People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars — For the first time in 28 years of JD Power’s car owner survey, there is a consecutive year-over-year decline in satisfaction, wit…::People are dissatisfied with the technology in their cars, according to a new survey from JD Power. They especially don’t like the native infotainment systems.
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Some proposed design principles:
- It’s a car.
- It’s not a goddamn TV.
- It’s not your goddamn ads platform or subscription service.
- It is, however, a piece of life-safety-critical equipment.
- Because it’s a car, the driver wants to deal with car stuff like driving, navigating, fuel, roads, obstacles, and not killing people.
- They also want to make it passably comfortable by messing with the heat or AC, the fans, the windows, and the fucking moon roof.
- Messing with your phone while driving is Actually Illegal these days in civilized parts of the planet. This is for good reason: people get killed that way.
- If the car requires messing with your phone, or messing with something that is basically your phone, then you have failed.
- There should be a big knob with a fan icon on it. Turning this knob all the way to the left causes the fan to turn off all the way. Turning the knob all the way to the right causes the fan to turn on all the way.
- If I ever have to use a touchscreen to control the side mirrors, I will become an extremely unhappy ape.
Dont worry.
They will make it all voice controlled in the future!
"Alexa, take me Starbucks and play latest episode of “Ow, My Balls”.
Fuck cars
Your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay.
Gotta get the cussy.
Agree… but I live in America… so there’s basically no reasonable alternative
Bitch I biked across this fucking continent. You have choices. Your fucking lazy.
Sometimes people don’t want to bike 2h each day to get to work and back, especially if you live in the desert…
Here’s an idea: don’t live in a desert.
Oh, for those carefree days. But someday if you have a house and a family to support, you’ll quickly find the difference between being lazy and being exhausted by your responsibilities.
I would love to take a month off and bike across the continent. That sounds incredibly lazy to me.
No shit, I barely have time to ride my bike around the neighborhood after work before making dinner, let alone for a month at a time.
That’s not the point, high-speed. You have options. Your legs work fine.
yeah no one ever bikes anywhere ever and its all just grown men in spandex out for a joy ride.
Yes, a month to bike across the county was awesome! I’m sure you’re just the fittest little tiger ever and doing 80 miles a day is easy-peasy!
Bitch I work in the trades.
You want me strap a condenser, furnace, A coil, 50 feet of line set, and 100 pounds of tools and supplies to a bicycle, and then tell my customers I can only see 2 of them a day because I’m gonna bike from each house and back to the shop for each call?
Sounds like a letter U problem.
Yeah, I hear you. I wish I had better bike infrastructure and a decent rail system in my city.
I would pay more to get a car with more buttons than you can comprehend and a small little infotainment system that allows you to play music than a super futuristic car with a iPad in the center and nothing else in the center console area.
physical buttons for the important stuff; stuff like setting interior RBG lighting color and intensity? that can go on soft buttons.
If a feature can go on soft buttons, it can stay at the fucking factory.
EQ for the sound system?
My 2004 Honda accord had a good EQ, and it was all controlled with 2 buttons and the radio tuning dial to adjust the levels.
There is no need for a touchscreen in a vehicle. A small screen for displaying information is one thing, but I should not be compelled to play with what amounts to an iPad when I’m driving a car.
If the sound system is why the touchscreen is in the car, the sound system can stay at the factory.
Adjusting mirrors and seats can go on the touch screen as you do that before the drive and I don’t think those can stay at the factory.
No thanks, mirrors and seats are too important for the touch screen and sometimes need to be adjusted while driving, as you adjust your sitting position.
And really, I don’t want to spend an extra 10 seconds (if you know the car) or 2 minutes (if it’s someone else’s) to get the seat and mirrors adjusted beofre a drive. I want to get in the car, adjust things quickly, and go.
How are you people moving in your seat this much? I never had to adjust anything but the rear view mirror and that is manual anyway.
