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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan of this vehicle at all, but this article is pretty vapid clickbait, besides the unexplained system issue.

No car should be washed in direct sunlight, you'll get spots from drying soap, water etc. And 'car wash mode' is totally normal and standard, you don't want charge ports to open, the wiper to start, or accidentally put it into gear.

I drove a Polestar 2 for a while and was extremely scared of going into a car wash, there are like 17 steps you need to take (including a warning that "the touch-sensitive doors might lock and unlock intermittently during the wash cycle").

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Anecdotal counterpoint, I've owned probably 15 cars in my life. Anything from performance to trucks. I've washed them in the sun, I've washed then in car washes, I've driven them through flood waters. I've actually never had a car that I own, break down on me in my life.

There seems to be a lot of stories like this one regarding cyber trucks. I don't remember reading anything like this about Toyota trucks.

I've had fewer cars than that but my experience is similar. Mostly older, youngest was a 2007 make. Take care of fluids, tires and brakes, and they've just worked.

Worst breakdowns I've had have been flat tires, that's a half hour downtime until the spare is switched in. Unexplained five hour "reboots" sounds like a joke. That's not a car, it's a toy.

That doesn't mean your manuals did not warn against doing some of that. Manufacturers want to offload as much liability as possible. Check out the list of warnings for a Corolla: https://www.toyota.com/owners/warranty-owners-manuals/digita...

But most importantly, the story does not provide anything linking the car wash to the truck issue, that was the owner's assumption. It's just speculation / early reporting for the clicks.

Agree, it's speculation, but the car has failed, there is many documented cases of similar failures.

Like I said I've owned a lot of cars, some of them were complete bombs, driven them hard in some very harsh conditions, they just don't shut down or not work like that.

I'm talking cars I purchased for $1000 dollars in some cases. I had a Suzuki Sierra with about 114953 on the clock, I drove that thing for years before I retired it. Before that a farmer owned it and used it for ranching work.

We're talking about a car that costs > $80000 starting.

just means you havnt read much about trucks https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1370PE/#:~:text=(Reut....

Toyota has produced almost 200 million cars...this sucks but ask nearly anyone in off road circles, Land cruiers and Hilux are considered bullet proof.

They are in fact the preferred truck of ISIS. This is worth a read: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Wild-Blue-Yonder/Article-Di...

Every auto detailing product you see on the shelf has instructions to wash your car in the shade. You don’t want the product to dry out while you are applying it.

This has nothing to do with the CT specifically and it’s actually embarrassing to see this mentioned in the article and interpreted as some kind of slam against Tesla’s quality

How do water spots cause a car to stop functioning?

First, you can absolutely wash a car in the sun and not get spots. With properly filtered water you won’t get water spots.

I wash my black car in the sun because I don’t care about water spots. It’s a car, it gets dirty and wet and clean again. It’s a piece of crap but it never stopped working because it got wet.

They don't. The point is, there's nothing in this report suggesting the water has caused the truck to stop working, despite what the headline implies.

Or alternatively people could stop buying cars that are designed in this way:

>The screen, which runs all functions of the truck, went black, and wouldn’t respond at all [...] A call with Tesla confirmed that the truck had needed a complete reboot which took over five hours of sitting to complete

It's an actual joke that this is what modern automotive engineering has become.

> Or alternatively people could stop buying cars that are designed in this way

It's hard to do in a race-to-the-bottom scenario. I'm not saying that it's the case yet with cars, but it will be eventually.

Same with TVs: I want to give money to the manufacturer who will sell me a TV without advertising malware.

> It's an actual joke that this is what modern automotive engineering has become.

I mean, there've always been cars with crap electrics; Jaguar used to be notorious, say (because of these people, a case-study in how to screw up competition regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Industries).

Is this normal for an electric car ?

It sounds kind of crazy to be scary to go into a car wash.

No issues with my Hyundai Kona Electric. Although it does not have features like hidden, touch-sensitive door knobs and whatnot. It washes (and gets dirty) just like any car.

Reword that, imo: although it has features like not having hidden, touch-sensitive door handles :)

The EV car wash experience I'm having: You drive it into the car wash, roll up the windows, put it in neutral. Don't open the doors while it is being washed. You're done.

From the owners manual:

Don't wash in direct sunlight.

Do not expose to bright lights.

Do not let it get wet.

No charging after midnight.

You toke that list from "Gremlins", admit it.

Yes indeed. That's the joke.

To me it sounds pretty weird to have a “car wash mode”, I have never encountered this in most ICE cars. I guess newer cars are more fragile though due to the multitude of sensors.

I wonder if it has to do with turning off automatic wipers that misidentify the car wash as regular rain while driving.

But are you driving while washing? Why would the wipers or anything else be activated when you stepped out of the car, locked it and waited for the cycle to finish?

Your car must be running and in neutral gear while going through an automated car wash.

