EVs and cold climates are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, if you want to road trip with snowy 30 mph headwinds, the charging times will be meaningfully worse. Not impossible, but definitely noticeable.
On the other hand, the traction control is fantastic and they tend to have the best preconditioning features so that you never have to get into a cold car for your commute.
For a lot of people, that second paragraph is far more important than that first for at least one of the cars in their household inventory.
I don't think it will change anything for Tesla, unless it lowers their costs through lowered tariffs somehow.
TBH, Tesla is in a tough position with their EVs in NA. They can't really build a cheap enough crossover/suv to compete directly with ICE RAV4, and virtually anything they do at >$50k would negatively impact their existing product sales. The base Model 3/Y are too expensive compared to ICE and have met tepid reviews because of their slightly odd mix of price and features.
So they've chosen instead to focus on autonomy and car hiring. I can't blame them for that. There's a huge potential for recurring revenue in that space and they've been positioning themselves to be in an excellent position to capture a lot of it over the next five years.
> They can't really build a cheap enough crossover/suv to compete directly with ICE RAV4, and virtually anything they do at >$50k
Doesn't the Model Y start at 40K? That's more expensive than the base model RAV4, but the Tesla is probably aimed at a slightly different market segment too. My guess is they could compete head-to-head on price if they needed to, but they don't think the math works out better that direction yet.
My 2024 Lightning Flash was just under 51K, FWIW. Extended range, plenty of toys, definitely not the base model.
I admit I was also under the impression they were expensive, and I was shopping for a Powerboost F150 first, until someone told me that MSRP was a lie.
I wonder who gets to decide when something is "associated" with something else in a way that makes any and all uses of that thing a cancelable offense.
I thought this way for a while. I still do to a certain degree, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in hurrying off into the change.
The most advanced tooling today looks nothing like the tooling for writing software 3 years ago. We've got multi-agent orchestration with built in task and issue tracking, context management, and subagents now. There's a steep learning curve!
I'm not saying that everyone has to do it, as the tools are so nascent, but I think it is worthwhile to at least start understanding what the state of the art will look like in 12-24 months.
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
TBH, if everyone involved is invested in what is being said, you don't need to be in person and you don't need to shut laptops.
If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.
The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was.
It isn't hard to see, tbh. Think about the controls in a Tesla from a few years ago. They had physical controls for drive selection, turn signals, cruise control/TACC, cruise control distances, volume, next and previous track, seat controls, and manual overrides for the automatic wipers. The things that were used a little less were on the touch screen, with automation attempting to mitigate the downsides of this. This largely consisted of climate, manual overrides for the automatic headlights, and things like suspension settings.
So, what has VW made better here? Well, they have physical controls for turn signals, drive selection, volume, next and previous track, etc. They appear to use the touch screen for much of the climate control and entertainment settings, including appearing to retain the much maligned touch settings for seat heaters.
I'm not convinced that this is better. By contrast, my Nissan has driving settings like lane centering and seat heater controls on physical buttons... right next to my left knee where they are nearly inaccessible while driving.
TBH, the whole debate around this needs to be recentered around actual ergonomics and less around touch vs physical.
The climate controls should be physical buttons. Touchscreen climate controls tend to be giant messes requiring multiple interactions and often (hi, Tesla!) have controls in unpredictable locations. And fine-tuning the climate while driving is not exactly unusual.
Of course, physical buttons can be awful too. I’ve been in a Mercedes SUV where the A/C state is controlled by some bizarre split physical buttons and 100% of front passengers surveyed are entirely unable to confidently figure out what they do even after reading the test and contemplating for a while.
> So, if I'm using physical buttons, how do I set the temperature to 24° (75° for US-folks) without looking away from the road?
You don’t. Instead you observe it’s a bit too warm and press the down button once or twice. Source: I used to do this regularly when I owned a car with excellent buttons.
> Or set the radio to 106.9MHz?
By pressing preset 6 by feel. Or by glancing for 1/4 second to find preset 6 (which is a clearly labeled button that never moves) and pressing it.
> Or the cruise control to 88km/h (55mph)?
By driving 55mph and pressing the stalk in the appropriate direction?
This stuff was all worked out very nicely in the late 1980s by UX experts who put very serious effort into making cars with an excellent user experience.
For decades, people have been able to change the temperature in their vehicles in less time and without taking their eyes off the road. Why defend an obvious regression?
Tesla fans sung the praises of other stupid ideas like the Highland's indicator buttons and the Plaid's 'yoke', both of which were silently shelved after buyer dissatisfaction.
Yoke was a mistake for sure (and FWIW works perfectly in Cybertruck because of steer by wire), but most people liked indicator buttons. The reversal is purely because social media pressure by people who never tried it.
> Why defend an obvious regression?
Because it's not a regression. Whenever I use my older cars with manual controls I see no benefit. Most of the time I still have to look at it - it has a dial or little screen to know what exact temperature you are setting.
> By contrast, my Nissan has driving settings like lane centering and seat heater controls on physical buttons... right next to my left knee where they are nearly inaccessible while driving.
I can beat that.
2011 Prius. USB-A port is inside the center console at the bottom of the back vertical interior panel.
You have to lift the center console lid, move all of the crap you've stored inside the console away from the lower rear of the compartment to reach the port, then by feel (unless you want to turn your head 100 degrees to the right and look down while driving) attempt to slot the USB cable into the receptacle.
My old honda fit had one of those inside the glovebox. I believe you were meant to plug in a flash drive or ipod and leave it forever. It did not provide enough power to actually charge a battery.
Oh. That's interesting. I have a 2018 Fit and I've never been able to get the USB port in the center console to charge anything. I bought it used, so I just assumed it was broken and moved on to using an adapter in the cigarette lighter. I wonder if that's what's actually going on?
There's a strong argument that you should never be plugging in USB devices while driving but it's hard to argue that you shouldn't adjust the lane centering settings while in motion.
Yeah, I think Tesla from a few years ago was the sweet spot. A small number of multifunction physical buttons for all the things you need while driving. I've driven a number of cars over the years with a mess of physical buttons like VW is introducing, and the result is that I've never actually used them because it's too complicated to locate the right button while driving. So usually I either just don't use the features in those cars, or end up having to stop to figure how to adjust some basic ass thing.
to VW's credit there is a setting to automatically turn on the heated seat and steering wheel when it's cold out. In my car it is fully toasty by the time I finish scraping the ice off .
These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.
Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?
TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:
- I've been a developer in XX language for NN years. How do I get my next job when the company is now hiring YY developers instead?
- There are lots of Level II jobs for YY, but I'm at level IV. Will eligibility rules even allow this transition?
- There are some Level V positions for YY, but my level IV in XX doesn't really qualify me in a way that would pass a tech screen.
The concerns in these types of posts are just so... different.
If the CTO is setting their position as the goal, we're talking about the managerial ladder.
ICs and specialists (I see product managers and directors as specialists as well) should have other options, but if all you're managing is people, getting more people under you is usually the only path forward.
3blue1brown videos are great if you want to go deep on the math behind it.
If you are struggling with the neural network mechanics themselves, though, I'd recommend just skimming them once and then going back for a second watch later. The high level overview will make some of the early setup work make much more sense in a second viewing.
On the other hand, the traction control is fantastic and they tend to have the best preconditioning features so that you never have to get into a cold car for your commute.
For a lot of people, that second paragraph is far more important than that first for at least one of the cars in their household inventory.
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