I am not a trucker, so I can't comment on the veracity of TFA's claims. But this rant reminds me of many similar things I've read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.
A lot of the things that matter aren't necessarily obvious to the designer or engineer who knows little about the nuts and bolts of every field. The usual remedy is to either follow a design process that incorporates user viewpoints, or to hire people with direct experience in the field.
Take the "wiping the mirrors" complaint. One design makes it easy to lean out the window and wipe the mirror by hand. Another design might make the mirrors retractible.
If I read a complain that retracting the mirrors was unnecessary complexity, I would think "Hmm, maybe, but then again it's a tradeoff because the narrow cab is more aero and increases range." I'd have a feeling that the designers knew this was an important use case, but this person complaining doesn't like their solution.
But it worries me that a number of use cases that seem quite obviously common even to a layperson... Are neglected outright. I don't get the impression that Tesla knew about all this and decided not to do anything about them, I get the impression that this is a company who thinks "design" is all about styling, and not about usability.
To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function-
> Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets and it's pin in the arse. Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it. (10)
This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. And while in normal cars they move units because features over functionality is acceptable, trucks aren't status symbols first. They do, at the end of the day, have to do the job they're designed for efficiently, and things like this are clearly just "trendy" not practical.
The reason for the touchscreens is simple... compared to all the design and manufacturing needed for a good console of buttons, it's cheap just to slap in an identical tablet unit in every car model.
From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching.
"From the very start it was just Tesla penny-pinching."
I don't think so. I think it was worse, and indicates a deeper (and more depressing) inadequacy:
I think Tesla put the big screen (17" ?) in the first Model S as a signifier of high technology and modernity.
So far, so good ...
Now, however, as the Tesla itself came to signify the steps forward to an electric car future and modernity in general, designers of other cars copycatted the Tesla so as to evoke the same sentiment.
Meanwhile, actual interior design of automobiles has regressed significantly - and very often, dangerously - and we have one, and probably two entire generations of vehicle models to get through before it gets fixed.
In the meantime, get used to monstrosities like this:
I drive old vehicles, but a few years ago I got the itch and walked into a Toyota dealership. When I was told they don't offer vehicles without the screen I walked out and have basically refused to purchase anything with such a screen.
I've driven a few rentals with them and yes, they're not the most terrible thing ever, but they definitely are inferior to not having them. I really hope what you're saying will come to pass and we'll get rid of them or have a better version of their functionality because they are so obviously unsafe it's nuts to me they were ever put in.
I think Honda announced they would be getting rid of them, if I were to buy a new vehicle today it would most likely be them for that reason alone, despite me being loyal to Toyota up to this point (I just trust their vehicles).
To expand on that, it is because Tesla fundamentally approaches design like a tech company instead of a manufacturing company. For example, you see this with how they make changes to their cars. They don't have any real model year. Any car of one model can be slightly different from others of the same model from the same year. They could also be nearly identical to once produced two years earlier. It all depends. They just make changes to them whenever they feel like making a change.
The tablets are there for the same reason. Instead of spending years fine-tuning a dashboard design through research, they can throw a tablet in there and release whatever software they currently have. They will get feedback from people like this Twitter user telling them they have it all wrong, then they iterate and release a software update. Maybe that process eventually gets them into a better place like it often does for tech companies, but the bigger problem is that this approach completely fails when it comes to their other design choices. You can't push out a software update to change the angle of the windshield. And this lack of focus on the initial design is what leads to making the bad choices highlighted in that thread.
This is an 80/20 problem if there ever was one, maybe even 95/5. In my car I really want the audio volume, heater fan speed, and wiper control to be tactile. But beyond that, I can probably deal, and even the heater fan speed might be negotiable.
In my 2003 car, the fan speed is buttons, oh well. In my 2013 it’s a paddle and I like it a lot better.
The newer car also has a knob for navigating the touchscreen, which isn’t perfect but is way better than touching a screen. The older car has no touchscreen and I like that better.
I didn’t rtfa because it’s a Twitter thread, and I didn’t see any comments on this in the 250 or so below. What else really needs to be a tactile control on a truck?
(Edited for clarification. I said “touch-based” when I should have used “tactile”.)
Could you please explain more about why you would prefer those specific controls to be touch based? Is it to have the possibility of finer-grained adjustment?
For me, wipers and audio volume are controls I want to be able to access immediately and without taking my eyes off the road, as they sometimes need to be used with urgency. (For example, turning down high volume to reduce distraction or activating wipers to clear a sudden downpour.)
or when another vechicle splashes you with a mass of mud or snow from a puddle or slush pile from plowing, or snow blows off the top of another vehicle etc, suddenly blind, at highway speeds with other vehicles, maybe with no barrier seperating the oncoming lanes, and your wipers require navigating menus on a tablet???
Even non-critical controls still need to be tactile, and not change from one day to the next, don't move location or change behavior from updates, because even if you don't need them in a hurry to avoid crashing, you still can't be hunting around in a multipurpose interface while driving just to change which direction the air vents point. Not a hyperbolic example, the Rivian actually has that.
It's so you don't have to look at them to use them while driving. Screens offer no tactile feedback that guides you, you have to look, which is dangerous.
I think tactile controls should be those things you would want to change while driving:
* Climate control heating/ac/defroster temp up/down fans higher/lower
* windows up/down
* signal left/right
* windshield wipers
* volume up/down
* audio basics (next track/previous track)
This allows you to keep your eyes on the road and rely on muscle memory to make the changes quickly. It's an important aspect of auto safety. Things like gps route selection, loading music into vehicle or configuring playlists can be done with touchscreens as these are complex tasks that are unlikely to be done while driving.
It seems they could have a set of programmable buttons with LED surface, as I've seen in computer keyboards for years. As sibling comment points out this is an 80/20 situation.
As much as I enjoyed my recent first time experience driving a Tesla, the screen controls frustrated me immensely. I guess they expect you will be talking to the car to make changes soon anyway, but we all know that doesn't work great either.
Edit: not to imply you were defending the choice. I can see why it is understandable when trying to iterate fast.
My 2013 BMW has 8 physical buttons that can be easily programmed to do whatever I want. It's awesome. Unfortunately this feature has been deleted from the newest models...
Physical buttons are far harder to produce and, once made, are set in stone until the car is recycled. Touch controls can be reprogrammed, updated, improved, etc, mixed with voice input, etc. Far more possibilities for improvement.
Who said physical buttons cannot be mixed with voice input? Most physical buttons these days are just an interface to the CAN bus, where the function is performed (in software) in the BCM and can easily interface with the voice module.
"Improved" is an interesting term. How much improvement can you make to climate control buttons? Their function in most vehicles has not changed in 30 years and are largely the same aside from styling.
