It's not "recessed" that's the issue. It's "mechanical".[1]
China is requiring door handles openable from both inside and outside without power, and without any difficulty finding the release.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
Hidden door handles, button open doors when inside the car, only touch screen buttons, rear red turn signal lights.
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.
When you can only see half of a car, the red turn signal lights also make it impossible to tell quickly whether the car is about to get into your lane or the driver's foot is on the brakes.
This situation can happen both in traffic or in a row of parked vehicles.
The whole thing would be a good example of dismantling Chesterton's fence, if the advantages of the traditional design of these things weren't obvious.
No it wouldn't, because there is no obvious fence here.
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"
One more trend I'd like to reverse is the always on cellular data connection, reporting back to the car manufacturer where you are and how you are driving.
Allowing Silicon Valley dorks to redefine the established UIs of cars was one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years. Ultimately it's cost shaving, but it spread like a cancer to other manufacturers owing mostly to a TikTok-brained customer base (to their own detriment).
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.
It's probably because they started mandating reverse cameras. Which is great, but any cars without screens suddenly had them. At that point, it was probably cheaper to put the rest of the functionality on the screen.
I agree with the point, i hate the touch screens, and i think you should be able to control almost everything without taking your eyes off the road. The blindfold made me think of some david blaine stunt.
In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.
Strong disagree; it's not saving anything but the jobs of those who seem to really enjoy overcomplicating things so they can justify their continued employment.
The old-school pure mechanical lock can be converted into an electric one with just the addition of a solenoid to unlock and lock it.
I've dealt with the complexities of automotive mechanisms long enough to see many cases where it seems someone just wanted to make something extra fancy rather than solve the fundamentally simple problem. German designs were notoriously one of the worst in this regard, but others are catching up.
Isn't it only the Model S that has those electric door handles that pop out on their own? And the cheaper Model 3 has hidden ones that you pop out yourself.
That's correct but the interior door handles are electronic buttons. When you pull the exterior handle, during the time when you pull the handle the car also lowers the windows so the door can open.
Which is only important because someone at Tesla decided their cars must have frameless windows, despite it being a luxury feature that adds complication.
Normal framed windows don't need any special handling of the windows when you open the door.
There have been other cars with frameless windows that didn't have this drop-before-opening feature.
2nd/3rd/4th-gen F-bodies (Camaro/Firebird), for example: All of these cars had frameless windows. None of them did an automatic drop. (And a lot of these cars didn't come with power windows to begin with.)
Is it really though? On a Tesla you have both the electronic button and manual door release from every door on the inside. You wouldn't need those manual releases if the doors weren't electronic.
Would it help to add a surface behind the side mirrors so that it's more aerodynamic? I'm thinking something that stretches from the car body to the side mirrors.
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
Audi e-tron has had this as a option for a number of years. But replacing mirrors with screen has a downside: it ruins your depth perception. Instead of focussing 30-100 meters away through the mirror you have to focus on a screen 0.5 meters away. Digital mirrors are very tiring for your eyes compared to mirrors.
But this is part of the problem. A mirror just works, or is very visibly broken if not. We want to have less electronic stuff in cars, not more. So I hope this isn't legal.
this is a good move by China, hopefully its the end of the line for hidden door handles for EV's everywhere. Some things are cool but impractical; others are cool but dangerous.
They could've made exterior door handles that look exactly the same as they currently do, but without adding all this additional fragile complexity: put them on a pivot, so you press one end and the other pops up so you can pull on it...
dogshit design. an uber driver picked me up from the airport a few weeks ago, was coming back from japan, jetlagged to all hell, only to find... no door handles. had to get her ass out of the car to open the door for me because I just could not be bothered with this anti-design nonsense. I'm tapping the door like an ipad like some idiot and nothing was opening. dogshit design.
I hope there's more "no, your 'luxury' feature is just unsafe."
Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.
You can install aftermarket stalks. They're actually quite good now, and are available for 3/Y, S/X. (don't know about truck) Some early models used adhesive (SEXY brand?), skip those.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
There are plenty of things they get right.
The original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
The original model s interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
the older UIs were easier to use (in a moving car). more old-school looking, but more contrast and bigger targets.
Yeah, everything about it seems trying too hard to be cool. My friend let me drive his new Tesla for a bit and I was like nah. Then a month later he was complaining to me how annoying it is to activate blinkers on it.
it's also annoying to accidentally activate a turn signal (or horn before they moved that). Then it is hard to cancel it, because you have to determine which one is pressed, and unpress it. choose the wrong one and you are back to cancelling the other one.
