In a rapidly digital world where UI/UX design is an art form, actual innovations in car design are few and far between.
It has gotten to the point where many car manufacturers have abandoned good sense in the name of “innovation” that often makes the life of a driver harder rather than easier. Here, we list down 5 of the most egregious car design “innovations” and why we think car makers need to STOP. DOING. THEM.
1. Touch screens in cars
After Tesla introduced their electric cars with huge touch screens that married smartphone interfaces with car controls, every car brand jumped on the band wagon to eliminate physical buttons in their cars.
It seemed like, the more money you paid, the less physical buttons you had in your car and the bigger the screens got.
Having to navigate ugly and cumbersome menus will always be worse than turning a dial to increase the volume or turning off your air conditioning. The new Proton S70 even hides the sunroof button behind the screen.
Imagine seeing an incoming storm and you’re trying to drive while navigating the touchscreen and trying to close the sunroof at the same time, that’s three tasks.
A driver has enough to worry about on the road without having to click buttons on a unresponsive screen.
The Tesla also takes the cake for the most confounding design choice: wiper controls hidden in the touch screen.
This particular “innovation” even caused a car crash.
2. Complicated door designs
This is another “innovation” by Tesla that has been blindly adopted by designers. The recent Cybertruck had a confusing door handle that was in the form of a button.
The design was so poor that Elon Musk had to stand at the delivery event and teach each car owner how to open their Cybertrucks.
We recently wrote about the Smart #1 which also has a hidden door handle that you need to activate for it open up.
We actually never found out the method for pulling the door open and that should tell you all you need to know.
To add insult to injury, these hidden door handles are usually paired to the car’s battery and there are no ways to work around it if your battery is dead.
Imagine that: you can’t even use a key to get into your car.
3. Fake grilles on electric cars
The BMW range of electric vehicles are to blame for this atrocity and just about everyone has copied it.
Front grilles were functional in the past with combustion engine vehicles because the grille provided cooling and it gave cars a distinctive “face”.
Nowadays, the batteries do not need the same cooling and are never put in the front where the engine used to be.
If not a fake grille, you get something like the Chery Omoda 5 that has a gaudy looking face that will trigger anyone’s trypophobia.
In this case, the Tesla gets it right for once with the Model 3 that ditches the front grille completely in exchange for a unibody look that’s more familiar to iPhone users.
We can actually go on with things like using capacitive touch controls on steering wheels, removing spare tyres, digital instrument panels (that often fail), and ambient lighting in cars (we’re driving here not running a disco on wheels).
