Yeah those suck - the vents often break, they’re ugly, they don’t work as well.

The Tesla vents are great, the ui is good or can use voice. Other companies that attempt what Tesla does do it poorly with bad software.

I've driven many cars over the years. Not once has a vent ever broken.

Which cars are you driving where they break often?

I don't know what kind of breakage was the parent talking about.

My experience is that as the car gets older it is common for the vents to lose the capability to stay pointed where I place them. As in: you point them where you want and they flip back all the way to one side as soon as you let go.

(Hot climate here, with several months of "a/c set to max during the whole trip" per year)

I’ve been in many cars where they don’t stay pointed and where the moving mechanism plastic broke off from where it’s connected so it doesn’t move the vent fins at all.

Plastic in the 1990s was more brittle than today. Even back then, my 10-15 year old Ford had issues with the vents not easily moving, then breaking from force.

More modern cars of decent build do not have this issue.

I've driven Tesla's a number of times and absolutely hate the vent controls, they are wildly less precise and take much more attention than in any other car I've driven. I hate pretty much all gimmicky Tesla UX decisions and think most are categorically worse than the standard options.

The Tesla vents are definitely a debatable choice. I like them, but I acknowledge they are mostly an aesthetic choice. Many Tesla removals (stalks, etc.) come with a cost savings, but I don't really see it with vents. You're probably adding parts in the form of little motors and wires to power them. But they do fit with the theme of autonomy. Software can remember their position for each driver, or could hypothetically cycle through different positions depending on mode selection. (They might do this already but I don't pay close enough attention.)

Edit: Now that I think of it, it's possibly still a huge cost savings in that you can have interchangeable parts across all models, since the vents are hidden to the user.

Lots of car brands have only a few sizes of vents across several different models of cars. Look at the interiors of all the various GM cars across their different brands especially in the 90s and 2000s, and they're all essentially the same vents.