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Tesla is an AWFUL software company

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ok, its easy to be a critic .. now be the artist .. what would you do to fix the UI ?

On these forums, I'm not so sure it's that easy to be a critic. But to answer question in a way that I anticipate won't satisfy you: I'd make it effortless and effective.

Thing is, I'm not Tesla's design team. They're a company with a $1T market cap. They can afford to invest in the UI, just like they invest in good battery or motor design.
 
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On these forums, I'm not so sure it's that easy to be a critic. But to answer question in a way that I anticipate won't satisfy you: I'd make it effortless and effective.

Thing is, I'm not Tesla's design team. They're a company with a $1T market cap. They can afford to invest in the UI, just like they invest in good battery or motor design.
Again, how is it not effortless and effective ? What specific things do you think need to change?

The fact is, posts saying "the UI is terrible" without specifics are just useless rants. If you cannot articulate specific issues that need to be addressed, then what use is your post? If Tesla contacted you tomorrow and asked for your feedback, what could/would you tell them? "You need to make it effortless and effective" is meaningless, you might as well say "You need to make it better".

I happen to think there are areas they can improve, but it's worthwhile to keep a perspective on what they do right (and I'm not being a fanboy here):

-- The UI is coherent and consistent. A single high-readability font is used throughout. Layout is accurate, aligned, and professional.
-- Clear textual information. Control labels and explanatory text is clear, accurate and concise.
-- Low-density layout. Controls are (mostly) large buttons with easy to read text, which is important on a touch screen used on a car in motion.
-- Logical organization. There are a lot of controls, but (in most cases) controls are logically organized making it easy to find the right screen.
-- Restrained color use. Blue is used consistently to mean "on" or "active", with almost no other use of color, except red for emergency notifications.
-- Restrained animation use. Screens roll up, making it clear that they are an overlay, but useless decorative animations are avoided.
-- Automatic map view changes. The map view changes zoom level and angle appropriately for the current activity and car location/mode.

What could be better imho (on Model 3/Y)?

-- Some use of reduced contrast and/or point sizes could be better (e.g. the PRNDL indicator is too dim/small).
-- On some screens it is not cleat that scrolling up will show more controls (some form of down-arrow icon would help).
-- Some screens are getting quite dense as new options are added (e.g. Autopilot), and probably need some cleanup.
-- Some buttons are unnecessarily prominent (e.g. the huge "Navigate on Autopilot" toggle button on the map screen).
-- The "button bar" along the bottom edge mixes up sub-screen buttons (e.g. Driving) with single-use buttons (e.g. heated seats).
-- A few buttons are in odd locations, e.g. Glovebox open probably belongs on the button bar (near the passenger side)?.
-- Lack of a "high contrast" option for those with vision issues (though presumably this would be mainly for the passenger).
-- Some controls are still not accessible via voice commands.
-- Right-hand drive arrangement is not as well done (e.g. "X" close screen button is far away from driver).
-- Lack of horizontal text scrolling in the media screens makes it hard to see long track names.

Overall, I'd give the UI about 8/10. Hardly "terrible" or "the worst in the industry" as others have suggested (without giving any specifics).

After the holiday refresh a bunch of people were saying the Ui should be updated to make it look more modern (whatever that means). I think they missed the point. Good UI is about functionality and clarity, not how "pretty" is looks according to some ephemeral aesthetic. And this is especially important when dealing with the UI in a car, since this can impact safety.

Remember, changing something is easy, making it better is much, much harder.
 
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The fact is, posts saying "the UI is terrible" without specifics are just useless rants
Several people in this thread, including myself, have given specifics on what they find wrong with the UI.

The UI is coherent and consistent.

I don't agree. Parts of the UI are coherent and consistent. But a lot of it just seems thrown together. Like the cards under the rendering of the car itself. That mechanism seems to be unique to just that part of the UI, and is frequently unusable. I've yet to understand where you're supposed to drag when trying to switch cards. It seems the drag handle is not consistent, or maybe doesn't even render sometimes.