I’ve adjusted mine twice in the last month alone because I needed to fold down the rear seats. But also sometimes you borrow your car to someone who doesn’t have a memory setting. Or your car doesn’t have memory seats and has multiple users.
If I have to use a touchscreen to adjust my seat once a month, that’s 11 times a year too much for me. Buttons? Fine. Levers and wheels like in old cars? Also fine.
My posture is completely different in the city, where I am constantly leaning forward and looking over shoulders to clear blind spots, and my foot is regularly on brake and accelerator. Contrast on the highway, where my head and body are mostly still, and my feet are flat on the floor while using cruise control. Since I’m not moving around as much, I regularly move the seat slightly to reduce pressure points.
Similar with the mirrors: For city driving, I want my mirrors a little lower and narrower to see parking spots while backing. For freeway, a little higher and wider gives better visibility of the blind spots without needing to move around as much. For towing, I want them even lower when backing, and even higher and wider on the freeway to clear blind spots.
Yeah, I might go more than a month without touching either the seats or the mirrors at all. But, I might also be adjusting both a dozen times in a single trip.
We share it with other people. I, personally, would just ban short people, but they do exist and they love to move the seat away from my sweet spot.
If I had to use the touchscreen to fix it every time, I’d just leave it in a ditch and set it on fire.
Sometimes I have to readjust the mirrors during a trip depending on how I sit.
For real if I wanted RGB footwell lighting I would install it myself. And I did, in my first beater car, as a dumb teenager does. I thought it looked pretty cool.
But now as a grown man I want a car to start every time, go fast when I step on the pedal, and have AC like a refrigerator. If it’s a truck I want it to pull heavy trailers and not get stuck in mud and THAT’S IT.
Currently driving a 2008 Crown Vic and a 1978 F350 on propane, both of which do exactly what I want.
Adjusting mirrors and seats can go on the touch screen as you do that before the drive and I don’t think those can stay at the factory.
I think it’s hilarious the people waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to use touch screens while driving are downvoting you because they’re adjusting mirrors while driving.
Get a 2004-2009 car, yank the stereo out and throw an aftermarket headunit with android/carplay in. Best of both worlds!
Ugh one of our cars needs a new head unit, as its mid-2000s aftermarket unit has gone bad. But I can only get the dang thing halfway out. I can’t even get to seeing the wires in the back. No idea how it was put in, but it seems the wires are too short, maybe I have to remove the whole dashboard front thing?
2010-2012 will work as well if no tech package. My 2010 Lexus RX350 has no touchscreen, but still has knobs and a backup camera on the back mirror. It’s wonderful.
Mazda. They’ve brought back physical buttons and have support for CarPlay if you want it.
I’ve also heard they are decent cars, at this point I’ll just keep driving what I’ve got and hope that in a couple years, more manufacturers will return to making most things controllable by physical buttons.
No. 9 but for media volume, touch controls are garbage and gestures are even more garbage.
Looking at you, VAG.
Oh yeah those shitty VAG touch controls. Went to a customer with my employee in summer. When returning home we opened the sunroof to cool the car down quickly. Couldn’t close that mf for 10kms on the autobahn until everything cooled down. Absolutely horrible.
When returning home we opened the sunroof to cool the car down quickly
Wouldn’t AC cool it down quicker? And more efficiently at autobahn speeds anyway, drag is worse than running AC at speed.
I don’t disagree with you on the horribleness of the controls though. Worst part is, MB has gone the same route. I’ve got the last generation with physical HVAC buttons. I have no idea what my next car will be, but apparently Mercedes doesn’t want me to buy their cars anymore. Mazda has come out as anti-touchscreen, which I admire, but it’s going to be a hell of an adjustment in terms of suspension and drivetrain comfort.
