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
I’ve been disappointed by every vehicle I’ve driven with auto high beam headlights. I don’t know if it was just the situation or what but I’ve never had a good experience. I’ve found that they are oversensitive when dimming the headlights but slow to go back to high beams. I disabled them after a week on my Maverick Hybrid. I can do a much better job myself, thankyouverymuch.
Agreed. When luxury cars started coming out with auto high beams, I was so excited! But in reality I am so often frustrated with its decision making that I switch back to manual control.
My current car’s auto high beams have a nasty habit of flashing the high beams in a situation where a human could see the next car coming in the distance and would never turn them on. Also, because the oncoming car’s headlights have to be visible for the car to recognize them, AHB kill the art of dimming before that car rounds the corner ahead.
Those were definitely more hassle than they were worth. Managing the high beams manually, it’s not like I wait until the last legal foot before I dip them to low beams, but the moment I’m past the oncoming vehicle, I’m back on high. On auto, they were pretty unpredictable. Much like rain-sensing wipers. I dislike those too.
Modern cars, just about everything.
But going back to the early 90s, when GM started putting ABS on standard level cars like the Corsica. I drove a few. It wasn’t a quick stopping system like we know it now. Felt more like the car was having an orgasm.
That was often due to the low rolling resistance tires that were still a rather new thing at the time, and the tread patterns and rubber compounds weren’t really all that well sorted. Basically very hard rubber and a tread very biased to the direction of travel; not a lot that would squeeze crosswise for a bit more grip and friction on braking.
You’d hit the bakes, the tires would lose grip almost instantly, the ABS would cut in aggressively, the slip would stop but then come right back as the ABS let up so it would cut right back in — lather, rinse, repeat, until the car came to stop marginally shorter than it would without ABS.
On the other hand, it was ridiculously easy to chirp the front tires with those even with an Iron Duke under the hood…
A Corsica LTZ or later Z52 had proper tires and would stop on a dime with the ABS barely clicking as long as the road surface was clean and free of stones or dust/sand. I know; I owned one and found that if emergency braking was required in traffic, it was best to dive for the shoulder to slow or stop because the car behind me wasn’t going to stop as fast as I could. I exchanged sheepish waves with other drivers who were suddenly off my driver-side window a few times.
Every single fucking one of them. None are worth the hype. None do anything better than the human form.
Air-cooled seats. I like bun warmers. But cooling fans in the seats have to run so fast that they become audible and then I’m “what the heck is that sound?” And for me, at least, they just don’t cool that much.
I’m with the HUDs are useless (especially while wearing polarized sunglasses) crowd. And I will never own another car with run-flat tires.
Rain-sensing wipers have been more of a miss than a hit in my experience.
10-speed automatics annoy me more than a CVT.
To not be all negative, I do like:
I realize that a lot of the “likes” have been around for a while, but it took years for them to trickle down to the price range of cars I’ll buy.
re: cooled seats
The first time I had experienced cooled seats was in my buddy’s 2011 Ram 1500 Sport. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the seats suck the air in instead of blowing it out. Of course he used this discovery to crop dust the helpless passengers every chance he got.
IMO, the cooled seats were amazing in the swampy Florida summers. I’m poor so none of my vehicles have had cooled seats.
I was in swampy SE Texas while driving an MDX with this “feature.” I was underwhelmed. Maybe the Ram’s were better.
Do cooled seats have any appreciable impact on mileage by reducing the need to run the AC?
Since they didn’t seem to do much for me, I didn’t raise the temperature on the AC. If anything, there might be a slight increase in parasitic drag for the alternator to supply the current for the in-seat fans.
Voice commands.
Voice commands- too cumbersome to remember the order of the commands.
self parking- used it once; don’t trust it.
heads up display- bought a lightly used car that has it. 99% of the time, I ignore it. It’s not even distracting… I just look at the instruments instead.
It has to be voice controls for me, and that’s kind of sad because it’s definitely a technology that excites me in theory only to spectacularly let me down in nearly all aspects of my life. The bespoke systems in automobiles are especially bad because they increase my cognitive load as I struggle to assemble the magical word salad each car might be expecting. Siri on my iPhone sucks too, but at least it’s a consistent devil I know so I can coax CarPlay to lumber along as something that I can tolerate within the confines of its limited capabilities.
