this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.


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The regulation calls out 19 vehicle functions which must have physical controls inside the vehicle, with additional requirements about size and usability of the buttons.

Those functions include:

Turn signals
Hazard lights
Horn
PRND gear shifter
Driver assist function, if present
Windshield wipers
Windshield defroster
Power windows
Emergency call system
Power off switch for EVs
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[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

So did the 50 ways new cars decided to make stupid levers and knobs and buttons to bop it twist it pull it to shift and mess with a known interface for no reason.

Well... I can see getting rid of the traditional big lever in favor of something else -- that big lever takes up a lot of space in the dashboard or center console that could be used for other things, and a lot of the replacements are much more compact, saving space. But manufacturers haven't yet come to a consensus about what exactly that replacement should be, which is why you're seeing such (potentially confusing) variety these days.

(But I'm sure that if a vehicle is your daily driver, you'd quickly get used to whatever interface it used and it would begin to feel fairly natural. The problem would come in for people who often need to change cars, like people who often find themselves driving short-term rentals. Then it would be very annoying to keep changing the interface for shifting the transmission.)

And that's all ignoring that we've already had a solution for a long time that frees up dash/console space: