I continue to be genuinely shocked that we don't treat touch screens in cars the same way we do as phones in cars (that is to say, it is literally illegal to use them while the vehicle is moving in most places because the distraction is such a danger). Moving away from tactile in-car controls has to be among the more boneheaded things we've allowed that industry to do.
It's a cost cutting move. One touch screen is cheaper than 30 individual buttons, and ultimately many people have died because of it. But I'm sure GM would never do anything sketchy or illegal to lower cost or increase revenue
Not having an accessible mechanical latch in the front of the glovebox hatch means it’s now a single smooth surface. That’s way cheaper to injection mould than something with a hole in it.
Also, the mechanical latch mechanism needs to be strong enough to withstand hard use over many years. AND it needs to be made in a shape and finish that fits the design of the interior. AND it needs to feel good in the hand. AND it might need a lock in it, either due to expectation or regulation.
Suddenly a simple little solenoid and metre of thin gauge wire starts looking pretty cheap.
I call BS. The cost of any difference in the dies for manufacturing the glovebox will be amortized to cents over a run of thousands of glove boxes and it's not like each wire you add to the wiring harness and connector that needs to be connected doesn't also have incremental costs associated with it.
This design is an aesthetic choice, though certainly motivated parties could spin at as being cheaper (I suspect it's close to a wash).
Another aspect of the touchscreen button, and no one else is mentioning, is the elimination of the valet key. Auto makers for years have had to machine an entirely separate key. The only difference being that it can start the car, but cannot open the trunk and the glove box. Presumably, this electronic actuator wouldn’t need the need for a separate valet key.
Not that I’m endorsing any of this, I have a model Y, and detest how hard it is to open the glove box.
- can't let the passenger in without touching the touchscreen several times (lock door handle, unlock door handle, THEN door presents itself on unlock)
- can't turn on the defrost/defog without using the touchscreen (and that requires attention to locate the control). The new UI that just came out puts these on submenus.
The new model S with the square steering wheel is even more of a dumpster fire. no stalks. Turn signals are buttons on the steering wheel. wipers too. and additional things like PRND on the touchscreen / center console.
That’s assuming competence. Design that follows consumer demand requires actual research work performed by the design team.
It’s much easier for product designers to simply follow the design decisions of the “market leader. It’s what their higher-ups may even be requesting or requiring.
This pattern explains such user-hostile decisions like the loss of headphone jacks, or curved glass displays that distort edge pixels and don’t accept glass screen protectors. Or car maker’s trend to remove tactile controls with a laggy, convoluted touchscreen UX.
> This pattern explains such user-hostile decisions like the loss of headphone jacks, or curved glass displays that distort edge pixels and don’t accept glass screen protectors. Or car maker’s trend to remove tactile controls with a laggy, convoluted touchscreen UX.
Curved glass displays cause phones to break more often which sells more phones, removing headphone jacks encourages users to leave bluetooth enabled which is used for data collection and tracking. People are making money from those design choices (at our expense), but who is making money by removing tactile controls and burying their functions behind menus? The screens and OS are there either way.
I have a car with a touchscreen all in one for audio and such.
I have to use bluetooth to connect my phone, rather than being able to just use USB. When starting the car, it loses the connection, and sometimes can't reestablish it. And like 1/10 times it asks me to stop the car to be able to pair it again.
Especially annoying if it happens when I want to use GPS through my phone.
(My record was having to stop -> start my car 3 times)
This old thing. Bluetooth is a technology that works fine for me and millions of others every single day. That is not to say it always works flawlessly. Seemingly every time I am forced to use Windows or Teams, it doesn't work. And if I had a car like the parent where it was my only option, I would also be annoyed.
But let's say I agreed with you, so us and what industry would declare it failed? Some Bluetooth consortium, i.e. the same people who make 99% of these devices with likely unbelievably buggy implementations hacked together in the minimum of time? Society at large? Consumers? Some union of software engineers?
I am very sympathetic to people's lives been made more annoying by technology that doesn't work, just as I am to people's lives being made worse by technology that does work. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution, either.
(Maybe right-to-repair could be a starting point for open-source efforts to change products where incentives don't align. Doesn't help much with firmware though.)
I use Bluetooth every time with my car and I never have a connection problem. I use an old iPhone and my car is 5 years old.
It may be an issue with GP’s car rather than the protocol itself. Turning your car off and on for Bluetooth sounds particularly stupid. I can unpair and pair my car without restarting it.
I can unpair and re-pair without restarting it as well. But then sometimes there is no sound coming through, or it requires me to turn the car off anyways.
I agree. Not only that, but I find the interface on my phone much better so sometimes I find myself holding my phone instead of using CarPlay...which I admit is even worse.
GM also has electronic primary door release mechanisms in their vehicles. So if the car has no power, you can’t open the doors from inside.
Granted, because of regulatory requirements there is STILL A MANUAL RELEASE… on the floor, near the chassis sill (and might be driver-seat only). So you save money going to electronic releases, but still have to put a manual one in anyways.
The glovebox is merely annoying (though I can think of edge case situations where it could lead to your death), but with the door release, there are documented instances where it HAS led to someone’s death: https://jalopnik.com/texas-man-and-his-dog-die-after-getting...
> GM also has electronic primary door release mechanisms in their vehicles.
They often have them hidden, though.
The other day, a friend of mine had his keys on the table. His car key was the common "oblong box" variety. A small black box, with a couple of buttons.
I asked him if he'd ever had a battery issue, and he said no, but he had nightmares about it.
I then showed him his "hidden" manual key (usually, there's a fingernail slot).
Then, we had to spend some time, looking around his car, for the keyhole.
It turned out to be under the driver's side door handle, covered by a plastic plug.
At a height that is reachable by anyone with the myriad of disabilities that would prevent you from being able to lean down and search the floor near your seat in the middle of the night on an unlit road. Not even bringing in damage to the car.
How does electronic release save money (or when is the breakeven), considering the engineering of the electronic / sw system and the new emergency release system vs adapting the usual manual system to a new car model?
Electronic locks create future revenue opportunities! Maybe the next auto industry innovation will be subscription doors. "Upgrade your vehicle from 3 doors to 4, just $19.99/month!"
I was in a car crash as a child. Two cars caught fire, although I didn't realise it until I got out.
My door was blocked by another vehicle, as was my dad's. He was busy trying to get my sister to open her front passenger door, so he could clamber out after her.
The other rear door was damaged, and I had to pull the latch and then kick it to open it. (Not sure how that would work with one of these small manual release things.)
But parents: if you have a daft car with electronic doors, make sure your children know where the manual release is, both front and rear.
It might also be good to have a car window breaker tool (or maybe more than one) someplace easy to reach. They usually also include a seat belt cutter so you can get out of the crash has jammed your seat belt mechanism.
