Car Buyer vs User

Image Google Gemini Generated

I stopped at a dealership recently to get some parts for my wife’s car and, as always, took a peek in the showroom. I ended up looking at stickers and counting the screens in a mid-range SUV. Four. One in the dash, one in the middle, one for the passenger, one in the back. A salesperson grabbed me and started walking me through them. I stopped paying attention about 30 seconds in. Paddle shifters, massage seats, gester controls, ten drive modes, ambient lighting, self parking, some kind of fragrance thing. I nodded. I would use none of it.

Apparently I am not alone. The JD Power 2024 Tech Experience Index rates the so-called advanced driver features near the bottom of what owners actually value. Gesture controls hit 43 problems per 100 vehicles, which is a polite way of saying they do not work. People pay for this stuff, give up on it, and then never bring it up again until they trade the car in.

I keep thinking about the iPhone in this context. Two billion of them have shipped. None came with a manual. Kids figure them out before they can read. Apple kept taking things away. The home button. The headphone jack. Each cut made the phone easier. Carmakers do the opposite. They keep piling features on and call it progress.

I drive a 2020 Tesla Model 3. The software is great. The maps work, the updates show up overnight, the menus make sense. The car also has a turn signal stalk, a gear stalk, and two scroll wheels on the wheel. Tesla removed all of those in the 2024 Highland refresh. You signal now by pressing a button on the spoke. You shift gears by swiping a slider on the screen. Owners are paying around $400 for aftermarket kits to put the stalks back in. Tesla rolled out a version in China with the stalk returned. The best software in the industry could not save the worst ergonomic decision in the industry.

A few years ago BMW went the other way and tried to charge for hardware. Eighteen dollars a month to turn on the heated seats already wired into the car. About 90 percent of BMWs leave the factory with the hardware in place. Customers were essentially being charged twice. BMW killed it in September 2023. New Jersey introduced a bill to make hardware paywalls illegal on cars, which tells you how badly that went over.

None of this is accidental. Cars get designed for the showroom because that is where the sale happens. Three knobs and two screens looks cheap next to haptic glass and 47 menu layers. Marketing wants the acronym count on the window sticker. So you walk in as a buyer, feel reassured by the complexity, sign, and drive home. About ten minutes later you become the user. The user wants the heat on without looking at a screen, the mirrors adjusted without a settings tree, and the left turn signaled with one finger (not that one! )

Things are starting to turn. Mazda kept the knobs and gets credit for it every time someone reviews the car. Volkswagen pulled the buttons, watched sales slip, and admitted in 2025 the buttons are coming back. Their design chief said the reversal is permanent. Euro NCAP is moving toward requiring physical controls on five core functions to keep a five-star rating, which means the regulators are about to do what the marketing departments would not.

The buyer is in the showroom for an afternoon. The best interface is one you do not have to think about, and you should not need a manual to signal a left turn.

Distributed Inference And Tesla With Some SETI Nostalgia

In this post, I’m setting aside any political stuff and focusing solely on tech.

 

In recent months, the electric vehicle (EV) market has seen a decline, marked by falling sales and an increase in unsold inventory. Tesla, in particular, has received a significant share of negative attention. During Tesla's first-quarter earnings call last week, Elon Musk diverged from the norm by highlighting Tesla's broader identity beyond its role in the automotive industry. He emphasized the company's engagement in artificial intelligence and robotics, suggesting that pigeonholing Tesla solely within the EV sector overlooks its broader potential.

 

Musk's suggestion to actively utilize Tesla's computational power hints at a larger strategic vision. He envisions a future where idle Tesla vehicles contribute to a distributed network for AI model processing, termed distributed inference. This concept could leverage the collective computational strength of millions of Tesla cars worldwide, extending the company's impact beyond transportation.

 

Very interesting – I drive maybe 1-2 hours per day, the rest of the time my car is not being used. What if all that computing horsepower could be used while I’m not using it? Musk’s concept brings up memories of the sunsetted SETI@home computer application. SETI was a distributed computing project that allowed volunteers to contribute their idle computer processing power to analyze radio signals from space in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). SETI@home used data collected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to search for patterns or anomalies that could indicate the presence of intelligent alien civilizations.

 

Participants in SETI@home downloaded a screensaver or software client onto their computers, which would then process small segments of radio telescope data during periods of inactivity. The processed data would be sent back to the project's servers for analysis. By harnessing the collective power of millions of volunteer computers around the world, SETI@home was able to perform computations on an unprecedented scale. The project was launched in 1999 by the University of California, Berkeley, and it quickly became one of the largest distributed computing projects in history. Although the original SETI@home project ended in 2020, its legacy lives on as an example of the power of distributed computing and the widespread public interest in the search for extraterrestrial life.

 

Musk's vision underscores Tesla's potential to revolutionize not only the automotive sector but also broader domains such as artificial intelligence and robotics. It signifies a strategic shift towards leveraging Tesla's resources and expertise in a SETI-like way to drive innovation and create value in new and unexpected ways.