Things That Annoy Me About Cars
blog.decryption.net.au
blog.decryption.net.au
- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
Pedantic, but more likely to be a moonroof. A sunroof is opaque, while a moonroof is the clear or mild-to-moderately tinted glass panel we've all grown used to.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
If your truck is that tall, I suggest measuring it and recording the height. After that, you'll find that just about every low-hanging garage, drive-up, bridge, etc. has a height listed. Over 9.5'? Don't try and drive through the Arboretum, as the signs will tell you.
Opening the roof...
That's a sunroof, not a panoramic glass roof being discussed.
I went to test the new electric BMW iX3 and it had it.
It was funny because it was July in Southern Europe so it was quite obvious why it was the worst idea in the world.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
Indoors most people indeed love windows, even moreso if they are roof windows. I agree dont hang a spotlight in your face, but that is hadly the same as the Sun, otherwise how do people their houses walking, running biking without roofs?
People do love windows, but people also love window blinds that they close when the light points directly into a room. Especially if you are forced to face that window.
People who spend a lot of time outside gravitate towards wearing hats and sunglasses.
Barring that, 80%+ of the people in the PNW live near the coast.
If you want the worst of both worlds with that kind of oppressive heat 24/7 and high humidity, take a look at Houston.
PNW isn't anywhere close to that.
As for number of 100+ degree days, it's more elusive, but the mean max is over 100 for two months on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick%2C_Washington?wprov=...
Utterly maintenance free. Utterly reliable. Drives great. 220 miles range on a full charge and it does about get that if you're not using HVAC heavily, not driving with a lead foot, and it's not extremely cold. Not horribly expensive. Would buy again, and plan to keep until it dies which for this thing might be a while.
Only bad thing is the ChaDeMO (or however you caps it) fast charging port. If I needed to fast charge a lot I'd buy a CCS dongle. They are now made but aren't cheap since it can't just be a dumb dongle, but apparently they work. I also think there are NACS dongles, or you can double-dongle that (NACS->CCS->ChaDeMO) if you really want to go there. Lol.
Glass roof: agree.
Buttons: yes, if Tesla would have kept the stalks and added 3-4 programmable buttons, I might rate them higher for a next car. That said, with the MG HS I guess I should have read 20+ pages of manual just to operate the 4-axis 3-rings windshield wipers stalk, not to mention that I could never engage cruise control at all despite trying; so my take on buttons is: something more than Tesla, way less than full-optional/overloaded car. At least with Tesla there's aftermarket options.
Smartphone/NFC: with the MG HS I had to perform a 4-point checklist every time I started it or parked it, and after 7y of Tesla it felt like a huge chore (esp. for quick stops). I've been very happy with Tesla and smartphone (failed maybe twice in 7y), and keep on me the Tesla card as backup (never needed it in the end). A key fob wouldn't annoy me if it worked just like the smartphone on my Tesla: if I don't have to do anything but keep it in my pocket, it'd be fine.
Door handles: the M3 handles are at the right intersection for me to be minimal, efficient and still mostly understandable (push, grab and pull). I can understand they're not regular grab and pull and not everyone is happy about it. I accidentally set off the MG HS alarm while the door and car were already unlocked by pressing the small button on the handle, which after seeing it for 10+y on many cars I still have absolutely no clue what it does (and most times it's only a placeholder for the small button).
Poorly calibrated ADAS: my experience with Tesla is extremely good and again strikes a good balance, while extremely poor applies to Hyundai i10, MG HS and others that I've driven recently. Also: the latter list seems to treat "silent ADAS" as a feature, while Tesla explicitly tells you whether auto-steer or cruise are being engaged or disconnecting, which seems a way better UX. I stopped using the lane assist on the MG HS because it'd randomly drop out even in mild curves without any clue whatsoever. The "auto-enable on restart" for these things is a reason I'll immediately drop the brand from the list of cars I may consider in the future (Hyundai i10).
One pedal: agree.
They just don't work half as well as when people did it manually.
