1. The controls on the 2014 are obvious, easy to find, and my choices are readily apparent. In the 2017 I have to search for them and often guess their meanings. If I'm actively driving, I just give up because it's too distracting.
2. The controls are not as responsive. Sometimes there's a lag. Sometimes they don't respond at all.
3. There are bugs with the digital controls that simply don't exist in the analog versions. As an example in the 2017 the radio turns on every time the car gets started regardless of if it was on when the car was turned off.
UNacceptable.
And yet now the norm.
I'll do you one better - I'm hanging on to my 2004 Subaru WRX for these and similar reasons too :). I go through dealerships every year or two looking for replacement... and keep my WRX with happiness in my heart.
You could argue that’s because of familiarity. Obviously I like a lot about my car or I wouldn’t have kept it for this long! But truly, it’s not that I don’t think there’s room for improvement on my old car. There have been plenty of advances since its time that I would welcome if I bought a new vehicle: improved efficiency, safety features, practicalities like better external lighting, and so on.¹
For me, those benefits always seem to be outweighed by the horrible state of controls and displays and “infotainment” systems in new cars. They’re cluttered and intrusive and distracting. I’m not sure which is worse, touchscreens that take your eyes off the road, or cluttering the steering wheel with controls for a phone that it is almost never appropriate to be using while driving anyway in my country. Meanwhile, apparently I still have to take a hand off the wheel for a second or two to change gear or switch on various external safety lights. This should have been some sort of meme punchline, not real life.
Between poorly designed controls, the security and privacy problems that seem to be rampant in modern cars, and the sense that EVs might be the future but there are still some big unanswered questions, I expect it will be a few more years before I change to a new vehicle unless some practical consideration forces the issue first.
¹ I’m still waiting for the windscreen that automatically enhances the driver’s full view in low light or poor weather conditions and subtly highlights the required driving line through junctions as directed by the navigation system, but I reckon we’ll have that too before the self-driving flying cars are here.
The RAV4 we had for 4 years now - I'm thoroughly familiar with the UI, and parts of it are still completely non-sensible.
Like yourself, before COVID I traveled and rented cars frequently; there are some UI choices that are inherently poor or against my priorities/workflows and they'll never be right. I could list them, but now we'd be into rant territory... :-/
There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible.
IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
And going from lo to hi takes forever, too. At least the fan speed knob seems good enough. The touch screen in general is decidedly not great; it's better than my C-max (sync2) in many ways, but I really like how the sync2 was designed --- they clearly considered how to make it useful, but then implemented it in the slowest environment possible.
The console is awful. Truly awful. Push the volume button within a few seconds of turning the car on to turn the radio off? Doesn't even register. Even if you give it a minute to warm up, it is half a second of lag on a physical switch. The touch screen has a half second of lag and requires several presses to do something as simple as switch from the radio to bluetooth.
1) that there’s no CAN bus messages in Subaru cars that offer GPS time, and
2) that at least older models of MFD counts time by dividing 125kHz CAN bus crystal, where a sane choice would be to use 32.768kHz one.
It’s not just your car, the issue is in design. To hypothetically fix it a firmware hack would need to be built. I learned this when a friend of mine told his is always way too fast and often makes him upset for a moment that he might be late to work — don’t know he meant it justify flooring it but sounded like he was genuinely annoyed.
It's still an issue in the 2018 Impreza. I've gotten used to it now, but it's still frustrating. Especially if I ended the drive with a phone call. On phone calls I have to really crank up the volume (nearly max) whereas for music and other things I have it very low (10-15? The numbers mean nothing to me, not loud). So when I turn it on after a call I get blasted by NPR for about 5-10 seconds before the audio volume dial actually responds (sometimes it takes the early attempted dialing down but delayed, other times I have to try and dial it down again).
Other than audio controls, though, everything else is responsive, I don't notice any lag. It really seems to be an issue with their stereo system. Either it's not fully booted (and can't respond to controls yet) or there's some mediating system that transmits the controls which isn't booted up as quickly.
This means I need to turn the volume up a ways to hear anything over bluetooth. This also means that between starting the car and bluetooth connecting I'm getting blasted by some random radio station at increased volume.
About the only time I interact with the touch screen is to control the apps I use (mostly maps and podcasts). Even the podcasts app rarely requires me to touch the touch screen; there are volume and back/forward switches right on the steering wheel. (And also on the console below the touch screen.)
Maybe that's switching back after 2017, or perhaps you use more of the controls than I do.
I hope to buy a similarly ergonomic vehicle when this one becomes unmaintainable.
(You kind of make an Ohm gesture around the volume knob with ring and middle for up down channel)
I am glad to see other's desire for analog cars align with my own views.
I have told everyone who will listen for a long time that I will never buy a new car because of these silly digital features that often include surveillance capability.
Neither of my Macs have one of these. This is why I'm asking.
And if you aren't looking you'll accidentally do things you didn't mean to, like press escape, or turn your mac off when trying to hit back space.
I also understand why car makers like digital flash: your 4 year old car doesn't support your latest iPhone, network, or peripherals, so you're motivated to buy a new one every few years.
(And of course, old car tech distracts your driving LESS, however that fits into the picture.)
I think we will never see cars with modular digital tech that can be updated. A car with replaceable digital hardware and software won't rapidly go out-of-date the way current cars do. They would cost far less to update than replace. So nobody wants it... except perhaps grownups.