https://twitter.com/jazz_inmypants/status/138178395638376038...
Fine for me as the driver, absolutely infuriating for my partner as passenger.
My Ford (which brand I will never buy again by the way) disables much while driving as well, which is utterly infuriating for the passenger. If they think it's "safer" then they didn't do much research because it just leads to us using our phones instead, which are far more distracting.
Thanks for mentioning this about the Mazda. I had considered looking at one for my next purchase, but I'll look for something less tyrannically paternalistic and full of misplaced self confidence and hubris.
1. The backup camera faults out about 40% of the time. Usually it gets riddled with digital artifacts that make it impossible to see important details (like was common when watching video files under weak hardware during the 90s/00s). This becomes a major problem when backing up to a trailer hitch or backing into a tight parking spot. I took it in twice to the dealer and the first time they said they couldn't find anything wrong at all (and charged me a hefty diganostic fee) and the second time they said the camera was bad and replaced it (for almost $1,000). Within a few days the new camera was glitching like the old.
2. The Throttle Body fails every two years and has to be replaced (which is not cheap). When this happens also, it enters "limp mode" which essentially leaves me stranded wherever I happened to be when it decided to die. Unlike an older (and better) vehicle it doesn't give me the owner/operator (who has to pay the bill) the option of saying, "I accept the risk and command you to run." I lived in Alaska for a few years and this could literally be a death sentence to somebody if it happened in the wrong place. As much as I hate the inconvenience of the design, I can't even imagine the rage and hate I would have after freezing to death because it refused to operate.
3. The blower motor stopped working, so Heater and A/C don't work. This is at best highly uncomfortable (and when paying $40,000 for a new vehicle, is unacceptable), but at worst it's a major safety issue. In the winter time the windshield and windows will fog up and I can't clear them. The dealer has replaced nearly every part involved (blower motor, resistor, etc) at $700 per pop, and it never fixes it. Utterly infuriating.
4. The bluetooth is awful. I frequently have to pull over to the side of the road and reboot my vehicle in order to fix the damn radio. It's like having a windows 95 powered car.
5. The physical controls for the rear heater/AC (which does at least blow unlike the main) are broken for some inexplicable reason.
6. The tail light bulbs burn out every few months and frequently need to be replaced. It's not terribly hard but I have to get out my tools and take off the tail light to change the bulb. Takes about 15 minutes but I'd much rather do something else with that time, and I hate randomly becoming a cop magnet every time one burns out.
There's more, but I am weary and must stop.
I've been considering a light-duty hybrid/electric vehicle for a while and the Ford Mavericks have caught my interest - I've been holding off because I don't want to be an early adopter of new technology that may or may not spontaneously break/wear out after a few years.
I'll have to do more research on vehicles - It sucks how you can only get massive heavy-duty giant trucks in North America - there's an entire market segment that wants light-duty trucks but nobody wants to serve it (regulatory emissions restrictions or otherwise)
Toyota owner checking in with this exact pain. Whenever my wife and I go on a road trip, we rarely use the built-in nav because the car needs to be at a complete stop in order for you to program it, even if it's the passenger manipulating it which has effectively zero safety risk. Total madness.
Using a dial is significantly less ergonomic than using your fingers to just touch things on the screen.
Dial interfaces hurt ergonomics without improving safety.
Disabling chunks of the UI while the car is moving should be illegal. First, I learn how to use the car while it is not moving. Then, I have to re-learn the damned UI on the freeway with people cutting me off because I'm swerving or whatever.
I wonder what percentage of rental car accidents are caused by this effect.
Joking aside, I wonder if it's a difference in much pride is tied to cars in USA vs Europe, or if there's the same amount of pride but just fewer predatory loan offerings allowed in Europe. Is it a legal limit, or just people unwilling to commit to 8 year loans?
I suspect if there were some government mandated limit of 5 years on car loans you would see no-frills cars take off like gangbusters in the USA as well.
I'm tempted to say that cars matter less here - they're usually parked out of sight - but I bike to a different neighborhood and there are young guys in pristine luxury cars cruising around. If you visit a different part of the countries the composition of cars changes too.
It definitely varies according to nationality, too. Perhaps it's a function of culture, insurance prices and petrol prices.
2) Those who want to keep up appearances with their richer friends (often in group 1), but are financially savvy enough to lease rather than finance a loan, especially since they would not be caught dead in a five-year-old car. This is by far the largest group, and why there is (or has historically been) such huge depreciation on high end luxury/sports brands, excepting Lexus.
