Dozen reasons to send car designers back to school

Bill Howard reviews a new vehicle each week for the website, TechnoRide. While most people envy this aspect of his job, he points out that driving so many vehicles exposes him to flaws and foibles that generate responses ranging from "Huh?" to "What were they thinking?" to "Stop the car, I want to get out."
Here are the twelve designs elements that particularly peeved Howard...

1. Space-wasting ashtrays
2. Mechanical transmissions
   
3. No digital owners' manuals
4. Bad PDF manuals
5. No PDF hot links
6. Dumb button placement
7. Overly reflective wooden consoles
8. Nag screens
9. Where's the Map button
10. No LCD screen controls
11. Unintelligent night settings
12. Dumb speaker systems

Note from JN - We've driven a few media vehicles in our day, and disagree with a few of Howard's criticisms. Ashtrays don't bother us too much anymore, as they're usually pretty small and make great places to stuff wads of paper in a jam. We're guessing Mr. Howard's love of electronics makes him loathe the mechanical, but there's nothing like feeling the components of a good transmission do what you ask. And PDF manuals? Who reads manuals? If I can't figure it out in five minutes, it's a bad design. We're with him on dumb button placements, nag screens, map buttons for nav systems, and pretty much the rest of the list, though.

Related: Technology Overload

[Source: TechnoRide]