I have an aging VW Passat that I’m looking to replace, but it’s no longer in production. I’ve looked at some sites with alternatives and comparisons, and they mention the “bathtub” effect and the loss of visibility compared to the larger windows in older models. We recently rented a Camry and I thought perhaps I had shrunk, the windows seemed so low. The crash tests was given as the primary reason.
oh, yeah, that’s logical and intuitive!
Geez–I despise having to learn strange and illogical codes to do a simple task. Why not have a button on the dashboard labelled “ACC mode”?
A wall of buttons are confusing and scary. Or so the designers tell us. Physical buttons are expensive and failure prone. Or so the engineers tell us. Management says: “OK, leave all those off. We’ll make another $4.57 per car. Ka-Ching, it’s bonus time!”
So the software folks install a bunch of “cheat codes”, mostly to facilitate maintenance, not end users tweaking their cars. And slowly these cheat codes leak out via teh googles from teh lee7 car hack0rz to the rest of us.
Just about every car is that way for me. My 4 Runner has an extra ‘joint’ the mount that you adjust. Helps a little bit.
Damn, that’s a good idea. I’m hearing impaired and have to squat down to see the under counter lights. Sometimes I still can tell if it’s running.
That’s usually a sign that your sitting height is higher than the designers expected. Whether that’s because you’re tall like @enipla, or because you sit unusually, weirdly upright like me the result is the same.
Try lowering your seat pan if your seat has that adjustment. Yes, it’s a compromise and now something else isn’t as convenient. Maybe the steering wheel blocks part of the instrument panel or you feel like your peering through the wheel.
But speaking from experience, when cars and peds can hide behind your rearview mirror, it’s just a matter of time before one of those hidden things jumps out to smite you. Or you to smite them. Either way a “bad scene” as we used to say.
Yes, 6’ 3".
And there have been almost-close calls. However, we’re getting a new car in the next year and that’s definitely something I need to look out for in the selection process.
I test drove a Prius, and didn’t buy it because the vertical bit between the side windows blocked my view of oncoming traffic when I wanted to merge right onto a larger road. It might be a great car, but it isn’t a great car for me.
They wouldn’t be if the designers would label them clearly.
(Seriously? They think people capable of driving a car are scared of buttons?)
And by clearly I do not mean “with miniature icons invisible while driving to anyone over 50 and some people much younger, and/or looking ‘intuitive’ to the designers but not to much of the population, and/or with no translation guide provided in the manual.”
Is it a Wilhelm Scream? Because damn, I would pay good money for a toaster that did that.
In the various menus inside my car’s computer screen there are about 150 adjustable settings. If there was a physical button / knob for each of them the dashboard of my car would look something like this:
Which would scare the shit out of many drivers. They’d be thinking
I could never operate that. So I’d never buy that.
Marketers sure don’t want that reaction from prospective customers.
Of course the deeper question is why a car needs 150 adjustable settings beyond the dozen+ that there really are physical switches for. But given rampant feature-itis, they have to hide most of them in menus in computer screens to avoid “scary cockpit syndrome”.
Aaand …
This is the other half of the problem.
If the buttons or knobs are big, and brightly labeled in large-print English, even a dozen of them takes up a huge amount of dashboard real estate. And means they’ll need to build a different version of the same control panel for Spanish-speaking countries, French-speaking, German-speaking, etc. And of course a special dual English-French labeled version for Canada.
The inscrutable icons we all love to hate (me included for sure) become a design necessity for a worldwide product. The only affordable space-effective way to avoid that is to move the controls into a computer screen where it’s almost cost-free to offer the labels in big bright letters in the user’s choice of any of 30 languages including Latvian, Croatian, & Vietnamese.
Both these things (creeping feature-itis and worldwide customer base) drive ever more functionality into the screens and away from physical controls.
We might both hate it, but that’s where the world is going. And they’re dragging us there kicking and screaming all the way.
I always look around to see if even a single person glances at a car that’s alarming.
And I’ve NEVER seen anyone reacting.
QEfrickin’D, if someone were stealing a car, the alarm would have zero effect.
.
Speaking of cars, the last one I bought was a '99, the one before that a '00. I don’t want bad design, I don’t want a display I have to watch, and I don’t want digital bells and whistles.
Just today ran into an unfathomably stupid design: why are Android smartphone wallpapers all but impossible to copy or save? Apparently the only options are use a special third-party program to do this (why does EVERYTHING you could conceivably want to do require a third-party program?); unroot your phone(!) then dig for a deeply buried file; or try to make a crappy screen capture of your wallpaper and save that as a photograph. Why the hell are wallpapers made as inaccessible as your phone’s security encryption?
