- Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak says a software’s user interface is “the most important thing”—and on that metric, Tesla fails miserably. An early Tesla adopter, Wozniak has since soured on the carmaker and CEO Elon Musk after a number of software changes he says destroyed the driving experience. Wozniak detailed his complaints in a recent interview.
Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was once bullish on Tesla—a decade ago, the early adopter waxed rhapsodic about loving his Model S “the most of all our cars—ever.”
But Wozniak has soured on Tesla and CEO Elon Musk after a series of changes to Tesla’s interiors he said degraded the driving experience.
“Coming from Apple, the user interface, the way you deal with technology, is the most important thing in the world to me,” Wozniak said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday. “And Tesla is the worst in the world at that.”
“Every step up, where they changed a thing in the car, it got worse and worse and worse. And now it is just miserable for user interface,” he continued.
What makes it miserable, according to Wozniak, is the system’s constant changes.
“Where to find the time of day changes depending on what [driving] mode you’re in,” he said. “The buttons that go through your six favorite channels don’t work if it’s satellite radio channels. It takes so many tries to hit one button in your jiggly car, and it just doesn’t work.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
The carmaker was an early pioneer of now-ubiquitous touchscreens in cars. Where drivers once had an array of knobs and switches in their vehicles’ dashboards, Tesla offered a single sleek screen, with options that could change based on a driver’s earlier selections.
“Why have buttons when you have a screen?” one driver asked, praising Tesla’s approach not just for its futuristic look but for the way it allows the carmaker to update its controls seamlessly. (With no physical buttons, Tesla could rearrange the entire dashboard with a single software update.)
But this futuristic look comes at a price, and for Wozniak, it’s the inability to ever truly know where a screen option is or what it does.
“The modes hide things that aren't there, and your finger knows how to get them,” he told CNBC. “Nothing makes sense in that car, intuitively.”
Wozniak shared the story of his wife, who was once pulled over after failing to signal a turn while driving a Tesla. The policeman had “never seen this yoke steering wheel,” Wozniak said. “When you’re already turning you can’t find the buttons for the turn signal.”
But the kicker was when the cop asked for the driver’s insurance information, which most drivers typically keep in the glove compartment.
“It’s kind of a new Tesla, with new software—[and] there's no button for the glove box,” Wozniak said. “You have to go and search in menus until you stumble into finding it—it’s horrible.”
