I recently bought a new car for the first time in 16 years. I had all the same concerns - my Acura MDX solved them all. It’s not perfect (has opaque shade for panoramic roof) but the number of physical buttons (dozens) is glorious. And the door handles are great.
Ugh the glass roofs. I don't know why people like them. "Why yes sir, I would love to get beat down on by the hot sun while lacking airflow over me and risk an expensive repair bill from a falling walnut!"
- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
I currently live in Seattle and drive a 4WD Toyota Tacoma with a rooftop tent on the back and frequently enter parking garages. I know the height of my truck and was careful to get a setup where the rooftop tent isn't gratuitously high. I think everything is still a little under 6' which is fine in just about every parking garage.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage.
If your truck is that tall, I suggest measuring it and recording the height. After that, you'll find that just about every low-hanging garage, drive-up, bridge, etc. has a height listed. Over 9.5'? Don't try and drive through the Arboretum, as the signs will tell you.
Opening the roof...
That's a sunroof, not a panoramic glass roof being discussed.
I love it, makes the interior feel light and open and i never experienced it being super hot or baking my scalp, there is a coating on it making it very different from just a clear pane. Model 3, 195cm.
It's fine for a passenger, especially in the back seat. But as a driver, it adds a potentially bright source of light right at the top of your vision, and that can be annoying as hell. I covered my roof and I felt more relaxed since my eyes didn't have to adjust if I accidentally looked too far upwards.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
What make and model?
I have not sat in a modern car where this have been a problem, ever.
I drive a model 3 Tesla with glass roof and there is simple no issues with Sun glare from the sunsglasses like filter on the glass roof.
Indoors most people indeed love windows, even moreso if they are roof windows.
I agree dont hang a spotlight in your face, but that is hadly the same as the Sun, otherwise how do people their houses walking, running biking without roofs?
The light is not incapacitating, it's simply an unnecessary annoyance.
People do love windows, but people also love window blinds that they close when the light points directly into a room. Especially if you are forced to face that window.
People who spend a lot of time outside gravitate towards wearing hats and sunglasses.
Having lived in West Richland before (in the Tri-cities, on Red Mountain, scrub and all), I don't think thats really true. Well, it is definitely sunnier than Seattle, but nowhere near Phoenix. It is more normal than special.
Tourism board proudly advertises the 300 days of sun on big bill boards at the airport in Pasco, and the hot summers are honestly worse than Phoenix, as there's humidity
I hate them too, its why i went with the toyota bz. They have the very loud fabric rollover cover. It was worth the annoyances of a toyota not yet being fully baked as an electric car to have a way to have the stupid glass roof for my kids and delrte it when i am in there. If tpyota can release a fully baked electric car (one pedal, self driving, etc) i will upgrade
Yes, but then they have other design flaws too. There's basically only 1 brand selling EVs in Australia that aren't a compromise (to me at least) in one way or another. Skoda and upcoming VW cars seem to be bucking the trend.
I wonder if there's a blog or something that tells the story of how good car design went off the rails. I'm pretty sure that there was a culture of design that gradually worked out what a great car is like until somewhere in the 2010s - and then got flushed down the toilet, but I don't know anything about it.
I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"
But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.
> But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens
We should never underestimate people's weird desires but this is mostly not it IMO. There was a new generation that felt the need to rebel against old established stuff and of course is now painfully rediscovering why this stuff was established in the first place.
Infuriating to watch, mind you. But also predictable, like watching bots play StarCraft against each other.
I blame Musk. Maybe I'm way off base, but most of these trends were first highly visible in Tesla products. They may not have created each dumb UX decision, but certainly were one of the first to put them all into a single car.
I remember the first time I tried to go to lunch in a friend's Tesla. I couldn't get in or out of the stupid thing without instructions. And getting in would be next to impossible for somebody with bad rheumatoid arthritis and bad fingers - the "push with thumb, while pulling with fingers" is awkward at best.
I would also like to find out what happened here. Here's a video with a BMW designer where they're asked point blank about some design aspects of their new iX3 (which seems like an impressive car, total clean sheet EV design) and when asked about the door handles - which are flush, but pop out, which isn't too bad IMHO - basically said they do it because it looks cool, any aero benefits are just the cherry on top.
