RapidcreekMitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law Angela Chao made panicked last call before dying in ‘completely submerged’ Tesla on Texas ranch: report
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.
Even a button shift. Literally just a row of buttons, select your gear by pressing it. Reverse would be under a safety cover so you don’t hit it at 60mph.
Or, you just have logic in the car’s software that stops you from shifting to reverse over 5mph.
Don’t trust software. Just don’t. Software crashes planes. There’s no way car companies are programming better than plane companies. You can certainly have the feature, but a safety cover should also exist in such a configuration. There’s no reason, except shareholder primacy, to not include it.