It would def draw a pause if I were driving a Turo rental. It's great to have the option of voice. But I can actuate the wipers much quicker with a hand stalk than I can speak it.

Absolutely. Not to mention the needless inaccessibility.

actually the wipers have a physical one-shot button on the stalk.

This will trigger it to run once, in the slowest setting. And then you have to wait for this to finish before it updates to the speed you've set on the touchscreen. Tesla could have also solved this by just letting the user decide if it should be a single wipe or toggle a certain setting.

Being able to toggle a single wipe, with or without wiper fluids is also something every single car I've ever operated has had. In addition to be able to control it from the stalk.

Not everything has to be reinvented. They walked back a little on the steering yoke, but for some reason they still remove the stalks and have touch buttons on the steering wheel. The one thing that everyone with the yoke categorically hated.

Seems like Tesla has a lot of solutions to problems people never had in the past until Tesla came around

The way to do it is to press the wiper button (press in on the stalk button) to swipe one and then it gives you options for manual wiper speed selection via an on-screen control.

So I use a touchscreen to adjust the wiper speed and delay? In the worst kind of weather where I really need it?

Sign me up!

This is a huge improvement over my 2008 Kia where I twist the stalk and don't have to look at it and I can keep my eyes on the road.

OTOH, my old Kia doesn't have Full Self Driving. Ah well.

> my old Kia doesn't have Full Self Driving

Don't worry, neither does Tesla :)

in every other car on the planet it is the right stalk down. They had to go and reinvent this.

I am absolutely not defending Tesla at all, and do genuinely believe they do things that are incredibly stupid in auto design.

But - at one point, when the shift was the right stalk, wipers were controlled via a switch, knob, or other mechanism either on the dashboard or on the left stalk.

So. It's not like changes haven't happened before.

They were still physical controls that offered tactile feedback and never moved so you could always operate them blindly.

Also my parents are older and something in their skin makes them routinely almost invisible to capacitive touch controls - heck I still have trouble from time to time getting displays to register reliably.

I loathe touch controls and will never buy a vehicle that only has touch controls. Luckily all my current cars are in excellent condition and I pamper the crap out of them. If I'm lucky I'll be able to be buried in them :p