I own a Tesla M3 2019, and recently drove 2-3yo MG HS as rental.
Glass roof: agree.
Buttons: yes, if Tesla would have kept the stalks and added 3-4 programmable buttons, I might rate them higher for a next car. That said, with the MG HS I guess I should have read 20+ pages of manual just to operate the 4-axis 3-rings windshield wipers stalk, not to mention that I could never engage cruise control at all despite trying; so my take on buttons is: something more than Tesla, way less than full-optional/overloaded car. At least with Tesla there's aftermarket options.
Smartphone/NFC: with the MG HS I had to perform a 4-point checklist every time I started it or parked it, and after 7y of Tesla it felt like a huge chore (esp. for quick stops). I've been very happy with Tesla and smartphone (failed maybe twice in 7y), and keep on me the Tesla card as backup (never needed it in the end). A key fob wouldn't annoy me if it worked just like the smartphone on my Tesla: if I don't have to do anything but keep it in my pocket, it'd be fine.
Door handles: the M3 handles are at the right intersection for me to be minimal, efficient and still mostly understandable (push, grab and pull). I can understand they're not regular grab and pull and not everyone is happy about it. I accidentally set off the MG HS alarm while the door and car were already unlocked by pressing the small button on the handle, which after seeing it for 10+y on many cars I still have absolutely no clue what it does (and most times it's only a placeholder for the small button).
Poorly calibrated ADAS: my experience with Tesla is extremely good and again strikes a good balance, while extremely poor applies to Hyundai i10, MG HS and others that I've driven recently. Also: the latter list seems to treat "silent ADAS" as a feature, while Tesla explicitly tells you whether auto-steer or cruise are being engaged or disconnecting, which seems a way better UX. I stopped using the lane assist on the MG HS because it'd randomly drop out even in mild curves without any clue whatsoever. The "auto-enable on restart" for these things is a reason I'll immediately drop the brand from the list of cars I may consider in the future (Hyundai i10).
Ugh the glass roofs. I don't know why people like them. "Why yes sir, I would love to get beat down on by the hot sun while lacking airflow over me and risk an expensive repair bill from a falling walnut!"
I love it, makes the interior feel light and open and i never experienced it being super hot or baking my scalp, there is a coating on it making it very different from just a clear pane. Model 3, 195cm.
It's fine for a passenger, especially in the back seat. But as a driver, it adds a potentially bright source of light right at the top of your vision, and that can be annoying as hell. I covered my roof and I felt more relaxed since my eyes didn't have to adjust if I accidentally looked too far upwards.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
I currently live in Seattle and drive a 4WD Toyota Tacoma with a rooftop tent on the back and frequently enter parking garages. I know the height of my truck and was careful to get a setup where the rooftop tent isn't gratuitously high. I think everything is still a little under 6' which is fine in just about every parking garage.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
I got a used 2023 Chevy Bolt and initially disregarded one pedal driving was an absurd and unnecessary feature, but now I think I would skip a car that doesn’t have it.
I've never tried it but can you explain why you like it?
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
They just don't work half as well as when people did it manually.
Before the pandemic, it was rare to get blinded by a person's brights. Now if I drive at night it's just non-stop, and I live in an area with street lighting. (Some of this is also due to after market LEDs and possibly lost driving manners.)
It's extra obnoxious as a pedestrian because at best they get turned off way too late, or frequently not at all.
The lack of buttons is also extremely annoying on kitchen appliances. To open my microwave door, I need to make sure my finger is clean (it’s a kitchen!) and also adds a very annoying latency between the “pressing” and the door opening.
As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?
I thought this was going to be about the noise, pollution, danger, bullying etc. Ah, no, it's about things that annoy the person on the inside of the car. So if both the people outside and inside the car hate the things, why are we stuck with them?
You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons
Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.
Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.
> Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
The author elaborates that it only works intermittently for them, providing a long list of links to similar complaints?
I wonder if there's a blog or something that tells the story of how good car design went off the rails. I'm pretty sure that there was a culture of design that gradually worked out what a great car is like until somewhere in the 2010s - and then got flushed down the toilet, but I don't know anything about it.
I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"
But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.
I blame Musk. Maybe I'm way off base, but most of these trends were first highly visible in Tesla products. They may not have created each dumb UX decision, but certainly were one of the first to put them all into a single car.
