I hate modern cars

I hate modern cars

Modern cars are terrible in many ways: the constant beeping, constant distraction-introducing sounds and visuals, everything on screens, several screens present at once (one behind the wheel, one on the dashboard).

Moreover, they’re packed with features nobody needs. I don’t need electric seat adjustment. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the manual levers. They were faster and they worked even when the battery was dead. Now, every time I want to adjust my seat, I have to spend 50% more time on the action of adjustment, and I also incur the risk of sometimes not being able to do that, depending on the state of the car’s battery. It’s strictly worse in almost all aspects, and I the positive (you can adjust tilt, placement and height using the same electronic lever) is hardly worth it.

The electric seat adjustment is just an instantiation of the wider overengineering and solutionism phenomenon present in modern cars. My car’s battery once died, and I couldn’t push it out of the way, because the electronic handbrake was engaged, and there’s no way to disengage it. The battery is dead, so the parking brake button doesn’t work. (I later found out that there is a way to manually disengage it, but you have to go digging behind a panel – hardly the UX of “simply disengage the big lever”.)

Screens everywhere

This is normal:

This is a mental illness:

Safety

The common argument in favor of new cars is that they’re safer.

In most cases, a car produced in 2020 is safer than a car produced in 1970. However, even that isn’t fully true, because depending on the type of problem you find yourself in, a much heavier and sturdier 70s car might actually be safer for you. For example, in a full frontal collision, the heavier your vehicle, the better your chances of survival. But in terms of safety “features” and general safety design, yes, a 2020s car is a safer vehicle overall.

Is a 2020s car much safer than, say, a 2000s car? I don’t think so. They pack in these safety features that beep at you when the car thinks you’re drifting out of your lane or falling asleep. Sometimes the wheel will fight you to stay in your lane. Fun fact, I once almost had a crash because of this behavior. I was in a curve, and had to straddle two lanes to pass a cyclist, but the wheel tried to yank me back on the lane where the cyclist was, in the middle of a curve at that. I distinctly remember being super pissed about that. Here’s a machine that thinks itself better equipped than me to drive, almost causes me to hit a cyclist, and then, on a straight stretch of road, when I’m testing if it’ll yank me back to the lane if I start drifting not into the opposing lane, but to the shoulder and off the road, it does nothing and happily would allow me to crash off the road.

Most safety gains have been achieved with airbags, general platform stability, good brakes and ABS, things like that. But all these half-baked, half-assed “safety” features are just safety theater, and they don’t meaningfully increase the safety, at least not to justify the sharp pricing and constant annoyance. There’s like 10% of high tech that is useful, which leads me to…

I want 10% of high tech

I don’t know how to best describe my relationship with technology, but I guess it could be called “high tech Luddism”. I mostly hate modern technology, but I love 10% of it.

I basically want a full self driving Golf II.

If I want you to drive, you drive. But don’t get in my way if I don’t want to. But actually do get in my way a little bit, in some specific cases, for example if I’m going to definitely crash, beep at me. But don’t constantly beep at me! Gah!

And for the love of God and all that is holy, please give me manual, physical controls for everything. Don’t try to make everything “extra” and luxurious. I don’t need that. I just need physical knobs and buttons and levers, for very basic features. I don’t want “advanced”. “Advanced” is bad. I want basic, but like, well-thought-out, sensibly built basic.