Archive for the ‘Car Features’ Category

One of my favorite things about the Mazda Protege5 I own is the 8-way manual driver seat adjustments. In addition to the ubiquitous fore-aft and recline, both the front and rear seat height are separately adjustable. So you can vary the seat’s tilt independently of its height.

The Mazda3 that replaced the Protege eliminated the separate height adjustments. Hyundai did the same when redesigning its small cars. So imagine my surprise when the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze came standard with eight-way adjustments not only on the driver side, but the passenger side as well.

It couldn’t last. After only a single model year General Motors has dropped the features, so the Cruze’s front seats are now the common 6-way variety.

Eight-way adjusters remain common with power seats. But this could also be changing. With the 2012 Volkwagen Passat the power seats are 6-way even on the top-of-the-line SEL Premium. Will competitors follow?

Electronics built into a car have always cost much more than those purchased from aftermarket suppliers. I’m old enough to remember when GM charged $500 for its top head unit back in the 1980s. This money, at least $1,000 in today’s dollars, got you a “graphic equalizer” and an auto-reverse tape deck with Dolby noise suppression. More recently nav systems have cost about $2,000 in the car even as the price of equally capable portable units fell to a tenth of this amount.

As I input pricing for the 2012 Chevrolet Equinox, I couldn’t help but notice that General Motors has replaced the navigation system in many of them, substituting an SD card-based unit for a hard disk drive-based unit. A touch screen also appears to take the place of voice activation with the new unit. The lower cost is passed on to the car buyer. The old unit listed for $2,145, the new one for $795. Still substantially more than a good portable unit, but no longer by an order of magnitude. On top of the price reduction, the card readers should be more durable than a disk drive.

Also on the 2012 Chevrolet Equinox, GM is offering a new safety option, a forward collision alert bundled with a lane departure warning. Both should assist drivers whose attention is wavering. While both features have been available on luxury cars for a few years, the news here is that they’re available on a relatively inexpensive vehicle at a low price, only $295. Previously, forward collision warning was often a subsidiary feature to adaptive cruise control, as it relies on the same sensors. Judging from the lower price and absence of adaptive cruise control (which automatically maintains a set distance behind the car ahead), it seems like GM is using a less expensive, less sophisticated sensor. Not a problem, as long as it works. Avoid one moderate accident in the lives of every ten cars so equipped, and the option pays for itself. If they aren’t already, insurance companies should provide discounts.

Audi and BMW have been competing to see who can offer the largest number of seat adjustments in their large luxury sedans. A major challenge: how to make all of these adjustments easy to control.

Previous solutions, especially that on the previous generation BMW 7-Series, have made it difficult to figure out–and then remember–how to make some of the less often used adjustments. Buttons often have to serve multiple duties, and these have been difficult to sort out whether they are located on the side of the center console or the side of the seat.

Audi’s solution in the new A8 is the best yet. Initially I couldn’t figure out the purpose of the wheel the encircles what appears to be a four-way lumbar control. Then I noticed that an image of the seat was displayed on the LCD screen in the center stack, with the selected area of the seat highlighted in red.

So you use the wheel to select the area of the seat–lumbar, upper seatback, side bolsters, thigh bolsters, thigh support, or seatbelt height–then make the adjustment using the shared four-way control.

It has taken decades, but auto makers are finally figuring out how to improve ergonomics through the use of display screens.

It wasn’t long ago that luxury cars were available with a cell phone built in. But, for many reasons, this isn’t the future. Instead, with cell phones and, more recently, music players like Apple’s iPod, the trend is to have these devices integrate with the car’s controls and audio system, but not to have them built into the car. Might the same eventually be the case with nav as well?

There are a few arguments in favor of building electronics into the car, chiefly lower risk of theft and no need to mess with cords. The main motivation for the car manufacturers: it’s more profitable to sell an electronic device than a port.

Of course, the last carries no weight with car buyers. And the arguments against built-in electronics are much stronger. People want to simply carry the same device with them all the time, whether or not they happen to be driving. They want to be able to upgrade their technology without buying a new car. And they don’t want to have to pay twice for two different phones or media players, when one will do.

And so, in the past few years, cars have increasingly offered ways to connect to portable electronics as options or even standard equipment. First we had aux-in ports and wireless Bluetooth, the former chiefly used for music players and the latter chiefly used for phones. The aux-in ports were usually free. The Bluetooth cost as much as $700, insane when you consider that Bluetooth earpieces can be bought for under $20. But a car maker’s got to make a buck, right? Also, some nav systems have come packaged with memory card readers, but these aren’t a convenient way to enjoy your music.

Most recently, owing to the success of the iPod, some cars offer full iPod integration. As I understand it, this requires either a proprietary port or a combination of USB and aux-in ports, a special cable, and software to integrate with the car’s controls. As an option, iPod integration can cost $400.

But this is clearly a product of the same line of thought that offered Bluetooth for $700. USB ports are very cheap, and the software isn’t complicated. So once the initial wave of profit skimming passes I suspect that iPod integration will be standard in most cars.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. People frequently complain to me about how their car handles in the snow. Sometimes they ask which car they should buy instead.

