I think the implication is that the current software is just not very good.

It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot. But it sounds like from the perspective of a normal person's sustained daily use, the gee-whiz feelings wear off and leave you with annoying issues.

But it could also partly be a case of differing expectations. The web has trained us all that software generally gets better over time. I never expect a car's too-low doorframes to make room for my head. But on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad. In fact, I ended up paying good money to replace the car stereo with something that was compatible with Android Auto mainly so I could have an ever-improving Google Maps in the same spot on my dashboard.

> on an ICE car when I'm confronted with, say, the same clunky dashboard nav system, it seems more frustrating that, year after year, it's still just as bad

I drove my first ICE vehicle for almost 10 years. The driver experience was exactly the same in year 9 as it was in year 1. The replacement is currently in year 7. It's the same as it was in its year 1.

Q: Why would that be frustrating?

Modern cars have much more features and tech than older cars. UX on a decently designed 30 year old car couldn't be improved much. While my current car is nice, I'd appreciate automatic wipers and Bluetooth that were more reliable. The voice recognition and navigation wasn't cutting edge the day it left the factory. There are a few behaviors of the automatic climate control that need improving too.

Did you have a touch screen? Or a screen that controls any part of the car?

The frustration is that those tend to have awful interfaces, with extra frustration that they could be fixed but don't get fixed.

If you had normal buttons then there wasn't anything to get annoyed with in this way in the first place, so it didn't need updates.

Given that this is a fairly common sentiment, it’s a bit wild to me that SpaceX uses touch screens to control almost everything in their Dragon capsule.

It's a different environment. Astronauts are passengers, not drivers, and they rarely need to make sudden actions while multi-tasking the way car drivers do. If they made all-glass cockpits for fighter jets I would agree with you, but they don't.

This isn’t a very accurate take, anymore than an airline pilot is a passenger. There’s an reason why the first astronauts to fly in it were military pilots. Dragon has a manual mode that requires an astronaut to control the vehicle for safety reasons. I’m not aware of any human-rated NASA software that doesn’t also require a human in the loop to meet the required safety thresholds.

It's just not as much fun when you're not renting your UX so next year could bring you better collision avoidance or require you to pay for an upgrade to continue to be able to recline your seats

> better collision avoidance

Mark I eyeballs still in use here, touch wood they're apparently still working ok.

Was driving round greater Innsbruck in the snow 10 days ago, someone was coming downhill on a snowy sidestreet too fast and out of the corner of my eye I clocked they weren't going to be able to stop, yanked my wheel left, I slid(!) out of my lane into the oncoming lane (happily empty) and the unlucky driver slid out over the white line right into the space my vehicle would have been in.

Talk about adrenaline rush :(

The distinction I'm drawing is that we expect software to improve.

My first car had no software, so I didn't expect anything to get better. But the most recent thing I drove frequently had significant amounts of software, especially the touchscreen that did audio and navigation. Even when it first came out it was not very good software, so it was the kind of thing I'd want to get better. And 5 years later, having watched all the rest of the software in my life improve, the flaws were ever more grating.

And I should add that I suspect there's a technology stage issue here. If you look at a model T dashboard, the controls were by modern standards terrible. All of us are used to cars where they spent decades refining physical controls, all of which were pretty uncomplicated compared to what we routinely expect software to do. So it's reasonable to me that if we count the number and severity of driver experience issues, the graph bottoms out sometime in the mid-1980s (1986 being the first time they put touch-screens in cars).

> It's obviously fine for techie early adopters, who like the new shiny and are willing to put up with a lot

"Buttons beat touchscreens in cars, and now there’s data to prove it": https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/yes-touchscreens-really...

I did actually chortle when I read that :)

That isn’t ICE vs EV that’s new vs old

A few months ago, Tesla rolled out a new feature where it will give a gentle ping if you’re standing in front of a stop light and the light turns green.

I love it.

That used to be part of the expensive FSD package, and it was the only part I liked. Glad it's standard now.