> I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!" But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens
Be careful not to confuse what consumers want with what marketers try to make customers care about. Nobody cares about screen footage, but the ads will still push that as something that their car has over others or because they want to shift how consumers view the product. Convincing customers that a cheaper/worse design is actually a feature they should find desirable is an age old trick, so ads aren't a good indicator for what consumers want, at least not until they become successful enough that consumers start blindly requesting what the ads have trained them to look for. Then you get a "it's got electrolytes" situation.
I am so happy to get rid of physical buttons. When entering a rental car I often feel like I've entered the cockpit of an airplane. I think Toyota bz4x has 20 separate buttons on the steering wheel alone.
I am exactly opposite, I feel like touch screens in cars are especially bad ux. If I get into a rental especially I don't want to go hunting through all menus to find out where to set what settings, which tiny slider to pull to do change the volume. Where to turn off the lane keep assist or adaptive cruise control.
I rented a car not an ipad multimedia system, touch screens in cars are totally counter intuitive and often don't have the basic functionally easily accessible. Also usually the ui is laggy.
Tactile buttons can be pressed while keeping your eyes on the road and your surroundings. Touchscreens are inherently visual and require looking. Relative positioning of differently shaped buttons help guide your fingers to what you need.
My 2021 Nissan Leaf checks everything, though the manual charge port release is hard to get to and under the hood so it only kind of counts. You can use it in a pinch.
Utterly maintenance free. Utterly reliable. Drives great. 220 miles range on a full charge and it does about get that if you're not using HVAC heavily, not driving with a lead foot, and it's not extremely cold. Not horribly expensive. Would buy again, and plan to keep until it dies which for this thing might be a while.
Only bad thing is the ChaDeMO (or however you caps it) fast charging port. If I needed to fast charge a lot I'd buy a CCS dongle. They are now made but aren't cheap since it can't just be a dumb dongle, but apparently they work. I also think there are NACS dongles, or you can double-dongle that (NACS->CCS->ChaDeMO) if you really want to go there. Lol.
Cool, my EV checks all these boxes. And as for the rear view mirror, I have the best of both worlds. Regular mirror, but if my back is full to the top (wagon), I flip a switch and it's a screen. I guess I got lucky since I didn't even know of any of these pitfalls when I impulse bought my EV strictly for the acceleration.
As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?
That correlates with my research too (which is at the end of the blog post if you read that far - fair enough if you didn't, it's a long post!). Skoda's design philosophy is "Simply Clever" and I guess they actually believe it rather than being a marketing gimmick.
The lack of buttons is also extremely annoying on kitchen appliances. To open my microwave door, I need to make sure my finger is clean (it’s a kitchen!) and also adds a very annoying latency between the “pressing” and the door opening.
I got a used 2023 Chevy Bolt and initially disregarded one pedal driving was an absurd and unnecessary feature, but now I think I would skip a car that doesn’t have that feature.
I've never tried it but can you explain why you like it?
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
Anecdotally, to me it's just more fun. It increases range by relying entirely on the regenerative braking and relegating the disc brakes to an "emergency" role. For freeway driving in traffic it's also more intuitive, since you don't have to balance coasting/braking and can just ease off the pedal more to slow down quickly. Muscle memory can definitely be hard to break though, when I'm in a hurry I sometimes forget to enable single-pedal and drive for a bit before I realize it. The car we have (Chevy Bolt) has a separate regenerative brake control as a paddle on the back of the steering wheel for use in "regular" mode, but it's awkwardly placed.
As you suggest, it smooths out your driving habits. You end up balancing the accelerator according to your desired velocity. Need to go slower? Back off the pedal until you hit the mark. The regenerative braking kicks in so it slows down quickly, sort of like light-to-medium braking. It’s more responsive than you might think. Need to go faster? Press the accelerator as usual. No more going back and forth between gas and brake, which makes it less exhausting in stop-and-go traffic. You’re also maximizing regenerative breaking, so that’s increased efficiency and less brake wear. That’s particularly good when you’re doing down hill.
