In too many cars the view forward is more constrained than I’d like. I’m not a fan of deep instrument panels, tall instrument panels, or low windshield headers. An increasing number of cars have at least two of these, and some have all three. But what if the windshield could extend far back into the roof, as seen on this… More →
Category: Car Features
Car Features
What…is your favorite color?
On Facebook you can find a fan group for just about any car color. I initially joined the Brown Car Appreciation Society thinking it was meant in jest. But this group’s love for brown is quite genuine. Truth be told, my personal allegiance is most with the Blue Car Appreciation Society. Yet I haven’t owned a blue car in over… More →
Which high-tech features do you want in your next car?
A challenge I did not foresee when I first created TrueDelta’s apples-to-apples car comparison tool in 2004: the flood of high-tech, software-centric features that would emerge in the following decade. It turns out auto makers are also bewildered. Which new high-tech features will buyers demand in their next car? Which can they afford to delay or never being work on?… More →
What happened with this 1.6T engine?
Every once in a while an engine comes around that’s promising on paper, but underwhelming in reality. It’s looking like the turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder introduced in the 2013 Hyundai Veloster and now available in the 2014 Kia Forte could be such an engine. On paper, the smallish turbo four is good for 201 horsepower at 6,000 rpm and 195 lb-ft… More →
Keeping today’s cars alive a decade from now
Consumer electronics aren’t designed to last more than a few years. After all, advances in technology render computers and phones obsolete long before many of them have a chance to fail. Many people expect their cars to last at least a dozen years. If the car is a desirable one, enthusiasts would like to keep it going…forever. But will this… More →
Whither 8-way seat adjustments?
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… More →
Cost of high-tech features keeps coming down
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… More →
Best bit of the new Audi A8: seat controls
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… More →
Rear-wheel-drive: still a disadvantage for many drivers?
Back in the 1980s GM, Ford, and Chrysler transitioned nearly all of their rear-wheel-drive cars to front-wheel-drive. The primary reason: front-wheel-drive cars inherently weigh a little less because there’s no need for a driveshaft running about half the length of the car, and reducing weight helps fuel economy. Other reasons included the superior space efficiency of front-wheel-drive cars, since the… More →
iPod integration in a car — why so costly?
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… More →