Generally, I’d say basically every high-tech attempt to sidestep using good old buttons, knobs, and levers has been a regression in utility and driver enjoyment. Touchscreen controls for nearly all functions, haptic controls, and voice controls are worse for most things. However…
Probably the most capital H hateful alternative input method I’ve ever encountered is BMW Gesture Control. I rented a 530i xDrive a few years ago and was repeatedly caught off guard by this “feature.” My road trip companion tended to talk with his hands and let my tell you, I DO NOT recommend having your tunes spontaneously go full volume as you blast up I-95 in the middle of the night. The final insult was once we figured out what was going on we could not reliably control the interface as intended even when we went full RTFM. I went from “this is a perfectly cromulent German sedan” to “they want almost $70k for this 4-cylinder shitheap??” in a matter of minutes. Maybe if an Italian automaker invented gesture controls things would’ve turned out differently. The only reason I didn’t nominate this UX abomination is because somehow the gods are merciful and this hasn’t become some widespread automotive tech trend.
Camera monitor rear view mirrors. Was excited to try one in a rental Escalade, but realized that my eyes had to focus from far away to close up and then back to far away every time I wanted to glance at it. Unexpected and made it a huge pain to use. No thanks!
Agree. A friend just bought a car with it. Every time I looked at the mirror I swear I could feel my eyes cross. Hated it. I kept my mouth shut.
Voice commands. None of them have been anything like KITT.
The fact that many rear view cameras still have shitty resolution, tells you everything about the future that never was.
The heads-up display makes me carsick.
I turned it off after a week and never used it again.
Voice alerts instead of dings and chimes, though I’d love to have the old Chrysler one in my truck.
The Maxima one we had got super annoying really quick “the door is ajar….the door is ajar…..the door is ajar….” ad nauseum, I get it! The door is open, also why can’t you say open???
Chrysler’s was better “Don’t forget your key”, followed by dings after playing once. But still.
Oh also new voice interaction still sucks for being in the future now.
Your door is a jar!
I do like having multiple chimes/alarms for doors/keys/lights. My old Cherokee had one analog buzzer for everything and you had to check all the potentials, which added a few seconds every time you left the car with the keys in or lights on. On the other hand, it saved you a few seconds when you got in and heard the buzzer struggling to make a noise. You knew that it wasn’t even worth turning the key before you got out the jumper cables…. which wasn’t a terribly rare occurrence.
Funny you should mention that, because I hate the all-digital dash in my truck. Not only is it buggy (sometimes UI elements just don’t show up, which is a problem when the missing element is the speedometer) which is a thing that rarely happened with analog clusters, but it’s also poorly designed. The tick marks on the speedo gauge are so far apart that trying to drive any speed not an even multiple of 20 requires quite a lot of estimation and guesswork. It forces me to use the digital number speedo instead, which I don’t like for other reasons.
There may be better all-digital dashes out there that I would be happy with, but I suspect this is another case of people tolerating shitty functionality because it looks pretty.
Being able to talk to your vehicle and have it respond.
It seemed so futuristic and cool in Knight Rider.
Screens everywhere!!! Sure it looks sleek and futuristic in some cars, but physical buttons are much more practical when you’re driving. (Although I did enjoy being able to change the appearance of the gauge panel on the Chevy Trax I rented last year.)
And I don’t recall anyone actually asking for them, but automatic seatbelts were awful…and the lap belt still had to be secured manually, so they couldn’t even benefit the people who claimed to ‘forget’ their seatbelt.
Don’t get me wrong, I love well intentioned people, saving the planet, biosphere etc. but vegan leather tastes like crap and I’m pretty sure it has zero nutritional value. This is definitely just another big oil conspiracy to greenwash with their vinyl.
Also XPEL. Really? How did that ever work out? 😉
Keyless Entry. Probably more to the point the elimination of keyholes and forced keyless entry/pushbutton starting. This was more to the point with regard to cost to replace one of these keys, but also due to a stranding in the winter in a previous daily driver Passat.