Some newer cars have switched from tempered glass to laminated glass for their side windows though which may make these tools useless on your car, so check that first.
Here's an article on these tools [1]. Here's one on the move to laminated glass [2].
Here are some links to window breakers that you might be able to find in stock locally and a couple at Amazon [3,4,5,6,7].
How does this work in a plain-old car with child locks set on the rear doors?
My children had opened the doors while the car was moving at least once before I had to use the child locks; now, as far as I can tell, nobody is getting out of the back doors unless they're opened from the outside.
Uninjured children can probably climb through to the front and use those doors, even if the driver is injured. I would think a 5 year old should manage that? But they would be familiar with how the doors normally open, and probably not an emergency release handle.
Maybe on some supermodern cars (which probably won't open at all after the crash breaks a few computers in there). But in all cars I have owned, the safety switch was mechanical, not electronic. If it's working, you can lower the window and open from the outside. But generally, children old enough to be able to take care of themselves in a car accident should probably have the safety unlocked already.
That's it isn't it; by the time my children are old enough to be able to do this, the child locks won't be on. I guess that's when they're old enough to be told not to open the doors "until it's safe" and actually listen and understand.
In my car they're mechanical, as I assume they still are in most modern, non-hyper-modern cars (like Teslas) so my curiosity was more of a "is there an exit strategy if the child locks are on and it's not possible to exit through the front doors"?
There's no mechanical override inside the boot (trunk) that I'm aware of and the mechanical child locks also have no internal override (that I'm aware of).
I guess in case of emergencies, the windows are the best exit strategy in such a hypothetical situation.
My impression is that all cars are intended to have a safety unlock in the trunk. I assumed it was mostly in case someone gets stuck inside, but maybe it's to escape through back seats in an accident.
That sounds super hard to pull off though, especially if injured and with an adrenaline rush that might help you problem solve but if this stuff is never habitually used it seems like a challenge even with no stress or urgency.
It's an escape room unless you've read the manual closely and practiced...
The model s door latch will electronically release at the beginning of travel, and if that hasn't worked, continuing to move the latch will open the door mechanically.
The OP's comment implies that GM is responsible for this trend, whereas they may simply be trying to meet consumer demand. Many consumers would like their cars to feel as "premium" as a Tesla and they are willing to vote with their wallet.
I don't want touch screens in cars period and I can't stand this trend of using them. I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.
The round knob to increase / decrease sound volume is simply the best UX in the car. Why do I have to navigate to a submenu to push a button repeatedly to change the volume. The less I look at the road the higher the risk of an accident.
Worth noting that that round knob, where it exists, has lost a lot of functionality:
1. Setting volume to 0 will pause the recording, even though I sometimes want to silently forward through some unwanted parts (intros or ads in podcasts).
2. These knobs are also infinity knobs, I liked to have fixed start and end position with an indicator how loud it's going to be when I switch on. That last part has been taken over by software and probably can't be done reliably any more.
3. On the leftmost, zero position that round knob was also used to switch a radio on or off. It is very convenient to have a single movement to switch music on, and with the same movement adjust the volume, or to lower the volume and while doing so, maybe decide to switch it all off entirely.
Analog potentiometers is what we all want. The worst are the rotary encoders (infinity knobs) that glitch when you turn them fast, like trying to turn down the radio your kid left on full blast, only to have it do nothing or actually turn it up instead.
Yep. Everything turned to garbage when "it all went digital", in the early 2000s. Now every single electronic product from appliances to vehicles are completely broken. Even the average thermostat spazzes out. There's no standard for anything.
My old car has a navigation thing that pops up out of the dashboard. It's not a touchscreen: all control of that is by a four-way button plus a confirm and an exit button on the back of the steering wheel.
The new car has a big flashy touchscreen, but there's no way to interact with it without taking a hand off the wheel and looking down below the dashboard line.
I don't know why they can't at least add button-based navigation to the UI.
Tried a quick search and couldn't find it. Is it like the scoll wheel on a mouse? Would be nice to have those on the steering wheel instead of up/down buttons.
I assume they mean the levers on the steering wheel, indicators and wipers... They look like whiskers in a cat's face that is the steering wheel (and you find them by touch, which is a nice double entendre)
Aye my skoda has a touch screen but I rarely use it (2016 model with touch screen and proper buttons, not the horrific current design of xbox style touch buttons) because I have 2 scroll wheels (volume and screen between the rev counter and speedo control), buttons to skip back and forward music, button for voice assistant, and a phone button. Its the best design out there I'm convinced.
Skoda is part of the VW group, as are Audi and Seat. There are some common parts used across the group, from chassis and engines down to much smller elements. But the different marques have different feels and appeal to different markets. Skoda cars have a reputation for being cheap and very reliable, unlike Audi which is positioned as a luxury marque
> 'I'm finally starting to understand the feelings my grandfather had for anything thing he considered superfluous or inconvenient in a car.'
I drive a 12 year old Focus that has just about the right amount of modern functions - such as aircon, bluetooth connection and rear parking sensors.
I guess the problem with cars nowadays is that there isn't much to differentiate between them so all these added features have become a bit of an arms race?
The irony, of course, is seeing all of these fancy Range Rovers and Mercs broken down at the side of the motorway waiting to be towed away because they have become so sophisticated to the point of not being able to fulfil their primary function of getting from point A to point B?
I feel similarly about my 2019 GTI. The fundamentals are available without the touch screen, but you still have CarPlay. The later model GTIs went fully touch screen and capacitive touch buttons everywhere, including the steering wheel. Disappointing.
No, even worse. You can take phone to the front of your face. So you may still be able to peek the road depends on situation. But a damn touch screen fixed to the car itself? Enjoy your car accident.
The last thing I want to do when driving a car is turn my head away from the road.
Somewhat counterintuitively even just talking with your phone near your face or on speaker greatly increases your accident risk when compared to talking with someone else in the car.
This seems to be because when you are talking to someone in person there are two things that help offset the risk from the increased distraction of the conversation.
First, your conversational partner being in car provided another set of eyes that might spot something the conversational distraction makes you miss. I personally saw this once where I was driving and started to pull out into an intersection after a stop sign where cross traffic did not have a stop sign and somehow completely missed a car approaching from the passenger side. My friend in the passenger seat saw it and yelled "STOP!" and I immediately hit the brakes.
Second, when you are in situations where you need to devote extra attention to the road such as dealing with heavier traffic or trying to navigate an in person conversation tends to slow down or pause naturally. On the phone the other person has no clue what is going on at the car and so conversational flow control is not as good.
I think touch screens are ok right now for two things: settings menus that you set once and never touch again, and Apple CarPlay.
