Associate Editor Brandon Turkus walks through the Scion iM's complicated infotainment system.
Transcript- Hey, Autoblog, I'm still here in the 2016 Scion IM. And while I like some of the interior touches, some of the stuff that Scion has done with this piece of technology has been less than appealing. So I'm going to go ahead and start the engine again.
And I had the Bluetooth on before I recorded-- or before I started recording this. It's now off, and this is one of the first issues that I noticed. Go ahead, and hit Continue here. Hit it again. There we go.
And if I hit this Media button here, which is the only button that goes through the different sources, it will try and find the Bluetooth. Once it can't find the Bluetooth, it doesn't give you any option for selecting another source, whether you want AM or FM or anything like that.
The only way to do that is actually by pressing the Mode button on the steering wheel, and that'll cycle you through. But the only way to actually get in to a source listing is by going to the AM/FM page and selecting from here. And if you look, you'll notice-- sorry for that glare-- you'll notice that is there is no satellite radio selection. There is no CD selection.
Scion is really embracing the idea of Apple Music and all this and Spotify and Pandora and offering all of that streaming technology. So to cut some cost out, they ditched CD player. They ditched the satellite radio hookup, and they left us with this obtuse, not very nice to work with, display.
It's responsive enough and everything like that, but navigating around it, there's no button to say Map or Navigation. It's-- you kind of just have to guess and hit Media, and it'll pop up on your display there. Same with a phone.
It's just not a very nice display to work with. It's not that the technology is bad. It's that it's not very well organized. All the buttons work. The touchscreen technology is just fine. But it's just it's not a very intuitive piece of technology, and unless you're a real tech-savvy consumer, I feel like that's going to be a turnoff. Let us know what you think in the comments.
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