And lack of CarPlay, especially due to how convenient SharePlay is with other car passengers.
Autopilot has also been sufficiently good for the price at which the car is sold at. At $40k, I did not find a competitor with a better version of lane assist.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-worlds-best-sell...
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1gyznda/t...
And just from visual inspection, it is evident that there are numerous surprises with the iSeeCars study that are difficult to explain. For example, why is there such a huge difference between Model 3 and Y fatality rates even though the cars are similar in most respects?
Another thing to note is that the number of fatalities is only a handful, often under 10 in a year. The standard deviation of the Poisson distribution would already give error bars of 30% at least, making direct comparisons between models meaningless.
Finally, if you read the accident reports, most of the fatalities are head on collisions with drunk drivers and not wearing seatbelts. Having physical controls for hvac or whatever has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Because money?
Nobody's that naive.
Would you take that bet?
Someone's been sleeping for last 12 months
Like 40% of people used to smoke. 40% of people are obese today. I’m not comparing these things to teslas in terms of harm (though funding musk is societal harm) but they prove that consumers can make very very bad choices and IMO do all the time
The vocal minority acts as a valid canary, probably most of the time.
Just because people buy something doesn't mean they love every aspect of it.
We recently switched to an ID Buzz because our family outgrew the Y. The interior is a huge improvement over the Y (which, fair, it is a more expensive vehicle) and CarPlay is just objectively better than Tesla’s infotainment, but the rest of the software is pretty meh. I really miss a lot of little things like phone keys and a built in dash cam, though.
Sorry, we all have our opinions and perspective, but money isn't the only value judgement.
I want my speedo in my easy line of vision on any vehicle I drive. I want to be able to demist my windscreen by reaching for a button I can find without taking my eyes off the road.
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/02/vw-ditches-base-2025-id-4-...
I was comparing a 3 row model Y AWD with tow hitch to AWD Pro ID.4 and ID.4 was coming in close to $50k, both with the federal tax credit. And the ID.4 lacked the 3rd row seating. I am also biased against European vehicles because I assume they will be more maintenance/expensive. I had a bunch of people recommend Model Y to me, and I trusted Tesla's electric vehicle making experience more than VW.
Yes, copium
But it’s crazy to claim Model 3 and Y are not competitively priced products that are usable for many, many people.
And I will also say I would not currently pay extra for a high end Tesla. But on the cheap end, and with the far superior buying experience without a stealership in the middle, it is welcome competition to the incumbent automakers.
You should upload a video of yourself doing it. Do it right now if it’s not a Nazi salute.
I’ll wait for your upload.
Obligatory disclaimers:
- Tesla is from USA and its CEO Elon Musk appears to be a nazi.
- Mobileye, the company that sells driving assistance equipment to many car manufacturers including VW, is from Israel.
Lucid, Rivian, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Hyundai/Kia, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW all have design studios in California. They don’t all have this problem.
Do we really think that Tesla engineers and product managers have never seen rain or snow before? And if so what kind of lame excuse is that?
Aren’t some of Tesla’s biggest markets in cold weather climates? Places like Canada, New England, Scandinavia, Germany, and China (Beijing).
I also don’t see much reason to buy a Tesla in 2025. There are better quality interiors for less money. The only thing Tesla has going for them is acceleration (if you pay!) and that is only relevant on a racetrack to push the car to it’s limits. Any normal EV is plenty quick for daily driving.
Tesla base (no extra cost) acceleration is really good for anyone but speed junkies. I’ve had plenty of people (non-gear heads, non-speed junkies) white knuckle when I showed them what my model y is capable of.
The best part is that the acceleration is punchy all the way from 0 to about 105-110mph.
Other than that, I think the “religious wars” over Teslas give folks a warped view of reality. My comments to anyone who is thinking of getting one:
- Test drive one for yourself — this will be the most telling. Sometimes the showroom will let you borrow one over night. I knew I was getting mine after about 2 minutes of a test drive.
- Learn about the controls. Reading the manual helps when you get one… there are tons of cool, functional features.
- Try to go in with an open-but-critical mind. If you test drive with an overly negative disposition, you will almost certainly hate it. If you go in with an overly positive disposition, you will be blind to potential faults (e.g., for me, a yoke steering wheel that some models have is a no-go).
Note that refreshed model y is coming out in May or so, and it seems like the options they chose are fairly optimized.
