My wife recently fulfilled her long-time dream of owning a “gold Lexus.” What model did she want? She couldn’t tell you, nor did it matter. Any gold-ish, crossover-shaped Lexus would do, and in her case, twas a 2023 NX250 that fulfilled her dream. The little 250 is hardly the most feature-laden Lexus model, but as she was coming from a 2015 RAV4, it was absolutely loaded by comparison, and she loooves it. Mostly.
There are two features she does not like, and I mean really does not like: the lane departure system, and the stop-start system. Frankly, I don’t like them either. Make no mistake, I’m not against these features, but as executed in the NX 250, I (and my wife) would much rather do without them. In the case of the stop-start system, we do do without it; it’s now a muscle-memory thing to press the on/off button for the feature right after engaging Drive. I’d leave it on if the system stopped and restarted the engine more subtly, but I can feel the restart to a sufficient degree that it’s annoying, and it takes a beat longer than I’d like to restart.
As for the lane departure system, I keep that one on, as it is useful and a nice bit of added safety just in case, though it’s never engaged for me in the way it’s intended, as I’m a good enough driver to stay in my lane. Where it does engage, frustratingly, is whenever I intentionally move right to enter the turning lane at the 4-way intersection that I navigate on virtually every drive. Every time, the NX fights me and tugs the wheel left. I’m like, “I know what I’m doing, let me steer!” I suppose I could avoid this by swerving into the lane like a maniac, but that seems worse.
So I could happily do without those two new-car features. What’s on your list?
Top graphic image: Lexus
Lane keep, auto braking, big ass screens, automatic and button e-brakes, subscriptions, digital displays, no spare tires, electric seats, fake “eco leather”, haptic buttons, touchscreens, no base models, 50 shades of grey, quiet lock sounds and turn signals, vibrator seats, dinky engines in big cars, auto start/stop, aero coupe SUV things, headlights being either too high on trucks or too low on everything else, light bars as head/taillights, fancy models being the same but with blacked out trim, fake carbon fiber, reverse sensors that don’t turn off, no steelies, climate controls that have temperature in numbers instead of a slider or dial, different drive modes that don’t do anything, anything that doesn’t come on a 2005 Honda CR-V ex awd
All I really want feature wise is a parking sensor and Bluetooth.
Fuel injection.
It’s so complicated you need a freaking NASA engineer to fix it if something goes wrong, and even then, there’s no way you’re going to figure out all those doo-dads and fancy sensors.
They just don’t want us to be able to fix our own cars. That’s why they keep forcing all this “technology” on us.
Gimme back my carburetor. All I had to do was slap it at just the right time and tickle it in just the right spot and that thing would be running like top.
Try doing that with your fancy computer car.
Pretty much all ADAS tech. I’ve never driven a car that had them that didn’t have far too many false positives to actually be useful and didn’t degrade safety overall.
Automatic braking, I just know this feature is going to screw up and scare the shit out of me and/or get me rear-ended.
Haven’t driven new cars enough to really know most of these, but I hate lane departure in every version of it I’ve used.
Power lift and tail gates feel like a feature that mostly folks didn’t ask for-If I had the option to either shut them manually OR use the power feature I’d be down but all the ones I’ve used seem to require you use it manually which drives me nuts on something so easy to do and when you’re trying to pack your hatch to the gills it’s especially annoying. And then there’s the powered pickup truck tail gate, like if you can’t lift a tail gate why are you even driving a truck, I assume you can’t lift anything into the bed. This seems nearly guaranteed to be a future inconvenience when it starts not working properly after getting clogged with dirt or ice on any truck that actually gets used.
Most “Drive modes” like wtf does a Nissan Rogue have a sport mode even my wife who is not a car person laughed when we had a rental Rogue and saw the little checker flag on the mode dial (which she ignored regardless of mode anyways)-really not sure who this is for.
I don’t have kids but the seat belt light for the back seat seems like sort of annoying overkill that is sure to irritatingly malfunction down the line, do what your mom/dad did and yell at all the kids to buckle up or the car wasn’t moving. I suppose maybe it’s more of a warning if one of them unbuckle? But feels like one more bit of information overload on the dashboard.
Not a feature per se, but why is automaker interface visual design (with a few exceptions) seem like it was designed by a ’90s graphic designer that time traveled to 2020s? Ridiculous gradients, faux metal finishes, random decorative elements and starbursts, ugly fonts, like bad enough everything is going to touch screen but then I have to deal with a but ugly laggy UI-which isn’t even getting into the terrible UX that seems to be a universal part of these systems.