Stupidest product design you’ve experienced

What color of electrical tape do you put over the stall warning indicator? :wink:

I realize you’re not quite serious. As wasn’t I.

Th airplane one at least is pretty good about not going off for the hell of it. Unlike the seatbelt alarm in my car that would sound before you started the car. But when the airplane one does malfunction, it’s an unholy distraction. To the point that EASA, and now with FAA grudgingly going along, will be mandating cut-out switches to disable malfunctioning noisemakers so pilots can think & talk to one another unobstructed.

Thanks to the earlier discussion, now I’m imagining what it would be like if the plane warned you every time a passenger had their seatbelt unbuckled.

My beer fridge has the same design flaw. After determining what exactly the numbers mean, I fixed the flaw with a Sharpie.

You must have a pretty bad case of sausage fingers if you keep missing the delete voicemail button for the call back button.

Here is another way to delete voicemails. Swipe left on the voicemail which will bring up a delete button.

Just Google it for your model car. I did and am delighted with only getting beeped at for a few seconds instead of infinity. (It’s not in my car’s manual.)

That’s what I did. And I disabled for similar reasons as others mention: Private driveways and roads and using my car as a utility/work vehicle. I’m going a max of 15MPH and hate that stupid beeping.

There are also physical buckle inserts that do the trick.

“12-A, if you don’t sit your ass down right now, I’m turning this plane around.”

I have a hitch mount on my Kia right now. I have to turn off the detection warning when I put my bike rack on it, for the same reason. At least in my case, there’s a convenient button on the center console.

The talk about dishwashers reminded me of mine: a nice sleek stainless steel under-the-counter machine that has all of its controls on the top edge of the door, hidden under the lip of the countertop.
You have to open it in order to press buttons, but worse still, you cannot read the display to see how many minutes are left. I find myself peeking in the thin crack under the countertop trying to read the flattened digits.

The first video Googled for a 2020 Corolla is very poorly designed, to address the OP.

We’ve got one like that. I think the idea is that any model that sleek and modern is also so energy and water efficient that the answer to “how much time is left” is always “days”.

I agree about the beeping, and will disable mine if I can figure out how, but about that 15 MPH:

Way back before seatbelts were required, I was riding in a friend’s truck that either didn’t have any or had them buried under the seat. The friend got careless in a parking lot, and ran into a post, bringing the truck to an abrupt halt. We were moving maybe 5MPH at the time; certainly less than 15.

I saw it coming, though not in time for my warning yell to work; and put my arm out to brace myself against the dash. Which worked, at 5 MPH, in that I didn’t bang my head or other anatomy against anything – but that arm was sore for days afterwards.

After that, I wore my seatbelt, even in parking lots; even if I had to dig it out from under somebody’s car seats, while getting laughed at for doing so. That last part’s not usually an issue any more.

– still don’t bother to wear it while moving the car around in my dead-end driveway, though. I know where all the obstacles are, they’re easy to miss, and other people’s errors aren’t an issue.

There are no other vehicles moving around where I am working. I’m all on my lonesome. And I have multiple air bags. It is often moving things (trailers) around with the hitch, and a lot of in and out of the vehicle.

I’ve done my risk assessment and have deemed it low risk for my operations.

I am a stickler for seat belt wearing on any public roads or where there are other vehicles around. I ride motos and am a firm ATGATT and I primarily ride in states with no helmet laws. No thank you very much…I like my fullface helmets. I also ride a lot of bicycles and I still wear a helmet, but oddly feel fine flying down steep grades at 40MPH with minimal other clothing, or going down trails mostly in control. :person_shrugging:

OK, makes sense. It was just the relying on going no faster than 15MPH that I wanted to comment on; but you’re clearly not relying just on that.

Yeah, I plow my property with a 2004 Dodge truck. Never get over about 5mph. Luckily, it doesn’t beep. Just an idiot light.

Your avatar rides a sweet Triumph. But is kinda light on ATGATT. Is/was that you? Not calling you out, just expressing admiration for the ride.

I’m not nearly as cool at the dude in that photo. Below is a larger photo showing the motorcycle that severely injured the rider. If Bob was ATGATT, he probably would’ve faired a bit better.

While I don’t have a Triumph, I do have an old Honda CB350 (the twin version, not the ultra-cool 4 cylinder) which has similar styling.

Sweet. My Dad had some vintage Brit bikes that I got to ride as a teen. My own bikes were Japanese from the late 70s, early 80s and already past that style. Haven’t ridden since the 90s and now live in a place where I don’t see the point of a bike despite the year-round good riding weather. Flat rectilinear suburbia or flat rectilinear farmland/wilderness populated with crazed Florida drivers is both booooring and stupid-dangerous.

Those early CB350s were mechanically indestructible as long as you didn’t crash them or run them out of oil. And they didn’t leak; at least not when new-ish.

The seatbelt chime discussion reminded me of another big product fail…

My GMC truck has a Park Assist feature that uses sensors to detect if you are close to hitting something. Sounds good, right? Except this feature is always on when you are driving very slow, such as going through the drive through at Starbucks. The beep is annoying and loud.

Why not just turn it off? There is a button on the dashboard to do exactly this–press the button and Park Assist is turned off…until you restart the truck.
But, some say, why not go into the menus of the entertainment system and find the “disable park assist” checkbox? Well, that does exist, and it works too…until you restart the truck.

This is well known and documented in online forums and it surely must be the result of lawyers. It seems that there may be some way that a mechanic could turn it off using the OBD-II port, but it doesn’t seem to be encouraged. Disabling the sensors themselves scares me since they are possibly used for other things like the airbags.

I wouldn’t mind so much if this stupid thing didn’t cry “Wolf” every single time I forget to disable it. Never does it actually warn me of real danger. So part of the truck start-up process is a quick tap on the Park Assist button to shut it off.