I remember the first time I tried to go to lunch in a friend's Tesla. I couldn't get in or out of the stupid thing without instructions. And getting in would be next to impossible for somebody with bad rheumatoid arthritis and bad fingers - the "push with thumb, while pulling with fingers" is awkward at best.
> But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens
We should never underestimate people's weird desires but this is mostly not it IMO. There was a new generation that felt the need to rebel against old established stuff and of course is now painfully rediscovering why this stuff was established in the first place.
Infuriating to watch, mind you. But also predictable, like watching bots play StarCraft against each other.
I recently bought a new car for the first time in 16 years. I had all the same concerns - my Acura MDX solved them all. It’s not perfect (has opaque shade for panoramic roof) but the number of physical buttons (dozens) is glorious. And the door handles are great.
I hate the tall center storage boots that leave me with no room for my elbow. There is no reason for anything to be there in a front-wheel-drive vehicle.
Why do I have less elbow room than in some 60-year-old rear-wheel-drive that has a transmission and axle in that spot?
Short, tasteful drink tray and storage bin, please.
I can tell you this annoyance - if you're behind a Kia Niro EV and you wonder why the driver is braking from 70 to 30 randomly all the way down a totally clear motorway, it's not the driver. The car's cameras have spotted a shadow across the road and decided it's an obstruction and panicked.
It's like being driven by an inexperienced and terribly stoned driver, paranoid, jumping at shadows, hallucinating shit all over the place.
The ones we have at work keep pinging and beeping about all sorts of shit - oh you're too close to that car over there! (Yeah the road is really narrow, shut up, you're the same width as my Range Rover, you fit just fine). Hey watch out for that twig that's 50 metres away across the field! Oh you wanted to change lanes? I don't think so! OMG WATCH OUT FOR THAT CAR YOU'RE ABOUT TO HIT! (yes because you steered back towards it you stupid machine).
Hey you look tired you should take a break right now so I'm going to ping and beep and make the instrument panel flash until you do, even though we only left five minutes ago and there's still over three hours to go!
Fuck everything to do with them. They're exhausting and stressful to drive. I don't know how anyone can cope with EVs.
I am so happy to get rid of physical buttons. When entering a rental car I often feel like I've entered the cockpit of an airplane. I think Toyota bz4x has 20 separate buttons on the steering wheel alone.
I am exactly opposite, I feel like touch screens in cars are especially bad ux. If I get into a rental especially I don't want to go hunting through all menus to find out where to set what settings, which tiny slider to pull to do change the volume. Where to turn off the lane keep assist or adaptive cruise control.
I rented a car not an ipad multimedia system, touch screens in cars are totally counter intuitive and often don't have the basic functionally easily accessible. Also usually the ui is laggy.
Tactile buttons can be pressed while keeping your eyes on the road and your surroundings. Touchscreens are inherently visual and require looking. Relative positioning of differently shaped buttons help guide your fingers to what you need.
I own a Tesla M3 2019, and recently drove 2-3yo MG HS as rental.
Glass roof: agree.
Buttons: yes, if Tesla would have kept the stalks and added 3-4 programmable buttons, I might rate them higher for a next car. That said, with the MG HS I guess I should have read 20+ pages of manual just to operate the 4-axis 3-rings windshield wipers stalk, not to mention that I could never engage cruise control at all despite trying; so my take on buttons is: something more than Tesla, way less than full-optional/overloaded car. At least with Tesla there's aftermarket options.
Smartphone/NFC: with the MG HS I had to perform a 4-point checklist every time I started it or parked it, and after 7y of Tesla it felt like a huge chore (esp. for quick stops). I've been very happy with Tesla and smartphone (failed maybe twice in 7y), and keep on me the Tesla card as backup (never needed it in the end). A key fob wouldn't annoy me if it worked just like the smartphone on my Tesla: if I don't have to do anything but keep it in my pocket, it'd be fine.
Door handles: the M3 handles are at the right intersection for me to be minimal, efficient and still mostly understandable (push, grab and pull). I can understand they're not regular grab and pull and not everyone is happy about it. I accidentally set off the MG HS alarm while the door and car were already unlocked by pressing the small button on the handle, which after seeing it for 10+y on many cars I still have absolutely no clue what it does (and most times it's only a placeholder for the small button).
