I have been smitten with Tesla for 15 years now and have purchased the safest car ever made for everyone in my family and firm. Over the years, it has been clear how the cars have improved vertically, from one model to the next. But now that I have donated my early cars to an automotive museum, I am driving the latest Model X, and can compare horizontally, from my white Model X on stage with Elon Musk for the first deliveries, to the Plaid X today.
The new X is amazing compared to where it started, with many fit and finish improvements, silent chassis rigidity, insane acceleration, longer range, drivetrain tuning, heat pump, and a more elegant interior design with no clunky AC vents. And it’s much less expensive. A number of controls and sensors have been removed (forward radar, ultrasound, and side-radar for door clearance detection). The steering wheel column is smooth with no stalks. Once the UI is streamlined, it seems obvious in retrospect. For example, the cameras and drive history can tell if I want to go forward or reverse. It guesses correctly 100% of the time. And this is just one subset of the full AI driving stack in development. So many features that are standalone modules in legacy cars are just derivatives of the FSD stack, like auto high-beam adjustment, proximity alerts, and auto windshield wipers. All of this is seen by the cameras.
And removing the stalks is an example of Elon’s mantra: “the best part is no part. It weighs nothing. Costs nothing. Can’t go wrong.”
I am reminded of a passage I wrote for the Steve Jobs obituary in BusinessWeek: “Jobs was the master architect of Apple design. Often criticized for bouts of micromanagement and aesthetic activism, Steve’s spartan sensibilities accelerated the transition from hardware to software. By dematerializing the user interface well ahead of what others thought possible, Apple was able to shift the clutter of buttons and hardware to the flexible and much more lucrative domain of software and services. The physical thing was minimized to a mere vessel for code.
Again, this came naturally to Jobs, as it is how he lived his life, from sparse furnishings at home, to sartorial simplicity, to his war on buttons, from the mouse to the keyboard to the phone. Jobs felt a visceral agitation from the visual noise of imperfection.” — archived here: flic.kr/p/atvnG7
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