“No one’s perfect,” as they say (except for my wife, obviously, in case she reads this), and the things we ones make are imperfect too. That certainly applies to cars, and even those vehicles that come nearest to the flawless combination of form, function, performance, and practicality still have irksome errors in design or execution that can annoy if not outright boggle the mind. An ill-placed door pull that rubs your knee in exactly the wrong spot. A rear-seat center headrest precisely placed to block your view out the back window. The cupholders in the S197 Mustang that made it impossible to enjoy a manual transmission and a Big Gulp simultaneously.
Or, perhaps there’s a bit of bum styling that offends your eye. My example–and perhaps an example only for me–is the first-gen Capri’s character line. It’s a thick spear that shoots down the side of the body and over the wheel wells like a three-dimensional speed line, only go limp and tuck behind the rear wheel. I’ve always loved the Capri’s crisp mini-musclecar vibe, but that abrupt turn is just ugh. Really kills the vibe, and I feel a straight line would have been superior. Judge for yourself … and the see how I have been judged.
1972 Mercury Capri image via Bring a Trailer
You may disagree! Lord knows Adrian and Jason did. One of the greatest–heck, thee greatest–things about working here is collaborating with the best and brightest writers and creatives, whom I admire greatly. Even if their tough love makes me wonder if they even tough-like me: 
Four out of five dentists recommend Whore Mouth toothpaste, FYI.
Had I thought of my Mustang-cupholders example earlier, this all could have been avoided.
FYI if you like that little peak behind the curtain: we collect the week’s best (or worst, as the case may be) high jinks for Tales From The Slack, a “members only” feature each week. It’s included with every membership tier including Cloth. You don’t want to miss that! Become a Member today– right now, even!
My car is missing front and rear rocket launchers.
There are so many idiots on the road, I wish I could just blow them away!
j/k. maybe
Bruce Cockburn, is that you?
I know a guy that sells them as a kit. He’s at the local flea market every weekend. Hope that is helpful.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,q_60,w_1600/a628e3bbf7aac9551296b571e55bf1a6.mp4
Drive Offensively!
He triggered the rear guns once more. A direct hit! The blue car skidded as the driver lost control – then flipped and caught fire.
That would teach him not to tailgate . . .
Drive the freeways of the future – where the right of way goes to the biggest guns.
*Your comment just made me think of the classic Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games.
I was actually thinking of that the other day vis a vis some conversations here…that in the Car Wars world, all the vehicles are electric.
There was even an expansion pack to bring in internal combustion vehicles, as this exotically raw and visceral thing from the past.
I played the Dueltrack expansion. I like rolling the dice to see what happened when the engine took damage. I think rolling a 7 had a description such as “Clang, something got caught in there, but otherwise there is no effect.”
My Mercedes E450 All Terrain’s doors will NOT stay open unless they are open all the way (which, when parking next to other cars, is impossible). So You’re basically rubbing against the door as you go out. First car I have ever owned that did not have at least a couple of “stops” before getting to full open. Other than that, it’s pretty good…with one other exception that I have had on a few other cars now as well…
What is the point of wireless charging if I don’t also have wireless CarPlay/Android Auto? I have to plug in anyway, and now I have a spot in some cars where it seems like it would be great to store stuff, but you can’t because if you screw up and put something there that reacts with the wireless charger, you’ll be sorry.
I have the opposite, wireless carplay but not wireless charging
See also my Kia Picanto review. It was exactly the same and really, what’s the fucking point?
Not that it’s unique to my car, but the A-pillars on my 2015 Fit have been known to hide a semi, let alone a pedestrian and bike rider or two. I otherwise love the car completely.
Same complaint about my wife’s old 2006 Honda Odyssey. We constantly complained about that, until the day it hid an entire deer running out into the road. Bambi brought a swift end to our Odyssey, and the van. Replaced it with a Sienna which has much better visibility.
2019 Chevy Bolt. I cannot stand the cup holders. There is only two and they’re positioned like they’re hanging off the end of a cliff. I have zero faith in them if If the drink is top heavy.
