In regards to the automotive industry's growing obsessions with electronics and touchscreens, I don't like how in some cars, controls such as A/C or volume, are now on touchscreens, instead of simple to use knobs and buttons in the past. It's a headache waiting to happen when the touchscreen inevitably fails, not to mention it being a hazard due to needing to pay more attention to adjust your A/C settings with a touchscreen. And touchpad controls, i.e. on Lexus's cars, are even worse in this regard.
I'm also not a fan of screens to display the speedometer and tachometer, compared to the trusty gauges of past cars.
The pouplarity of touchscreen HVAC controls has somewhat dialed back since its peak in 2013. The logic manufacturers went through boils down to two key points:
1. They could save money on soucring, assembling, and installing physical HVAC buttons, instead opting to lump them all into the existing touchscreen.
2. It was the style at the time.
Everyone once thought the glass-cockpit car interior was super slick, so intereiors were designed to meet that demand. It looks nice on promo shots that will draw people in, but now consumers realized that actually drilling down through on-screen menus just for defrost WILE DRIVING is an enormous dick chafe. To the manufacturers' credit, they recently picked up on this and gave you the HVAC basics (where do you want it? how hot do you want it? and how much do you want?) on physical buttons. Camaros in particular have a neat thing where the temperature dial is set into the bezel of the vent itself.
Now with all that being said, what really fucks me up about cars is how manufacturers deliberately fuck with maintainability by slowly including parts that are not serviceable by the owner. Tesla is probably the most severe offender seeing as how they go out of their way to seal off every part of the fucking car with glue, or use wild ass DRM measures to "marry" a digital screen to the car so it cannot be replaced by anyone else but the dealership. They're the Apple of the car world. Fuck 'em.
Even domestic brands are getting in on this with non-serviceable transmissions. What does this mean? Basically the manual tells you that the entire transmission is "sealed", and
should last throughout the lifetime of the car. How long is that lifetime? 90k? 150k? fuck knows! You can't even run a dipstick into the tranny to check the fluid for levels and discoloration, which will give you important information that it will grenade soon.
I like to work on my own cars, so I dont generally like a lot of tech in them. Right now, its kind of a pain, but I can tolerate it. I can see my breaking point being hit as manufacturers keep tryin to fuck people like me over, and also as the sum of the parts becomes "the internet of things" within the vehicle.