I recently moved backwards from a CarPlay car to a non-CarPlay car. Even with a very convenient MagSafe phone mount right where the CarPlay screen used to be, I still miss CarPlay. It was just easier and more convenient for controlling phone media, gps, etc.
On the settings app, the choice is between a crappy touchscreen UI and a crappy non-touchscreen UI, so I’m kind of neutral.
I have never driven a Mazda but I watch a lot of car reviews. It seems to me they're the only car manufacturer that gets car interactions right. They actually have a philosophy how human-cars should interact and design everything based on it. Hence everything comes natural and consistent and logical.
I moved from a Mazda to Hyundai and find my Elantra very much like my Mazda 6 in terms of ease-of-use.
It has android auto/carplay. To change songs, increase the volume, mute you use buttons on the steering wheel. There is a physical volume up/down knob as well in case the passenger wants to use it and these can be done via the touch screen as well.
They have done an excellent job blending new technology and continuing to use "what works" from the past.
Too many of these touch screens in cars requires accessing menue's and sub-menu's to do basic things that should be on the steering wheel. My ex-wife's Lexus which cost 5x what i paid for my Elantra wont let her access the navigation system unless it is stopped and in park?? I can simply hold a button on the steering wheel to access Siri and state where i want to go. Far too often if you touch the screen on her lexis you get "vehicle is in motion".. Great.. and i'm in the passenger seat confused as to why this is an issue?
perhaps they should have done a better job planning this out before releasing it to the public?
Personally i feel Hyundai provides better "value for your money". By not having the incredibly complicated model and options packages you find in North American cars they keep their costs down and the variations on their products low.
No need to deal with the NA style "you want package A, you need to get packages B and C as well" crap.
I can't say it's the main reason I would choose a car, but bad UX (the whole thing, from UI to knobs) is certainly one of the no-compromise ones I would bail a car on.
They've had their hits and misses over the years. Not at all typical, I'm sure, but a fun anecdote: I had a 90s bmw at one point, with electronic controls for the adjustable driver's seat down near the floor between the seat and door. The buttons got wet one time when it was raining, and it led to the seat coming alive and trying to crush me against the steering wheel while in highway traffic. Mashing on the controls didn't work and the motor was quite powerful. I was barely able to pull over with the room I had to move. If I wasn't as thin as I am, I might have been pinned down and crashed.
I’ve got an off button in the center of my controls. The only oddity is that I have to press it to lower the airflow from 5 to 0 (off) but otherwise pretty easy to find and use. It says “OFF.”
I misunderstood what you were looking for. AC seems easier for me as there’s a button labeled “A/C” that is lit up when AC is turned on and not lit up when it is off.
Really? What model do you have? I have a 330e and it does not have an A/C button, only a "MAX A/C" button. I can turn the A/C on with this button, but I can't turn it back off.
2018 330. That’s weird you don’t have an AC button. What I find curious is that “Max AC” is on the left side on a big round button but “AC” is on the right side on a square button with another square above it.
I don’t understand the layout sense but at least I’m lucky enough to have buttons.
Dad has a Mazda. Can vouch for this 100%. It's very clear to me when I drive it that their car interfaces are very deliberate and properly designed. That rolling knob thing which controls the screen is amazing and I wish it were standard
This was the first thing I disable when I got my 2016 Mazda 3. SSH'd into the infotainment and locked the GPS position. Now the car thinks I'm always parked, even when rolling. I also reduced the warning/notice on boot to about 500ms.
Considering this, I don't think I've ever even had to touch the screen since; the wheel is just so nice. The volume knob down in that cluster is also very ergonomic.
Some cars like My ex-wife's lexus wont let you access the navigation system unless the vehicle is stopped.
This is VERY VERY stupid and TBH dangerous. Should se find herself lost on the highway she would need to leave the highway or stop on the side of the road to access the navigation system??
If you attempt to access the nav system while the vehicle is not stopped it simply displays some sort of "vehicle is in motion" alarm.
My Elantra wont let me use the keyboard to enter an address while the vehicle is in motion, but it will let me use Siri so i can make changes while moving if needed.
Is the system still disabled if someone is present in the front passenger seat (modern vehicles have sensors for this)? Oftentimes the passenger acts as the navigator and it wouldn't make sense for them to be locked out of the system.
Yes, it has been a while since i've been in her car.. i think you actually need to put it in park to "unlock" it, not just be stopped.
This is why I said the system is very stupid.. one would think that a passenger can access the navigation system given they are not driving.
The lesson I took away from this is: Never buy a car with a built-in GPS system.
Android auto/carplay are a much better - They are not likely to hold your car "ransom" for map updates or such, and don't have stupid rules like must be in park.
It's weird that they didn't think of the simplest solution, which is to use the speedometer, and instead chose to use GPS. I suppose that makes it so you can't even use the nav if you happen to be riding on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off .
I have a Mazda 2, touch is disabled as soon as the car starts rolling, but is available at a stop.
I like their rotating joyknob implementation, which can be used without looking nor stretching arms, and integrates well with CarPlay as well. It's so good I skip on touch even when touch would be a good fit.
Even their homegrown UI isn't that bad, which is actually praise given the crap automakers can come up with.
Side node: touch is useful for the passenger though, as reaching to the knob can be annoying for the driver, even at a stop.
It’s interesting to consider that your grandfather was probably wrong about somethings being superfluous. Im not saying that as a criticism — but there are probably necessities of modern cars you and I find magnificent and essential (whether we our conscious of them or not) that your grandfather disdained.
Don’t get me wrong, touchscreen gloveboxes are stupid as hell, but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m being discerning or closed-minded.
> but as I get older and things change, i find myself wondering if I’m
being discerning or closed-minded.
You're being discerning. And a little over-generous.
I'll counter - as a fellow 'older' one :)
There's a tendency to be over-conciliatory and exercise excessive
tolerance towards folly, for fear of being labelled a throwback.
Don't minimise the wisdom your age brings.
Some things just get worse, objectively, until a correction occurs.
Reality is, there are perverse design incentives and it's also the
younger people who are tearing their hair at the madness of gratuitous
tech and UX as a cult/ideology.
Diminishing returns? Let me do an inverse car analogy. I know how to write a complicated SQL query in SQL and in maybe a couple of different ORMs, because customers don't know SQL and want everything in (say) Ruby, Python, Elixir. Then the world inflicts us another ORM and I have to waste hours to learn all of it again only for the ORM to build my original SQL query and send it to the DB. Rolling eyes and WTF!
That reminds me of payment processors. They usually have SDKs for PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, and maybe others. Often these just end up doing a simple HTTPS post of name=value pairs.
It is almost always easier and cleaner to use their HTTPS name=value post interface directly if they officially allow it and support it.
