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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I'm not looking forward to buying another car, since I've been hearing of a lot of criminally negligent human factors engineering for at least a decade, combined with increasingly invasive spying on people in their own cars.

Is there any decent automotive company remaining?

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Subaru is too small for this crap and also design their cars around people wearing gloves so lots of chunky knobs.

We are getting their ev next the Solterra which is a shared venture with Toyota.

Big +1 for Subaru, but some of their newer cars are starting to fall victim to these gimmicks now. But they generally give you some of the tech features without getting in your way.

Eg. you get CarPlay, but also physical climate controls and volume knobs. Automatic cruise control & lane centering, but you can disable certain parts of it that you don’t like.

And the Outbacks are some of the safest cars out there in terms of “deaths per million miles” statistics according to the IIHS [0], probably due to their over-engineered frames and engine-dropping crumple zones

[0]: https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...

Mazdas higher end cars are pretty nice. And like anothother commenter mentioned about subaru, they are a smaller company who still makes most of their cars domestically (japan) and seems to care about quality. I will warn their pait always seems a bit thin, so get a clear cover if you do a lot of highway or dirt roads. They still use buttons for nearly everything even when they have screens.

Mazda is all _out_ on touchscreens... There are knobs and buttons for controlling things. You still get all the standard bells and whistles (radar cruise, lanekeeping, heads-up display), and, at least in Australia, no phoning home or built-in connectivity beyond a GPS receiver and radio.

No hope unfortunatelly, car-as-subscription is the dream of automakers and they will do everything to reach the goal. Adding various gimmicks and as many electronic failure points as possible is to make device less reliable and obsolete in a couple of years so new one needs to be bought.

Toyota is alright. I've got a recent RAV4 without any of this nonsense.

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