Do they have humans test cars before they produce them or what?

14 Jan, 2024

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Introduction

Living in the city, I don’t own a car. But I rent one quite a lot if I want to go somewhere for a weekend or do odds and ends.

The result is I’ve driven a fair number of cars over the past two years. Probably close to 70 or so. As a side effect, I have a lot of comparison points of features I like, feel indifferent about, and hate with a passion of 1,000 suns.

The overarching lesson I’ve learned from these rentals is just how user hostile these cars have become and how it’s become a displeasure to operate a lot of them. I've documented some of them here. Forgive any foul language.

Entering the car

Let’s start with opening the car (yes, we are not even in the car and I already have complaints).

Front doors

Oh, yeah, there are subsections.

I recently rented an electric Kia SUV. It looked cool and thought I would give it a try. When I went to grab the handle to open the door I was met with a Tesla-esque handle.

I hate this handle.

Whichever way I attempt to open this handle feels wrong.

Do I push it with my index finger and then do a hand shake with the car?

Do I use my thumb and do it underhand?

Pushing into the handle, you need to make the rest of your fingers get out of the way, because (and maybe I have weak fingers or something) it's more difficult to open it with an open hand than a closed hand.

This is not even taking into account the times I have shit in my arms and need to get in the car. "Wanna open the door? Get fucked."

Trunk

There I was, standing in an H-mart parking lot with my groceries, desperately wanting to put them in the trunk because it was approximately "cold as hell" outside and I wanted to toast my buns on the heated seats.

Luckily for me, the key fob on my rental (Ford EcoSport Titanium) didn't have a "open trunk" button, so I needed to find the latch to open the trunk. I looked for the latch in the usual places: the center. I found nothing. After that, I was feeling around the car for something like a latch (still in the center). If you were an onlooker, it might have looked as though I was having a love affair with this car.

After a minute of fumbling around, I then admitted defeat and Googled it. There's a YouTube video that currently has 85,000 views showing how to open the trunk of this car. Let me repeat that: 85,000 views. Even if it wasn't all unique people, that means people had to REWATCH because they forgot how to do it. Now, if 85,000 people don't know how to open your trunk, surely that must have come up in testing at least once, no?

Shifters

After finishing a long drive in a Polestar, I wanted to park it and grab a quick bite. Easy. Let me just shift it into par — OH SHIT IT'S IN REVERSE.

Polestar, if you aren't familiar, is an electric car. Overall, it's not bad, but it's shifter is a problem for someone like me that doesn't use the car a lot. It's an actual danger.

Instead of the shifter moving in a singular direction across gears: P -> R -> N -> D, it uses a button for park (fine, I've used that before), and (more crucially) centers the shifter in a quasi-neutral position. You can shift up or down to get into neutral. Although, there isn't really any up and down, the shifter remains stationary and only takes the direction of the shift. So, there's no indication of where it is aside from an extremely small indicator on the dashboard showing the gear.

So, if you aren't familiar with the shifter (like me), you go to park and think it might operate like a regular shifter. You shift it all the way forward thinking that might get you into park, but surprise: you're in reverse and about to hit little ol' Bertha with her Dunkin' Donuts.

Controls

I'll keep this one short because I think it has been written about plenty. But touch screens are only good for apps like navigation & music and I absolutely do not want my temperature control or seat controls on a touch screen since I don't want to have to look at the screen.

Acceleration and braking

This is more a nit for electric cars than anything. These cars sometimes come stock with the brake functionality built into the accelerator pedal (or at least it seems like that).

The behavior I expect from an accelerator pedal is to accelerate. I do not always have my foot on the pedal, because I do not always want to accelerate.

But that's so 1940, ya know?

— some electric car companies

In that same Kia that had the door handles I hate, it has this accelerator pedal that decided to brake when I lifted my foot off the gas. I tried looking through the settings but couldn't for the life of me find the setting to turn this off, or if it was even a setting.

This brake-when-foot-not-on-gas behavior is a hazard because it's not just a slight brake, it's a jerks-my-whole-body-forward brake. And even more THERE'S NO BRAKE LIGHT THAT COMES ON. Like, what?

Safety features

There are definitely features that I've come to really like in this category, but the flip sides (or extensions) of some of these features have made me want to turn them off entirely.

Blind spot detection

Love blind spot detectors. Little lights to remind me there is another living being that I don't see and can potentially make them have a very bad day.

What I don't love are blind spot detectors that, when I turn on the blinker with a car in the blind spot, give me temporary shell-shock with it's 500 dB "BEEP BEEP BEEP". But here's the great part: I wanted to turn off this beep, so I went to the settings and the ONLY option is have it with the "BEEP BEEP BEEP" or don't have it at all. All or nothing.

I went with nothing.

Collision avoidance

City living = parallel parking. It's a fact of life. Sometimes, these spots are tight and you think if you just do a 20-point K-turn, you can squeeze it in juuuuuuussst right.

But now, cars have an autobrake functionality if you get too close to a car. Reasonable, I suppose.

But not for parking.

Because when parallel parking, inches are precious. If you have 6 spare inches, that's enough to give you the spot. But if I have a car that is being a little wimp, and aggressively braking on me when I KNOW I got the room, it is costing me a coveted spot that will be snatched up within 10 seconds by the next car.

CarPlay

This one is quick. Cars that withhold the autoconnect via Bluetooth functionality for a higher tier car can fuck off. Making me connect to CarPlay with a CORD? gross

Also, I'm not going to use your shit-ass maps or media functionality. I immediately hate a car that doesn't have CarPlay.

Conclusion

And so concludes my gripes with cars. I'm sure there have been more, but these have been the heavy hitters. Part of me is glad that I have experienced all of these cars because I know that when I need to go purchase a car, it'll be an absolute nightmare.