Often you are going to get your payment information from the user in that format anyway, such as via a post from your checkout page, or as a row of named columns when you retrieve on file payment information from your database.
In that case submitting name=value pairs mostly just requires translating the field names from your checkout page or column names from database to the names that the payment processor uses, plus adding a few more name=value pairs.
Going through their language specific SDKs often requires building up some ridiculous object oriented mess.
That grandpa probably complains about ridiculous things like having to uninstall the bumpers to replace a front lightbulb which don't matter in the grand scheme because I know a mechanic who does it for 20€ (excluding the cost of the parts) but it is still silly because it is something that anyone with zero training could have done.
I’m pretty much with you and was exactly the same - until I got a Polestar. All the stuff I need is still an actual button - although not ac controls. Physical buttons for volume, front and rear demist, cruise, lights and wipers. So I only need the touch screen for maps and some audio - like changing radio or which streaming service. Can still be eyes off road for a second admittedly. My dad has a VW golf with this don’t have to quite touch it interface and it’s always changing stuff on him as he chats away, waving his hand about - it’s super dangerous imho.
"Blame" that on Volvo. They've had some of the best in-car UX imo. Dozens of physical buttons, but they're intuitively laid out and it requires almost no thinking to do something.
While I agree things like volume, glovebox release, and other standard functions should stay far away from a touchscreen, I do like that touchscreens have enabled highly customizable options/settings that would be a bit tougher to achieve without a touchscreen.
Or at the very least a digital screen with manual navigation buttons, but in this case, a touchscreen is a bit more convenient (and you usually have to have the car parked to change settings, anyway).
Sadly it's only going to get worse. Companies left and right are seeing the light so to speak (i.e. how much money can be saved by using touchscreens) and putting them in everything in tandem with switching over to being electric. Doesn't help that countries everywhere are demanding that ICEs be phased out despite EVs having a host of problems and having nowhere near the amount of reliability.
But there's no way that a manually-operated latch is more expensive than a latch that is controlled by an electronic component, and that's leaving aside any time spent by developers and product managers to design the look, location, and functionality of the button in the software itself.
I wish they had left navigation to external devices which can be updated independently of the rest of the car. It took less than a year for the in-car navigation system to be effectively obsolete.
Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
No, the same couldn't be said about smartphone keyboards. The space in a smartphone is at an extreme premium and having the ability to display a keyboard or something else is very valuable. In a car this problem doesn't exist - you can have a touchscreen AND a normal glovebox latch. Removing the glovebox latch and replacing it with a touchscreen is nothing but idiocy, with zero benefits for anyone, ever, at any point.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.
> Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.
In 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving. According to automotive historian Michael Lamm, “Opponents of car radios argued that they distracted drivers and caused accidents, that tuning them took a driver’s attention away from the road, and that music could lull a driver to sleep.”
It's true but the physical buttons on my car radio let me get things over with very quickly.
The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.
Nope. I bought phones with physical keyboards for as long as I could, because they work better for me. But I'm not in the majority, and manufacturers didn't want to keep selling phones with moving parts, so here we are.
And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.
Someone in the comments pointed out that not only is this terrible, you can only open the glove box while stationary.
I thought GM had jumped the shark when they started leaving the reverse lights on when you park, just to make sure people or cars nearby don’t know whether it’s safe to pass you in the parking lot. This is a whole new level of stupidity.
I hate the reverse light thing so hard. If I see a GM with reverse lights on I completely ignore it and never stop. Thanks GM for ruining something nice.
Likely not, some pickup trucks can "force" the backup lights on as "bed lights" it seems. When parked, the car doesn't have tons of requirements vis-a-vis the lighting (the laws are usually worded like "when in reverse gear, two rear-facing white-burning lights must be visible with a power of X lumens" or something).
Um, what truck bed can be lit by using the reverse lights? The only way I can see this working is if there's another truck behind you so that your reverse lights are pointed at the other truck. Truck bed lights have always been behind the cab. I've never seen reverse lights considered as bed lights.
All pickups I've seen have reverse lights built into the third brake light which is behind the cab above the bed.
And with that it makes sense as a safety feature - if the only way to turn those on is go into reverse, people would be tempted to throw the truck in reverse and leave the parking brake on while they jump in the back to look for something. Unfortunately it seems not all of them are locked out as I've seen trucks driving on the freeway with the reverse lights on.
I think you may be confusing things. There is a separate switch for turning on the bed lights which has typically been above the rear window in the center. The reverse lights are part of the rear brake lights. It is absolutely possible to leave the bed lights on while driving.
The concept you propose is absolutely preposterous to the point I feel I'm feeding a troll
> Include Reverse Lamps
This setting turns the reverse lamps on when you switch the rear lighting zone on.
Switch this setting off if you have a backup alarm installed to prevent the reverse lamps from turning on and sounding the alarm when using zone lighting.
>(telsa's brake lights are triggered based on deceleration so they constantly flicker when you're just using regen a bit)
Thank the SAE (the de-facto regulators of this space since many laws are just pointers to their specs) for that. There's a spec for triggering brake lights based on how fast the car is decelerating. Depending on your regen setting you're probably right at the threshold.
"The touch-screen-actuated glove box is terrible because it’s one of those examples where carmakers have found that they have the technology to do something, so they do it, without considering literally anything about what they’ve done. Did anybody want this? At all? It takes something that has never been a problem, opening a glove box, and added cost and complexity to the construction, and added time and inconvenience to the process. No problem is solved, but a fuckload of new problems are introduced."
Here's the gist: carmakers, as many other businesses -this can apply to pretty much every product-, need more bullet points to be shown in advertising, so they use technology to add every possible feature, including those that are technically useless but still could add points of failure because of their bare existence. I think there's no way out until people is taught how this works very early in their life, and I mean children at school, so they can use their wallets when time comes. I can't see this coming anytime soon, however, as our economy totally embraces advertising the useless.
That was essentially technology bullet-point features, but since they flopped hard you can no longer buy curved TVs or 3D TVs. Turns out if people really don't want shit, it disappears again, no matter how hard various corporations push the shit.
Except that you can't "not buy" a vehicle you need for transport just because the manufacturers decided to remove the latch from the glove compartment.
Your logic only works in healthy markets like TVs where you could buy _EQUIVALENT_ device without the curvature or 3D.
Meanwhile with cars this isn't true - the touchscreen crap trend is being implemented across the market (since its cheaper) and many people can't freely choose a model and brand of their car (either due to costs, dealer availability or other factors like interior space or fuel consumption requirements).
If you'd be able to buy the same car, just with different control stack, THAT would enable the behaviour you describe.
>Your logic only works in healthy markets like TVs where you could buy _EQUIVALENT_ device without the curvature or 3D.