The plan was to let the heat out for a couple of seconds until the ac was cooled down 😉
Had a Mazda in the past and driving a Honda now. The Japanese cars are often conservative and not as fancy as the European ones but usually they just work in my experience. They are often cheaper and maintenance is also cheaper. My 320HP Civic Type-R has the same maintenance costs then our Fiat Tipo with 120HP. Performance wise it was comparable to a A45 AMG which cost twice as much with maintenance costs about 2-3x of the Honda.
Mazda may be a smaller car brand but their combustion engines are often very innovative.
I mostly drive slightly bigger cars. So while I’m fairly sure the Japanese will beat the A-class in just about every metric, but they don’t really have a good answer for C-class and above - outside of maybe Lexus, but a 3 year old Lexus is way more expensive than a 3 year old Mercedes. I buy my cars after a few years of depreciation, so I actually like the fact that German cars depreciate a lot in their first few years. But then Lexus doesn’t really have good diesel engines like the Germans do, so fuel consumption differences alone will add up a lot.
To be clear, I don’t really need or want any of the fancy features (aside from Carplay, which is starting to be ubiquitous), but just the suspension setup alone between a C-class and a Toyota Camry is vastly different. The 9 speed auto box is also excellent, to the point that I don’t even feel like I’m driving a tiny 2 liter diesel with only 190HP.
A special place in hell is reserved for whoever the hell keeps putting capacitive buttons on cars, ESPECIALLY when they put them on the steering wheel!
…who tf…which car maker has gestures? If you’re gonna gesture how about you gesture your damn hand over to the button?
I think mostly VAG (VW-owned brands) and BMW, maybe Mercedes as well. VAG uses them to sense your hand approaching the touchscreen to hide additional items “when you don’t need them”, BMW uses full-on hand waving to navigate menus.
Why 10? It’s not like you do that while driving.
Thing is every knob saved saves time and money during manufacturing. So the companies want to put as much as they can on the touch screen. I don’t mind if they do that with things I do before driving, I mind a lot if it’s something I have to do during the drive.
Why 10? It’s not like you do that while driving.
Thing is every knob saved saves time and money during manufacturing. So the companies want to put as much as they can on the touch screen. I don’t mind if they do that with things I do before driving, I mind a lot if it’s something I have to do during the drive.
Yeah they do it to save money, and then charge you out the ass for “oOh LoOk ItS tHe FuTuRe”
Well prices should come down once competition from the Chinese manufacturers picks up. Hopefully at least.
In China you can get a VW ID.3 for 15000€ and a Tesla model 3 for 30.000€.
In China, you can get a VW ID.3 manufactured by a state-owned and subsidized company in China. The same is true for the Tesla Model 3.
Basically, the Chinese government is subsidizing electric car (and battery) production (and enforcing domestic protectionist policies) so of course the same version of the car is cheaper in China. The US goes with a different approach, by providing tax write-offs to people who purchase electric cars which is vastly less efficient (and more expensive to US taxpayers).
Last car I bought was a 2015, infotainment in it is a disaster but completely ignorable/replaceable. If cars keep going the way they are, Ill drive what I have into the ground.
What boils my blood is infotainment systems with icons and functionality for premium services that you can’t hide or remove. It wastes space and it’s just evil. I rented a Toyota Rav4 in Florida and I swear 1/4 of the front screen was for some satellite radio service that wasn’t enabled.
Blank switches in vehicles has been a thing for 50 years.
I’d say the problem is really the lack of tactile feedback. A touchscreen requires your eyes to use, while a dial with blanks just requires your touch to skip past the blanks. It’s not impossible to memorize how many services to skip past, just made worse.
It’s honestly really stupid. I think that car manufacturers are trying to design their cars to look futuristic, while not understanding that the futuristic designs from the previous 30 years are impractical, fantastical, and stupid to pull into real life. You can really tell they aren’t actually trying to improve based on user feedback when designing these things.
Nah, they are trying to save money. Every knob adds time and materials to the manufacturing process and thus loses money.
I agree for the interiors of the vehicles, but I’m not sure if the weirdly designed exteriors are more cost effective.
