Continuing?? Most Chinese domestic market cars can't be sold in the west because they're to dangerous or polluting. I'm sure they're getting stricter on both fronts but they're still behind developed countries.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
Euro 7 takes effect in a couple of months. For practical purposes, that means that anything on sale in Europe already has to comply; no-one’s going to launch a car on the basis that any they don’t sell by November become a waste product.
Yeah so in like 2014 you would see chinese EV's mostly when they caught fire, exploded, or their batteries died in like 20 minutes.
The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.
Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.
So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.
The current top three auto-makers by sales in Australia are Toyota, BYD, then Ford. They might not have quite the same market penetration in Europe but BYD vehicles are sold there, and some have 5 star safety ratings.
I'm talking about cars made for the Chinese domestic market, not made for the Australian market. Remember the point here is that China is super reasonable about safety in its domestic cars compared to the US.
I hope there's more "no, your 'luxury' feature is just unsafe."
Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.
Yeah I dunno, I own one in the extremely rainy PNW and it’s fine. I was very apprehensive of using the touch screen for basic functions also but it turns out you don’t need to.
You can install aftermarket stalks. They're actually quite good now, and are available for 3/Y, S/X. (dont' know about truck) Some early models used adhesive (SEXY brand?), skip those.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
Actually the original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
also the interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
Tesla also cheaped out and didn't use a normal rain sensor for the wipers to enable auto mode, instead using "Tesla Vision". I've heard nothing but bad things about it.
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
Before I bought a car, these articles would come out every now and then "X recalls 500 million cars over blinking light on dash" and I'd think that was crazy. "They just refund the owners of the car? But what if they don't want to give them up". Then I bought one and it turns out everyone gets these recalls all the time. I'm sitting at my desk and there's a Subaru Emissions Recall WRA-26 right now next to me. And the Tesla recalls are just an OTA update?
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
> Tesla (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and Tesla Motors (Beijing) Co., Ltd. will apply warning labels free of charge to vehicles covered by the recall. They will also use an over-the-air (OTA) update to upgrade the window-control software, adding a strategy to lower the windows after an accident, thereby reducing the safety risk. Because some vehicles are already equipped with the warning labels, those vehicles will not need to have the labels applied again.
Okay, so they'll put some stickers and update the software OTA. I mean, come on. What are we talking about here.
... 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.
Gen 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.
It'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.
Oh, 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.
> 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.
Allowing 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.
It's probably because they started mandating reverse cameras. Which is great, but any cars without screens suddenly had them. At that point, it was probably cheaper to put the rest of the functionality on the screen.
I agree with the point, i hate the touch screens, and i think you should be able to control almost everything without taking your eyes off the road. The blindfold made me think of some david blaine stunt.
I 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.
at some point, beyond aesthetics, sometimes a function is done and doesn't need tinkering anymore.... especially in something like a car that is 2 tonnes of steel and metal...
Hardware controls might cost more to develop (do they?) but on the other side they don't get any modification during the life of a car. No need to spend money in updates. Given the long history of those controls they are well understood by the car maker and by the car owners.
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
We 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.
Here 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.
NY state has 30% tint law, but my Uber driver last night was more than that.
I’ve heard tint being enforced with other violations, but i believe window tint analyzers are in short supply or costly, and they have to share. Which leads to longer roadside detainments.
I'm surprised NY allows tinting of the whole front windshield. Here in AZ we're bound by the (stupid) AS-1 line. Tinting here would help more than in NY.
It’s cultural; style over function—-unless the function is more traffic deaths (for which I have no numbers of traffic deaths involving tinted windows, I freely admit. I have had uncomfortable interactions with tinted cars on the streets and highways, so they have earned my permanent enmity).
The trouble is both the cops and bully boys like tinted windows the same as acculturated Captain America and the Red Skull.
> 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.
The USA doesn't mandate red turn signals. They can be red or amber. Plenty of BMWs with amber turn signals. Although the current one has red turn signals.
I'd say on modern cars it's less bad, the turn signal is usually a strip, and the brake light is larger, joined with a 3rd brake light.
