9 ms·

I'm sure the decision was "data driven" based on real life usage. It's a bit disturbing they're able to make such drastic level of changes without heads up. C

• vitaflo 5y ago
  >Even Model 3 has a physical hazard light switch. That's because a physical hazard light switch is required by law.
  • gleenn 5y ago
    The irony was it took me a lot longer to find because I was searching through the computer screen for a long time assuming it was there.
    • pcurve 5y ago
      And Tesla didn't help you by making too subtle. https://i.insider.com/5a861ac9d0307228108b466c?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/5a861ac9d0307228108b466c?width=600&for... Compared this to Hyundai cars, who I don't think gets enough credit for their ergonomics. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022-Hyundai-Ioniq-interior-2.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022-... https://www.genesis.com/content/dam/genesis-p2/kr/assets/models/g80/gallery/genesis-kr-gallery-g80-sport-interior-03-desktop-848x848.jpg https://www.genesis.com/content/dam/genesis-p2/kr/assets/mod...
      • Syonyk 5y ago
        Uh. Really? On the ceiling? Or have I screwed up my perspective entirely there? If it's actually on the ceiling, I either know it's there, or I'll be into pulsing my brakes manually before I bother to find it should I actually need it.
        • pcurve 5y ago
          I thought old Mercedes w221 took the cake for the worst place to put hazard light switch. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/14/c2/e014c2545b5af19946c9d61a4fbeaaba.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/14/c2/e014c2545b5af19946c9... But model 3 takes the cake.
          • andi999 5y ago
            This is bad. Maybe it is because this switch is often used in Germany (when you approach a traffic jam on the autobahn you should press it), they though after a few of these incidents one would have figured out.
          • morcheeba 5y ago
            At least you can find the W221 button by feel (as one does when they don't want to take their eyes off the road). The w205 one doesn't stick out at all. https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/2021-mercedes-benz-c-class-sedan-dashboard-carbuzz-589991.jpg https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/2021-mercedes-benz-c-...
            • userbinator 5y ago
              That one was even harder to find because it's not centered. In that image I noticed what looks like two Chevy bowties on either side of the steering wheel, before I found the hazard light button (spoiler: it's toward the passenger side and looks almost like the other buttons in the area.)
            • pcurve 5y ago
              Agreed. That one seems like an afterthought. Thankfully, the issue has been fixed in w206.
          • zoomablemind 5y ago
            IMO not an unreasonable placement. The button is quite recognizable and right at the fingertips, unless it's been prone to accidental presses. The trim of the dash in the picture, as much as luxurious it may be, reminded me of driving a desk, a walnut or ?mango wood desk... sitting in a comfy four-wheeled office chair. Also notable so many buttons on the driver side door, not sure for what purpose.
• dathinab 5y ago
  The problem with "data driven" approaches is that they often miss the context. Which can make their results absolute garbage. Like data driven can tell you a button is "not used often" it can't tell you that a button is "essential to be fast available in some safety critical situations". (Or for other examples, that a feature is not unused because people don't want it but because it's hidden or bad designed.) But somehow I still meat people which believe that poorly data driven approaches will yield the best results, which as far as I can tell is complete unrealistic. (Which doesn't mean in any way you shouldn't also use data for decisions, just be aware that data just shows a part of an picture and can often be very misleading.)
  • calvinmorrison 5y ago
    you don't like your hazards hidden behind 3 submenus? you monster
    • GrifMD 5y ago
      Is it really hidden that deep?
      • pedrocr 5y ago
        By regulation (at least in Europe) that's a physical button, so is unchanged. But the point applies for fog lights for example. They used to be on the quick controls menu, which was already bad compared to physical buttons, and are now a further click away as if they're not something that you need to use while driving when suddenly entering a foggy area. The new UI is quite bad.
        • Aeolun 5y ago
          I find it hard to understand why these things are allowed to be more than one button away in the first place. You really don’t want people driving a 2 ton monster taking their eyes away from the road to locate something 3 submenus deep.
  • 5y ago
• rawland 5y ago
  > Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console? That got me laughing. :) I would be _convinced_ it's a joke and my friends are behind this and want to give me a treat in already sucking Covid-times..
• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Tricky thing about "data driven" / behaviour observation is: App/icon X may be the most COMMONLY used one. But it doesn't necessarily make it the most IMPORTANT one, the one I need to reach in a hurry / most easily. I don't know how to capture, via automated telemetry, "this occasional button I REALLY REALLY need"... so it's just hubris then. I'm an outsider, I've only entered Tesla's as opposed to driven them, but the UX is such a massive deal-breaker for this old grouch, it's unbelievable. I wish it weren't so but c'est la vie.
  • heleninboodler 5y ago
    It's also subject to an unhealthy feedback loop. Oh, this button isn't commonly used, so let's move it to a slightly less prominent place. Oh, this button's usage dropped, it must be super unimportant, let's move it behind a menu. Oh, nobody ever presses this button, let's get rid of it.
