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simondotau 2 hours ago

At least your friend can add loops to the physical door-releases. If the problem is software defined, good luck hacking in even the simplest of one-liner bugfixes.

I agree Tesla door releases are silly, on both sides of the door. As a bald person in a city with hot summers, I am no fan of the glass roof either. But at least I can mitigate those. And neither are anywhere as maddening as being unable to wind windows up after opening the door. Or having to switch the radio off every single f****g time I start driving. While those might sound like mere annoyances, the repetitious inanity is utterly grating. I value physical ergonomics greatly, but there's something about pseudo-malicious software behaviours which make me angrier than any door handle ever could.

On a recent holiday I rented a Model 3 (pre-facelift) for a few weeks. It has a few quirks, but nothing that irritated me. It was an utterly pleasant experience. The quirky door handles became second nature within a day, for example. Navigating maps and music on that screen was less of a driver distraction than in many other cars I've driven. Not perfect, but well above average.

I do appreciate physical buttons, but my 1-series BMW from 2013 has taught me that there's something better than physical buttons. It's having systems behave well enough that the buttons might as well not exist. I almost never touch the climate control. Setting the internal temperature to 22 degrees seems to work perfectly all the time; somehow it always seems to do the right thing. The only intervention I regularly make is to press the "MAX A/C" button when driving home from sports or the gym. And I'm pressing that before I start driving anyway, so it's not a driver ergonomics issue.