But on one of those old Ford vans, with incandescent red brake/turn signals with no/often broken 3rd light: you have to wait a second before you can determine if the person is braking / indicating.
There 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.
You'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.
The 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.
No 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"
Having 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.
When 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.
One 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.
Always 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.
What? 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 ?
In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.
Would it help to add a surface behind the side mirrors so that it's more aerodynamic? I'm thinking something that stretches from the car body to the side mirrors.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
How about a mirror that is only there when you need it? The car could detect from a combination of your eye movement and from its own monitoring of the road behind when you are likely to check the mirror, and pop it out then.
This sounds like a lot of overengineering - you need reliable low latency eye movement detection and a motor mechanism that can react that fast but withstand the air forces at highway speeds. Just to deliver a worse UI - imagine the complaints about how Tesla doesn't detect my eyes unless I look just right. But 6% fuel usage sounds like an enormous saving that would be worth some of your complexity budget.
Yes, you can make mechanical handles that are flush with the car body. In which you push one end and then the other end sticks out, allowing you to open the door.
The fancy electric handles are just for show. They’re cool looking and engineers salivate over this stuff. But they’re a bad idea.
this is a good move by China, hopefully its the end of the line for hidden door handles for EV's everywhere. Some things are cool but impractical; others are cool but dangerous.
"Great" except for those nagging problems in Xinjiang, that nasty business with trade in prisoner's organs, forced labour camps, lack of freedom of association and expression, the problem with people forcibly being disappeared by the state, the heavy omnipresent censorship and many other similarly repressive policies.
Hey, CCP bot, please explain the downvote. If you disagree with what I write here and can prove what I wrote is in error we'd all learn something. If what I wrote is correct and you just hope other knee-jerk downvoters will follow your example I'd say get lost.
I personally don’t find a thin corporate layer in the West controlling all facets of life to be a functionally different user experience than a system where everything is theoretically effectively nationalized and is the government controlling all facets of life
In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
It doesn’t really matter if most of the deplatforming is social and corporate digital fiefdoms, or directly from the state run “Ministry”. It’s too similar at this point to single them out, even when it comes to disappearing and held without a way out. Every country has marginalized people, single party states don’t have assurances for dissent and Xinjiang already has economic sanctions against it. Check your privilege, if you aren’t marginalized in the target region, the check passed, proceed
Realise that saying something like this against the Chinese regime in China will land you in hot water while you won't have any problems now.
> In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
Who can't you criticise in the West? What happens when you criticise them anyway?
These defences of authoritarian regimes like that in China almost read like that old 'Soviet joke' where a westerner says "at least I can criticise the US government without fear of repercussion" whereupon the Soviet citizen answers "I can also criticise the US government without any fear of repercussion".
China is so paradoxical that its impossible to explain how it works without running afoul of their regulation, at this point I would petition for an educational exemption with the party
Essentially anything that is seen as undermining the “territorial unity” of what the party considers China will be reprimanded in harsh ways, including expropriation and jail time, for foreigners a public apology is often enough
Knowing that, it’s easy to navigate. You can live your life there doing normal stuff without running into party politics the whole time, thats not controversial to me, thats not oppression to me and hundreds of millions of people. Democracy failed in China multiple times, its not going to happen, the last time because people wanted to democratically vote in more marxism after they realized the Standing Committee are the best capitalists. The party is what it is, they won. And I wouldn’t say that there, if you cant read the room you’re excised out the population. I kind of dont mind, US prisons are filled with mentally impaired people too, for everyone else the rulebook is easy to follow, its just not different enough for me to match your energy
And yes “but we can talk about it here” means absolutely nothing to me, the consensus mechanism has totally failed while that quip is used to shut down all discussion as if its better. If you dont have citizenship status the government is absolutely arrested, kidnapping and disappearing people for their speech and expression here, when it doesnt match the government position
Yeah whoop de do, we havent had a military coup and we can chat about it, I can navigate what the state capitalists are doing
Yes, limiting military power access to political power was a great move. 25 years ago, and limited military waste. This is also why I don't believe China will invade Taiwan anytime soon, removing military families removed most of the jingoist part of the CCP.