On my model y and (I think) the new model y releasing in May:
1. Physical controls (stalk button and scroll wheel)
2. Stalk
3. Voice or top level of screen, although the auto-temp is good for me 99% of the time
The extent to which some folks fixate on these issues (at least for the model y) makes me think “religious war” or “neurodivergent”. It’s unnecessary fear-mongering.
Interesting choices. None of those are driving controls.
Presumably lights and wipers are on stalks. What about cruise control and related functions?
> the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light".
Volume - scroll wheel
Heating - voice or screen, screen can be top screen for most functions (it’s editable for most-used functions)
Fans - same as heating, adjusting direction is top screen
Hazards - physical button near rear view mirror
> Presumably lights and wipers are on stalks.
Lights - stalk
Wipers - stalk and scroll wheel
> What about cruise control and related functions?
Autopilot (adaptive cruise control with lane assist) - right stalk and scroll wheel
Note: Article isn’t opening for me (hug of death), so I can’t refer to it.
If you must stop suddenly on a motorway, the hazard lights give additional warning to following vehicles. Switch them on as soon as possible. This is especially important in low visibility or at night.
Fans are also essential. You obviously don't live in a climate where the windscreen can fog up unexpectedly.
For the fans, usually they turn on automatically, but sometimes I have to turn them on by voice control.
As I have said before, these are all things that are trivially easy to handle without removing one’s hands from the wheel or eyes from the road. Some folks are just hellbent on tilting at this windmill for some reason.
Many people just hate touch screen controls. Maybe that is kind of a religious war with car enthusiasts, like auto vs manual. But a lack physical controls are a huge deal for some people. It's like if a dev tool doesn't have a cli.
I'm not even a car enthusiast and I refuse to get a car without decent physical controls.
I've been hearing for years from Tesla fans about how perfectly amazing the cars are but I doubt they will suddenly be right after yet another redesign.
I haven’t had to change heat/cool settings, I have it set to 70F and I haven’t had to adjust it.
I don’t think there’s any other modern car getting so much scrutiny. Ironically it is making it so much better than competitors they basically have no chance to catch up.
I have a Model Y and a Toyota Highlander (so not just accustomed to the hostility), and I prefer the hands-off approach in the Tesla. No reason to lie.
You never need to touch the AC controls when driving thanks to auto mode. In the worst case you can use voice control, which you can again trigger from a physical control.
The 3D visualization is completely separate from the code that actually runs FSD, auto park, and other driver assist features, so just because it shows something wonky like a motorbike doesn't mean that it's what the car "thinks" it is.
I do need to control it depending if it’s sunny or cloudy. Otherwise it is perfect.
> People don't feel hot or cold based just on ambient temperature
This is well known, and it is why sun-load sensors have been commonplace in cars for decades.
Automotive engineering is quite mature.
Never got in the car having one layer too many and having to turn down the temp? Never got in the car with not enough layers on just to realise 10 minutes into the drive that it’s a bit chilly? Is your preferred temperature the same as the one of you passenger? Or you get in the car from a massive rail and you beed to blast that aircon and bump the temp to deal with humidity completely obstructing the windshield?
My thermostat just works. I don’t live in an extreme climate, so layering isn’t a thing. The car has a button specifically for defogging your windshield, so that is treated separately from climate control. You can hit max if you want drastic temperature change, but it’s a heat pump so thermostat is the only way to go really.
See, you don’t. It’s okay.
“It barely ever rains in California. I don’t understand why we need wipers. And when it rains once in 10 years, I can stop… I don’t understand why everyone cannot just stop. Why do we spend money on those little engines and wipers.”
By the way… there’s nothing preventing auto aircon and having a manual dial to change the setting rather than through a touchscreen. It safer. You know, in case if you have to. Which you don’t have to, apparently. That’s cool.
I think some people would do well travelling a tid bit more.
The AC auto button takes the needed action to get to the temperature you set. In On Tesla this was mostly set and forget.
Does it also do seat heating/cooling automatically?
>In the worst case you can use voice control, which you can again trigger from a physical control.
Does it understand my accent or do I need to learn to talk like an American?
I have physical buttons for changing the temperature, driver's side and passenger's side, and they don't get used even one in three times we get into the car -- but I'm still glad for the physical controls.
I really dislike using a touch screen while driving, as it makes me take my eyes off the road more than I'd like. I also just like how physical controls feel and make more sense. I was gifted the book, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, back in college and it really stuck with me how unintuitive many physical controls are in cars, as well as poorly designed doors on/in buildings (Norman doors as they are often called, in honor of the book).
It baffles me that they were ever considered “luxury” cars except as to price.
