China has already mandated an end to retractable outside door handles and electrical inside door handles. That takes effect January 1, 2027. There were two major incidents where people could not get out and could not be rescued.

The powered charger port door would make sense if there were robot chargers that used it. Tesla demoed that, but people disliked the snake robot approach. Technically, a snake robot is ideal for that, but too many people fear snakes and tentacles.

Rear view cameras are better than rear view mirrors. The field of view is better.

My Nissan Ariya checks nearly every box. The controls for the AC have dedicated buttons, but they are capacitive, not tactile. Anyway, love the car. It's a real shame that they aren't selling them in the US anymore.

I love the note regarding the rearview mirror being an actual, you know, mirror.

A friend was teasing me the other day for using my mirrors while I backed up, ignoring the various screens and camera feeds dotting the dash. I reminded him that photons impinging my eyes reflected off the material world at the diffraction limit of the visible spectrum remain much higher fidelity than some shitty parts-bin screens.

Plus those rearview screens are always horribly bright. You know what has infinite levels of dynamic brightness? Light bouncing off a planar reflector.

So much of modern cars is cost savings and poor design decisions dressed up in the name of modern - but ultimately resulting in UX worse than an early 2000s Honda.

I like retractable door handles. But I think a cutout underneath (maybe spring loaded) might be a good compromise.

also, I WANT A PRNDL (drive select stalk). Even though they overloaded it with autopilot, I think the older model 3/y version was great. Removing it was dumb.

An super-easy-to-locate hazard light button (required by law) would be nice. Not out-of-the-way.

Why can't they just ask the us faa or us military - they have a century of experience with critical control design and placement that don't kill people.

This made me realize it's been 12 years since the last John Siracusa review of an OS X release on Ars Technica.

I miss those so much! Here's John talking about ending them in 2015 https://hypercritical.co/2015/04/15/os-x-reviewed where he said "Someone else can pick up the baton for the next 15 years" - but sadly nobody even came close.

One of my favorite car reviewers is Doug Demuro. His videos on youtube mostly focus on the 'quirks and features' of the car, AKA all the minutiae you notice a few months into ownership.

Nothing to discuss here, the article is spot on. I doubt though that those top of the class manufacturers are this stupid. They are rather playing the stupidity of the common consumer.

Almost none of this is specific to EVs, manufacturers just see EV consumers as technology forward (which seems to largely stem from Tesla's design approach) so they have been more aggressive with technology than with their traditional ICE models.

Ok, I'll take the bait. I have a thermostat at home, I set a temperature, it keeps my house at that temperature. I have a thermostat in my car, I set the temperature, it keeps the temperature. Fiddling with with climate controls and vents is not something I've done for 8 years now. Why is everybody always touching these things?

Such items need to be standardized, and cars driving on public roads must conform to a standard. It's that simple, but legislative bodies seem to have lost the ability to regulate basic items such as rear-view mirrors and non-blinding headlights.