CNN Money review of the Model 3 - not very flattering

[Az_Rael]

Adjusting cruise speed will be unnecessary as speed limit recognition is implemented and autopilot becomes increasingly powerful. Time to quit thinking of the old way of doing things.

The car already knew what the speed limit was, that was the problem. Traffic was flowing 20mph, the speed limit was 70mph, I didn't really need the car to try and achieve 70 when a large gap opened up in front of me but traffic still going 20mph ahead.

The car would need to understand the actual traffic speed, not the speed limit to make it work better. Would be a good feature when the lane next to you slows down too. I really don't want to be going 70 when the lane next to me is crawling at 20 even if my lane is clear.

 

[Xminus6]

I really suspect the screen would be quite a bit more helpful if the sizing of different areas on the screen were much more dynamic. That is, as you touch the area of a given functionality- audio, climate, autopilot- and the visual display of that function enlarges considerably on the screen until a few seconds after the last input.

I was thinking about this originally in terms of the relative size of the NAV screen, and the AP UI. I would think it's better to have the AP be the largest portion of the screen most of the time rather than the NAV. The NAV appears to be something like 70% of the screen... I really only want it that large when I'm within a few minutes of a new instruction for the route. If I want the NAV to be large at any other point while I'm driving, the system could be set up so I can tap anywhere on the NAV area, and it enlarges to 70%, until I double tap on the AP, and it returns to 70% of the screen. Something similar could be done with tapping the audio, climate, etc., areas, with the AP UI always kept at a useful size.

This is all from someone who has not driven a 3... I wonder whether gg and others who've driven the car think this would be helpful. Of course, if they nail the voice commands, this may be a moot point, except for the AP... I doubt that AP changes via voice command would be as safe and effective as inputs via touchscreen or scrollwheel.

The other thing I think Tesla should investigate is the use of more multi-touch gestures for controls. For instance, Have a default two-fingers up/down for a function (fan speed, temperature, volume). Another one for multi-touch left-right. Or you could do a tap-multitouch slide. Tape the fan button then two-finger slide up/down left/right to control speed and temperature. That way you're not having to target a tiny virtual button to make controls.

You could also make audio volume 5 finger rotate like a huge dial.

Anything to make the controls more intuitive and require less attention would be good. Arguably if you did it right it could be less distracting than physical buttons once you're memorized the control invocations.

 

[davedavedave]

They have been saying that about computer keyboards for 20 years now.

Yup.

Now there's iPads and iPhone and Siri and Alexa, oh my!

IMHO, no matter how far along FSD gets, there will always be some vehicles with old-school steering wheels, foot pedals and buttons and dials. Thank goodness we don't have those hand cranks on the grill anymore!

 

[MotoEvCA]

Why do people think that the user controls are set in stone and will never change?

I trust the professionals who study UI /UX design. They study a subject before making an informed comment

 

[N5329K]

Do we expect some excessive over-regulation?
The last I heard, they wanted to promote innovation instead and issued guidelines only also asking states to not override and talk to them first if any concerns...Department Of Transportation Rolls Out New Guidelines For Self-Driving Cars

I'd rate the chances of the technology and the law coming together to allow FSD on all public roads during a current Model 3 ownership years to be pretty far up in the miraculous band.
Robin

 

[cella]

The everything on the screen talk reminds me of Apple, specifically Jobs when he remarked how you can control the volume and just about everything else on the screen so the physical buttons weren’t really needed. Ultimately he was mostly right and it’s easy to see that now.

That's kind of a bad example given that iPhones, iPads and Macs have physical volume buttons to this day.

Personally I think Tesla is close but missed the mark by a little. They should bring back physical controls for a few critical functions such as activating/adjusting the wipers and TACC. It wouldn't impact the simplistic interior design at all if the wiper stalk had a few more functions and another stalk was added for the TACC. Most of the other control issues can probably be fixed by software updates.

 

[myusername]

not sure how many people have seen Elon’s tweet last night about adding much more functionality to voice commands ("...You will be able to do pretty much anything via voice command...") re concerns about reliance on the center screen, taking eyes off the road,

Elon Musk on Twitter

"You will be able to..." -- so let me guess, in 12 to 18 months?

 

[myusername]

Exactly what I was thinking. And how many people own smartphones? Using a screen to do things seems rather mainstream to me. This is just the first all-in implementation in a car. And it surely won't be the last.

how many people use smart phones in their car? how many people should? touch screens require you to LOOK at them because there's no physical reference that you can feel with your fingers of where you are touching. I can adjust my cruise control without looking. I can turn on my fog lights without looking. I can turn my windshield wipers on without looking. I can change my suspension from cruise to sport without looking. The only thing I need to look at is my fuel and speed, both of which I only have to move my eyeballs and not my head.

There's a pretty big difference between the purpose of a phone UI and an automobile UI... and it's not AGE.

 

[dhanson865]

Super short review, but seems quite reasonable. Its expensive, and putting all the controls on the touchscreen is idiotic. Touchscreens are great for the flexibility that they afford. But for common functions I want real buttons. The S does a pretty good job with this. The 3 goes way to far away from buttons.

