The author has some points that could be improved. Things like the "accelerator braking" (regenerative braking) exist because they're some of the most important efficiency gains EVs can implement. Yes, it's different behavior than gas vehicles, but it's not a bad thing if the regeneration curve is good.
Having been involved with auto production, I have a bit more insight into how the sausage is made. People do test these things before they're on the road, quite a lot of people in fact. Many of these issues do come up in testing, but for various reasons aren't addressed or the relevant teams that could change them are never even informed. With something like the handle design, the direction is likely coming from product design, who you don't want to fight with as an engineer unless they're asking for something especially stupid.
One of my projects involved a camera and product had unnecessarily chosen to mount it facing upwards towards the sun. This was pointed out when engineers saw the first prototypes and kept being pointed out as an issue throughout implementation. The design got to mass production without changing the angle.
Guess who got the panicked call from product when field testing discovered the camera was unusable at certain times of day? They were informed of root cause, the software knobs we built to mitigate the issue when it arose and I even offered to help them with field testing the fixes. No response.
Have a manual transmission? a automatic Mercedes? what about use paddle shifters or manual mode? what about turning off overdrive? of, use the S, 1-3 gears?
In the US, yes, the automatic transmission is most common, but worldwide, less so. Even then, we've failed to educate how to use the settings of the automatic transmission to not overheat brakes on steep grades, varying terrain, or actually control a vehicle.
One thing I hate about driving an automatic transmission car is that it doesn't have a predictable engine braking mechanism.
I got an European plugin hybrid after manual car and there is one thing I very much like about it. When I take off my foot from the gas pedal then it automatically kind of behaves like a manual car depending on the situation. If there is nobody in front of me then it continues to move forward with the same "gear", if there is a slower car in front of me then it will use regenerative breaking to slowly go down in speed and when I turn on turning light and there is an intersection upcoming then it will use more aggressive regenerative braking to slow down the vehicle. It is very similar to how I would have used engine braking in such situations. I'm quite confident that the full electric version of the car would behave similarly.
> Things like the "accelerator braking" (regenerative braking) exist because they're some of the most important efficiency gains EVs can implement.
No please no. You are resurfacing my nightmares from working in the autoindustry programming BEVs. Good damn I had to fight against regen braking when releasing the gas.
You want to be able to coast.
Regen braking should be on the brake pedal or a separate lever.
Yeah regen breaking on the accelerator is so bad and unnecessary.
It makes sort of sense from a non-human what’s the motor doing now perspective if this was similar to a gas pedal and removing all gas/juice input. but has no meaningful technical reason to mimic that functionality of the gas pedal rather than the coasting functionality.
In fact, some EVs actually do instead mimic the coasting part rather than the remove all juice part. They mimic the function result rather than not the actual detailed process which doesn’t actually translate well.
The plug in Subaru crosstrek for example configured the thing super well. Let up on the gas pedal, the car coasts with similar slight slowing to a gas car. The brake pedal when starts in regen mode, the tachometer indicates regen. Press harder it transitions to both regen and actual brakes. It’s sensical and just seems so obvious that it should be that way.
You want to coast because it's the most efficient. Regen is better than burning brake pads, but you'll go further by coasting than you will by Regen and then pushing it back out later.
Also, the gas pedal doesn't have enough resolution to handle forwards, coasting, and decent braking all one one pedal travel. You have to be super careful to go straight to coast on a 1 pedal driving modem. It's much better to just be able to lift of the go pedal.
> There is no “reason” for the car to coast either.
The user wants it to! That's a really great reason for the machine to obey.
The driver generally has superior information/ estimates about upcoming conditions and decision-trees which the gearbox does not.
For example, "That intersection's red light will probably become green soon, allowing me to efficiently coast for a bit before accelerating again, and I don't (yet) need to brake if instead it stays red."
A similar scenario exists for highways, where the driver is managing their following-distance to buffer-away repeated cycles of braking and acceleration.
Then there's also the problem of cars where the precise increment on the gas pedal isn't accessible or ergonomically viable, and then coasting serves as a way to moderate the output.
> The user wants it to! That's a really great reason for the machine to obey.
No, the user wants to maintain a speed or slow slightly, that does not demand rolling in neutral.
Maybe it is because I have grown up with cars with manual transmissions or maybe it is because I live somewhere with hills and regen is extremely useful, but I don’t find it particularly hard to modulate a vehicle with regen, nor do I think there is an inherent reason for a car to coast other than “it is what I am used to.”
That's why I like my Chevy Volt. It has a couple different drive modes selectable with the shifter. Under the normal drive mode the regen braking is controlled by a little paddle on the wheel or during regular braking (hitting brake pedal). In the other mode (I believe they call 'low') the regen is applied when you take your foot off the gas, aka single pedal driving. I normally use the regular drive mode and reserve low for when there's some nasty winter conditions which dictate the sort of subconscious slowdown that the forced regen provides.
It would seem more logical to me if the regenerative braking was tied to a physical user input. Like... the brake pedal from 0 to 30% could be regenerative, and beyond that engage the brake discs. Or it could be tied to the shift stick, on a L-D position, acting like a low gear on a manual car.