Excuse me, but the TV is not at all "a healthy market", in a healthy market you would have choices for non-smart TV sets or - even more simply - decently priced simple monitors.
Yeah, this is better example than curved/3D. Curved TVs are minority and 3D is completely harmless (that's why they can add it for cheap even though very few contents). Smart TV is the default and isn't harmless.
Sadly the TV makers only wanted 3D TVs or curved TVs so they had a marketing bullet point, so they lost interest when consumers didn't want them that much.
The makers also want ads in TVs for additional revenue streams, so customer wants can go jump off a cliff for all they care.
It's much more secure. Electric locks can be stronger and you can't jimmy them like you can mechanical locks. Plus it makes the dash look better and it's kind of cool.
People are coming up with all sorts of ridiculously contrived scenarios to make this look bad. But I haven't seen anything that's more than a 1 in a million type problem with an obvious solution.
Is it kind of dumb? IMHO yes. Are there people who like this sort of whiz bang gadgetry in their luxury cars? Absolutely.
That is patently untrue. Electronic locks use the same latches and manual ones, just activated by a solenoid, easily defeated with... a magnet. The attack surface of a mechanical lock exists, bit at least has some mitications. Electronic locks seldom have any.
> The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
> In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Doubt it. It's still a latch but now you need a power release and some wires. Glovebox cover is still made in 1 operation regardless if it have the opening for the latch on front or not, you still need someone to install that latch in the cover, but now you need to trace wires to it.
one tangentially related extremely irritating “feature” of Teslas is automatic updates, which not only disable the car while they’re going on, but often rearrange the UI so you have to figure out where the buttons are all over again. it’s a flat out disgrace. you get into your extremely expensive car, ready to go, but no the car isn’t available because some dev team somewhere a few thousand miles away decided to push an almost certainly unnecessary change to YOUR possession. I don’t like this concept on mobile devices and PCs, but I despise it for cars
It's a very software idea to ship things unfinished and fix them later. At best it's annoying, in a car it's dangerous.
I expect when I buy a car that the manufacturers have spent time thinking about the layout, and they've got it the best they can, ironed out the bugs etc. I don't want to come in in the middle of an iterative process. I don't want buttons moving, I don't want 'improvements', I want to buy an actual functioning car from day one. One that the manufacturer is happy to stand by from day one, and they don't feel entitled to 'improve'.
And updates could totally be cancellable... Nearly every device has an "A" and "B" firmware stored, and therefore if you need to drive away during an update they could just stop the update and reboot every device back to the old firmware that's already stored and you'd be good to drive in 10 seconds.
Does the average person who has never owned a Tesla know the updates work that way? And how many of the Tesla owners still dislike it, but have decided that the risk (which could have been prevented by Tesla) is worth the reward?
in any other industry you could say that and I’d agree with you, but cars are an exception. cars are first and foremost a status symbol, and, compounding, they historically didn’t have computers inside them. plenty, plenty of rich humans will be buying teslas as either a status symbol or simply the next cool thing to own without any thought for the specifics of the management of updates of the OS
In what model of Tesla are the updates automatic? I've always been prompted whether I want to install an update, or schedule it to be installed at some early hour in the morning. I'm also told about how long the update will take (generally 25 mins).
But I agree about the horribleness of the UI changes - I still hate whatever the UI update was that went out like a year ago and haven't figured out why they actually did it.
Wow, that must be annoying. Imagine you're almost late to go somewhere, or you have an actual medical emergency and the car says nope, now I'm updating...
Seriously I would probably remove the antenna or the sim card for the car's data connection.
Can we make the steering wheel a touch screen too? Like a digital wheel you turn with your finger to steer the car. Wouldn't that be just super duper? Couldn't possibly go wrong.
The newer VW models (Golf, ID series, etc.) had touch controls on the steering wheels instead of physical buttons. Of course what happened is what you anticipated. Bad customer feedback made them reverse that for future models.
There was a prototype in 2011 that, though the wheel was still a wheel, was otherwise even worse than you're imagining: No touch buttons, it used gestures.
What you've described and what's described in the article are different. The steering mechanism is still a steering wheel with a steering column, it's just the display (speedometer, odometer, maps) is a touch screen on the wheel instead of behind the dash. Maybe not the best, but not approaching gesture-based steering.
The less used something is, the more apparent it must be how to use it.
If something is used once a year, most users won't know what myriad of menus to follow. Some won't even know it is a menu option, and may hunt all over the car for a hidden release.
It is provably different for you, but where I am (Canada), you'll open the hood release at least a half dozen times a year, just for windshield wiper fluid.
That said, the hood release has been on the driver side somewhere, under the dash, in every car I own.
With a physical release, you can often hunt for a thing, much faster than a dozen submenus.
It's worth watching the other few dozen seconds of the Cadillac video; not only is the glovebox overengineered, but so are the other doors on that car. Then again, it is a Cadillac, so "luxurious excess" is not surprising, but I'm not sure how having to go through that awkward indirection could be considered a luxury.
Excellent point. There are a lot of people for whom the #1 goal when purchasing a car is to stake out as high a spot in the "Who's Got More Bling?" pecking order as possible. If a car company CEO developed some weird obsession with maximizing profit, it wouldn't take much genius to start ignoring the practical & thrifty car buyers in favor of the bling maximizers...
It wouldn't take a genius because that would be a terrible business decision when you consider number of units sold. And profit-maximizing wouldn't be a particularly weird obsession for a CEO to have, in fact, it's exactly the obsession you'd want him to have.
That's not entirely true. There is a SW / mechanical/ test & integration team somewhere who was employed due to this feature that I'm sure very much appreciated this feature. There is a product manager who got to add a line item to their list of accomplishments and a sales team lead show get to draft instructional material to all the dealers, again justifying his existence.
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.
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
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.
The reason they do this is simple, money.
It is much easier for a manufacturer to produce a single screen that contains all the functionality that can be adjusted on the fly using software.
The alternative (and the way it has always been) is early in a car conception, to design the cabin with the buttons layout, design the switches, find a manufacturer, test the switches, test the layout, repeat, etc…
Plus if they find a flaw in the cars button design / layout late in the process, it becomes even more expensive to fix.
Nowadays, car companies have an excuse to use screens, not only does it save them money, but they can disguise it under « modernism ».
Disclaimer, this is from what I heard and using common sense, but in might be completely wrong.
This argument applies to maybe HVAC, it doesn't apply at all to what we're talking about: A glove-box.
A traditional, mechanical, glove-box contains all the same components as this one (a latch, hinges, door, etc) but this adds a new wire harness, new connection points, new software, and an electro-magnetic servo to unlock it.
I can think of no argument at all for how this decreases cost. It only increases them and increases failure points, all for what? Nobody knows exactly for what.
