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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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes I have to readjust the mirrors during a trip depending on how I sit.
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.
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.
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.
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).
China hasn’t subsidized the EV industry in years. Don’t believe everything you hear from your 60 year old neighbour.
The fact is batteries have come down in price so much that that price of the car is absolutely economically viable. They are just milking us for all we are worth in the west.
No. 9 but for media volume, touch controls are garbage and gestures are even more garbage.
Looking at you, VAG.
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!
No. 9 but for media volume
Thankfully, all cars I’ve driven that had a touch screen also had some media buttons on the steering wheel. I’d prefer to have good old physical buttons in the center console, but at least you didn’t have to use the touch screen.
Buttons on the wheel are better than a touchscreen, but they suffer from being all backwards sometimes, as you use the wheel for it’s intended purpose. The old Peugeots had this thing behind the wheel, you can controll the radio with, using just 2 fingers, without looking. It’s the peak user experience. Nothing will ever beat it. I feel a suden urge to buy a beer for whoever came up with it.
French cars regularly had sometimes strange looking but often quite useful quirks.
…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.
My buying habits mostly consist of living in the late 2000s and what little open source tech there is a available such as framework and pine64. I’m allergic to manufactured ewaste. If i can’t maintain it, i don’t want it.
I love the idea of a computerized car and fully integrated infotainment system. In the same way I would love a fully automated house. The automation and debugging benefits would be incredible. But only if I’m in control at an open source hardware / software level. Otherwise it’s just manufactured ewaste to me.
…useless tech
Oh, it is “useful”; to the real ‘owners’ of “your” car…
Yup. I’m in Automotive, I work for a company that makes software for basically any car brand you can think of. I just recently left an internally developed project that aimed to create a personal assistant in the car. It was terribly ran and will go nowhere, but other departments in other companies will probably have more success, especially since the rise of chatgpt.
To add to your point though - the main idea on how to sell this assistant to car makers was the features, but the driving force behind developing the project was customer data. Collect a huge amount of info from customers, info that is shared with the car brand, but also accessible to us. To give some credit, discussions were never about using it for evil purposes - imagine a secretary knowing their boss’ schedule, our software would make suggestions like “you can’t make your 1 PM luch appointment with the client, would you like to reschedule it” and “I see you’re headed to Chicago and will arrive in 2 hours, should I make a reservation at that restaurant you like?” or some shit like that. But we all know that it’s not the engineers who decide what the company does with the data once access to that data exists. And knowing where a user eats, having access to their calendar, having access to their phone… This shit can get out of hand so easily when a budget-oriented executive type decides it’s time for this project to be even more profitable by selling the data to advertisers.
Last I heard before I left, the plan was to “get consent” to process this data through a disclaimer when booting the car’s infotainment system, saying that attached devices share data with our servers etc. Read the manuals, ToS and pop-ups and don’t connect your devices to systems that do this. You’re already the client when buying a car worth thousands of dollars. Don’t also be the product.
such bullshit. how can engineers not let this happen?
Unfortunately I think engineers, as employees of a company, don’t have a lot of power. You aren’t typically the one making feature decisions. You can always try to talk product people out of bad ideas, but at some point if you refuse to do what you’ve been told to, you lose your job. Some engineers are in a financial position to take that high road, but a lot aren’t. And then even if you do quit, there will always be someone else willing to do what you aren’t.
I think as long as there is money in doing unethical (but legal) things, those things will continue to happen
so this is why i think that reasonable engineers (and most actual engineers are reasonable, hence being an “engineer”) should get together and make good stuff. stuff that is not corrupted by perverse incentives. an engineer is capable of understanding the flaws of an economy and how that can be detrimental to the functionality of some tool or system.
unfortunately as long as they’re still subject to the whims of global capitalism, they will never be free from perverse incentives
subject to the whims of global capitalism
so how can we make that not be the case? this is what engineers and innovators are thinking about. we are thinking about what the next system will be and planning how to get there.
systemic change is required, that’s for sure. as to the how of that? fucked if i know tbh
Same reason I’m still driving an older truck. While I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a new truck, I don’t want to deal with the computer controlling every aspect of the vehicle (breaks, accelerator, lights, etc.) As it is now, if I want to turn my headlights on, a relay controls it. Same with the turn signal, radio, A/C, and the list goes on
I had to drive a newer Subaru recently, and it had no physical interface for any of the fan controls. I had to glance down to change temperature and speed, and that had me really uncomfortable.