Even where you say they get things right, you also say "Controls are (mostly) large buttons with easy to read text", or "(in most cases) controls are logically organized." I'll admit I'm sorta splitting hairs here, and possibly chasing something unobtainable, but to me, coherent and consistent means that I can't find reasons to say things like "in most cases".

I agree with your "what could be better" list as well. Especially the point about lack of contrast options. I don't even have vision issues and find it difficult in certain conditions to see things clearly on the screen. Related to that, the reduced use of color is a double edged sword. It's easier to accommodate certain forms of color blindness, and the use of blue instead of green is either deliberate or a happy accident (green and red can look nearly the same for the most common forms of color blindness), but it also means it's a lot harder to emphasize things with just two colors.

Good UI is about functionality and clarity, not how "pretty" is looks according to some ephemeral aesthetic.

I agree 100%.

Remember, changing something is easy, making it better is much, much harder.

100% agree. Tesla is no stranger to solving hard problems, which is why I've been surprised with the UI. Compared to everything else that makes a Tesla amazing, the UI seems to fall flat.
 
Again .. what specifically would you do to fix it? And why?
Higher contrast and larger fonts for the speedo and a few other things, make the regen bar thicker/easer to see, reduce the fraction of the screen taken up by the car virtualization panel (or make it adjustable, I would love to get rid of it completely), and (my own major request) is make the wiper speed card persistent when the wipers are on so that I can manually adjust the speed easier. Also, the car model changing from overhead to side view when parked is annoying and less useful, make it optional.
 
Higher contrast and larger fonts for the speedo and a few other things, make the regen bar thicker/easer to see, reduce the fraction of the screen taken up by the car virtualization panel (or make it adjustable, I would love to get rid of it completely), and (my own major request) is make the wiper speed card persistent when the wipers are on so that I can manually adjust the speed easier. Also, the car model changing from overhead to side view when parked is annoying and less useful, make it optional.
Great .. I'd agree with a couple of those (I originally felt the regen bar should be bigger, but I now feel it would be distracting wobbling about in the corner of your eye all the time, and it is after all just a "nice to know" thing). The wipers certainly need to be easier to control given that the Auto is still a bit hot-or-miss (though voice control works fine for me). Maybe a button that cycles through the modes (less screen space taken up).

I doubt you will get your way on the visualization screens (though FSD has a toggle to adjust the width) .. Tesla envision a future where the car is doing most of the driving in which case the screen is your way to keep an eye on the car (I can attest to that, with the FSD beta you look at the visualization a LOT).
 
I don't agree. Parts of the UI are coherent and consistent. But a lot of it just seems thrown together. Like the cards under the rendering of the car itself. That mechanism seems to be unique to just that part of the UI, and is frequently unusable. I've yet to understand where you're supposed to drag when trying to switch cards. It seems the drag handle is not consistent, or maybe doesn't even render sometimes.

Even where you say they get things right, you also say "Controls are (mostly) large buttons with easy to read text", or "(in most cases) controls are logically organized." I'll admit I'm sorta splitting hairs here, and possibly chasing something unobtainable, but to me, coherent and consistent means that I can't find reasons to say things like "in most cases".
I agree the cards concept needs work .. sometimes you swipe and get the card, sometimes the visualization view rotates. I'm ok with the overall idea, but card access gestures need to be re-thought.

And yes, I did qualify my points somewhat, after all I gave the car 8/10, so there is stuff that can be improved. My main point was not to throw the baby out with the bathwater .. Tesla need to continue to iterate and improve the UI, but it hardly warrants the screaming "AWFUL .. terrible .. worst I've ever seen!!" invective that started this thread.

I recently spent some time driving a new Mercedes, and frankly the screens were truly awful. Vast amounts of bling, arbitrary colors swirling all over the place that contributed nothing at all to the functionality. All (bad) style and no substance. Compared to the whisper-quiet Tesla UI the Mercedes seemed to be shouting "look at me! .. look look look .. I can do swirly patterns! .. aren't I clever!" The UI equivalent to buying a car because the exhaust has been (artificially) tuned to make extra noise. Yuck.
 
