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This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use

by Wistar 7y ago

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--allowing the car (me) to drive off the edge of the map--and didn't allow me to move the map, to re-center by touch, while the car was in motion, instead presenting an alert saying that the action was unavailable while the car was moving. As I was driving in an unfamiliar city, this issue forced me to stop several times so that I could see the map surrounding the car, it was simply horrible. To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I'd think I had tamed the user preferences, the "other" set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons. Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect. Just give me a dedicated knob.

yitchelle 7y ago
This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute. Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?
t0mas88 7y ago
That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.
- stevehawk 7y ago
  The honest truth to why they do it is because they don't want to be in a situation where they're shipping keys around between locations (or even pretending to inventory/store them) because people keep forgetting to bring back both or lose one and the other one is in an office in another state. You're far less likely to lose both keys than just one because of how obnoxious it is. And having 2 keys is actually a reasonable increase in re-sale/auction value because of how expensive/difficult it is to re-key cars these days (unless you're a criminal then it's really easy and cheap apparently).
  - Wistar 7y ago
    I suspect you are correct. I looked it up and, on the 2020 Q7, the fob itself is ~$350 and the Audi-dealer required re-programming is $150, so, at least $450 to replace a fob.
- Wistar 7y ago
  The two Audi smart key fobs together weighs too much for a pants or light jacket pocket, especially on that steel cable. A day or so after I removed the battery from one fob, I stopped at a Home Depot and used a bolt cutter to cut the cable and separate the fobs. I returned the keys to the rental agency on a large steel keyring. They didn't seem to mind.
mihaaly 7y ago
Modern time developments: high tech high pace revolution for powerful and automated delivery of making the user miserable. Showing off without sense, basically.
imperialdrive 7y ago
You just gave me flashbacks to renting my first Audi and not being able to leave the lot for a good 15 minutes before I could figure out what the hell was going on. Audi sponsored the whole thing but it backfired because I would NEVER drive one again after that, or recommend to anyone - what happened to cars? Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it's all located on one panel.
- natch 7y ago
  Most everything on the Tesla screen is non-essential other than the current speed (which while driving is always displayed prominently in a large font and in the closest place) and possibly some alerts that rarely happen, such as “tire pressure low” in actual words, not just a cryptic glowing red icon on the dashboard.

by Wistar 7y ago

yitchelle 7y ago

This is one direction that I never wanted a car dashboard to go towards. The amount of information packed into a dashboard is overwhelming. Most of them is not relevant to the daily commute. Who wants to know you water temperature measured to a 0.5degC accuracy?

t0mas88 7y ago

That keys-with-steel-cable thing car rental companies do is terrible. And there is absolutely no point in doing so. Either give me two separate keys so two drivers can use them, or just give me one key.

stevehawk 7y ago
The honest truth to why they do it is because they don't want to be in a situation where they're shipping keys around between locations (or even pretending to inventory/store them) because people keep forgetting to bring back both or lose one and the other one is in an office in another state. You're far less likely to lose both keys than just one because of how obnoxious it is. And having 2 keys is actually a reasonable increase in re-sale/auction value because of how expensive/difficult it is to re-key cars these days (unless you're a criminal then it's really easy and cheap apparently).
- Wistar 7y ago
  I suspect you are correct. I looked it up and, on the 2020 Q7, the fob itself is ~$350 and the Audi-dealer required re-programming is $150, so, at least $450 to replace a fob.
Wistar 7y ago
The two Audi smart key fobs together weighs too much for a pants or light jacket pocket, especially on that steel cable. A day or so after I removed the battery from one fob, I stopped at a Home Depot and used a bolt cutter to cut the cable and separate the fobs. I returned the keys to the rental agency on a large steel keyring. They didn't seem to mind.

mihaaly 7y ago

Modern time developments: high tech high pace revolution for powerful and automated delivery of making the user miserable. Showing off without sense, basically.

imperialdrive 7y ago

You just gave me flashbacks to renting my first Audi and not being able to leave the lot for a good 15 minutes before I could figure out what the hell was going on. Audi sponsored the whole thing but it backfired because I would NEVER drive one again after that, or recommend to anyone - what happened to cars? Newer Suburus are almost as bad. Tesla is too but at least it's all located on one panel.

natch 7y ago
Most everything on the Tesla screen is non-essential other than the current speed (which while driving is always displayed prominently in a large font and in the closest place) and possibly some alerts that rarely happen, such as “tire pressure low” in actual words, not just a cryptic glowing red icon on the dashboard.