Humans are just apes looking for the newest color of banana. We already know a lot about human machine interfaces and safety and human attention, and yet we throw that all away to offer and get the new shiny toy that merely changed something and usually for the worse. The older you get, the more you realize why older people are so cranky about certain things. As you gain age and experience, you become aware of the reality that humans simply will not change for the better in the collective, and that we remain driven by emotional needs rather than the reason we pride ourselves on.
I read on another forum that there isn't even a manual release somewhere. I understand for security it's nice not to but maybe hide one _somewhere_ so at least you have some backup option in an emergency?
That'd be nice .. or just bypass the entire added layer of relay controls and go back to a manual latch.
The article scenarios raise some of the real life issues:
* What if your battery dies, and you have your small emergency charger in the glovebox?
* What if you’re waiting in a turned-off car while your friend or parent or lover pops inside the liquor store, and you need to get, say, your hyper-important pills out of the glove box?
* What if you get pulled over by a cop, and they tell you to turn your car off, like they do, but then you have to explain to the already tense cop that you need to turn your car back on so you can open the fucking glove box door so you can get your documents? ( Depending on the cop and the circumstance, this can only make things worse. )
etc.
I've spent decades on bleeding edge tech .. and I still detest this kind of ill thought through "just because we can" stupidity.
There is no way a 90lb, octataraien, is going to rip a seatbelt loose if stuck, or smash her car window by hand, if the power is out, or if underwater.
Yes she can reach the glovebox and get this tool, but not if the thing won't open!
I'm in an Australian rural farming district and a neighbour of mine used something similar when his 4x4 landcruiser was T-boned into a dam back when he was 90 or so (he's pushing 97 ATM).
If you or your mum haven't done this already .. get her a few old seat belts and passenger windows from a wreckers to practice on.
The theory is good but nothing beats a bit of muscle memory practice.
It's taught here in Australia as part of many "advanced driver training" courses which are common for many using company fleet vehicles (especially country, off road, or heavy vehicle).
Skid pans, broken road hill climb, basic first aid, accident protocols (both in accident (freeing yourself or not) or as first on scene) etc.
Because on long trips, passengers NEVER use the glovebox?
When I go on long trips, my passenger often reads, uses their phone and store these things in the glovebox when we are stopped. It is a convenient storage box right at their disposal so why not use it?
As the other guy said, this is a classic case of "you are holding it wrong".
This is going to cost lives. Most people I know have their safety vests in the glovebox. Imagine if your car breaks down and you can't get the darn thing open/on the side of a highway?
I'm American, so — you know. It does make logical sense to do so, but I've never known anybody who keeps a safety vest in their vehicle. Is this something like the metric system?
It is required by Law, like the warning triangle, requirements are different in different countries, some mandate also a first-aid kit and/or a fire extinguisher:
Lots of people keep the hi-vis vest together with the triangle/spare wheel, etc. in the trunk, but in theory these high-vis vest should be put on as soon as you get off the vehicle, so a better place is the glove box or (even better if available) the pockets on the rear of fronts seats.
In Austria, if you have your hi-vis vest in the trunk, an officer will at least let you know their disappointment in case of a control. Driving schools also teach you to put it in the glove compartment.
Contrary to the author's belief, grocery store doors do not open when you step on a mat. They open due to change in incident light on a photoelectric effect sensor above the door.
It makes me so happy to think the Nobel committee, which was dominated by experimentalists, when considering Einstein's contributions to science, could only bring themselves to award him the prize for grocery store door openers.
Leaving aside the question of whether touchscreens make sense inside a car at all, I’m not sure how a control to open the glove box which is not situated on the actual glove box help? I mean, you probably opened the glove box to put something in or take something out. Once it is open, you would almost certainly physically reach inside it.
That doesn't mean you can't put a touch button on the actual glovebox.
Use the UI (with a pin) to lock the glovebox so that it doesn't open when the glovebox button is touched, use the UI (with the same pin) to reverse that at a later stage.
Putting the button anywhere but on the glovebox makes non-fanboys seriously question the suitability of the car as a convenience.
But just to play devil’s advocate here: the benefit of the glovebox being software-controlled is that it enables features like PIN-protecting the glovebox contents, or Tesla’s “valet mode” where certain car features (including opening the glovebox) are disabled when you hand your keys to a stranger.
At first I thought this is about some extra functionality, like having an additional way of opening the glove box, or perhaps even locking it. I thought it's harmless, since that action wouldn't be performed too often. I never thought this would be about actually replacing the physical latch.
The author answers their own question. It's in the marketing research! /s
Did they do focus groups for this feature? Did they get responses like these?
“I hate how easy and quick it is to get the glovebox open. Can you guys solve that?”
“Is there any way to make simple acts I’m used to doing a real fucking chore?”
“How can I be sure every single tiny fucking thing on this car will be an expensive hassle to repair in 10 years?
“If the battery dies, is there any way to fuck me over even more than normal? Like, you know, hard?”
“Can you just smack the shit out of me over and over again with like a slab of roast beef, or is there some electromechanical and software solution you can integrate into the car for the same effect?”
This is on the same level as designing doors that are supposed to open with a button but shame your passenger and supposedly damage your seals if they use the highly obvious and intuitive latch instead of the button that looks like a window control.
From (the) experience(s of many, many people), I've learned that GM makes mechanically terrible cars. Digitizing a handle that doesn't even require a lock tells me that they're simply bad at design and build across many domains. So my misunderstanding is, why does anyone with enough money to finance a new car, ever, buy GM? What do people see in their cars?
The plural of anecdote is not data. And GM sells a great many vehicles.
Some are just fine. Some are "mechanically terrible". You'd have to look at big picture stats to see how often it's the case. Most people that buy GM do not end up with mechanically terrible cars, but because so many are bought, a large number are.
Beyond that, there are nationalists (will only buy American) or otherwise brand loyal, often taking up the same preferences as parents.
I hate a lot of the touch screen controls in the Tesla - like AC controls. But the glovebox is actually pretty nice. Being software controlled means I can require a PIN to open it. Also, there's no handle so it doesn't even look like a glovebox is there. If someone breaks in they probably aren't getting to any valuables in the glovebox.
Right, but the average thief is probably not that familiar with a Tesla, and even if they are, these guys move very quickly. Their goal is to get in and get out and move to the next car. They're not going to sit there with an angle grinder unless they somehow know you have something good in there.
The average thief is probably not N is not a safe bet for most values of N. Pros exist and technique gets spread from person to person. BITD car stereo systems were the target of choice and I assure you they were significantly more difficult and time consuming to remove than popping open the glovebox on a car that's missing a button. All I'm saying is if car companies are shilling this bs as a security measure I'd take that with a rather large grain of salt.
