93EXCivic said:Stupid tall truck beds and gaint trucks, overly bright headlights (imo GM trucks and SUVs is the freaking worst).
This one hit home for me when I "upgraded" my K3500 from a GMT400 to a GMT900. I used to be able to leap up into my truck bed easily...the first time I tried that in my 900 I almost kneecapped myself on the tailgate
I'm researching lowering blocks for the truck now. Because I actually like to be able to load E36 M3 into the bed.
As I get blinded by the same cars night after night running around with their high beams on, no matter the road conditions, lighting, or traffic, I would love for a manufacturer to make it so high beams turn off automatically when the car is shut down. Make these inconsiderate idiots turn them on each time they want to use them.
High Beams should also with a timer, after a set amount of driving, they revert to regular low beams.
DirtyBird222 said:6) The evolution of a generation of a car taking a step backwards
That's not a new trend, just look at the Mustang II :)
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:As for the worst design trend, I'm going to say the death of pop-up headlights. They're cool, bring them back! :)
I couldn't disagree with you more. Pop up headlights are terrible by every single measurable metric. They're heavier, less aerodynamic, more dangerous to pedestrians and introduce multiple new failure points into what could and should be a solid state system. They were a lazy engineers band aid fix to a headlight height rule.
and the aesthetic front, sure wedges are cool but no car looks good with its headlights up. They all look nervous, unsure, or like rhey are receiving a surprise prostate exam. With the advent of led technology there is no reason to ever mention these travestys ever again.
Also, touchscreens mean I have to take my eyes off the road.
In reply to AClockworkGarage :
mad_machine said:As I get blinded by the same cars night after night running around with their high beams on, no matter the road conditions, lighting, or traffic, I would love for a manufacturer to make it so high beams turn off automatically when the car is shut down. Make these inconsiderate idiots turn them on each time they want to use them.
Agreed. And on that same note, if the car has an always back-lit dash (especially if it also has DRLs), auto headlights should be required. And if you turn them off manually, either the dash lights should turn off, or the car needs to display a "headlights off" warning.
OHSCrifle said:wae said:What about the maniacal push to replace actual physical buttons with a touchscreen menu?
this is the one - if not for the loss of buttons then for the total burial of every control inside the electronics.
...and nearly impossible to upgrade the stereo.
The biggest irony is god forbid you use the touch screen on your phone but touch screens in the car are just fine. .... To operate your phone. With tactile buttons and knobs you really did not have to take your eyes off the road. With touch screens you HAVE to take your eyes off the road.
To me this is both stupid and hypocritical. If I was emperor of the universe touch screen in cars would be banned.
AClockworkGarage said:and the aesthetic front, sure wedges are cool but no car looks good with its headlights up.
On the other hand, when the headlights are up it's dark out, so the car's looks aren't as apparent.
AClockworkGarage said:codrus (Forum Supporter) said:As for the worst design trend, I'm going to say the death of pop-up headlights. They're cool, bring them back! :)
I couldn't disagree with you more. Pop up headlights are terrible by every single measurable metric. They're heavier, less aerodynamic, more dangerous to pedestrians and introduce multiple new failure points into what could and should be a solid state system. They were a lazy engineers band aid fix to a headlight height rule.
and the aesthetic front, sure wedges are cool but no car looks good with its headlights up. They all look nervous, unsure, or like rhey are receiving a surprise prostate exam. With the advent of led technology there is no reason to ever mention these travestys ever again.
AClockworkGarage said:I couldn't disagree with you more. Pop up headlights are terrible by every single measurable metric. They're heavier, less aerodynamic, more dangerous to pedestrians and introduce multiple new failure points into what could and should be a solid state system. They were a lazy engineers band aid fix to a headlight height rule.
I didn't say they were objectively better in any way, just that they were cool. :)
Also, my understanding is that they were driven more by the requirement to use sealed beam lamps, which is a large part of why they went away once that requirement did.
what's uncool was pointless pop-ups
dean1484 said:The biggest irony is god forbid you use the touch screen on your phone but touch screens in the car are just fine. .... To operate your phone.
This is not true, at least not in Delaware. Delaware requires HANDS FREE telephone operation. It's not a matter of where you put your hands to operate your phone.
As the owner of a daily driver with a touchscreen as its primary interface, I think there is a proper balance between tactile button ease-of-use and touchscreen flexibility.
I don't think touchscreens should be banned and they have an excellent place in interface design. It's really nice to be able to wander through the touchscreen and easily make all manner of hyperdetailed adjustments to the car. Plus the accompanying ability to have different preference profiles tagged to different remote fobs is epic.
But that's for stuff you don't adjust daily. HVAC, seat / steering wheel heaters, and primary audio controls should be available via tactile buttons.
I forgot to mention one that snuck up on me today.
