Sheesh.
I don't know what it is. The SO and I happen at the moment to have two Teslas, a 2021 MY and, currently, a 2023 M3 that replaced a 2018 M3 during the "swap and keep FSD" follies of last year.
The SO, interestingly, is a no-kidding Human Factors engineer, underlying degrees in Industrial Engineering. I'm the techie maniac with a very-mixed-signal background in EE.
Let's just say that I more than I care to mention about RADAR, specifically, and have a decent handle on what's going on with all this NN stuff. And control theory. And integrated circuit design. I joke around a bit about working on stuff from DC to Daylight.. and it's not that much of a joke.
And I've been messing with technology since I was a teenager. Ham Radio with tubes and knobs; actually building some (in terms of transistors) Pentium class IC, VHDL and all (that last with a team.. which, at times, I led.)
So let's get real: Technology
changes. The look of MSDOS 1.1 doesn't look much like IBM JCL and punch cards; neither of those had much to do with Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 95, or any of those successors. And the
tools that I had to use.. they changed, too, for as much as they've always tended to be text based, although in latter years even GUIs came to those. And the
GUIs changed, too.
And, you know what? Living with changed development systems
was never a problem. It's just the job. For that matter, living with changed
software systems was never a problem. Yeah, I Am That Guy who always downloads the latest updates, learns what's different (release notes, anybody?) and Just Goes On. I read manuals, too, from time to time.
And I
actually appreciate Tesla's approach. As I said, the SO is an HF person. She has actually designed human-machine interfaces to make users' lives easier, reduce error rates, and reduce costs.
Thing is, nobody runs around changing GUIs and stuff just to irritate the heck out of people with an Old Fogey attitude. I suspect that Tesla doesn't speak about it much, but they clearly have HF people on stuff, as does
every other car manufacturer. The difference is, with the old-timey car makers, is once they've put their buttons and clicky stuff where they wanted it, no matter how bad it was (and it could be pretty bad), there wasn't going to be any changes going forward. Except, possibly, once every multi-year interval when the designers got a chance to give it another whack.
And people don't generally complain about bad UI on older cars because humans are adaptable and
get used to it. Anybody remember when the high-beam/low-beam switch was on the floor to the left of the brake pedal? How about when the wiper speed switch was on the dash, and not a stalk? You guys may not remember, but I remember how much Consumers Reports
complained about those changes.. because whatever it was, it was
different, and that meant that people had to learn something
different, and, to CU, in full Old Fogey mode, that was too much.
Thing is: Stalks
Are better, at least to the wipers on the dash/headlight high beams on the floor control theory. Right at your fingertips, hardly have to take one's hands off the wheel. Did that stop CU from bitching? Nope.
So, our buddies at Tesla have Mad Scientist HF types who, from time to time, take a really serious look at the User Interface. If they're the type of HF types I think they are, they pull their rats (random subjects pulled from the street, literally usually) and run them through the maze of old GUI/new GUI, for both experienced and non-experienced users. And, after a lot of testing, statistical analysis, and what-all, they plotch a new GUI on the hoi polloi.
When this happens, do I freak out and start screaming? Nope, it's just another blame GUI change. First thing to do is figure out what's changed so errors aren't made, then apply brain, fiddle with it, and see what's good/bad/indifferent.
Honestly, there's nothing bad about the Tesla GUI. Moving the speedometer from the far right on the screen to the left,
which is a closer angular distance to the eyeball, improves safety. Trying to arrange the GUI that, with non-infinite real estate, packs Large Icons into a limited space with reasonable efficiency and usability. Is it perfect? Nope.
Can it be improved? Sure. And TESLA CAN IMPROVE IT. Try
that, any other automobile manufacturer.
As regards the RADAR and sonar sensors on the car.. heck, we humans get around without RADAR pretty effectively, and don't really need USS to figure out where things are, and a Tesla has a lot more eyeballs than we do. Once Tesla realized that that extra hardware wasn't going to be cost-effective, both for users buying the car and the company spending money developing software to support those sensors, and the fundamental issue that development money was probably better spent on getting the blame FSD working, it actually makes
sense that pulling the bandaid off by disabling the RADAR and USS was a good idea. I mean: Keeping a dozen or three engineers working on keeping USS and RADAR working when those hardware platforms are going to be ditched?
I'll admit I've been sad that my parallel and tail-in parking and the basic Summon were gone when I got the 2023 M3. But I've been pretty impressed with the visual aids on parking that both the 2021 and 2023 cars have been displaying, heat maps and all. And, unlike the people who run around screaming, "Fraud! Fraud! It's all Fraud!", I actually believe Tesla is going to return those functions to the car. That heat map stuff we're seeing right now sure looks like a big step in that direction. Frankly, I'm more than happy to wait, so long as it's not going to be a year more.. and Tesla has been saying it
won't be a year more for that.
So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for
@SidetrackedSue, who appears to have degenerated into true Old Fogey mode. What's next with her? Horses? (Although technology change comes to horses, too: At one time neither horse collars nor stirrups were around. Although I was definitely not around for that.)