I had to use a car with an actual key and it was a pain in the ass to find it in my purse to unlock the car. Reminds me of the days when us ladies would get our keys in advance and thread them between our fingers like brass knuckles before walking across the parking lot.
See, so its unsafe for the ladies now!
I was really excited for adaptive suspension as a concept, but all it’s done is allow companies to sell performance cars that handle poorly on the road and ride awful on track, so you have to pick one of the two for backroad driving.
I also thought torque vectoring was going to be awesome, but it’s always either a standard LSD with an electronic controller or brake-grabbing, both of which end up being less predictable than a basic mechanical LSD.
Lastly, I was downright lied to about all the half-assed pretenders to the vacant Lancer Evolution throne, empty promises of amazing AWD systems that can send 75-100% of power to the rear and enable real WRC-esque activities, only to find out it’s a coupling just like every other FWD-based system. The Focus RS, Golf R, CLA35, RS3, “m”235i xDrive, GR Yaris/Corolla, none of them have a center differential like the Evo did, and anyone who’s driven a WRX, Evo or Celica GT-Four in anger can attest that one component makes ALL the difference.
While I’ve never piloted one of those, I just wanna say “Preach, brother/sister”
I know the 3.3 T Genesis G70 does have the Drift mode option where you turn Traction Control off and stability control to enable 100% to the rear for Drift mode. just saying.
That’s a RWD-based system, quite a different beast (and in a different size category/price point), and it’s a similar concept, just the opposite so it’s RWD until slipping, then it engages the front wheels through a coupling.
looks like a proper Transfer case under there, but I am not sure if it a hydraulic coupling or a clutch type system like other AWD systems that are full time AWD.
A transfer case is a coupling, these systems are as good as a 4×4 (ground clearance and front/rear lockers notwithstanding), but they just don’t have the mid-corner behavior of a full-time AWD system, because while they can be RWD one moment and 4WD the next, they don’t have a consistent front/rear torque bias like a true differential. Mind you, coupling-based systems can be very quick and very good at getting you up an icy hill, they just don’t behave like a differential.
I think the easiest way to put it is that if you perform a certain set of actions in a Lancer Evolution, the resulting behavior will be exactly the same as Tommi Makinen’s WRC car, just slower, but a coupling-based car behaves differently and demands a different driving approach.
I was ready to flay your for your opinion on Torque vectoring, then you called out how good the evo was…yeah 🙁
Torque vectoring was amazing, futuristic stuff until the manufacturers spent 2 decades pouring their heart and soul into researching the bare minimum that could legally be labeled “torque vectoring”, and that’s what most of the market gets.
The Evolution is immune to all criticism, no matter how many AE86’s get pit-manoeuvered.
“Automatic “ seatbelts
Not really answering the question, but when I first got my ’24 Mazda3 I always used the dash setting that displays your speed above an image of the car indicating if someone is in your blindspot, you are centered in the lane correctly and if you are following roo closely to the car ahead. Then I started the ground portion of flight training and since many smaller airplanes have analog gauges, I thought that I should use the analog setting to maintain my ability to read dials. To my shock, I actually had trouble reading them at first. Now I use the fake analog setting on two lane roads and the other setting on multi-lane roads only.
I feel like futurist views have gotten significantly less fun as time goes on. One example I can think of is the humble Raygun. We have lasers nowadays, they’re great for shooting down mylar balloons, but almost every sci-fi franchise has abandoned the blasters and phasers for 7.62 NATO. And it mostly seems less hopeful and more depressing. Or, if it’s a more explorey than shooty thing, is relatively realistic, at least to current theory, and comes off less wondrous and more nerdy to me.
I kinda feel the same way about car features. Digidashes are that ’80s “Future is now!” Kind of sci-fi fun. Even the fully analog Chevy S10 dash imitated digital displays in some model years. It’s goofy, but it looks cool. The modern glass cockpit is way higher resolution but not nearly as fun. Even the future grew up. At the same time, I see why. All those fun graphics are hard to read. Even modern glass dashes can suffer from UI clutter. Then there’s the hideaway electric door handles, the assists and warnings…
Who sucked all the fun and whimsy out of the future? And why, still, does nothing work?
