Are futuristic cars even a thing anymore? I feel like all the future tech is already here, at least the interesting stuff that we actually see, touch, and experience with our cars. We’re at the point where it seems the only futuristic box to tick is self-driving, and when that happens, forget it. There won’t be anymore car-of-the-future interior takes, other than comfier chairs and bigger screens, I guess.
… but I’m getting way off course here. I want to explore how we feel about all those once-futuristic speculative car features that have since arrived but failed to whelm. The earliest among them, at least from my Gen-X POV, are the ideas of talking cars (pre-Knight Rider, mind you) and digital dashboards.
Set aside the fact that I still love digital dashboards. Based on how well they flourished, It’s save to say the general public got over all-digital gauge clusters pretty quickly. Even when the “gauges” in a modern car are 100% pixels, they’re frequently representing good ol’ numbers in a circle with a swinging needle. And when they’re not, they’re doing some weird thing like 3D tunnel-ometers or I don’t know what. Does anyone like that?
Also super-futuristic when it launched, but nobody (as far as I can tell) cared: automatic parking. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s neat, especially when the car is making an actually-difficult (for most people) maneauver:
Much less impressive: this dumb make-car-crawl feature. Is there also an integrated dentless paint repair feature for when your doors get dinged to hell by the people parked next to you trying to get into their cars?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone auto-park a car, ever.
Your turn:
What Futuristic Car Features Impressed You Least When They Finally Arrived?
Top graphic image: GM
Run-flat tires.
Also the ‘no spare tire’ feature. Just you a can of fix a flat and an armadillo carcass stuck in your tire.
Heads up displays are one of the things that sound great in theory. Now that they have been around and I’ve tried a few cars with them,it would say they are irrelevant at best and mostly just annoying.
I liked the HUD on my old C6 Corvette. It had a G-meter, which encouraged some fun cornering and acceleration.
Was looking forward to them, then discovered that make me queasy.
Weirdly enough, HUD displays. I thought they would make me feel like I’m in a jet fighter, instead they just feel… underwhelming? It’s kinda there, in the way, I don’t like it. Prefer to glance on my tach once in a while and the follow the road only again with my eyes.
My top pick would be voice commands, but they don’t qualify since I was never looking forward to them in the first place 😀
Things I thought I would hate, but ended up liking:
electric propulsion. Oooh the quiet, the smooth power delivery, the efficiency! Just had to wait for the right one.auto climate control. When it sucks, it sucks big time. But then other brands made it work and it’s amazing. I’ve never touched manual controls in my BMW, ever, whereas in all previous cars I mostly went manual.advanced driver assists. I never liked the idea of a system imperfectly messing with my drive, but when they get good enough to not be intrusive, I love them.
Big tires and wheels. My current car has 19’s on it. And that’s the smallest factory option! 18’s fit but barely. To be fair the brakes are large and it stops really quickly. But low 4 figures for a set of tires bites. At least they’re good tires.
I had never owned, much less wanted 20″ wheels and tires until we bought my wife’s QX56.
I still don’t want them, but welp, that’s what size shoes she wears. Ugh.
Auto climate control. I forgot that one.
Get in. Set vent temp to what I want.
~ SOME TIME LATER ~
WHY IS THIS THING BLOWING COLD AIR ON MY HANDS WHEN IT’S 12 DEGREES OUT?
Sigh. It’s not a house. The knob is right there. If I get warm, I will adjust it.
The servo loop is such a parlor trick.
*A sunny day happens after a week of brutal cold*
“hey, I noticed that you probably want the AC blasting in your face. It’s a hot one!”
I never want my fan blasting on high, unless the windows are completely fogged up.
My 30 year old BMW has automatic climate control. But in addition, there is a hot/cold dial above the radio that you can fine-tune the temperature with. It’s awesome and I hate that new cars don’t have one.
Thank you! I thought I was alone in this.
I am quite certain I now adjust the “auto” climate controls more often than I did the manuals ones. Or, at least if I was suffering being convected into a pot pie, well … that was on me.
Yeah – I have to constantly fiddle with it to just stop the nonsense.
I don’t even use the auto mode, because of all the weird stuff it does. But even in manual mode, it starts toying with the temperature/blend of the air.
The. Worst.