If voice control gets implemented well enough I might not miss the buttons. Heck with or without buttons I'm hoping the UI is better than the Leaf.

The dance I do with my Leaf is when I want to change HVAC settings but keep the vent on recirculate. There is a physical button for each function but the system wants to second guess me or gets in my way trying to be too helpful.



I want to turn on the fan at the lowest setting from completely OFF and it turns on AC and opens the vent. If I hit the recirculate button before turning off AC it will open the vent again. So I have to do Fan up, AC, recirculate (3 buttons) to get what I want to happen by pushing one button. If that fan is on at the lowest setting and I turn it all off it opens the vent and I want it closed so I have to do Fan down, recirculate (2 buttons) to get what I want to happen by pushing one button.

There are a number of various interactions but one of them that is most frustrating is when the vent is open and AC is off and I want to close the vent and leave AC off. I press recirculate and it closes the vent and turns AC on, I turn AC off, so it responds by doing that and opening the vent. Then finally I can set recirculate again and it will take. So to go from vent open fan low to vent closed fan low I have the absurd key combination to memorize of "recirculate, AC, recirculate" and I have to do that while driving in less than x seconds before the cycle times out.

Heaven forbid I get the order wrong as that just continues the loop and adds 2 more key presses to make actual progress to the desired state. It is perfectly happy to let you hit the same 2 key combo in an endless loop and end up right back where you started no matter if you hit it 4 times or 20.

I'm constantly having to hit 2-7 key combinations to get the fan, vent, AC set like I want. And due to varying weather and temperature my starting point or end point may change meaning I have a new set of key combinations to apply this time. It's like those key sequences you see done on Star Trek except I have to make it happen when I'm the only one there and while I'm trying to drive.

I've done it so many times it doesn't take me long to get it done. But every time I do I'm tempted to think of the revenge I'd like to get on the person at Nissan responsible for my torture.

Give me button-less or buttons just so long as this sort of brain dead UI mistake doesn't happen I'm fine with it. But even better give me voice control over the AC and vent and I won't have to take my hand off the steering wheel to do it, nor will I have to use peripheral vision or take my eyes off the road.

And say this is Tesla, with software presets and customization. Let me configure the fan settings for "fog", "rain", "sunny" and such and let me call out "set the fan for fog" or "set the fan for sunny" and have it change to my preset. Do that and I won't need to memorize button sequences.

 

[Beckler]

I've been slightly annoyed about this. Why did Tesla go this far? Let's face it, it's minimalism taken essentially as far as possible. The "annoying as hell" line in the review worries me somewhat. For those here into photography, you know that cameras with all-menu control where you set everything in menus & lists and have no buttons are indeed annoying and they make no sense - other than in very basic, inexpensive cameras. It makes no sense in cars, either, as long as they have to be manually driven. One must assume the primary driver here is cost reduction.

I just wonder how much it will annoy me - that's not new tho; I knew it as soon as the first pictures. But the review gets you thinking again...

 

[McRat]

Yup.

Now there's iPads and iPhone and Siri and Alexa, oh my!

IMHO, no matter how far along FSD gets, there will always be some vehicles with old-school steering wheels, foot pedals and buttons and dials. Thank goodness we don't have those hand cranks on the grill anymore!

Actually the digitizer was intended as a replacement for the keyboard. You might know of the digitizer by it's modern name, the mouse.
But some of my equipment (early HP lab computers) had light pens. In fact, most the early computer motherboards had light pen ports on the board.

So voice to text, touch screens, light pens, mice, and digitizers, and yet there is a keyboard on every serious computing machine.

Yes, both you and I are obsolete fools, typing away right now on a technology that predates the computer, that has had it's obituary written hundreds of times.

I can't even find my iPad. Not even the kids wanted it. I bought one when they were cool. But we never figured out why it sold. It's too big and too small at the same time, has wimpy processing ability, and deliberately gimped interdevice interfacing.

 

[Xminus6]

I've been slightly annoyed about this. Why did Tesla go this far? Let's face it, it's minimalism taken essentially as far as possible. The "annoying as hell" line in the review worries me somewhat. For those here into photography, you know that cameras with all-menu control where you set everything in menus & lists and have no buttons are indeed annoying and they make no sense - other than in very basic, inexpensive cameras. It makes no sense in cars, either, as long as they have to be manually driven. One must assume the primary driver here is cost reduction.

I just wonder how much it will annoy me - that's not new tho; I knew it as soon as the first pictures. But the review gets you thinking again...

Good analogy. Having to use a touch screen to change cruise control speed is like having to use a screen to change aperture.

 

[TaoJones]

Annoyingly, a "review" streamed from ABC News today complained almost immediately that there have been production delays - instead of realizing that *the cars are shipping NOW*. They also kvetched that the base model wasn't available until later this year. They did say that 500,000 reservations had been made, and that the car was fast. Deep thoughts for the masses, evidently.

