If anyone’s curious, it looks like you “hold the brake and swipe up” on a touchscreen area to go in drive, and “hold the brake and swipe down” to go into reverse.

So yeah, it’s not a physical shifter, though it seems pretty intuitive and simple. BUT if you’re in reverse and try to swipe up to drive(like you’d do during a 3 point turn) , you have no feedback aside from looking at the screen to let you know it actually registered your shift.

IMO this is another idiotic implementation at going cheap on physical controls or “being high tech fancy” that shouldn’t exist. It’s dumb to not have important functions give physical feedback while driving. I’m not laying most of the blame on tesla for this. It still sounds like she’s the one who really screwed herself, but I’d all but guarantee there’s going to be a lawsuit for this one, and rightly so. Fuck all this touch control crap in cars. It’s lousy enough just on the radios.

Don’t forget the fancy electric door handles that stop working when you back into a pond.

There are emergency override handles, but not everyone knows where they are or how to use them, so they’re not all that useful in an emergency.

These deadly features are purely cosmetic, so I would lay a decent amount of blame is on tesla

If I had my way, regulations would require a physical connection for all door handles, and not just that a secondary physical release be available. I don’t know how you would go about finding injuries associated with each design as a layperson, but I bet there’s a death or two associated with each novel design.

An old man roasted in his Cadillac XLR because the battery was dead and he didn’t know where the secondary release was. I think it’s under the seat on that car. I don’t care how cool that electronic door release was, or if the old man was negligent in not knowing his exits; it wasn’t worth his life.