Like many, my parents taught me to drive using the family car. Although it was not that long ago, it was certainly enough years back that our car did not have driver profiles (seat position, mirrors, etc.), and as such one had to manually set your seat and mirrors for each subsequent driver. As Tony Fadell discussed in his TED talk "The first secret of design is ... noticing", this was just the way things were, and we accepted that as such.
Flash forward several year. I finally had a car that was really mine and it came with 3 memory settings, although by this time it didn't really matter all that much since I was the only one who ever drove the car. By this time the family car had also been updated and it too had driver profiles. Sadly it only had 2, meaning that when I would drive the car, I still had to revert to the old manual way of doing things. Needless to say, not having that extra profile did discourage me from driving that car.
A few more years and an intervening natural disaster introduces the Tesla. The Tesla interface is another evolution from both of the previous memory systems, both because it can store more profiles -- road trip profile anyone? -- but also because the profiles are now named rather than indexed. No longer do I have to remember what number I was using. Laugh now, but once you get used to having a name rather than an index, you'll agree: it's a far more sane system.
With the increased ability of the Tesla system and the introduction of the named profiles for the driver though, I've wondered why there is no such saved profile system for the passenger side as well. Are all passengers somehow anonymous strangers? At least in my personal experience, the set of passengers is all that expansive; it's mainly the same combination of family and friends with a few guests sprinkled in for good measure. This set could easily be stored by the system, provided that the passenger seat were connected to the central system.
At least in our family, the roles of driver and passenger are rather fluid, so although it's extremely simply to go from passenger to driver by just touching your name, the reverse is less pleasant: you have to go back to the old way and reset your own seat position. Passenger profiles would eliminate this asymmetry. Although perhaps unnecessary, it may also be desirable to allow the profiles to be imported from the driver side in case set
While passenger profiles aren't always necessary, since many people drive alone a significant fraction of the time, the system can easily display / hide an option to use a passenger profile based on whether or not the passenger side airbag is ON. When the system detects someone sitting in the passenger seat, it can display a little icon at the top indicating that passenger profiles can be used.
The main interface for adding, saving, and selecting a passenger profile can be as buried in the main system as the Cold Weather package menu or charging settings. One would like convenient, but does not necessarily need immediate access to said profiles.
No comments:
Post a Comment