Does the one pedal drive activate the brake lights, or why does it feel that a lot of evs don't show the brake lights when 'braking', which is really annoying when you drive behind them.
It does if the person driving sucks at using it. I've been driving OPD since 2018 and friends that get sick in Teslas driven by Uber drivers have told me they didn't get sick and wondered what I was doing different. The difference is I know how to use it.
>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons
Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.
Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.
I can tell you this annoyance - if you're behind a Kia Niro EV and you wonder why the driver is braking from 70 to 30 randomly all the way down a totally clear motorway, it's not the driver. The car's cameras have spotted a shadow across the road and decided it's an obstruction and panicked.
It's like being driven by an inexperienced and terribly stoned driver, paranoid, jumping at shadows, hallucinating shit all over the place.
The ones we have at work keep pinging and beeping about all sorts of shit - oh you're too close to that car over there! (Yeah the road is really narrow, shut up, you're the same width as my Range Rover, you fit just fine). Hey watch out for that twig that's 50 metres away across the field! Oh you wanted to change lanes? I don't think so! OMG WATCH OUT FOR THAT CAR YOU'RE ABOUT TO HIT! (yes because you steered back towards it you stupid machine).
Hey you look tired you should take a break right now so I'm going to ping and beep and make the instrument panel flash until you do, even though we only left five minutes ago and there's still over three hours to go!
Fuck everything to do with them. They're exhausting and stressful to drive. I don't know how anyone can cope with EVs.
None of these are specific to EVs or necessary for EVs or really have anything to do with the car being an EV. You'll note that literally all of these things are both possible in an ICEV and are actually present in ICEVs.
I have never driven an ICEV with them, but I take your point.
My current daily driver is a 30-year-old Range Rover that has none of the annoying beepy flashy distract-o-trons. It's far safer for other road users than the Kia because there's not much to do other than look out of the very large completely unobstructed windows and observe other traffic.
That's the other thing I missed out about the Kia - the whole middle third of the windscreen is completely blocked by this huge camera pod thing with a tiny little mirror at the bottom, about a hand's width above the dashboard.
This camera pod takes up the space on the windscreen where I actually need to look for pedestrians at crossings.
I've driven a couple of Teslas and I can't say I'm a fan of the interior. I mean, I'm not a fan of Elon Musk either, but let's leave that aside for now.
They feel really cheap and flimsy inside, definitely not an 80 grand car.
I don't like the gigantic screen in the middle. I don't want any kind of lit-up screen in my car, for anything.
> If you look at any other recent/modern car, ICE or EV, you'll find few brands have kept the "quality" interior that was characteristic of premium cars in ~2010 (yes, even German brands).
Teslas are sub-Dacia build quality. I know that US-market cars are kind of built down to a price point and therefore generally lower-quality to begin with, but that won't fly over here if you price yourself the same as something like a mid-spec VW.
> I understand the take, but since it's basically a must-have nowadays
Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
> Teslas are sub-Dacia build quality. I know that US-market cars are kind of built down to a price point and therefore generally lower-quality to begin with, but that won't fly over here if you price yourself the same as something like a mid-spec VW.
This sounds like another early M3 frequent complaint. I've had exactly 1 issue under warranty for my M3 2019, have recommended it to friends that are also very happy with theirs (I also live in the EU). My cousin leased a mid-spec VW, and I heard more complaints from him in 2 years than I've heard from the 6+ Tesla owners I know the past 8 years. So, again, german brands are not really indicative of quality anymore. And Tesla offers better features, performance and UX for the same price anyway (and a few other EV brands, but those cost more).
> Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
Because it provides a lot of useful information?
Above all I like having the integrated navigator without having to attach a mobile or TomTom to my windshield (which can move and fall). Also because if I do that, then I might get useless notifications and have them at eye-level, which is more distracting than a purpose-placed screen. Same reason I hate Android Auto / Apple CarPlay.
Perhaps you always move around in your area and know exactly where to go, but I often go to new places and I'd rather have the integrated navigator than a flimsy windshield phone holder (or even worse, people that drive by looking down at their phones every now and then).