 

[streetskooler]

That's kind of a bad example given that iPhones, iPads and Macs have physical volume buttons to this day.

Personally I think Tesla is close but missed the mark by a little. They should bring back physical controls for a few critical functions such as activating/adjusting the wipers and TACC. It wouldn't impact the simplistic interior design at all if the wiper stalk had a few more functions and another stalk was added for the TACC. Most of the other control issues can probably be fixed by software updates.

Yeah I guess I wasn’t clear. What I was trying to say was they took every button they could off the phone but still realized that somethings were better with physical buttons, like volume control and a dedicated silent button. Yes you can control it via software but first you have to dig into the menu and slide it to the desired level. I feel this is analogous to certain design choices Tesla made here such as the whipers and autopilot. Minimalism is great but sometimes buttons are better

 

[myusername]

Yeah I guess I wasn’t clear. What I was trying to say was they took every button they could off the phone but still realized that somethings were better with physical buttons, like volume control and a dedicated silent button. Yes you can control it via software but first you have to dig into the menu and slide it to the desired level. I feel this is analogous to certain design choices Tesla made here such as the whipers and autopilot. Minimalism is great but sometimes buttons are better

this all stems from unrealistic and pie in the sky expectations. this is clearly a relic of the expectation that they'd be far down the path of FSD. either that or they designed it so people would think they'd be, never thinking they'd actually get this far or an FSD miracle would happen. and now they're spinning up a chip division to replace NVidia who says 2020 is the earliest they'll be ready... and they have a car that is strange on the inside because of it, that people now have to drive... or not buy.

 

[JonathanD]

I Think You May Be Missing The Point - Change For the Sake of Change

It's not change for the sake of change, and I think it's you who is missing the point. This car was designed to ultimately be fully autonomous. Fully autonomous cars don't need physical buttons nor can they make use of them. Tesla is thinking two steps ahead. Big auto manufacturers will come out with electric cars with all the physical buttons you want. And once again, they will have missed a trend. The intermediate future state is that the car drives you most of the time -- you take over when necessary for unusual road conditions or for fun; there will be plenty of time to navigate the touch screen, and no physical impediments to the car being constantly updated over-the-air. But the bottom line is, the reason nearly all functions reside in the touch screen is absolutely not change for the sake of change, it is change with an incredibly focused purpose. Once you understand that purpose, the rest makes much more sense.

 

[myusername]

It's not change for the sake of change, and I think it's you who is missing the point. This car was designed to ultimately be fully autonomous. Fully autonomous cars don't need physical buttons nor can they make use of them. Tesla is thinking two steps ahead. Big auto manufacturers will come out with electric cars with all the physical buttons you want. And once again, they will have missed a trend. The intermediate future state is that the car drives you most of the time -- you take over when necessary for unusual road conditions or for fun; there will be plenty of time to navigate the touch screen, and no physical impediments to the car being constantly updated over-the-air. But the bottom line is, the reason nearly all functions reside in the touch screen is absolutely not change for the sake of change, it is change with an incredibly focused purpose. Once you understand that purpose, the rest makes much more sense.

"This car was designed to ultimately be fully autonomous"

yeah, why?

 

[Ulmo]

I'll pick the standout descriptor in your title: CNN. Everything else fits with that.

While I wish we all knew of good honest news organizations, probably based upon full payment for per-use service, I think we based our prior news consumption on times when land was cheaper and taxes were lower centuries to decades ago, and more recently, when broadcast (almost a century ago) changed the funding models to advertising rather than a mix of ads and direct purchase. Also, I think it has never been true that large presses that cost a lot are free of influence from outside investors and powerful interests, who were necessary to get the presses going. We have an opportunity today to use the Internet for the best most honest and accurate news sources ever via micropayments to fully-per-use paid news reports, but for now, that exact thing is being done by discussion forums full of argumentative and poorly spoken people, as a bridge to that freeer press eventuality.

All in all, we have it the best we've ever had it in history, but at a price (currently in the form of time and effort to wade through a large number of different quality posts), and not in a format that everyone wants to use. For those who prefer the older formats of the last century (TV, newspaper), we have some of the worst we've ever had of that now. Millennia ago, one on one gossip networks were superior to that, and today, often still are. There were some particularly oppressive times, and still are in many places, when things were even worse: even gossip is faulty. However, one on one gossip has often been the most constructive news source throughout history.

 

[Jason S]

Does the system automatically remember each driver's preferences for mirrors? Say, wife and two kids?

Yes. Part of the profile. However I don't think the 3 is set up to automatically choose the profile based on the keycard/fob like the S does. (I could be wrong. The 3 is getting wrapped and I haven't played with it for more than an hour.)

 

[Jason S]

Note also that very few people with no EV experience have driven a Model 3 yet. That will come, and we will see what their feedback is.

I don't think "EV experience" is really the issue. It is "Tesla experience" - the interface choices are just different. I think gg is correct regarding the feedback - the buttons are annoyingly small and I do think the S was done better than the 3. On the other hand, after initial setup there isn't much to mess with on the 3's screen I hope.