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Consumer Reports Withdraws Its Tesla Model S Recommendation (consumerreports.org)
An anonymous reader sends news that Consumer Reports, after earlier giving the Tesla Model S a perfect road test score, has now withdrawn its recommendation for the electric car after investigating its reliability. As part of our Annual Auto Reliability Survey, we received about 1,400 survey responses from Model S owners who chronicled an array of detailed and complicated maladies. From that data we forecast that owning that Tesla is likely to involve a worse-than-average overall problem rate. ... The main problem areas involved the drivetrain, power equipment, charging equipment, giant iPad-like center console, and body and sunroof squeaks, rattles, and leaks. ... Overall, squeaks and rattles appear to be the most prevalent complaint. But as one respondent commented, "The car is so very silent when driving that minor squeaks and rattles that you wouldn't be able to hear in a gasoline engine car become very annoying." The list of issues also includes more significant problems, which could be pricey to fix once out of warranty. Based on survey responses, Tesla has made a habit of replacing the car’s electric motors. The brake rotors tend to warp. And the door handles often fail to “present” themselves as drivers approach their cars.
Hearing those noises is reassuring - it tells me the part making the noise hasn't fallen off yet.
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I think the touch screen console was a big mistake. You need to be able to manage things like climate settings, radio stations, etc. by touch.
Knobs and buttons in a car seem to be going the way of the dodo. It's a major pet-peeve for me--I can't stand the idiocy of car user interface design--they seem to be getting so much worse. Wife's Honda Odyssey has two screens (one touch, one not), and it's never clear which information will display where, the climate control is dreadful, tuning the radio is time consuming and attention-grabbing. It's just awful.
Nice car though.
They aren't powered by electrity, but hampsters. Now hampsters normally are not enough to power a car, but put some snakes in with them, and they make orders of magnitude more energy trying to run away. This is the only possible reason you hear squeeks and rattles.
God spoke to me
True, they will often look. The difference is the time needed to actually actuate the control. A quick glance is enough to get your finger on the right real button, because you can rely on touch to "zero in" on the control.
With a touch screen, you have to keep your eyes off the road a lot longer, because there is no point at which you can rely on touch alone.
Knobs and buttons will always be best in cars for physically manipulated interface controls. The reason is pretty simple - cars move. When they move, they hit bumps that makes everything inside jiggle. Unless through a remarkable coincidence the mass, springiness, and dampening of your body, arm, and fingertip exactly matches that of the LCD display, this means your finger will move relative to the screen every time you hit a bump. This makes trying to precisely manipulate touchscreen controls in a moving car an exercise in frustration.
Knobs and buttons are not just decorative. They support your fingers as you wrap them around the controls, effectively "docking" your fingers to the control. When the Shuttle or Soyuz capsule reaches the International Space Station, do they just kinda press up against the ISS and open the hatch? No. They dock the two with clamps which hold them together, then open the hatch. That's an extreme example because lives are at stake, but the principle is the same. By docking your fingers to the knob or button, you prevent your fingers from slipping around the control with every little bump you hit - your wrist and arm absorbs the relative motion of your body with the car, while your fingers remain stationary relative to the controls. Thus allowing you to precisely manipulate the interface in a moving, jiggling, bouncing car.
Don't get me wrong, touchscreens have their place. They're especially good for arbitrary 2-dimensional inputs, like typing on a virtual keyboard or flinging a GPS map back and forth. But the designers who decided to make basic controls like the radio and climate control touchscreen-only were idiots too caught up in the hype over the latest trend to bother thinking about why traditional interface controls are built they way they are. They can be somewhat forgiven because they probably used their phone or tablet inside and car and thought it was great. But what they didn't realize was that when you use a touchscreen phone or tablet in a moving car, you're holding the device so it doesn't move relative to you. And so accurate touchscreen inputs are possible.