It’s wild how the machine is starting to make its own decisions. There’s no controlling it now. It lives, it breathes.
And before op could reply vd1n vanished into a cloud of cannabis vapor and fell asleep.
Dude… Puff puff
PASS
Our Subaru nags you to check your text messages constantly while driving. Can’t be disabled if you want to use carplay.
Every time I’ve connected my phone through Carplay I have to explicitly give the car permission to access my texts. If you refuse that permission, does the car still nag you about texts?
EDIT: Maybe it’s only Android Auto that makes you explicitly give the car access to texts. I don’t remember if my Apple workphone asks for permission.
I am currently keeping my 2004 going as long as possible. These people need to just make everything configurable, like a smartphone, and then I’d make the switch. It’s the last piece of bad design that’s keeping me on an ice vehicle at this point.
<vent>I don’t want to have to look down to change the radio station just because some jackass buried it under 3 fucking menus. That’s dangerous, damn it! Fuck your research, let me configure my own shit! </vent>
They need to just put knobs and buttons for all the car stuff and bring back interchangeable faceplates so people can just get what they want/need for stereo/GPS equipment.
Just give me a screen for Android auto and that alone. Everything else should be knobs, especially climate controls
Moving parts cost money and wear out.
And if there’s one thing the auto manufacturers are good at, it’s cutting costs.
Maybe they could remove the engine and gearbox with all their moving parts…
Touch screens break and wear too, and it’s more expensive to replace a touch screen than an AC fan knob.
Unless it happens during warranty, that costs money to the user not the manufacturer.
I don’t know about that. I love the navigation system from my KIA, in my opinion it’s far superior to google maps. I even can set the destination remotely via the KIA app, so I don’t need to fiddle around once I’m in the car.
I guess I like the idea of having tech in my vehicle, but it doesn’t work right. I’ve found so many flaws in the software that can’t be remedied. It’s not designed with user control/customization as the main priority. Furthermore, it’s tied to main functionality of the vehicle which is restrictive in what it allows you to do upgrade wise.
As an audio enthusiast, it sucks that I can’t upgrade my stereo/audio system.
What would be ideal in my world is open, user focused technology, upgradeable and repairable, and not this proprietary bullshit that we currently have. This is not intelligent design.
Also, while I’m thinking about it, it’s bullshit that we are forced into these operating systems. Uconnect is garbage. Just give me stock android, with the ability to do what I want to with the hardware in the way that I see fit. The responsibility, freedom, and trust of the consumer has been predetermined. I don’t like that.
As an audio enthusiast, it sucks that I can’t upgrade my stereo/audio system.
Exactly! I can have the system I want but having it somehow means no heated seats in the winter.
It’s not a joke, the majority of people carry around a crazy amount of technology in our phones.
And it’s not meaningfully replaced in the console. I don’t know what GM’s thinking because I will never accept a business or personal vehicle that doesn’t have Car Play/Android Auto ever again. It’s that useful…
The problem is that backup camera’s are mandated safety equipment, and that means a screen. And if you have to put in a screen and all that infrastructure anyway, it’s only a few more dollars to add a proper infotainment system.
Okay a bit off topic but am I the only one who thinks that car companies are hiding bad design with back up cams? Like I feel like thats part of the reason why cars are getting bigger, cause they don’t need to make everything easy to see from the drivers seat.
I lost the key to my car since last August and just found it a few months ago. Car needed a bunch of work since it had some problems and just got it back on the road this week. They finally canceled work from home so I needed the car. I have been using my wife’s since we both really didn’t need it much at the same time. Anyway my car is an 07 basic model car and hers is from 2015 and has a backup camera. Going back to my car is crazy just because of how used to the backup camera I had gotten. I immediately look to my center console area and go oh yeah… I then wondered just how many people have the issue of going backwards with car technology like I did!