Great .. I'd agree with a couple of those (I originally felt the regen bar should be bigger, but I now feel it would be distracting wobbling about in the corner of your eye all the time, and it is after all just a "nice to know" thing). The wipers certainly need to be easier to control given that the Auto is still a bit hot-or-miss (though voice control works fine for me). Maybe a button that cycles through the modes (less screen space taken up).

I doubt you will get your way on the visualization screens (though FSD has a toggle to adjust the width) .. Tesla envision a future where the car is doing most of the driving in which case the screen is your way to keep an eye on the car (I can attest to that, with the FSD beta you look at the visualization a LOT).
Yes, Tesla does have the vision. I have no interest in that vision any longer personally.
 
What software version do you have? I have a 2021 Model Y Long Range running (2021.36.1) and a 2021 Model 3 Long Range running (2021.36.5). I haven’t encountered the display crashing when trying to read the manual at all.
I have the latest now but when I got the car in June it had 24.xx At that time the manual crashed the display every time. I haven't tried it since. I'll check now with 32.5.5
 
More user-defined control of the UI would be welcome, within reason. It wouldn't have to be as highly configurable as an Apple Watch face, for example, but I'd like to see a better representation of regen braking, which for all practical purposes, disappeared earlier this year (the thin horizontal bar being replaced by a one-pixel high line). Maybe they could offer a limited number of skins or themes. Or even font sizes - small, medium, large.

The tiny icons at the top of the screen are nearly impossible to hit while driving. The FSD Beta report camera being particularly hard to actuate. And those cards under the visualization, yeah those are awful. After a year, I can't reliably get them to activate. Usually after some amount of poking and swiping, they appear.
 
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More user-defined control of the UI would be welcome, within reason. It wouldn't have to be as highly configurable as an Apple Watch face, for example, but I'd like to see a better representation of regen braking, which for all practical purposes, disappeared earlier this year (the thin horizontal bar being replaced by a one-pixel high line). Maybe they could offer a limited number of skins or themes. Or even font sizes - small, medium, large.

The tiny icons at the top of the screen are nearly impossible to hit while driving. The FSD Beta report camera being particularly hard to actuate. And those cards under the visualization, yeah those are awful. After a year, I can't reliably get them to activate. Usually after some amount of poking and swiping, they appear.
I’d like a way to pin the wiper control to stay present. Not all the time, but when it’s raining (Seattle) the car can’t seem to figure out how best to wipe the window and I’m always messing with the setting.
 
The tiny icons at the top of the screen are nearly impossible to hit while driving. The FSD Beta report camera being particularly hard to actuate. And those cards under the visualization, yeah those are awful. After a year, I can't reliably get them to activate. Usually after some amount of poking and swiping, they appear.
Yeah this is the biggest thing they have wrong imho .. we can argue about aesthetics forever, but trying to swipe up those cards is just plain BAD design. They need a button to hide/show the cards and then you just swipe left/right to choose one (and if the button started with the windscreen wipers it would just BE the existing button but extended to access all the cards).
 
How about that when you reach the last track of a USB folder |< is displayed fooling you into thinking you can press it and go back a track!!! But maybe a left click on the left steering wheel button will make it go back a track? Silly, of course you can't! You have to look away from the road and click back a folder, or click on another song! How has this not been fixed?
Also. Absolutely no way to skip back / forward 15, 30, 60 seconds. A horrible music slider that would never be safe to use to move back/foward through a track! Why no voice command for this?
No resume play for USB music. Which would be REALLY useful for people listening to downloaded audio books and podcasts. Or anyone wanting to carry on listening to their favourite music without hunting through folders and then the track to find it. When you have a audio book / podcast in 30minute chapters... and your 10+ year old Pioneer Mp3 CD player in your 15 year old failed MOT car would resume tracks!! Jeez!
 
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I'm in agreement with OP that Tesla is a truly awful software company. Don't get me wrong, I like my car, but before 2020's christmas 'update' I loved my car. Now it's getting into the category of acceptance that it's just always going to have shitty software, ruining an otherwise brilliant vehicle.

I've had my car almost two years, and there has never been a single drive without somehing odd happening. I'm serious, every single time, something goes slightly off. No one seems to care, least of all the software devs at Tesla.


