Quote:
Originally Posted by rumatt
He sounds like a tool. You can drive the car without navigating menus. If he wants to dick around on the screen, or use a cell phone while driving, that's on him.
I guess people will see the big screen and claim the design encourages it. But is this really Tesla specific? My Colorado also has a fairly elaborate infotainment that allows navigating all sorts of menus and apps (weather apps, etc) while driving if I wanted to. The screen is smaller but this doesn't make it safer. If anything it might be the opposite.
Both vehicles (and even waze in Android auto) disable some functionality when the vehicle is not in park. How much policing do we want down this line, vs personal responsibility? I'm not sure how to best draw this line. Hell, we could make cell phones not work when they're moving more than 10 mph if we wanted to police this aggressively.
On waze on Android auto, you cannot access the keyboard to type a name of a place you want to go unless the vehicle is in park. If you're driving and your passenger wants to type "Lowes", you have to pull off the highway and put the car in park. Or alternatively you can unplug your phone, the music stops, you let it disconnect and shut down all the apps, then you start waze on the phone, search for Lowes, then reconnect the phone and fire up waze again on the car.
It is a miserable and maddening experience. I cannot see this being the type of solution we decide to go to solve distracted driving.
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I agree with you about driver responsibility and I hate tech nannies, but Tesla's approach is a radical departure. This can be overcome with a rock-solid voice control, but it doesn't appear to be there.
Until then, if my butt is cold and I need seat warmers or any other function for which there has been a traditional button, I could probably hit it without looking or a short glance may be all I need to know where it is or to confirm I hit the right button.
A screen that dynamic and with no tactile feedback is a poor design if that is the only way to control functions given the inevitability of their use while driving. It is slick and very cheap to implement, but not better than real buttons for commonly used functions. Frankly, iDrive bothers me in that I don't have enough/more discrete buttons between functions, but at least they throw you a bone and give you several shortcut and programmable buttons.
I agree that manufacturers are all going there, but that doesn't make it good.