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Hidden door handles, button open doors when inside the car, only touch screen buttons, rear red turn signal lights. Reverse these trends. They all suck and uns
by aurareturn 2mo ago
Hidden door handles, button open doors when inside the car, only touch screen buttons, rear red turn signal lights.
Reverse these trends. They all suck and unsafe.
Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too. It's very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny. For you people out there who buy cars with red blinking signal lights, I hate you.
- vatsachak 2mo agoIt's almost like an EV should be regular car with a battery
- frollogaston 2mo agoAt least Tesla was the first to make an EV that looked normal on the outside.
- rsynnott 2mo ago... Huh? The Nissan Leaf and Renault ZoE looked fairly normal. And the eGolf looked _so_ normal that people didn't realise VW made electric cars. (I'm fairly sure that the reason the id3 and 4 look a bit weird is a direct reaction to that.) Only seriously weird-looking early (current generation, excluding oddities from the 80s) electric car I can think of is the BMW id3.
- frollogaston 2mo agoGen 1 leaf looked super weird like it was making sure you know it's an EV, never saw a Renault ZoE in real life but it looks like the same kind of weird, eGolf looked normal but was after the Tesla Model S. And the Tesla Roadster predated the Leaf, but I'm not counting it because nobody really cared about Tesla until the S. Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
- ZeroGravitas 2mo agoIt's commonly accepted that the Leaf Gen 1 was weird because it was an EV, but in reality it's weird because it was a new generation of Japanese design. There are non-EV models Nissan released in Japan around the same time with the same design language that you could combine together to get something that looked like a gen 1 leaf, like the front of the first gen Nissan Note.
- antisthenes 2mo agoNo more or less weird than some other Nissan cars, like the Juke for example, or the Cube (not very popular in the US).
- rsynnott 2mo agoOh, sorry, yeah, the eUp (looked just like an Up) was the first modern VW one, not the eGolf. Design shown off in 2010, full production in 2013. Again, looked just like an Up. I’d say a first gen Leaf looked fairly typical of small Nissan cars from that era, tbh; all their small cars looked a bit like that. And a Zoe looked pretty much the same as a Clio of like era. Interestingly, the Renault 5, their new electric car in the size category, is self-consciously weird-looking (you can get it in bright green as a standard option!), and seems to be doing very well. Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
- jerlam 2mo ago> Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less. Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
- hulitu 2mo ago> Tesla was the first to make an EV that looked normal Your definition of normal makes me suspicious. I thought GM were "the first to make an EV that looked normal". Tesla was the first to make a "software defined vehicle", 10 years before this became mainstream. Tesla is the Google of EVs: the UX sucks, but everybody wants to copy it.
- frollogaston 2mo agoSuspicious of what? GM had the EV1 then the original Volt, which looked ridiculous.
- pudgywalsh 2mo agoAllowing Silicon Valley dorks to redefine the established UIs of cars was one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years. Ultimately it's cost shaving, but it spread like a cancer to other manufacturers owing mostly to a TikTok-brained customer base (to their own detriment). It's one of the reasons I refuse to own a new car. Zero reason to hide critical controls behind a touch screen. My daily driver has all tactile controls. I can operate wipers, climate, radio, and all critical functions blindfolded.
- roncesvalles 2mo agoThe reason is cost savings. It's cheaper to modify software UI than it is to modify hardware UI.
- szundi 2mo ago[dead]
- cicko 2mo agoThere's no need to modify the hardware UI. It worked fine for decades.
- spockz 2mo agoI heard a very simple explanation from a car engineer involved with setting up the factory pipelines. Each button has a limited life time, each button has a particular chance of being doa, or a particular chance of being fitted badly, some fail prematurely. All of this leads to an increase in “failures” in seperate steps of the manufacturing pipeline, assembly of dashboard, assembly of car, after the car is completed, after it is shipped to dealer, and after the new owner picks it up, during the lifetime of the car. Each of those moments occurs a significantly increased cost of replacing the button. By simply removing buttons and knobs, this source of failure rate goes down and it appears cheaper. It is also the reason behind going from 4 buttons for the windows to 3 (left, right, and a toggle for front/rear) According to him the monetary savings were significant enough to proceed with it. Personally, I wish they wouldn’t. But I believed the numbers.
- wilg 2mo agoTesla several years ago returned to amber turn signal lights the US (and always had them outside the US).
- versteegen 2mo ago> Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too. I'm surprised. But it shouldn't be up to Tesla; it's illegal and they never get on the road in countries with proper regulations.
- bestouff 2mo agoYou will never see those in the EU.
- Zanfa 2mo agoI wish. Never used to really see any until recently. Looks like a brake light malfunction if you're not expecting it.
