quick blast at any time. Hold down for 2 seconds to get wiper fluid/de-icer. Seems like Tesla actually has the safety feature you want.

Seems like Tesla has a lot of solutions to problems people never had in the past until Tesla came around

This will trigger it to run once, in the slowest setting. And then you have to wait for this to finish before it updates to the speed you've set on the touchscreen. Tesla could have also solved this by just letting the user decide if it should be a single wipe or toggle a certain setting.

Being able to toggle a single wipe, with or without wiper fluids is also something every single car I've ever operated has had. In addition to be able to control it from the stalk.

Not everything has to be reinvented. They walked back a little on the steering yoke, but for some reason they still remove the stalks and have touch buttons on the steering wheel. The one thing that everyone with the yoke categorically hated.

I can’t even get Siri to reliably play a song or skip a track, let alone anything useful. Must be my accent.

I’d hate to try to operate vehicle controls with the same hit-and-miss interface. Give me tactile controls any time.

It was doing its best on automatic but the wipers were sporadic at best. This was a major winter storm and visibility was awful …the model 3 had no idea where the lane lines were and apparently no idea how bad the precipitation was.

I think I’m just going to keep buying and driving 15 year old cars until the new cars are an order of magnitude better. I can buy 10 half decent 15 year old cars for the price of new Tesla!

(15 years old is the magic number in MA where the car no longer has to pass emissions checks during inspection)

Plus, you can probably fix them yourself! None of this "hack it yourself and void the warranty, or pay a goon to hookup a computer to your car to 'fix' it."

I wonder how long it will take for people to start selling jailbroken cars...

The voice control is shit

> the music fades

Disgusting.

Love when the music fades for like 5 seconds to play a 250ms chime.

Cool, and if you have a strong accent then what?

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