Overreliance on screen menus and voice commands in modern vehicles can have unintended consequences.
Well, about those voice commands: they’re far from perfect, as the owner of a Link&Co Z20 EV in China discovered the hard way. While driving at night on a highway in China, the driver politely asked the car to turn off “all” cabin lights. However, the voice command system misinterpreted the indication and also switched off the headlights.
The driver desperately tried to convince the car to turn the headlights back on. Still, the system responded that the operation cannot be completed. The fact that the Link&Co Z20 doesn’t have a dedicated physical headlight switch didn’t help either. Without seeing anything ahead, the driver lost control of the vehicle, which crashed into the median barrier.
In the Tesla you can tap on the headlight icon to turn the headlights on/off. This icon is always shown near the upper left corner showing you if the lights are on or off.
You can also go into the menus to toggle them on/off or to change the mode auto/manual. Even if you change it to manual the next time you start the car it goes back to auto such that the lights automatically come on when dark, thus not needing to fumble through the menus to turn them on. Maybe not as good as a physical button somewhere, but pretty well thought out.
Question: How does a person get out of a Tesla after it’s been in a crash, the doors automatically lock, and it catches fire disabling the electronic locks?
Answer: In a hearse.
Good news: If you drive off a cliff in a Tesla you’ll probably survive.
That’s the crux. All these touch screen bells and whistles are not as good as a physical switch. Sure, they can be well thought out, but it’s simply doing a good job at a bad idea.
To be fair, physical switches have some advantages, but also disadvantages.
Take headlights and wipers for example. No one can read the small icons or lettering saying what these do while driving at night. I’m talking about the typical ones on steering wheel stalks. You operate these, largely by muscle memory. But when renting a car from a different company than your car you guess and check if you did the right thing…there is no standard for these and the controls are swapped from left to right very often.
Does anyone even use those controls anymore??? In all our cars, including most rentals, those features are automatic and almost never need to be messed with.
All the time. I typically adjust the intermittent nature of my wipers. I prefer a slightly wet windshield over fast wipers. I also often turn on my auto-dimming bright lights (that do not auto-turn on themselves).
OK. But once you learn where they are in your car, you can operate those stalks reliably without looking. You can never reliably operate a touch screen without looking unless the touch areas are ridiculously large. And then you’ve still got to glance at it to see if you’re in the right menu area. The touch screen is constantly dragging you away from the task of driving. And unless you’re in a true level 5 self driving vehicle, you are responsible for driving, even if driving aids (like cruise control and lane keeping and automatic braking) are helping you with the task.
Yes. There is a world of lower cost cars that don’t have automatic headlights and wipers. I just rented one recently that didn’t have automatic headlights. (No idea about the wipers - never needed them.)
