Five most useless features in a car
Discussion
'Parking Lights' on VW group cars only on one side of the car switched on by the indicator stalk. Knock the indicator stalk when getting out of the car (or my three year old playing with the switches whilst pretending to drive the car) and there is an annoying beep, or worse still you come back to the car a few days later with a flat battery.
zarjaz1991 said:
Parking sensors annoy me. I don't need them. I can park a bloody car.
I appreciate quite a lot of people can't though.
They would be quite useful if they could be adjusted for sensitivity. I can park a car, but in a tight spot, going mental at a foot away & getting twitchy a country mile away is chocolate teapot territory. However, if that could be adjusted to be difference between, say, 2, 4 and 6 inches, that would be somewhat more helpful.I appreciate quite a lot of people can't though.
Other stuff - I actually find auto lights fine enough in a car with DRLs, even though I agree with the principle of driver actually giving a s
t about whether it is light or dark. Wipers are a bit more hit & miss IMO - as said, mental or non-responsive when they should be.Radar cruise is an interesting one. Mostly good in roadworks or when you CBA, but a bit untrustworthy occasionally & it needs some work for manual cars (plus, possibly, when to flash brake lights and when not to).
My own gripes - Seats, design features/general styling that's s
te in the real world and some manual gearboxes - haven't your teardown people bought a Honda recently?In reply to the OP from 4 years ago..
Electric rear windows are ideal. Why would you not want them?
If it is a hot day, I like to have the window open for fresh air - but if I go too quickly with only my window open, there's a lot of turbulence. Opening the rear window means I can avoid most of the turbulence and just get a rush of air into the car to cool me down. if I only had a manual rear window, such as in my wife's car, I would have to put up with irritating levels of turbulence. And I do sometimes prefer the window open to the climate control
Electric rear windows are ideal. Why would you not want them?
If it is a hot day, I like to have the window open for fresh air - but if I go too quickly with only my window open, there's a lot of turbulence. Opening the rear window means I can avoid most of the turbulence and just get a rush of air into the car to cool me down. if I only had a manual rear window, such as in my wife's car, I would have to put up with irritating levels of turbulence. And I do sometimes prefer the window open to the climate control
The Auto dipping headlights feature on my E90 is terrible, probably blinds half the people that drive past and then when I need hi beam driving down pitch black A/B Roads, the system detects light being reflected off signs and dips . Needless to say I try not to use it, but end up inadvertently activating it when manually switching to hi beam.
For me, the only feature on my X1 that gets me annoyed on a regular basis are the auto-wipers.
Absolutely useless system and, what's worse is that they have removed the variable-rate intermittent wipers that most cars have (and that has been faultless in every car I've had in the last 23 years) so I'm stuck with either auto-wipe or manual flick-wipe.
Can't think of anything else that the car has that I don't use at one time or another.
Absolutely useless system and, what's worse is that they have removed the variable-rate intermittent wipers that most cars have (and that has been faultless in every car I've had in the last 23 years) so I'm stuck with either auto-wipe or manual flick-wipe.
Can't think of anything else that the car has that I don't use at one time or another.
The Eco Pro mode on my M135i. Technically I've not had much of a test of this but It didn't seem any more efficient than comfort mode and it turned my car into a death trap when trying to pull away from a roundabout on the A1. I thought I'd broken the engine. Engaged that mode once and never touched it again.
dazwalsh said:
The wife's car has a compass. Utterly pointless in a car. I couldn't think of a single use for it.
I recently bought a new satnav for the bike, the old one shoed a compass wheel on the corner, which the new one doesn't, I'm surprised how much I miss having it. Don't need it for navigation obviously but it's a nice check that it's not sending me on a completely stupid route, or if I've got a relatively long complicated route programmed in it's a bit of an indicator as where I am on it. Probably less use on a family car anything you're likely to drive for fun I can see the point.Shakermaker said:
In reply to the OP from 4 years ago..
Electric rear windows are ideal. Why would you not want them?
If it is a hot day, I like to have the window open for fresh air - but if I go too quickly with only my window open, there's a lot of turbulence. Opening the rear window means I can avoid most of the turbulence and just get a rush of air into the car to cool me down. if I only had a manual rear window, such as in my wife's car, I would have to put up with irritating levels of turbulence. And I do sometimes prefer the window open to the climate control
I had a ZX years ago with electric front and manual rear windows. Pain in the arse, the one I can actually reach is the one that least needs to be electric. Although in a surprisingly intelligent bit of design the left mirror was electrically adjusted, and the right one, which I could reach and tends to me more likely to be damaged, was manual, great idea.Electric rear windows are ideal. Why would you not want them?