I came here wary of posting this because I expected responses like “This isn’t the climate control from your 1985 Saab. The tech works now. Set and forget.” But it’s been around forever and still disappoints because temperature gets personal. I remember seeing a statistics joke that went “Percentage of office workers who say it’s too hot: 35; Percentage who say it’s too cool: 35.”
That’s the real reason for dual-zone climate control. I don’t believe for a second that the car can make just the passenger side a few degrees cooler. But if the driver has the temp set too high for comfort, it’s nice that the person in the other seat can dial it down.
I’ve had it on several cars in a row now and it always seemed kinda pointless but I never really noticed it either way. Then I picked up a new 4runner that doesn’t and it drives me nuts… Not really, but it does bug me way more than I thought it would. In any of my other car’s I’d just leave it around 70, if it’s hot the AC blasts until it’s 70, then tapers off. If it’s cold the heat blasts until it’s 70, then tapers off. With the new car I’ve got to mess with it, then mess with it again once the temps get where I want ’em.
You just need a car that actually has GOOD auto climate control. I literally never touch the controls in my BMWs. Other than the face level temp adjustment – that is brilliant and should be required by law. Volvo auto A/C in particular sucks donkey balls.
BMW has, by far, the most adjustable climate controls. Not ready to jump back into the Euro thing right now though
The only car I’ve had with automatic climate control was a Mazda and the most notable thing was finding out how to get the temperature back to Fahrenheit after my wife mashed button and flipped it to Celsius.
I never had high hopes for them, but powered door handles. What problem are they solving? Regular door handles already do the job as well as anyone could need. I’ll bet if you go to the dealership to have your stuck powered door handle fixed the service manager will start humping his desk thinking about how much he is going to charge for it.
Most underwhelming is definitely voice commands. There are buttons and knobs that are easier to use for car functions, and for phone interface functions it just doesn’t work that well. I do use the built in phone commands at times, but the ones built into the car are useless.
My Chevy SS has a parallel park feature that works fine. It tells you when you’re in position then turns the wheels, but you’re in charge of changing to reverse and applying throttle/brake. It works pretty well for “easy spaces” and doesn’t engage for tighter fits. I will occasionally use it, but I’m proficient enough to get into spaces it can’t, so if there’s any doubt whether it will engage I just park myself.
New auto-parking systems aren’t very hard to use, you just have to be somewhere where the cars cameras can see the space.
I’ve showed quite a few people how to use it, and the people who could really benefit from auto-parking are too stupid to line it up to use the system. I tell them to pull up next to the space they want and they are 4 car widths away at a 45° angle
So yeah, the feature is ultimately useless
Wow, this is tough.
Gonna say whatever chicanery happens with some of the few manual trans cars you can still get. Some try to “help” by messing with the throttle just as you, an experienced stick driver, are also feathering it. And off you go, lurching like a 13 year old.
I was also pretty skeptical about voice commands, and I maintain that distaste for talking to machines to this day. What a slow, stupid way to do things, foisted upon us by a bunch of nerds who wanted to live in Star Trek and not out here where NLP is slow and usually wrong.
Lane keeping makes the car fight you. Put your goddamn hands on the wheel.
Radar cruise has finally gotten better – still jams on the brakes when it gets confused, but the latest generation of these systems has a level of subtlety that the earlier stuff couldn’t manage.
OH! And I really, really hate how my WL Jeep will jam on the brakes and cinch down the parking brake if I try to drive it with the door partially open, like moving it around the driveway a little bit. Look, jerks, if I fall out of the car and run myself over, that’s my fault. Stop it.
And screens. OH MY GOD I hate screens.
I’m gonna stop. We’ll be here till next week.
Sincerely, Abraham Simpson.
Dear auto manufacturers,
There are too many features these days. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot.
Better yet: Since absolutely everything is computerized and has been for decades now, how about you build an app that lets me design my own car from among the features available for that car, and I’ll just send the damn production order directly to the factory myself?
psst – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5dmxBUbzBU
No app, just a helpful salesperson sitting at a computer, but I did that twice for BMWs and it was *awesome*. With picking them up at the factory in Germany the cherry on top. Ordered exactly how I wanted them (well, in the case of the M235i they wouldn’t let me have the cloth seats Europeans could have, for reasons. Sigh).
