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by vga42 158 days ago
Yeah, I was also utterly disappointed at Volkswagen early last year. After Musk's nazi moment, we started looking for a replacement, and after months of reading about how Tesla is the worst car that has ever existed, I thought this would be an easy trade.

But nope, turns out that Tesla's UX is actually top of the line and everybody else, even the best chinese models, are fumbling about, trying to catch Tesla's quality and failing.

ID.7 was absolutely the worst. As you say, the cars are good as cars, and indeed climbing into the car felt good. That shattered utterly in 10 seconds -- we talked loud with the family how neat the car felt, and turns out that the car was listening to us and started blabbing "sorry, I didn't get that" in loud volume over our conversation. Trying to find out how to permanently turned that feature off revealed how dismal the UX of the media system is. Perhaps a testament to the Android system it's built on.

It might be fastest I've ever experienced a mildly positive feeling dropping to absolute zero point.

VW needs to fire 80% of the interface designers they have, starting from the top and perhaps hiring somebody from Tesla to help them restart from scratch. They had the moment of a lifetime 2 years ago and they totally blew it.

2 comments

How wrong am I to think that car UX was a solved issue and this is just the proof. Trying to improve something "done" often leads to worse.

I recently used a kia Rio 2019 and everything is nicely placed, zero ambiguity and, except the touchscreen, everything cam be used with gloves

Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions or hiding emergency door opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6.
> hiding emergency door

That's a horrible mistake from their part, but has nothing to do with UX.

>Curious how did you consider a car forcing a giant tablet interactions ... opening a "top of the line" ux, compared, say, to Kia EV6.

By having good taste, I guess?