Standardization also leads to stagnation. You’d be missing out on years of innovation and improvement. Even something as basic as the gas and brake pedals are being impacted by the shift to one pedal driving modes in EVs.
All reasonable points.
My questions (which I’m not saying I can answer) would be:
How much are these innovations really worth? Should we allow them to proportionally drive up car prices more?
Seat belts, air bags and anti-lock brakes have obviously greatly increased safety. Have things like lane assist? What about all the other features? I’m guessing we could do without some of them.
In the end, I just don’t see “features” as so desirable and I don’t believe the push for more should have such an outsized influence on design. I want basic, reliable cars. But I realize I’m in the minority here.
How does that even work? You give the car the same instructions if you want it to go as if you want it to stop? Can’t be that. You just take your foot off the pedal and the car brakes? That would give you no way to tell the car the difference among ‘slow down a bit’, ‘stop soon or slow down a whole lot’, and ‘stop NOW!’; so I doubt it’s that, either. You push on different parts of the same pedal, maybe? That’s going to screw up a lot of people’s reflexes if the EV isn’t the only car that they drive.
The car actively brakes when you aren’t applying force to the accelerator. Coasting isn’t really a thing, it’s more active on the driver’s part. You want to go faster, push down on the pedal. You want to maintain the current speed, apply pressure to the pedal. You want to decelerate, take your foot off the pedal. You want to decelerate really fast, use the brake pedal.
I obviously cannot speak for anyone else, but lane assist has saved me from a potential collision on at least two occasions. Both times the driver behind me (in the other lane) was travelling far faster than I had thought when I checked my mirror.
Back-up alarms are also needed features, IMO.
Oh, so there is a brake pedal.
The rest of that reads to me like driving a standard shift car (which is not in freewheel, a setting most of them didn’t/don’t even have). Unless you also depress the clutch, it’s not going to coast; it’s going to slow somewhat if you take your foot off the gas.
The one pedal braking is much more aggressive than that. You can easily drive around town all day and never touch the brake pedal.
Ah. It’ll bring you to a full stop, then, I assume. (Granted, a standard shift might do that too, by stalling out; but not very predictably, and then you’d be stalled out, which is not generally an issue with an automatic.)
I’m pretty sure it’s adjustable on most/all EVs. One I drove had 4 modes, from little/no regenerative braking up to bring the car to a dead stop rather quickly.
Agreed, and safety regulators have likewise made a lot of safety features mandatory to compensate for the ineptitude of the average American driver. This is what we get for having a car-addicted culture. If you take away an American’s ability to drive (because they aren’t as good as the typical German driver), it becomes very difficult to get through life unless they live in a city with decent public transit. And so as much as we would like to require US drivers to be excellent, we can’t do that. So instead, we get extra safety features baked into the car itself to try to lower our fatality rate.
For safety-related controls, I agree that there should be some mandatory standardization. I made that same point in the recent thread on a runaway Honda Pilot:
For things that aren’t safety-related, I’m fine with letting the marketplace drive the design decisions.
I don’t know whether there’s enough data (yet) to say whether cars with things like lane-assist reduce accident rates. But if they are shown to be beneficial, they might become mandatory. Electronic stability control provides an instructive example: it was available on more and more cars sold in the US for a couple of decades before the NHTSA made it mandatory for 2012 model year.
One pedal driving an EV feels very similar to driving a manual only in first gear. Except that an EV motor is perfectly happy running at 8000 RPM all day. The EV has the same first-gear feel of quick acceleration and quick deceleration.
As for the keyfob discussion, I really like the phone as a key feature. It is essentially exactly the same as a keyless entry/start keyfob, except using your phone instead of requiring a standalone keyfob. One less thing in my pockets and one less thing I need to remember.
Because the keyless ignition has a FOB, it is an electronic smart device, and it can be hacked. So, you’re right, you aren’t completely in control like you are when you start a car with your key.
We love not having to grab something else to operate our car. If we have our phone in our pocket, we can get in and drive our car.
When I was 17 or 18, I drove over to my girlfriend’s house in the rain. I parked the car, and in my rush to both see her and get out of the rain, I dashed to the front door and rang the bell. I turned around to take in the scenery, then turned back to the door. That’s when my brain went, “Wait… something’s not right.” I turned again and realized—where’s my car? Just then, the door opened, and her entire family was there to greet me, while I stood there, staring out at the street, confused. I looked up the road—no car. I looked down the road—still no car. I looked again and finally spotted it in a neighbor’s yard, about 50-100 yards away. I had parked on a small hill and left the car in neutral. If I remember right, my keys were still in the ignition. I had somehow just completely brain farted. Luckily, it didn’t hit anyone and just barely missed a mailbox. Sheepishly, I drove it back up, parked it properly, and we all had a good laugh about it.
As multiple people have mentioned, most cars make a right ruckus if you try to exit with the key in your pocket and haven’t turned the car off. I can’t even grab something from the house without handing my wife the key or else she has to listen to DONG! DONG! DONG! until I get back. If you somehow manage to miss or ignore that noise from your car as you exit, I dunno, but don’t make the rest of us fob-using people suffer for it.
While I can’t speak for the particulars of the OP’s situation and how it happened, I have to assume that most people who leave their cars on overnight did so by leaving their fob in the car which is the same principle as leaving your key in the car. The fob (or keyless ignition) isn’t really the culprit here.