I feel like we just had this conversation two days ago, with the Amazon driver that has to use a touchscreen to open the cargo door in his new EV delivery van. Another ridiculous design courtesy of SV. Maybe the Juicero engineers found a new life at the EV manufacturers.
That's ridiculous. Multi-function displays/inputs have been a thing for decades. A physical button does not need to map to one and only one function. Just like MFDs in aircraft, physical buttons in a car display can perform different tasks depending on the mode of the display. I've had several car head units over the years with multi-function buttons.
Touch screens in cars are shit. Not only is there no tactile feedback but you can't place your finger on a button before pressing it like you can a physical button. To touchscreens a touch is a press so you better hope you touched the screen in the right place and your finger didn't move around because of a bump in the road.
When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.
Fast forward to now, even Android phones have lost all physical buttons for home/back/menu and now it is all just touch screens. This approach allowed changing button-controlled interface to gesture-controlled.
So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.
> When the original iphone premiered, a lot of experts were saying it'll be a failure because it lacks physical controls and it makes calling while driving impossible.
Several things to unpack:
1. Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone. When the iPhone was released there were few truly hands free calling systems in cars, many jurisdictions have laws against phone use in cars. This is a moot point.
2. Touchscreens on phones before the iPhone were shit. The UIs were primarily designed for a stylus. In the rare situation UI elements were even big enough to hit with a fingertip the resistive screens sucked and wouldn't properly register a touch. Physical buttons were necessary because the screens and UIs were not designed for touch. The iPhone changed that calculus.
> So touch screens might be shit, you just don't need to touch them while driving.
Except for functions like the defroster on Teslas which requires navigating nested menus on the touchscreen to activate. So you definitely need to use the touchscreen while driving if all the physical controls have been replaced by a touchscreen.
> Dialing a phone while driving was no better with phones with physical buttons than with an iPhone
This is absurd. I could not only dial, but also answer to calls and write whole messages on keyboard phones without ever looking at the device. They were tactile and the home key (number 5) was easily located by rubbing the thumb against the keys.
With an iPhone, the simplest of these tasks, taking a call, still requires me to look at the screen and aim for the right place where the button is.
The average driving-age person could definitely not dial and text on a T9 phone and drive safely. You could have but the uptick[0] in accidents related to phone use in the early 2000s are a testament that this was not a common skill.
You're not wrong that a tactile keypad was superior for dialing without looking. Touchscreens were a major step back for anyone practiced at blind dialing/texting.
People spend a lot of time staring at their phones because of those touchscreens. Which is what the phone makers want. But automakers and fellow drivers -- not so much.
For the same reason, the US Navy announced it was moving away from touchscreen controls. When actions need to be taken quickly, muscle memory and tactile feedback are preferred.
Yes, actually. Never in decades in had to do something about climate control urgently. There is always a pause when you can do it safely even on a touch screen. I used Android Auto quite a lot before Google broke it.
As I said, if we're talking about advanced cars, touch panels are more versatile, better suited for future updates, and all important functions should understand voice commands anyway.
Controls that change based on mode are terrible for a vehicle. IE, a physical button that's programmable and doesn't always do the same thing, is no good.
Controls that change location or behavior from one day to the next, are absolutely horrendous.
I rented a Jeep today. It has most functions on a touch screen. But above 60mph (I think) the controls all lock so you can’t touch anything.
They probably did it for safety but it feels so dumb. I’m on a highway trying to turn off Bluetooth and then FM but I can’t. All screen functionality locked, no workaround.
That's probably a restriction on the rental that's just an option if you own it. My 2013 Ford allows me to limit several things over 55mph for drivers using my second car key.
Car crashes are the leading cause of death of children under age 18. The number of deaths has risen in the US even as it's fallen across the rest of the world. I have begun to wonder if phones are just a convenient scapegoat, even if the criticism is in the right direction.
I wonder if it's a combination of phones, car centric city design with wide stroads, and automatic transmissions. The latter two make driving very easy and boring, with long waiting periods at red lights, high speed between the lights, and you can keep your phone in one hand all along because there's no stick to shift. No wonder people are not looking at the road.
They absolutely reduce the number of variables requiring attention, except the problem and the source of danger is they only appear to. They make the way appear to be free of things to look out for, and so appear to require less attention. That's the "boring".
In reality of course, all the same kinds of unexpected events can still happen at any time. A baby can suddenly appear anywhere along one of those roads. But that doesn't mean the road does not encourage inattention.
It comes up periodically here and it makes some logical sense but I don't know of any regulatory efforts or push back and I'm certain someone would blame in-car screens if it was the cause of more accidents. Screens seem to keep getting bigger and incorporating more function.
The other factor that counters it is there is also a lot more automation. I have a 10 year old car and the lights are automatic, the climate control is automatic (I think my wife or I adjust it about twice a year) Things like hazard lights are used fairly rarely and I've never needed muscle memory for it.
Several studies have shown touch screen are less safe. Having tactile controls doesn’t prevent automatic wipers etc, it’s a pure UI choice as your generally run everything through the CAN bus either way.
The initial idea for the CAN bus was simply to save copper by having fewer wires inside the car, it was only much later that touch screens leveraged that system. Basically if you want a truck release from a key fob and a trunk release from a door you might as well have both talk to a computer which only runs connection to the trunk. At which point you can redesign the controls more or less independently because they don’t change how everything is wired up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus
Hazard lights need to be accessible with zero thought so you can warn people the instant a hazard arises, without taking your eyes off the road during hazardous conditions. My car has them on a big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and that's the way it should be.
I didn't make the claim but I thought to look it up. From NHTSA's report, if I'm reading it correctly, 2021 had 42,915 traffic fatalities, of which 8,174 were related to alcohol. I think those numbers are estimated. I'm not aware if there's better data.
My information appears to be a few years out of date - probably from the last time I had this debate here on HN. 2021 does appear to have been a particularly bad year...
Regardless, the numbers are very good for the US, compared to the rest of the world. iihs.org[1] indicates the US is averaging somewhere around 1.5 fatalities per 100 Million miles traveled.
Compared to the rest of the world... that's pretty decent. Most of the places with significantly high fatality rates are not the places that will be purchasing self driving electric vehicles anytime soon...
You are deluding yourself if you think the US is doing well on traffic fatalities. From the graph at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest... we can see that US car deaths/capita have dropped slightly (10-20%?) since 1995. Meanwhile, in France where the rate about matched in 1995 they have dropped by 3x, leaving the US rate at about 2.5x the French rate.
If every driver were drunk at all times, roads would be designed with that in mind. It's much harder to dangerous things in a car with better designed roads
The point is that the design of the vehicle, or anything, needs to be as good as possible regardless of anything else, and there is no overriding excuse not to.
