Tesla's Design Changes Confuse Drivers, Undercut EV Quality

So much of the Tesla origin story was that it's technology was great, it was a great product, but they've made some tweaks that on specific models, I think it's Model X&S after a certain year and then refresh Model 3. That actually have not gone down well with the Tesla owners. Yeah, that's right. It did start in 2021 with S&X. It's now migrated to three, which means it's hitting the mainstream buyer and the mainstream buyer does not like giving up their turn signal stocks. What Elon is trying to do is trying to go stock free. And so you lose the turn signal stock and you also lose the windshield wiper stock on the other side. All of those have migrated to being buttons on the steering wheel. So as regular viewers of Bloomberg technology know, I, I have a Model Y which I pay for myself, but it, it, it has the stalks. The one thing I'd observe is like the screen in the middle, there are no, there are no dials or buttons on the dash. I spend a lot of time looking at the screen and reading the JD report. I think that was a big point that many of the respondents made as well. Absolutely. JD Powers said. The author of the study told me that that the consumers report that they have much more eyes off the road time because they're hunting around for these, you know, ordinary functions. This isn't high level tech that people are looking for it, they just want to beep the horn because something happened in front of them and they can't find it. We won't get into the whole idea about the future of Tesla and full self driving where to Elon Musk's mind, you won't need to pay attention anyway. But you've covered this industry for such a long time, you've written brilliant pieces at the product level. How impactful are these JD reports? Like, does the average consumer pick it up and go, well, this will inform whether or not I get a Tesla. Absolutely. JD Power and Consumer Reports, those two measures are the ones that carry the most weight with consumers. You can see it in the automaker's advertising. They'll they'll, you know, run the JD Power seal if they're one of the preferred brands. And Tesla has always been the highest ranked EV. Now, all the other E VS Rivian, the legacy automakers, they've all caught up with Tesla primarily because of these rudimentary functions that have been put on the steering wheel and taken away from their usual locations. In the story. There's a chart of problems per 100 vehicles, but it's also a quality survey. Can we just quickly talk about the quality part of this discussion? Yeah. So I mean, quality is defined in a couple of ways. One is things that break that don't go well, But also quality in the survey now reflects what consumers are having trouble operating. It might be functioning as designed, but if the if the driver can't figure out how to use it, then that's a quality problem. And so that's what's showing up on Tesla here. These are things, the buttons work if you can find them, but can you find them in an emergency situation? And, and others have pointed out if you're in a roundabout, the the way the turn signals work now is just a couple of directional arrows on the steering wheel. If you're in a roundabout and you're in the middle of it, your steering wheel's upside down and you don't know which arrow to push.