Technology! What can’t it do? With such modern marvels as smartphones and AI and egg sushi making our lives easier every day, we truly owe a massive debt to the wonders of tech. Except, of course, when technology is making things awful, which is what we’re Autopian-Asking you about today.
To be fair, it’s the people implementing technology who are making things awful, not technology itself. Tech doesn’t care. In cars, technology delivers our favorite features (“The seat and steering wheel automatically move from ‘tiny wife’ configuration to my preferred ‘sedentary fatass’ positions, bravo!”) just as easily as it delivers such stinkers as screen controls for the glovebox – only screen controls, no latch, as in the case of the Tesla Model 3.
Here, allow Doug Demuro to demonstrate:
Yuck, amirite? Why are we bringing microchips and high-res LED screens into this? A latch is fine! Better, even!
Here’s another tech-gone-awry example, the infuriating dipstick delete, as we’ve covered before. Most recently, Edd China vented on Twitter/X about it as “the dumbest thing on modern cars.” And while there’s nothing wrong with alerting drivers of oil level via an electronic warning – screen, idiot light, or otherwise – completely deleting the ability to dip a stick directly into the engine just sucks.
Please, just let me see how much oil is on the stick with my own eyes – and not just the oil’s level, but its color and smell as well. It’s important! And just think of what dipstick-deletion does to Sheriff Rosco Coltrane’s signature insult. “You know what you are, Cletus? You’re a graphic representation of a dipstick!” just doesn’t sing, you know what I mean?
Your turn: What Are The Best (As In Worst) Examples Of High-Tech Improvements No One Asked For?
Top graphic image via Doug DeMuro/YouTube
Oh, SO many!
$$$$ headlights that require engine removal or other overly complicated procedure to replace.
Idiot lights that go on when upgrading from halogen to LED bulbs unless you add in a resistor completely nullifying the energy savings of LEDs.
Rodent approved biodegradable wiring insulation
Unadjustable, software managed idle speed.
Wet timing belts
Integrated George Foreman sandwich grill
Dipstick delete
Plastic where plastic has no business being
Holographic passenger – your ticket to the carpool lane.
One or more of these might not be real.
I’m a huge fan of my backup camera. Besides being able to quickly and confidently back into even tight spaces, the ultra-wide angle lets me see around corners (like when backing out of my garage) long before I’d be able to otherwise. And to people who say “just use your mirrors and windows”, that may be the best part: you still get to use those too! It’s great!
The lane keeping assist feature that gloms onto trolley and light railway tracks and tries to drive through a brick wall? That one sucks. Over by the Brooklyn Costco and the Brooklyn army terminal is an adventure!
What’s that thing that when you get out of the car at the airport to take a suitcase out of the trunk and when you close the trunk, it locks all the doors with the engine running in the key inside? That feature sucks.!
Maybe they got rid of that by popular demand but I remember for about a 10 year stretch. People were abandoning running rental cars at the airport when they had a plane to catch and had been locked out.
Similarly, cars (w123 Mercedes for me) that when you lock one of the rear doors, all the doors, lock are a supreme pain in the ass when your babysitter puts your kid into the car seat in the back, pushes the button down and closes the door and suddenly your kid is locked into a car with the engine running in the middle of Brooklyn traffic and you have to walk 10 blocks to get the extra set of keys out of your apartment after your landlord let’s go into the apartment because the apartment keys are locked into the car. Whatever it is named,that feature sucks.
I own a Rollie. I bought it for a workplace gift swap and ended up coming home with it. It horrified my family. But now I can’t part with it. It’s too evil to send back out into the world!
The rear view mirror camera. I hate it, and my eyes hate it.
I’ve come around to liking mine. I can still see when my rear is loaded with camping gear and there is a max level of brightness it can output so if someone is behind me with obnoxiously pointed headlights, it doesn’t blind me, like my sideview mirrors can.
I was really annoyed that the button that locked window controls on a rented Cadillac also made it so rear seat passengers couldn’t open their doors. Should be separate functions. Glovebox being electric in any way is just annoying, but opened via screen is an entirely new level of annoying. And yeah, I am WAY more comfortable with dipsticks.
Older cars I’ve owned had turn signal bulbs that could be replaced with no more tools than a Phillips screwdriver and 12volt batteries that could be replaced by loosening the two cables with a Crescent wrench. Now, you have to jack up the front wheels, pull the tires and undress the inside of the wheel well to get to the stinking turn signal bulbs. You need to remove various random large pieces of plastic with guaranteed difficult to reach fasteners to get to the battery in modern cars. I wasn’t looking for those improvements.
