Hacker News Reader

Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

A little off topic, but I have a Kia and I feel like they made all the locking and unlocking behavior as unintuitive as possible. I always find myself pushing more buttons than I think should be necessary. And at the same time, if I walk behind the thing with the keys in my pocket, half the time it opens the trunk completely unbidden.

Also, the infotainment system is constantly yelling at me about contact downloading from my phone and I have no idea how to turn that off.

Weird combination of hard to operate and way too proactive. I wonder what kind of team would produce this Frankenstein behavior.

The stuff that needs to work does work though, and the price worked for me.

View on HN

I love the car itself; it is cheap to run and reliable, but, oh, boy, does the software ever suck. I have never seen a car with so many software bugs. Two examples (out of many):

The car is set to unlock the doors when I shift to Park, but if a passenger manually unlocks a door while I am still in Drive, it does not unlock the other doors when I do select Park. I need to shift to Park, back to Drive, and then back again to Park to let the rest of the passengers out.

If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.

> If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.

I'm renting a Fiat at the moment and it has this same bug. It's so infuriating that I stopped playing music in it entirely.

Someone else would bitch that the car reset the volume on them every time.

I don't feel like I would want the car to turn down my music for me.

Just...don't pull into your parking with the music blaring like a punk...?

The problem is the difference in level between different sources, combined with the car starting to play music from a different source when you start it up again.

I have my phone playing music over Bluetooth at a normal volume (pretty quiet, in fact), and then I leave my car, come back and start it and some random local radio station starts playing at an ear-splitting volume.

Can you reprogram any of that through the OBD port? I had this issue on a BMW and fixed it through reprogramming some settings.

Can’t speak to the other problems, but the trunk thing is a handsfree feature that opens the liftgate if you’ve been away and then return with the keys. Not sure why they didn’t go with the standard “kick under the trunk” handsfree thing, though.

That's really bizarre. Do they think that every single trip made in the car involves loading stuff into it?

I wasn’t super clear, but you need to stand at the trunk for this feature to operate. It then gives you a few seconds before opening the lift gate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com