I bet it takes mere seconds to angle grind your way into a glovebox. Thick hardened steel bike locks resist angle grinders for less than a minute. Thieves also talk to each other and spread techniques.
My car is 22 years old and has a key lock on the glovebox. It even rejects the valet key in case I wanted to give someone access to my car without giving them access to the glove box. This is a solved problem.
I’m the exact opposite of you. I like most of the touch screen controls, including the AC ones, but the number of taps it takes to open the glovebox always irritates me.
Yes. AC is ok to not be so accessible. After all, if the car has a decent temperature regulation system (as it should), with a decent PID, you set up the temperature once and don't touch it for long time.
Dude, the 2018 Citroen Berlingo (cheap family car) has a glove box without a latch. I didn't even find ours for the first week, because it is in an unusual spot where you would expect the airbag.
So you store a weapon in the area where police are expecting you to reach for and instead store your license and registration to one of the spots where police are trained to prevent people from reaching into because of the fear of storing a weapon there.
I also hope that you either live in a state where there aren't any CCW permits required or that you have a CCW permit (which during my class, they went on and on about why you shouldn't store a weapon in the glove box).
Regardless - locks on glove boxes have been a thing for a long time. Having a PIN Enabled glove box even for your (imo very stupid) use case isn't enough of an argument to make touch screened glove boxes standard.
Big-touch-screen-only interaction is one of the things that keep me from buying a Tesla.
There’s the simplicity of Toyotas that keeps me attracted to them. Although when battery dies, you can’t open the trunk in newer RAV4s. So they’re going to shit as well.
I would buy a dumb cheap electric car in a heart beat.
Now extend this reasoning to see why everything has become touch screen. It will all make sense. My oven has touch buttons. No idea if I pressed it or not because it doesn’t give feedback for a second or two.
Good automotive quality switches and encoders are expensive. And they don’t make them anymore because market dumped them. See the dwindling alps catalog.
I got a new washer. You have to push a touch button for four seconds to wake it up. Then wait a couple of seconds for the controller to boot and show the touch screen. Then you select what wash mode you want by pressing the touch screen for two seconds for each selection.
I was so looking forward to the Rivian suv ever since the truck came out, and then saw the first video of it where it requires navigating menues to AIM THE AIR VENTS.
That Rivian was so bad I feel like it should be illegal. Who the F comes up with this stuff?
Not all cars support that, though. Due to licensing or tech, some cars (even new ones) only support Apple car with a cable (my case). I bought a wireless adapter on Amazon and it works seamlessly.
You’re mad that Toyota didn’t include an extra WiFi radio in your car, so that you can be more conveniently distracted by text messages and speed trap warnings, in the same thread where everyone else thinks that electric starters ruined cars forever?
Carplay lets me use the car to control audio with the car controls instead of the phone. That’s a big non-distractor. Your comment tells me that you have never actually used CarPlay (and perhaps that Android Auto is not so good—I wouldn’t know, I always assumed it was roughly equivalent to CarPlay in features and functionality). My phone doesn’t notify me about text messages when I’m driving and with the Prius, if I want navigation, CarPlay is the thing. Having the nav on the big display instead of the little display (which would be well out of the normal peripheral line of sight if it’s sitting on the wireless charger) is again an improvement in safety.
I don’t want touch screen anything that doesn’t also at least have a manual release. I will continue to buy junker cars and fixing them up. Thanks Dad for teaching me how to fix my own cars (and YouTube has filled in the gaps).
I can’t help but wonder if/when such things will be leveraged into having glovebox subscriptions, with the unlock functionality being disabled if the subscription lapses
People raise their blood pressure for nothing. You could have both a touch screen glove box release and a discreet manual release for emergencies. It’s just for aesthetics.
If it was just for aesthetics, you could have just a discreet manual release.
Anyway, you don't have "a discreet manual release" on actual implementation of that crap, so yeah that's the point: you could and you should have a manual release. At which point the touchscreen insanity for that would not make sense and would disappear.
This is bad, but what Tesla has done is much worse, not least because they will probably lead the way for bad decisions industry wide, and anything "novel" they do is probably a sign of things to come from other manufacturers trying to be "hip".
There is no longer anything useful on the dash above the wheel. No speedometer, odometer, battery level indicator, repair lights, nothing. All of it is integrated into the infotainment unit on the dead center of the dash. Similarly, there are no knobs or real buttons anywhere on the center of the dash; it's all touch screen. All of it. I wanted to moan about it the entire time I was in the car, but I didn't want to just complain about my friend's nice new vehicle.
The F-150 lightning I test-drove similarly has all of the climate control and music controls stuffed into infotainment center with no physical knobs or dials to be found. If you read online, you will also find that its infotainment center is notoriously slow. Otherwise, it's a very nice truck.
Tesla is basically the Apple of EVs right now. Leading the way in some really interesting technology and features while causing potentially irreparable long-term damage to the health of the industry overall (think storage-tier pricing and the removal of all but USB-C ports/headphone jacks).
Edit: found this video in the Twitter thread linked in the article 1. Actually what the Cadillac is doing here (particularly with the doors) is aggregious. Tesla has added an additional step to opening doors from the outside (you push your thumb in first and then grab the handle) which is something you can become accustomed to in one fluid motion. At least it looks kind of nice and is only mildly less convenient than traditional handles. The push-to-release-pull-side-of-door-because-theres-no-handle mechanism on the Cadillac is absolutely braindead.
Seeing this video and multiple other new cars in person, I've also noticed a disturbing trend of changing the hatch opening mechanism. Before: manually open the hatch assisted by hydraulics which prop the door open until manually closed. Now: automatically open the hatch (slowly) on a button press and close it (slowly) on a button press. What's the problem here? Apart from being actually worse UX once the novelty wears off, the second mechanism is much more failure prone over the lifetime of the vehicle. The nice salesman at the Ford dealership actually told me off for trying to manually close the frunk on the Lightning because he was afraid I'd break it!
My honest opinion is that these changes all point in one direction but cut two ways. 1. Increase revenue by increasing standardization and eliminating many pieces from the manufacturing process (at the expense of UX/longevity) and 2. Mitigate the lost recurring revenue due to how much more reliable EVs are than ICEs by introducing new failure modes masked as modern features for plausible deniability.
I like it. It means if someone breaks into the car they can’t get into the glove box. Also, with a Tesla, the car is never off so you don’t need to turn the car on again to get access to it.
I locked the glove box on my old Honda once. All it got me was a new dash, since the thief took a screwdriver and pried it open, destroying a lot more than if I'd just left it unlocked.
I had a lock on the glove box on a used car. The lock was broken and it was difficult to open it so I never even bothered to use it. This has always led to awkward moments at borders.
