What I hate about modern cars

There are two types, both flawed. The first simply yanks on a cable with a solenoid, which is arguably less sophisticated than a manual handbrake where the user can determine just how much pressure to exert on the handle. The second has an electronic actuator on the rear brake caliper, which is more sophisticated, but in a vulnerable place introducing potential unreliability.

What’s wrong with them? Well clearly there’s no fun to be had in a snowy car park without one and slewing a car through a tight turn with the handbrake is a key skill for a rally driver; but the main issue is the extra functions like hill hold that car makers wire into the system. It means if you’ve got a sloping drive onto a busy road it’s virtually impossible to get the car off said drive. Press the throttle and the car surges downhill, especially in reverse, and you can’t balance the car on the handbrake or with the foot brake and throttle as the handbrake automatically goes on. Grrrrr.

Powered tailgates

In the old days (read as little as a year ago), hatchbacks had tailgates that were counterbalanced with either a spring or a set of pressurised struts. Press the button and the lid would gently spring open and then equally gently move upwards. Yet these struts wouldn’t impose such an effort that closing was a chore.

Now powered tailgates are the norm, which have motorised opening and closing. This is not good for dog owners since you have to step back while the closer does its stuff and the first thing the dog wants to do is follow you or at least stick its head out of the gap – cue trapped ears and noses. There’s also the fact that the tailgate swings out further than the car’s length, which means it will open against the car parked behind, or the wall/tree/bush/person.

And on the basis that there’s never enough technology, there are also kick-opening systems, which require you to kick your foot under the rear valance which triggers the powered tailgate. Yet after being covered in mud for six months they have a habit of leaving the owner doing an undignified hop around the car park with a couple of armfuls of shopping. This is all a technological step too far. Jim Rockford managed to get both his paper-bagged shopping and himself into his Pontiac Firebird Esprit in The Rockford Files without this tech, so why can’t we?

Automatic dipping headlamps

Not really a bad idea, but they simply don’t work very well. The simple switch on in dark areas or at dusk is fine(ish), but the auto dipping function is too slow so on-coming drivers are momentarily blinded and furiously put their full beams on, which starts a game of dip-chicken where no one gives way. Auto headlamps also don’t detect on-coming vehicles on undulating roads that hide the headlamps, so truck drivers are blinded by your full-beam lamps. A dip switch wasn’t the most onerous thing to use in the first place so why the automation?

Some modern cars come with (or can, at a considerable price, have optioned in) what are known as ‘matrix’ LED lamps, which use a complex series of LEDs to shed light on areas of the road that aren’t occupied by other cars’ lights, giving you a flood of light to see your way while simultaneously preventing dazzle. Very clever – except these systems, too, have trouble keeping up, leaving passing motorists suddenly bathed in the full blast of your full beams at close range. Moreover, some on-coming motorists don’t perceive you have dipped your lights – cue another impromptu round of dip-chicken. Apparently, these new LED lamps can play old black-and-white movies against the garage door (Casablanca anyone?). It’s about all they are good for.

Lane-assist steering

A gateway technology to autonomous driving and so called ‘zero-accident driving’, but highly flawed. Some systems owe more to a drunk on a bicycle than automated guidance, and most are confused by broken-edged roads, with worn-out or no white-lane markings. They are ill-suited for narrow British lanes and switching the systems off is really difficult.

The New Car Assessment Program (EuroNCAP) has received a lot of flak for mandating these systems, though while they award extra safety points for them, they do allow the system to be switched off, but only with a ‘significant action’ such as a long push on a button, switch or screen. Car makers interpret this direction differently. Ford for instance has a button on the end of the left-hand steering column to stand down this steering corrupting system, but you have to press it every time you restart; other car makers require up to five keystrokes.

Again, this is an NCAP requirement. Yet when we spoke to one NCAP engineer, he appeared to have misunderstood UK road traffic law.

‘We want the system to always be there,’ said Richard Schram, outlining three situations where LSS (Lane Support System) should warn a driver. ‘They shouldn’t allow [without warning] the vehicle to cross a solid line because that’s illegal,’ he said, ‘or cross a dotted line in case there’s an oncoming overtaking vehicle, and they should never allow the vehicle off the road.’

Actually, crossing a double white line is not illegal in the UK, where the Road Traffic Act of 1988 section 36 says you can cross such lines to overtake a bicycle, horse or road-maintenance vehicle as long as you don’t exceed 10mph. But anyway…

Schram further states that NCAP ‘does not prescribe the response, or the rate at which the vehicle should correct the steering if at all,’ which leads to a wide variety of bells, whistles and lights going off if you do cross a line as well as an awesome amount of torque being fed into the electric steering rack to steer you out of what the systems regard as trouble, but which isn’t always trouble.

I always find it quite useful to actually look through that big piece of glass in front of me and make my own deductions and actions, but I fear this may in time become a minority view.