- bigfatkitten 2mo agoAustralia generally follows EU for vehicle safety regs, and red turn signals were banned for new vehicles in 1973.
- Bimos 2mo agoNever see this in China and didn't know it exists before.
- spockz 2mo agoWe do see them here occasionally on US import cars. (NL) Tend to be older models like those long and wide models with benches in front and back and very loose suspension.
- ndsipa_pomu 2mo agoHere in the UK, older cars are often exempt from various safety standards. Otherwise, recent imported vehicles have to comply with e.g. headlights dipping the wrong way which is common as we drive on the left.
- xtiansimon 2mo ago
- baybal2 2mo ago[dead]
- userbinator 2mo agoAgree, except the red turn signals --- they've been the standard here for at least half a century... very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny. Perhaps because they're too small and the LEDs are not diffused enough. Red means Rear, and white means front, which is why reversing lights are white and front turn signals are (should be) yellow.
- Bimos 2mo ago> Red means Rear, and white means front And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
- Freedom2 2mo agoThere's commenters here who genuinely believe the hidden door handles have a non-negligible effect on the aerodynamics of these cars.
- bdhdhduuyd 2mo agoA 0.5-1% efficiency gain is not much.
- otherme123 2mo agoThere are traditional door handles that are practically flush with the rest of the car (semi-hidden is the name I believe). If you are after aerodynamics, you could copy the gas door / cover from any car after 1980. There are bigger losers in car aerodynamics. The worse one is the frontal section, that current models seem to ignore, making bigger and bigger cars almost for the sake of it. Then they have forgotten parts like the underside, that could be covered with something light and smooth for decent gains, but are instead an aerodynamic nightmare because nobody is looking there. There are cars with Cd around 0.2 (Xiaomi SU7, Lucid Air, Tesla S, Hyundai Ioniq...). The Mercedes A-Class Saloon since 2018 and BMW 5 have a Cd of 0.22, and they look like normal cars, with normal door handles and normal mirrors, but carefully designs of the underside, air around the wheels and rear drag reduction. The Mercedes include active aero around the engine, shutting the grill when cooling is not needed. But they keep selling SUVS with Cd over 0.35, up to 0.45 with flushed door handles "for the aero". Please.
- 6510 2mo agoYou'd want things to go fast after the crash too. I've had fascinating conversation with people about safety measures in general. Many prefer to imagine it wont happen. Inspections are still real. They cant imagine them away.
- boomlinde 2mo agoThe whole thing would be a good example of dismantling Chesterton's fence, if the advantages of the traditional design of these things weren't obvious.
- dist-epoch 2mo agoNo it wouldn't, because there is no obvious fence here. You can't call any change "dismantling Chesterton's fence" - "Windows made the corners of the windows round, users hated it, obvious example of Chesterton's fence"
- boomlinde 2mo agoHaving visible door handles is a safety feature. Having clear turn indicators with a distinct color is a safety feature. You have simply not examined what the fence is there for.
- sudahtigabulan 2mo agoWhen you can only see half of a car, the red turn signal lights also make it impossible to tell quickly whether the car is about to get into your lane or the driver's foot is on the brakes. This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
- RachelF 2mo agoOne more trend I'd like to reverse is the always on cellular data connection, reporting back to the car manufacturer where you are and how you are driving.
- spockz 2mo agoAlways on cellular data is fine, and useful for many things. They should just stop gathering and transmitting the data to the manufacturer. Cars above a certain price point need a tracker to be installed in order to get insured as well. Also not necessarily a privacy problem.
- kotaKat 2mo agoCan I extend the turn signal thing to "can we please recall and ban Hyundai's shitty H-lights on the back of their new vehicles"? https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_mousetrap_santafe2.jpg https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_m... Those turn and brake signals are nearly unreadable at distance now. Even worse when snow-covered.
- FireBeyond 2mo agoShout out to the Mini Cooper's UK flag lights: https://unsung.aresluna.org/should-be-no-trouble-at-all-for-a-driver-to-understand/ https://unsung.aresluna.org/should-be-no-trouble-at-all-for-... which look like an arrow pointing the opposite direction to the one the driver is indicating for.
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoYet most popular car in the world. You need to touch grass or something.
- defrost 2mo agoBy "current fad" (and waning) metric, sure. Still a good 42 million or so short of, say, a Toyota Corolla.
- euroderf 2mo agoWhat? I thought the auto industry had standardised long ago on yellow for turn signals. When did this red-blinker information abomination make it to market ?
- OptionOfT 2mo agoMandatory video on red turn signals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1lZ9n2bxWA