I’m hopeful now that manuals are no longer about performance, those “helper” features will go away as they take away from the engagement that manuals ARE now about.
I had a loaner RAM 1500 for a day, and the thing REFUSED to back out of my driveway. I had a somewhat steep apron, and it SLAMMED on the parking break to engage collision avoidance. I had to turn it off.
I also had a Cherokee for a year with lane keep assistance that regularly “corrected” me into the lane, and also would erroneously claim I didn’t have my hands on the wheel. I just turned the whole system off. I don.t want to be told I’m a bad driver by an arbitrary algorithm. I can tell by my screaming passengers thank you very much.
I had this happen in an uber in NYC. Crossing a main road there was enough down slope because of the crown of the street we were crossing that it thought the alley apron was a wall or something. Uber drive was at WOT (because NYC) and car just slammed on the brakes.
Satellite radio is very disappointing because you have to pay a subscription to use it and it cuts out if you go through a tunnel, hilly terrain, and my favorite when you are in your garage.
An FM receiver is so much better.
Sounds like ass with reception that’s worse than AM, plus the corporate ownership would use my money against my interests. And they have tiny, tiny playlists. Are they still keeping a bunch of celebs on life support with channels and shows?
It’s a microcosm of the ultra-concentration that’s happened in all of radio. They’ve got hundreds of channels but it’s centralized, so they spread the few air talents they have across multiple “stations” – instead of, you know, staffing it vibrantly with unique talent (the people they *do* employ are pretty good, experienced radio pros, for the most part)
On the plus side, it’s better than regular airwave radio, whose stations now all seem to be owned by the same conglomerate and feature DJs who almost never talk about the actual music they’re playing. At least on satellite, I can hear Billy Idol reminisce on the 80s punk scene in the UK.
I will give them that, there is some good programming. Terrestrial FM is becoming churches and stock quotes, just like AM 25 years ago.
The non-commercial end of the spectrum between 87.9-92.0 is usually the most interesting, but also the least powerful signals.
I think I have every NPR station in the region programmed into my car’s stereo. Including the massive transmitter for WILL. Interesting part is many of those stations have HD Radio substations. That’s a feature of my stereo I quite like and wish more stations did.
Community radio stations, which are the last bastions of freeform DJ-run radio, are all in that range. They are low-power, but you can stream most of them now. Nothing beats them for a broad range of music, crazy non-professional volunteer DJs, and NO F@$*king COMMERCIALS.
The horrid sound is real. My wife had it for a while in a car we used to do *tons* of long roadtrips in. It seemed like a great idea at first but we canceled it after the 1st trip because the sound was so damn bad. Fine for talk radio or whatever, but we both like music and after a few minutes the sorta tinny low bitrate noise gets hard to listen to.
SiriusXM app + Bluetooth. No need for an in-vehicle subscription anymore.
just wait until you decide to cancel the satellite service.
they did not understand “no” and called incessantly for months until i finally persuaded them they’d crossed the line from marketing to harassment.
Riffing on Peter’s example, screens but specifically, what they display.
As an 80s kid, I fully expected once the future arrived, our cars would display all manner of automotive-critical information, making us feel like Michael Knight even when going to the grocery store.
I feel so let down that for most vehicles, the information you can display is basically that of your living room – your entertainment and comfort.
KITT had a light for “ignitors” damnit! Sigh.
The LED and LCD matrix displays on 90s car audio looked better to me than the bland UI design on most infotainment screens today. A double-DIN or DIN 1/2 setup with a good head unit display and a graphic equalizer/spectrum display looked like it belonged in KITT.
Your term “bland” captures things so well! That’s exactly it, it’s like its designed by committee to be as inoffensive as possible.
I once knew a guy who had an 80s 280ZX. The uplevel version, with the window louvers and everything. Sitting in it felt like sitting in the Millennium Falcon – it was a wonderful assault of tech that made you feel like the future was here as a tangible thing.
Same! I loved this thought so much, I bought an OBD2 scanner that connects to my iPhone. I run the CarScanner app and can display so much more information than what the actual car (Mustang Mach E in my case) offers. I highly recommend this for my other data nerds!
Why can’t I pull up/scroll through all of the drivetrain live readings of trans temp, oil pressure, coolant temp, etc like I can on an obd scanner.
