At least you have those ridges dividing the directions. My car has similar but oriented correctly and no ridges. All too often I skip to next when trying to increase volume. It’s really annoying
My Tesla has one, but I haven’t yet figured out what best to do with it. The current leading contender is wipers - auto wipers are not sufficient. Also I hesitate to rely on and get used to primary co trol in custom places
I change the source regularly between my phone and the radio, but I don't use any of the wheel buttons, so I'm not even sure if my car has a source button on it.
This is actually exactly how my telly remote works. Left and right are volume down and up respectively, up and down are next channel and previous channel respectively.
Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.
It's almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.
Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.
Funny enough, it's not the engineers that are doing it. Left to their own devices without ridiculous constraints like "someone else is doing it this way so we need you to do something that sets us apart" or "you can't look at what everyone else is doing", engineers will do it the laziest way they can..... By copying what others are doing and essentially making it standard.
Have you ever been to an oil and air filter warehouse?
Some are more common than others, but there are hundreds of different types, and some of them vary by a millimeter in diameter from the more common ones.
They couldn't design the inlet to fit a pre-existing filter already in circulation, no sir, instead of any sort of compatibility they felt compelled to make up their own fucking specification and parameters that varied by a tenth of a percentage point.
That can only be the work of engineers, and from the looks of that oil filter warehouse, or from the different types of electrical sockets, the contrary bastards are everywhere, they REFUSE to meaningfully communicate with each other, and will NOT listen to reason.
More recently, look at crypto. For every well-meaning and thoughtful endeavor like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there are ten thousand shitcoins. Many are just greedy con jobs, but many are also due to stubborn and petty, noisy squabbles over minutiae. Suddenly the whole damn space was a hive of useless noise and confusion.
This tells me that you know very little about how in control of designs engineering teams are. 99/100 times it's not up to the engineers on what the specifications or limitations are for any given design.
Typically, sales says they'll have something that fits whatever crazy need no matter if a perfectly suitable design already exists if they consulted the engineers or shop, typically to get the sale. Engineering is then forced to adjust the design because nothing existing will fit.
The designer of this layout look at the display, saw that the volume slider was going left/right and placed the buttons accordingly (probably what happened).
That is what I imagined as well. Some QA or tester or whatnot probably found it annoying to click left/right when navigating the radio. It does make some sense.
Fellow Mini owner. This is only one of the many questionable UI decisions made in my car. I literally had to get help to get it started the first time.
I've got a 2018 mini cooper SE hybrid. It has a little switch to turn on. The switch has its light on when the car is turned off and it's light off when the car is turned on. It also has a third state after you get out of the car where it's not really on or off but you can't charge it or drive it until you turn it completely on or off. And you can't turn it on if you don't have it in neutral. And it doesn't really tell you if the parking break is on except a little light on the center console which you never see, so the car may be on but you won't be able to drive it because the parking brake is on. Sometimes it wont let you unplug it until you lock it and unlock it again for some reason.
And don't even get me started on the CarPlay or the driver profiles or the park assist menu that overstays its welcome by about 3 minutes.
Yeah, that’s a little different than mine. Although it does do that double-tap to completely turn off the car. That’s pretty annoying. Other manufacturers just put a sensor on the driver’s door. If the ignition if off and the door is opened, the accessories turn off automatically.
I rent a lot of cars 'cause I go on the road. When I drive a rental car, I don't know what's going on with it. A lot of times I drive for ten miles with the emergency brake on. That doesn't say a lot for me, but it really doesn't say a lot for the "emergency brake". It's really not an emergency brake, it's an emergency "make the car smell funny lever".
I recently had this conversation with my teens. Going through drivers Ed, they want you to use the emergency brake when parking, but odds are against them ever driving a manual where you’d need it. It’s unfortunate that such a potentially useful thing like the “make the car smell funny” lever is just a way to keep spending money on brakes over and over
Well, it is a parking brake and not an emergency brake. And while in an automatic you can use park and mostly rely on the parking pawl to keep the car from moving, on inclines it's not good for the transmissions.
Fuck no. I handled it like a man and trial and errored it for weeks. I am ashamed to say that I had to ask the dealer for assistance to drive it off the lot because I was blocking people and they were getting pissed.
Because it's not that easy, unfortunately. The 5-way switch (d-pad with center button if you will), is molded into a shell. That shell is what sits in the cavity of the steering wheel. Even if you removed the switch from the shell, you still have to deal with the wiring inside, behind the switches and contacts, and the fact that the d-pad and the shell are formed in a way to only allow installation one way (as in there's notches or grooves that will only let the switch sit in the shell at the "correct" position).
Hope this makes sense. (I'm a former automotive technician turned training/warranty coordinator)
My pet peeve has always been when media controls (like volume) are on the right side of the steering wheel rather than the left.
To me it makes a lot less sense to put them on the right when my right hand is already 10 inches away from another set of media controls (left-hand drive vehicle).
My 2004 Mazda, 2018 Mazda, and 2011 Kia all had it figured out and pretty much used the same layout for media controls and accessories like cruise control. My Ford, however, seems like no thought was put into it.