Adam Cook (@motorcityadam) on Threads
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Mode confusion is real, folks. We spend an enormous amount of time in aerospace designing everything right down to the contrasts, color palettes and fonts used to challenge mode confusion and to maintain situational awareness. And that is with the luxury of highly-trained professional pilots. Dial up the complexity to Mars for unsophisticated, unmanaged consumers. Vehicle interfaces should be standardized across all makes and models and maintained under a single regulatory lifecycle.

Adam Cook starts a good discussion on a recent Tesla accident resulting in a death.

In it, a woman put her Tesla in reverse, confuding forward with reverse. This is likely due to a variety of user-interface issues on Tesla, including the confusing / non-standard touchscreen controls, the lack of physical controls, and so forth.

Adam Cook makes a strong argument for making controls standardized, like we do on Airplanes, to ensure that people know which buttons do what in their cars.

Tesla is quite bad at this, with multiple changes to their interface over the past 10 years for seemingly no good reason.

I’m not 100% sure if I can get behind Adam Cook’s full argument. But he’s correct in that Tesla has substantial UI issues to fix here, and this latest fatality proves it.