I've only familiar with the Hyundai Ioniq and the Chevy Bolt, but both those cars can be configured for that - the Chevy Bolt you only have to ensure it is not in one-pedal driving, which is just a button near the shifter, and the Hyundai Ioniq you just have to set the regen to zero. It's a failure of the rental place that these electric vehicles are not set up in such a way to match the mental model of a usual driver
The Chevy Bolt has it's brake lights come on automatically regardless of what is causing the deceleration, and I believe Hyundai is coming out with an OTA fix for that as well.
When you drive the electric car every day, it's nice using the one-pedal mode... Except it has taught me a large flaw in that my instant braking reaction is to depress the regen paddle, which doesn't work (only 10kW of effort) when the car batteries are well below -20 C, causing me to panic and brake too hard using the traditional hydraulic brakes.
I find that one-pedal is okay as a driver and not so pleasant as a passenger: feet are really quite bad at applying constant pressure, so there’s a tendency to alternate between excessive acceleration and deceleration. This can be nauseating, not to mention a bit inefficient. It’s made worse by the generally fast torque response in an EV.
I’d rather see really nice haptic controls, like so:
One-pedal: the pedal has a detent at the neutral point, so a range of forces will hold it at neutral, and a small conscious effort will switch between acceleration and braking. (For good measure, neutral could be zero acceleration instead of zero torque or power.) This would require some kind of variable electrically controlled haptics, and it would need to fail safe.
Two-pedal: a similar detent, but on the brake pedal at the position where mechanical braking starts.
Either one would need serious driver testing, especially to make sure that drivers won’t fail to apply adequate braking in an emergency.
There's a whole bunch of legislation that specifies what happens when you touch the brake pedal and how much deceleration needs to happen at every part of the input range. Any system involved in that needs to meet much stricter requirements. This also applies to regenerative braking on the accelerator pedal if the deceleration is over certain values. From what I understand manufacturers will actually have multiple "regeneration" modes to work around all this, but I don't have first hand knowledge of this particular area.
Almost all brands of electric cars (BEV, HEV, PHEV) use regenerative braking when you press the brake pedal when possible (i.e. they switch to the physical brake pads when the speed gets too low for effective regenerative braking, or when the battery is already full, or in case something's wrong with the electrical system).
Big exception is Tesla: Tesla's braking pedal uses only the physical brake pads. In a Tesla the only way to regenerate brake energy is by lifting the accelerator.
But in a stick shift, the engine brakes, even in the highest gear ie 5th or 6th - the car slows on it's own about 3x quicker than an automatic in overdrive.
Yeah, that's how my car does it (unless you "shift" into coasting with the paddle shifters. It does feel a bit clunky when you change between regen levels since the throttle is mapped differently
> Things like the "accelerator braking" (regenerative braking) exist because they're some of the most important efficiency gains EVs can implement.
I don't get why this needs to be in the accelerator pedal. Wouldn't it make more sense in the first stages of the brake pedal? (I haven't driven one of these.)
Ordinarily, you want to be able to let a car coast, and single-pedal driving seems to get in the way of that?
So, I kind of get it -- you have acceleration, and two braking mechanisms, which adds up to three things, and you need to come up with some natural way to expose that to the driver without giving them a billion controls to think about. So is single-pedal more about controlling a speed setpoint than about controlling acceleration? Maybe you just get used to it?
The lack of brake lights does seem like a legit problem though.
Because they're a product designer and you're "just" an engineer. Places with product designers usually have them trump the engineers, so you don't want to burn what little social capital you have on silly things like the product actually being usable.
I feel like this explains a lot about modern crapitalism. How did we get to a point where designers who have very little technical understanding have more power than actual engineers who actually build the actual products? Is it just that every company, in some grand vision of world domination, transitioned their culture from "we make good stuff" to "we sell a lifestyle"? Did the marketing wonks really infect and metastasize so completely that the idea of a thing is now more important than the actual thing, even inside the literal engineering of a product? Do these people really think, "well we can sell an idea, but you can't really sell a product"? What the fuck? The actual product is the whole point!! These fucking "idea people" have all conglomerated and seized power and it's really beginning to show in modern life. It feels like most everything i own was crafted to be marketed first and actually fucking work second.
Not mentioned in this but what drives me the most crazy are climate controls. These are literally safety devices for defogging windows. In several cars I’ve driven they are hidden behind touch screen entertainment systems. Madness.
In my own car there is a physical rocker to change the temperature but a touch screen to change the fan speed. Guess what I never want to change and what I need to change all the time?
That car allows me to configure special start up messages for my birthday and wedding anniversary but I can’t reprogram what the rockers do.
Actually, it needs 4 clicks as one additional click is needed to return to the previous screen (like navigation or media).
This means that in total 8 clicks are necessary to turn on and off air circulation. The areas to click are not in the same section of the screen, so in total 4 different locations of the screen must be clicked.
I find that there should be a criminal level of responsibility for making user interface like this in a vehicle.