Good example, I click on the supercharger icon on the map so I can navigate to nearest Supercharger. And.. it shows me the nearest superchargers in Iowa, only 1649 miles away. The map shows it knows I'm at Arroyo in San Carlos, CA. Yeah! Tesla.

IMG_1574.JPG



Today I get in to go get food- and the car wakes with the contactor clunks... but the screen is black. Doesn't come up. Interior lights are on, but no computer. Put my foot on the brake- yeah not going anywhere. Can't go into drive. WTF? How does it just crash sitting in the garage? After I two button reboot it comes back alive. No errors reported, nothing on the scren. Yeah... their software is just sad.
 
I'm in agreement with OP that Tesla is a truly awful software company. Don't get me wrong, I like my car, but before 2020's christmas 'update' I loved my car. Now it's getting into the category of acceptance that it's just always going to have shitty software, ruining an otherwise brilliant vehicle.

I've had my car almost two years, and there has never been a single drive without somehing odd happening. I'm serious, every single time, something goes slightly off. No one seems to care, least of all the software devs at Tesla.


Good example, I click on the supercharger icon on the map so I can navigate to nearest Supercharger. And.. it shows me the nearest superchargers in Iowa, only 1649 miles away. The map shows it knows I'm at Arroyo in San Carlos, CA. Yeah! Tesla.

View attachment 754061


Today I get in to go get food- and the car wakes with the contactor clunks... but the screen is black. Doesn't come up. Interior lights are on, but no computer. Put my foot on the brake- yeah not going anywhere. Can't go into drive. WTF? How does it just crash sitting in the garage? After I two button reboot it comes back alive. No errors reported, nothing on the scren. Yeah... their software is just sad.

It seems to me that they don’t have a good testing methodology. It appears to be all ad-hoc testing with little/no formalized unit & feature tests. And a lack of filling in the gaps. Eg when something is found why did that issue get through testing and go back and fill that hole in.

You can write software they way they are doing it. But it gets really hard to scale. At some point the systems get too complex and the chance of a regression is too high.

This is not some phone app they’re writing. It needs to be done professionally. An interesting thing is (thankfully) it seems to be limited to the higher level software stack. Eg the hardware on the car is well designed. So are some of the fundamentals. The whole ‘desktop’ doesn’t randomly crash. And its always taken user input as an override.
 
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I agree that they take lot of things for granted and don't put in much effort fixing broken things, especially in software area. But you need to realize that even the so called 'top-notch' iphones crash. I am not saying Tesla is doing great in software, just not awful as claimed by OP.
 
I'm in agreement with OP that Tesla is a truly awful software company. Don't get me wrong, I like my car, but before 2020's christmas 'update' I loved my car. Now it's getting into the category of acceptance that it's just always going to have shitty software, ruining an otherwise brilliant vehicle.

I've had my car almost two years, and there has never been a single drive without somehing odd happening. I'm serious, every single time, something goes slightly off. No one seems to care, least of all the software devs at Tesla.


Good example, I click on the supercharger icon on the map so I can navigate to nearest Supercharger. And.. it shows me the nearest superchargers in Iowa, only 1649 miles away. The map shows it knows I'm at Arroyo in San Carlos, CA. Yeah! Tesla.

View attachment 754061


Today I get in to go get food- and the car wakes with the contactor clunks... but the screen is black. Doesn't come up. Interior lights are on, but no computer. Put my foot on the brake- yeah not going anywhere. Can't go into drive. WTF? How does it just crash sitting in the garage? After I two button reboot it comes back alive. No errors reported, nothing on the scren. Yeah... their software is just sad.
I’ve had a very different experience. We have 2 Model 3 SR+. We have a 2109 and a 2020, and I’ve had almost no drives where something went weird. The 2019 has been my daily commuter since mid-June 2019 and the 2020 is my wife’s car and our beach trip car. There were a couple of times immediately after an update where the 2019’s screen took longer than normal to come up and one occasion when I had to restart after the update, but other than that handful of issues it has been solid. I’ve never had an issue putting the car in drive, even when the screen remained dark.
 
