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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

> As the target demographic and someone who dreamed of owning one one day

I don't know if it's one of those sunlight = best disinfectant situations where the bloom has fallen off of Tesla's rose as time has gone on, or if it is the rush to gain market share has caused quality to decline, or the original reviews were just shills. However, I too refuse to contribute one cent to the increasing of that one individual's wealth because I find them to be a loathsome individual. Setting that aside, their decisions on being the champion of telematics, OTA updates/modifications without your approval, the increasing use of touch screen controls, and all of the other things that have all just added up to never wanting to own one of these cars. That negativity has not soured my desire for owning an EV, just not a Tesla

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Yeah, seconded. Tesla is representative of everything wrong with EV design. Yes, they came in and disrupted everything wrong with ICE design, but they've created a monster. The touchscreens for opening the glove box, the software feature lockout, the lack of repair-ability...I mean cars used to come with a wiring schematic. We need cars buit like the ATX computer standard, something EVs are especially well positioned to do, not built like the IPone.

> We need cars buit like the ATX computer standard

Isn’t the controller area network an equivalent standard for interop? What’s keeping someone from offering a physical button that signals toggleLatch to the device providing glovebox services on the CAN bus?

Who is that someone? The person that bought the car, got frustrated, and is now looking for 3rd party/after market fixes? That seems like such a wrong solution to me.

CAN bus isn't an interoperable standard, it's closer to lightly structured I2C. It feels like the standards committee might be moving in that direction with the more ethernet style version they're pushing, but I need to sit down and play with it a bit.

While CAN is a standard, it's basically transport layer only. The automakers have all sorts of custom stuff on top of it that's wildly proprietary. Talk to a mechanic and they'll complain about how each car company requires them to buy their own special software suite for diagnosing issues.

> Yes, they came in and disrupted everything

This entire pursuit of disruption has become just a red flag to me. Are there industries that are desperate for an outside company to come along and change the status quo? Absolutely. However, the SV "disruptors" have soured my view altogether on their willing to just be a bull in the china shop looking to gain notice/investment, yet ultimately not actually providing a good service/product/etc.

On the upside Tesla is at least putting back the horn in the middle of steering wheel, so there could be a glimmer of hope.

Don't forget their abysmal safety record and bait-and-switch "Full Self Driving!"

yeah, my fingers were getting tired from all the ranting, so i cut it short

They build the safest cars ever https://www.whatcar.com/news/tesla-model-y-wins-what-car-saf...

They also crash way more often[1] and have disproportionally more deaths[2].

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2023/12/18/tesla-ha... 2. https://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=35819

The first link is for people looking for insurance quotes, not actual crash data

Link 2 is about deaths. Let's find the death rate per registered car years from the NHTSA's data.

For all 2020 vehicles it's 38 per million, for midsize luxury, 23, Tesla Model 3 2WD: 15, 4WD: 52

For large luxry: Model S 4WD 17, vs 22 average

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

Add "getting distracted by hideous vanity projects like the Cybertruck" to that list.

Every automotive CEO has been complicit for a hundred years in polluting the environment and killing millions of people with air pollution, millions with substandard safety and excessively large vehicles, and likely billions with global warming in the future, and a mass extinction of species.

Musk busts unions (like every other CEO), gropes women, is a bad ex-husband/father, and tweets right-wing mean tweets. OMG WORST PERSON EVER.

No I'm not giving him sole credit for Tesla/SpaceX/etc, no he is not god messiah of the earthworms.

The touchscreens are out of control, though, that is undeniable.

Tesla should have bought Nissan or some other failing mainline car company and rolled out EV tech with their traditional designs, but... that had to happen a decade ago. No point now.

The whataboutism is dripping so much it's a monsoon. Why is everything a comparison with "you people"? I have many reasons to dislike Musk not exclusive to your sarcasm of a 12 year old. I don't like brussel sprouts, but I don't need to know about your opinions of eating snails, raw fish, or burnt popcorn. It makes no bearing on my dislike nor does it have a bearing on the conversation.

The car Tesla produces is a piece of trash and is unsafe at any speed, and you will not make me like it by telling me "yeah but other cars are worse".

Whataboutism is when someone posits a substantive deep problem and the other side lists a bunch of counterpoints that are shallow and unconvincing. I noticed you offered zero counterpoints to my core argument except that I am apparently a 12 year old.

So in addition to misusing "whataboutism", you simply fell back to ad hominem. Finally, you were the one that went on the intertubes and espoused your view. I did not inject any new subject matter except to counterpoint your pretty myopic viewpoint.

I don't care if your feelings were hurt by simple argumentative debate, the point of my response isn't to attack you, but to offer a different viewpoint to anyone ELSE that reads this. You are correct, it is futile debating people like you.

Teslas have their problems, but they aren't trash. In particular if you look at GM's EV recalls, Porsche's issues with the Taycan, and various EV startups having major issues and scaling problems, Tesla did phenomenally well. The only other companies that did similarly were Chinese and Korean companies that are almost literally parts of their respective governments with unlimited budgets, and armies of near-slave labor in the case of the Chinese.

And it is debatable if any other EV company is actually producing EVs at a sustainable economic profit. Likely the Chinese have turned the corner in the last year or two. Everyone else is still using ICE sales to pour research into their EVs.

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