The hubris of the company is insane. People treat the FSD updates like it's nothing when they're essentially rolling untested patches that may behave differently and drive into traffic it wouldn't have yesterday. Tesla defended the auto-close mechanism on the CT (when a youtuber showed it severely pinching his finger) by saying "They were doing it wrong, by design if you're hitting the button repeatedly it uses increased force assuming something is stuck". They just don't have a culture to make consumer goods. They constantly dismiss the design constraints required to be in the market they're in.
And it is the worst kind of engineers who dismiss that stuff with "omg people are so stupid". Other (better) companies have worked it out. It's a reasonable expectation. No ones forcing you to make goods for this market, but the constraints are what they are.
And it is the worst kind of engineers who dismiss that stuff with “omg people are so stupid”. Other (better) companies have worked it out. It’s a reasonable expectation. No ones forcing you to make goods for this market, but the constraints are what they are.
well put. automotive design should start with the 'so stupid' crowd and work it's way up - a tremendous amount of product design is making it exceptionally hard for the user to do something fatal, and Tesla just does not grok this at all.
"what does this do if we lose power" is literally the first thing anyone is supposed to think of from a design standpoint when they have an actuator somewhere.
Part of the problem is that "fail fast" which is fine when someone's email doesn't work for 15 minutes turns into "fail deadly" when you're dealing with a physical thing in the real world.
My understanding is there is, in-fact, a mechanical way to go about it. But it's nothing but a design failure it's not evident to an average user. A deadly one.
Canadian engineers have a tradition around an iron ring as kind of "class ring" when you graduate (they've kind of tried to push it in the states but it didn't catch on in the same way). The notion is "it's heavy, but not because of the weight". It's meant to be a reminder as you go out into the world that what you put on paper has real implications.
I get down on Tesla specifically because they've got... I don't know, 100 years of history to learn from? Like you had the whole world on your side and you gave us the effing "explode on rear impact" pinto, but without the luxury of saving the victims the cremation costs.