The downward droop thing ties the fake brake vents together.
I think it works best as is, as far as that goes.
Personally I prefer the Mk 2 Capri body.
I love my Grand Cherokee Trailhawk, and the UConnect system is generally better than most, but Jeep/FCA/Stelantis is trying their best to screw up the CarPlay features.
Example 1: Unless you’re stopped, you can’t search for a song/album/whatever using carplay. I’m sure this is from some sort of “we know what’s better for you” distracted driving reason, but… All I end up doing is instead of tapping on the large screen that’s near eye level, I have to start looking down near my lap to the display on my phone just to play the album or artist I want to hear. (And don’t get me started on the Siri voice command functionality. It does not work at all.)
Example 2: I’m the guy that likes to pit GPS apps against one another during a drive. (Google vs. Waze, for example) I’d let the UConnect Navigation in on the fun, except it doesn’t play nice. If UConnect Navigation is running (in the instrument cluster), it turns off Google Maps in the infotainment.
If anyone has a software work-around on this, I’m all ears.
Spotify through CarPlay is absolute garbage. You HAVE use voice controls to search, and you can’t just tap on an artist and play their discography.
This feature used to be a big deal when my TSX was built (2006), but just horribly dates it now: the Nav system. The map graphics are slightly better than SNES. I never use it, but it is annoying as the rest of the cabin looks reasonably up-to-date for a car that old. That, and the whole Y2K22 clock bull crap that Honda products from that era suffer from…
My 350z has a horribly dated Nav system as well. There’s a cd rom slot behind the driver’s seat to update it. Thinking about updating the whole stereo and Nav system, but nobody makes a good kit to replace the Nav.
The sunroof control on my Mk 7 GTI drives me nuts. It seems like you should push the switch back to open the roof and forward to close, but it’s forward for both. Then you’re like “hey, is it all the way back? Guess it must be ‘cuz it’s trying to close again”. I liked the switch in my MINI — it was a push once for tilt, twice for full open.
Mine is back to open and forward to close. And up to tilt. Look up the procedure to reset it, maybe it’s gone wonky.
What a strange design! My Dad’s old MK4 GTI used to have a dial for the sunroof that worked great.
You simply turned the dial to represent how far you wanted the sunroof to open – very intuitive.
The stepped front on the Fiat Multipla.
It’s PEEK behind the curtain. Second time, double demerits. The Capri kink has been there so long it can’t be challenged. To the main topic: On the original Lotus Elan, the window frames that stayed in place with the windows rolled down. On the new Cadillac CT5, the little tear duct shape at the Hoffmeister kink.
Even more annoying, it was only the later (and better Elans) that had the fixed window frames. The earlier ones did not.
It’s easily remedied, but the 1-4 skip-shift has to be mentioned as a notorious example of this on most GM and Chrysler RWD manuals the last 30 years. I know why it’s done, but its approval rating has to be lower than Congress’s
If I ever bought one of those cars I would expend all of my energy in finding a way to defeat it.
It’s remarkably easy, a resistor gets plugged into a wiring harness under the transmission and fools the computer. The kit costs about $10 and takes all of 30 seconds to install with the car in the air. Just annoying that it needs to be done at all.
Add cylinder deactivation to that for GM. I know most people shed zero tears when some GM cars were sold without it last year(?) due to the chip shortage..
That is a new one on me and absolutely stupid.
It’s apparently to save $1000 worth of gas guzzler taxes or something. The EPA cycle is such that a shift from 1st to 4th at 18 mph or whatever actually saves a bunch of fuel on the test. GM and Stellantis use it wherever they use the Tremec, but for some reason Ford never did on the GT500 or Cobra.
So in that sense, it’s “worth it”, but it’s ridiculous to bog the engine at 900 RPM when all you really want is gentle acceleration.
Wtf?
That yellow Capri is identical to what I drove throughout college. Bought it for $900, drove for ~5 years and sold it for $300. Loved that car.
Push button shifters, all of them, are bad. Rotary knobs are a little better, but still not great.