Not surprisingly, companies that have been making cars forever are pretty good at making cars. Cars have always been a very competitive market, so you didn't have the kind of absolute stagnation you see in some other industries. Tesla just gave them a kick in the butt to make electric cars.
That's true, and they are insanely fast. But I will never forget when the Model S was released and was competing against flagships like the 7 series and S class. When I tried one out, my overwhelming first impression was: this is it? And that was 2012. And it's still basically the same car!
The frame and body and interior was garbage. That drive train though.
AIUI, it turns out that the ability to select drive vs reverse is considered safety critical, so it has to work even if the infotainment system is not operational. This involves something along the lines of a dual-port touch sensor so that an independent, higher-reliability system can detect the gesture to change direction, and the hardware for that is not free. And the “gear shift” stalk was simple and cheap.
I haven’t tried it in an appropriate model Tesla, but I suspect you can trigger an infotainment reboot using whatever the current button press combination is, and then, before it finishes rebooting, select drive or reverse by swiping the left edge of the screen, and it will work.
Score one for car regulations doing the right thing? Maybe, but this all misses the mark, because how many people will know to do the ridiculous swipe on an invisible target when the need to get out of the way of an emergency vehicle and their infotainment system isn’t working.
(I don’t know about newer Teslas, but infotainment glitches on older models are common.)
That was Tesla's sales pitch. Model S was no competitor for Mercedes-Benz S-Class. It competed against the E-Class.
Success is self limiting. It makes people start to engage in magical thinking about their own abilities and vision.
Sit in a Toyota and you’ll understand what is cheap.
If price and fuel wasn't a consideration (diesel cars and fuel have crazy taxes around here) I'd end with Toyota 10/10 times.
The current Model 3 seems to use about 25kWh/100mi. The off-peak rate (PG&E EV2-A) is 31c/kWh, giving $0.078/mi.
Tesla is winning, but not by a ton.
Supercharging seems to be a bit more expensive than home charging. Gasoline is less expensive outside California. Electricity is much less expensive outside of the investor-owned utility territories. Heck, Palo Alto (not exactly a low cost area) only charges $0.21c/kWh.
Where I live in Norway, this morning diesel is around $1.85 / l (so around $7 / gallon) and that is on the cheaper side since the pandemic ended.
I’ll take a Toyota Century over a Tesla any day of the week.
The most obvious example is they have few ways to customize the look of your vehicle. A model S has what 7 colors and 2 kinds of wheels vs 2025 EQS 450 with 18 colors and 6 wheels to choose from. The Bens then has 23 Upholstery options and 4 independent trims and that’s before all the odd option packages.
Tesla used to operate an exclusive charging network which was a premium feature, but they opened that up to other manufacturers.
CCS2/Type-2 were adopted as EU standards with enforcement to start this year, although it sounds like it's more of a "the charger must have this, but can have others".
The vehicle keeps also falling apart. The wheel covers keep falling off because the clips keep breaking, even though there has been no damage that should have caused it.
On the previous one they were about seven or eight repair attempts for the window failing to roll up so I was unable to secure the vehicle and they kept failing to provide loaners when it was in for service.
This is for the model X and model S, which is supposed to be their “luxury” vehicles
By the way, if you would like to lemon your Tesla, please read your purchase agreement for the email to send your request. You get back all of the interest, payments, tax, registration and everything.
Lemon laws are laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance. Although many types of products can be defective, the term "lemon" is mostly used to describe defective motor vehicles, such as cars, trucks, and motorcycles.
https://www.wordsense.eu/lemoning/ It's number 5 here ^
At this point it feels like you're misunderstanding the chain on purpose.
Facts are definitely treated as misinformation by a certain class of people these days, that's for sure.
First time riding in both. The road noise in the Y made it feel really cheap. Rough ride. Generally cheap feel.
The Kia was much smoother, quieter, obviously more premium materials.
It's really simple, Tesla people will tell you the car is built around a computer while other manufacturers stick a computer in their car. They're correct, and that's not a compliment for the Tesla because the ergonomics as well as the fit and finish were clearly an afterthought.
Kia EV6 GT Dry Michelin PS4S Summer 255/40-21 255/40-21 64,4 66,9 68,8 67,06 Tesla Model Y RWD Dry Michelin Pilot Sport EV Summer 255/40-20 255/40-20 64,5 67,1 68,7 67,09
Source: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HOwktdiZmm40atGPwymz...
You clearly haven't sat in a loaded '25 Camry.