The issue now is that the CCP is now a millionaire club, which means China will probably soon start to devolve into the US, but without a lot of freedom and privacy rights US citizens have.
I’m wondering if a reinterpretation of that national security article in their constitution could weaken its use to control all facets of life
The rest of the constitution is at parity with western ideals but its been undermined by that one clause, all nominally communist countries fall into the same dilemma
That, and I realize that a single party system is effectively a partyless system, rule of law would therefore be going through motions, but I like the direction things are currently going there
Article shows a picture of and then starts talking about exterior door handles, but then:
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
They could've made exterior door handles that look exactly the same as they currently do, but without adding all this additional fragile complexity: put them on a pivot, so you press one end and the other pops up so you can pull on it...
It's not "recessed" that's the issue. It's "mechanical".[1]
China is requiring door handles openable from both inside and outside without power, and without any difficulty finding the release.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
I miss being able to simply wish folks ill and hope they get what they "deserve".
Instead, as I get older all I can think of is how horrible it would be to possesses some vague idea of escape but have to deal with a smoke or rising water while trying to discern the inobvious escape route to save you from the fancy grave you've dug for yourself.
Horror is a much less satisfying than schadenfreude.
dogshit design. an uber driver picked me up from the airport a few weeks ago, was coming back from japan, jetlagged to all hell, only to find... no door handles. had to get her ass out of the car to open the door for me because I just could not be bothered with this anti-design nonsense. I'm tapping the door like an ipad like some idiot and nothing was opening. dogshit design.
Someone with an old and a new car drove the old one into a canal. The doors didn't open because the water was up to the window. He cranked open the window to let the water in, eventually the door opened. He stayed perfectly calm. The funny part was that he didn't know what would have happened if he took the other car. That thought scared him more than the dive and continued to bother him for years.
The recalled vehicles will have a warning label stuck on the interior door and receive a software update to automatically lower the windows in a crash.
The designs have come under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
124 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadI wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory, or just try and place a tariff on normal doors.
As long as they’re steam-powered.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.
Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.
So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.
Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- non-round steering thing (model s/x yoke, cybertruck squircle)
- removing stalks
- touch-sensitive buttons on steering wheel
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
Actually the original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
also the interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
I don't think that's the case here.
Translated with ChatGPT, it reads:
> Tesla (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and Tesla Motors (Beijing) Co., Ltd. will apply warning labels free of charge to vehicles covered by the recall. They will also use an over-the-air (OTA) update to upgrade the window-control software, adding a strategy to lower the windows after an accident, thereby reducing the safety risk. Because some vehicles are already equipped with the warning labels, those vehicles will not need to have the labels applied again.
Okay, so they'll put some stickers and update the software OTA. I mean, come on. What are we talking about here.
Reverse these trends. They all suck and unsafe.
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
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.
Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
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.
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.
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.
A button for a car is designed and tested to last 10 years. Software on the other hand...
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
In fact they are hated so much people are deliberately buying older less safe cars instead.
That's what car manufacturers make you think. Who do you think it (paid) lobby for those features to be mandatory in new cars ?
Fully agree
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.
Enforcement, no?
NY state has 30% tint law, but my Uber driver last night was more than that.
I’ve heard tint being enforced with other violations, but i believe window tint analyzers are in short supply or costly, and they have to share. Which leads to longer roadside detainments.
What makes them so difficult to test?
https://dmv.ny.gov/inspections/tinted-windows
The trouble is both the cops and bully boys like tinted windows the same as acculturated Captain America and the Red Skull.
The USA doesn't mandate red turn signals. They can be red or amber. Plenty of BMWs with amber turn signals. Although the current one has red turn signals.
I'd say on modern cars it's less bad, the turn signal is usually a strip, and the brake light is larger, joined with a 3rd brake light.
But on one of those old Ford vans, with incandescent red brake/turn signals with no/often broken 3rd light: you have to wait a second before you can determine if the person is braking / indicating.
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.
And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
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.
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"
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
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.
which look like an arrow pointing the opposite direction to the one the driver is indicating for.
Still a good 42 million or so short of, say, a Toyota Corolla.
> https://medium.com/@arunchidambaram/is-teslas-door-handle-an...
