This is bad, but what Tesla has done is much worse, not least because they will probably lead the way for bad decisions industry wide, and anything "novel" they

This is bad, but what Tesla has done is much worse, not least because they will probably lead the way for bad decisions industry wide, and anything "novel" they do is probably a sign of things to come from other manufacturers trying to be "hip". There is no longer anything useful on the dash above the wheel. No speedometer, odometer, battery level indicator, repair lights, nothing. All of it is integrated into the infotainment unit on the dead center of the dash. Similarly, there are no knobs or real buttons anywhere on the center of the dash; it's all touch screen. All of it. I wanted to moan about it the entire time I was in the car, but I didn't want to just complain about my friend's nice new vehicle. The F-150 lightning I test-drove similarly has all of the climate control and music controls stuffed into infotainment center with no physical knobs or dials to be found. If you read online, you will also find that its infotainment center is notoriously slow. Otherwise, it's a very nice truck. Tesla is basically the Apple of EVs right now. Leading the way in some really interesting technology and features while causing potentially irreparable long-term damage to the health of the industry overall (think storage-tier pricing and the removal of all but USB-C ports/headphone jacks). Edit: found this video in the Twitter thread linked in the article 1. Actually what the Cadillac is doing here (particularly with the doors) is aggregious. Tesla has added an additional step to opening doors from the outside (you push your thumb in first and then grab the handle) which is something you can become accustomed to in one fluid motion. At least it looks kind of nice and is only mildly less convenient than traditional handles. The push-to-release-pull-side-of-door-because-theres-no-handle mechanism on the Cadillac is absolutely braindead. Seeing this video and multiple other new cars in person, I've also noticed a disturbing trend of changing the hatch opening mechanism. Before: manually open the hatch assisted by hydraulics which prop the door open until manually closed. Now: automatically open the hatch (slowly) on a button press and close it (slowly) on a button press. What's the problem here? Apart from being actually worse UX once the novelty wears off, the second mechanism is much more failure prone over the lifetime of the vehicle. The nice salesman at the Ford dealership actually told me off for trying to manually close the frunk on the Lightning because he was afraid I'd break it! My honest opinion is that these changes all point in one direction but cut two ways. 1. Increase revenue by increasing standardization and eliminating many pieces from the manufacturing process (at the expense of UX/longevity) and 2. Mitigate the lost recurring revenue due to how much more reliable EVs are than ICEs by introducing new failure modes masked as modern features for plausible deniability. 1. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/sirCpkqvpE0?feature=share https://m.youtube.com/shorts/sirCpkqvpE0?feature=share