White LED DRLs that are also the front turn signal. It looks tacky when it take the LED driver a few seconds to switchback, and also when that inevitably goes out, you'll have to replace the whole headlight housing to fix the issue on certain models.
Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:Functionally my beefs have already been covered. Dipsticks, elimination of rotary volume controls, etc. But there is one thing that just feels like an affront against laws of nature and all that it holy, it is.....
Dumpy trunks. Ford And Infiniti were the worst offenders, but you still occasionally see someone do this (Mercedes)
Ahh yes, the Frumpback! This was the "bustleback" of the 90's, and for some strange reason, it's starting to come back. The "Oval Era" Taurus/Sable did it, but nobody did it like Infiniti did with the J30 back then. And for some strange reason, Hyundai designers thought that now would be a good time to bring it back. The upcoming Ioniq 6 has the dumpiest Frumpback since the J30. Look at this thing!
Tony Sestito said:This was the "bustleback" of the 90's, and for some strange reason, it's starting to come back.
You can blame physics and the wind tunnel again.
I've got a few bad design trends I'd like to point out that drive me nuts:
-Making the HVAC controls integrated with the infotainment without providing redundant controls. This is truly evil. And when the radio eventually breaks, there goes your HVAC too! Great! Those who have owned a 2000's Nissan or Infiniti know this pain. When that thing goes, prepare thy bank account for impending doom. It's expensive enough of a repair to total most vehicles of that vintage.
-Overly complex infotainment systems. Touch stuff can be annoying, but sometimes in today's vehicles it's just easier, especially if the system is good (like the one in my Forte GT). For example, the newest Mazdas have a slow, clunky infotainment system that's convoluted and complicated. They want you to use the controls on the console, but they are less than intuitive, especially when trying to do something in Android Auto/Apple CarPlay. For example, if you need to change route in Android Auto on Google Maps, you have to click over to the section of the screen you need to access and then scroll around with the wheel until the little icon is highlighted, which requires you to not only mess with a bunch of controls; you have to take your eyes off the road for a bit to see where the damn highlighted part is! They heard this complaint and made the screen touchable, but it's a mile away from the driver's seat way up on the dash, so you have to strain yourself to reach the damn thing. On my Kia, you just touch the icon like you would any button, boom, done. Especially evil are also the old Lexus and Mitsubishi touchpad controls. WTF were they thinking???
-Modern dash clusters and overly bright DRL's that confuse people into thinking their headlights are on. I see this every single day on my commute: some moron with no lights on except the DRL's. Today's dash clusters are either now screens or have screens in them with all sorts of distracting lights, so they don't see if the tiny "headlights are on" icon off to the side is on or off. In the old days, you wouldn't see any gauges at all at night unless the lights were on. Now, without lights, the gauge lighting is even brighter than it is at night so it's legible in the sunlight, so people assume the lights are on.
-Likewise, people that drive with only their high beams on because they can't tell they are on due to confusing dash clusters. Again, they can't see the blue high beam icon and they go about their drive blinding everyone. In the old days, there was a bright bulb in the cluster that would show they were on, but now that everything in that cluster is a bright, backlit thing, it's easy to lose track for some people.
Motor or vacuum driven ventilation controls. That don't work. Just give me cable controls, want defrost? Slide the defrost control. Floor vent or dash vent? Slide their knobs. Want some of each? Slide the appropriate one. They last forever and give the ultimate control.
Luckily, I have never experienced touch screen control. Half of the times I am working on any of my cars, I swear that if I ever got a terminal illness, I was heading to wherever and hunting down the engineer that caused my misfortune. Unfortunately, the age of my cars means that they are probably already dead.
At a certain point, the Frumpback, or Dumpytrunk becomes a regular hatchback and everything's OK again. It's just that no man's land between a proper trunk and a hatchback where only fools tread. At least the Hyundai has a more or less constant arc.
Edit: I just realized what the dumpytrunk reminds me of: Old persons butt - like when gramps loses all his muscle tone back there and the pants start falling off. It's an ugly image.
Non serviceable components. "Your headlights out, that will be 3200 dollars"
Duke said:dean1484 said:The biggest irony is god forbid you use the touch screen on your phone but touch screens in the car are just fine. .... To operate your phone.
This is not true, at least not in Delaware. Delaware requires HANDS FREE telephone operation. It's not a matter of where you put your hands to operate your phone.
As the owner of a daily driver with a touchscreen as its primary interface, I think there is a proper balance between tactile button ease-of-use and touchscreen flexibility.
I don't think touchscreens should be banned and they have an excellent place in interface design. It's really nice to be able to wander through the touchscreen and easily make all manner of hyperdetailed adjustments to the car. Plus the accompanying ability to have different preference profiles tagged to different remote fobs is epic.