In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
This sounds like a lot of overengineering - you need reliable low latency eye movement detection and a motor mechanism that can react that fast but withstand the air forces at highway speeds. Just to deliver a worse UI - imagine the complaints about how Tesla doesn't detect my eyes unless I look just right. But 6% fuel usage sounds like an enormous saving that would be worth some of your complexity budget.
I think Tesla looks for efficiencies wherever possible, and any alignment with aesthetic goals is an easy win.
If the Tesla door handles were really because they care that much about aerodynamics, their cars would look more like the 1st Gen Honda Insight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Insight#/media/File:Hond...
The fancy electric handles are just for show. They’re cool looking and engineers salivate over this stuff. But they’re a bad idea.
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
Maybe Xi getting rid of generals in the party really helped many other high ranking officials step in line and step up in doing things for the people
In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
It doesn’t really matter if most of the deplatforming is social and corporate digital fiefdoms, or directly from the state run “Ministry”. It’s too similar at this point to single them out, even when it comes to disappearing and held without a way out. Every country has marginalized people, single party states don’t have assurances for dissent and Xinjiang already has economic sanctions against it. Check your privilege, if you aren’t marginalized in the target region, the check passed, proceed
> In both systems, anybody with a pulse knows what they can’t talk about. Who you can’t criticize to keep your standing in society
Who can't you criticise in the West? What happens when you criticise them anyway?
These defences of authoritarian regimes like that in China almost read like that old 'Soviet joke' where a westerner says "at least I can criticise the US government without fear of repercussion" whereupon the Soviet citizen answers "I can also criticise the US government without any fear of repercussion".
Essentially anything that is seen as undermining the “territorial unity” of what the party considers China will be reprimanded in harsh ways, including expropriation and jail time, for foreigners a public apology is often enough
Knowing that, it’s easy to navigate. You can live your life there doing normal stuff without running into party politics the whole time, thats not controversial to me, thats not oppression to me and hundreds of millions of people. Democracy failed in China multiple times, its not going to happen, the last time because people wanted to democratically vote in more marxism after they realized the Standing Committee are the best capitalists. The party is what it is, they won. And I wouldn’t say that there, if you cant read the room you’re excised out the population. I kind of dont mind, US prisons are filled with mentally impaired people too, for everyone else the rulebook is easy to follow, its just not different enough for me to match your energy
And yes “but we can talk about it here” means absolutely nothing to me, the consensus mechanism has totally failed while that quip is used to shut down all discussion as if its better. If you dont have citizenship status the government is absolutely arrested, kidnapping and disappearing people for their speech and expression here, when it doesnt match the government position
Yeah whoop de do, we havent had a military coup and we can chat about it, I can navigate what the state capitalists are doing
The issue now is that the CCP is now a millionaire club, which means China will probably soon start to devolve into the US, but without a lot of freedom and privacy rights US citizens have.
The rest of the constitution is at parity with western ideals but its been undermined by that one clause, all nominally communist countries fall into the same dilemma
That, and I realize that a single party system is effectively a partyless system, rule of law would therefore be going through motions, but I like the direction things are currently going there
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61xdWAXl2ML.jpg
...no electricity required to operate those.
door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
Except for those which still have chromed handles, I think this is the case for the majority of cars. It's not the colour that's the problem.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
[1] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/03/WS69818ec6a310d...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...
carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle
This reads like satire.
Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
1. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.
2. Press the red tab to remove the access door.
3. Pull the mechanical release cable forward."
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...
Instead, as I get older all I can think of is how horrible it would be to possesses some vague idea of escape but have to deal with a smoke or rising water while trying to discern the inobvious escape route to save you from the fancy grave you've dug for yourself.
Horror is a much less satisfying than schadenfreude.
The designs have come under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
If the power fails, how will the windows open?
The door handles on my Y are blacked out and actually hard to find at night sometimes.
I don’t get Elons obsession with the black out look.
Here's a different way of doing it: https://stwinglist01.blob.core.windows.net/media/NarBC_ny/8e...
General aviation manufacturers figured this out decades and decades ago. I really don't understand the Tesla engineer mindset.