It's not like the poorly designed controls are necessary for some other even more important reason.
If both roads and drivers were all excellent, the vehicle still needs to be as excellent as possible. If all other factors are so good that only 10 people die each year from car accidents, there is still no excuse for making vehicles less safe and make that become 20.
Alcohol, lack of alcohol, good roads, bad roads, speed limits, none of that matters.
It’s a bit silly to assume they didn’t solicit feedback from real truck drivers. While developing a multi-billion product. But “Musk/Spaceman Bad” right?
That’s just one of the many jobs they posted during the development of semi. They also have “real” drivers that put a ton of hours shuttling Tesla cargo from NV to CA and vise versa.
Not to mention the author is from the EU. Trucking in the U.S is vastly different. I drove in both regions during my time in the USAF.
In your honest opinion. Do you think they just developed the semi without gathering/soliciting feedback from real truck drivers?
That a very opinionated yet empty statement. Please elaborate and share your experience driving long haul semi trucks in U.S. interstates and city streets.
I am responding to the challenge that Musk doesn't ignore all sense and advice and feedback and established best practices in favor of simply what he thinks is cool.
Perhaps, but SpaceX interfaces share the same issue: focusing on looks at the cost of usability, so I would think that either he's involved in this quite a lot, or he built both companies to have similar cultures. For example, the first mockup of Dragon v2 control panel presented to the public [1] looked all sci-fi, but as someone who actually knows how spacecrafts function I can tell just by the look that this was unusable. They were forced to switch to a much more pragmatic design [2] during the development, probably because folks from NASA shared some real-life experience and had their own requirements written in blood. Still touchscreens, but only where it doesn't matter (hard to have tactile controls in a spacesuit anyway), with a handle to hold onto under acceleration and to provide a basepoint for muscle memory, and buttons under protective caps for critical commands.
So what you're saying is that his company posted a mockup then listened to people with real life experience through the development process and produced a good actual product?
One technique is to dock some of your fingers against known reference points such as the corner of the screen, then you can stabilize the finger pressing the button and rely partially on muscle memory to locate the target button.
Why don't we have any physical "dynamic" controls yet? A "3D" touchscreen? Something like a ferrofluid [0] layer underneath a flexible display. It seems both technically possible, and a way for us to have our cake & eat it.
> This is a KNOWN issue. There's very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle.
That’s a very confident statement to make without data to back it up.
Strong disagree. I see a huge number of benefits from the touchscreen in my Tesla. Continuous improvements to how the fundamental controls operate. New features that could only have been possible due to the controls not being hardware…
And generally speaking my vehicle seems to save me from human lapses in judgement even when I’m paying perfect attention so I’m not convinced about the argument that they purely increase distraction.
Are you able to perform a good majority of functions without taking your eyes off the road over 95% of the time? In my perfect setup I would have configurable buttons to map critical functions to and then a touch screen for non-important things. I have a very hard time seeing how a touch screen alone would be better than touch screen + a couple buttons.
Yes. Everything you need while driving is on the wheel or at a well defined corner of the screen (which big touch targets). And that too can be avoided if you’re willing to use voice control.
You have to take your eyes off the road for multiple seconds to turn the defogger/defroster on, as one example. Maybe there are studies to back it up too, but intuitively, this seems unsafe compared to turning a knob that you don't have to look at.
I'm not a designer but one principle I've adopted in most things I purchase is to minimize complexity. My goal is always to optimize for "least willpower consumed". Because I know that if its not easy to do, I'll just skip it after a long day.
If I was making something for professionals who might use the tool for long, tiring hours, I'd probably want to give them the least bit of complexity possible. At the end of an 8 hour shift, how many truckers will have the energy (or rather, spare willpower) to press a button, wait for the mirrors to retract, clean it, and press the button to get it back into its original position? Compare that to the much simpler single-step current process (grab cloth, clean mirror).
The fewer clicks, the fewer steps, the fewer movements something takes, usually, the better.
1. Design it myself. Get my ideas on paper before I'm biased.
2. Review designs. See how other people did it.
3. Talk to experts.
4. Integrate ideas and build it.
Most of my clever ideas turn out to be dumb at step #2 or #3, but a few pan out, and those have been important. In many cases, there is some kind of fusion too.
Sometimes I actually do a slightly similar one. I do 3. 2. 1. 4.
I also sometimes skip point 2. to avoid any bias and follow their own pitfalls instead using my own creativity from the raw material of point 3.
But your workflow is great. :) It's the same than Apple or Ford when they created the first cars. Like their famous quote: if Ford asked first to experts what the next transportation will be they would have said faster horses. It had to start from a visionary first and not experts.
No, since that would tie back to my identity. I use throw-away accounts online. When I upgrade my web browser, this account will disappear and a new one will appear.
I have the level of fame where you almost certainly wouldn't recognize my name, but where most people (not just on HN) have heard of one project I created from scratch (to give an analogy, very few people would recognize the inventor of the Nerf gun, the Super Soaker, the touch screen, a popular TV show, or the iPod, but if you said "I'm the inventor of the ____," they'd know who you were).
It takes about 30 seconds with Google my successes and failures to figure out who I am.
I attribute that success to:
1. Being willing and able to talk to a large and diverse set of experts (and not just recognized ones; in the above example, an expert might be a trucker, rather than just a truck designer, and you want to talk to both, not to mention people who hire truckers, people who ship things, etc.). Finding something like an "expert trucker" is probably harder than you'd imagine; "expert trucker" isn't the same as "random trucker."
2. Being able to swallow my ego, ignore my ideas, and follow their advice.
Most of my success was based on gluing together ideas that other people / products had in innovative combinations, and in being somehow effective at scouring the universe for good ideas.
Heck, even most of what Microsoft designs/builds/releases is after-the-fact mind boggling un-user-friendly, and they are mostly working on their own and hugely deployed products with many years of real world experience already under their belt. And they still screw it up regularly! I don't readily know what one would call this phenomenon. Is it as serious as technical cancer? Dementia? If feels like a disease that is spreading to so many companies rather far, and fast.
Perhaps the good news is that it should result in more competition, I think. Tall growth getting hit with beetles, ideally leaving behind fertile ground for something else?
If anything it reminds me of all the arguments on slashdot when iPhone was announced that it would never take off because full touchscreen phones without a physical keyboard were a gimmick.
Is the difference here is there is already long running expectations? The iPhone was charting a brand new course across undiscovered seas, how trucks drivers interact with their vehicle is an experience with literally generations of data.
Keyboards go back a long way, and the iPhone was widely panned as "not a professional device" because "how could you type email on it?" After all, we all had experience with just how bad on-screen keyboards were. It was so bleeding obvious that Steve was an idiot.
