To hate modern cars?

[Sandflea9900]

Just got a new car after having our previous one for about 9 years. It’s a disaster. Too damn clever for its own good with automatic everything. The problem is that all these automatic features don’t work properly to the point where I think they’re actually making the car more dangerous. Examples:

a) Automatic headlines on, driving at night on the motorway, car changes from dipped headlights to full beam despite there being oncoming traffic on the other side of the motorway.

b) Driving along a residential road at the speed limit of 20mph, late at night. No other road users on the road, no pedestrians, cats etc. The anti collision system does an emergency stop for no reason.

c) Car randomly beeps warnings with no visual warning light/symbol/message so I have no idea what it’s warning me about. Car manual doesn’t explain.

AIBU to want to go back to a simpler car without all these magical gadgets? DH insists all cars are like this now. I know I can turn off automatic lights (and have done so) but I’m thinking I need to turn off all the other safety features if this is how the car is going to behave.

This so why I love my 2015 car. Just enough tech to make it interesting and comfortable, but it doesn’t think it’s smarter than me

Boys toys, yes that's a good description!

All the tech I really want is

• music of some kind, don't care how
• electric windows
• electrically-operated wing mirrors (I don't suppose there are any manual ones left now anyway)
• I would love wing mirrors that I can fold in with the press of a button
• auto-clearing windscreen (had this on a 20-year old Ford till it packed in)
• everything switching off when you get out, so you can't flatten the battery
• reversing sensor (I have one now and it's more useful than I would have thought, stops me reversing into boulders etc.)

I don't want touchscreens (distracting and complicated, plus I have dry fingers and they don't always work well for me). I don't much care about automatically-adjusting wipers, lights, etc. I'm not a big user of satnav, though that might change if I had it installed. I don't want a car that beeps at me all the time. Most of all, I don't want a car that tells me how to drive and takes over if it thinks I'm doing it wrong. The posts here about lane assist are truly scary.

I would love wing mirrors that I can fold in with the press of a button

My 12 year old car does this automatically when I lock it

If women bought more cars, the car manufacturers would cater to our needs more. But I'm sure they'd just add different unnecessary technology aimed at women. When all most people want is a car that gets them from A to B.

Ah cool. Though it's actually for when I'm driving along narrow streets between parked cars.

I have found my people!! My Audi A3PHEV has been beset with loads of niggly problems as it was built during Covid - it keeps telling me to take over the steering when both hands are on the wheel which doesn't have sensors anyway!. Hate the automatic gearboxes, automatic headlights, automatic wipers, touch screens and constant beeping. Do like electric windows and wing mirrors and reversing sensors even if they do react to the tiniest blade of grass and become inactive very quickly during the winter months due to a build up of muck! Would much rather have buttons to push and knobs to twiddle. I drove a transit van recently and loved having everything manual again!

But it would be stuff at aimed at women made by men. Like a tampon warmer or something stupid 🤣

Looking to ungrade in Spring 25. One of my main questions will now be, can all / which bits of tech can be turned off. Or rather which bits can't. Because if I don't want it, I need to know it can be turned off, as pp's have shown, certain bits just can't be turned off.

Our 11yo car does both, automatically on locking and you can push a button to make them fold in when you want them to.

Most of the annoying bits can't be turned off permanently, and if they can be turned off at all you have to do it again every time you start the car.

Got a new mini convertible .I love it .But still think of my 2005 Golf that I had before it .We sold it to my sons friend for 500 Euro and he is buzzing around Berlin in it .It was a great car ,very little technology and I never had a problem with it .I still miss it.

I had a 1990 car that did both so it’s certainly a feature that’s been around for a while.

I think a lot of the new technology is creating unthinking zombie drivers.

I have noticed a massive increase in the amount of people driving around without lights on. The front DRLs come on and the dash lights up so the driver thinks that the lights are on. But there is nothing at all lit up at the back of the car. I was following one in the dark the other day and flashed my lights a couple of times to alter the driver. Nothing. So I tried turning might lights on and off a few times. Nothing. Flash again, then turn my lights off and on a few times again. They never picked up on the hint so I gave up. At least if the DRLs lit the back of the car up it wouldn’t be as bad.