Backup camera and more buttons than you’ll ever need
https://cars.usnews.com/static/images/Auto/izmo/i2314392/2016_volvo_xc60_dashboard.jpg
I love my car.
useful technology has been neglected for years. simple thing like autostart and remote warm up/cool down have been outsourced instead of built in. some brands are light years ahead with apps/monitoring and people are figuring that out.
I’ve never had a car with a touch screen or whatever fancy centre panel - but I have scrapped old cars because the ECU decided that there was an airbag fault which was not resolved with a new airbag. I’m a full time sysadmin/developer - my car does not need a computer to go, and if it must have one, it shouldn’t be a brick covered in epoxy.
I somewhat long to return to dumb electromechanical components like distributors, rather than unimaginably expensive, irreparable, interdependent systems.
#RightToRepair
My 1991 4Runner doesn’t even have a diagnostic port (pre OBDII), but you can get it to tell you what it thinks is wrong.
To do this, you need to use a paperclip to jump two terminals in a box under the hood, then turn the ignition to ON, count the number of times the check engine light blinks, write that down, then look up what that code means, in a book.
(Granted, the book is a PDF these days, but still)
As a sysadmin/dev you should know its not a computers = bad situation. It’s God awful system implementation, trash software, trash components, and even worse redundancies.
It’s like you’re saying “why use email, when i can send a physical letter” in some aspects
But I agree these manufacturers produce shit products in the form of vehicle electronics.
This is exactly the reason why they do it. They can put a hidden countdown or just outright brick your vehicle over the air and you can’t really prove they did.
The battle against requiring a computer for your car to run was lost over 30 years ago. It’s just been gradual expansion since then.
A computer running the car isn’t inherently bad. Direct injection with a computer running the show is very efficient for fuel usage. But at that point for commuter vehicles they might as well be electric motors
I have a 2009 Mazda 3 with Bluetooth connectivity and steering wheel button activated voice commands to make calls, configure the phone book and connections etc. This was the sweet spot for technology in cars in my opinion. Oh but the best part is all the dials and LCD clock are all in red light which is wonderful when driving at night.
Everything else I do via voice commands on my smartphone that’s mounted on a phone mount on my dash. Like asking for GPS navigation, playing music, sending text messages.
Nowadays the car infotainment system is trying to reproduce what your smartphone already does with controls that are less intuitive.
Also, what’s the deal with all the bright white and neon blue colors lighting up everything? Can I get a red filter for night driving maybe? Is that so hard to ask?
Yeah my 2011 BMW has Bluetooth for calls/music streaming, and a navigation system that I can split screen so I’ve got a mini map showing the names of upcoming cross streets next to my music info. It’s pretty much all I need and works great.
how much money does your car typically take to repair and how often?
I have a 2016 Mazda 3, and agree. I don’t want a BS touch screen. I want intuitive controls that work without me having to look at a screen. The knob control is amazing.
I have the 2018 Mazda 3, and Mazda is actually still one of the better companies when it comes to the infotainment stuff. No touch screen, and the controls are in the center console, where they’re super easy to reach.
I don’t know for sure about the 3, but the CX5 and CX9 definitely have touch screens but can only be used that way when stopped. The 2018 Mazda3 smart start guide says it also works that way. My wife didn’t even realize she had a touch screen until I showed her. I had an Infiniti with touch screen and knobs and I only used the knobs, they are superior for sure.
2016 Mazda 3 does indeed have a touch screen, but not really, because like you said, can only be used when stopped. Knob control otherwise, which works fantastic.
Mazda also has some hilarious bugs in their infotainment systems. This forced people in Western Washington to the NPR station https://jalopnik.com/a-weird-radio-glitch-has-mazda-owners-stuck-listening-t-1848506850
The only tech I want in my car is satellite navigation, Bluetooth audio and Bluetooth calling support. Anything else is fluff.
Reverse camera is nice, too
swapped out my dumb dash unit for android auto and never going back. next car will either have android auto and carplay or it will be easily removable/replaceable or no buy.