But that's for stuff you don't adjust daily. HVAC, seat / steering wheel heaters, and primary audio controls should be available via tactile buttons.
I am not sure I understand what you are getting at. To me it is simple. It is not ok to use a touch screen on your phone that many people have fixed to their dash but at the same time, it is perfectly ok to use the touch screen that the car manufacturer affixed to the dash. Both play music, do GPS stuff and make phone calls. Hell, I can look at all kinds of engine and systems-related info on my phone in real time. The same info you can pull up on a touch screen in most cars. Why is it ok to use touch screens that are part of the car but using the touch screen on a phone gets you a nice ticket and points on your license?
VolvoHeretic said:Motor or vacuum driven ventilation controls. That don't work. Just give me cable controls, want defrost? Slide the defrost control. Floor vent or dash vent? Slide their knobs. Want some of each? Slide the appropriate one. They last forever and give the ultimate control.
I'll agree that vacuum driven climate controls are stupid. But if the system is designed well, motor driven controls are just fine. If they're built decently, they last a long time. And I'll take a well configured auto climate control system over constantly needing to fuss with the HVAC controls to keep the car comfortable.
I've got a pair of 20+ year old auto climate systems parked in the garage, both of which still work perfectly fine. The Jeep one is a decent implementation, certainly good enough to be better than manual controls (and more reliable than the vacuum controls they used on manual HVAC versions of that Jeep).
The BMW auto climate is almost as good as a house thermostat. Pretty much set the temperature and other than telling it if I need window defrosting, I often go months without touching the HVAC panel because it knows its job well enough. And that system has also been reliable.
Those systems are more complex than the cables, but a well engineered system will have diagnostic ability if a problem comes up and should last a long time. Like anything else, it needs to have enough functional advantage to justify the complexity, but I'd say that at least the good implementations do. And in 13 years of owning the Jeep, I've never had to touch the auto climate system. Only things I've done were a blower motor resistor, heater core, and A/C evap. In other words, parts that are present and still fail on the simplest of climate control setups.
dean1484 said:I am not sure I understand what you are getting at. To me it is simple. It is not ok to use a touch screen on your phone that many people have fixed to their dash but at the same time, it is perfectly ok to use the touch screen that the car manufacturer affixed to the dash. Both play music, do GPS stuff and make phone calls. Hell, I can look at all kinds of engine and systems-related info on my phone in real time. The same info you can pull up on a touch screen in most cars. Why is it ok to use touch screens that are part of the car but using the touch screen on a phone gets you a nice ticket and points on your license?
Use of the built-in touchscreen may not be enforced, but it absolutely fits into many distracted driving laws. And a cop could ticket you for it if they felt like it.
Courtesy lights - the silly bit of programming that leaves your headlamps / parking lights lit for an additional few minutes as you leave the car. Specifically, GM's implementation where THEY ALSO LIGHT THE REVERSING LAMPS! That makes navigating parking lots and parking garages even more exciting. Why? Why didn't anyone who actually drives speak up about "Gee team, this sure sends a confusing message to other road users. Maybe not light those?" Sigh.
Also, pop-up headlights are the best headlights - even the goofy partial pop-ups like Porsche 928s and Lamborghini Miurae. And would rock a J30 no qualms, ditch the rear spoiler and let the round trunk show off in all it's glory. Lots of shared parts with a 300ZX, so manual swap could be fun!
VolvoHeretic said:Motor or vacuum driven ventilation controls. That don't work. Just give me cable controls, want defrost? Slide the defrost control. Floor vent or dash vent? Slide their knobs. Want some of each? Slide the appropriate one. They last forever and give the ultimate control.
Luckily, I have never experienced touch screen control. Half of the times I am working on any of my cars, I swear that if I ever got a terminal illness, I was heading to wherever and hunting down the engineer that caused my misfortune. Unfortunately, the age of my cars means that they are probably already dead.
I like the electrically driven HVAC blend/mode motors are pretty great. But they'd be even greater-er if they weren't mounted in the bowels of the dash. I know that would take not only a good engineer, but a good engineer talking with a good engineer from a different team/subsystem. (EG, dash design guy talking with the HVAC design guy).
Floating displays in the dash are my current biggest annoyance. Take the new Civic as an example. This would be a genuinely good looking interior if there weren't an ipad perched on top.
rkammerer said:Specifically, GM's implementation where THEY ALSO LIGHT THE REVERSING LAMPS! That makes navigating parking lots and parking garages even more exciting. Why? Why didn't anyone who actually drives speak up about "Gee team, this sure sends a confusing message to other road users. Maybe not light those?" Sigh.
IMO GM does its best to annoy other road users with their lights between the stupid reversing lights and I swear the most blinding lights on any vehicles are always GMs.
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