I’ve never had a car with auto park, but I worked for a boss who bought one of the first Fusions with it right when it came out. It was basically a party trick, his first week with the car, he took me to lunch and we drove around for almost an hour looking for the perfect spot to demonstrate the feature. It worked, but was painfully slow, and he had no intention of parking there, so, once it was in the spot, he pulled back out and we continued on to find a place to eat
My understanding is that after about the first week or so, he never used the feature again – just demonstrated it a few times to some friends and family, then continued on as if it didnt exist, it was just too slow and overly cautious. I’m not the best with parallel parking, but even I could do it better (I’m out of practice, I street parked a Fleetwood in Philadelphia almost every day in college, but that was a long time ago)
Head up display, or whatever you call it where the information is projected on the windshield. Feh…
My biggest problem with it has always been I want like a row of projected gauges, needles fluctuating, bar graphs pulsing. Instead, it’s usually “here’s your speed in digits.”
Heated seats, only to have them behind a paywall subscription.
Anything calling itself a flying car, because they are not CARS. They are different versions of airplanes and quadcopters. I will be impressed when a car can actually fly.
Well, technically, any car can fly — given sufficient velocity and someplace to launch off of. For a short distance. For some values of “flight”… 😛
Landing, as always, is the hard part.
Take-off is optional. Landing isn’t.
Hell, the guy in my profile pic had a flying car a half-century ago.
Radar cruise control. It’s very vendor-dependent, but it never seems to adjust to or know my driving style. Mazda’s in particular works on this kind of “bubble” method and it relies way too much on the brakes when lifting off the gas would do the job. Nothing more annoying than some aggressive driver cutting across the lane and it thinking it needs to maintain a follow distance at all costs when that car is going faster than I am.
Mazda’s “shortest follow distance” is still way too long for the northeast here, IMO.
I was going to comment the same thing, but I’ll just add on here. On a divided highway, radar cruise is really frustrating. A car half a mile away is slowing down to get onto an off ramp… better slam on the breaks even though they’ll be well clear before we even get remotely close to them.
I won’t buy a car where the radar cruise can’t be switched to regular cruise. Luckily Toyota is pretty good about this. The dodge loaner car I had once wasn’t, though.
Unfortunately in my 2022 CX-30 MRCC is re-enabled every time you start the car.
Funny about the Dodge though, because the last time I had a Chrysler product in 2023 they actually had two separate buttons on the wheel for standard cruise and radar cruise. I never used the radar cruise once because I was always turning on standard cruise.
Mazda allows you to use CC sans radar but it is not a storable change so you have to go through several menu layers to get to it every time you drive the car – it would have been nice to have a dedicated radar-kill button on the steering wheel. It was likely an intentional design choice akin to the touchscreen-off by default for AA / CarPlay – they apparently consider it a safety issue.
Electro-tint self-dimming rearview mirrors. They seem like a nifty idea. But then the ones I’ve experienced don’t dim as well as a manual flip-down prism mirror does. Also always going back to “day” mode too soon, and then not dimming quickly enough when another set of headlights appears. The one in our van, which has factory limo-tint rear glass, never even seems to bother dimming when it ought to.
Maybe some of the most recent ones are better? All of the cars I have are over ten years old, though, so I can’t say.
I’ve never had any unusual behavior with auto-dimming mirrors. Basically seamless – I’ve never noticed them non dimmed when required. That’s mainly on vehicles made within the last 5 years. The auto-dimming side mirrors on the one vehicle were great too.
Good to know. We have three cars currently, all with auto-dimming mirrors, all made by the same supplier, all from within a 20-year timespan. The oldest one mostly stopped working. The two newer do dim — just never enough.
I’ll take a guess that either the patent expired, or some other manufacturer figured out a better way to do it. Putting it on the outside driver’s mirror is genius, especially with today’s badly glaring headlights.
Still, for the inside mirror, how hard is it to reach up and flip the day/night tab? (Goes outside and shakes fist at clouds…)
It’s not super difficult, so I agree that anything other than “perfectly seamless” is unacceptable. In my uses, it has thankfully been perfectly seamless.
Big fan of the side mirror dimming on car-height vehicles, especially in wet weather when the mirrors get dirty from road grime and they disperse bright headlights even more into my eyesss aaaaa!