If it is a hot day, I like to have the window open for fresh air - but if I go too quickly with only my window open, there's a lot of turbulence. Opening the rear window means I can avoid most of the turbulence and just get a rush of air into the car to cool me down. if I only had a manual rear window, such as in my wife's car, I would have to put up with irritating levels of turbulence. And I do sometimes prefer the window open to the climate control
Edited by RizzoTheRat on Friday 22 September 11:35
Goes to show how subjective things are as a number of things on here I have made regular use of.
Electric seats in my E Class, use regularly as they're memory seats so cruising on a long run I have a different setting to day to day driving.
Cruise control I used regularly just can't on the M25.
Had a Saab and used to use the night panel for long motorway runs at 5am in the winter. Only need to see the speedo with the the cruise set to 70!
For me I'd probably say some of the insanely OCD features built into my E Class and CLS. Like how you can select the length of time interior lights or fog lights stay on for after you've locked the car.
Electric seats in my E Class, use regularly as they're memory seats so cruising on a long run I have a different setting to day to day driving.
Cruise control I used regularly just can't on the M25.
Had a Saab and used to use the night panel for long motorway runs at 5am in the winter. Only need to see the speedo with the the cruise set to 70!
For me I'd probably say some of the insanely OCD features built into my E Class and CLS. Like how you can select the length of time interior lights or fog lights stay on for after you've locked the car.
Driver alertness monitor - no need for it. If I'm sleepy, I'm pretty sure I'll be in bed/lying on the sofa - not out driving
Drivers sun visor mirror. I already know that I look awesome, no need to keep checking
Live torques vectoring display. If I'm driving hard enough to actually need the torque vectoring system, you can be pretty certain my eyes will be on the road, not on the dash display screen
Tyre pressure monitoring systems. Waste of time
Weather updates. I've got windows and eyes, they are more accurate
Sat Nav's. Waze or google maps are just better, making in car sat nav's redundant (unless its app enabled)
......
Things I actually need:
Coffee machine
360 cameras....but not for parking....360 camera's to help spot hot chicks out walking and then I can simply take a photo and view them later, saving me from being distracted while driving and causing an accident
Ball scratcher/tickler - for long boring journeys
Rear flame thrower - for those that drive up my rear end too close - 'have some of this - flame thrower enabled'
Ejector seat - for when I drop my kids off to school so I don't have to leave my seat
There has to be a market for these sort of features surely!?!
Drivers sun visor mirror. I already know that I look awesome, no need to keep checking
Live torques vectoring display. If I'm driving hard enough to actually need the torque vectoring system, you can be pretty certain my eyes will be on the road, not on the dash display screen
Tyre pressure monitoring systems. Waste of time
Weather updates. I've got windows and eyes, they are more accurate
Sat Nav's. Waze or google maps are just better, making in car sat nav's redundant (unless its app enabled)
......
Things I actually need:
Coffee machine
360 cameras....but not for parking....360 camera's to help spot hot chicks out walking and then I can simply take a photo and view them later, saving me from being distracted while driving and causing an accident
Ball scratcher/tickler - for long boring journeys
Rear flame thrower - for those that drive up my rear end too close - 'have some of this - flame thrower enabled'
Ejector seat - for when I drop my kids off to school so I don't have to leave my seat
There has to be a market for these sort of features surely!?!
The interior self cleaning system in Skoda Octavias. If you're going to have a system to drip water in to the car from the door seals can you make it do it when I'm not in the car please 
soupdragon1 said:
Driver alertness monitor - no need for it. If I'm sleepy, I'm pretty sure I'll be in bed/lying on the sofa - not out driving
Tyre pressure monitoring systems. Waste of time
you might be, but that doesn't mean everyone else is. Given that RoSPA reckon driver fatigue is a factor in about 25% of serious crashes, and the amount of people I see driving along with very soft tyres, I think they're both a great idea.Tyre pressure monitoring systems. Waste of time
RizzoTheRat said:
The interior self cleaning system in Skoda Octavias. If you're going to have a system to drip water in to the car from the door seals can you make it do it when I'm not in the car please
Better than having to do it manually with your Mercedes: https://youtu.be/oMVSXi2JgpYdazwalsh said:
Self opening bootlids, either by a button on the fob or waving your foot underneath like a . They take an absolute age to open.
They don't. Mine's as quick as a hand operated boot up and down. I always hated them until I got one and now I find it's actually quite useful. . They take an absolute age to open.Edited by dazwalsh on Friday 22 September 09:57
E.g. When it's raining hard, I can press the button and leave it to close itself - by the time I've walked from the back of the car to the driver's door, it's closed. Yes, it might only save 5 seconds, but that's quite a lot when it's hammering down
Hoofy said:
Yes - utterly pointless for the driver but fantastic to watch for everyone else.
Got to say I think they look a bit naff. They remind of a 90's graphic equalizer. Do they have any function? I sort of assumed they might have a different pattern for hazard lights or something. Edited by Hoofy on Friday 22 September 12:41
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