    • wlesieutre 5y ago
      I get this a lot with URL autocomplete. For some reason it decides “news” means “some other URL with news in its <title>”, then out of habit I type news+enter and it takes me to that website, further reinforcing “Yeah he goes to this website a lot, let’s keep that at the top autocomplete priority!” So now I have to type “news.” before it will fill news.ycombinator.com, because it started showing me the wrong option and I kept inadvertently picking it because it used to give me the right one. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for it to realize “every time this happens he closes that website immediately and goes to a different one that we ranked #2 in the autocomplete search.” So until I retrain my muscle memory I’ll just keep on mistraining the autocomplete even further.
      • TuringTest 5y ago
        > “every time this happens he closes that website immediately and goes to a different one that we ranked #2 in the autocomplete search.” This is a disheartening yet frighteningly common problem with UI automation. It doesn't learn enough to actually be aware of the expected result, yet it can't be programmed to behave exactly as you want or need. Automation in user interfaces should be exactly the opposite. It should try to learn your repeated actions so that you can perform them automatically, yet if the learning goes wrong, the user should be in control at all times and override the automatic deduced actions.
• KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > I'm sure the decision was "data driven" based on real life usage. You're assuming Tesla's end goal is to make the car more usable, and not to maximize revenue. Their goal is to be transportation smart TV. Sell apps, media, advertising, etc. That's why so much money is being poured into self-driving cars. Americans in particular spend a massive amount of time staring at pavement, and that represents a huge untapped market. Self-driving cars aren't about the betterment of humanity; the deaths and injuries are certainly horrific in scale, but self-driving cars don't solve the primary problem: our heavy use of low occupancy vehicle trips is not sustainable environmentally, energy-wise, land-use wise (roads or parking), logistically, economically (6+ year car loans, crumbling infrastructure because we can't afford to keep it all in good repair, etc)
  • userbinator 5y ago
    Self-driving cars are really about bringing the movement of the population under government control.
    • dannyw 5y ago
      Precisely. Unvaccinated? Your car won't allow you to drive to a restaurant. (If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, just look at how technology is currently being used for government control around the world, and consider how self driving cars will be different).
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • sdf4j 5y ago
        I'm more concerned with cars taking certain route to pass by a restaurant that is paying for advertisement. But I can understand how the whole covid narrative gave some pople an excuse to feel opressed.
    • copo233 5y ago
      Even assuming that you are correct in your absolutely ridiculous assumption that self-driving cars are about controlling the movement of the population, why would you think it would be government control and not control of the company that is trying to develop the self-driving technology?
• YZF 5y ago
  Hm, when they took away the defog button did they control for cold/wet/rain? Sure, the defog button isn't used much when you don't need to defog, but when you do, you need it right away! I'm a big Model 3 fan but I hate the new UI. At least let us use the new docking areas for every possible function. Up till now the windshield wiper control was the biggest model 3 UX issue. When I took delivery of my model 3 it started raining and I almost had an accident trying to figure out how to get the wipers working. The auto-wiper function sucks big time. But now there's more fairly important functions that are really hard to get to, from annoying (driver profiles) to safety (defog). This is really hard to understand and concerning.
• erpellan 5y ago
  “We collected data all summer long, from all over California. Nobody pressed the defrost button! Guess we can get rid of that” Touchscreens for any functions related to operating the vehicle should be regulated out of existence IMO. It’s a car not a phone. The optimisation function should be how much you can do without needing to look away from the road.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  If it's anything like most of the software industry, being data driven means you look for data to support what you wanted to do already, but pretend you're being objective and rigorous.
  • fortysixdegrees 5y ago
    This is the best comment I've seen on HN in years.
• tolien 5y ago
  > Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console? If ever there was a case of “you break it, you bought it”.
• sgustard 5y ago
  I doubt the move was "data driven". Elon has made it very clear his vision is to make the car automated enough that the driver doesn't need to interact with the UI. If anything, he's intentionally trying to change user behavior and train drivers they don't "need" these controls.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    I don't very much trust Elon's vision in this regard, with respect to the near-to-medium term (say, the next 5 years or so). It seems very unlikely that within the next 5 years technology will have advanced sufficiently to enable that level of automated driving in day-to-day traffic. He might have intuition in this area, but one individual's intuition is a poor substitute for actual data.
  • tomc1985 5y ago
    Can we please have all these supposedly super smart dudes stop trying to think for us? If there is one thing that I hear way too much out of intelligent, moneyed minds, is that people need to be controlled.
• accrual 5y ago
  > I'm sure the decision was "data driven" based on real life usage. This is also how we ended up with the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and beyond, then later other places within Windows (Explorer, Paint, etc). Microsoft essentially collected click statistics across various UIs and used those for decision making to choose which buttons would be big and which would be buried under small icons or sub-menus. I'm used to it now, but it was jarring and took a while.