Dave Winer's years of experience writing software has prepared him for life as a newbie Tesla owner:
I found out in the latest update. I had the temperature in the car set to 65 degrees, the same temperature I have my house thermostat set to. When I got into my updated car, the temperature was 72. It said so very clearly on the big display in the middle of the dash. So I did what I did before, touched the temperature, up pops the environment panel, but I couldn't find any way to change the temp back to 65. I know how to scan a UI from left to right and top to bottom to find the thing that should be big, in the middle the display. A slider that sets the temperature. It wasn't there. I sat in the car in my garage for a few minutes before I had a brilliant idea. Try doing it on the phone where the UI didn't change. Voila. Back to comfort. I'm in good shape until they auto-update the phone UI. 😄
A bunch of other things were moved around. Why? Developers have their own insights into what users need, and they're always wrong. What users want first and foremost is the UI of the fucking cars to not fucking change! I put the f-word in there twice to emphasize the importance of this idea.
I'm way out of practice as a driver - I haven't driven a car on the public roads in more than 20 years - but I do remember the extent to which muscle memory helps you operate the car's controls when you're driving, and the notion of a driver's attention being drawn to the central screen to on a Tesla to try to find and use a non-tactile control while driving is horrifying. One day, Tesla would say, their cars will have full self-driving capabilities built in and turned on by default so this won't matter, but that day is not with us just yet.
Sure, logically the driver should know that tweaking the internal temperature is a much lower priority than steering the car and defer fiddling with the touchscreen until a more opportune moment. No doubt there's small print covering this in the End User Licensing Agreement, but HUMANS ARE JUST NOT ALWAYS THAT LOGICAL.
I would imagine that a significant portion of Tesla's funds is devoted to employing lawyers whose job is to shield Tesla from liability if lawsuits about their software updates to their user interface ever makes it to court. It'd be good to think that state regulation will pre-empt their efforts and Elon Musk will one day find himself having to answer for inflicting this sort of idiocy on road users, whether they're driving Teslas or just unlucky enough to share the public roads with those who do.