But then people actually used iPhones. While not as good as a physical keyboard, Apple's soft keyboard was vastly better than anyone anticipated. So good, in fact, that everyone basically forgot about physical keyboards and started typing their email on iPhones.
A big part of it was two things:
1. Apple put an actually-good LCD in the iPhone (Apple's LCDs get brighter and dimmer than the competition)
2. Apple used a capacitive touchscreen (that didn't suck).
I think the key thing is "is Tesla going to install good or shitty screens?" My guess is good screens--so I kind of laughed when the trucker complained about Mercedes touchscreens being too bright at night. Just like Apple's good screen enabled things you couldn't have before in a phone, I think Tesla's will too.
They can show blind spot cameras, for example. That may mitigate most or all of the impact of the center driver position on visibility. The same cameras can potentially show a better view than the mirrors (who cares if they're hard to clean when you only have them installed for legal compliance). So the giant screens enable Tesla to offer a Semi with vastly better aero than the competition.
The problem isn't just the quality or sensitivity of the displays (though that could also be a problem). The problem is that any interface designed for drivers that requires you to stare at the interface and not the road is a bad idea. Any control that you are likely to operate while the vehicle is in motion needs to be something you can find by touch alone. A fixed, physical button.
That's how it looks with the benefit of hindsight.
In 2007, there were plenty of people who thought the iPhone wasn't charting a brand new course across undiscovered seas. They thought it was an expensive, overly engineered toy. They thought the smartphone market of Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices was already mature.
They repeated exactly the same mistake early EV cars did, Prius, i3, Leaf, all ugly, quirky or just impractical for completely unrelated reasons to being an EV. Trying to reimagine what a car is, instead of just taking a good old proven chassis and slamming an electric drivetrain inside.
Yes, there are enablers and constraints in EV platforms you both need to and should make use of, like more floor space, frunk, aero. Tesla finding the right things to change out of that pool is what made them successful. Today most other manufacturers have come to their senses and we today have great selection of good and non funky EVs on the market. This semi on the other hand is the i3 of trucks, judging by the Twitter thread.
The Tesla semi design is the exact opposite of the iPhone's keyboard removal. It's larger but still less useful and flexible because its use of space is so inefficient.
The smartphone's lack of a physical keyboard is a tradeoff that works well for most users who tend to consume a lot of media content and rarely write long texts on it. According to that truck driver the Tesla semi is not a tradeoff but a downgrade without any upsides.
Fat fingering an instagram post rarely causes an accident which can delete a family from existence in half a second. The argument against touchscreens in vehicles is sound, not just contrarianism.
Devil’s advocate: the buyer and operator of the trucks may not care what the driver thinks. Most of these complaints don’t seem to hit at the truck’s profitability for its target market.
As a counterpoint, check out the review of the Amazon truck by Rivian by a delivery worker, that was posted here on HN just this week. It turned out being a good experience for the driver. If UX issues are big enough that they can potentially affect productivity, then corp headquarters will care.
Pretty much, yes? I mean, EV trucks are going to start out limited to fixed routes with known charging facilities. They require more expensive capital outlay and have probably-cheaper-but-very-different maintenance regimes that will benefit from commonality more than "just another diesel tractor" would.
So I'd say yes: absolutely sell to the fleet market first. Individual truck owners will come along (likely from the used market) as the facilities evolve.
That's a weird position to advocate from. I mean, it's the traditional soul-sucking capitalist position: who cares about the user as long as it makes money?
Your critique makes sense, it reminds me of an electric truck startup called Edison that was started by a former truck driver: https://www.edisonmotors.ca
Basically the exact opposite approach, they started by bolting together mostly commodity parts. It's not pretty in a consumer product sense but for industrial users I get the sense that sleek is not good if it comes at any cost to serviceability, durability, parts commonality, etc. I don't know if that specific company will go anywhere but I like the approach.
Considering that the original lead for the project was also the lead for the Cascadia, I don't think its fair to say that they lacked people with industry knowledge.
Side mirrors: I have _never_ cleaned the mirrors by hand. That happens when I'm refueling with a squeegee on a long pole that they have at truck-stops. I will tell you that those mirrors will vibrate like hell and be difficult to see clearly out of. That far away from the chassis and with only one point of contact will make it vibrate a lot.
Gatehouses: that is a very valid point, but most guardhouses (I mostly just have experience with Ford/Chrysler/GM) make you get out of the truck and go open up the trailer. You don't even roll-down the window to talk to them.
Weigh-Scales (aka Chicken-Coops) where Highway weight inspection happens: Most just use a speaker on a pole at window height, but other places (like USA/CAN border crossing) you have to pass paperwork back & forth to agent, so this would be difficult.
Entry/Egress: these are valid points but the need to enter/exit from the passenger side has only happened to me once. My biggest use of the passenger seat: That's where I kept my cooler for food/beverages.
And that brings me to my list of observations that make this tractor seem like a non-starter (from things i noticed watching the '10 hour drive' video):
(1) The monitor on the right-side of the driver. Some of the time it was a map/GPS, but most of the time it was displaying text that the driver leaned over/turned his head to read. This might have been dispatch notes, or vehicle diagnostics or something else. HELL NO, not even once would I ever drive something that required that much attention away from the road.
(2) Food/Beverage options. Most drivers that I ever saw used a LARGE 24oz-36oz insulated mugs for coffee. A lot would pour an entire pot of coffee into their mug! So most trucks had 'over-sized' cup holders. The 'nicer' trucks I drove also had shelves with guard rails (it always reminded me of boat-storage) in areas that I could put food that I could eat while driving. I didn't see that same kind of space. The less-nice trucks would force me to use the passenger seat. This truck did have lots of area, but there was nothing to prevent things from sliding around.
(3) Load/Log paperwork: Usually kept in a clip-board (mandated by law if carrying hazmat material to be stored in drivers-side door pocket). Once again door placement and lack of shelves play an issue here. I often kept mine on the passenger seat. This material is rarely touched while driving, but there is a considerable amount of paperwork that needs to be done each time the truck stops. Related: Notepads. About half the companies that I worked for required that I log the vehicle mileage (and time) when crossing state lines. There might be adequate space for this. Notes were needed to be written down quite frequently.
(3) Range to refuel ratio.
I drove a 600 mile radius centered around Detroit. I would goto Quebec, Missouri, Tennessee, and all points in between. Each time I needed to 'fill' the fuel tanks would take ~30 minutes. That 30-minutes would give me ~1800 miles of range (VERY rough estimate, I never got close to empty). I would often get fuel at either designated locations (like at the company lot)or when I was OTR I would do it before I stopped for the night (as needed). Even if Tesla built out a super-charger like network for the trucks I can't imagine having enough time to make 3x more stops, with each stop taking MUCH longer.
