With every generation of cars comes new, more capable, and more complicated features.
However, not all these nice-to-haves are, in fact, nice to have, and some verge on unbearable.
Here are three features we would rather not have in new cars.
Electronic parking brakes
While a sleek button for a handbrake looks much better than a large lever, I far prefer having the mechanical lever rather than an electric switch as a last resort keeping my car from rolling away.
Take it from someone who owns a daily driver with an electronic parking brake and who has also had a battery failure just this winter.
After this happened, I was stuck without a handbrake for a weekend until the car could be taken back to the dealer for a factory software reset. According to them, this was the only way the handbrake would work again.
A mechanical lever also comes with the benefit of being able to do handbrake turns, and who doesn’t love those.
Lane-keep assist
Lane-keep assist (LKA) aims to keep your car between the lines of the road but more often than not it doesn’t get it quite right..
Some manufacturers do it better than others, nevertheless, LKA regularly struggles to keep the car equidistant from the white lines and tends to start snaking across the lane if left to its own devices for too long as it continually overcorrects itself when it gets too close to the sides of the road.
If you forgot to turn it off on a poorer-quality backroad where swerving to avoid potholes and debris is a necessity, it quickly also becomes a duel between the car and yourself as it generally wants to go one way while you want to go the other.
Start/stop systems
In the spirit of fuel saving, manufacturers have built an engine start/stop system into their cars that switch off the motor when it’s not being used, for example when stopped at a red light, and switches it on again as soon as the car starts moving.
How much fuel this really saves is a mystery and the inconvenience it brings overshadows it.
In bumper-to-bumper traffic, these often over-sensitive systems can create even more headaches by switching off the car if you press the brake just a few millimetres too far creating more lag on lift-off as now you have to wait for the engine to start again which can happen dozens of times over the span of an hour of congestion, which possible also defeats the original fuel-saving goal.
If you’re parked for a long time at a red light on a particularly hot or cold day the airconditioning will switch off, too, having to expend more energy to get the cabin back to the desired temperature when it switches on again while simultaneously making the drive more uncomfortable.
There’s also a safety risk involved in having a vehicle that first needs to start before pulling away.
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