Nice outcome! I had a feeling you’d like decade-newer features.
As my mom would say, “use it in good health” (google definition - a combination of two wishes: I hope you enjoy it AND I wish you good luck and good health)
Nice outcome! I had a feeling you’d like decade-newer features.
As my mom would say, “use it in good health” (google definition - a combination of two wishes: I hope you enjoy it AND I wish you good luck and good health)
My friend has had to go back to the dealer 3x for lessons (Mazda). We call it the space ship.
If I don’t get everything on the set up…my engineer husband will tell me to “read the manual”. And I will tell him “show me!”
Congrats, I love car manuals.
So does my husband🤣
He’ll want to sit in your car to enjoy the manual🤣. I would be in danger of running the battery down.
Not my husband. He will read that owners manual cover to cover in the house. Ask me how I know!
The problem with cars today is the technology. There’s too much. Buttons are disappearing for screens. It’s not easy to set the AC or radio although some you can talk to.
I’m shocked more people don’t get into accidents for being distracted. Or maybe they do.
In 2017 the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that performing tasks on a car’s screen took a driver’s attention away from the road for more than 40 seconds. (A thorough rundown of the safety issues can be found here.) With traffic fatalities spiking over the past few years and with no real plan for how to make screens less distracting, we seem to have entered into the type of brutal acquiescence that’s common in the tech era; car manufacturers will keep putting bigger and more complicated screens in cars without much thought to safety or even functionality, and we, the consumers, will continue to buy them… This process in which tech proliferates for no particularly good reason has been described, in part, by the writer Evgeny Morozov in his treatises on “solutionism,” which he defines as “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.”
I’m an engineer who used to work on manuals (creating printer service doc material and coordination of user docs). But I’m big into human factors / useability - good, intuitive design such that the manual is rarely needed. I won’t be a happy camper when hubby and I switch to newer cars someday with more reliance on touch screen (which may or may not have intuitive setup).
Can I be friends with your husband? PLEASE?
I was at the doctor’s last week and I was chatting with the nurse about how low tech I am but that I finally changed the clock in my car - 2 weeks after ‘fall back.’ She said her cousin asked her to change his while they were driving and he told her to just touch the clock face, and she did and it worked! And then she did it on her car and it worked! Who knew? Well not me because my cars are 2002 and 2012 and you need a degree in CS to change the clock - and the manual.
Touch screens are good for set-once-and-forget stuff like user customization. That can eliminate dozens of single use buttons.
But controls commonly used while driving like HVAC and audio system are best left with knobs, dials, or buttons that can be operated by feel without having to look at them.
I don’t adjust anything on my control panel except when I’m stopped. There are no dials so feeling the glass surface is unhelpful.
Except on my new car, I can just say “google, turn the heat to 70 degrees” or “change the radio to FM 90.5”. No looking even at knobs, buttons or dials. Very slick!
Just a quick update. I got my new car today…and I really like it so far. Oddly it didn’t come with the home link visor but that’s a $300 add on we will get done sometime soon.
It’s going to take me some time to get used to all the bells and whistles.
One feature I already like is the auto headlights that are on, and know when to switch to high beams and off of high beams. Works really really well!
Congrats on the new car. Sounds like a fine outcome. Regarding the auto headlights, be careful if you/spouse switch cars. You can get spoiled and forget to turn them on in the other car. Ask me how I know
Or on rental cars…
Hint:
When you pick it up from scheduled service in a few months, don’t be surprised that (check whether) the regular headlight switch (at the steering column) will have been turned from “Auto” to “Off” (presumedly as to not drain battery while in the service bay).
More than once have I pulled out of my office parking lot at night onto a local road (after having picked up the car early in the PM), before eventually realizing that I’m virtually invisible to everyone else.
Never realized that was an optional feature with some models/trim levels.
And… learn now how to move the wipers into the “service position”. ONE will readily “flip up” to scrape ice & snow. The OTHER will be tugged “below” the hood. If you expect ice/snow, moving it to the “service position” when parking your car, will make cleaning significantly easier later.
My car has heated wipers! I’m looking forward to seeing how that works. The car is also garaged…so I don’t usually need to scrape at all. Actually…I haven’t even had a scraper on my car for a number of years.