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This is not some phone app they’re writing. It needs to be done professionally. An interesting thing is (thankfully) it seems to be limited to the higher level software stack. Eg the hardware on the car is well designed. So are some of the fundamentals. The whole ‘desktop’ doesn’t randomly crash. And its always taken user input as an override.

That's a good point to clarify. It's not every software stack on the car. My impression is that they are super serious about their driveline/motor/brake software. In actually driving I don't see anything weird happen, like brakes stop working or lower power than expected or stuff that would be really concerning.

It's all the higher level software on the MCU/Display stack. Earlier last year, they had a bug where opening the user manual would crash the head unit. That is some absolute crap software right there, and brings into question the entire architecture. Drawing a PDF can cause a blue-screen. What kind of horrible OS are they running?


Not being able to put the car in drive with a dead head unit is extremely concerning to me. Right at this moment, I may need to head to a vet for an emergency at any time, and having it be dead when I get in is totally, 100%, unacceptable.

I presume it wouldn't let me go into drive because it didn't have an active key when it woke up. I put my card key on the center console but it did not change anything. If the MCU is required to authorize first- that means if the MCU is dead you cannot drive your car, and would be a huge design flaw/weakness because their MCU software stack is written so poorly.
 
Today I get in to go get food- and the car wakes with the contactor clunks... but the screen is black. Doesn't come up. Interior lights are on, but no computer. Put my foot on the brake- yeah not going anywhere. Can't go into drive. WTF? How does it just crash sitting in the garage? After I two button reboot it comes back alive. No errors reported, nothing on the scren. Yeah... their software is just sad.
I'm curious how you eliminated a hardware problem as the cause? I don't recall others complaining about issues like this. Maybe you have a faulty MCU? A faulty 12V battery could have marginal voltage that dropped too much due to the inrush current when the car woke up.

I'm not saying that you didn't have a software problem, but given that the car was presumably asleep and crashed right when you woke it up might indicate some hardware issue.
 
I've had a 2021 Model 3 for a year now, and the only problems are occasionally the phone app doesn't work as a key for my wife's iphone. My Android phone seems to always work. But I think that's because it picked up my phone when she was leaving. Now I keep my phone away or bluetooth off when she's leaving.

It has never had any of the problems mentioned here. Sometimes, it takes the app a long time to connect, so functions will fail. My wife mostly drives the car to commute to work, and I usually open the app before she leaves to help make sure it's awake. I also schedule preconditioning now, which probably helps.

One thing I learned as a programmer for a client/server company where the main people were the server programmers is that they never thought the UI was important. To them, it was just simple stuff to work the important things in the server. I think the Tesla programmers for the car are probably similar. But I've done both types of programming, and I think the GUI is more complicated, because people are unpredictable and do things in ways we never consider. One problem with Tesla is there is no easy way for users to even report problems, except to enter a service request in the app, and those people often don't care about bugs in programming.

One example of UI programming. One time, a user reported that the program would crash if they clicked a certain area more than 10 times in a row. Programmers would never do that, and wonder why the user even did it. We want to say "well, don't do that!" But the user says "well, the program shouldn't crash anyway." And they're right.
 
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I'm curious how you eliminated a hardware problem as the cause? I don't recall others complaining about issues like this. Maybe you have a faulty MCU? A faulty 12V battery could have marginal voltage that dropped too much due to the inrush current when the car woke up.

I'm not saying that you didn't have a software problem, but given that the car was presumably asleep and crashed right when you woke it up might indicate some hardware issue.

Yep, always possible. I'm coming up on 2 years (but only 2600 covid miles) , so maybe 12v is getting sketchy and it's been cold (CA cold anyway, 45 degrees) which could make 12v bad. No warnings or errors though, and I had the SC check my primary battery for possible range loss and they said everything looked good. If there were other faults reported, I would assume it would have shown up there.

There is no other indication that there is a hardware error, but maybe the weird glitches I see from time to time are that. Like that drive to Iowa supercharger map. But I've also had the screen go black while driving and reboot, and tons of reboots from that stupid user manual bug.

I'm a professional software dev with an EE degree, and my experience suggests to me it's just software not hardware, but it's not out of the question.