It is also just as hard to cancel the turn signal/lane change that FSD is attempting that you want to veto.
I have no idea what people behind you are thinking (or acting on while all this struggle is going on)
Tesla also cheaped out and didn't use a normal rain sensor for the wipers to enable auto mode, instead using "Tesla Vision". I've heard nothing but bad things about it.
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
Yeah I dunno, I own one in the extremely rainy PNW and it’s fine. I was very apprehensive of using the touch screen for basic functions also but it turns out you don’t need to.
"Great" except for those nagging problems in Xinjiang, that nasty business with trade in prisoner's organs, forced labour camps, lack of freedom of association and expression, the problem with people forcibly being disappeared by the state, the heavy omnipresent censorship and many other similarly repressive policies.
Continuing?? Most Chinese domestic market cars can't be sold in the west because they're to dangerous or polluting. I'm sure they're getting stricter on both fronts but they're still behind developed countries.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
The current top three auto-makers by sales in Australia are Toyota, BYD, then Ford. They might not have quite the same market penetration in Europe but BYD vehicles are sold there, and some have 5 star safety ratings.
Yeah so in like 2014 you would see chinese EV's mostly when they caught fire, exploded, or their batteries died in like 20 minutes.
The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.
Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.
So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.
Article shows a picture of and then starts talking about exterior door handles, but then:
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
Before I bought a car, these articles would come out every now and then "X recalls 500 million cars over blinking light on dash" and I'd think that was crazy. "They just refund the owners of the car? But what if they don't want to give them up". Then I bought one and it turns out everyone gets these recalls all the time. I'm sitting at my desk and there's a Subaru Emissions Recall WRA-26 right now next to me. And the Tesla recalls are just an OTA update?
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
> that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision
I wonder how long until people figure out that tapping the bumper of a parked tesla opens all the windows, letting people either steal the infotainment screen, or the whole car...
To detect impacts cars typically use sensors that require the entire car to experience significant acceleration, tapping the car definitely won’t do it.
No, you’d need to have the centre of the car exceed well beyond 9.8m/s^2 for a few milliseconds for airbags. I don’t know the exact figures but basically you’d need to smash another car into the car, at which point it would be easier to just break the window.
Of course they could make the window impact detection thing as sensitive as they want, but why?
Also many cars detect occupancy and selectively trigger airbags, so depending on what the regulations are exactly, if none of the seats detect anyone is inside the car, and the car is turned off, and the car is not moving, probably safe to keep the window closed.
Like this is already a potential problem we had, if someone could write your car off by simply kicking it, or body slamming it, causing the airbags to deploy (which is often a write off)… but it’s not a real problem because the threshold for deployment is high enough that it would require a crash that would probably ruin the car anyway.
Western societies are relatively high-crime for their development. My uncle just leaves his motor-scooter's key in his helmet and leaves the helmet on the vehicle. Millions of people live in Taipei. "I wonder how long it will take people to look in helmets and steal what's there". Turns out pretty long. Been over a decade now.
You're obviously right, Ben, and GP is out of touch. Like a Chinese guy saying, "I wonder how long before the Americans figure out their LLMs don't hide the Kent State shootings". That kind of thing is not a problem here.
Tesla model X manual: "Opening a Rear Door with No Power
To open the falcon wing doors in the unlikely situation when Model X has no power, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door."[2]
[1] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/03/WS69818ec6a310d...
[2] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...
carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle
This reads like satire.
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.
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.
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"
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.
> https://medium.com/@arunchidambaram/is-teslas-door-handle-an...
In aerodynamic terms, door handles are nbd compared to side mirrors. Mirrors account for 6% of a car's aerodynamic drag. Door handles: roughly 0.2%. Basically they make no difference -- their effect is a rounding error -- and they were implemented for form-over-function style points.
The old-school pure mechanical lock can be converted into an electric one with just the addition of a solenoid to unlock and lock it.
They can be just as flush and aerodynamic without introducing more complexity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415744
I've dealt with the complexities of automotive mechanisms long enough to see many cases where it seems someone just wanted to make something extra fancy rather than solve the fundamentally simple problem. German designs were notoriously one of the worst in this regard, but others are catching up.
Normal framed windows don't need any special handling of the windows when you open the door.
2nd/3rd/4th-gen F-bodies (Camaro/Firebird), for example: All of these cars had frameless windows. None of them did an automatic drop. (And a lot of these cars didn't come with power windows to begin with.)
Or could the side mirrors could be shaped like an airplane's wing so that the air displaces nicely?
It'd look weird, but I'd rather have the fuel efficiency.
