I am a 71 year man who has been driving for over 50 years. I have at least 2 million business recorded miles plus driving almost every year from Ohio to the west coast for all 50 plus years. I have had all kinds of new cars from a 62 corvair to my current 2013 F-150. I often put as much as 50,000 miles a year on my vehicles and even in my semi retirement put nearly 30,000 miles per year on my truck. I have never had an accident.

What I hate about todays vehicles is the push button heaters, air conditioners, signal lights that you can't turn off, stupid headlight buttons, all that force you to take your eyes off the road to turn off or adjust.

This week I have witnessed the most stupid engineering thing I have ever seen on any car. I rented a new Ford Edge. The stupid speedometer is canted to the left so that the low speeds are at the far left bottom of the odometer and at the top where you normally have speeds from 60 to 70 mph is actually 100 to 140 mph. How ridiculous can you get. My wife has to look over the steering wheel down to the left which means taking you eyes of the road again. Normally looking straight ahead and glancing down at the speedometer all you see is 100 to 140 mph. THIS ISN'T A RACE CAR.

The heater and air conditioner have so many buttons and are so complicated you should stop the car to adjust the temperature. The radio doesn't even look like a radio, I didn't even try to figure it out.

Finally one of the biggest peeves I have with my truck and this car is the high beam indicator is off to the left side of the instrument panel. Again instead of just glancing down to see if your headlights are on high beam, you have to look to the left. With all these years of looking straight ahead at the indicator it is very hard to have to look to the left side.

I think todays cars are way over engineered and it has become a safety issue

 

I agree 100% deer. Unfortunately we aren't the target market anymore. Companies these days could care less about what we want or even think about their products.


You remember when car companies took the high beam switch off the floor and put it on the column, a lot of folks in northern Ohio kept getting their left foot caught in the steering wheel.

 

I have drove for millions of miles too and every vehicle you get into takes learning the position of the controls. I read once when I was a kid that to get your top fuel dragster license, one of the tests was to be able to find all the controls when blindfolded and have always kept this in mind. I find the controls simple enough AFTER reading the manual many times to get familiar with them.


Maybe you don't have the auto headlights but I cant see it getting any simpler than that...

 

Yes but everything now is also voice controlled, press a button on the steering wheel and tell the sync lady what you want and she does it.

 

Until the damn thing takes a **** when you need it most. Gone are the days of having a simple cable going to the heater box that had a physical steel cable that moved inside a cable housing. It never broke and if it did it was a $5 replacement.

 

Sorry, I couldn't help myself

Though I do agree with the speedometer part

 

It could, but so could your motor or anything else.

 

If it did I could always put a pair of Vise-Grips on the end of the cable to operate my heat until I got it fixed. Vise-Grips won't work any more. As for the motor, it my EcoBoost motor takes a **** out of warranty a new one can be had for the bargain basement price of $13,000. Really, $13,000 for a lawnmower engine?

 

I would rather deal with two wires and a servo to adjust the heater controls... cables get dirty... frozen... kink... even dangerous to the eyes

 

People also thought T.V. was a waste of time and hugged their radios for dear life.

You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
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