Bells And Whistles Press My Buttons

Utterly useless accessories? For me, it’s beeping warning signals, the push-button starter, the electric handbrake on new cars, and the way these all conspire with each other against the driver, in completely different ways depending on the make of car. For example, I had an AMG A45; get in, foot on the brake, press the button, put it in gear, press the sport mode (don’t get me started on what happens in normal mode) then simply work out where to store the key (scratch up the centre-console was usually my go to). At the destination just pull up, foot on brake, leave it in gear and press the stop button. No need to touch the electric hand-brake or the shifter, but of course if you did, you’d end up in neutral with the parkbrake off, getting beeped at and having to start again.

Try the same sequence on my wife’s Hyundai Santa Fe ( Yeah, yeah , I know) and I end up with a series of different beeps going off at me for different reasons. Then, even when I re-do what I’ve done wrong, and it’s in Park, with the hand-brake on, and the button in off mode, there’s nothing more I can possibly do and it should be happy. But it still beeps at me... presumably because I’m sitting in a Hyundai, or maybe because I’m within one metre of the garage wall.

Anyway that’s my gripe, but having said all this I seem to have much fonder memories of the car that I first encountered this nonsense in, albeit in analogue form. The grand-daddy of them all, an old 80s Volvo GL240 wagon I had many years ago. I bought the Volvo for towing the dinghy, taking the dog down the beach and being discreet, while I waited out a penalty for doing what you do in an S15 200SX. I remember reversing the Volvo down the boat ramp: Beep beep beep (driver’s door open so I could hang out the car

and look backwards); na, na, na, na (dog in the front seat); ticker-tick ticker-tick (dog has no seat-belt on). That’s three audible warnings going off together with various warning lights flashing, and of course old dog barking at them all. Made me laugh out loud every time before LOL even existed. Maybe it’s an old versus new thing, but I miss that old car, and of course the old dog. Great mag by the way, keep up the good work. Milo, WA. AH YES, THE magical, relaxing sound of warning buzzers. I remember when the Japanese car-makers started putting them in every car for every kind of warning back in the 1980s. We all thought we’d have to cut the wires on the buzzer to avoid going mad. Maybe some people did. Kind of turned out, though, that you got so used to it, you kind of started to ignore it. A bit like having your mother-in-law living in a granny-flat in the backyard.

The whole push-button start thing is a lot more vexing as it’s something you’re forced to physically deal with every time you enter or leave the car. What gets me is just how anti-intuitive some of these systems are. My pet hate is the electronic park-brake that requires you to push down on the button to apply the brake, and pull it up to release the damn thing: Exactly the opposite of what you’ve been doing for decades with conventional park-brakes. As the same kids who use LOL would say: WTF?

I’m also always suspicious of keyless locking where you run a thumb along the door handle and the car locks. Again, decades of habit have taught me to check that the door is actually locked, but when you give the handle a tug to check, the bloody car unlocks, assuming you’re ready to go again having completed your business at the shops in the last three seconds.

But my absolute hate-its-guts set up was in FPV cars of a few years ago, when the decision was made to adopt a starterbutton. And, yes, the big red button did look cool, but FPV didn’t bother to engineer the entire system. Which meant you still had to place the ignition key in the barrel and then hit the starter button. Again, this wouldn’t have been so bad if the barrel and button were within coo-ee of each other. But, of course, they weren’t; they were on opposite sides of the steering column, making starting the engine a two-handed job. Taking

a one-handed task to a two-hander! How on earth is that progress?

Meantime, seems like the useless accessory debate has raised a few hackles. So keep them coming.