I just got my first Tesla (a 2019 M3LR) after wanting one since seeing the original roadster in person. As a new owner, I keep finding myself searching for "how to do x", since the documentation doesn't always seemed aligned with reality, if there is any at all. I found this forum by searching to see if it's possible to turn off the visualizations in the car.
Like the OP, I find the visualizations pretty distracting. Taking my adult kids for their first ride, the first time we were stopped at a stop light, one of them asked "what the hell is going on with all the cars dancing around us on the screen? We're all just stopped, perfectly still, but on the screen they're freaking out!" Then from the other kid "it thinks that dude on the sidewalk is a traffic cone!"
I've been experiencing a lot of those kinds of moments where I'm just puzzled by why something is the way it is on the car. A lot of the UI is just plain weird, or not obvious, or buried deep in some counter-intuitive place. None of those weird issues are deal breakers, but they are surprising given how incredible the car is in most other ways.
To be frank, my first thoughts driving the car were "this is insane" as I pressed on the throttle, followed up quickly with "WTF is going on with the display, and when will I have time to learn where everything is?"
Unlike the OP, I won't go so far as to say Tesla is awful at software. If anything, they're very good at writing and shipping software, but far behind on good design. Now, I've been a programmer of UI heavy software for the last 25 years and know how challenging it is to find the perfect combo of well designed software. Getting things right is hard. Good design is exhaustive, takes an enormous amount of effort from multiple teams of people, and when done right, is practically invisible. I see hints of that kind of design in a lot of the overall Tesla experience, but I also see a lot of what look like half baked ideas wedged into an existing tab/widget for lack of a better solution.
As a total Tesla noob, here's what stood out the most to me in my first week of using the software:
- The flickering/dancing visualization is a distraction for sure. Looking straight ahead, the visualization is still within my peripheral view. Any movement there tends to grab your attention, since your eyes tend to notice movement in your periphery far more than detail. This is a physiological thing - your eyes have more cones in the center of your field of view to help see more details and colors. On the periphery, your eyes have more rods, which are far more sensitive to movement. That arrangement is good for survival. With the always moving visualization of the Model 3 display, it's hard to tell your eyes and brain to not do what they are very good at doing (noticing motion in your peripheral vision).
- I'd love to just turn off the display. Or all of it except for some indication of my speed.
- Dashcam seems straight up broken? When I launch the viewer, I see a black screen with a dim grey x on the upper left corner. Nothing else, even with sentry mode on. Close the viewer, then open it again, and now I see a live camera view. Huh?
- I have no idea where anything is in the menus. This will likely improve with time as I learn stuff, but I also worry that stuff may change with a firmware update and I'll be scratching my head as I re-learn stuff again.
All that said, there's a lot to love.
Which leads to the bigger thing that motived me to post here. As a noob to the forums, I've seen a pattern that concerns me.
The pattern I see is this: someone makes a critical post about something Tesla related, and a large portion of the responses tend to sound like "don't like it? Don't own a Tesla" or "compare that to other companies, which are just awful," or "stop being stupid and read the [nearly impossible to find or non-existent] manual," or worse, attack the person making the criticisms.
It's perfectly valid to criticize something, even if that something is best in class. Even if what it's trying to accomplish is hard. Even if no one else gets it right either. Even if the current state of that feature has evolved over the years and improved. Someone criticizing something you love isn't someone attacking you. It doesn't mean you're wrong in loving the thing someone else thinks is a problem. Someone criticizing something doesn't mean they hate the thing they're criticizing. I really love my kids. When they leave dirty socks in the middle of the floor, I still love them, even if I hate their dirty socks on the floor.
Criticism is how things improve. It's what gives a community like this the chance to shape the future of what they love.