Have you ever been working your way down the highway in a rental car and suddenly the steering wheel refuses to comply with your decision to change lanes? That temporary resistance — part of a supposedly helpful tool called “lane assist” — is meant to prevent you from changing lanes too quickly. But it can be so oddly timed, and jarring, that it distracts you from the road, having the exact opposite of its intended effect (promoting convenience and safety).
Now, more than any other time in the past century, is the most exciting time to buy a car. So, why does it feel as though we’re plagued with new innovations that are driving us mad?
The market is saturated with car options. There are dozens of electric vehicles and hundreds of hybrids; luxury sedans that (almost) drive themselves; SUVs that can crab-walk and spin; 1 400kW hypercars; and million-dollar sports cars made to look like they’re 40 years old.
Even affordable economy cars offer nearly seamless connections between your vehicle and your smartphone. To make matters more exciting, as car makers in Europe and America battle for every sliver of attention from buyers in their regions, an armada of Chinese manufacturers is developing even more advanced and affordable wares that could join the mix.
But not every technological gewgaw represents progress. Some are downright annoying, like that lane assist and preemptive braking so sensitive it makes the car feel like a carnival ride on the fritz. (Preemptive braking is a control function that applies the brakes when the car decides its current speed is unsafe.) Drive modes and shifters that involve screens and levers rather than a stick in the centre console can also feel like a step back.
“Unintuitive gear shifters are an issue from a host of brands including Jeep, Mercedes and Tesla,” says Rebecca Lindland, an automotive industry analyst and innovation consultant. “Anyone who goes through the car wash — and needs to find neutral while some well-meaning attendant breathes down your neck and your car rolls towards that first giant brush squirting soap out — knows what I’m talking about.”
Trendy doodads
Trendy doodads and novel designs that detract from, rather than enhance, the driving experience are the opposite of progress, she says. They can be so distracting as to become dangerous. “There’s nothing wrong with innovation,” Lindland says. “But anytime you are innovating for human use, there needs to be a baseline of ergonomic intuition, functional improvement and safety.”
We’ve long kept our own mental tally of car-related pet peeves. Turns out, just about everyone else has one, too. So, we decided to make a list. We surveyed thousands of our followers on social media and spoke with automotive enthusiasts and analysts.
We asked, “What car trends do you hate?”, and got responses like puddle lights, Cybertrucks, auto stop/start, fake exhaust tips and bumper stickers. Several main themes emerged, too. Here’s what we heard.
Outside the car
Poorly placed rear pillars. “Visibility is still so important, regardless of technology,” says Marcus Stewart, a New York-based model and real estate investor who recently cut short a Jeep Cherokee rental because the rig had such bad lines in the rear they impeded his eyesight. “The blind spots literally made me want to park the car.”
Plastic cladding is the worst, says Keith Naughton, a Bloomberg motoring journalist in Detroit. Car makers and aftermarket shops affix these nonessential hunks of plastic to cars or SUVs to make them look bigger or tougher, but they’re nothing more than cosmetic clip-ons. They really just look like a bad toupee, Naughton says. “If you want the silhouette of your vehicle to look rugged, just design it that way to begin with and stamp the body panels with your interpretation of toughness,” he says. “Don’t design a bland body panel and then try to butch it up with bulbous plastic bits.”
Cars shaped like lozenges are another black eye for many drivers. Designed to maximise efficiency and reduce drag, they seem to have no regard to beauty, personality or style. (See Mercedes-Benz sedans like the EQS for Exhibit A.)
Door handles that sit flush with the body of the vehicle, then pop out when the key fob approaches, grate on those of us (this author included) who embrace practicality in design. Intended to reduce drag, they’re often mistimed with the sensor that opens them, so they appear too late or too early to naturally grab the handle and open the door. Forget making a quick getaway — these doors are slow and awkward when you want to just jump in the car and go.
Oversize SUVs. Talk about an arms-race on the road. Tesla’s Cybertruck is 1.8m tall and is nearly 5.7m long — the length of three king-size mattresses laid out top to bottom, or two Volkswagen Beetles.
