Don't complain when they extrapolate to the subscription based door locks and braking system. Just about everyone would almost have to sign up for them! /s
ETA: I guess it could be debated as well whether the "auto brake" type features would be desirable by that group. My personal opinion is no, but I think other threads have indicated I may be in the minority.
I rented a uhaul last year and it was mostly analog, with not a screen anywhere on the dash. The backup camera was ingeniously placed under the glass of the rear-view mirror. Most of the gauges were "digital-lite" (lots of lcd/led segmented displays). I'd say if there was a car version with the same interior I would have been quite happy to drive it.
For example a screen in the car doesn't have to be bad tech. But if the screen is where all the controls of the car are located then it probably is. Internet connectivity doesn't have to be bad tech. But if it allows access to the most critical parts of the car it probably is.
Then there are things that aren't bad until you realize they're probably abused by the manufacturer. Your internet connectivity meant to allow you to locate your car in the parking lot is great and might be harmless until the manufacturer starts selling that data to pad the profits.
Sometimes all the high tech in the car might be super useful, super secure, super private, and still be bad because in a few years it makes the car prohibitively expensive or outright impossible to maintain and repair.
Preach it brother!
Throw in an analog dial for the A/C fan too!
/s
I'd rather save thousands on the car price up front with a basic head unit that is affordable to replace.
But I absolutely prefer having CarPlay instead of having to stick my phone in a random location, blocking the view, or having to make sure wires don't interfere with anything, or finding a way to have the phone not vibrate, etc. I usually rent my cars, so I can't set up something sturdy and have cables get there nicely.
I also like my phones small, which makes them less than ideal in a car, being sometimes far away (I hate talking to my phones so have to be able to reach them with my hands). The aforementioned vibrations don't help, either.
My dad's Toyota, as well as a Fiesta I rented a while back, were perfect for this. I could stash the phone somewhere out of the way, and have the map or whatever displayed on the big screen of the car, which didn't vibrate and was well-placed.
This.
One of the nicest cars I've driven, controls-wise, was a Fiesta I rented a few years back. I just plugged in my iPhone, and directly got access to maps, spotify, etc via the car's controls.
It had physical knobs to adjust the volume, the air conditioning, etc. When I put it in reverse, the camera feed would replace whatever was on the screen.
It worked perfectly because it just didn't get in my way and didn't have me futz around in some three-level-deep menu to do anything.
And as others said, CarPlay is so much better than the older OEM systems for music and maps. Even current OEM systems in 2023 don't neccessarily have maps that keep themselves updated.
One feature of CarPlay I didn't think of until I used it, is the ability to plan your route on your phone while you're drinking a coffee or walking to your parking spot, and have your navigation ready to go before you even start your car.
Maybe I'm the problem?
Personally I'm in for anything passive (cameras, sensors) as long as it is not intrusive, acc and lane centering is kinda.... I'm already driving and have hands and feet on controls, I don't need that automated in the first place.
I am 100% or 0% on any "driving automation" or self driving. Either work as automated taxi, let me enter the address and let me read book in peace on back seat, or let me drive the car without bothering me. So I drive 15yo civic type R lmao.
Anecdotally: I and a number of friends have held this same opinion for years, but recently it has changed. Not because of lane marker following, but because of this situation: “idiot in front of me slammed on their brakes at the last second while I was scanning left or right”; the system kicked in and legitimately prevented an accident. If there was some way to just enable that feature I’d be pretty happy.
How many accidents have you had of that type in the past, say, 300000km of driving?
Because you say it legitimately prevented an accident, but this is a routine thing that happens (drivers slam on brakes at the last second) and if you aren't routinely driving into the rear of cars who brake at the last minute, then ... no, the accident wouldn't have happened anyway.
As an aside, trying to quickly search for these sorts of statistics leads to an awful lot of law firm websites.
But that number is not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of humans avoiding these accidents to humans not avoiding these accidents.
Like I said, having to avoid the car in front which braked hard is routine. It happens all the time. It's why the blame and culpability for a rear-end accident is always on the rear driver by default - safe driving distance and all that.
Which is why I phrased my question to the GP the way I did - if he managed to go 300000km without rear-ending someone even though unpredictable braking happens so routinely ...
> What % reduction in these would make it make sense to "require" this?
I doubt there'll be a decrease, if any. A better system that beeps if a safe minimum following distance is not adhered to will almost certainly prevent more accidents than auto-braking, because the auto-braking system will sometimes get it wrong and cause the jackass tailing you to rear-end you.
An alert won't cause any accidents.
I don't have an auto-brake feature, only ridden with people who do. I believe that most of them do have some sort of warn prior to brake - but to your point, there are so many situations where this could falsely trigger that it would likely end up being tuned out, at least as I imagine it. Actually, my truck has one of the "warning" things, and I ultimately turned it off for this reason. The number of "immediate danger" warnings that would flash when I was driving, e.g. alone on a country road at night, made it not worthwhile to me. I can imagine an auto-brake would be even worse that way though, lol.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what the main driver of this is. In part, it's probably a combination of "I know better than the system," especially after some incidences of false positives, and then the general confusion / annoyance with "new UI." Again, at least for most people I know, having an "entertainment center" in the car is not desirable. A simple display for current time / now playing and then a series of tactile buttons is the desire.