Poorly calibrated ADAS: my experience with Tesla is extremely good and again strikes a good balance, while extremely poor applies to Hyundai i10, MG HS and others that I've driven recently. Also: the latter list seems to treat "silent ADAS" as a feature, while Tesla explicitly tells you whether auto-steer or cruise are being engaged or disconnecting, which seems a way better UX. I stopped using the lane assist on the MG HS because it'd randomly drop out even in mild curves without any clue whatsoever. The "auto-enable on restart" for these things is a reason I'll immediately drop the brand from the list of cars I may consider in the future (Hyundai i10).
One pedal: agree.
Newer Tesla glass roofs don't radiate any heat. So I've heard.
[delayed]
Similar to the 'EV Stupidity Checklist' from John Siracusa:
https://hypercritical.co/2026/05/29/ev-stupidity-checklist
Ugh the glass roofs. I don't know why people like them. "Why yes sir, I would love to get beat down on by the hot sun while lacking airflow over me and risk an expensive repair bill from a falling walnut!"
I love it, makes the interior feel light and open and i never experienced it being super hot or baking my scalp, there is a coating on it making it very different from just a clear pane. Model 3, 195cm.
It's fine for a passenger, especially in the back seat. But as a driver, it adds a potentially bright source of light right at the top of your vision, and that can be annoying as hell. I covered my roof and I felt more relaxed since my eyes didn't have to adjust if I accidentally looked too far upwards.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
Not to mention how easy it is for T-rex to smash through.
This is the most important reason not to have them...
Suddenly everyone is putting them on cars.
I went to test the new electric BMW iX3 and it had it.
It was funny because it was July in Southern Europe so it was quite obvious why it was the worst idea in the world.
Most people don't utilize them fully.
- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
I currently live in Seattle and drive a 4WD Toyota Tacoma with a rooftop tent on the back and frequently enter parking garages. I know the height of my truck and was careful to get a setup where the rooftop tent isn't gratuitously high. I think everything is still a little under 6' which is fine in just about every parking garage.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
What you’re describing is a sunroof that’s useful for a small set of use cases. Panoramic roofs that don’t open are different.
I got a used 2023 Chevy Bolt and initially disregarded one pedal driving was an absurd and unnecessary feature, but now I think I would skip a car that doesn’t have it.
I've never tried it but can you explain why you like it?
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
Add automatic high beams to the list.
They just don't work half as well as when people did it manually.
Before the pandemic, it was rare to get blinded by a person's brights. Now if I drive at night it's just non-stop, and I live in an area with street lighting. (Some of this is also due to after market LEDs and possibly lost driving manners.)
It's extra obnoxious as a pedestrian because at best they get turned off way too late, or frequently not at all.
Uh... Auto beams made driving definitely more pleasant around here.
On the other hand, extra-bright blue LED headlights compensated for this.
Combined turn signals and brake lights!
This or even properly dedicated indicators that aren't orange.
A sim card which connects the car to the internet.
One Pedal Drive Option tends to cause motion sickness.
I suppose as a band aid solution for the sunroof you could have the roof wrapped in the body color, an other color or even a funky design.
Also perhaps a hybrid would also fulfill the authors needs?
I do sympathize with the opinion that most new cars are not very attractive. At least to me as a petrol head.
Turning indicator stalks that don't allow soft-signaling (i.e. ability to nudge the stalk without snapping it into place).
The lack of buttons is also extremely annoying on kitchen appliances. To open my microwave door, I need to make sure my finger is clean (it’s a kitchen!) and also adds a very annoying latency between the “pressing” and the door opening.
As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?
I thought this was going to be about the noise, pollution, danger, bullying etc. Ah, no, it's about things that annoy the person on the inside of the car. So if both the people outside and inside the car hate the things, why are we stuck with them?
You could easily avoid every single one of these issues by driving an older bog standard, cheap car rather than one costing tens of thousands. Seems like a no brainer really?
I agree with most of these but
>Smartphones and NFC cards instead of keyfob with buttons
Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
>Turning on/off headlights, auto lights are good but I still regularly need to manually control them.
