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Tesla scraps its plan for a $25,000 Model 2 EV (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Their infotainment system and app are pretty great compared to some other brands.

I'm currently driving a VW id5 and it's like they've never designed any kind of software interfaces at all. Example:

the VW app can tell me the car is unlocked, but can't lock it for me.
it can't show me the VIN number, even though I had to use it to register it ( it was hidden in my user profile on the site somewhere )
I can let it pre-heat and such, but only on two schedules .
can't schedule appointments through the app
that weird sliding thingy for switching between speed limiter and cruise control is unintuitive AF
every other time I'm driving it's giving me a pop up saying "there are new updated user settings for your account". With only an ok and a cancel button. Where are they? What are they? Where can I find them? Did clicking"ok" accept them? Not a clue. When does it show this message that blocks the rest of the UI? After 1 minute of driving.

Not to hate on VW engineers but goddamnit guys. Get your shit together and hire a UX expert. Shortly drove a BMW 1 series before the VW and the infotainment was a lot more practical to use.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I really don't get why automotive electronics makers are allergic to having a proper UX team, other than no one else in the industry has one either so it's not a competitive disadvantage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My suspicion is that it's because the shots are called by people who worked their way up doing automotive electronics. As in the microcontrollers inside of engine control units. So UX is kinda foreign.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

which is hilarious because they're pushing us to touch screens when these devs all grew up on physical interfaces, you know, the ones that worked? goddamn give me switches and knobs any day over touch screens

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

As best I can tell, the touchscreen is added at the concept phase by folks who mostly know what's going to make people look at the car and want to buy it, several years before the car hits the market and well before the actual car electronics teams are involved.

So, yeah, car UI/UX sucks right now because we're seeing all of the things added to cars a few years ago in response to Tesla and implemented by people who think that just because they programmed a random car-focused microcontroller back in the day that this means that they understand all of the layers involved in a modern Linux or Android or Windows embedded car electronics unit including layer 8 of the OSI stack (meaning: interfacing with humans)

But, yah, dono. I don't actually have my own car. My spouse got a Mazda a bunch of years ago now and it has actually a pretty good touchscreen interface with physical controls such that if you want to dig into stuff, you can touchscreen but all of the common stuff is switches and knobs. The generation before that had way way too many buttons and it was just gag-me-with-a-spoon. The generation after that removed the touchscreen because the leadership at Mazda decided people were just not to be trusted with a touchscreen and I feel like they went a little too far in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, in airplane cockpit design, they put great pains into having you be able to navigate by touch where necessary such that all of the knobs are differently textured or shaped. And, as I said, I don't actually have my own car, but I have to say that if I did have a car, I'd want it to be designed like that.