Well, the problem usually isn’t the car. It’s the tires. Some tires handle much better than others in the snow. And winter tires handle best of all. I’ve been using a set on my Mazda for the past few years, and wonder how I got by without them.

One qualification: winter tires are only at their best for a couple of seasons. Those on my Mazda, now in their fourth season, don’t have nearly the traction they had when new. Also realize that winter tires don’t last as long as the average conventional tire, because they’re made from very soft rubber. Especially if you continue to use them once temps get back over 50 Farenheit.

To see which winter tires are available for your vehicle, check over at The Tire Rack. You’ll find their widget in the sidebar of our Vehicle Specifications pages.

Every once in a while while checking the car pricing data I come across something that must be an error, except it isn’t.

I came across such a case when going over the 2009 Mercedes ML350 today. On the ML350 you can get leather upholstery. And you can get a “Heating Package,” which includes heated seats in both rows and a heated steering wheel.

But you can’t get leather and the Heating Package together. Instead, the latter is only available with the standard vinyl seats.

For years I’ve come across complaints that the rear side window of this or that car doesn’t go all the way down. Often people assume the reason for this is safety, to prevent children from falling out of a moving car.

Well, that’s not the reason, at least not the primary reason. Especially in this age of mandatory car seats, when children are no longer standing unrestrained on the rear seat as the car goes down the road. (Yes, this was done when I was a child, along with throwing a bunch of children unrestrained into the “way back” of station wagons.)

So, why don’t rear windows usually go all the way down? Because there’s not enough space in the door for them to go down into. Look at the outline of the rear door. Almost all of the time the rear wheel opening cuts well into the lower rear corner of the door. So, at its rear edge, the door isn’t very tall. If the rear window is a single piece of glass running the entire length of the door, it will only go down part of the way before running into the lower edge of the door.

One solution: split the rear window, so that the retractable front piece of glass can retract farther, and maybe even all the way, into the door. This clutters up the design, so designers resist doing it. Often when this approach is used the split isn’t far enough forward to enable the glass to retract all the way, just more of the way than it could otherwise.

Child safety likely remains an additional factor. Not actual child safety, given today’s restraints, but perceived child safety. After using this excuse for partially retractable windows for decades, manufacturers must now work with this “fact” they created.

Well, now I know what Chrysler had been up to. Few if any new products are on the horizon–no surprise, since the company seems very unlikely to survive in anything resembling its present form. But every Jeep model except the Wrangler did receive an upgraded interior this year. Too bad they didn’t take this step back when Jeeps were still in demand.

I haven’t had a chance to check out the improvements myself yet. Most notable: all but the base trim Grand Cherokee and Overland get leather-upholstered door panels and center armrests. The Grand Cherokee also gets a leather-upholstered instrument cluster hood. Usually “leather upholstery” means that the main seating surfaces are leather, while everything else that looks somewhat like leather is actually vinyl. So Jeep is taking a step into premium luxury car territory with the 2009s. For anyone who didn’t buy a Grand Cherokee SRT8 because they interior was just okay…

Many have argued that if an automaker puts a few hundred dollars more into a car’s interior they can charge much more for the car, because the impact on perceived quality can be substantial. Well, Jeep appears to have bumped prices only about $200 to $300 to cover the cost of these upgrades. Since sales of these models are weak, they aren’t the best test of the conventional wisdom with regard to interior quality. But they are a test.

Over the past decade manually shiftable automatics (and more recently, automated manuals) have become increasingly common. And yet there’s no standard way to operate the things. With BMW and Mazda pushing the lever forward downshifts, and pulling it backward upshifts. With other makes (and I believe even older BMWs), it’s the opposite.

With paddles on the steering wheel, somtimes you push to downshift and pull to upshift. Or the left one downshifts and the right one upshifts. Or some other combination.

There is no standard. I’ve often thought there should be one.

Or maybe not. In the comments on today’s BMW 128i review over at The Truth About Cars, ash78 suggests:

There is no reason Tiptronics shouldn’t give the driver the option on how they want the paddles/lever to react.

If Nintendo can offer this sort of option on sub-$100 consoles, surely huge auto manufacturers can do the same.

Brilliant. But is any manufacturer paying attention?

When I first set up the pricing database, it distinguished only between partial leather and leather.

But the database now includes all non-exotic luxury cars, and manufacturers have been adding more leather to their luxury car interiors. In the last year or so leather-upholstered instrument panels
have become increasingly available in the segment. At a lower price point, first Mercedes and now Cadillac offer models with leatherette upholstery covering the IP–the latter refers to this treatment, sourced from the same company that supplies Mercedes, as “cut and sew.”

It might seem frivolous to upholster an instrument panel, but the interior can feel much more upscale as a result.

In a related vein, alcantara headliners are standard or optional in more and more luxury cars.

So the database has been upgraded to track these features, and (for model years beginning with 2008) leather door panels as well.

In adding the last, I was surprised by how rare leather on the door panels seems to be (if the sources I used are accurate). It seems that the stuff on the doors is often leatherette rather than leather.

Finally, the database will now track (for 2008+ cars) the number of rows covered in leather.

I’d like to get even more specific, and track the grade of leather, but as far as I can tell there’s no standard way to grade leather, and this information simply isn’t available. So this will remain one of those things not adjusted for.