Besides navigation, I can change the car settings and functionality easily with an intuitive UI that includes help, rather than having 200 buttons I don't remember the symbols and states of.
They just don't work half as well as when people did it manually.
Before the pandemic, it was rare to get blinded by a person's brights. Now if I drive at night it's just non-stop, and I live in an area with street lighting. (Some of this is also due to after market LEDs and possibly lost driving manners.)
It's extra obnoxious as a pedestrian because at best they get turned off way too late, or frequently not at all.
You mean to say "automatic high beams on Teslas". The ones on our Hyundai Ioniq work just fine, and have never blinded anyone. But in Redmond, WA, Teslas are everywhere and 90% if you're getting beamed, it's a Tesla. Their headlights are, in many cases, improperly aimed out of the factory and their shit auto high beams only make it worse.
It's not just Teslas. It's also hard to take an inventory of each vehicle blinding me because I'm being blinded while still paying attention to everything else.
There's also the issue where most people who use them clearly think they're fine, or they would stop.
Can confirm, my Ioniq5's auto high beams are great. I've felt the need to manually override them twice in nearly a year of ownership, both times were cross traffic that didn't have enough visible reflectors for the car's cameras to tell they were there.
I own a Tesla M3 2019, and recently drove 2-3yo MG HS as rental.
Glass roof: agree.
Buttons: yes, if Tesla would have kept the stalks and added 3-4 programmable buttons, I might rate them higher for a next car. That said, with the MG HS I guess I should have read 20+ pages of manual just to operate the 4-axis 3-rings windshield wipers stalk, not to mention that I could never engage cruise control at all despite trying; so my take on buttons is: something more than Tesla, way less than full-optional/overloaded car. At least with Tesla there's aftermarket options.
Smartphone/NFC: with the MG HS I had to perform a 4-point checklist every time I started it or parked it, and after 7y of Tesla it felt like a huge chore (esp. for quick stops). I've been very happy with Tesla and smartphone (failed maybe twice in 7y), and keep on me the Tesla card as backup (never needed it in the end). A key fob wouldn't annoy me if it worked just like the smartphone on my Tesla: if I don't have to do anything but keep it in my pocket, it'd be fine.
Door handles: the M3 handles are at the right intersection for me to be minimal, efficient and still mostly understandable (push, grab and pull). I can understand they're not regular grab and pull and not everyone is happy about it. I accidentally set off the MG HS alarm while the door and car were already unlocked by pressing the small button on the handle, which after seeing it for 10+y on many cars I still have absolutely no clue what it does (and most times it's only a placeholder for the small button).
Poorly calibrated ADAS: my experience with Tesla is extremely good and again strikes a good balance, while extremely poor applies to Hyundai i10, MG HS and others that I've driven recently. Also: the latter list seems to treat "silent ADAS" as a feature, while Tesla explicitly tells you whether auto-steer or cruise are being engaged or disconnecting, which seems a way better UX. I stopped using the lane assist on the MG HS because it'd randomly drop out even in mild curves without any clue whatsoever. The "auto-enable on restart" for these things is a reason I'll immediately drop the brand from the list of cars I may consider in the future (Hyundai i10).
I thought this was going to be about the noise, pollution, danger, bullying etc. Ah, no, it's about things that annoy the person on the inside of the car. So if both the people outside and inside the car hate the things, why are we stuck with them?
You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
> You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
We're already set to pass 1.5C warming in the next couple years, which was supposed to be the best-case scenario as of 10y ago. I don't know if you noticed, but batteries cost more to make because we're building the supply chain for them, after 100+y of "bog standard" vehicles left us with a world that each year registers new temperature records and increasingly violent weather events.
Counterpoint: it's safer and better! Not slowing when taking your foot off the accelerator is counterintuitive and dangerous and there's no reason for it to exist in a better world. Certainly not as a contrived reason to resist a safer and better design that we would have coalesced on if it were technically feasible before.
Also I drive my one-pedal driving car and my wife's ICE car and manage to not fuck it up all the time.
there's a big one that i'm surprised doesn't get more attention: motion sickness. Several friends of mine have commented that they avoid Uber's that are Teslas, because they are so jerky. Hard suspension, super torquey drivetrains, rigid chassis (good!), and spartan seats make for a pretty uncomfortable ride as a passenger.
i've never once been excited to ride in someone's ev, though they are fun to drive.
