There has always been a herd instinct in automotive design: someone sets an example and everyone else thinks they absolutely have to copy it. Tesla in particular is often copied, but there is little reason for this. The three worst bad habits of modern cars.
Progress is unstoppable! Our cars are becoming safer, cleaner, more comfortable. Countless airbags protect the occupants in the event that the automatic braking systems are no longer able to avoid a crash. When reversing, cameras and parking beepers ensure that you don’t run over grandma on the sidewalk or the neighbor’s cat. Catalytic converters also filter the last pollutant out of the exhaust gas. E-cars whirr through the streets without any direct emissions. Instead of workshops, there are more and more wireless updates “over the air”, and instead of micro screens with pixel cards, there are colorful XXL displays with a home cinema ambience.
And yet everything that glitters in the modern car world is not always gold. FOCUS Online names three things that have “eaten up” as a real design bad habit by many manufacturers – and that car manufacturers should rather save in the future.
Tesla did it with the Model 3, others followed suit, for example BMW with its electric cruiser iX or Ford with the Mustang Mach-e: doors only open at the touch of a button, either from the inside or even from the outside like the Mustang. Tesla has made opening the door from the outside a real fiddling with its recessed door handle. The reason for this bad design habit is a “cleaner” look – but ultimately it’s probably just the desire to be somehow hip.
But in practice it’s just annoying, not only because you now need two movements to open it. It simply feels unsafe when you no longer have a real handle to open it. In fact, there has already been a case in the US where a man burned to death in his Tesla because a police officer couldn’t open the door from the outside. There is a manual emergency release via a lever – but who can find it quickly enough in an emergency? So, dear car manufacturers, away with the nonsense. Normal door handles belong in a car, both inside and out.
With new VW models, but also many other cars, it is extremely annoying if you only want to set the temperature and ventilation and have to use a fiddly virtual touchscreen to do it. The car manufacturers may sell this as modern, but of course it also saves them money.
However, the shot backfires. The VW Golf, for example, just got its fat off because of its virtual fumbling operation in a major operating test by the ADAC. Even with a large touchscreen, a car still needs buttons, at least for the most important functions: light, air conditioning, volume control.
“Vorsprung durch Technik” is Audi’s motto, but sometimes even the hardest-working PR babble can’t explain what kind of advantage cameras should have instead of exterior mirrors, for example. Audi has thus set a supposed trend – which in practice completely fails: the camera image is more irritating than it helps, distances can hardly be estimated and the braggart factor (“Look, my car has cameras in the exterior mirrors”) quickly wears off . By the way: Only a few Audi customers order the virtual exterior mirrors for their cars. The best argument that car manufacturers should quickly banish this wrong path to the cabinet of curiosities in the company museum.
All electric car and plug-in hybrid models at a glance