On mirror vibration, my personal experience is that a lot of it is contributed by the diesel engine, at least on the freeway / at idle. It is really obvious when you're cranking it. The proximity of their mounting point to the engine bay doesn't help either. IMHO the axle-mounted motors are gonna suffer less from this particular cause, but maybe the bad roads will make it worse regardless.
A related point is "E-mirrors". The regulation is not there yet in the U.S., but apparently they are in Europe [1]. I think they have the potential to be _more_ safe than traditional ones, despite the glare issue at night --- for example taking advantage of the low-light HDR capabilities. Also, their FoV don't shift around as the driver's head does; this may be both a pro and a con.
Also, had they made the driver's seat slideable left-to-right (e.g. with 3 locking positions) it would solve the problem of not being able to hand something over the left window ;)
This isn't for OTR though, as most truck routes are shorter in nature. They aren't gonna touch long haul for a while. Though they do apparently charge up very quickly.
I agree there are a lot of negatives though. Not a truck driver but the ipad light seems like it would be very annoying and then reading instructions while driving, especially where you have to turn your head away from the road is really bad.
Ultimately I think people are too worried about the interior. It's not gonna be that hard to move seats over if needed.
this rant reminds me of many similar things I've read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.
I've had similar experience with silly old web development.
I spent a week sitting down with actual users of the web site that I was so proud of and watched them use it. Oh, man did that hurt.
All the "telemetry" in the world will never prepare you for actually watching real people at work and talking to them.
It completely changed the way I build web sites.
The Tesla designers should spend more time in truck cabs, shadowing actual truckers. Based on this Twitter rant, it should be illuminating.
It's ok, it lights up for 30s after the door opens. Oh you need to find it but were in the cab for longer than 30s? Just open and close the door again, dum-dum!
And others emulating them. I would like a Rivian for several reasons, but I can not accept the cab, especially the suv. It's the stupidest least functional least convenient least utility thing imaginable for a utility vehicle.
IDK, when I see threads like this hit high rankings on HN, I don't even have to click through to know that it's a rant — it wouldn't make the front page if it was like "Sweet, this looks good."
Parts of the thread are just nonsensical; for example, I've seen many other threads and business analysts concerned about whether an electric semi-truck is even viable at all. Meanwhile, this thread explains that "All major truck manufacturers offer [sic] electric trucks for years now." Wow, maybe everyone else is wrong and doesn't know anything about truck sales? So I did the bare minimum of research, and... The Mercedes truck he claims has been offered "for years now" is in prototype phase and has never been released; the Volvo class 8 semi was only released in October of this year and has less than half the range of the Tesla; the Scania was also only launched this year and similarly has less than half the range... He even cites "Nikola" as a manufacturer that you can buy a truck from. Nikola! The infamous company that was convicted of securities fraud for faking their electric truck last year! Apparently as of this year they finally managed to deliver a whopping 48 trucks, all of which were promptly recalled for safety issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation
Meanwhile, the snow considerations from the dreaded "angled windscreen." In the thread, the author posts a few pictures of trucks with completely vertical faces. Is that representative of semi trucks? Well, let's go ahead and look at a picture of the Volvo electric class 8 semi that the author was touting... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/18/first-drive-the-volvo-v...
Uh-oh. It's got way more horizontal faces that the Tesla! And look at those giant mirrors placed 5+ feet in front of the cab... How will the driver wipe them without leaving? Whoops. Or, maybe that's not actually the death sentence for the truck that the author claims?
And then there's the "place to put a mattress." But — the Tesla Semi is what's known in America as a "day cab." Day cabs do not have places for mattresses, and it's generally illegal to sleep in one: https://ratings.freightwaves.com/day-cab-vs-sleeper-cab/. If you're on a route that requires sleeping, you need a sleeper cab. And yup — the Tesla Semi isn't one. But neither is any other day cab.
Rants like these are usually pretty boring TBH: if the product is actually terrible, no one will buy it (and thus the author won't be angry about it). The anger betrays their certainty that the product is actually more attractive than they'd hoped, and than they're claiming.
> if the product is actually terrible, no one will buy it (and thus the author won't be angry about it). The anger betrays their certainty that the product is actually more attractive than they'd hoped, and than they're claiming.
"People loudly disagree with X, this proves X right" has never been a convincing argument.
Just for one example, you have to know that the people who buy industrial equipment don't always communicate with the people who will be expected to use that equipment. "My boss is gonna get seduced by this shit and I'm gonna have to deal with it" is a perfectly legitimate concern.
For another, you've read enough tech news to know that people find terrible design annoying even if they don't expect to ever have to use it themselves, especially if it falls within their field of expertise.
Maybe the problem is that he is being critical of something made for Americans being European. American semis would be super stupid here, as well as European trucks might be stupid there, but then again Brazil is as large and less dense than the US and prefer EU style trucks.
This truck is for a very specific niche: owned fleets near two warehouses or within a 500 mile round trip from a major port. Basically: all the warehouses in the Inland Empire near LAX and Long Beach and the warehouses in the Newark area that service the NYC metro area. It has the potential to dramatically reduce costs for some routes/corridors.
It will be a big hit in these areas. It will have a large impact on a very specific niche. There's nothing wrong with that. These aren't going to be used by independent truckers. It's not for them. It's for drivers making the same 80-100 mile or so trip from port to warehouse every day.
I don't see how that is relevant. Nearly all of the criticisms posed (maybe not the snow one?) would still be relevant to a driver in the situation you describe. This has nothing to do with range or even the fact that it's electric
These sorts of posts always show up anywhere that somebody posts anything remotely critical of a Tesla product. They could make a combination trash compactor-bassinet that randomly switches modes and somebody would come out of the woodwork and post “People don’t realize the value in maximizing functionality in small spaces”
Most of the criticism assumes people will be in these cabs for 8 hours at a time. They won't. This is for very short trips. We are talking 80-100 mi each way. 2-3 hrs in each direction, max. It's not for independent truckers.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all? The windscreen complaint is about what happens when the vehicle is parked. The baffling "seat is in the middle" decision affects all drivers, both when passing (ever driven in the UK for the first time and tried to pass?) and at toll booths. The muddy floors are worse with short-haul drives, since you're in and out more often. The tablets impact anybody driving at night. The only long-haul thing I really see here is the bed thing.
I don't think Tesla knew all of this. I think they just fucked it up.
In an ideal environment the operating cost of a Tesla Semi is about 1/3rd (conservative estimate) that of a diesel.