OH YEAH – I hate these. A solution in search of a problem. And then they die, the goo leaks out, and you’re left with a crap mirror. Prismatics are so much better and don’t wind up as e-waste in the water table. They never dim enough, and, again – so complicated. You need a sensor, expensive glass, electronics, power. Great, you CAN. But it still sucks.
“fwap” there we go, night mirror. Done.
I’ve been a fan overall on my recent cars, but watching the goo leak all over the interior of my friend’s E series BMW was gut-wrenching. That shit did not clean up well, and she probably should have worn gloves doing so too.
“Goo leaks out” is a failure mode? *facepalms*
Well now you got some of the goo on your palm and your face!!!
Subscriptions. Very unimpressed.
That wasn’t on the list of features promised to me by 80s-90s concept cars. That was an idea devised by C-suite execs who suddenly realized they could do something without questioning whether or not anyone would like it.
Push-button start.
When I was a kid, I thought that it would be like I was touching off the SRBs on a Space Shuttle mission. Now that I’m An Old in the automotive industry, the fact that it’s so easy to not know what state of “on” a car is in when I need to scan it or diag it just frustrates me no end. Mechanical keys with modal positions and tactile mechanical feedback are wonderful! They’re everything that you need to do the damn job without having to check the car’s screen to make sure it’s “on-on”.
My 1960 Triumph had push button start AND a hand crank!
And I’ll bet that it’s a really satisfying clacky button that feels awesome to press, not the mushy-feeling push buttons of contemporary vehicles.
It was.
And you could start it with a slight hill just by letting the clutch out.
True
I’ve see folks do that with 40-Series Land Cruisers. Give the stalled one with the bad starter a little nudge downhill and dump the clutch.
It still works, just worse. Had to do it a couple of times in my old BRZ and the routine goes something like: Poke button, is this acc or run? Poke again, how about now? Maybe… Poke again, ok now it’s off…
That’s exactly how it goes. I work at a hybrid/EV collision repair center and how do you tell if a car is “on” if there’s no engine turnover? Is it on acc? Did I just accidentally turn it off mid-scan?
Oddly, the Teslas have been the easiest for this because you just get in and put the goofy little card in the card spot and car go.
My 1955 Land Rover has a push button start, too.
You still have to turn a key to switch on the ignition, but then there’s a huge metal button next to your knee that closes the contacts for the starter motor.
This is the proper way to do a push button start. Replace the last key position with a sweet button.
YES!
Once starters became electronically controlled, I greatly prefer push button starting over me having to rotate the key switch just long enough to trigger the starting process. Plus just leaving my fob in my pocket is great while I’m at work.
Agreed, seemed so neat in the fancy sports cars but when I actually got one I found it sorta klunky. Now I’m sorta nostalgic for a normal key.
When I rented the Polestar 2, it took me days to figure out that the key fob automatically unlocked the doors and turned the car on.
I’m sure if I owned the car I’d have read the manual and adapted far better – but I struggled with the key fob and it’s miniscule buttons, and pressing random buttons inside the car to make it go when it was already prepared to do so.
Then there was the automatic proximity braking. As I’m backing into a parking space, monitoring the rear view on the screen – the car suddenly came to an abrupt halt, as if I had hit something. When I got out to look – I hadn’t hit anything at all. I believe the sensors must have triggered on the potentially suicidal light pole next to the parking space which was prepared to leap out behind me to it’s certain death.
Poles and other objects are sneaky that way. Ref: all the Camry dents.
I had this problem with my rental Hyundai last summer in Milan. The parking lot for my office was surrounded by tall grass, like 3 feet tall, and the car insisted I was going to hit something. Well I was, but it was just grass, and I didn’t want to leave it half out of the parking spot to satisfy the “safety system” so my morning routine for that week became start parking process, left the sensor beep, hit the override, then finish parking.
Inversely, when parking at my hotel, the system did a decent job of getting me close to the wall of the garage, as long as I wasn’t parking under an overhanging HVAC Vent, then it was back to disabling the system to get into the (very tight) parking spot.
I get frontal collision alarms in my Mercedes when I encounter a sharp turn or a particularly dark shadow. I’m just glad it doesn’t have automatic braking.