Before the pandemic, it was rare to get blinded by a person's brights. Now if I drive at night it's just non-stop, and I live in an area with street lighting. (Some of this is also due to after market LEDs and possibly lost driving manners.)
It's extra obnoxious as a pedestrian because at best they get turned off way too late, or frequently not at all.
On the other hand, extra-bright blue LED headlights compensated for this.
You mean to say "automatic high beams on Teslas". The ones on our Hyundai Ioniq work just fine, and have never blinded anyone. But in Redmond, WA, Teslas are everywhere and 90% if you're getting beamed, it's a Tesla. Their headlights are, in many cases, improperly aimed out of the factory and their shit auto high beams only make it worse.
There's also the issue where most people who use them clearly think they're fine, or they would stop.
I think what you're really experiencing is default/shit calibration from factory (0/"highest it can get") + super-bright LED lights. The first 2 months I drove my M3 everyone was flashing me on the highway, and it took me a while to put that together and notice that it was me with low beams. I realized how bright the LED lights are the moment I saw the orange turn light brighten up a 5m overhead sign from 25m away, and then looked for calibration settings of the beams. Haven't been flashed since :)
i've never once been excited to ride in someone's ev, though they are fun to drive.
You can definitely ride it smoother and I haven't had anybody complain so far, but I guess after hours of driving the real issue is the torque. On one hand you want to have it available to be able to merge into traffic ASAP and go on your way, on the other hand 500Nm torque means that in order to get gentle acceleration you have 3mm of play on the accelerator pedal, and you need to caress it rather than push it (own a M3). I guess after hours of driving one might be tired enough that their sensitivity is way lower than when they started in the morning.
The ones on the left open "submenus" the ones on the right trigger an action from the submenu.
Can be visual, but should not depend in the GUI to keep up.
Examples: Left 1 puts you in the audio menu, Right 1 increases volume. Left 2 puts you in the cruise control menu, Right 1 activates.
Humans are actually pretty good at learning simple patterns like that.
4x4 gives you 16 functions on the wheel. Going one level deeper (left, right, left) would give you 64 possible results. That should be enough to cover all bases.
But "should not depend in the GUI to keep up" is wrong, I think. It needs at least one LED per mode. Because sometimes it's a bit annoying. Rarely cruise control doesn't engage or turns off by itself or something caused the cruise control mode diverge from what I have in mind, and a quick glance would help to resync.
The menus should be shown on the dashboard (not on the central screen). I would argue that that would be even safer than trying to look at the symbols in the wheel/stalks while driving.
Other cases will arise: someone driving nothing but one-pedal for 7 years, suddenly finding themselves without it.
There are going to be new drivers who learn on one-pedal and drive nothing but that for years, so all their core habits are formed around that.
The last time[0] I rented a car they tried to put me in a Tesla. I literally spent 30 minutes in the parking lot with my foot on the brake trying to figure out how to put it in park before giving up and engaging the parking brake buried three settings menus deep on the touchscreen. Walked back inside and they gave me some Kia EV that was about a million times better by virtue of having an almost-normal gear selector. The only real problem was that even the DC fast chargers took like an hour to get the car to full and "just charge it to 80% and top it off before you drop it off" is not an answer when your flight is at 8AM at JFK.
Related note: I'm not really interested in autonomous driving either. Cars that drive themselves are a band-aid solution for the underlying problem that cities build too much private car infrastructure and not enough transit infrastructure. People don't like sitting in traffic, they will actively avoid paying attention to the road when in traffic, and the easiest way to fix that traffic is to provide convenient alternatives to driving.
[0] Emphasis on last: this rental wound up being so comically overcharged that I am actively avoiding car rentals and taking public transit - or, worst case scenario, an Uber.
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
I'm not sure about the Bolt, but most EVs work that way, one-pedal or not. Even a hybrid Prius doesn't seem to use the friction brakes unless it has to (emergency, coming to a low speed stop).
I don't like one-pedal on the Hyundai Ioniq if for no other reason than it uses both front/rear motors regardless. In contrast to Eco/Normal mode that uses the front motor only if it feels the need for moar power!!
