Teslas and touchscreens

At the beginning of this year, I was in the market for a new car. My partner and I had just finalized plans to move to the Portland area and were about to get a new puppy (which we now have). We needed a car to get around and drive the puppy (a potentially anxious one, at that) in to vet appointments and training classes. We were also moving to a larger townhouse outside the city in a very car-dependent neighborhood. I had mixed feelings about this whole thing, because I’ve always been very against car ownership. I hate how dependent the US is on cars and despise the fact that entire towns and cities are built around how efficient it is for cars to navigate. Yet, I found myself moving into one of these suburban neighborhoods due to a number of personal reasons, so it was time to go car shopping.

My car ownership experience is strongly anchored to the last car I owned, a 1998 Chevrolet Prizm (which is essentially a Toyota Corolla). It had roll-down windows, no power steering, had constant issues with its engine, and was so fragile in cold weather that the handles broke off at one point when I pulled it after it was entirely covered in ice. I inherited this car from my parents and used it to commute forty-five minutes each way when I lived and worked in the suburbs of Philadelphia some seven or so years ago. It would frequently skid out of control when braking in a rainstorm uphill and the zero to sixty speed was so abhorrent that I would constantly get honked at every time I merged onto a freeway.

Needless to say, that car did not help me enjoy the act of driving. The amount of maintenance and repairs it needed, combined with my general distaste for commuting almost an hour each way to a job I hated didn’t help either. After a year and a half of putting up with that car, I nearly traded it in for a new one (but ultimately didn’t). I test drove several cars based on the recommendations of my auto-hobbyist friends and fell in love with the Mini Cooper Countryman after a test drive. It seemed like it was made as a “driver’s car” and maximized the drive feel. It felt sporty, handled great, and had a lot of quirks in its design that I appreciated. I didn’t end up buying that car at the time (was so close though) because I moved to Boston, where you don’t really need a car to get around. I sold my Chevy Prizm and lived car-free for six years in Boston. Having now spent a year living in San Francisco and recently having moved to Portland OR, I’ve come to realize how much of a necessity owning a car is on the west coast. There is no strong infrastructure here for public transportation simply due to the vast geographic landscape between the major cities, and the mountains don’t exactly make that easier. The west coast is known to turn even the most anti-automobile activists into car owners simply due to the inconvenience of doing anything without a car. This was most certainly the case with me.

Naturally, my first choice for buying a car of my own choosing was to do some research on the Mini Cooper Countryman. I looked up a ton of videos and articles from owners about what they liked and disliked. As I kept researching more and more models to purchase, the thing looming in the back of my head was gas. It’s no fun stressing about the fluctuating gas prices and given how dire things are looking in the climate crisis for us in the years to come, it just felt incredibly irresponsible to buy a new car and contribute to the pollution. I was caught in this middle ground of needing a car to survive reasonably on the west coast and the general sense of being a burden on the environment by the simple act of driving around. This then led me down the rabbit hole of fully electric vehicles and researching what the best options here were.

Time and time again, Teslas came highly recommended everywhere I looked. I had always written off Teslas due to Elon Musk’s controversial approach to making a difference in the world (valuing profits over people, forcing long working hours, defying health safety protocols to keep factories open, etc). Additionally, Tesla seemingly pursued the minimalist future approach for car interiors to such an extreme that they removed all the knobs, gears, stalks, and physical controls in favor of a giant touchscreen in the middle of the car. This was such an immediately glaring red flag to me as a designer. How and why would you do away with over a century of standardization and familiarity in how the functions of a vehicle work? Why would you take away the accessibility and ergonomic benefits of having physical controls and force users to directly look at a screen while they take their eyes off the road and trigger actions that have no haptic feedback? I was initially going to write an entire post about this specific thing, but it seems like someone has done a much better job at it already (highly recommended read).

The Tesla Model 3 in particular was people’s car of choice in the price range that I was looking in. A used gasoline-powered car that fit my criteria for being fun to drive, having a low maintenance overheard, and having a decently modern interior seemed to bring me to the thirty thousand dollar price range. A Tesla Model 3 was just a few thousand dollars more, and it was all-electric. So in I went consuming all the information I could about this car to justify whether or not I’d want to make this purchase given my hesitancy of Musk’s approach and the all-touchscreen interior controls. I was left pleasantly surprised after hearing reactions from owners.