I’d love for a ding back feature, for the dingbats that ding my car. Whether it opens my door and dings their car, or there is a separate mechanism that does it, I don’t even care.
I’m with you on this one. But they would probably bury it behind a subscription.
If the mechanism for ding retaliation involved missiles, then you’ve basically just gotten Iron Dome for your car.
Ding ding ding!!
Voice commands, hands down. We’ve all seen the sci-fi shows and movies where voice commands are instantly understood by whatever vehicle the characters are in, but the reality is so much dumber.
My car has it, and I’ve used it a few times, but the reality is I’m pretty good at parallel parking and can do it way faster than the automatic system.
I will say that every time I’ve used it, it absolutely nailed the parking job, just took a bit too long to get there.
Of all the loaners I’ve had – I’ve never been able to get the auto-park to work.
It’s easier to do it manually.
I’ve had it on two rental cars and neither one would let me use the auto-park feature. On one I could never get the system to engage, and the other it would error out seconds after it eventually started moving.
Voice commands can be pretty bad. One time I was road tripping and I was getting near my destination for the day, so I asked for directions to my hotel. The car kept getting it wrong, so eventually I swore at it. It asked me, “What kind of Bar-be-que do you want?” At least I got a good laugh out of it.
Eventually, I just pulled over and input the address of the hotel manually, which it wouldn’t let you do while the car was in gear, even though the passenger could have done it. Also, this was before carplay/AA.
It hasn’t gotten better. At least in the Google ecosystem, Gemini has completely ruined using voice commands to Maps. I’m actually not sure when the last time I successfully voice-navigated to a destination was, although to be fair I’ve mostly stopped trying because it has become a giant distraction trying to work through the stupidity of the modern system.
I use Google Maps within CarPlay (so no Gemini), but the standard Google dictation does a good job transcribing the address or location name. That’s the extent of the voice commands I use though.
Siri dictation for playing songs in Apple Music is utter garbage, which is why I just stick to my curated playlists while driving.
Rearview Mirrors that are a camera, I always wanted one till I got one and when the camera is dirty and you have a car behind you at night, the image gets all blurry and it gives you a headache eventually, I have to flip to regular mirror.
Good luck Polestar 4 drivers with no rear window.
I liked the idea, but my eyes can’t focus quickly on the mirror/screens vs. an actual mirror. I’m sure it’s actually something to do with the way the eye works – reflections work better than pixels.
Jason has written some articles about this. Its because the focal length of your eyes at “distance” which is where you drive is the same when using a mirror because you look “in” to the mirror, instead of AT the screen, so you are constantly adjusting from distance to near focus.
It’s a hugely distracting hazard because you’re looking away from the road for a longer time just to understand what that blob of color is.
My Prius has a washer nozzle for its rearview mirror cam. Absolutely asinine other brands don’t.
Soft close trunk/boot mechanisms. When they fail the parts are far more expensive than a non soft close. Bonus points for using a mechanical linkage to pop the boot from the passenger compartment – I love those, they just work.
Just more stuff to break. Like auto closing tailgates. Push a button and it closes. Ooooh, ahhh. When it fails out of warranty? $$$$$$
Voice recognition in cars. I’ve had cars from two different manufacturers that had built-in voice commands. It’s intended to handle simple tasks like adjust the climate control temperature setting or changing the radio. They don’t work well at all. Even when the car is connected via a data plan, it still can’t get the commands right.
No kidding, I simply do not use voice commands on any vehicle. The closest I’ll get is Siri over Apple Carplay, and even then I only do the few things it can do reliably like send texts or calls. It’s a shame since good voice commands should cut down on distracted driving, but the low quality we get only adds to it.
What gets me is that when we complain about the absence of physical controls and having to drill down through three layers of complex menus while driving to turn the heat up a little bit, manufacturers say, “You can also use voice control! It’s so easy!” It would be easy if it worked, but it doesn’t. I don’t even use Siri, which is one of the better systems, because it’s faster, easier, and more reliable just to do the thing myself.
Agreed. I remember my first car with voice commands and being all excited for it, only to be severely let down at how poorly it works. Fast forward a decade and a half later and I swear they work even less effectively on new cars.
Exactly, when reaching for a button would be the quickest most efficient solution. Oh, wait, that ship has sailed…