Alas, it’s just a sustained beep through a terrible speaker. I think the speaker is what gives it the scream-like quality.
Kind of the same thing for me. My car is a Peugeot and every time I start the engine, the radio comes on, usually full blast. I asked the dealer how if could stop that, and he said that I can’t, “it is a Peugeot thing.”
Going back a ways, calling the two different ways of breaking the 640K barrier “extended” and “expanded”. Both started with “ex” and I never could get them straight.
Yes, but one was abbreviated EMS, and the other XMS, which made it clear.
That doesn’t sound that unusual to me, except maybe the “full blast” part. I mean, back in the old days before integrated infotainment systems, if you didn’t remember to turn off the radio when you stopped the engine it would come on the next time you started it. Come to think of it, my new car does that, too.
Or are you saying your car always turns the radio on, even though you did turn it off before the last time you turned off the engine?
Good question. I use my car infotainment system exclusively for streaming music from my iphone via bluetooth to the system. So this means first pressing the button to put the system into audio mode, then selecting bluetooth as the source. I should add that another minor annoyance is that, despite the fact that I never use the radio, this is always the default when I turn on the audio. It takes another two button selections and 5-10 seconds to get it into bluetooth.
So once I stop driving, I just turn off the car. Sometimes I will remember to pause the music on the screen before turning off the car, but that doesn’t make any difference.
And the next time I start the car, the radio is back on.
The only workaround I have found is to remember to mute the system with the volume knob before pressing the Off button for the car. So when I start the car the next time, it is in radio mode, but it is muted.
The reason the radio is so loud is that for some reason the output in the Bluetooth mode is relatively low, so I have to turn the volume up. And when the car switches back to radio, it blasts.
It is a minor bug in an otherwise wonderful car, but strange that Peugeot isn’t bothered to fix it.
Three truck design flaws, not sure which is worse.
First is a 4WD truck with lower half of front bumper made of plastic. Behind the plastic is the turbo’s intercooler slightly ahead of the front wheels. One of the most vulnerable parts of the machine is unprotected and the first thing to hit obstacles when offroad. This was a $2000 lesson for me, only solved by buying one of those redneck-ish grill guards to cover the plastic area.
Second is a Rotary shift knob for choosing gears. Instead of the long-established and intuitive shift lever, gear selection is moved to a spiffy chrome knob on the dash. To do this requires introducing some way of locking out risky shifts, like inadvertently bumping from Drive to Reverse. Previously this required intentional movement, pulling the lever toward you to overcome a detent. Now, every movement previously limited by detents is limited by requiring brake application. And to avoid newly introduced confusion and common mistakes (such as exiting the vehicle while in gear), they had to add software and hardware to counter this error by automatically shifting to Park. Note the old lever was obvious from sight and feel, new knob is hidden behind my knee and indicated only by lights. I was puzzled by the emergency shift feature until [drum roll] I made the mistake and the truck thankfully threw itself into Park.
I must add, however, that this moron-level design feature is bumped up to the truly idiotic level by making the tactile feel of all knobs/knurls identical. Yep – the shift, volume, tune, fan, and vent selection knobs have identical surfaces and are in a (mostly) neat row across the dash. Only the shifter differs by being twice as large. And since the overdrive lockout can no longer be located on the gear lever (you know… the lever where all shifting stuff used to be?) it’s now a button on the steering wheel, just below all the other buttons. Shifting into gear to pull a large trailer now requires: a) rotate a knob down by my knee, b) reach down near the ashtray to press the “Tow/Haul” button, c) press a button on the steering wheel repeatedly to select the max gear allowed. This must be re-done if you put the truck in Park.
Thirdly is the touch-screen interface designed by (apparently) the Fisher-Price corporation. Instead of the old vertical knurled knob to choose the electric trailer brake gain, they’ve moved some of this function to the touch screen where the user must pre-select either lightweight or heavy trailers. The rest of the function (manual gain) is now on two buttons in the lower/middle of the dashboard. Now there are + and - buttons to cycle from 1 to 10 in half increments. This system defaults to the lowest level of braking. If an owner takes the truck to the dealer, and they reflash the system (for updates), all his brake settings are reset. And the next time he attaches his 12,000 lb. trailer, he discovers he not only has no brakes, he needs to push the tiny + button down on the dash 18 times to override the setting enough to get brakes working. Thankfully I tested it on the lot before heading onto the highway.
I’m beginning to think they’re not building pickups to be functional, but only as driveway ornaments, so owners can show off all the features to friends – but not really use them.
Apologies for the length – and the rant.
That kind of shit really drives me nuts. I buy 4x4s because I need 4x4s. I need ground clearance and 4 wheel drive. It’s one of the first things I look at before buying a vehicle.