Having driven lots of different cars myself, I understand the frustration. Cars are inconsistent -- BUT! One thing the author misses is that a person typically drives one or two cars and becomes intimately familiar with their operation. The first time you open a new door handle it can be awkward/unfamiliar/surprising. You might have to look up how to open the trunk, fuel door, or charging port the first time. Perhaps how to turn on the rear window wiper, four wheel drive, cruise control, or fold down the rear seats, and other specialized features. Point is -- normal car drivers figure these things out once and it's not really an issue.
Speaking of not testing cars for human compatibility: I went to buy a Toyota Camry a few years ago, and most of the models they had available for sale in Australia had a sunroof. The sunroof mechanism was so thick that even with the driver's seat at the lowest position, I could not sit in the car without my head touching the ceiling. I'm not that tall!
Of the entire line of Camry vehicles for sale, only the lowest-tier model had no sunroof. So you either got that one, or learned to drive with your head sideways.
I came to read some feel good confirmation bias aka their complaints on lack of buttons for things like defroster and fan speed.
I was horribly let down. Have they never driven a ford edge?!
Anyway why does turning on defroster in most cars turn all the fans to full blast immediately. On normal cars I’m mildly annoyed but it’s simple to turn the fan knob with muscle memory.
On the ford edge to turn it off full blast requires pressing a tiny circle on the touch screen to bring up a slider and then push the correct space on the slider, no haptic feedback is possible. it requires staring at the console and ignoring the road.
Best not to judge all cars by EVs.. for some reason most manufacturers have decided to discard 100 years of ergonomics learnings and start anew for no reason (beyond meager aerdynamics gains)
The trend of removing buttons and switches in favour of touchscreens, which have no feedback, must be one of the worst recent developments. I think it's mainly for 2 reasons - cost saving by removing physical switches which also speeds up manufacture and secondly just copying Tesla.
I guess they assume that the human will be spending more than a handful of hours with the car and will be able to read the quick start guide etc. I don't think they optimise for renters.
He didn't like the default regenerative braking on the Kia. Fair enough.
I tried looking through the settings but couldn't for the life of me find the setting to turn this off
The Kia would have paddles on the left and right of the steering wheel for adjusting the regen. Kindof behind all the usual stalks, two little paddles. This would be in the quick start guide that is either the first chapter of the manual or a little book that goes with the manual.
THERE'S NO BRAKE LIGHT THAT COMES ON. Like, what?
On Kias, the brake lights usually do come on during regenerative braking, although it does depend on how much braking is occuring. If the car is only slowing down a little, the lights might not come on.
forced dogfooding is unethical, but I wonder if every company marks up their cars 1% to offset a 50% internal employee discount, would that ultimately lead to a higher quality car?
It's my understanding that most people at Microsoft run frequently updated pre-release builds of Office for example. Having a VP call you to say that spellcheck got broken in the latest release is a great way to motivate fixing issues or preventing them in the first place.
So at least one VP at Microsoft likes playing Candy Crush Saga all day while browsing LinkedIn? Or how gets this stuff forced onto your machine at every couple of boot cycles?
i saw it at a previous job: some people that are genuinely good at solving specific technical problems aren't the target audience for every single app that may suffer backend latency issues
that doesn't mean someone shouldn't test releases internally before it goes out the door, but it also showed me how users that are forced to use a platform can actually be a detriment if they're not in the cohort you are building for in the first place
that's fair, i was imagining that the person who was tasked with seperating the 'useful' from the 'non-useful' might have qualms over which factors to analyze when choosing whose feedback to prioritize... but i guess that's also part of the job
Automakers haven't cared about the people who actually drive their cars for a decade or more unless you're in the ultra-premium segment where they make the fattest margins. They keep shoving shit we don't want down our throats because it makes them more profit and they'll keep doing it as long as we keep buying their increasingly enshitified products. Automakers could sell millions upon millions of barebones, basic, user-repairable, high MPG cars for under $30K USD if they bothered to listen to what regular folks actually want, instead they almost exclusively now make and sell $60K+ cars full of touch screens, pointless features and subscription services because they, like almost every other company on earth has decided they'd rather make $25K in profit per car selling a heck of a lot fewer $100K cars than make $5K in profit per car selling a heck of a lot more $30K cars.
Having been involved with auto production, I have a bit more insight into how the sausage is made. People do test these things before they're on the road, quite a lot of people in fact. Many of these issues do come up in testing, but for various reasons aren't addressed or the relevant teams that could change them are never even informed. With something like the handle design, the direction is likely coming from product design, who you don't want to fight with as an engineer unless they're asking for something especially stupid.
One of my projects involved a camera and product had unnecessarily chosen to mount it facing upwards towards the sun. This was pointed out when engineers saw the first prototypes and kept being pointed out as an issue throughout implementation. The design got to mass production without changing the angle.
Guess who got the panicked call from product when field testing discovered the camera was unusable at certain times of day? They were informed of root cause, the software knobs we built to mitigate the issue when it arose and I even offered to help them with field testing the fixes. No response.