I'm surprised. But it shouldn't be up to Tesla; it's illegal and they never get on the road in countries with proper regulations.
Enforcement, no?
NY state has 30% tint law, but my Uber driver last night was more than that.
I’ve heard tint being enforced with other violations, but i believe window tint analyzers are in short supply or costly, and they have to share. Which leads to longer roadside detainments.
What makes them so difficult to test?
The trouble is both the cops and bully boys like tinted windows the same as acculturated Captain America and the Red Skull.
The USA doesn't mandate red turn signals. They can be red or amber. Plenty of BMWs with amber turn signals. Although the current one has red turn signals.
I'd say on modern cars it's less bad, the turn signal is usually a strip, and the brake light is larger, joined with a 3rd brake light.
But on one of those old Ford vans, with incandescent red brake/turn signals with no/often broken 3rd light: you have to wait a second before you can determine if the person is braking / indicating.
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
You can't call any change "dismantling Chesterton's fence" - "Windows made the corners of the windows round, users hated it, obvious example of Chesterton's fence"
There are bigger losers in car aerodynamics. The worse one is the frontal section, that current models seem to ignore, making bigger and bigger cars almost for the sake of it. Then they have forgotten parts like the underside, that could be covered with something light and smooth for decent gains, but are instead an aerodynamic nightmare because nobody is looking there.
There are cars with Cd around 0.2 (Xiaomi SU7, Lucid Air, Tesla S, Hyundai Ioniq...). The Mercedes A-Class Saloon since 2018 and BMW 5 have a Cd of 0.22, and they look like normal cars, with normal door handles and normal mirrors, but carefully designs of the underside, air around the wheels and rear drag reduction. The Mercedes include active aero around the engine, shutting the grill when cooling is not needed. But they keep selling SUVS with Cd over 0.35, up to 0.45 with flushed door handles "for the aero". Please.
very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny.
Perhaps because they're too small and the LEDs are not diffused enough.
Red means Rear, and white means front, which is why reversing lights are white and front turn signals are (should be) yellow.
And yellow means sides then? Make sense to me.
It's one of the reasons I refuse to own a new car. Zero reason to hide critical controls behind a touch screen.
My daily driver has all tactile controls. I can operate wipers, climate, radio, and all critical functions blindfolded.
All my cars have had basically the same controls for turn indicators, lights and wipers. The variations are minimal.
I got two cars with cruise control and I had to read the manual once per car (better not to experiment at high speed.) I probably just poked with the levers to understand how to control the radio. However it took me four years to finally make my phone play audio over Bluetooth (calls were OK.) Everybody's else phone was fine. I finally found the right incantation of taps on the touch screen. Luckily very few functionalities must be accessed via the touchscreen, most notably adjusting the time and resetting the tire pressure sensors.
> cheaper to modify software UI
All of this leads to an increase in “failures” in seperate steps of the manufacturing pipeline, assembly of dashboard, assembly of car, after the car is completed, after it is shipped to dealer, and after the new owner picks it up, during the lifetime of the car. Each of those moments occurs a significantly increased cost of replacing the button.
By simply removing buttons and knobs, this source of failure rate goes down and it appears cheaper. It is also the reason behind going from 4 buttons for the windows to 3 (left, right, and a toggle for front/rear)
According to him the monetary savings were significant enough to proceed with it. Personally, I wish they wouldn’t. But I believed the numbers.
A button for a car is designed and tested to last 10 years. Software on the other hand...
In fact they are hated so much people are deliberately buying older less safe cars instead.
That's what car manufacturers make you think. Who do you think it (paid) lobby for those features to be mandatory in new cars ?
Fully agree
Before the S also were the Volt, Fisker Karma, and GM EV1.
I’d say a first gen Leaf looked fairly typical of small Nissan cars from that era, tbh; all their small cars looked a bit like that. And a Zoe looked pretty much the same as a Clio of like era. Interestingly, the Renault 5, their new electric car in the size category, is self-consciously weird-looking (you can get it in bright green as a standard option!), and seems to be doing very well.
Apart from BMW, the trend has been for electric cars to get more visibly weird/different, not less.
Yup, also see the weird styling decisions on the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars that shared bodies with non-hybrids.
Your definition of normal makes me suspicious. I thought GM were "the first to make an EV that looked normal". Tesla was the first to make a "software defined vehicle", 10 years before this became mainstream. Tesla is the Google of EVs: the UX sucks, but everybody wants to copy it.
https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_m...
Those turn and brake signals are nearly unreadable at distance now. Even worse when snow-covered.
which look like an arrow pointing the opposite direction to the one the driver is indicating for.
Still a good 42 million or so short of, say, a Toyota Corolla.
Reverse these trends. They all suck and unsafe.
Ok the rear red turn signal lights were already a trend in the US before Tesla. But please reverse this too. It's very difficult to see blinking red lights on the freeway when it's sunny. For you people out there who buy cars with red blinking signal lights, I hate you.