That environment is, again, very specific. But if your routes are short and predictable, you have massive warehouse space for solar, and you can get your average electricity cost as low as Tesla can then it pays off. 1 million miles in a diesel is going to cost well over $1 million dollars (including the price of the cab). With a Tesla Semi that cost is at least half… IF you can get the electricity cost low enough.
Nikola was convicted of securities fraud last year for faking their electric truck. They finally delivered 48 trucks this year, and then all of them were immediately recalled for safety issues. I think the fact that the author referenced them as viable alternatives is pretty emblematic of how accurate the thread is.
This is my issue. You're replying but clearly you are missing that there arent any electric semis to compete with.
The author of the thread also clearly hasn't ridden a tesla semi, so he is just assuming that eg the mirrors can't be cleaned either from the inside nor the outside. Isnt that a bit too bad of a take?
I mean I love to read about his experience, but many of his points of criticism seem hypothetical.
While I largely agree with you, there are at least a subset of the complaints in the Twitter thread that are pretty inconsequential if the truck is only intended for < 500 mile routes (for example, the "no space for a bed" complaint).
The driver sleeps in the truck in neither of those scenarios. The driver drives back and forth from the port until his shift is over, then another driver takes over. If the truck breaks down ... you're in the middle of Los Angeles. Someone from the company picks you up, and you drive another truck, or go home.
GP's (very reasonable) thesis is that these are for truck driving as a day-job, in fair-weather locales, which obviates most of the complaints.
Not even, though. GP mentions the NYC metro area. I wouldn't call that a "fair-weather locale" in the winter. All the snow-related complaints seem to apply here.
I mentioned 3 trips a day because you could wake up in Los Angeles, drive deep into the inland empire, drive back to Los Angeles, and then back into the inland empire again. This was the context mentioned by an earlier top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926883
You are quite right that running into problems in the Los Angeles is only a minor inconvenience. Having worked at both ends of this route, I regret to tell you that the other end is not the most welcoming environment. You probably wouldn't be out there too long if you did break down, but the desert gets pretty chilly at night.
Who cares if they do 3 trips a day, it's not like they won't need to stop and unload on each trip. Beds-in-cabs is really only a thing for long haul truckers. There are tons of vehicles used for trips of the length that the Tesla Semi is for that don't have beds, and nobody would expect they would.
What if it is relevant and all the criticisms are true?
It’s a big world - a company targeting a very specific narrow niche in a specific location sounds like a great strategy for getting started. And it wouldn’t invalidate the euro truck driver insights on what would work for Europe’s logistics reality.
What on earth are you talking about? What has that got to do with the criticisms in the post? If they were taken into consideration, how would that in any way affect their cost savings?
all the criticism is from the point of view of a european trucker dealing with weather. The only weather those trucks will be dealing with is hot and hotter, and the cab shape and size is normal for US trucks.
That tweet stream is mostly an uninformed nothing burger and this comment comes from someone that HATES Elon Musk.
Minor inconvenience. Pepsi doesn't care how you hand papers to someone. FedEx doesn't care if you get mud in the cab, you'll just have to clean it after your shift.
This is the kind of efficiency tool that will be bought by large corporations and forced on drivers.
You still have to look over you shoulder when merging and need the ability to shift your body to see in the mirror or to check where your tire is when backing up.
I get that lots of car drivers merge by faith, but you kill people and potentially spend time in jail in a CMV.
Local deliveries are far more dependant on this than OTR, and even the drivers of front discharge cement trucks with narrow cabs complain about this.
Pepsi probably bought their delivery slot for the publicity more than the trucks being practical. It isn't like they got the first delivery slot by finding a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.
The thing you're missing, and most folks in this thread are missing is... there's already a bunch of electric semi's out there available for purchase right now.
Nobody is buying them (by nobody I mean so very few...). If Pepsi really thought electric was the way to go, they would already be doing it.
It doesn't until there are negative externalities, you know, like labor retention rates, that cause those transport costs to go back up.
Tesla might be able to sell some of these to some companies for a while, because brand recognition and Elon stans in purchasing positions. That's not really a good strategy for long term growth, and Tesla can't just will an automotive niche into existence.
This guy genuinely has no clue what labor retention rates are. He thinks an unsafe truck that saves a tiny percentage of money will actually save large corporations cash on their bottom line
If it really "sucks", you'd probably see incident rates go up, meaning down time, maintenance costs, legal issues, even impact on the public image. There is a point where bad mood and annoyance of a troubled work force become a serious inconvenience.
Besides the fact that other electric trucks already exist, I question the roadworthiness of a design that doesn't have any instrumentation directly in front of the driver (like a speedometer...) and that puts the driver several paces and a corner away from a door, which seems like a distinct disadvantage in the event of a crash or a fire.
There is really no difference if the speedometer is in front (actually below) or to the right. In both cases your eyes have to refocus. I tried both. It‘s a non-issue in the Model 3/Y.
It sounds like Tesla has a lot to prove to skeptical truckers, so a big number on range can head off some criticism.
I think what people are saying is that there are a lot of 80-100 mile trips that this can serve, where the criticisms aren’t really a big issue. But more range still means expanded use cases.
It doesn’t have to prove anything to truckers. It’s not for truckers. It’s for large companies that want to reduce their transportation costs. They don’t care about you, the driving experience, how inconvenienced you might be, etc.
In general, companies _do_ care somewhat about worker convenience; poorly designed inconvenient things slow everything down. Particularly with trucking, actually, I'd have thought; I'm not sure how it is in the US, but there's an acute shortage of truckers in much of Europe (particularly post-Brexit), so employers won't necessarily want to annoy them for no good reason.
But why buy a truck that has such a narrow use-case? Economic situations can change a lot over the lifetime of a semi, and not being able to drive longer routes is a notable limitation.
Many trucks have even more narrow use cases than their range. Some are built specifically for particular types of cargo. Typically these trucks are purchased when the business has a specific need, and I suspect that this truck will only be considered by buyers with that specific need.
Also note that (nearly?) all EU trucks are cab-over-engine because laws in Europe on the overall length of the truck are more strict, so you get more cargo for the same LOA vs a conventional cab. Author of TFA certainly appears to be in Europe.
Wait so Tesla knows that it's not possible for the driver to reach out the window to hand over the paperwork necessary to get into and out of a port, or through scales, because... the truck is designed for ports. Ok then.
The cost per mile will be radically lower IF (big if) customers can actually achieve the wholesale electric rates that Tesla estimates are possible. Like, dramatically lower. The cost of diesel over 1 million miles is going to be north of $600k easily. At Elon's "guaranteed" 7¢/kwh the cost to run a Tesla Semi over the same mileage is about 1/3rd.
This truck is designed to be an efficient workhorse for short routes with owned fleets.