Flat screen HMI don’t work in cars, and I am not on board with it as a standard.
I don’t get how my headlights can be set to off and for some reason they are still on. And I don’t need my headlights to stay on for 30 seconds after I leave my car, I want to know that my lights are off and I won’t wake up to a dead battery. (Luckily I just figured out how to disable this)
And automatic lift gates that don’t open unless 10 unknown conditions are met is infuriating. It’s not a useful feature unless your disabled.
I do like those unlock buttons on the door handles when your keys are nearby though… When they work anyways.
I do like those unlock buttons on the door handles when your keys are nearby though… When they work anyways.
My Dad has an '08 Toyota Prius that was gifted to him recently. He loves being able to just unlock the door by grabbing the handle. I tried it out for about a week when he was still getting the tags for it and also enjoyed it.
My '10 Ford Ranger is a fleet truck, so simplified its an XL with zero options. The only “upgrade” might’ve been the seats, vinyl instead of cloth. No electronic locks, no alarm, no electronic windows.
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…
I use rental cars quite often. There’s so much garbage in newer cars. Why is there something trying to control my steering wheel, seriously who thought that was a good idea. Also nothing is tactile responsive anymore. It’s like being sold a bloat ware filled phone where you can only use garbage native apps. They made it so much more dangerous.
The Polestar by Volvo is absolutely going to convince someone to never touch an EV again. Not because of the charging, that was fine. But oh my god the interior design and the UX of their infotainment is among the worst I have ever had to tolerate. I wanted to drive the car into the ocean.
It’s still better to drive than a tesla, but I agree that the Polestar UX is crap.
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.
The older I get and the more I get into tech, the less I want of it in my life. Especially when driving two tons of metal on the highway. Fuck that noise.
the “term” technology has been corrupted. what people call “tech” is not tech, it is gadgetry.
Just give me an amp with Bluetooth so I can play my phone through the car speakers. Anything the car makers produce will be woefully out of date before I sell the car.
see also: every mid-to-late 00’s car with specific iPod connection ports
i wonder if what the cassette tape adapter of the future will be like for people into vintage cars from 2010-2023?
I have a feeling this era of cars won’t last long enough to become vintage
but radio will outlive everything, so those low FM station override things could make a comeback
I am a big FM radio user. I lurve that free RF
The only app I need is Android auto or a decent equivalent. Heck I don’t even need on board GPS. Just let me plug in my smartphone and have it display everything on the car’s screen.
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 couldn’t care less about all of the proprietary “infotainment” stuff, but I’ll never buy another car that doesn’t have Apple car play or maybe Android auto if I ever switch back to Android one day. Some manufacturers have talked about killing support.
I have a 2018 car and the android auto on it doesn’t seem to be compatible with the android auto on phones anymore. It worked fine for a few years, but not anymore. I highly doubt they release a software update for it to make it compatible again.
Fuck all of this, and insurance companies that want to track your driving behavior with a module installed in your car.
I don’t give a shit about the bells and whistles they’re adding to cars and the infotainment systems. I am absolutely LIVID that they are starting to lock bits of hardware (or the complete functionality of that hardware) behind subscription paywalls. If i ever buy a car and discover they’ve locked the heated seats behind a monthly fee, i’m tearing the infotainment system out of the fucking dash and leaving it on fire in front of the dealers house.
In the future I can totally see black market auto shops that specialize in bypassing all the bullshit paywalls that restrict your car from functioning the way it should to begin with.
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Yeah my 2013 Honda has Hondalink, whatever the heck that is and an outdated GPS system which I refuse to pay to upgrade. I typically buy a five or six year old honda which I don’t look forward to next go round, bc I’m sure the tech will be woefully outdated.