3) The group who really wants to fool people into thinking they have more money than they do, and actually takes the idiotic road of financing a depreciating asset in such a way that they will be perpetually "upside down" on it, and responsible for horrendous maintenance and repair bills once the warranty period is up.
I don't need any big screen or surveillance things. I just want to drive, with a little music and that's it. Nothing more nothing less. Maybe navigation, but even that is not necessary. I have my phone, which works fine.
... But no way to keep the commercial relationship going after the sale - huge downside, for the manufacturer !
The second is even more distant, and that is for the right to repair to extend to cars so that we can safely mod all the software that comes with a modern car. Then, at least if we don't want it we can turn it off.
One bright spot though is a massive growth in non-car transportation. I work by the window in a lower middle class neighborhood in a small town and I already see all kinds of cool e-bikes, scooters and hell-knows what whizzing by the house. No room for awful electronics on those, they're just wheels, motors, and helmets. Here in Colorado something like that would serve 80% of my transportation needs. Maybe renting a car for the other 20% becomes more of an option.
[1] https://www.electric-cars-are-for-girls.com/electric-car-con... [2] https://canev.com/
In this case, I wonder what the story is. Ideas... - Feedback loops are very slow to close in auto design/manufacturing, widening the stakeholder-execution gap. - I have the impression that disconnected, unaccountable "futurists" lead auto design and obfuscate real human needs - Classically, there is a big gap between what people say they want and what they're actually willing to pay for
What else might be contributing factors?
But then consumers who imagined all sorts of problems with a system sit down and try the system in real life (not in a contrived test) and they find they surprisingly like it and it works very well.
The other is that, when it comes down to it, consumers probably care more about other things, like price, MPG/range, exterior styling, brand loyalty, etc. This means that even if the car has a sub-optimal UX, customers will still buy it (because the positives outweigh the negatives).
It should in be easier to create low tech versions of cars (no need to have an entirely different transmission) so perhaps this is a flimsy reason.
It may make more sense for regulators to get involved. "Include physical buttons for commonly-used controls" is a clear common-sense goal, although I'm not sure which things would qualify as commonly-used. And of course automakers could maliciously comply - maybe Tesla would bury tiny controls in the bottom of the center console or something and just keep focusing on touch-screen controls and minimalist dashboards.
Based on conversations I've had with people involved, I think presuming competence is too generous. The huge number of variables and gigantic bureaucracy involved is highly stifling to legitimate improvements and ends up making terrible decisions. They do try to make data-driven decisions, but they're quite incompetent at it. And, most of the decisions they do are to comply with regulations and protect their asses from lawyers. Much better (from their perspective) to have an enraging user experience for navigation than to have a person crash because they were plugging in an address while driving.
Honda said they're not too keen about touchscreen-mania [1], but that seems to have gone away in more recent model-years (at least based on what I saw displayed at a recent auto expo).
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/32797/long-live-buttons-hondas...
The capacitive slider for volume seems fine, until you realize it was implemented entirely in software, so if the touchscreen hadn't finished booting, or was slow because it was too cold, that experienced extreme lag. Since the steering wheel buttons ALSO didn't work until the touchscreen booted, it meant if the wife was listening to music super loud with the windows down at night, when you turned the car on in the morning it took about 10s to be able to turn the volume down.
The Fit was redesigned with a touchscreen for 2015. ONe of the biggest owner complaints was lack of a a volume knob for the audio system. In 2018, Honda responded with a mid model change that added a knob. I have a 2018 with Android Auto, with a side array of fixed buttons (Home, Back, Menu) that have proved useful when underway and making split-second decisions (need to see map right now for instance).
The Fit's HVAC system is delightfully simple: Fan, Temp, and a mechanical lever for fresh/recirc. We would have liked dual zone controls and the dozen-speed fan control in higher models instead of just 4 speeds, but also I'm old enough to remember car air conditioners with 3 speeds (1964 Impala, for example). To me even the 4 speeds still seems like something of an upgrade.
Sadly the HR-V with its increased weight, cost, and height siphoned off sales from what was an already anemic sales performance for the poorly marketed Fit. It was dropped in the US in 2021. The Jazz (the moniker for the Fit in most places) continues to be available in sales territories when people still buy cars.