It’s on one of the slides in his presentation. In fact, I think it’s been in multiple presentations. May not be the easiest thing to find because I remember it being skipped over and in small print somewhere but he does speak to it.
It's likely being guaranteed because he knows the cost of installing solar and battery banks and he (and his customers) doesn't have to buy directly from local power companies.
Electricity cost is much higher in the US and almost 10 times more expensive in Europe.
Also, a diesel engine can easily run millions of miles, I don't believe a battery's efficiency would hold even few hundred thousands. Teslas don't at least and degrade around 10% every 100k miles, with most dying before hitting 400k.
Like everything those calculations seem always based on best case scenarios and ignore that batteries are super expensive and degrade at each cycle.
Diesel Engines are rarely getting more than 6 or 700k without a 30k+ rebuild. You make it like they are all going millions of miles, that's not accurate.
Still, some companies will be able to realize the gains. They can invest in solar on site. The people purchasing these often have warehouses with 1,000,000 sq ft of roof space.
My residential retail electricity is 0.098 per kw-h. Midwest prices are generally decent, but the town is buying from ~1 large utility to get that rate, with a few solar panels perhaps lowering costs some of the time. Seems like there is room to do better just going to market, and there is certainly room to do better by buying directly from new solar installed in the next few years.
Cost-per-mile is cheaper from electricity than from diesel, and it's expected to have lower maintenance costs too (fewer moving parts, no oil changes, etc)
It's been almost four years for me, and I've had to spend exactly $0 in maintenance on my Model 3. We'll see what the future holds, but not bad so far.
It has been 3 years with my Toyota and all I have paid for is new windscreen-wipers (winter ruins them). I don't see how that matters though. What matters are actual numbers from a trusted source: ADAC (German motor organization) says it costs $0,51 per kilometer to drive a Tesla Model 3. My Toyota costs $0,31. Nothing exceptional about the price on Tesla maintenance.
You didn't link your reference, so I don't know how those numbers were calculated. However, they are so large they are clearly not maintenance costs, but probably all in costs. That's apples to oranges (Tesla vs Toyota are two different segments). It's also not the topic of conversation (Tesla maintenance costs).
ADAC's measure includes the cost of the vehicle itself so that number is completely inappropriate for the actual operating costs. Also ADAC has been called out as wrong and having biased testing many times: https://insideevs.com/news/456957/bjorn-nyland-charging-loss...
My PHEV has a two year oil change interval, I'd imagine a Toyota hybrid does too. So in 3 years of driving, there's one oil change, but they only said they didn't pay for anything other than wipers. First service paid for is a pretty common incentive with a car (may be factory included)
Doesn't that work out to like 2¢ per ton-mile??? Don't confuse yourself by only looking at the numerator. It probably costs close to $100k to refuel a train.
If that's the use case then Tesla has entered the market late and with an inappropriate solution. You can already buy that local route electric truck from 4 different legit truck companies.
TBH, I really wonder if fuel delivery would be a big market eventually. There seems to be a lot of traffic between near-urban terminals and urban gas stations that is very inefficient with diesel semis.
"Drivers sits in the middle. This makes overtaking or looking ahead more difficult. But also makes it impossible to reach out of the window to pass the paperwork or to talk with the guy in the gatehouse when you enter a port or a factory or, say, a tollbooth."
This one seems like the worst one of all these criticisms.
My guess is that they needed to get the drag coefficient down, and did so by first raking the windshield back, then pinching the cab horizontally to get some more gains. That narrowing of the cab then led to the center-seat arrangement?
Bonus being that you don't need to configure a LHD and RHD version of this truck for different markets.
Different markets can’t be addressed with the same truck anyway. Lights are different, mandatory equipment is different, EU trucks are limited cabin-inclusive, US trucks are cabin-exclusive, etc.
Lots and lots of LHD trucks serve the UK making daily cross channel trips, or even just based here full time from Dutch / Eastern European shipping firms.
This truck still appears to have a passenger seat on the right side, though, despite the driver being in the middle? So presumably they'd still have to reconfigure it for RHD.
Indeed, I wonder if they will be able to address this fast enough because it does seem serious. Same goes for the mirrors that are out of reach of the driver for easy cleaning. It could be a pain point.
I guess the author wanted the pile-on a bit, but the rest feels a bit more like "this isn't how we are currently doing it so it's just wrong", especially when it comes to the shape of the truck. Being aerodynamic seems like a good way to increase the range.
> I guess the author wanted the pile-on a bit, but the rest feels a bit more like "this isn't how we are currently doing it so it's just wrong", especially when it comes to the shape of the truck.
I got that impression, too, but in more ways.
1. The interior shots I've seen show blind spot cameras (on the tablets that he doesn't like). That seems like it would address the problem with visibility from the center driver position, and probably goes a long way to addressing the mirror-cleaning issue he mentioned.
2. Why couldn't Tesla just have a little wiper-fluid squirter on each mirror to clean it off remotely? (and do we know they don't already have that?)
3. Tesla already coats their glass roofs with something that blocks lots of IR and UV, but little visible light (and makes the roof of older Teslas a very strange color when viewed from outside). I would assume they are aware of the HVAC issue and apply a similar treatment to the Semi windscreen.
Tesla has been testing these things for like 5 years now, and the Semis have been seen at Pepsi warehouses for about a year. It seems unlikely that Pepsi would take delivery of a truck with such obviously fatal flaws after a year of acceptance tests... so I bet there are mitigations for most or all of the issues identified.
I wonder how this cab design would affect interactions with the police. I did not realize that you enter via a corridor behind the driver seat. US officers do not respond well to people getting out of the vehicle during stops.
True, but I don't think police are as worried about long-haul truckers behaving well, versus someone in a civilian car. The trucker needs to keep their CDL, and they do trucking professionally.
Most damning. The driver being able to easily lean out the window to talk to people as it passes tolls, inspection points, hell, weigh stations, is important. That all of these engineers and designers massively overlooked such a vital component of truck driving out of Tesla's own hubris is hilariously embarrassing, IMO.
I don’t think they overlooked it. I think they designed the cab to be as aerodynamic as possible, so as to squeeze out every bit of range they could … and this dictated the driver position.
I think it’s more that this truck is at the edge of viability as a long haul commercial vehicle. They don’t do things like this, and this truck doesn’t exist.
inspection points, hell, weigh stations, is important.
FWIW, a lot of US weigh stations are automated now.
I know very little about it, but from what I've observed, it seems that the truck drives through, and the information is transmitted from the truck to the station, and computers handle fuel tax and that sort of thing.
I don't know if this is the future, or how widespread it is, but it's at least a step in the right direction.
A microphone and a speaker allows customers to talk to bank clerks sitting far behind thick bulletproof glass. They could implement that on a truck.
