{"id":52033,"date":"2025-04-23T19:12:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T02:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=52033"},"modified":"2025-08-24T13:17:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T20:17:25","slug":"20-minute-tesla-model-y-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2025\/04\/23\/20-minute-tesla-model-y-review\/","title":{"rendered":"20 Minute Tesla Model Y Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entirely unintentionally and much to my chagrin, I had my first ride in a Tesla today; one of the newest Model Ys, in fact. I\u2019d never have done this voluntarily, but I was taking a Lyft from a work conference at a school about 20 minutes away from my home, and didn\u2019t realize it was a swasticar until it pulled up.<\/p>\n

What an absolutely foolish design.<\/p>\n

\n\"The
\n<\/figure>\n

Virtually no physical controls. Nearly everything is on this display, mounted dead-center, so none of the critical info is directly in front of the driver; you have to look down and to the right to check anything. I think the only physical controls were the wheel, with a couple buttons, and the pedals. There was no stalk on the right side to control things like the wipers, I couldn\u2019t see if there was a left-side stalk for turn signals or not.<\/p>\n

The left third of the display is a live updating animation of whatever the car sees, which means there\u2019s a large, constantly moving distraction just barely out of your eyeline, primed to pull your attention away from the road in front of you. Every car or pedestrian the car senses is shown on the display. It will even show whether a car is a sedan, pickup, or box truck, if it can figure that out (more likely when they\u2019re crossing side-on rather than directly in front or behind). I\u2019m a little surprised that it doesn\u2019t distinguish other Teslas with some sort of special icon or coloring or something.<\/p>\n

The right two thirds are all the controls, presented with a low-contrast dark grey on light grey color scheme, with small text and icons, all of which makes it difficult to distinguish any one control from another at a quick glance. And, of course, because it\u2019s all a touch screen, you can\u2019t do anything by feel, because it\u2019s one flat pane of glass and you have<\/em> to look at the screen to make sure you\u2019re touching the right spot.<\/p>\n

Even if the owner of the company wasn\u2019t a raging monomaniacal ego-driven techno fascist doing everything he can to rip this country apart and grift as much money out of the process as he can (which, to be clear, he is, and if Republicans were actually at all serious about getting dangerous immigrants out of the country, he should be at the top of the list), I\u2019d still be baffled that these cars are approved to be on the roads and that people are as enamored with them as they are. It\u2019s like a master class in designing a user interface that\u2019s as potentially dangerous for the driver as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Entirely unintentionally and much to my chagrin, I had my first ride in a swasticar today; one of the newest Model Ys, in fact. What an absolutely foolish design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2038],"tags":[6878,6879,6877],"class_list":["post-52033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-model-y","tag-swasticar","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52033"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52335,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52033\/revisions\/52335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}