Most glove boxes don't have large panes of glass? The sound of a broken window to get in will also motivate a thief to not stick around messing with a glovebox very long. Maybe leave something worth running off with in the center console as a deflection.
This is a seriously marginal bizarre contriviance of a scenario to piss off people daily who use the glove box.
For your benefit, you'd need to have a thief that somehow can break class (which is suprisingly hard to do if you ever tried it) and then can't defeat a simple latch on a glovebox where they now for sure valuables lie?
Word “most” doing a lot of heavy lifting. I drove a lot of different types of hire car, and I’ve never seen an option to lock or unlock the glovebox, nor had a situation where it’s been locked.
All these problems are caused by the mindless American consumer. If you look at a hardware review for absolutely anything tech related, it will be some absolutely useless 1 paragraph of content surrounded by 3 paragraphs of non useful information, and then some type of sponsor insert, like a pitch, or an Amazon referral link to the product. If you shop for LCDs, there is not even one website from 2000-2023 that provides real reviews (even tft central never says anything bad about products that have pushed the envelope of lowering quality, because the author is naturally biased against that due to his conflict of interest along with not really knowing what he's talking about). The most contentful review will merely talk about how good the build quality of the stand of the monitor is. If you go on whatever forum for discussing some subset of technology, you will get banned if you point out 2 issues with some product, (due to the fanboy effect, not claiming a conspiracy here).
Continuing from that last sentence, a big part of the problem is that the Christian religion is all but replaced with a corporate equivalent. It's now plausible to claim someone is racist and homophobic if they don't like Apple products. This is a huge part of the issue. There is almost no criticism in media about technology. On any nerd social internet corner, you'll have a bunch of burger eating slobs who do exactly what I complained about: You'll explain that this toaster is bad because it smells like burning plastic and has holes in it that drop bread crumbs all over your counter which get blown around the kitchen. They'll respond by saying, "how dare you insult this prestigious company that only existed for 5 minutes, they are my favorite. I have never actually tried another product but this is the best because I bought it and it had a shiny thing on it and I felt so good after this purchase". Thanks to this social environment, it's basically impossible to get a good review of any product what so ever on the internet. 99.9999% of "Nerd culture" is actually just about buying stuff. Any time I want to buy something I expect to take days out of my time just to find a product that isn't severely crippled so badly that the mindless consumer will complain about it (on 1/20 review sites). Don't get me wrong, this isn't an internet problem. Most people IRL hold the same mentality.
Vehicles have all the garbage you'd expect for this demographic:
- ECU with shoddy and fraudulent software (dieselgate, uConnect, unintended acceleration)
- LEDs that flicker worse than a CRT (these are actually dangerous as at night you can't immediately tell the position of a car within a split second, which goes to show how much shits regulators give, "at least they saved a penny and some carbon emissions (TM)")
- Terrible inputs with issues like being touch screen, horrible debounce, etc
- Cheap, vain, lack of taste, glossy paint that easily sells to idiots who like shiny things and they'll even pay extra for it despite it being worse in every way
- All kinds of dangerous half working gimmicks around "steering for you" which are especially easy to upsell to idiots
- Spyware that phones home
A conversation that should have happened during the development of this car, but didn't:
"Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu? Because that would be inconvenient, unintuitive, and doesn't allow quick access?
Then why the fuck would you do this with anything?"
> Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu?
“Because title 49, subtitle B, chapter III, subchapter B, part 393, subpart C, paragraph 393.40 of Federal Safety Regulations requires us to install brakes as specified by subpart B, paragraph 571.105 of the same regulations, which require a pedal. And if those did not exist, then we absolutely would install some other bullshit, make you pay extra for it, and bear no responsibility for it whatsoever.”
Glove box isn’t a safety feature? Do whatevs, land of the free.
Unless you really know what you’re doing, you’re better off trying to steer the car into the safest crash site/uphill possible than to try to stop it with the hand brake. The hand brake only locks the rear wheels and are not designed to brake at driving speeds (they are for keeping a stationary car from moving). Improper use of the handbrake results in the car spinning out.
This is exactly why I'm so sore about the newfangled button handbrake in my current front-wheel driven car. No more fun getting the rear to spin out by yanking the handbrake while exiting a corner at full throttle. Sadness.
It screeches warnings at me and fully engages the brake after a second or so. Which isn't optimal... because this is such a dumb ass dick move you need good timing over when you engage and release the rear brake. Or otherwise you'll end up outside the designated driving surface.
You the fuck do this with some things because if you didn't ever do it, modern cars would either look like a jet aircraft cockpit, or they'd have very few features. Anyone who's looked inside a Subaru from circa 2019 would know how physical button mania can make cars objectively worse.
(To be clear, I'm firmly on team mechanical glove boxes.)
A lot of them. There are multiple grids of buttons in multiple locations for enabling and disabling various active driver assistance and active safety features.
Not buying one car in a sea of available choices sends a very vague message of why that particular car wasn't purchased. Plus such a car might be the ideal, desired car except for one specific egregious flaw.
Why shouldn't people write articles that clearly communicate what makes a specific feature a deal breaker?
This is the kind of “feature” which you may not realize you’re buying.
Also, the earlier we raise a stink about the incredible user hostility of something that can’t be opened in motion, and can’t be opened with a dead battery, the better the chances that it won’t be widely adopted.
I can fully relate to the criticism expressed, but does the article have to be that filled with expletives? I would argue that it could appeal to a far wider audience if the writer would be able to find a way around this crude use of a language. Less is more.
I understand that this is a rant about a niche feature but you know what we really should stop doing right now? We should stop producing giant piles of metal with four weels weighting more than 2 or 3 tons. No matter what stupid options they have, SUVs and big cars and trucks are a total nonsense. Sadly they are slowly becoming the norm. We should keep our vehicles under a ton so that we stop wasting so much of our precious energy moving these f-ing tanks on the road. Roads that we pay for and that are decaying faster and faster the more we keep buying them. Not to mention car accidents involving those monstrosities...
Most product decisions represent a tradeoff. The tradeoff the author doesn't mention is one of a clean look versus ease of use. The author also doesn't mention how frequently they actually open their glovebox.
From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.
A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.
Your argument basically boils down to you don’t really use your glove box and prefer the slightly cleaner aesthetics. In your case you might argue for a car that doesn’t have a glove box. But if the glove box is included it should be intended for use. To not be able to access it by the passenger while driving, or while the car is off can be very frustrating for people who like to have a glove box.
All the comments on this thread seem to ignore a basic simple truth.
On long road trips with passengers, they often use the glovebox to store things.
When we go on road trips the kids rotate sitting in the passenger seat. They store their books, kindle, phone, etc there as it is a very convenient storage space easily accessible to them.
