So maybe it’s just me, but I hate how the legacy auto makers, even the luxury ones, nickel and dime everything. You buy a $75k car and the frequently touched places are metal, but if you go looking at all you find cheap $15k car tier plastic. With Tesla, the entire car is made of a few middle of the road materials. I don’t want the cheap plastic, but I also don’t want a facade. I just want reasonable quality everywhere. I feel like cars that don’t do that are lying to me. Also Tesla basically succeeded at replicating an iPad as the screen, which to this day no one else has done. I think they actually poached part of the iPad team to do it.
Tesla makes their own fabrication machines in house, so their body panels don’t have to look like every other manufacturer that uses standard supplier machines. And I’m not referring to the cyber truck, the shape of the main line cars is not achievable with the standard equipment, which is why they are able to stand out visually.
Where are the competitor electrics beating out Tesla? Are the acceleration dynamics better? Is the handling better? Is the screen better?
I’m guessing the seats are more comfortable, and the interior is bifurcated into nicer and less nice parts with the average niceness being about the same. They might be dumping here though since they are still burning through cash on these cars AFAIK, so I think it remains to be seen whether whatever advantages they have in the comfort and materials areas are sustainable.
(For the record, the electric door openers and the self driving labeling are both moronic, but when you have a dictator you can’t really avoid getting some bad stuff where the individual guy turns out to be wrong about something).
Well it's nice that Tesla cars are uniquely made, but they are very ugly to the average consumer. More traditional cars produced by legacy makers just... look better. To most people.
Legacy makers are producing cars with things consumers actually want. Higher quality interiors, nice exteriors, good ride dynamics, Apple car play, and competitive price points.
I think the reality is that most people actually don't care about Teslas big screen or autopilot. They want a car thats somewhat normal that does car things and does them well. They want good range, comfy seats, and steering wheel stocks.
Kia provides that, Hyundai provide that, pretty much everyone provides that except Tesla. The extra acceleration points doesn't matter. It's never really mattered, that's just a spec sheet bragging point.
I am not talking about the size. Capacitive touch screen hardware and software seems to be really difficult to nail. The actual touch interface on Tesla is at the iPad level. Also the material quality is very good.
All other cars I’ve tried recently have all had a touch screen, it was just bad. If I have to have a screen, I want it to feel like a first class citizen and not some cost cut afterthought.
I don’t really get why people would want CarPlay instead of the native Tesla OS? I have another car with CarPlay which was more expensive than my Tesla (so apples to apples or better comparison), and I find CarPlay on the B tier screen to feel extremely clunky by comparison (though still much better than what came before in the legacy makers).
Have you daily driven a Tesla before? Have the other car makers released some crazy breakthrough? I might test drive some, I’m curious now.
It seems to me like the biggest difference is the media turned against Elon, and so we went from having positive coverage of Tesla to negative. I think that alone could explain the sentiment shift, based on how people all around me seem to be brain-led by the media.
one has to be out of their mind to prefer carplay over tesla’s native, literally out of their mind. tesla’s tech is far superior than any other car and it isn’t even close.
the problwm with tesla is that it is a dinosaur. I own 2014 Tesla S, my neighbour latest one - it is same f’ing car. tesla X was cool looking… in 2016, now it looks like it belongs in a museum. model 3 is chopped up S and Y is blown up 3. the cars are sooooo outdated it is nuts people still buy them
I get what you’re saying, but I feel like this is basically an immoral reason to judge a car. Immoral in the philosophical sense, not in a religious sense.
Like do we really need our cars to have random shapes added and removed from them every 3 years? Why? Sure, novelty feels good, but the impact of this behavior is pretty clearly not positive. A lot of waste is generated, both at a societal level but also at a personal and familial level, and also in terms of industrial production resource direction, basically in the name of fashion. The new BMW design isn’t any “better” than the old design, it’s just visual social memes.
So anyway it makes sense that Elon is being stubborn against this, and it also makes sense that he will probably fail at doing that because not everyone is a turbo autist.
> one has to be out of their mind to prefer carplay over tesla’s native, literally out of their mind.
Hi, it's me, I've driven Tesla's and yes - I prefer carplay and android auto, and I have good reasons for it.
The first being that touch displays, even if they are the best displays that could be manufactured on Earth, will always be inferior to physical controls for many functions.
Me swiping up and down or pushing plus or minus to turn up the heat does not compare to a rinky dink dial found in a 1999 Toyota Corolla.
So then, what's left? The software-only stuff: navigation, music, notifications.
I think CarPlay and Android Auto does all of those better. Navigation is best on Google Maps and Apple Maps. And, even if you disagree, just have ONE app to do it across the board and share the data is a superior experience.
But, even if you're still not convinced, consider: your phone is 500 - 1000 dollars, and your car is tens of thousands of dollars. Why are you tightly coupling these throw-away software functions to such an expensive thing?
What happens if, tomorrow, some service goes away and your Tesla doesn't update? Then you'd be like those bozos who bought a fancy SiriusXM subscription in their 2015 car.
The blower speed can be mapped to the steering wheel button. And it’s actually easy to map things because the software is made by a company with real software people, the software quality in terms of intuitiveness is night and day compared to the legacy companies. I find it easier to adjust the heat/cooling in my Tesla compared to the standard buttons. I don’t generally mess with the temperature though, and turning AC on and off is very slightly annoying through the screen, but that doesn’t happen much. Also the voice controls actually work well enough that I can use them reliably. You do have to figure out what to say (“my butt is cold” does not turn on the seat heater, unfortunately), but once you know that the system is very good at reliably picking up what you’re saying.
> What happens if, tomorrow, some service goes away and your Tesla doesn't update?
I would sell it at a greater loss due to it being nerfed and I would at that point buy a different car. I don’t generally drive cars that old anyway, just because random issues become a lot more frequent and I don’t want to deal with that.
Tesla is married to the designs because of the way that they’re manufactured.
For example Tesla uses a very large press to make the Y monocoque body in one or two pieces. They get a lot of their manufacturing capability this way, reducing assembly costs and weld time, but then they do weird stuff like bolting the control are inside the passenger wheel well interior under the carpet. This kind of stuff isn’t replicable , each vehicle is for the most part a siloed manufacturing process
This is fine for a one off model, but now the manufacturing process is bespoke across the board. Any other maker can switch out parts of the line and make a different vehicle, Tesla needs to redesign the process, supply new assemblies, get another Gigafactory Press from Idra Group, and then retrain everybody. So they don’t.
Instead you get Full Self Driving.
Pretty much every Tesla product has been seen more than a decade ago (cybertruck was first discussed in think 2014) except the Semi, which doesn’t exist, but had lots of press regardless.
Tesla makes their own fabrication machines in house, so their body panels don’t have to look like every other manufacturer that uses standard supplier machines. And I’m not referring to the cyber truck, the shape of the main line cars is not achievable with the standard equipment, which is why they are able to stand out visually.
Where are the competitor electrics beating out Tesla? Are the acceleration dynamics better? Is the handling better? Is the screen better?
I’m guessing the seats are more comfortable, and the interior is bifurcated into nicer and less nice parts with the average niceness being about the same. They might be dumping here though since they are still burning through cash on these cars AFAIK, so I think it remains to be seen whether whatever advantages they have in the comfort and materials areas are sustainable.
(For the record, the electric door openers and the self driving labeling are both moronic, but when you have a dictator you can’t really avoid getting some bad stuff where the individual guy turns out to be wrong about something).