“ A Hyundai executive told the media in 2024, "we also tried out putting touchscreen-based controls, and people didn’t prefer that", "people get stressed, annoyed and steamed when they want to control something in a pinch but are unable to do so".”
I always wonder if the folks who make these decisions themselves ever drive a car. Because this nonsense is wildly irritating. No one who regularly drives long distances could possibly think these are positive features, right?
I don't get the allure of one pedal driving. I have a Model Y, so I use it, but I'm just kind of "meh" about it. I think they introduced it related to re-gen, but these days it's kind of an arbitrary UX choice - on the Tesla you can enable brake assist to mimic the one-pedal driving experience when it's cold or you have a 100% battery, and other cars (maybe Tesla?) will periodically use brakes instead of regen to dry them off or otherwise exercise them a bit.
So then, if it's not actually a "fly-by-wire" mechanical system, why would you choose that as the UX? It cramps my calf constantly keeping it partially activated and the pedal half way depressed. More often than not I'll relieve my foot by doing short stints of cruise control, but that's tedious to manage.
My dream set up would be the accelerator pedal is, well, an accelerator, and the brake is a decelerator, and if you're not pressing either the car maintains the current velocity. It feels like _most_ of the time that you're driving you're just trying to make it go the same speed, and then you can press whichever pedal you need if you're wanting to stop or start again.
I don't suppose any cars work like this? ICE vehicles more or less in the moment do but "coasting" does decelerate a small amount so that over time you have to push the pedal again.
> and if you're not pressing either the car maintains the current velocity
That'd be horrible. A medical emergency of one would potentially turn into a medical emergency of many.
With a Tesla you can use cruise control without autosteer also on smaller roads, and it should also slow down for turns (since ~1.5y or so IIRC). Normally it's good enough that I don't mind.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 72.3 ms ] thread- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
If your truck is that tall, I suggest measuring it and recording the height. After that, you'll find that just about every low-hanging garage, drive-up, bridge, etc. has a height listed. Over 9.5'? Don't try and drive through the Arboretum, as the signs will tell you.
Opening the roof...
That's a sunroof, not a panoramic glass roof being discussed.
I went to test the new electric BMW iX3 and it had it.
It was funny because it was July in Southern Europe so it was quite obvious why it was the worst idea in the world.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
Indoors most people indeed love windows, even moreso if they are roof windows. I agree dont hang a spotlight in your face, but that is hadly the same as the Sun, otherwise how do people their houses walking, running biking without roofs?
People do love windows, but people also love window blinds that they close when the light points directly into a room. Especially if you are forced to face that window.
People who spend a lot of time outside gravitate towards wearing hats and sunglasses.
If you want the worst of both worlds with that kind of oppressive heat 24/7 and high humidity, take a look at Houston.
PNW isn't anywhere close to that.
As for number of 100+ degree days, it's more elusive, but the mean max is over 100 for two months on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick%2C_Washington?wprov=...
I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"
But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.
We should never underestimate people's weird desires but this is mostly not it IMO. There was a new generation that felt the need to rebel against old established stuff and of course is now painfully rediscovering why this stuff was established in the first place.
Infuriating to watch, mind you. But also predictable, like watching bots play StarCraft against each other.
I remember the first time I tried to go to lunch in a friend's Tesla. I couldn't get in or out of the stupid thing without instructions. And getting in would be next to impossible for somebody with bad rheumatoid arthritis and bad fingers - the "push with thumb, while pulling with fingers" is awkward at best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irPxEW0_dbQ
Be careful not to confuse what consumers want with what marketers try to make customers care about. Nobody cares about screen footage, but the ads will still push that as something that their car has over others or because they want to shift how consumers view the product. Convincing customers that a cheaper/worse design is actually a feature they should find desirable is an age old trick, so ads aren't a good indicator for what consumers want, at least not until they become successful enough that consumers start blindly requesting what the ads have trained them to look for. Then you get a "it's got electrolytes" situation.