For me personally, the blind spot indicators specifically, the yellow triangle blinking on and off in my periphery, are really bothersome. I haven't owned a car with them yet, so likely after enough time I'd get use to it, but I really don't like this feature. I'm not familiar with ACC, looks like "adaptive" cruise control? In general, I don't have the opportunity to use cruise control, except for infrequent drives to some other location. In this case, the manual cruise has typically been plenty, and if I have to turn it off due to traffic, it's usually enough that I'd probably want to be paying enough attention to manually manage my speed rather than letting the car adapt. I haven't used it though, so hard to speak to that. I have not liked the centering, though maybe the versions I've used have been too primitive - it generally makes me nauseous if it's on, the unexpected pulls back are too abrupt..
It's IMO OK to use the screen for the rear camera when reversing, but even for this I'd prefer the rear mirror to have a picture-in-picture thing rather than taking over the screen that's IMO supposed to be my phone's external screen. This can be an actual nuisance because I cannot roll out of my garage, set directions on the phone while the gate closes and then finish backing up onto the street because the rear camera will keep hogging the screen unless I switch to a different great just to get the screen back.
Backing camera is kind of must for US market so I guess it would have to have it too
It's got what I consider the important features - auto lights, auto rear view camera in reverse (embedded in the rear view mirror), bluetooth.
It has very little else smart. Knobs and buttons everywhere, basically no screens (a very small one under the dash showing trip stats, but dials are hugely predominate, and a normal radio display with nothing but the station, song, and clock).
It's a very nice truck - was near top of the line for it's year, good sound system, heated seats, cooled seats - all of it has a physical button.
I hugely prefer it to the dash of any modern car I've rented in the last 5 or 6 years.
It looks like this: http://gtcarlot.com/data/Ford/F150/2011/41459168/Dashboard.h...
---
I would absolutely prefer to buy a high end car with the budget dashboard (GIVE ME KNOBS AND BUTTONS!)
https://cjjeepbuilders.com/ , https://www.fj.co/
and similar wouldn't exist?
Here's some example clever features that I like:
- automatic wipers
- automatic headlamps
- cornering lights
- auto-hold
- hill hold
- tyre pressure monitoring
Stupid features I don't like:
- games in the infotainment screen
- smartphone integration for, eg opening the glovebox
- anything involving a subscription, especially for features whose hardware is already in the car
I wonder if the insurance lobby was the one that pushed for backup cameras, it's probably greatly reduced the number of rear collisions that they have to pay out.
I think in my developing country daytime running lights have been made mandatory for all new vehicles, but the millions of existing vehicles don't have them, and their drivers don't bother to turn them on during rains.
This is literally why I drive a 25-year-old Range Rover.
It does seem anticompetitive though so maybe there are antitrust and interoperability angles?
How about "no subscriptions on titled property"
Compare to a heated seat. They are some of the simplest circuits out there. Apply 12V and it will heat up a nichrome alloy wire. Same way a cigarette lighter works.
It's never RICO until it is. But it's never RICO.
Of course, for things like heated seats, the question is whether or not they've actually reduced the price of the car to account for the additional post-sale revenue. For Tesla, the Model 3 started out at $35k so heated seats being an additional charge at first made a lot of sense, but as it crept well over $40k for the standard range/RWD version, it started to look like a money grab and IIRC it was the 2022 refresh that removed the heated seat post-purchase requirement on the RWD trim.
"Heated seats" is just a piece of wire put into seat, some $1 (probably less) micro to turn it off and on and some $0.1 sensor.
I wouldn't be surprised if even few % of buyers buying that would cover for having to fit extra (and not have separate SKU for heater-less seats)
The point is to find the most innocuous thing that you would accept at time of purchase and then make the majority of customers pay for that more often and longer than anybody at the time of purchase thinks about.
It's similar to the marketing for payday loans. People are not entirely rational actors.
If you could make double the normal sales price of the car in revenue, and the car stops working if the customer ceases to pay, then if you don't mind the occasional customer service public meltdown on social media, then as a car manufacturer you are welcome to scheme away.
As a smarter than average customer, you are wise to the scam, and hope that the scheming of the car companies is not effective on the general public.
Also subscriptions are awesome for car manufacturers for accelerating planned obsolescence. Why should there be any resale value to your car anyway, if they could figure out a way to either 1) make the new owner pay for the car again in subscriptions or 2) make your car near worthless after you initially own it, then from their perspective this is the most brilliant thing they have ever thought of! ;)
Of course, barring legal discovery or a leaked email we'd never know.
Auto loan rates are about 7% p/a.
On a 5 year loan of $589, you'd pay $700 including interest. Plus you might recoup some of that when you sell the car.
A monthly subscription for the same period would cost $1740.
Wordt lease offenders I've seen so far: bikes. You repay it in about a year.
I’ve passed on many cars because they didn’t have a heat or cooled seats and other tech options. The car makers said it’s cheaper to make all the cars similar than to remove heated seat components.
The end game is EVs where it’s chock full of subscriptions a dealer can enable.
Most cellular modems are pushed through the head unit, and most car operations are controlled by the canbus. Given this, you could probably talk to the canbus unit to control the seat warmers.
It would be nice to open physically locked compartments with an app too! And if I could purchase more for my Steam library I'd be almost completely happy with my new advanced motor vehicle.