The new Mercedes Sylvia got is fully electric, and it invites you strongly to install the app on your phone for emphasizing their branding (can do without, but whatever) and ease of use (oh well, I succumbed to this call too).

Terrible behaviour surfaces, quality testing wise. They should have caught this early on.

This is long, feel free to skip.

One feature, slightly more useful (I think) than a washing machine app that alerts you when the thing finishing its washing cycle, is the ability to monitor the charging state while it is, well, charging. And when it is not. Why is that possibly important, since the next charger may be several hundred metres away, out of sight, on a public street where they charge extra hefty fees when you park there and the thing is full or does not charge.
Good feature to have also to not exceed the recommended 80% full by much.

So an iOS app was first to pair with the car. Sylvia used the car, parked it at the charger, started charging, walked to her office and called to tell me. First time users are like that, I am too. :)) I then opened my app, and something happened. Her app stopped updating the charging state. My app did show charging state and progress, but hers did not any more.

It took a version update of her app to "fix", which happened weeks later. No release notes saying "we fixed an annoying bug related to charge-o-metering".

Another issue with the app is, it notifies about the car state. Again, well-intentioned, but... implementation meh.

Lets say, I drive to the scrapyard to orderly dispose of electrical appliances, let the door open because no spare hand, take out the thing from the back seat. Lug over the thing towards the container, door stays open for more than 30 seconds, triggers an (invisible to me) alarm state. I do not know, receive no notification, then got rid of whatever, then drive home. Some 10 minutes later Sylvia's app triggers the alarm "door is open, do something, yes?" with no clear labels on the available buttons either. Terribly useless UI, and the delay of too many minutes means I do not know what she is talking about when she calls to ask "what happened to the car?" at first. Also, she does not get a timestamp of the event sop does not know "something" happened many minutes earlier.

We can smile this away, but quality assurance should have caught this.

We can smile this away, but given quality assurance for a Chinese make of BYD or Beijing motors that comes at half the price would probably mean better software.

We can smile this away, but we can attribute the 40% lower numbers of new Mercedes sold last year may trace back to quality assurance - it should have hjalped to prevent this.

Software must just work and get out of your way. German engineering forgot. Oh well, at least there's physical, tactile buttons for many oft-used features.

The one useful feature of having the app it enables per-user profiles for the in-car system controls and that allows me to switch off or turn to mid-grey all the interior LED blinkenlights. If you don't it feels you're driving around a mobile disco. They kept changing colours all the time, super distracting and depending on whatnot. The off feature is the best thing I've discovered yet.

Speaking generally of making cities available to all, the other evening I walked along this electric charger set in #Berlin. Chargers being mounted on the road, in the lane where cars would park. The minor advantage here is pedestrians have no impediment this way. Electric cars still eat up too much space, as any other car will, but car users' perceived privilege of owning the road is broken.

I like it this way, it intrudes into a space combustion car users may have long thought is untouchable, in a way. Not it isn't, you too are supposed to see change is happening. It practically solves the issue of where the plug is. Park any way you see fit. Carsten Raddatz (@carstenraddatz@pixelfed.automat.click)

Carsten Raddatz

2025-10-05 10:34:12

Speaking generally of making cities available to all, the other evening I walked along this electric charger set in #Berlin. Chargers being mounted on the road, in the lane where cars would park. The minor advantage here is pedestrians have no impediment this way. Electric cars still eat up too much space, as any other car will, but car users' perceived privilege of owning the road is broken.

I like it this way, it intrudes into a space combustion car users may have long thought is untouchable, in a way. Not it isn't, you too are supposed to see change is happening. It practically solves the issue of where the plug is.

not necessarily related to the topic, but I spent the day (it was wet outside) installing FreeBSD 15 and Sway/wayland on a lenovo thinkpad.

i have not touched freebsd in many years, and never even tried wayland previously.

i do have a bootable machine with a "desktop"

Yay FreeBSD, 'twas my first touch point with hosting web servers ca. 2004. Rhe linux-vserver kernel stuff was a mess back then. We needed jails and a plan to scale many things on the two machines we had.
Today I use cbsd because it does what its told, is robust and plays very well with many core hardware.

Tupperware was a thing my auntie did, and she earned good money for many years in the 90s. Way before that there was Avon and Amway too. Mum still 40+ years on uses their stainless steel kitchenware and pots and things. This all seems pretty indestructible.

Re consumer rights, all these direct distribution channels earned a bad reputation in Euroland at one point. Since you don't buy from a store and have no legal guarantees for returns. You were at the mercy of a private distribution canal, disguised as a "sales party".
Or if the plastic Tupperware used to do stuff of poor or health detrimental quality, or even have PFOA and BPA and BFAS, you couldn't easily get your money back and opt out but were persuaded to get a replacement of new, better quality. Uuurgh.

That said, when the newer food safe Tupperware that survived in this household breaks (lids tend to tear first), they are replaced by robust glass somethings.