Too Much Technology

I’ve never thought of myself as someone who would ever say those three words. I’m not sure I’ve ever used them in the form of a complaint until now. I just bought another car. I’m not going to get into what it is as it misses the point. Yes, it is a leading-edge ICE. The problem is, it’s taken me days to get into the layers and layers of settings.

It’s so deep that it reconfigures the entire car if there is another driver and good luck getting it back to your driver profile. The problem is, you have no way of knowing how deep everything runs and after a week, I’m still pulling into a parking lot to sort out something that suddenly got annoying, such as seat massagers or a third row climate that differs from the front and is blowing loud enough to hear in the front. My dog doesn’t need that much cooling.

I was thinking about it from the manufacturer’s point of view. They want to remain ahead of the competition and keep building cutting-edge features to remain in the lead, however there is a point of diminishing returns, and I think we’re there. I was wondering about what I’d do differently rather than complain.

I was giving some thoughts to my own habits and once I’ve set something up, I’m not going to do a lot more adjusting. Once I have the seat where I want it, that’s about it. Same with programming radio stations and other media. I’m not going to be reconfiguring every day.

What’s missing is the master checklist, similar to preflighting a plane, where I go through the initial list, and once done, put it away. While pilots do it every flight, this would be an initial settings list followed by a sub-list of what I’d frequently adjust. Once you’re through the list, you know what everything does, how it works, have it set and off you go.

Currently, you have to sort through a menu tree and unless you know a branch of that tree exists, you wouldn’t know there was a setting. I could be driving somewhere and not know I had a way to adjust something when it was all right there all along. I finding myself parking in the garage and reviewing the capabilities of each menu layer.

The reality is that car manufacturers don’t know where to go to create a better experience. There is only so much you can do with a car door. So your drivers seat adjusts twenty different ways, do I need twenty-six? Do I really need to adjust every climate corner of the car? Then we have audio choices, and that too gets tedious as we tend to listen to just a few media sources.

I get excited about tech when it’s something groundbreaking such as autonomous steering, but it gets annoying when you’re on a twisty road and lane keep assist keeps going off in what’s normal driving and you can’t easily find the “off” button. I dare anyone to drive it and not have it continually activate as it is. Even a tar snake will trigger the shake of the steering wheel. So, how is this helpful?

I picture a bunch of engineers in a room asking each other what else they can add that isn’t there? I’m guessing they are having trouble with real innovation. An automatic leg shaver wouldn’t surprise me a whole lot at this point. In fact, I wonder what’s not made the grade because it’s just too silly. The point is, more is not more unless it’s useful. If I have to dig into five layers of menus just to know there is an adjustment as I hurl down the freeway, we’ll I’m long past safe driving.

For me, we’ve crossed the point of diminishing returns. Just because it can be adjusted, doesn’t mean it should.

I’ll end up writing the engineering team.