In Cars, 'Smart' Often Means 'Cheap and Dumb'
Monday, January 31, 2022
By coincidence, my wife and I had to go car shopping this weekend on the very day Tech Crunch released a short opinion piece titled "Please Make a Dumb Car."
A major source of Devin Coldeway's complaints about modern automobiles has been a pet peeve of mine for some time: the near-ubiquity of touch screens on dash boards. These touch screens are bad enough during the day, because they replace simple, intuitive knobs and levers that a driver can operate by touch -- with unintuitive menus that require a driver to take his eyes off the road to use them.
At night, they're worse since the road is dark and the screen, however dim its setting, isn't. Not really.
The car my wife picked out -- which is hardly the worst offender by today's "standards" -- has heated seats. But if you're chilly, get ready to pull over (or drive distracted) and play guessing games: They're controlled from a damned touch screen via a toggle buried two layers deep in a menu.
Why not a simple rocker switch?
What is with so many moderns that they can't accept that a problem has been solved well, and move on?
Other even more ridiculous examples abound, because even setting aside the fact that touchscreens don't belong on dash boards, the touchscreens also suck as touchscreens:
And, as if the cargo-cult ergonomics of dashboard touch screens aren't bad enough, most cars now even make politically-motivated choices on your behalf. Our new car has a setting enabled by default to turn its engine on and off instead of idling thanks to global warming catastrophism. It can be turned off, but until I buy an aftermarket chip to permanently disable this, we will have to do that every ... damned ... time ... we start the car.Our Volvo doesn't let you adjust the volume when you're in reverse. That means if you're backing out of the garage and the music is blaring -- you can't turn it off! [I suspect this is because the display for the backing-up camera pops up and covers all the controls, like it does in our new car. --ed]
Image by Randy Tarampi, via Unsplash, license.
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow. [emphasis in original]
The Tech Crunch piece isn't exclusively about this stupidity. It also considers some actual advantages to the latest technology that is being added to our cars, and it does offer an explanation for the prevalence of touch screen controls that goes beyond the faddishness I saw when I first considered the problem: The touch screens save money on parts.
So also: Pragmatism, goaded by the manufacturing costs surely worsened by regulation, explains what's going on from the manufacturers' perspective.
This is a significant -- but not insurmountable -- obstacle to reversing this trend. If enough customers objected to touchscreen controls for everything, and voted with their wallets, the problem would disappear.
But the following precedent does not encourage me on that score:
Cars now are like budget smartphones with wheels: loaded with bloatware, unintuitive and slow to operate.I suspect that there is a mixture of economic and cultural factors behind the wide acceptance of dumbed-down, personal-agency-free mediocrity when it comes to technology, but I will leave my speculation at that for now.
-- CAV
5 comments:
Hi Gus,
I drive for a living and use my own vehicles. I try to find the most basic model available because, from my point of view, any extra gadget is just one more repair bill waiting to happen.
I have only purchased one car brand new off of the lot - I don't like the 30% depreciation that comes when you drive it off the lot - and that was because it was a fire sale and they had already marked it down appreciably. It was a 2001 Toyota Tacoma extended cab and I'm still driving it 616,000 miles later with only 2 major repairs; a differential and the right back axle.
I have driven cars with the 'touchscreen' controls and think that they are an active safety menace; like trying to text while driving only less intuitive. (I don't text while driving and only answer the phone using a hands-free earpiece)
On the topic of headlights; when I went through Driver's Ed, lo these many decades ago, one of the instructors told us to 'look past your headlights'. I have twice avoided fatal accidents by following this advice.
Unfortunately the bright blue-white headlights of the recent model cars are making that bit of advice a near impossibility. The blue spectrum absolutely destroys your night vision, making anything outside of your own headlight 'hotspot' imperceivable. And to top it off, a lot of the new models have what I call 'vanity lights' - unnecessary lights that do for the driver's ego what dropping the muffler from a dragster did back in the day. I've seen vehicles with 3 pairs of lights (counting fog lights) making normal driving at night a hazardous proposition, particularly when they are coming at you.
Back in the day, cops would issue warning tickets for failing to dim your headlights. These jokers go blithely on, blinding all and sundry and I don't see any enforcement actions targeting such behavior. But then again, there are laws against texting while driving and I don't see anything enforced there either. And I've seen some doozies when it comes to unsafe driving by those absorbed with their cell phones.
I think that touch screen controls provide the same order of distraction and I won't have a vehicle with them as standard equipment.
c andrew
C.,
Yes. I, too, loathe blue headlights. Thanks for bringing that up. I also agree that a lot of this high-tech garbage just adds unnecessary failure points and opportunities for unscrupulous businesses to plead or artificially cause "obsolescence."
Many aspects of traffic enforcement are a sad joke, and it goes double for "speeding," which is usually selectively enforced, abused as a source of revenue, or both.
For example: I was recently pulled over for "speeding" on the main road of our development. Its posted limit is a ridiculous 25, despite no houses fronting it. I was doing something like 33 and got pulled over. After seeing how fast so many other people go, I couldn't resist laughing at the absurdity, and joking, "It was going great until now," when the cop asked me how my day was going.
After they ran my tags and saw my clean recent record, they told me I was hardly the worst offender and let me off with a warning.
If this thorughfare really needed a 25 mph limit, why not install road humps? If not, why not raise it to something like 35?
Many cars don't have cruise control below 30 or 35: I'd rather a driver pay attention to the road because he's cruising at 35 than having to constantly check his speedometer because he's having to hew to a ridiculously low speed limit that his intuition isn't going to help him follow.
But instead, we have 25 mph, only selectively enforced, in the name of "safety" "for the children".
Gus
Almost forgot. Soon after that stop, I was PASSED while driving around the limit on a nearby two-lane road in a double solid yellow line zone. This us only blocks from a sheriff's office that's usually swarming with patrol cars.
Nothing happened.
Yo, Gus, looks like my comment yesterday disappeared into the ether; I guess my cell phone doesn't like your blog! I agree about the touch screens, but everyone's said what needs to be said on that count, so I'll point out another misdirected technological advance: GPS in the car. It's a bone of contention between me and my wife: The newer and shinier and the more whistles something has the better in her view, so I have to use GPS on my cell phone when driving. Conversely, maps are as old hat as my hat collection, and the fact that I insist on having them in the car is double-plus ungood. GPS is a useful complement at times, but a map is an essential basic tool for driving. This post makes the case perfectly, so I'll just highlight the point that a map allows you to form an overall view of your path, whereas GPS on the way does no such thing. The point about Google Maps being a distraction hazard is right on the mark as well. (There's also this podcast of theirs on navigation as a human trait, GPS, and maps. I don't listen to podcasts so I have no idea if it's any good, but I strongly suspect it's excellent if not superb.)
Yes. Maps and GPS are indeed complimentary. My main two uses cases for GPS are when I can't remember the finder details of one end of a route, and when I want timely traffic information. The latter was essential back when I lived near DC.
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