But the Bolt isn't available in Australia! GM abandoned us when they shut down Holden. Ironically, it was designed for production based on a South Korean prototype in Port Melbourne, 40km from where I live! https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/chevrolet-bolt-reveale...
The ideal is a big overpriced car that depreciates rapidly and requires a lot of maintenance.
Also my current car is a wagon, with a massive aftermarket ecosystem, and overall fun to drive. If there was a compelling wagon ev option that wasn’t plagued by the issues you highlighted, and offered some form of ability to tune, I’d be all over it, but at this point I’ll just drive my current car into the ground.
I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"
But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.
We should never underestimate people's weird desires but this is mostly not it IMO. There was a new generation that felt the need to rebel against old established stuff and of course is now painfully rediscovering why this stuff was established in the first place.
Infuriating to watch, mind you. But also predictable, like watching bots play StarCraft against each other.
I remember the first time I tried to go to lunch in a friend's Tesla. I couldn't get in or out of the stupid thing without instructions. And getting in would be next to impossible for somebody with bad rheumatoid arthritis and bad fingers - the "push with thumb, while pulling with fingers" is awkward at best.
Be careful not to confuse what consumers want with what marketers try to make customers care about. Nobody cares about screen footage, but the ads will still push that as something that their car has over others or because they want to shift how consumers view the product. Convincing customers that a cheaper/worse design is actually a feature they should find desirable is an age old trick, so ads aren't a good indicator for what consumers want, at least not until they become successful enough that consumers start blindly requesting what the ads have trained them to look for. Then you get an "it's got electrolytes" situation.
You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
We're already set to pass 1.5C warming in the next couple years, which was supposed to be the best-case scenario as of 10y ago. I don't know if you noticed, but batteries cost more to make because we're building the supply chain for them, after 100+y of "bog standard" vehicles left us with a world that each year registers new temperature records and increasingly violent weather events.
>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons
Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.
Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.
The author elaborates that it only works intermittently for them, providing a long list of links to similar complaints?
The linked complaints are all for one specific car which I've never driven, so maybe there's some problem with that model or Volvo's software.
I don't actually ever expect this to happen in North America. Have you seen what motorists get away with? Everything from minor issues (mis-aligned headlights, dead brake lights) to major safety issues (tinted front windows preventing eye-contact with the driver, off-road bars on jeeps), to shit that is an easy pull for any cop (missing the required-in-BC front license plate).
We probably end up at the same place though, regardless of which of us is right: I think internal combustion will instead die a slow economic death, as gas stations become less common, the expertise to keep them running evaporates, and parts become harder to source when OEMs are no longer legally required to keep them available
Also perhaps a hybrid would also fulfill the authors needs?
I do sympathize with the opinion that most new cars are not very attractive. At least to me as a petrol head.
So then, if it's not actually a "fly-by-wire" mechanical system, why would you choose that as the UX? It cramps my calf constantly keeping it partially activated and the pedal half way depressed. More often than not I'll relieve my foot by doing short stints of cruise control, but that's tedious to manage.
My dream set up would be the accelerator pedal is, well, an accelerator, and the brake is a decelerator, and if you're not pressing either the car maintains the current velocity. It feels like _most_ of the time that you're driving you're just trying to make it go the same speed, and then you can press whichever pedal you need if you're wanting to stop or start again.
I don't suppose any cars work like this? ICE vehicles more or less in the moment do but "coasting" does decelerate a small amount so that over time you have to push the pedal again.
My dream set up would be the accelerator pedal is, well, an accelerator, and the brake is a decelerator, and if you're not pressing either the car maintains the current velocity.
Sounds like cruise control, which many cars have.
That'd be horrible. A medical emergency of one would potentially turn into a medical emergency of many.
With a Tesla you can use cruise control without autosteer also on smaller roads, and it should also slow down for turns (since ~1.5y or so IIRC). Normally it's good enough that I don't mind.
I always wonder if the folks who make these decisions themselves ever drive a car. Because this nonsense is wildly irritating. No one who regularly drives long distances could possibly think these are positive features, right?
