18 Car Features We Absolutely Hate
Modern cars offer tech and features that were once unheard of, but some of them should be confined to the trash pile.
MotorTrend has always had an eye toward the future. We tell you what’s going on in automobiles today, but we’re just as interested in what’s coming next year, in the next few years, and beyond. Innovations aren’t inherently good or bad, and as we look forward to what’s coming, we’re also taking a moment to consider what we’re ready to leave in the past.
If you talk cars much, you’ve heard the complaint that today’s models have too much technology. Some of that is just get-off-my-lawn in automotive terms, but there’s a case to be made automakers are running out of ideas for genuinely useful new features and are instead greenlighting increasingly niche add-ons with diminishing use cases.
Since we test every new car, truck and SUV, we’re acutely familiar with feature bloat. We polled our staff to find out which bits of modern car tech our experts are most ready to be done with.
Multi-Function Switches
Whether it’s two window switches that do the work of four (Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar), knobs and touch-sensitive buttons that switch from volume and stereo controls to temperature and climate controls (Kia, Hyundai), or some other cost-cutting combination of functions, we hate it. More editors complained about this trend than any other. If a feature gets used enough to need a hard button, it needs its own hard button.
Air Vents Controlled by Screens
Yes, it’s very cool Tesla uses clever fluid dynamics to control airflow out of the vents. We don’t care. Adjusting air direction through touchscreens is needlessly complicated and frustrating, especially while driving. Worse, it’s expensive to engineer—adding cost to the vehicle which is reflected in its MSRP—and expensive to repair if any of those hidden motors and flaps has an issue. Focus on making manually adjusted vents beautiful instead.
Hyperactive Active Safety Systems
Some of them beep at you about every little thing (Subaru). Some of them slam on the brakes when you’re backing into a garage and are still four feet from the wall. Some throw constant false alerts or grab the brakes when there’s no actual danger. No matter what, these well-intentioned systems instead become sources of anxiety and frustration, at which point we just turn them off, defeating the entire purpose.
Bad Blind-Spot Monitoring
With beltlines rising and roof pillars thickening (another frustration of ours, only somewhat mitigated by the crash-safety function they serve), blind-spot monitoring systems can be great. They can also be needlessly frustrating, particularly when they freak out if there’s a car anywhere within 100 yards of you in the next lane. If we’re not going to collide, shut up. Similarly, we need automakers to stop putting visible turn signal repeaters on door mirrors if they’re also going to put orange blind-spot warning lights on the same mirrors. It just creates confusion about which light is blinking when you’re trying to change lanes.
Touch-Sensitive Steering Wheel Controls
Just stop. It’s not high-tech or futuristic, it’s just infuriating (Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari). They’re never responsive enough when you want them to be and yet, somehow, can be activated accidentally just by shifting your hands on the wheel. They don’t do anything better than buttons and they introduce driver distraction. Enough.
Bad Driver-Monitoring Systems
If you’re going to offer steering-assistance systems, and especially hands-free systems, do it right. Spend the money on a driver-facing camera or a touch-sensitive steering wheel rim. Most of America’s roads are straight; demanding that drivers jiggle the steering wheel periodically, even when their hands are already on it and their eyes are on the road, is obnoxious. Similarly, quit grabbing at the steering wheel if the car isn’t in the exact center of the lane. It’s OK to leave a little wiggle room to account for traffic and objects in the road.
Forgetful Settings
Drivers personalize their cars. They choose which features they want enabled and at what sensitivity or intensity. They’d like to not have to reset everything on every single drive. This goes double if the vehicle has an “individual” or similar settings mode. Every setting should remain the same when you turn the car off and back on again.
Power Boost
Every vehicle already has a power boost mode: it’s called the accelerator pedal. When the accelerator pedal is on the floor, you should get maximum power. You should not need to press a special button, select a specific drive mode, or find a setting in a touchscreen. Looking at you BMW, Porsche, Hyundai, and Dodge.
Key Cards Instead of Fobs
We get it, you’re supposed to use your phone as your key, and you’re supposed to share a digital key with friends or family borrowing the car. Making those people download the app just to unlock the door or run an errand is ridiculous. Having them use a pseudo credit card that’s easy to lose, easier to lock in the car, and has to be in physical contact with the vehicle to work is just as annoying. Sell us a key fob anyone can use to unlock the doors or open the trunk from a distance without any additional steps.
Shin-Busting Steps
If you’re going to put side steps on a truck or SUV, make them big enough to get a foot on (Mercedes-Benz) and hang them low enough below the door to be useful (all midsize trucks). Otherwise, don’t bother—you’re just providing something to bust a shin on, or at least muddy a pant leg.
Please Stop Reinventing Exterior Door Handles
That is all.
No Direct Tune
Whether it’s satellite radio with more than 300 channels or a big city with dozens of FM and AM stations, having to scroll through endless options you don’t want or go through a decision tree of genres just to tune the radio is infuriating. You don’t even have to get rid of those features in case some folks like to browse but give us a number pad that allows us to type in the channel or frequency we want.
No One-Pedal EV Driving
We’ve heard the argument from Porsche, in particular, that coasting is more efficient for EVs than one-pedal driving (where the regenerative braking engages as you release the accelerator pedal and brings the car to a stop without using the brake pedal). We’re saying it now: many of us are willing to compromise a few miles of total range for our preferred driving style. Make it an option we can turn on or off and let the driver decide, as is Polestar’s strategy. Porsche, Audi, Toyota, Lexus, Subaru, and more need to get on board.
No Home Screen
Some automakers—Toyota and Lexus, especially, but also Rivian—have chosen to forgo home screens for their infotainment systems, presumably to make them simpler. We’re OK with a little complexity in this case. At minimum, a home screen where you can easily find all the major features and categories of features rather than searching through endless menus. Really, though, the customizable home screen which you can pin multiple features to simultaneously is king.
Hot Wireless Phone Chargers
Wireless charging creates heat, and phones stop charging when they get too hot. Running CarPlay or Android Auto while streaming maps and audio also makes heat. Doing all that while crammed in a little slot or compartment creates an oven. Your phone then ends up with less charge than when you started. There’s a simple solution, and some automakers are already doing it: blow cool air on the phone. Done.
Extremely Bright Yet Dumb Headlights
Yes, this has been complained about extensively, but we’re piling on. LED headlights are very impressive, and being able to see better at night is a good thing. Everyone blinding each other with super bright headlights is not. It’s truly frustrating because we have the technology to prevent it, but archaic American regulations won’t allow it. Europeans have had adaptive headlights on their cars for years which don’t shine any light at all on other cars, instead bending it around them (Mercedes-Benz, Audi). It’s high time we got this technology.
Touch-Sensitive Volume Controls
File this one right up there with touch-sensitive steering wheel controls. Swiping or tapping at a touch-sensitive strip is a dumb way to adjust the volume in moving vehicles. Put the volume knob back and stop fooling around.
No USB Cord Cut-Out
If you’re going to hide the USB ports in a compartment with a lid, fine, but there needs to be a way for the cord to get out. Slamming the lid down on your charging cable is a needless frustration. Just mold a little cutout into the lid or compartment wall for the cord to pass through. This goes double if you don’t offer wireless CarPlay and Android Auto.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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