It depends on the style of automatic wash, but even for the ones that pull the vehicle along... why would you leave it running? Not only does that waste fuel, it seems like a good way to get carbon monoxide poisoning.

Not in my country - or any I have ever visited. Interesting discovery, I always assumed "car washes" would be a basic service running the same everywhere. Anyway, why should the engine be running for washing??? In neutral gear means it's not going to drive, so...?

The car washes here pull you by the front tire. The other wheels need to roll, which would not be possible with the car turned off - either a gear would be engaged, or the parking brake applied automatically.

It seems my Honda 2006 can survive a car wash under a direct sunlight than whatever that thing you are driving right now. I also live near the equator where El Nino is brutal.

I just wish they could make electric cars with our all the touch sensitive glossy dogshit. Just a decent make's mid-spec car circa 2010 with cruise/limit, central locking with a keyfob, Bluetooth, A/C, a decent sound system, the old button/knob console controls and maybe adaptive cruise if that's your thing. This was all a completely solved problem 15 years ago.

Just swap (yes i know it's not a straight swap, the chassis and other bits are basically completely different) the engine for battery, motors and regenerative brakes. That's the only change that needs making to the visible function of the car.

Leave out the touch screens, proprietary nav running on an underpowered shit SoC, media player junk, app control, LED strip lighting, Street sign sensitive limiters that downshift in traffic because the think they saw a sign that said 30, subscription this and integration that and anything that expects an internet connection. It's all utter dogshit.

There are a few which sit in a decent middleground. Kia and Hyundai EVs, BYD, Nio, Polestar all have a decent amount of physical controls to varying degrees. It's a shame that Volvo went in the opposite direction.

I don't think we can turn the page back on central touchscreens though, there are way too many features and settings that you cannot translate into physical buttons.

I don't really care about any features that the touchscreen enables. None. Not the crap nav, not the crap media applets, none of it. And especially not the fan controls, even if i do get a needless 3D render of a fan, slightly stuttering through a graphics processor that i could be convinced was repurposed from a vTech toy.

I literally cannot think of any that a modern car has that I sit in the 2010 and go "man I wish I had X". The little LCD in there actually has more functions that work via the steering wheel controls! Maybe the backup camera (which yes, I know will probably be a regulation so now you have to have a screen, nicely played, auto lobby), but even then I don't really want one if the cost is a car full of junk and I've never had one up to now, even in the newer cars I've also had.

I'd rather they stripped all the pointless shit out and just gave me the savings and reliability bump. And that's why they won't ever do it, they get a bump in price up front and they get to ding you for magical electronic dingleberries in 10 years and meanwhile they can slurp whatever data they can.

I was thinking of features like an audio equalizer, introduced on a screen around 1989. Or very specific settings like audible warnings, tire pressure sensor setup, interior lighting... if everything was a physical button your car would look like a 747 cockpit (not that it would be such a bad thing!).

And yes, the backup camera. Essential safety feature in a world where 2-ton SUVs and children share spaces.

Audio equaliser works just fine with a wheel and buttons. Actually, once I press "menu" on the console, I can do the whole process using the steering wheel controls.

Tire pressure monitoring doesn't need an HD display either. It's got only three real functions: low pressure detected, low battery and calibrate. You don't need a touchscreen for any of that.

And even if you have to drive an urban tank, you could still have the camera display on the dashboard: you don't have to use a touchscreen for everything just to have a camera display. Or, you know what, have the shiny bullshit if you have to, but it all had to work from the steering wheel controls. And no, voice control is not a good substitute. But even then all that junk makes the car an expensive and unreliable prospect in the short and long runs.

Huh? I’m in my mid-40s, have been washing cars since I was 10. Other than closing the windows, there is no prep procedure.

I’ve never experienced a car that opens and closes its doors when exposed to water, and I never will.

My buddy and I had an idea to buy up low mileage 2002-2005 Hondas and Toyotas to “mothball” and resell at a premium later as a business years ago. We laughed it off, but now I regret not doing it.

If your car doesn't have rain sensors, a powered charge port, automatic door handles, collision warnings, automatic emergency braking, auto parking brake, etc, then yes, nothing to worry about.

ICE higher-end models can also have a lot of assist features that need to be disabled in a car wash.

> My buddy and I had an idea to buy up low mileage 2002-2005 Hondas and Toyotas to “mothball” and resell at a premium later as a business years ago.

The industry has finally figured this out, too; it looks like we have reached Peak Touch Interface, and a number of manufacturers are either already rolling some of it back or will start in the next model year.

There's been a lot of problems with delivered cybertrucks. It going through a car wash could just be a correlation and not a causation

I have a 25-year-old car. The thing I have to do before a car wash is crank the windows closed.

Some day I'll have to buy a new car, but I'm not looking forward to the bullshit. (Cruise control will be nice.)

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