I rented a car not an ipad multimedia system, touch screens in cars are totally counter intuitive and often don't have the basic functionally easily accessible. Also usually the ui is laggy.
https://hypercritical.co/2026/05/29/ev-stupidity-checklist
Utterly maintenance free. Utterly reliable. Drives great. 220 miles range on a full charge and it does about get that if you're not using HVAC heavily, not driving with a lead foot, and it's not extremely cold. Not horribly expensive. Would buy again, and plan to keep until it dies which for this thing might be a while.
Only bad thing is the ChaDeMO (or however you caps it) fast charging port. If I needed to fast charge a lot I'd buy a CCS dongle. They are now made but aren't cheap since it can't just be a dumb dongle, but apparently they work. I also think there are NACS dongles, or you can double-dongle that (NACS->CCS->ChaDeMO) if you really want to go there. Lol.
https://www.skoda-auto.com/world/simply-clever
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
https://youtu.be/U0YW7x9U5TQ?t=557&si=MCP_WBc7MR1mWhXj
Also perhaps a hybrid would also fulfill the authors needs?
I do sympathize with the opinion that most new cars are not very attractive. At least to me as a petrol head.
>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons
Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.
Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.
It's like being driven by an inexperienced and terribly stoned driver, paranoid, jumping at shadows, hallucinating shit all over the place.
The ones we have at work keep pinging and beeping about all sorts of shit - oh you're too close to that car over there! (Yeah the road is really narrow, shut up, you're the same width as my Range Rover, you fit just fine). Hey watch out for that twig that's 50 metres away across the field! Oh you wanted to change lanes? I don't think so! OMG WATCH OUT FOR THAT CAR YOU'RE ABOUT TO HIT! (yes because you steered back towards it you stupid machine).
Hey you look tired you should take a break right now so I'm going to ping and beep and make the instrument panel flash until you do, even though we only left five minutes ago and there's still over three hours to go!
Fuck everything to do with them. They're exhausting and stressful to drive. I don't know how anyone can cope with EVs.
My current daily driver is a 30-year-old Range Rover that has none of the annoying beepy flashy distract-o-trons. It's far safer for other road users than the Kia because there's not much to do other than look out of the very large completely unobstructed windows and observe other traffic.
That's the other thing I missed out about the Kia - the whole middle third of the windscreen is completely blocked by this huge camera pod thing with a tiny little mirror at the bottom, about a hand's width above the dashboard.
This camera pod takes up the space on the windscreen where I actually need to look for pedestrians at crossings.
It's specific brands, I'm happy with my Tesla (see my other comments).
They feel really cheap and flimsy inside, definitely not an 80 grand car.
I don't like the gigantic screen in the middle. I don't want any kind of lit-up screen in my car, for anything.
Teslas are sub-Dacia build quality. I know that US-market cars are kind of built down to a price point and therefore generally lower-quality to begin with, but that won't fly over here if you price yourself the same as something like a mid-spec VW.
> I understand the take, but since it's basically a must-have nowadays
Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
This sounds like another early M3 frequent complaint. I've had exactly 1 issue under warranty for my M3 2019, have recommended it to friends that are also very happy with theirs (I also live in the EU). My cousin leased a mid-spec VW, and I heard more complaints from him in 2 years than I've heard from the 6+ Tesla owners I know the past 8 years. So, again, german brands are not really indicative of quality anymore. And Tesla offers better features, performance and UX for the same price anyway (and a few other EV brands, but those cost more).
> Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
Because it provides a lot of useful information?
Above all I like having the integrated navigator without having to attach a mobile or TomTom to my windshield (which can move and fall). Also because if I do that, then I might get useless notifications and have them at eye-level, which is more distracting than a purpose-placed screen. Same reason I hate Android Auto / Apple CarPlay.
Perhaps you always move around in your area and know exactly where to go, but I often go to new places and I'd rather have the integrated navigator than a flimsy windshield phone holder (or even worse, people that drive by looking down at their phones every now and then).
Besides navigation, I can change the car settings and functionality easily with an intuitive UI that includes help, rather than having 200 buttons I don't remember the symbols and states of.
They just don't work half as well as when people did it manually.
