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Setting aside politics for the moment, Tesla really has lost its way. It has made many extremely customer-unfriendly UX and technology changes over the past few years, including: * As mentioned in the article, removing the turn signal stalk. Other than the obvious mess that is, the stalk also provides other important functionality such as cleaning the windshield, forcing the wipers to swipe (which is critical since Tesla's automatic windshield wiper setting is famously terrible), and switching off the headlight high beams (also necessary due to the poor automatic mode). And even when they recently re-added the left stalk, they still omitted the right stalk which controls the drivetrain (PRND) and the parking brake. * You know where the horn button is on every vehicle? Of course you do, because it where it should be. On some Tesla, it was moved to a tiny button on the right side of the steering wheel - just where you'd never find it in an emergency. There was also the (mostly) unpopular yoke-style steering wheel, which was initially forced on Model S/X buyer, then the round steering wheel was available as a more expensive option, and finally it became the default. * Removing ultrasonic sensors on the bumper and replacing them with camera-only obstacle detection. This was very buggy for some time and even now, almost all Teslas do not have a camera on the bumper, so there is an area in front of the car where the cameras can not see due to the hood. Ultrasonic sensors are cheap and work very well, and provide an alternative sensing technology to vision-only, but conflict with the mantra that since humans can drive with vision-only, cars should too. This mantra also prevents the use of radar (which was present in early Teslas and then disabled) or LiDAR - both of which could be important additional/supplimental safety technologies, which are explained away as being less reliable than vision. There are probably some other examples, but these are just a few off the top of my head. Once you include politics and alienating the company's most loyal fans, the increasing quality of the competition, and the Tesla charging network advantage disappearing, I'm having a hard time seeing Tesla growing in the future. |
I just learned about Ionna yesterday, 8 major automakers building out a NA charging network together
https://www.ionna.com/