I brought my Tesla Y in for a repair and they gave me a new Model 3 with 590 miles on it. It was one of the stalkless Tesla Cars. The service guy had to instruct me on how to put the car in reverse and drive. I felt like a child. I have been driving for over 40 years!
For those of you have not had the experience of driving a stalkless car, I will provide my insight. Tesla removed the turn signal stalk and the gear shift stalk from the driving column. In their place, they moved the turn signals to the steering wheel and the gear shift to the monitor. Now, when you change gears, you need to either slide up the arrow or slide down.
I found the removal of these stalks to be a real learning curve. I kept reaching over to where the stalk was going to be to signal a turn. I would wager that most people feel uneasy when they have they learn to drive without these stalks. My experience on the road is that fewer people signal when they turn or change lanes. It is one of the banes of my existence. These people do not care about the impact of their driving may have on other drivers. Signaling allows other drivers to anticipate actions and reactions of people around them.
The gear shift change is also annoying in that once again you lose a physical item to a move to go digital. I bet it saves Tesla a few dollars by removing his hardware. But it reduces the user experience.
My take is that as annoying as these changes are, you would get use to them over time. It will require more thought process to signal when making a turn and changing lanes. Not an ideal situation for people on the road. Especially in Florida!!
As I checked people’s reaction to these stalkless cars, everyone says they can adapt but no one expressed their love for this new change. Just because something is new does not make it better than the prior version.
The other problem is that your car creates real issue for other drivers in your family who would not have the same experience as the primary driver (you) in adapting to the new stalk approach. The end result is that this car becomes a one user car and other drivers would seek to avoid it. Now the plan that I wanted to create when I buy a new car!