Before the pandemic, it was rare to get blinded by a person's brights. Now if I drive at night it's just non-stop, and I live in an area with street lighting. (Some of this is also due to after market LEDs and possibly lost driving manners.)
It's extra obnoxious as a pedestrian because at best they get turned off way too late, or frequently not at all.
You mean to say "automatic high beams on Teslas". The ones on our Hyundai Ioniq work just fine, and have never blinded anyone. But in Redmond, WA, Teslas are everywhere and 90% if you're getting beamed, it's a Tesla. Their headlights are, in many cases, improperly aimed out of the factory and their shit auto high beams only make it worse.
There's also the issue where most people who use them clearly think they're fine, or they would stop.
Glass roof: agree.
Buttons: yes, if Tesla would have kept the stalks and added 3-4 programmable buttons, I might rate them higher for a next car. That said, with the MG HS I guess I should have read 20+ pages of manual just to operate the 4-axis 3-rings windshield wipers stalk, not to mention that I could never engage cruise control at all despite trying; so my take on buttons is: something more than Tesla, way less than full-optional/overloaded car. At least with Tesla there's aftermarket options.
Smartphone/NFC: with the MG HS I had to perform a 4-point checklist every time I started it or parked it, and after 7y of Tesla it felt like a huge chore (esp. for quick stops). I've been very happy with Tesla and smartphone (failed maybe twice in 7y), and keep on me the Tesla card as backup (never needed it in the end). A key fob wouldn't annoy me if it worked just like the smartphone on my Tesla: if I don't have to do anything but keep it in my pocket, it'd be fine.
Door handles: the M3 handles are at the right intersection for me to be minimal, efficient and still mostly understandable (push, grab and pull). I can understand they're not regular grab and pull and not everyone is happy about it. I accidentally set off the MG HS alarm while the door and car were already unlocked by pressing the small button on the handle, which after seeing it for 10+y on many cars I still have absolutely no clue what it does (and most times it's only a placeholder for the small button).
Poorly calibrated ADAS: my experience with Tesla is extremely good and again strikes a good balance, while extremely poor applies to Hyundai i10, MG HS and others that I've driven recently. Also: the latter list seems to treat "silent ADAS" as a feature, while Tesla explicitly tells you whether auto-steer or cruise are being engaged or disconnecting, which seems a way better UX. I stopped using the lane assist on the MG HS because it'd randomly drop out even in mild curves without any clue whatsoever. The "auto-enable on restart" for these things is a reason I'll immediately drop the brand from the list of cars I may consider in the future (Hyundai i10).
One pedal: agree.
You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
We're already set to pass 1.5C warming in the next couple years, which was supposed to be the best-case scenario as of 10y ago. I don't know if you noticed, but batteries cost more to make because we're building the supply chain for them, after 100+y of "bog standard" vehicles left us with a world that each year registers new temperature records and increasingly violent weather events.
Also I drive my one-pedal driving car and my wife's ICE car and manage to not fuck it up all the time.
i've never once been excited to ride in someone's ev, though they are fun to drive.
I always wonder if the folks who make these decisions themselves ever drive a car. Because this nonsense is wildly irritating. No one who regularly drives long distances could possibly think these are positive features, right?
So then, if it's not actually a "fly-by-wire" mechanical system, why would you choose that as the UX? It cramps my calf constantly keeping it partially activated and the pedal half way depressed. More often than not I'll relieve my foot by doing short stints of cruise control, but that's tedious to manage.
My dream set up would be the accelerator pedal is, well, an accelerator, and the brake is a decelerator, and if you're not pressing either the car maintains the current velocity. It feels like _most_ of the time that you're driving you're just trying to make it go the same speed, and then you can press whichever pedal you need if you're wanting to stop or start again.
I don't suppose any cars work like this? ICE vehicles more or less in the moment do but "coasting" does decelerate a small amount so that over time you have to push the pedal again.
That'd be horrible. A medical emergency of one would potentially turn into a medical emergency of many.
With a Tesla you can use cruise control without autosteer also on smaller roads, and it should also slow down for turns (since ~1.5y or so IIRC). Normally it's good enough that I don't mind.