Then there’s the $349 000 (R6.2-million) Mercedes-AMG G63 4×4², which, with a roof nearly 2.5m high, is too tall to drive under the entry gate at most parking garages. Such large vehicles hog space on the road, impede parking in small spaces, exacerbate damage in the case of accidents and generally leave their entitled-feeling drivers with a sense of superiority from their lofty seating positions.
Inside the car
Touchscreens. The top complaint we got from all of our conversations is that no one likes too many screens their car. From the skateboard-size screens at Mercedes-Benz down to the tiny screens behind — and touchpads on — the steering wheel of the Ferrari Purosangue, which you use to adjust simple things like audio and volume. These screens wormed their way into the zeitgeist largely through one brand: Tesla. “Somehow Elon convinced us this was futuristic tech, rather than a way to save money on parts and engineering,” says Kyle Stock, a senior correspondent for Bloomberg who focuses on EVs. “I’m all for it, if the car links the settings to a driver profile, but so many haven’t taken that step.”
CarPlay and Android merit dedicated screens, but studies show that most consumers, especially in the premium segments, prefer an analogue interface, says Tony Salerno, MD for automotive advisory and analytics at JD Power. Almost no one likes traditionally analogue controls like side-mirror adjusters, vent directions and seat adjusters to be baked into the computer. “Consumers were having problems with the interfaces; menus are too deep,” says Salerno. “It’s like, ‘I just wanna turn the volume up. I want to touch a button. I don’t want to have to flip between the radio and the air conditioning, I want to be able to see them both at the same time.’”
Giant glass roofs like those found in BMW’s iX and Lucid’s Air can prove counterintuitive, too. These seem to be standard in most new EVs, says Stock, but they make the HVAC system work overtime, which in turn saps the battery power and range. They can leave the interior sweltering. “It’s too damn hot in sunny spaces,” one Instagram responder said of greenhouses-style ceilings. We’ve felt the same heat, friend. It’s brutal. On top of the temperature issues, they’re expensive. The panoramic roof option in the Purosangue SUV costs around £13 400 (R308 000).
Electric vehicles. A large contingent of people told us they’re unhappy with new products that are marketed as environmentally friendly but actually have big consumptive footprints, from EVs in general to Tesla in particular. (The greenhouse gases released while making a battery-electric vehicle account for a higher portion of its life-cycle emissions than those produced making a combustion engine vehicle; plus, EVs require more precious resources to produce — an average of about 45% more metal than a traditional vehicle — thanks to their increased weight.)
Musk’s personal behaviour has put off significant numbers of prospective customers, according to multiple studies including Creative Strategies, a California-based customer-experience measurer, and Strategic Vision, a US research firm consulted by car companies. “The whole EV push has been, arguably, from an industry standpoint, incredibly mismanaged, because we’ve never given the consumer a reason that an EV is a better solution than what we already have,” Lindland says. “Consumers will adopt new technology — if it’s better.”
Imitation leather. Often touted as an eco-friendly alternative to animal hide, and sometimes the sole option in EVs marketed as Earth friendly, faux suedes and “vegan” hides are made from chemicals such as polyurethane and polyvinyl chloride. Rather than being eco-friendly, these synthetics are made with plastics and other oil-based materials. Authentic leather used in cars, on the other hand, is a byproduct of the cattle industry, an off-cast remnant that can be sustainably and ethically sourced from a family-run company like Bridge of Weir, the Scottish leather house with roots as far back as the 1700s.
One final beef: the frunk, as drivers commonly, cringingly refer to that empty space at the front of an a EV where the engine would be. Bloomberg’s Naughton describes them as displaying “a complete lack of ingenuity”, and says he expects consumers will eventually remember and ridicule them like the Pet Rock craze of the 1970s.
“Think about what they are: a vast void in a spot where an engine used to be on an internal combustion engine car,” he says. “But if your car doesn’t need an engine, why are you still leaving space for it and putting nothing there? It’s ridiculous. Certainly that free space could be better utilised that just leaving it a big black hole.”
We feel your pain, Keith. The struggle is real. — Hannah Elliott, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP
Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here — it’s free