Raygun deserved better in the Olympics.
Fun and whimsy are locked behind a subscription now 😛
Head Up Display is a complete waste of money.
The nagging voice of the car reminding me to “please depress the brake pedal in order to release the parking brake”. I want to shoot the dashboard every time I hear that goddamned thing.
But your door is still a jar.
I think the fact that the image used in the Lead STILL looks futuristic says a lot about our current reality.
My fancy truck has a few.
My Comma 4 comes this week for the truck (I ordered it toward the end of December) so I’m hoping that impresses me rather than disappoints, but I’ll have to play around with it for a bit. I’m really looking forward to having that for a 2400 mile round trip pulling the camper this summer to North Dakota. Pulling a camper is much more fatiguing than just driving, so having something to keep me in the lane with the hands off the wheel sounds so cool. Plus it may help get the wife comfortable with towing the trailer. It was expensive, but there’s no monthly fee, so overall it’s so much cheaper than all the other Level 2 ADAS systems and it’s supposed to be better than Super cruise, but a bit behind Tesla. I just want it for the long, boring highway runs.
I’ve got a friend in Montreal that spent months training a Comma Ai system in his Jetta, and was almost happy with it for his daily commute to work. This was like 6 (ack!) years ago, so I’m sure it’s gotten better by now. Hope it works out for you!
I may reach out to the crew here and see if they want to do a Comma 4 review once I’ve had it for a bit. It’s such an interesting product. American designed and manufactured (including the boards) with open source software and a skeleton crew of like 30-35 people. It’s up to being officially supported on like 250 models now. The 4 that came out late last year looks to be a lot more consumer ready than their previous models. It’s down to just $999 now, including a vehicle specific harness, and there’s no monthly fees like the auto companies that are charging $45-90 a month for similar or less performance.
I’d be interested in learning more about this. Last week a thread about self-driving had me thinking “we’ve had adaptive cruise control and lane keeping for more than a couple decades now” so after your comment, my “WTF is a Comma 4?” reaction led me to learn that somebody’s selling a plug-in device that integrates ADAS functions into a unit performing driving tasks. That’s a pretty big deal and quite a surprise.
Get ready for the flamethrowers to come out, though. Expect people to object to the random deployment of smartphone-priced gizmos that “drive your car” and were developed by a startup with fewer than three dozen people (US translation: bold entrepreneurs; UK translation: blokes in a shed).
Yeah, I can’t even remember where I found out about it, but I think the Comma 4 is the start of the move from product for super nerds to product for nerds and maybe some regular consumers. I’m a person who loves to drive and needs to have at least 1 stick shift car in the fleet, but I also hate mind-numbing drives on the interstate for hours upon hours, or sitting in traffic jams. We have a Super Cruise trial on our Bolt right now and it’s pretty nice once you get used to it, but I hate monthly fees on everything and I don’t know that it’s worth $39.99 a month for it for a car that only has a 230 mile electric range. But a one time purchase for a device that keeps getting better with every software release is a much better option. Just not having to keep the car centered in the lane is more of a load off your brain than you realize. It still monitoring you to make sure you are paying attention and alerting you when you need to take control, just like the major systems.
The name of the company is Comma AI for those interested in checking it out further, or if you need in depth info, the videos on YouTube from their “CommaCon” last year go really deep into the product.
The open-source aspect of it is both interesting and a bit concerning. Opting out of manufacturers’ subscription demands to access features your car already has seems great, while allowing tinkerers access to them gives me pause. I tend to trust the practicing nerds but fear the wannabe ones.
Recent talk about self-driving tech in the comments here has me checking my assumptions and reservations about its broadening implementation. It’s a bit like my biases in terms of media: I trust heavily vetted products like newspapers and Waymo, but acknowledge that established models are being replaced with things like social media and this Comma platform. A lot of the objection to driving assistance comes from an unawareness of how widespread the various aspects of the tech has become. Not that many people have Super Cruise or similar features, but we’re often on the road with vehicles that do and probably don’t even know.