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After riding as a passenger in a Tesla I was shocked at how often the driver looked down at the screen and not at the road.


In aviation, pilots struggle with that.

Pilots have a duty "to see and avoid" in VMC, which means visually scanning outside the plane 90% of the time.

But it's human nature to fiddle with instruments and displays. So even in the steam gauge era it was a tough balancing act, and now it's much worse with acres of cockpit electronics.

It requires more training, and one would hope ADS-B provides sufficient collision alerts, to offset the heads-down tendency.

One of the best illustrations of this is the Qantas A380 in-flight engine failure that resulted in 1,000 or so alerts. They had to be manually acknowledged before the systems were cooperative again. One of the pilots was completely occupied with that task alone.


As a Tesla owner I completely agree. I really like what Ford did on the new Mach-E. They unabashedly 'stole' the touchscreen idea, then iterated. Now I want the smaller, wider LCD in front of the driver, and the big knob at the bottom of the center touchscreen. Maybe Tesla can copy that idea and iterate it some more... add some programmable buttons along the bottom or something ;-)


You have physical volume knobs on the steering wheel. That is less distracting than any reach to the console.


For some things, absolutely, but for the times when you need to interact with things on the screen that are more complicated than simple volume, a knob is still a pretty great option to have.


Same experience here. Model 3 is absolutely terrible for this. My father actually kerbed his and screwed up the alloys looking at the screen.


Can you watch movies on that screen while driving?


No, Theater mode (full-screen Youtube, other apps and games) and video playback in the browser are only available when the car is parked.




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