411–420 of 671 posts
Mine is a 2016 Nissan Frontier and it only has a backup camera (which is honestly needed with a camper top).
It has 1 door-key-hole, no power windows or power locks, and an aftermarket stereo.
As a software engineer, I feel much safer in it than a car with more sophisticated computer controls XD
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Wind tunnel engineering. Cars do not have large upright rear windows anymore because a sloping "fastback" design with a higher rear deck is more aerodynamic and gets an extra fraction of an MPG on the fuel economy rating.
I’m not so sure this is entirely due to fuel. A Volkswagen Golf with great fuel economy still has a big rear window and an FJ Cruiser has a tiny one and chugs gasoline. Many of the cars don’t actually have dramatic tapering roof lines, what they have is rising belt lines which cut into the window space.
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Backup cameras are mandated in the US now, so that requires an LCD screen on the dash.
Am in the only one who turns and looks back, out the window? I had 20 plus rental cars last year and very few had tech features I would ever pay for. Lane assist with adaptive cruise are the only notable features for long drives. I did enjoy the red dash notification Toyota has. Totally caught me off guard the first time however, I tried out the ABS.
It takes some getting used to, but once you learn to back via mirrors you won't want to twist around anymore. You do need to check behind the car beforehand because you cannot see directly behind you and thus might hit something on the ground. However you get much better visibility to things that are moving from the side to behind you, and that in my experience is where the danger is most of the time.
I do favor backup cameras though. They show you things you would miss either twisting to look backwards, or looking in the mirror.
Even the 'base models' are loaded with touch-screens, assistive driving and loads of other stuff I don't want.
I understand there are people out there that do want this stuff. I would hazard a guess there are many like me that would opt for another car without this stuff if it were available.
Brand it 'security-hardened' or whatever, I just don't want to be driving around your IT security nightmare. I also don't want you remotely hot-fixing my ride to make up for it.
I think there are people that care about this stuff enough that you could create a brand around the concept of 'just enough tech to make it work'.
I see this problem in other things too. I wanted to buy a radio, but the only option I have is an boxed in android phone running apps and a DAB receiver. I only need two functions, a knob to change channels and one to adjust volume. If I need to play music, some aux input would be nice - that’s it!
I don't mind having a smart car, in fact, I like most of the "smart" features - lane centering, adaptive cruise, emergency braking, TPMS, lane change cameras, auto headlights, auto wipers, etc. But I want buttons and knobs for everything I use while driving. I probably wouldn't pay extra for built-in navigation (it generally comes with other options that I do want), but I've found it useful a few times when I was out…
Mercedes and Mazda have this in many of their models - mechanical rotary dials and real buttons for common controls.
I went car shopping this year in the new market and found that that if you want more a "dumb" car (UX occurs primarily outside of a touchscreen, no internet, no geolocation) you lose all potential for any nice non-smart features. So no heated/powered seats, no power windows, the material of the interior is refurbished from a spirit airlines airplane, etc. I think manufacturers are hoping that certain aspects of the m…
I think that implies nefariousness that probably isn't there. It's more likely a combination of:
1. Marketing/sales wanting whiz-bang features to use in their pitches.
2. Copycatting competitors, also for marketing/sales pitches.
3. Customers that are often not aware of the downsides, have been conditioned to accept them (e.g. they'll all like that now), or are uncritically enthusiastic about shiny new things.
4. Lazy design thinking, of the kind that causes Mozilla to drop good features from Firefox.
5. Cost cutting, of the kind that causes almost all companies to consistently choose to make their products marginally worse over time (e.g. lets not pay for feature X, since the users can use a cheaper awkward workaround instead).
Personally, I think we should have some federal standards for car UX: a required set of standard physical controls for commonly used standard functions (e.g. car operation, climate control, audio entertainment) and plus minimum standards for screen UIs (e.g. touch sensitivity & accuracy, UX latency, etc.).
While I'm wishing, cell modems and other data transmitters should be required to be separately fused, and that the car should be required to operate without annoying error messages if that fuse is pulled.
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It's really not that subjective. Take the feature set of mass-market cars from 2000 - 2008 and then just ... stop. That's your baseline. There's nothing magic about the 2000s it's just happens to be the era juuuust before people started complaining about smart features in cars. * Media controls are handled by swappble receivers that can handle anything from tapes to Bluetooth and satellite radio depending on your pre…
It's like you completely missed the point of Joel's blog
In the car market you actually can get 80% of the sales with 80% of the features in defiance of Joel. That’s Honda and Toyota’s bread and butter.
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I'm a UX designer and I've taken delivery of an XC40 Recharge two months ago, and I've never felt dumber in my life. Don't get me wrong, the car is absolutely wonderful, but the UX is so badly designed it makes me question myself. For starters, I have absolutely no clue how to use the lights, fans and wipers. Just last Saturday, a design oversight (and idiocy from my part) caused me to reverse into another car parked…
I’m having a hard time understanding how “I forgot to change gears and then hit the gas” can be classed a UX problem. Sounds like PEBKAC.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.