I can’t believe I’m one of these people now, and only because I own a Hyundai with its push button shifter… but just give me the damn lever back please. I don’t give a shit that it’s shift by wire and the lever is a glorified switch anyway, it works, everyone knows it, and it’s intuative without looking at it for k-turns/parking, etc…
Toyota knew their core audience on the all-hybrid sienna to not fix what’s not broken and they did a regular shifter lever.
Extra points for any car maker brining back column shifters, which are superior to console shifters for automatics.
I’ve hit park a few times on the Hyundai and it didn’t register because I didn’t push hard enough and almost caused a small incident… that has happened exactly zero times when slamming a lever in park…
There’s a lot to be said for established heuristics in car design, and they are often overlooked in favour of a solution looking for a problem. My RR Sport was a late facelift and had the pop up rotary gear selector, and while the theatre of it was fun it was surprisingly unintuitive. I often selected the wrong gear or none at all. Interestingly JLR have ditched it now in favour of a more traditional style selector.
I experienced the same thing when looking at an LR4 since I loved my old LR3 so much. The LR3 shifter was great, simple, intuative… LR4 had the same RRS rotary shifter and I thought it was just something else to leave me stranded in the wilderness.
Side note: LR3’s and Range Rover Sports during very specific model years are suprisingly reliable.
Yes, and I think this is feedback that needs to be amplified so that OEM’s hear it. I would have thought the Grand Cherokee roll-away issue that famously killed Anton Yelchin would have put an end to such adventurism in shifter design, but evidently not.
When automatic transmissions were first introduced into the market in the ~40’s and 50’s, there was no single established shift pattern. This was a problem because people used to one implementation could end up doing something wrong and dangerous by accident when changing cars to one that had the gears in a different order (sound familiar?) The industry ended up standardizing the PRNDL order of things after Nader’s book made all it’s waves, and eventually it was coded into law as 49 CFR 571.102.
Evidently the wording of that part was changed in 2005 from specifying ‘shift lever position’ to ‘shift position’ to allow ‘joysticks and buttons’ that companies were wanting to introduce. Seems innocuous, but in hindsight I think it was a mistake.
Any shifter that doesn’t have a defined and unique physical position for each selection is bad.
^This guy gets it
You hit it on the head. I prefer traditional solutions, but am open to new ones if it is easily learned and has very deliberate action (struggling to articulate).
Right?
Lever-based Shifters with defined positions (like v10omous said)Obvious volume/mute knob for the infotainmentObvious temp control knob for HVACObvious button for hazard lightsObvious (mechanical) lever/latch for the glove box or other interior storageRegular cable operated door pullsRegular stalks on the column for blinkers, wiper control, etc..Hard buttons/switches on the steering wheel for cruise and other functionsTouchscreen what’s left….
I am aware that I basicallly just described most cars built before 2018, but is that so god damn bad?
It’s like back in the 80s and early 90s there was some brief obsessions with touch (not press) based controls for electronics. End table lamps, old fake wood TVs, and aftermarket video game controllers… then people didn’t like it so it went back to physical controls… the cycle will probably continue. Sorry I don’t want a Model 3/Y/S/X because I live in a state with lots of weather variables and I don’t want to go in to a touch screen menu to adjust the rain sensing wiper sensitivity… I’d be dead by then on certain mountain roads.
(Get’s back on rocking chair, sips lemonade)
I guess this site doesn’t like to save bullet points in comments… is this a known issue?
I think I found those the other day…
I don’t understand why it needs to be complex.
Most “fancy” shifters don’t save much room over a console or column shifter.
If there are hidden efficiencies by getting rid of cables and such inside, so be it, but the lever can still simulate movement between gates even if it isn’t really “doing” anything. It should be immediately obvious what gear you’re in at a glance, and it should be possible to shift between them by feel alone.
I kinda like the dashboard push button shifters in 1960’s Valiants and Darts.
They had a defined and unique physical position for each gear selection.
You can get a column shifter as god intended on a Ford SSV, good price too after its done with service (police, park rangers…)
for me it is falling into the seat and rubbing the side. Need to invest in some leather dye.