Funnily this happens only in my model 3, not my X (I bought them before Elon went crazy). Both have automatic wipers on.
Nothing spells out "luxury" better than misadjusted panel gaps..
Tesla is upper middle class (model S) or lower, just with potentially more horsepower in some models. It has great straight line performance and thats about it, but then ie dragsters should be in ultra-luxury class by that logic.
I had a chance to drive MB van recently. Steering wheel has 12 buttons with 28 positions. It was a nightmare. CarPlay maps are garbage. Changing radio station was 4 swipes and taps on touchscreen. Jerking off little joystick to navigate over complex menu’s is far worse than 1 tap on touchscreen.
Buttons vs touchscreen isn’t the problem, it’s how they are implemented.
What? The benefit of CarPlay is that I can use my map app of choice. Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, whatever. In 5 years of daily driving I rarely used Tesla’s maps and opted for my phone connected via Bluetooth.
The difference between changing to a different input source or changing a track or adjusting the audio settings between the two is night and day. I don't have to have my phone plugged into a USB port, which is flaky. The Lexus automatically goes back to the map after a few seconds.
I don't understand the appeal of having your car screen be a dumb terminal for your phone. Maybe it's better if you use Spotify or Apple Music or something, I don't know.
I get into a rental car, I connect my iPhone and use CarPlay, I don’t have to worry about leaving my contacts data behind or anything else, and I am already familiar with the UX.
That is why Tesla and Rivian and GM don’t offer CarPlay, even though it is free and easy to implement. They don’t want people to be able to easily switch cars, they don’t want to just be a fungible appliance.
But as a consumer, I do want them to be a fungible appliance.
> IDK perhaps you haven't used Tesla, but carplay just is incredibly inferior.
Necromancy here, but I'd missed this earlier. If it wasn't clear in my comment somehow, I was referring to driving my Tesla daily for 5 years. It is interesting that I have the exact same feeling about the iPhone vs Nokia argument, but opposite: the switch to CarPlay from Tesla's infotainment was hands down the biggest upgrade of our new car.
One person's "context sensitive" is another person's "mode confusion".
https://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/papers/ModeConfusionAnalysi...
I have the opposite experience. My friends Teslas blow me away with their drivers assistance stuff. But the German and Japanese cars I’ve driven - absolute garbage, bordering on deadly. Random braking, not braking even with traffic stopped in front, aggressive collision prevention in places like parking lots, suddenly losing recognition of lanes, and other things. I believe these companies outsource the high tech stuff - not sure to whom - but I suspect they aren’t a tech company.
The one thing that I think should be improved in all cars is that I want to use the AC auto settings but still have the air come out of the bottom vents and not into my face only.
A well designed user interface for an automobile should be discoverable and intuitive for anyone that’s driven a car previously.
My argument would be that 'tools' should be designed solely with the purpose of enabling them to work in the most effective way possible. That is often not immediately intuitive at all. Go open up e.g. Unreal Engine and you're going to struggle to do literally anything. Maybe after an hour you might figure out how to put a square on the map. The same is true of something like Maya or any other really powerful tool.
Obviously things should not be unnecessarily hostile, but it often simply turns out that there are 'revolutionary' ways to do things that weren't really done in the past, and so somebody coming from that past will often find themselves out of their domain, at least for a few moments until they learn and/or have things explained.
A car is not a 3D modeling or game world building system. They’re functionally much simpler and don’t really benefit from added control complexity.
All in all, it's a control that helps you maneuver a 2 tons vehicle, like your wheel, your gas pedal and your brake pedal.
I personally think this kind of control should never depend on a flimsy touchscreen that can break or bug more easily than a mechanical control (although I agree it's less important that the wheel and pedals).
I had the opportunity to drive a Tesla recently, and I was pretty blown away by how hostile the ux was. Even the indicator stalk has no tactile feedback leading to me indicating left then right multiple times after completing a simple lane change (as I pushed it slightly too far for the lane change mode so it didn't shut off automatically). Don't get me started on things like the AC and window wipers being behind the touchscreen, it's like they designed it to require a copilot.
It's driver aid features also get easily tricked leading to random steering corrections and slamming on the brakes. I'd love to know if anyone's analyzed the rate of rear end collisions compared to older/simpler cars, as I suspect it could be statistically higher.
It was also fairly amusing parking it in the garage - it seemed to mistake our dog for a motorbike and the other vehicle as a truck with the 3 of us colliding, glad it didn't try and automatically phone in the "collisions"