I'm currently driving a Fiant Panda w/ a manual transmission. It has basically no features. Bluetooth, cruise control, and that's about it. I'm loving it. The only thing I wish it had was four wheel drive, and maybe a holder for my cell phone when using Google Maps.
Please make a dumb car
101–110 of 671 posts
Re: Please make a dumb car
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The steering wheel in an F1 car only goes about 220 degrees in either direction (drivers have to keep their hands on the wheel and their arms aren't made of rubber). The steering in a regular car goes about 540 degrees in either direction (one and a half times around). When parallel parking you often have to turn the wheel three whole revolutions. F1 steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVz6IW_wegs&t=45s Tesla st…
Touch-based buttons feels like a huge step backwards. Have we learned nothing from having to use touch phones for the last 12 years, either that or everyone is much better than me at not missing touch inputs
And everyone wants to be part of that cool touch movement too, by using capacitive touch buttons. So modern! And cheaper too, but that doesn't stop you from marketing it as premium. Try buying a stove with induction and normal knobs. Nope, it's touch. Cheap touch buttons, that don't work if your hands are wet, or greasy. Which totally never happens when you're cooking. So you're handling three pots, one starts boiling over. With knobs it would take me half a second to turn it off. With my awesome induction stove I'm stuck on mashing the button to select the proper field with my greasy hand which doesn't work, but at least when finally half the pot's content flows onto the touch controls the stove turns off entirely and starts beeping like crazy. But at least it's easier to clean than haptic controls.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#103I didn't think it bothered me until I read this and then thought of the biggest gripe with my Skoda Octavia and that is when the auto-start doesn't start in traffic and I end up on the receiving end of the beeping of obstructed drivers!
The specialist garage doesn't know what's wrong and I don't hold out much more hope for the main dealer who should know best but I've met people who work at main dealers.
What is annoying is that it seems to try to start and sometimes immediately stops like a stall. If you press the brake and let ago, it will try again but after this it tells you to restart the car so you have to move the transmission back to park, turn the key with your foot on the brake and then move back to drive to pull away. As you can imagine, this takes longer than it takes for the person behind to beep their horn. It makes it worse because I am usually looking down when it all kicks off so the people think I am not paying attention.
I can disable the auto-stop but it gets enabled when you go into Eco-mode so you have to remember this in traffic before the panic begins.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#104Hear hear. I sold my old 2004 Skoda Fabia (which for Americans has the technology of a 2000 VW golf), since repairs were costing more and the car sharing here in Amsterdam is really becoming reliable for the few times I need a car. Recently I rented a car for a ski trip, a recent Jeep Renegade, oh my lord. It was constantly trying to take the controls from me (god forbid you change lanes without signaling on a totall…
I've had this experience with rental cars recently. It's terrifying! I usually spend half an hour in the parking lot sifting through menus turning off all the warnings I can find. I like Skodas. Although a Czech friend told me that Skoda in Czech is a car name, a common surname, and a casual term for "idiot".
I love my 2014 Skoda. It is the most boring car I have ever owned. It just does exactly what I want every time without fail and is never 'surprising' or 'interesting' or 'fun'.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#105Re: Please make a dumb car
#106After years of driving a several Mercedes E-Class cars, I now drive a 2004 Jeep Cherokee (not the 'Grand Cherokee'... In the US my Jeep is called the Liberty). It's very basic compared to my Mercs, but oddly I enjoy driving it more - and I'm not one of those 'love cars, love to drive' people. I relate to the point in the article about fancy screens; In my Jeep I fitted a very cheap (£30) Chinese radio head unit. It h…
I once bought such a Bluetooth radio.
It cost me over 300€ (new starter, new battery) to finally figure out myself that the cheap Chinese radio was draining my battery and preventing my car to start. Sometimes I had to turn the key 30 times (with a full battery) to start the car.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#107I'm currently driving a Fiant Panda w/ a manual transmission. It has basically no features. Bluetooth, cruise control, and that's about it. I'm loving it. The only thing I wish it had was four wheel drive, and maybe a holder for my cell phone when using Google Maps.
I hate my panda mostly because the built in radio is only displaying directory names for the far majority of my music collection.
I wasn't aware that 16000$ worth of car comes with the music hardware straight out of the 90s
Mine is 4 wheel and came with a mobile holder. So there is that :)
Re: Please make a dumb car
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went with WebOS, so far the best of them, meaning the less painfull one.
WebOS is by far the least painful, but by no means good. You can disable some of the crap, but still it occasionally injects ads and other crap on top of the broadcast. Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid .
I learned to live with it, considering how bad the Android TV alternative is.
It has become really hard to get a proper dumb TV, if they aren't using the well known OSes, they bundle some custom firmware that also pretends to be smart anyway, most likely using some FOSS POSIX OS.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#109That's exactly why I love my ten year old BMW 1 series as someone who works with computers all day. It's not that old that it's terribly unreliable, ugly and drives bad. It's just a modern car with no extras and awesome driving performance. No screens besides two, small, orange LCDs, analogue gauges, a stick shift, a big not too powerful engine for such a small car and the best steering I ever experienced.
My mountain bike is even better. Nothing electronic at all and only mechanical things I can fix myself. I love working on it more than on code sometimes.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#110Same with TVs, please. I can't find a single OLED on the market that doesn't have Android or some shitty Samsung OS installed on it.
Agreed. I recommend Roku TVs - at least the UX is simple and it doesn't spy on you or show you ads.
If you have a Roku TV, I would urge you to set up a pi hole to see how many queries it sends out. Mine blocks upwards of 10 per minute.