But not sure that would be legal.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a28120245/car-... (2019)
"We'll just open the windows automatically using the same power that was lost"
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61xdWAXl2ML.jpg
...no electricity required to operate those.
door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
Except for those which still have chromed handles, I think this is the case for the majority of cars. It's not the colour that's the problem.
Being unable to turn on the windshield wipers (not engage for a swipe, turn on) without fully taking eyes off the road to interact with the giant touch screen, that's going to get people killed. The #1 thing that convinced me Teslas are absolutely unfit to operate safely for many common actions was driving one at all.
In the end, I think tesla is just stupid.
- removing dashboard in front of driver (3, y, cybertruck)
- non-round steering thing (model s/x yoke, cybertruck squircle)
- removing stalks
- touch-sensitive buttons on steering wheel
- critical controls on the touchscreen, usually behind a swipe or two. for example can't locate defrost on touchscreen without swiping
- can't remove non-critical music player overlay
- hard to find or touch-sensitive buttons for hazard lights
- tiny targets on touchscreen (for a moving car)
- so much overloading on center console (for a moving car)
I could go on and on.
There are plenty of things they get right.
The original model s was ok. Not as "super-clean" looking, but you had stalks with buttons for fingertip access to many things 1) turn signals, headlights, wipers 2) self drive functions 3) gear select with present handles when you pressed park button 4) adjust steering wheel position;
The original model s interior door handles were good - the lever to open the door had two functions. Pull the lever a little bit and it would electronically trigger the door release solenoid. But the same lever, pull it further and it would mechanically open the door. So the same lever would open the door with power or without power, no need to discover something new in an emergency.
the older UIs were easier to use (in a moving car). more old-school looking, but more contrast and bigger targets.
It is also just as hard to cancel the turn signal/lane change that FSD is attempting that you want to veto.
I have no idea what people behind you are thinking (or acting on while all this struggle is going on)
Rain sensing was a solved problem and Tesla un-solved it.
Covered in this Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm7Q92xMjQ
Maybe Xi getting rid of generals in the party really helped many other high ranking officials step in line and step up in doing things for the people
I wonder if the USA will double down and make hidden door handles mandatory, or just try and place a tariff on normal doors.
As long as they’re steam-powered.
IIRC more than half of cars sold in China are EV or PHEV. I am receptive to learn that there are PHEVs that are too polluting to be sold in the west, but I would love to see the data.
The thing was, that the chinese government really sort of accepted that outcome as they wanted to brute force EV tech into existence.
Nowadays, Chinese EV's are easily at parity. Better than parity if you consider the price and standard features. They have heaps of export quality cars.
So yeah, continuing feels right. I don't know if the policy worked, or if their car market would have caught up anyway, but they knew what they want, and got it.
> door handles that are "difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim".
The interior controls are hidden?! Is this like an electronic egress with a hidden mechanical backup?
For those external door handles it would be ideal of their failsafe state was popped out. Fire doors in buildings work like this. Would it consume too much energy from the battery to hold the handles in?
> BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Tesla and eight other automakers said on Friday they will recall a total of about 4.3 million vehicles in China over concerns that doors may be difficult to open in an emergency, marking the country's largest automotive recall.
> Tesla's remedy includes warning labels and an update delivered remotely that automatically lowers vehicle windows after a collision.
Yes this is a recall and yes Tesla will be changing the design in the future but this is an industry-wide regulatory change and the automakers are being given considerable latitude to patch existing inventory while updating future designs. I am supportive of this change and it is also not a huge problem for Tesla (it's an over-the-air update) or even isolated to them.
Recalls are just automotive industry term for 'errata'. It's like if we said "Google issues recall for misaligned CSS on Updates tab in Gmail" or "Slack issues recall for UX changes: all customers encouraged to Cmd-R". I can't believe this is news.
I wonder how long until people figure out that tapping the bumper of a parked tesla opens all the windows, letting people either steal the infotainment screen, or the whole car...
Also many cars detect occupancy and selectively trigger airbags, so depending on what the regulations are exactly, if none of the seats detect anyone is inside the car, and the car is turned off, and the car is not moving, probably safe to keep the window closed.
Like this is already a potential problem we had, if someone could write your car off by simply kicking it, or body slamming it, causing the airbags to deploy (which is often a write off)… but it’s not a real problem because the threshold for deployment is high enough that it would require a crash that would probably ruin the car anyway.
You're obviously right, Ben, and GP is out of touch. Like a Chinese guy saying, "I wonder how long before the Americans figure out their LLMs don't hide the Kent State shootings". That kind of thing is not a problem here.