Handing papers over is harder, but I wonder if making a small window that can be opened would be really hard. The driver would need to stand up, though.
How much do you think the total absence of engine noise compensates for the additional distance? Also there could be less attenuation inside the cab if there aren't many soft surfaces to absorb the sound.
We can only assume they overlooked it. The opinion of someone who has actually driven a Tesla Semi through a weigh station would be infinitely more relevant than anything you, I or the OP have to say.
And like most things, it's going to be a series of trade-offs. Perhaps they decided that in a big picture analysis, the disadvantages are fewer than the advantages.
>The opinion of someone who has actually driven a Tesla Semi through a weigh station would be infinitely more relevant than anything you, I or the OP have to say.
Thank you for quickly dismissing the opinion of someone who has experience driving semi-trucks and currently works adjacent to that industry, interacting with truck drivers on a daily basis.
I see a massive, massive flaw in this design based on my own experience but, "Nope, shut up, you haven't driven the new one, your opinion is invalid". Got it.
I didn't say shut up, and I didn't say your opinion is invalid. Your opinion is valid. Please stop putting words in my mouth. All I'm saying is I don't feel there's a need to come to any conclusions about the design until we've had feedback from people who have actually used the product in the real world. I can't believe anyone would consider this an unreasonable stance.
> The opinion of someone who has actually driven a Tesla Semi through a weigh station would be infinitely more relevant than anything you, I or the OP have to say.
---
> I didn't say shut up, and I didn't say your opinion is invalid. Your opinion is valid.
I think you need to reexamine the phrasing you're using, because it's coming off as extremely dismissive of people with significant knowledge of the industry.
That's hilarious. Okay, go tell every warehouse and factory with a loading dock out there that their systems are out of date and they need to use RFID for everything. And if they don't -- well, we won't send this truck to your facility!
A little bit of humility when it comes to appreciating how sectors of the economy you have zero experience with would go a long way.
Maybe, but trucking is a low-margin industry. If the "fuel" savings are even half as big as Tesla claims, there is going to be a strong incentive to switch to this truck.
Suddenly, the warehouses that refuse to switch are paying more for shipping via ICE truck... that is their choice of course, but I don't want to hear any whining about how unfair it is.
It's not that I don't understand the challenge of changing not just infrastructure but the way people do things, but it can be done.
Either climate change is a real problem and society is going to have to fundamentally shift and do lots of little things like change how warehouses and factory loading docks work for increased efficiency. Don't you think these challenges will be solved before we have robo trucks on the roads, which will need the same changes?
I wasn't a trucker, but I did do LTL shipping in addition to FedEx, so I've signed enough manifests to know that having a good excuse to update the industry wouldn't be resisted as much as you think, because the costs would pay for themselves eventually.
Coins and paperwork will not be gone by the time this truck is on the market, just as coins and paperwork aren't the only reasons the seat placement is flawed.
The most damning in that they obviously didn't consult any real truck drivers or truck manufacturing companies to figure out why things are the way they are, before setting out to try improving them.
We see this a lot with smart inexperienced developers taking on entire industries with hopes of "disruption" - but lack even the most basic understanding of that industry and it's problems. The hubris necessary to assume everyone in the industry are dumb and just haven't thought about these novel improvements is very high...
Perhaps you are talking about Feightliner's eCascadia truck? If so, I think we're only making this case stronger. The eCascadia is a traditional semi, but electric and technology improvements here and there. It's not a "throw everything out and start from scratch" thing. Perhaps there's a reason he is the former lead...
The Tesla Semi is a fantasy semi that no one asked for and I suspect no one will buy. There's plenty of electric semi's already available...
I'm not sure that I understand your point here. He was there for the Cascadia program almost 20 years ago. It had plenty of problems on its own, but I don't think there's doubt that he worked with a traditional trucking company. They had plenty of relevant experience on hand.
You should probably be more clear in what specifically you are talking about. Names and links would be helpful...
Regardless, just because he was part of some team at some truck manufacturer doesn't mean he knows what he's doing. The Tesla Semi isn't a "Trucker's Truck" by any stretch of the imagination. It was designed to look cool and get good PR...
I'd say one of the worst things about this truck is you cant bail out of the thing as the door is behind the seat. Ever see that video where the tow truck driver bails out after the truck he is towing slides off the icy road and down a steep hill and takes the tow truck with it? You don't have time to walk around the seat.
The driver sitting in the middle makes it clear no on at Tesla ever drove a truck. I have and the driver sitting in the middle does will not help with visibility. You want to be able to stick your head out and look right down the side of the truck. This is important as you cant see everything from the mirrors and in addition they can be broken, missing, iced up, fogged, etc. Same with cameras in case you thought they are solutions.
I dunno. I get annoyed just having to unbuckle and get out of my seat for parking tickets that are out of reach.
I can't imagine having to do repeatedly do this while maneuvering a big rig around a stockyard. Or did you mean it was one of the most valid criticisms?
Its not a problem in the states, but in the EU/country with cyclists, you'll never see the 20/30 of them that are sneaking down the inside of you at a junction.
Look, here in the EU we have plenty cyclists getting killed daily by trucks of the current “benchmark” design. Just the other week https://www.adnkronos.com/e-morto-davide-rebellin-ex-ciclist... so meh, these arguments about dead spots are just pearl clutching. The truck has more cameras than a bank, it’ll probably do better than what we have today
I understand and partly agree with your sentiment, but "offsetting" technologies/components are all over the place. E.g. combustion engines also need mufflers, catalytic converters, etc.
Good, we can go paperless and minimize human contact and viral exposure with digital paperwork and authorization systems and intercoms. No need to roll down the windows and let the climate controlled air get dirty and hot/cold.
You do realize that there are literally thousands of weigh stations in the US that would need to be upgraded? They're run individually by the states, who will have minimal incentive to cooperate.
A lot of the things that matter aren't necessarily obvious to the designer or engineer who knows little about the nuts and bolts of every field. The usual remedy is to either follow a design process that incorporates user viewpoints, or to hire people with direct experience in the field.
Take the "wiping the mirrors" complaint. One design makes it easy to lean out the window and wipe the mirror by hand. Another design might make the mirrors retractible.
If I read a complain that retracting the mirrors was unnecessary complexity, I would think "Hmm, maybe, but then again it's a tradeoff because the narrow cab is more aero and increases range." I'd have a feeling that the designers knew this was an important use case, but this person complaining doesn't like their solution.
But it worries me that a number of use cases that seem quite obviously common even to a layperson... Are neglected outright. I don't get the impression that Tesla knew about all this and decided not to do anything about them, I get the impression that this is a company who thinks "design" is all about styling, and not about usability.
Somebody resurrect Steve Jobs.