The most annoying thing in every car I had the last 40 years was my dear wife constantly mashing the invisible brake pedal from the passenger seat. Alway made for a relaxing ride with no stress. Right…
Ah yes, the Speed Governess.
Sometimes when your passenger is scared it’s not their fault.
I’m a terrible passenger and always sit with my right leg straight so the driver can’t see it suddenly straighten when they do something I don’t like.
The auto-brake function when you are reversing in the Polestar 2, is so aggressive, I had my mom as a passenger the other day and she almost had a heart attack. The first time I was thinking I hit something, my neck bounced but it was just the auto brake… and there is no logic when it will kick in
That is annoying, the one on a Caddy I drove was more of gentle pulse that slowed you down, did not yeet you from the car.
And then you hear all the alarms and the seat belt has some type of automated pretensioner that you hear like a small motor running and push you against the seat so bad that you cannot move for a while, like a roll coaster.
Are you talking about the rear-collision warning? The first time that went off, I was driving my wife home from a minor procedure while she was still high as a kite. So that was fun.
I FUCKING HATE the auto-brake on the Polestar 2. That thing will slam on the brakes so hard, it’ll relocate your organs. The first time I experienced it, I was parallel parking with my in-laws in the car. They thought I hit the car behind me and I had to spend the next 5 minutes explaining that it was the auto-brake and their daughter didn’t marry an inept fool.
The auto-brake will instantly ruin my day. The team that designed it can go fuck themselves right off a cliff.
Everybody who knows nothing about car design always say the 1961 Jaguar E-Type is the most beautiful car in the world…
Well I can’t stand the extra piece of lenght it has on the side between the front door and the front hood. Looks like a last minute insertion. See how the door and front hood are supposed to meet on the 1961 Triumph Spitfire (mk1).
Also the flat piece of filler metal to get the bottom of the door window horizontal. On the roadster (OTS) they even put a big ugly two inch piece of chrome on it! Also see how it’s done on the Spitfire mk1
I’m not saying the early Spitfire is the most beautiful roadster in the world (but it sure is close..) but at least it got those two things more right than that Jag everybody loves.
I drive a Porsche 356 Coupé. Can’t really find anything wrong with that. Besides from being over 60 years old and not really suitable for modern traffic. But that’s not a design fault 🙂
Wow. Somehow you’ve overlooked how the wheels are inset a solid 6 inches too far under the bodywork. The track width is just terrible for the width of the bloated body. It’s like every single one has been built on top of an original Mini.
I can’t stand the E-type, apart from the bonnet. I love me some louvres.
Personally I find big fenders rather interesting. Wheels are always so circular and boring. Have you seen one, you have seen them all almost. So things like old Hudsons or Nashes or an old english Commer van are beautiful in my eyes 🙂
Narrower track gives you worse cornering with absolutely no benefits at all. Wheel inset is wasted space, you could fit better suspension or have more space in the car for people or luggage.
Having been in an E-type a few times, and recently a C-type, I have to say a bit more room inside would be nice.
From a technical point of view you are right 🙂 I am also art school educated, so I just like beautiful and interesting looking cars..
On my 356 I can only just get my little finger in between the rear (165R15) tyre and the fender, so that is of course how it’s done 😎
https://www.instagram.com/p/CuboeXao4kK/
E-Type is alright I guess, but really the Jag to have is the XKSS.
Ha! The E-Type breaks a lot of what would considered car design rules, but gets away with it for various reasons. Personally I don’t like them (although I’ve never driven one), but that’s more my ambivalence to British sports cars than anything else. If I ever get round to starting a ‘design classics’ series it will make an interesting discussion.
Oh I would love a series like that! (heart emoji)
Please Adrian. Please start that series.
Please?
Yeah a few people have asked, so I will get round to it soon. I have a few things to write up first, and I’ve been both busy and away a lot recently which is why I’ve not been particularly prolific recently, but hopefully that will change soon.
Do it.
You failed to mention that the windshield needs about 10 degrees more rake. Still, love me some E-type.