In every review, owners constantly touted the safety features of the Model 3. A fully-electric car’s batteries make it much heavier, in turn allowing it to maintain its center of gravity better during sudden movements or crashes. This already gives it an incredibly high crash safety rating. In addition, Teslas seem to have plenty of safety features built-in, like the lights inside turning on as you approach or Sentry Mode recording everything that happens around your car after you leave it unattended for a while. This plays into convenience as well. There are no keys to lose, since everything is controlled via the phone. There’s a built-in GPS and controls for many of the common features directly in the companion app for Tesla. It operates like a modern technology device, on wheels.

I decided to try a test drive in San Francisco, since they were free. As soon as I got into the vehicle, my first impression was one of surprise. Sure, I knew there weren’t any controls or knobs aside from the two stalks behind the steering wheel, but just seeing the lack of buttons and switches was pleasing. It felt like a car from the future. When I started driving, I realized that there was no dashboard displaying information like speed, mileage, and car status behind the steering wheel. After years of driving random rental cars, I had gotten used to having some kind of informational display for driving directly around or behind the steering wheel. And there was nothing here. It was all shown on the main screen in the middle of the car, and I had to frequently glance at it by turning my head and then looking back at the road. It felt unintuitive at first, but I slowly got used to it.

It’s an interesting piece to discuss. At some point, some designers for the driver experience in these car companies decided that the drivers need to know, at all times, some set of crucial information that they can easily reference. Over time, this crucial information has evolved and absorbed pieces of the infotainment system, car status, phone calls, notifications, and so much more. Tesla took an arguably extremist approach here by killing the driver dashboard entirely and offloading all this information to the main screen. Glancing over and looking at the information is certainly a little more trouble, but it’s actually not that bad when the car does most of the work for you.

I’ll explain what I mean. Usually, you need to know your speed because you’re trying to stay under the speed limit. Well, Tesla automatically detects what the speed limit is for the road you’re on and can cap the max speed to that (you can adjust this to an offset, if needed). You typically need access to the wiper controls in case it starts raining. Tesla can detect when it’s raining and turn those on for you on its own. Same goes for headlights at night. Essentially, the car automates a lot of the work that you would normally need a button or a switch for in a regular car. Also, some of the primary controls like adjusting speed (during cruise control) or volume (for media) can be done through two simplistic scroll wheels directly on the steering wheel. They’re not labeled because they’re re-purposed for different controls depending on which mode you’re in, but it works quite well.

When driving, there was lane assist, which meant that the car automatically tried to stay in its own lane until you oversteered it out of it manually. It could automatically switch lanes for you if you turned on the turn signal. It had the traffic-aware cruise control that maintained a set following distance from the cars around you (granted, a lot of modern cars now have this anyway). All of these combined meant that you as a driver could focus on the road and not so much on how to turn features on/off or adjust things in the car while driving. The lack of physical controls and buttons was surprisingly very mentally freeing. I didn’t have to think about where a certain button was or how I’d toggle it. The car did most of this stuff on its own. I instead got to just enjoy the minimalist interior and take in the views. It really felt like the designers had questioned why and how everything exists in a regular car and redesigned whatever they could to be better. The car also handled very smoothly and was fun to drive. This test drive sold me on it. When I got out of it, I just wanted to drive it longer. So I made my choice.

In late February, I placed an order for my Tesla Model 3. A month later, I received it as I moved in to my new place in Portland, OR. I must applaud something that doesn’t get enough credit, which is Tesla’s disruption of the car purchasing process. If you haven’t been keeping up, this is currently the worst time to buy a car in the past seventy or so years (thanks to the pandemic and rise in demand for personal transport turning it into a seller’s market). The car buying process involves visiting several dealerships, trying to negotiate down prices, working with the dealer to complete and fill out paperwork, signing off on titles and forms, and figuring out financing details. And that’s if everything goes smoothly. Buying a car is a multi-week process involving lots of headaches, back-and-forth interactions with car salesmen, and timing the logistics of getting the car with when you have the payments ready.

