I’m a firm believer in FOBs with a physical key option. I had that on a Prius I owned a number of years ago. Looked like a straight FOB but had a key that could be pulled out if the need to physically unlock the doors arose.

We went and picked her up and brought her home, leaving her bright red Tesla there at the convivence store. Turns out she and her husband had neglected to take it in for regular service. If it goes a certain time or number of miles without that service, it becomes a brick, a statue, anything but a car.

Any Tesla owner should have one of those window breaking hammers within easy reach, I’ve heard stories of people being locked into their Teslas as well.

Gone are the days of being a mechanic. Only a “technician” can work on modern cars.

It seems whenever a company releases new versions of their software or operating systems they move things around making it difficult to find commonly used options. Things that are obviously important and commonly used should be easily located, not buried deep in submenus.

To my surprise, I noticed that underneath each decal was a recessed opening and the end of a metal lever was accessible in each. With a little experimentation, I was able to determine that the levers allowed me to open and close the heater/ac duct baffles so that I could easily redirect airflow through the car’s environmental system. By throwing the switches in different combinations, I could quickly redirect hot or cold air to lower/upper, front/back and passenger/driver vents. It took a while to figure out how to do this, but once I had the muscle memory hooked in it could easily be done, even while driving in heavy traffic.

Why had the manufacturers gone to the trouble of hiding a useful capability from the user? The only answer I could come up with was that the manufacturer had marketed a more capable but complex a/c system in their more expensive models, but had cut expenses by using the same vent control manifolds on both the economy and luxury versions of the car. The purpose of the decals was to hide the fact that both the economy and luxury models were equipped the same way, but that the former had that enhanced feature hidden from the customer.