It has a lot wrong with it. Mentioned the two worst things I could think of.
I loved my 1991 K2500 pickup, but the one flaw that bothered me nonstop when I owned it was that the power window switch was at the exact spot where my left knee would rest on long drives. I’d be cruising along and then suddenly the window would start rolling down?!
Making up for the window switch placement was the sweet blood-red interior that desperately needs to make a comeback.
I want car interiors in actual colors once again at least as badly as I want car exteriors in actual colors once again.
I’m with you on that. I get comments on just how incredibly bright the blue is on my current vehicle, and I always choose to interpret that as a compliment because it absolutely should be. The endless sea of white, black, and infinite shades of grey on dealership lots always makes me sad.
Adrian will probably tell me to wash my mouth out as well, but the chrome strip upturn on the Volvo P1800. It’s always bothered me.
Ask Peter to borrow his toothpaste. Now. But be sure to give it back because he’s going to ruin something else at some point.
I own an SN95 Mustang, and for me, she’s the perfect combination of modern safety equipment and retro charm, both intentional and not – basically, it’s a bad-old-days vintage Mustang but with airbags, ABS, and computer controls.
But oh the seats. Specifically, you feel like you’re sitting on top of the thing, not in it. They only go so (inadequately) low, and it throws the pony car vibe off. Just a little, but since it’s happening right where you are when driving it, you notice it.
The Stepside on the Toyota Tundra Stepside. The “tear” on the face of the facelifted 2014+ 4Runner. There are many, but these are egregious.
My old Giulia would turn the radio on every time I got in the car. No matter what it was set to before. I always use AA and never listen to the radio, I never even set any presents, so every time I turned the car on it would play static unless I connected to AA. Drove me absolutely bonkers.
Currently, I’m annoyed that US Audi’s don’t come with brake auto-hold and remote start. I’ve retrofitted auto-hold on both of them, but I’m not keen on spending $1k to fit them with remote start systems. You also have to turn on the auto high beams every time you start it, which is a feature that really should be persistent. Can’t even code it with VCDS or OBDeleven. Aside from that, they don’t really give me much to complain about. Engine/transmission tunes spice up the driveline, and most other nitpicks can be addressed with coding and adaptations.
I’m afraid it’s a +1 on the whore mouth washing out here…
On my end, the only thing wrong with my Spark is how annoying the rear seats are to fold:
Other than that, it’s the perfect little car, but I tend to haul stuff in the back more often than people, so I’ve been tempted to just leave the damn seats down.
Interesting… my username seems to have been replaced with my real name. Yikes. (Edit: Fixed, but fuck if I know how that happened.)
I noticed yesterday that the same thing had happened to my account. Inasmuch as my username is just my first and middle initials followed by my surname I’ve decided I don’t care and won’t fix it, so if it does get switched back it won’t be because of any action on my part.
Same shit here. The Col was not amused…
Just curious how did you fix that as I moved to my username.
Fuck, me too. Oh no! My secret is out.
I’m Batman! No wait… I have no internet presence whatsoever outside of this site so I guess it doesn’t matter. It is a little weird though.
The 2001 VW New Beetle seats folded flat like that, too, but it had holes in the seat bottom that the headrests would then drop into when the bottom was folded forward. They’d nestle out of the way against the back of the front seats.
The term “Feature” here seems to be heavily leaning into styling, so I’ll start with this:
The silly chrome streak running front to back on the Buick Regal TourX, which looks cheap, amateurish and slapped on as an afterthought.
https://imgur.com/ABmPBNJ
If you’re talking like, features in general, it’s that BMW/Mini are still selling cars in TYOOL 2023 which only support CarPlay and don’t support Android Auto.
My 2019 Camry was only the second car I’d ever bought new and the first time I paid over $20k for anything other than my house. So compared to my past automotive experience this thing is niiiice. But the lane departure system is for crap. I drove a 2020 Corolla loaner for a week prior to purchasing this and the lane system was nothing short of magical to me. Rental Corolla, magical; $32k Camry, for crap. That blows my mind and irritates me to no end.