Why? Auto headlights work 99.9% of the time in every car made in the last 20 years.
> Using a phone as a key is super convenient, and having a little credit card sized NFC key works great as a backup. I've rarely had any problems with it.
The author elaborates that it only works intermittently for them, providing a long list of links to similar complaints?
Sure but if we're comparing anecdotes all I'm saying is I've had a great experience.
The linked complaints are all for one specific car which I've never driven, so maybe there's some problem with that model or Volvo's software.
I wonder if there's a blog or something that tells the story of how good car design went off the rails. I'm pretty sure that there was a culture of design that gradually worked out what a great car is like until somewhere in the 2010s - and then got flushed down the toilet, but I don't know anything about it.
I can see how this might have happened. Tessla was a big deal and had those horrible door handles and companies probably wanted to look innovative rather than have good working designs. And physical buttons are more expensive to put in and don't look nearly as futuristic. I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!"
But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens, who cares what they do, and the car companies just threw up their hands and gave them what they wanted? I don't know. I would love to know the full story. I'm sure its documented somewhere.
I blame Musk. Maybe I'm way off base, but most of these trends were first highly visible in Tesla products. They may not have created each dumb UX decision, but certainly were one of the first to put them all into a single car.
I remember the first time I tried to go to lunch in a friend's Tesla. I couldn't get in or out of the stupid thing without instructions. And getting in would be next to impossible for somebody with bad rheumatoid arthritis and bad fingers - the "push with thumb, while pulling with fingers" is awkward at best.
> But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens
We should never underestimate people's weird desires but this is mostly not it IMO. There was a new generation that felt the need to rebel against old established stuff and of course is now painfully rediscovering why this stuff was established in the first place.
Infuriating to watch, mind you. But also predictable, like watching bots play StarCraft against each other.
Subaru Trailseeker was the best I could find, for us.
I recently bought a new car for the first time in 16 years. I had all the same concerns - my Acura MDX solved them all. It’s not perfect (has opaque shade for panoramic roof) but the number of physical buttons (dozens) is glorious. And the door handles are great.
I hate the tall center storage boots that leave me with no room for my elbow. There is no reason for anything to be there in a front-wheel-drive vehicle.
Why do I have less elbow room than in some 60-year-old rear-wheel-drive that has a transmission and axle in that spot?
Short, tasteful drink tray and storage bin, please.
There are EVs with no sunroof.
I can tell you this annoyance - if you're behind a Kia Niro EV and you wonder why the driver is braking from 70 to 30 randomly all the way down a totally clear motorway, it's not the driver. The car's cameras have spotted a shadow across the road and decided it's an obstruction and panicked.
It's like being driven by an inexperienced and terribly stoned driver, paranoid, jumping at shadows, hallucinating shit all over the place.
The ones we have at work keep pinging and beeping about all sorts of shit - oh you're too close to that car over there! (Yeah the road is really narrow, shut up, you're the same width as my Range Rover, you fit just fine). Hey watch out for that twig that's 50 metres away across the field! Oh you wanted to change lanes? I don't think so! OMG WATCH OUT FOR THAT CAR YOU'RE ABOUT TO HIT! (yes because you steered back towards it you stupid machine).
Hey you look tired you should take a break right now so I'm going to ping and beep and make the instrument panel flash until you do, even though we only left five minutes ago and there's still over three hours to go!
Fuck everything to do with them. They're exhausting and stressful to drive. I don't know how anyone can cope with EVs.
I am so happy to get rid of physical buttons. When entering a rental car I often feel like I've entered the cockpit of an airplane. I think Toyota bz4x has 20 separate buttons on the steering wheel alone.
I am exactly opposite, I feel like touch screens in cars are especially bad ux. If I get into a rental especially I don't want to go hunting through all menus to find out where to set what settings, which tiny slider to pull to do change the volume. Where to turn off the lane keep assist or adaptive cruise control.
I rented a car not an ipad multimedia system, touch screens in cars are totally counter intuitive and often don't have the basic functionally easily accessible. Also usually the ui is laggy.
Tactile buttons can be pressed while keeping your eyes on the road and your surroundings. Touchscreens are inherently visual and require looking. Relative positioning of differently shaped buttons help guide your fingers to what you need.