Too many people in new cars driving in the fog or heavy rain without lights on as well as they assume their automatic headlights will come on. More often than not they won’t in those conditions.

Don’t get me started on the heater controls. What’s wrong with 3 dials?! Temperature, speed and direction. You can get into any make or model of car with those 3 dials and adjust the heating without even needing to see what you are doing - just reach down and spin them until it’s doing what you want. Easy. I had a hire car this week (Peugeot) and it took me far too long to find the right menu on the touch screen to adjust the heat. And that was whilst pulled over. Even when I knew where it was and needed to do it on the move it was a lot more distracting as you have to keep looking from the road to the screen then back to the road, back to the screen etc. Takes 10x longer than it needs to and if it had a dial I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road at all.

I think my 2016 vehicle is about as advanced as I need it to be. Air con, electric windows, central locking, heated seats, multifunction steering wheel, cruise control. The only thing it was missing that i wanted was CarPlay so I fitted that.

I also have cars that are over 90yrs old. They have keyless entry (no keys needed, they don’t lock and there is no ignition barrel) and push button start (you can also use a starting handle if you like). Sure they have ‘get fit’ windows but I can live with that. Only 3 gears to worry about. No parking sensors but they are so small compared to a modern car that they fit in a space with so much spare room you are never near the edges anyway. You can set the throttle position so they kinda have cruise control too lol.

@DogInATent
Exactly. Turning off say 3 annoying bits every single time you start the engine, won't work for me.

I thought of this thread earlier when my car screamed at me that I was going to hit the car in front - except I wasn't as it was already turning right and the car couldn't see the indicators!!!

I've just thought of an arrogant, distracting feature on my 12 year old car. An up or down arrow flashes on the dashboard to indicate the optimal time to move up or down a gear. I'm quite capable of making decisions about gear changes myself, but I can't help glancing at it to see whether it agrees with me.

They’re there purely for the official fuel consumption tests.

It should be a legal requirement that there should be a base model of every car without all the flashing lights and other "helpful" functions.

Also that even if you do have a car with all the bells and whistles, there should be one switch that permanently turns it all off.

I have a 73 plate Polo. I don't have the automatic light function on (not just the standard one, but the one that adjusts to driving conditions) as there was so many times were they stated that it was a hazard, and it pretty much included all the roads I drive home on (windy unlit single carriageways and unlit dual carriageways) I think this is what causes all the incidents with blinding headlights.

The car before was a 14 Audi A1, just enough technology and like others have said, things like a dial to turn the heating up and down is much easier than a touch button that I have no idea what I'm doing without looking. (The Audi I knew every click was half a degree)

DH and I had a nightmare when we rented a car in Austria earlier this year (have previously rented cars all over the place). It was a quite new Mercedes. Switched it on and up came a screen with all sorts of instructions - in German.
No option to switch language.
We don't understand a word of German.
Took about 30 minutes to work out how to get the engine on - and it must have been over 40C inside it as was mid-heatwave.

Our last car was a Skoda that did some fancy crossing over of the headlights every time you switched them on. A totally useless feature that then became dangerous when they got stuck in the wrong position - helpfully illuminating the sides of the road, rather than directly ahead.

Prior to that we had had multiple superbly reliable Hondas, all with the same very intuitive dashboard. So we got a new Civic - and I hate it, the dashboard appears to be have been designed by someone who has never driven a car, and its bleeping at me constantly. I've been driving safely for 40 years without all this useless tech, I would definitely buy a 'simple car'.

I just remembered another annoying feature of DH's car. It pops up a message on the screen to say it's logged DH in (even if he's not in the car), but the message that pops up turns the rest of the screen entirely black, and only pops up once you've been driving for about 5 minutes, so if you're following a sat nav, nope, black screen that you've got to touch the smallish "OK" button to clear on the touch screen (which I hate using for aforementioned reasons that I think they're dangerous).

It also takes DH an age to find how to change his clock every six months, despite the clock actually being an analogue clock in the middle of his dash, that he could wind back and forward himself if it just allowed him to.