It's like being driven by an inexperienced and terribly stoned driver, paranoid, jumping at shadows, hallucinating shit all over the place.
The ones we have at work keep pinging and beeping about all sorts of shit - oh you're too close to that car over there! (Yeah the road is really narrow, shut up, you're the same width as my Range Rover, you fit just fine). Hey watch out for that twig that's 50 metres away across the field! Oh you wanted to change lanes? I don't think so! OMG WATCH OUT FOR THAT CAR YOU'RE ABOUT TO HIT! (yes because you steered back towards it you stupid machine).
Hey you look tired you should take a break right now so I'm going to ping and beep and make the instrument panel flash until you do, even though we only left five minutes ago and there's still over three hours to go!
Fuck everything to do with them. They're exhausting and stressful to drive. I don't know how anyone can cope with EVs.
My current daily driver is a 30-year-old Range Rover that has none of the annoying beepy flashy distract-o-trons. It's far safer for other road users than the Kia because there's not much to do other than look out of the very large completely unobstructed windows and observe other traffic.
That's the other thing I missed out about the Kia - the whole middle third of the windscreen is completely blocked by this huge camera pod thing with a tiny little mirror at the bottom, about a hand's width above the dashboard.
This camera pod takes up the space on the windscreen where I actually need to look for pedestrians at crossings.
It's specific brands, I'm happy with my Tesla (see my other comments).
They feel really cheap and flimsy inside, definitely not an 80 grand car.
I don't like the gigantic screen in the middle. I don't want any kind of lit-up screen in my car, for anything.
The 80k cars were the early M3 performance I guess? The only one I see selling for ~80k now is the Cyber Truck, which I agree was a fail but for other reasons.
If you look at any other recent/modern car, ICE or EV, you'll find few brands have kept the "quality" interior that was characteristic of premium cars in ~2010 (yes, even German brands).
> I don't like the gigantic screen in the middle. I don't want any kind of lit-up screen in my car, for anything.
I understand the take, but since it's basically a must-have nowadays, I'd rather get the big high-res integrated Tesla experience rather than the Android Car / Apple CarPlay cheap mess. Consider that if you think it's a distraction for night-driving, Tesla will automatically switch to dark mode at sunset, and I've never had any trouble so far driving even on very dark roads. The brightest I've seen the screen at night is still way darker than my wife unlocking the mobile phone.
Teslas are sub-Dacia build quality. I know that US-market cars are kind of built down to a price point and therefore generally lower-quality to begin with, but that won't fly over here if you price yourself the same as something like a mid-spec VW.
> I understand the take, but since it's basically a must-have nowadays
Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
This sounds like another early M3 frequent complaint. I've had exactly 1 issue under warranty for my M3 2019, have recommended it to friends that are also very happy with theirs (I also live in the EU). My cousin leased a mid-spec VW, and I heard more complaints from him in 2 years than I've heard from the 6+ Tesla owners I know the past 8 years. So, again, german brands are not really indicative of quality anymore. And Tesla offers better features, performance and UX for the same price anyway (and a few other EV brands, but those cost more).
> Why is it a "must-have"? There is literally nothing I want to look at on a screen in a car, ever.
Because it provides a lot of useful information?
Above all I like having the integrated navigator without having to attach a mobile or TomTom to my windshield (which can move and fall). Also because if I do that, then I might get useless notifications and have them at eye-level, which is more distracting than a purpose-placed screen. Same reason I hate Android Auto / Apple CarPlay.
Perhaps you always move around in your area and know exactly where to go, but I often go to new places and I'd rather have the integrated navigator than a flimsy windshield phone holder (or even worse, people that drive by looking down at their phones every now and then).
Besides navigation, I can change the car settings and functionality easily with an intuitive UI that includes help, rather than having 200 buttons I don't remember the symbols and states of.
Why do I have less elbow room than in some 60-year-old rear-wheel-drive that has a transmission and axle in that spot?
Short, tasteful drink tray and storage bin, please.
I rented a car not an ipad multimedia system, touch screens in cars are totally counter intuitive and often don't have the basic functionally easily accessible. Also usually the ui is laggy.