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One related and another unrelated though... First: Auto manufacturers ought to get together and agree on one common key + entry system standard. It can be a c

One related and another unrelated though... First: Auto manufacturers ought to get together and agree on one common key + entry system standard. It can be a combination of physical key and remote key if necessary. The problem: If you have multiple vehicles (and many families do) you end-up with a keychain full of horrendously large and unnecessarily inconvenient keys, key-fobs, whatever. Some manufacturers seem intent on making the larges and most inconvenient boxes they can possibly imagine. This is entirely unnecessary. In this day and age one ought to be able to have a universal programmable entry system that gets programmed for your vehicles and that's that. One device to rule them all. Second: Auto manufacturers ought to get together and agree on placing the fuel tank port on the same side. The problem: Today you have cars and trucks with fuel tank refill ports on the left and the right. It can be an absolute nightmare to go to a gas station where most of the cars have ports on the left and you show-up with one on the right. This is one of the reasons for which I hated driving our BMW. Going to the gas station was always a game of chicken with cars entering in the other direction.

maxerickson 7y ago
Phone as fob is more or less here. Probably watches too.
close04 7y ago
> fuel tank port on the same side I want to believe this is to be able to spread the use around both sides of the pump without pulling the pump hose over/around the car. In some gas stations there's no easy way to turn the car around the pump.
garaetjjte 7y ago
>was always a game of chicken with cars entering in the other direction Uh, other direction? Almost always there are hoses from both side of pillar. Is it some regional thing?
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  There are hoses on both sides of the line of pillars, but at the same time cars can approach the line from either end. No matter what side your port is on, you can use any spot. In these stations.
  - azalemeth 7y ago
    That is rather alien to me. In my country, you have a system where the fuel station has one defined entrance and exit: everyone queues, uses either side of the pillar (the hoses are long enough) and then leaves.
- robomartin 7y ago
  As Dylan said, cars come in from any direction, which makes not having the port on the same side in every vehicle a complete mess. From my experience most vehicles have it on the left side, in the US that would be the driver side. If you show-up at a busy gas station with a BMW --which has the port on the right-- well, good luck, it can get ugly. Rather than lining-up behind the car currently fueling-up, you have to line-up in front of them. Which means that someone entering the station with a left fuel vehicle often ends-up behind them --even with you waiting patiently in front way before the third car showed-up. That's where the problems begin. This has happened to me many times. Because the car that finished fueling drives forward to exit, the car behind it has a natural advantage and the one in front a disadvantage (at the very least you have to allow plenty of room for them to drive out). The car behind them, if they want to deny your rightful turn, just crawls forward as the first car exits. Before you can do anything at all they are in front of you, took control of the pump and you have to choose between waiting, moving or getting into an argument with someone you know isn't likely to be a nice person. If all fueling ports are on the same side there are no problems. The alternative is to require that hoses be longer. The problem with this is that it doesn't work at all for trucks.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    >Second: Auto manufacturers ought to get together and agree on placing the fuel tank port on the same side. The problem: Today you have cars and trucks with fuel tank refill ports on the left and the right. It can be an absolute nightmare to go to a gas station where most of the cars have ports on the left and you show-up with one on the right. This is one of the reasons for which I hated driving our BMW. Going to the gas station was always a game of chicken with cars entering in the other direction. I would say that in EU (German, French, Italian) cars have it on the right (like the BMW), i.e. opposite the driver side, I have now an Opel and it is on the right, and my my previous car was also on the right. I believe it being on the right is a traditional safety provision, though they are becoming very rare nowadays (and since several years) a number of fueling stations (at least in the cities) were not, like it is common nowadays, in a (large) court, the pumps were simply along the road, at the most in a 3-4 meters enlargement of the road itself. So it made sense to have it on the right, the only moment where the driver is exposed to the trafic is when he/she gets out of the car, during the refueling he/she can stand on the right of the car, i.e. between the car and the sidewalk (and the same applies to - as it was once most common - to the gas station service personnel).
modeless 7y ago
Phone as key is the future. I was skeptical at first given the general unreliability of Bluetooth but Tesla managed to do it. It's been flawless for me. Key card as backup makes perfect sense although I believe upcoming NFC standards will make even this unnecessary with the ability to have the phone act as a passive NFC tag even when the battery is dead. The key fob is still available if you want it. Tesla even allows adding and removing keys at home. It's an underrated part of the Model 3. Phone key could have been a disaster but they nailed it.
- robomartin 7y ago
  What we need is a world wide standard that every car manufacturer has to adopt by, say, 10 years from now (or whatever is deemed reasonable).
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    That would be nice, but what is actually going to happen is that all the cars are going to support an Apple-proprietary standard (there are references to a "CarKey" framework in released iOS beta builds). Certainly Google are now working on their own equivalent for Android. So there will be two standards, Apple and Google and all cars will support both. Kind of like with CarPlay and Android Auto.
    - robomartin 7y ago
      Yeah, that’s why I would not be for the standard being based on phones. As a side note, I stopped buying phone controlled devices a while ago. All of these things are going to end-up on a big pile of trash as technology evolves. I don’t need a phone controlled toaster oven or power drill.