VW’s misguided switch from physical buttons to those weird touch screen-ish things to control the heat and a/c and then a touch screen for adjusting which vents are used. I hated them so much that when we bought a new Tiguan we went with the Wolfsburg Edition over an SE because it had physical buttons (and it was $500 cheaper, but really, buttons rule).
The worst feature that probably saved Volkswagen millions of euros is using the turn signal stalk to activate the left or right side illumination at night. If you leave the turn signal stalk down or up, the respective left or right side is illuminated when turning off the ignition.
I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back to the car to move the stalk to the neutral position or I went away from the car for a while and noticed one side illuminated when I returned to my car. That happens whenever I signalled to turn into the parking space and forgot to cancel the turn signal before switching off the engine.
Mercedes-Benz has this function ( <– P –> ) on the headlamp control dial.
That seems completely logical, those are the parking lights required by law in many jurisdictions. Sounds much more convenient than the way Volvo does it.
There sure are a few:
Tesla touch screen sliding gear change and, even worse, auto-shift! Thank God for the redundancy on the center control panel.
Volkswagen (and others) capacitive steering wheel buttons – just makes it impossible to perform any type of task while wearing gloves
Confirmation of user profile at each key cycle – Why the hell can’t the car just stay in last profile until I want to change it?
Touch screen ventilation adjustments – Dismissing a physical design that works flawlessly by instead introducing a complicated procedure that requires driver to take eyes off the road…
Electric door handles are deadly and need to be outlawed.
Especially the flush-mounted ones that don’t spring outward after the crash or electrical failure.
Damn I want to answer this question the other way, too. I’ll answer the right way first: the “tainment” in “infotainment.”
Here’s the wrong answer.
Hill hold assist is a best (as in best) technology I definitely asked for in a manual car.
I still have nightmares about desperately pulling the parking break on a Polo as I tried to reverse up hill out of a steeply sloped parking lot as my car inched closer to a parked Jaguar.
Meanwhile, with hill hold assist I’ve driven up the steepest street in San Francisco in stop and go traffic.
You may have had better luck pulling the brake instead.
The only time I’ve used a car with an electronic handbrake, I was terrified trying to reverse uphill out of a parking space. I had no idea if it would work in that direction, so I think I ended up heel-and-toeing it, one foot hard on the brake, tickling the throttle, and the other working the clutch. It was someone else’s car, parallel parked partly on the curb, with another car parked about 20cm in front.
“…desperately pulling the parking brake…”
It’s bad with the right-hand-drive Mercedes-Benz and lot of vehicles with pull-and-twist handle for the parking brake on the dashboard. If it’s not that worse, here’s the left-hand-drive Mercedes-Benz W123 with foot-operated parking brake and hand-operated brake release.
All LHD W123 regardless of gearbox type have foot-operated parking brake. The small pedal is adjacent to the clutch pedal. I know for fact because my family often rode the W123 taxicabs when holidaying in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
One taxicab driver had a trick for hill start, which was easier done than said. Here’s the trick:
1. Right foot on brake
2. Press clutch and shift into neutral
3. Release clutch
4. Press the parking brake
5. Release the brake
6. Press clutch and shift into first
7. Left hand on the parking brake release
8. Release clutch and parking brake at the same time
All the comments on my lack of technique are 100% valid.
It was my first time driving a stick in years, and it was a rental, and it was on the opposite side (RHD, and I live in the US).
My point is that regardless of my lack of skill in that moment, this is simply a non-issue with hill-assist.
Most of my gripes have been covered but generally, any feature where the car decides on its own how it wants to be operated is a strong no go for me. Some non- driving features discussed here sound like they’re just poorly implemented. Ex: my LX470 has auto dimming rear view/ side view mirrord, and side mirrors that angle down in reverse. The former work very well and the latter can be easily disabled with a physical switch in easy reach of the driver.
It’s not necessarily high-tech, but the release handle for the fuel filler door. It adds weight, cost, complexity, and failure modes that can all be avoided with a simple, unobtrusive notch in the door, or a little raised hump for a finger to fit under.
Yeah, but with the remote release deleted you then have to add remote locking of your manual fuel flap, with wiring an an actuator and a secure manual release for that lock.
So you’re not actually saving anything unless you have a manual lock on your filler cap.
Up to and including electronic fuel injection, almost all technological changes to automobiles were improvements. Pretty much downhill after that.
Word
Lane departure warning. FFS, if you can’t keep your car in a lane, please get off the road.