From the article: "five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light".

Interesting choices. None of those are driving controls.

Presumably lights and wipers are on stalks. What about cruise control and related functions?

They mentioned returning to physical buttons on the steering wheel as well. Past VW models (eg. Golf Mk7) have the cruise control button on the steering wheel. I read "five most important functions" as relative to those you would usually find on a centre console, not for overall driving.

On Model Y:

> 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.

Hazard lights absolutely are driving controls in some countries. I'd argue all countries.

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.

As I mentioned, hazards are a physical button. I don’t know what the issue is.

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.

Nah, the religious war people will complain about Elon, and maybe vague accusations of poor general quality (not untrue but no-one cars about the door gap, poor tolerances are only an issue in the drivetrain, and Tesla's drive train is inherently very good even if they don't have late 90s Toyota levels of quality control).

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 driven several Teslas and all were a terrible experience largely for this reason, basic controls are often absurdly clunky or hard to find. That's nice that they finally fixing some of these mistakes after years of complaints, but I'm very skeptical of a company that so often goes out of its way to create problems in order to be cheap and novel.

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.