When I get a new vehicle, I read its owner manual fully. If I'm going to pay several tens of thousands of dollars for a vehicle, I will damn well learn to use all the features I paid for.
TBF a lot of the complexity, like sticking sensors on everything, is because the end user is a fucking moron who'll try pouring an energy drink in the fuel tank.
Reminds me of the video I saw a few weeks back where some woman was putting fuel in the DEF tank of her husband's diesel pickup. The nozzle clearly didn't fit, but she had it pressed up against the hole and was putting fuel it in anyway, and all over the ground. Fucking moron indeed.
Every person thats ever ridden in my car is blown away by the tech features you say nobody cares about. The truth is, if more people could afford vehicles with these features then they would buy them over cars without them. Are you seriously gonna act like if you could buy a car with things like hands-free driving, cooled seats, digital rear view, or a car with manual everything & they were the same price ,you wouldn't choose the tech car?
I'll take the backup cam and the cooled seats, but touch screens and driving assist features can fuck right off. I much prefer a simple contract where I'm fully responsible and in control. Some of the assist features I've used are downright fucking dangerous under certain conditions.
Dangerous? What features are you talking about? No system is perfect, but I've been using these features for years & they've only gotten better over time. I can confidently say that 99% of the time they function as intended.
Certain adaptive cruise control implementations, for example. I recently took a new RAV4 through the rocky mountains, and dangerous is the only way I can accurately describe that feature.
It would slow down when coming up behind a slower moving vehicle. Okay, sweet, no problem. But then, when you enter a corner and the radar loses sight of the vehicle in front, it decides that it should accelerate rather hard to return to the set point. It seemed to have zero concept that it was cornering, going downhill, or that the car that was in front literally 2 seconds ago was very likely still there. For an inexperienced driver, this could absolutely be dangerous. I also caught it riding the brakes down long hills, instead of downshifting, which was causing the brakes to fade. I gave it a lengthy and fair evaluation, but ended up deactivating it and just driving manually.
I'd also consider anything that excessively nags the driver to be an unnecessary distraction, and therefore dangerous. Some vehicles really treat the driver like they're an incapable moron, chiming and flashing at them, vibrating the seat, etc. I kind of get it, because most drivers are complete fucking dipshits, but still.
Take this with a pinch of salt, I guess. I was a professional driver, running 80 hours a week through most of my 20s, so I've had significantly more time behind the wheel than most people ever will, and tend to view driving a little differently. I can float shift an 18 speed better than most people can use their paddle shifters. I don't want or need help from the vehicle.
I get what you're saying, but cruise control is just that. Its meant to be used on highways & freeways. Its not an autonomous driving mode. That's why its important to understand how these features work before using them. Expecting it to safely navigate you through winding mountain roads is a little ridiculous. Like, I'm actually blown away you thought that was a good idea, lol. I've been using/testing driver assist features daily for nearly a decade & I wouldn't trust adaptive cruise control on surface streets let alone in the mountains lol.
It's not that I thought it was a good idea lol. It was more an experiment to see how it would handle it, knowing that I have both the technical and driving experience to both understand the system and deal with anything it might throw my way. I was anticipating the cornering issue even before the first time it happened, and had my thumb on the cancel button and foot over the brake just in case. Like I said, I don't trust these features at all.
But this is all related to what I'm getting at. The average driver is a complete imbecile. If you give them features like this, they're going to misuse it for stuff like that, which makes it dangerous. I mean, fuck, I far too regularly hear about locals getting pulled over while asleep behind the wheel of their Teslas, putting their full trust in an autonomous driving feature that's still half-baked. But you think an inexperienced driver putting too much trust in adaptive cruise control through the mountains is a stretch?
and when they make these cars you people supposedly want...
no one buys them.
The last two japanese automakers with a car under 20k (barebones like you claim to want) both just dropped tem because they sold less than 10k a year of each.
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u/Tquilha 9h ago
Agree 100%.
Modern cars add way too much tech sh!t that most drivers will never use and is completely unnecessary.
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid is a very basic engineering principle and one that must be well studied.