DAB radio

The UK Government bullied the BBC into this in 1990, its ministers anxious to be seen as achingly trendy and state-of-the-art. They threatened the broadcasting industry with analogue shut down while simultaneously choosing the wrong format so that instead of DAB+ or Internet radio, we ended up with plain old DAB which isn’t that compatible with anything else. It’s all great if you live in ‘that London’, but out of the home counties the signal is shockingly poor especially on early sets. It’s also darn complicated to programme, demanding a knowledge of national and regional ‘ensembles’ and taking an inordinate amount of time if you’re looking for obscure channels.

My Triumph GT6 has a Fifties His Masters Voice 500T, a hybrid transistor/valve unit, which is one of the loveliest looking sets ever fitted to a car. Careful renovation included Bluetooth so my telephone can act as the receiver and my wonderfully warm sounding set can broadcast anything I want. Simples.

Panoramic sunroofs

There’s seldom an options list that doesn’t contain one of these, usually at a four-figure price, with the promise of light and airy ambience for every passenger, which they usually fail to achieve. What they do is introduce weight exactly where you don’t want it, reduce head room, introduce a gimcrack motorised roller blind to the car’s specification and are a potential source of water leaks and wallet-decimating damage if they crack, which is more often than you think. Oh, yes, and most of them are no bigger than the hatch on a main battle tank; don’t tick that box.

Tonneau covers that can’t be stored in the car

Keeping prying eyes away from the load space on a hatchback, crossover or SUV is vital. Park in town and you want to have a cover, whether it’s a pull-over tonneau or a tilting semi-rigid panel. But what happens when you carry a dog, for example, or a tall load? You take the tonneau out of course, but where do you store it? Not in the car as there’s nowhere to put it.

So, walk into your shed or garage and look in the far corner. Sweep away the cobwebs and dust, and I bet you will find a grubby luggage load cover there; donor car unknown. I’ve just done it and found three – heaven knows which cars they came from. What a waste.

Some car makers have thought about this dilemma and now include underfloor storage for the tonneau. We suggest others do the same; quickly.

Keyless locking

Renault’s unlamented Eighties Fuego was one of the first automobiles to offer remote keyless locking, with a radio signal emitting key fob, which the car (sometimes) recognised. We all thought it was the cat’s pyjamas at the time, but pretty soon the flaws began to appear. Unlocking all the doors in a car park left vulnerable folk at risk of the creatures of the night joining them in the passenger seat.

Motor industry marketing departments, however, were in love with these systems and when thieves began to duplicate the 433.92MHz signal, car makers introduced a rolling code system, which the thieves soon got around, as they did with engine immobiliser circuitry buried in the ignition key.

This cat-and-mouse game ran on until car makers made a key that passively recognised the key fob holder (or a suitably programmed mobile phone) and unlocked itself when it detected it was close. This led to the thieves developing a relay attack strategy, where they boosted and broadcast the key’s signal to the car where an accomplice climbed in and drove away. It’s been a major scandal of the last few years and cars are still being stolen using this technology, which can be sourced on the internet.

The motor industry insurance centre at Thatcham tests for security of key fobs, but these keyless systems, which have now trickled down into smaller and cheaper cars, are still a major source of vulnerability and unreliability as well as being a pain in the backside, especially for sporting types who are forced to carry an expensive piece of electronic wizardry through rain and shine, or in the water with them.

Voice command systems

These are supposed to help reduce distraction by reacting to your voice commands and adjusting settings, or switching things on and off, saving you the trouble and danger of pawing at a touchscreen or scrabbling around for a button. Trouble is, the rival voice recognition system on your mobile phone is infinitely better at simple voice recognition having been developed for longer with vastly more resources than a car maker can summon.

The result is that the car systems are, well, not very good. Even the Mercedes-Benz system on the new S-Class misinterpreted ‘I’m feeling old’ for ‘I’m feeling cold’, turning up the heating to the max to ‘help’. In fact (and not to single Mercedes out here), Mercedes Me is like all such systems and listens in to your conversations for any mention of ‘Mercedes’, although it will also answer to ‘mercaptan’, or ‘Maimonides’ and then won’t go away until you deploy some good solid Anglo Saxon. This is not progress.

Adaptive cruise control with speed-limit recognition

Another fantastic illustration of engineering hubris where one useful system is enhanced until it’s almost useless. Set the adaptive cruise in a new car and within reason, it’ll keep you in lane and a safe distance from the car in front, but now that vehicles can recognise the speed limit, this system has been linked to the adaptive cruise so the car will cruise at the speed limit, changing speed up and down as the limit changes.

Except this doesn’t always happen. The car only reacts to what it can see and, on some motorways, there are visible speed limit signs on diagonally crossing roads, and when in adaptive cruise the car reacts by slamming on the brakes and standing the vehicle on its nose. We’ve also experienced cars accelerating strongly in 50mph posted road works and displaying speed limits of 100mph for long periods. Bodes well for autonomous driving, doesn’t it?