Voice controls are great, unless you have a strong accent it doesn’t understand, a speech impediment, or mute. Which are all things that normally wouldn’t disqualify you from driving a car. Which I feel like should disqualify them from the discussion of physical vs tablets myself.

Agreed. That’s why I really dislike the theory it’s some 4D chess. More prof of that is if he wanted it to burn he wouldn’t have renamed it his precious X.com. He wants to still show the world what PayPal would have been if they hadn’t removed him. The same reason he wanted to review all of the code and be in charge of development at X, he still is holding onto the image he’s a rockstar dev and everyone else just doesn’t know what they’re doing.

The sad fact is he may be intelligent in some stuff, but he also lucked out. And as you said he’s increasingly got surrounded by “yes men”, and let go of the people that had tried to mitigate some of tendencies. Not realizing they helped get him to where he was. Even in the original x.com days he had someone help manage and buffer him because he had the tendency to scare off investors.

Monuments of Mars and later Command & Conquer were the two biggest.

Got to love that Earn Trust and Day 1 culture. Also it’s amazing how high up some of the decisions are being made without consulting even VPs. The RTO, layoffs, the recent Return to Team, and the shaming email were all done without some VPs knowledge. That seems like a good way to erode trust throughout the entire structure.

Not saying alternatives to steering are a bad thing, but there is also an issue of feedback and customer expectations. People like what they know/are used to. That’s why EVs had to add a lurch option and additional sounds. It throws people off mentally when part of the standard experience is missing.

Joysticks in theory would be an improvement, but let’s be honest you’d basically have to retrain people on how to drive it. Just a person gets additional training even to drive a forklift. And let’s be honest even if mandated not everyone would, and there would be wrecks. Not counting because of the learning curve it’d sell less, and it’d get bad press for every wreck.

I suspect the general consumer would be willing to hand control over fully, than have to spend extra to relearn how to drive their vehicle. We’ve been trained that self driving cars are the future for multiple decades now.