Lehto’s Law had a video on them changing their mind about charging for the heated seat activation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORjiWAjytx4
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Knocks on wood…
My current German car has required no maintenance so far beyond the usual. Only 50k miles in 7 years, so it’s still early. It did have 2 recalls which were free to me, and I wasn’t having any problems from the recalled items.
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Not surprising they didn’t choose a Ford. Which stands for found on road dead
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I do like our current (and first) German car. It runs really well. However, and this is a common criticism for the VW ID4, the dashboard user interface is very non-intuitive. I can just imagine a team of brilliant German engineers determined that this is how it should be, with absolute no user testing done by regular people.
And thus dangerous.
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Unless you know how to drive a car.
I throw less shade at VW and more at BMW/Audi/Merc. Can’t say much about the ID4 yet, but the VW 2.0 turbo is a really, really good engine, as was the 1.8t that came before it.
It is the distractions. Playing with an interface is not driving. Always helpful to have a “navigator” for such things.
I have never driven a W but some cars that I have driven make you click through a few sub menus in order to change the ac or the radio station.
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One of my main wishes for my next vehicle is analog controls.
It’s bad enough on my car which has a few touchscreen buttons. My spouse’s expects you to watch the screen to so much as scan through the radio. While driving. For me it’s more dangerous than texting while driving. At least the few brief texts I send from the road, I can type without looking then glance down a moment to make sure the words are half-comprehensible with the road still in peripheral view. Fiddling with the touchscreen, I may as well have my eyes closed.
Too close to home
Mine has steering wheel buttons, but you still need to look at the screen because, depending on what screen you’re on, the up button may take you from preset 3 to preset 4, or it may take you to preset 2. That is, the same buttons have the opposite effect, depending on the screen.
That’s poor user interface design. Reminds me of those websites where you have a series of screens where you click No to get through to the next screen and the very last screen has a Yes button where the No button normally is.
We have steering wheel buttons for presets, but that doesn’t help you much on a long car ride. Instead you have to find the little area near the bottom-left to carefully boop without hitting another button and then hold your finger there (or hit the touchscreen repeatedly).
And because it ticks 0.1… 0.3… 0.5-0.7-0.9 super fast all of a sudden you need to truly WATCH it.
See the EV thread for loads of complaints about the UI in modern cars. I was really worried about buying a Tesla because it has two steering wheel scrolly things that also work as buttons and toggle left/right, and window switches, and that’s it. Everything else is on the screen.
It’s actually working out really well, you can customize some things, and the temperature is always pinned at the bottom. I’d prefer a manual, tactile switch for temp and fan speed… turns out I can program the left steering wheel button to do one or the other (or a host of other options) but no way to do both.
What Tesla did, and I don’t know how many other cars do this, is they let you talk to the car. Hit the right steering wheel button and just tell the car what you want. Set the temperature to 71 degrees. Open the glove box. More fan speed. Open the charge port door. At first it feels weird but it’s actually a workable setup that lets you keep your eyes on the road and get what you want intuitively (once you learn to do it).
Good Analysis examining CEO pay vs Worker pay for the Big 3. Seems UAW folks have a point.
Gift Link below for the FT:
Auto industry recovery has favoured investors and bosses over workers - Auto industry recovery has favoured investors and bosses over workers | Financial Times via @FT
If you have a pay structure that varies by seniority and the distribution of workers varies over time, the average employee pay doesn’t tell the whole picture. If CEO pay varies by company performance (as one would expect) and average employee doesn’t (as is common), the graph doesn’t tell you much in the absence of performance information.
Although CEO compensation is very visible, the ownership compensation in dividends/repurchase is a better measure of the share of the pie the workers are claiming.
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