maxerickson 7y ago

Phone as fob is more or less here. Probably watches too.

close04 7y ago

> fuel tank port on the same side I want to believe this is to be able to spread the use around both sides of the pump without pulling the pump hose over/around the car. In some gas stations there's no easy way to turn the car around the pump.

garaetjjte 7y ago

>was always a game of chicken with cars entering in the other direction Uh, other direction? Almost always there are hoses from both side of pillar. Is it some regional thing?

Dylan16807 7y ago
There are hoses on both sides of the line of pillars, but at the same time cars can approach the line from either end. No matter what side your port is on, you can use any spot. In these stations.
- azalemeth 7y ago
  That is rather alien to me. In my country, you have a system where the fuel station has one defined entrance and exit: everyone queues, uses either side of the pillar (the hoses are long enough) and then leaves.
robomartin 7y ago
As Dylan said, cars come in from any direction, which makes not having the port on the same side in every vehicle a complete mess. From my experience most vehicles have it on the left side, in the US that would be the driver side. If you show-up at a busy gas station with a BMW --which has the port on the right-- well, good luck, it can get ugly. Rather than lining-up behind the car currently fueling-up, you have to line-up in front of them. Which means that someone entering the station with a left fuel vehicle often ends-up behind them --even with you waiting patiently in front way before the third car showed-up. That's where the problems begin. This has happened to me many times. Because the car that finished fueling drives forward to exit, the car behind it has a natural advantage and the one in front a disadvantage (at the very least you have to allow plenty of room for them to drive out). The car behind them, if they want to deny your rightful turn, just crawls forward as the first car exits. Before you can do anything at all they are in front of you, took control of the pump and you have to choose between waiting, moving or getting into an argument with someone you know isn't likely to be a nice person. If all fueling ports are on the same side there are no problems. The alternative is to require that hoses be longer. The problem with this is that it doesn't work at all for trucks.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  >Second: Auto manufacturers ought to get together and agree on placing the fuel tank port on the same side. The problem: Today you have cars and trucks with fuel tank refill ports on the left and the right. It can be an absolute nightmare to go to a gas station where most of the cars have ports on the left and you show-up with one on the right. This is one of the reasons for which I hated driving our BMW. Going to the gas station was always a game of chicken with cars entering in the other direction. I would say that in EU (German, French, Italian) cars have it on the right (like the BMW), i.e. opposite the driver side, I have now an Opel and it is on the right, and my my previous car was also on the right. I believe it being on the right is a traditional safety provision, though they are becoming very rare nowadays (and since several years) a number of fueling stations (at least in the cities) were not, like it is common nowadays, in a (large) court, the pumps were simply along the road, at the most in a 3-4 meters enlargement of the road itself. So it made sense to have it on the right, the only moment where the driver is exposed to the trafic is when he/she gets out of the car, during the refueling he/she can stand on the right of the car, i.e. between the car and the sidewalk (and the same applies to - as it was once most common - to the gas station service personnel).

modeless 7y ago

Phone as key is the future. I was skeptical at first given the general unreliability of Bluetooth but Tesla managed to do it. It's been flawless for me. Key card as backup makes perfect sense although I believe upcoming NFC standards will make even this unnecessary with the ability to have the phone act as a passive NFC tag even when the battery is dead. The key fob is still available if you want it. Tesla even allows adding and removing keys at home. It's an underrated part of the Model 3. Phone key could have been a disaster but they nailed it.

robomartin 7y ago
What we need is a world wide standard that every car manufacturer has to adopt by, say, 10 years from now (or whatever is deemed reasonable).
- kalleboo 7y ago
  That would be nice, but what is actually going to happen is that all the cars are going to support an Apple-proprietary standard (there are references to a "CarKey" framework in released iOS beta builds). Certainly Google are now working on their own equivalent for Android. So there will be two standards, Apple and Google and all cars will support both. Kind of like with CarPlay and Android Auto.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    Yeah, that’s why I would not be for the standard being based on phones. As a side note, I stopped buying phone controlled devices a while ago. All of these things are going to end-up on a big pile of trash as technology evolves. I don’t need a phone controlled toaster oven or power drill.