Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical - why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! - but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes.
Here is the trunk door on the previous model. The problem is, it is not spring loaded; to open it you had to press the lock button and then claw it open by trying to pry up the bottom edge, which is a tight fit to the bumper below it (on most cars the door at least has some depression, perhaps for the license plate, where you can grasp it; this door is smooth and lacks any such grab point).
Quite annoying, and a lovely bit of poor usability. In fact, I saw one of these cars on the road whose enterprising owner had screwed a handle - from a kitchen drawer, by the looks of it - onto this door!
So here is the same door on the new model. Same door - one key difference: now there is a depression in the bumper to allow you to grasp the door.
People must have been complaining - and the design team at Mazda had been listening. Better late than never!
As a conscientious techie I do what many car owners don’t: I ch
eck the oil and other fluids in our cars once a month, rain or shine. But our latest car, the 2007 Renault Clio, seems determined to foil this good intention.
It used to be simple: A fluid would either have a straight dipstick with marks for Max and Min, or a clear reservoir with lines marking these two limit levels. The new Clio, however, abuses these age old concepts.
Like most modern cars its engine compartment is as densely packed with systems as an animal’s belly is with entrails; and the clear reservoirs for coolant and brake fluid are so positioned that there is no way on earth you can see all the level lines without either a dentist’s mirror or X-Ray vision. You can see the Maxi lines, but the Minis are hopelessly hidden (see photos).
As Obelix would’ve said: Ils sont fous, ces ingenieurs!
We like our cars to have large glove compartments, but when we cram stuff into them we can’t seem to find anything (a problem especially while driving). I recently drove a Chevrolet Optra, and it had an obvious solution: a divider, to split the compartment in two, like this:
But even nicer, the divider was removable, allowing you to recover the full width at will. Of course, drawers in office furniture have been doing this sort of thing for ages, and I’ve retrofitted homemade dividers to drawers in our home many times - it extends the usefulness of storage space significantly. However, this is the first time I see it in a car. Nice touch!
Last year we traded in our old Clio, and got the latest model. Nice car, as before, and it looks like the design engineers at Renault have been busy thinking of ways to improve it. Like the side molding on the doors: the new car has a turn indicator lamp right inside it!
Now, though they’re often touted as “decorative trim”, these moldings have a practical function: they are essentially protective bumpers that absorb the usual nicks and scratches that the side of a car suffers all too often. To put a fragile light fixture in one, where it is guaranteed to break at the first scrape with a tree or a passing car, makes about as much sense as sticking your head out the open car window on the freeway. Of course, once it gets smashed, you can sell the customer a replacement part…
So there, it happened to us! The Clio got hit lightly by another car, and behold… the turn light was shattered, the rest of the molding was fine, and the authorized garage insisted they can only replace both as one piece - not just the lamp, but the entire strip, made more expensive because it contains a lamp. One look at the photo can convince you that the two are actually separate pieces - note the different color of the plastic.
But hey, business is business!
Parking lots try to cram as many cars in as they can (the ones that charge you to park do, anyway) and so it often happens that you exit the car only to find you’ve overstepped the white line. If you’re conscientious like me, you get back in, restart the motor and wiggle the car the few inches required to fit in your own space. The problem is that you can’t really see the lines in the last stages of the parking maneuver…
So I was in Tel Aviv the other day and saw a simple fix to this problem. Look in the photo: they extended the white line up onto the wall! That way you can see the boundaries in front of you (or back, through the mirror) as you move in.
While they were at it, they also did the handicapped spaces - now no one can say (honestly or not) that they didn’t notice the faded symbol on the pavement; if you park in one of these spaces, it stares you right in the face.
Good thinking!
This one has been bothering me for years: why don’t all cars have rear window wipers?
Typically station wagons, hatchbacks and all sorts of minivans and SUVs have one; but ordinary four-door cars almost never do. Yet the need is identical: why, then, discriminate against these?
If you have a good answer, post it in the comments!
A particularly heinous bit of bad product design are ear-shattering car alarms.
The underlying thought was good, I’m sure: let’s make the car raise an unholy racket when someone messes with it, and we’ll put a stop to car theft! Of course, this failed miserably, both because of high false alarm rates and because in the case of a true alert most bystanders will prefer to mind their own business rather than confront a possibly violent thief. In fact the New York City Police Department claims that car alarms actually contribute to making the crime problem worse; and every urban dweller is familiar with their harm to quality of life in the city (for more data, see this report).
Now, car alarms come in many forms, and not all are harmful to our sanity; there are silent alternatives that will alert the owner wirelessly without raising a ruckus; there are immobilizer devices that can prevent theft in various ways; and so on. But many manufacturers still use the useless, maddening audible alarms, and a few design ones that will not shut themselves down after a minute or two - the designers of these deserve to be drawn and quartered…
So, what can we do about this? As a society we can certainly do much, if only we’d try (Terroncito has some interesting thoughts on this). I can tell you what I did. I used to have a car with a particularly nervous alarm, which got in the habit of treating my neighbors to minute-long blasts a few times a week. I tried to have it fixed, but to no avail. So I called my insurance agent, whose policy insisted I have this option in the car. I told him either the alarm goes, or his customer goes. Guess what - the insurance company wouldn’t budge, but the agent, after some diligent search, found another who was willing to accept a silent immobilizer. End of problem.
Remember: you can, and should, refuse to be told by some insurance company to torture your neighbors!