It’s not just the overnight scenario the OP described - it’s the lack of needing a key physically inserted which can lead to confusion about whether the car is running. It’s happened to me, thankfully with less dramatic results.
In my car (which has a fob and no ignition key), if you press the power button a couple of things can happen depending on whether the car is in park or not, and if you’re pressing the brake. I’ve had occasion to turn off the engine but mistakenly left the electrical power on. Similarly, many modern engines are quiet enough that it can be hard to hear them running, leading to the opposite situation we’ve been discussing.
Seems to me most of those situations wouldn’t be possible with keyed ignition systems. If the key has to be physically inserted to power on the electrical system and run the engine, it’s a natural fail-safe. Not to say a foolproof one, but I think better than what we have today.
Again, I realize many people feel differently and certain bugs to me are features to others. I personally don’t like having to keep the key in my pocket. Both for lack of fail-safe design and simply because I don’t like lumps in my pockets. I preferred when the key lived in the ignition while driving. Let’s also note I’m old enough that I’ve seen these systems evolve. Whereas younger people grew up with key-less systems and may have no experience with keyed ignitions.
This has happened to me, too. Sometimes I cycle through the button presses to make sure everything is REALLY turned off.
I don’t dispute that many new features have been useful and important, but many are not, and some can be downright counterproductive. Where I differ from many others – but I’m certainly not alone here – is that I’m not a “car guy”. My approach to cars is strictly utilitarian, which means that my priorities are reliability, safety, and suitability for intended purpose. I care about pretty much nothing else.
Yes, buyers are impressed by whiz-bang new features and they’re a selling point. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that a major factor here is that the majority of car-buying decision makers are probably men (or in the more common vernacular, “guys”, or “boys”). And boys love their toys, whether it’s cool new doodads on their new car, or whether it’s the entire car itself considered as a toy. There’s no other explanation for bizarre phenomena in automotive design like cars of the 1950s and 60s sprouting fins and taillights that looked like rocket engines, as if the whole car was trying to transform into some species of spacecraft. I suspect that if more women made car buying decisions we might have more sensible cars. As a guy (but not a “car guy”) I think I should be allowed to be critical of my own group.
I will say that I’m not completely immune to understanding why many people love cars. I felt somewhat differently than now when I was younger, but even then, cars weren’t typically a big deal to me. My attitude to cars then was typified by the joke about the kid who was asked how he enjoyed his time at summer camp, and the kid replied, “I liked it, but not very much”. And I had some pretty nice cars back in the day. I had real affection for only one of them, and it’s telling that it was the most sedately conservative one of them all. Today I don’t care about cars at all, except as utilitarian transportation.
For the reasons I just stated. Or to put it another way, essentially for the same reason that I’d rather have a Toyota Camry than a Mercedes or BMW – because I don’t want the higher acquisition cost for over-engineering that I don’t need, and because I don’t want the higher maintenance cost and the unforgiving temperament of a high-maintenance vehicle. Obviously many buyers feel otherwise, and are willing to pay a premium in money and high-maintenance automotive temperament for fancy features. I don’t.
Well said, and I agree completely. I like the term “technological conservative”. It describes me perfectly, especially when it comes to cars.
Do not underestimate the power of human stupidity!
When I first got my Tesla I quickly learned that all I need to do is put the car in park, and then walk away. My brain must have adjusted the “walk away” step to the category of all cars. A few weeks later, driving my old-style key in the ignition truck, I put it in park, and just walked off…
A few weeks ago I did rent a car with keyless stuff and push button start. For the three days I had it, I’m only aware of leaving it running once. As mentioned, it was quiet enough (and some cars run their fan after turning off anyway), that it wasn’t engine sounds that notified me, but just a general sense of unwellness in the world.
The car did make a beeping noise when I got out, but cars are always beeping about something. Lights on, door open, passenger unbuckled, &c., so I didn’t pay attention, because by the time it alerted, I wasn’t looking at the display, which I’m sure said something like “the key has left the car!”
And a secondary issue, although rarely a problem. With the lever, in our increasingly “Stuff” filled cars, oversized mugs, electronics, or god knows what else (I’ve seen people have full sized tablets propped up for people driving (shudder) or for passengers) put in and around the faux-shifter blocking it. Rarely a problem, but if you did have to quickly put it in AWD mode, or decided you needed to downshift to a lower gear for bad weather (things that come to mind as winter approaches) it might be more difficult that a spinning wheel. Not saying humans won’t screw that up as well, but it is probably a non-zero improvement on that element only.
Me, I like tinkering a good bit, and I’ve learned more about my wife’s new PHEV than she has, that’s for sure. But, I think part of it for the USA at least, is that the domestic manufacturers have largely turned away from the whole *concept of “basic, reliable cars”. They’re selling almost exclusively big SUVs and Pickups, where the profit is high. Then you have Tesla, which is as much about selling tech for tech’s sake as they are for selling cars, who want to force us into a vision of the future a la Musk whether or not we want it.
And then you have the rest of the world making cars that suit their circumstances, but look at the American market and only sell what they expect will sell here, which tends to exaggerate all the things @Llama_Llogophile doesn’t like. We don’t (often) get the cheap little micro cars with simple features and high fuel economy because there doesn’t appear (rightly or wrongly) to be a market!
It is pain inducing, agree.