With Tesla, I clicked a “Buy Now” button to place my order with a hundred dollar deposit, and the car showed up literally in my driveway a month later. I didn’t interact with a single human. Sure, there was some insurance stuff to take care of and some online financing paperwork to fill out, but it was crazy to me how different this experience was than what I saw my parents go through when they were buying cars. It felt like my generation’s ordering experience when buying something from Apple or Amazon. You order it and it shows up. It felt really weird in the month leading up to it telling people that I had “bought” a Tesla. I had just clicked a button on their website, and I was now the owner of a new car? There’s quite a bit of paperwork involved for auto financing and DMV title/registration information, which Tesla actually fast-tracks for you by filling out whatever they can themselves and only asking you to confirm or sign the finalized papers. This is such a relief from the hassle of having to deal with DMV paperwork yourself after buying a new car.

I will call out that Tesla should be looked at as a technology company and not a car company. They still have ways to go if they want to be considered a serious competitor in building vehicles. For instance, when I took delivery of my Model 3, there were several issues with the factory not having taken the inner seals or tape out of the vehicle before final inspection. My trunk’s liftgate wouldn’t close properly, which required a couple of mobile service appointments as well as a visit to the service center. There were a couple of glaring misalignments in the panel gaps around the car that also required fixing with a couple of service visits. Tesla isn’t known for their build quality. It isn’t at the level of what you’d expect from an established manufacturer like Ford or Toyota who have been in the game for decades. Even while driving, there’s an audible noise in the car because you can tell that the doors aren’t sealed up properly. Tesla has even tried to use active noise-cancellation to minimize the cabin noise in their latest refreshed Model S variants, which is a telltale sign that they’re a technology company and not a car company, because they could also simply get better at sealing the cars properly to solve this issue.

I’ve now had my Model 3 for a little over two months now and am very pleased with it. The car works as expected, it has all the smart tech that I wanted it to have, I love not having to pay for gas, and most importantly, I actually love driving it. I was dreading going back to a life of suburban living and needing to drive a car to even get to my closest coffeeshop, but it hasn’t been all that bad. Having a Tesla has made the drives more enjoyable and I like getting around and exploring my new neighborhoods. My initial hesitancies around not being able to get accustomed to a car that relegates all its functions to a giant touchscreen have all but gone away as I get used to the car more. Better yet, it constantly gets regular software updates that make big improvements in how the interface functions.

Tesla’s UI design in the car’s interface is actually pretty solid. Given that you interact with all the car’s features through the touchscreen, it sort of needs to be. Most infotainment systems in cars typically look dated or bloated with unnecessary visual flair. Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto are good examples of what a car UI should be, where it just focuses on the important stuff and leaves out everything else. Tesla’s UI is modern, intuitive, approachable, and useful. Most features have an explanation of what they’ll do, and they tend to use consistent patterns across the car UI, the phone app, as well as the ordering website. The ordering experience on Tesla’s main site actually prepares you to use the in-car UI, whether you’re conscious of it or not. It uses similar design patterns for selections, segmented controls, disabled buttons, and warnings. All of this ensures a seamless transition to when you actually get your Tesla and start driving it.

Anyway, I’m so far impressed by Tesla’s ability to deliver in a future vision for electric cars. One of their biggest wins for Tesla as a company has been supercharging the race to a gasoline-free future for automobiles. Before Tesla, all the EV options out there looked lame. The Toyota Prius, the Nissan Leaf, and the Chevy Volt all paraded eco-friendly values and marketed themselves towards environmentally conscious consumers, which didn’t exactly grab attention or market share quickly. Tesla made EVs feel cool and sporty while proving that they can compete, if not outperform, regular gasoline-powered cars. You didn’t have to be limited to a low top speed and charge it every day. Tesla made it clear to the world that EVs were capable of much more, and this is what eventually turned heads towards them. They capitalized and went all out on it, and they’re now reaping the rewards. Q1 2021 was incredibly good for them and they had the highest volume of shipments ever in the company’s history. Fueled by the Biden administration’s push towards EVs and many states committing to a green future, many automakers are now playing catch-up to Tesla’s battery technology and already-expansive charging infrastructure. I still have my qualms about Elon Musk as an individual and how he sees the world, but his initial instinct about how and why to market EVs to consumers certainly wasn’t misguided. I’m having a blast with my own Tesla for now and am looking forward to exploring more of the Pacific Northwest in it this summer with my partner and my puppy!