Biggest Pet Peave on New Cars

What's your biggest little complaint on newer cars?

Mine- misaligned dual exhaust pipes.
It seems every new car out there has the option for dual exhaust pipes, from pickups to family toasters. The purpose of which is primarily appearance, to make a plain vanilla car look mean, grrrr. But I've seen so many brand new cars with the dealer tags still on them with obviously misaligned pipes. I mean come on. Just looks tacky, and ridiculous.

Oversized and squared off wheel arches. Ugly now and even uglier in the future, IMO. Here's an example, but certainly not even the worst.

Doors that are too high to hang your elbow out of comfortably.

Price.

The lack of rear visibility in almost every new car

High belt lines. I should not have to put my elbow at ear height to rest it on the open window.

All the nanny crap. I don't care if its available as an option for those who wish to have it. I hate that it is mandatory. I do not care how many lives are saved by ABS, traction control, tire pressure monitors, etc... I DON"T WANT TO PAY FOR IT. STOP TELLING ME WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME. (deep breath... ).

All the crap that doesn't help me drive the car.

Sat nav. Bluetooth. Traction control. ABS. Leather seats. (I HATE leather seats) Ugly styling. Weight. Automatic transmissions. Price.

There are no new cars that i could buy, that i would.

Those stupid start buttons! It was corny but OK when the S2000 introduced it as it was a sports car, but now nearly every car has one.

Also, did anyone....ever complain about using a key to start a car? Nearly every new car I drive has a "fob" instead of a hard key. It is the answer to a problem no one ever had. Sure it may be a little more convenient to not have to take the fob out of your pocket, but just try to have your local hardware store make a spare key. Expensive, fragile, and prone to failure.......great idea!

Lack of visibility is another massive pet peeve. 50 airbags, and traction control won't help if you CAN'T SEE!

Cars that do things for you that they have no business doing. Like locking the doors automatically as soon as the vehicle gets over 5 mph. I don't like headlights that turn themselves off - they always cause me to try to save people in parking lots by helpfully reminding them that they just left their lights on only for them to look at me like I have three heads because they turn themselves off. I don't like that new cars all have hoods that are as high as the top of my Miata windshield. Not just gian trucks and SUVs, but normal sized cars are all tall these days.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: High belt lines. I should not have to put my elbow at ear height to rest it on the open window. All the nanny crap. I don't care if its available as an option for those who wish to have it. I hate that it is mandatory. I do not care how many lives are saved by ABS, traction control, tire pressure monitors, etc... I DON"T WANT TO PAY FOR IT. STOP TELLING ME WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME. (deep breath... ).

+1 million

driver nanny stuff - and on our 4-runner - beeps constantly while in 4-low to let you know that, while you had to manually and deliberately switch to 4-low, that you are currently in 4-low. Weight - just about everything could stand to lose 1000 lbs. Tire pressure lights that won't go out Nov - March.

berkeleying SELF-PARKING??? Jeez. Pretty soon we'll have a whole generation of people who don't even know what side of the road to drive on.

Complexity. Why do I have to unplug an aftermarket stereo in a VW before I can plug in a $7000 Genisys scanner? And why does the low oil pressure light come on when the ABS fails in Passats? Why would anyone engineer a subaru spindle where the force required to press the bearing in and out often times is greater than the spindle can handle? (P.S. I have a small pile of broken Suby and Mazda spindles sitting beside my press if anyone wants them for scrap)

This complexity just makes things expensive and laborious to repair... not to mention diagnose. And IMHO, the 600% added complexity doesn't provide nearly a proportional supplement to safety or convenience.

The consumer is being duped twice - first when they're led to believe that heated steering wheels and OEM bluetooth are something they really NEED, and second when their intelligence and driving skill gets numbed to the point of just being a passenger in a car that does everything for them.

The third problem comes for me when I have to convince these people that "yes, your cheap-ass, tin-can RAV4 transmission that you didn't service for 189k really DOES need $4000 in repairs PLUS a new PCM"

On a nicer note, I just built a TH350 for a customer in his 64 chevy pickup. Even with R&R labor, rebuild time, and all the parts he's only paying $950... and I'm making more profit on that deal than I am with the $4000 RAV4 I finished last week.

Wow. I made the first comment on this, but now that I read all the others I have to say that nothing stated here is NOT a pet peeve of mine.

Already mentioned, but TPMS. Why do I have to pay extra for the new car AND every set of wheels I may ever put on it from here until eternity just b/c some moron doesn't know how a tire guage works? (Or for that matter, apparently doesn't have the ability to look at a tire and say "hey, that looks a little low") GRRRRRRR.

Oh, and price, but that's a function of all the other previously mentioned ridiculous crap.

I hate reverse lights that come on when you unlock the doors and stay on for a few ticks after you get out. It's very confusing in a parking lot as it looks at night like the car is about to back up.

Joey

You guys have already covered all of mine, so I'll just echo the high beltline (and teenie weenie greenhouse) again. If I wanted chopped & channeled, I would have bought a custom.

Some one mentioned their tire pressure light that won't go out Nov.-March.
That is exactly the purpose. Tires lose pressure as it gets colder. Get a tire pressure gauge. DUH.

Stickers. This has been a curse of the PWC, ATV and Motorcycle for some time and is making it was into the car more and more. After the designer pens a beautiful interior, some lawyer has to put 20 warning stickers all over it! Put it in the manual dammit!

This goes double for dealers putting their name on the rear end. Some even have fancy chrome jobs that look like OEM badging. You screw me on the price, screw me on the financing, screw me on my trade in...and now I am supposed to advertise for you?

As I said earlier, price is my biggest pet peeve and here is why. I bought my Ranger XL back in '96 for just over 10k. If i want to buy a new '10 Ranger, I fork out 18k. I have yet to see 8k worth of "improvements" This is the stripper model with a base 2.3/5spd, manual rollup winders, vinyl mat, etc.... I know they now come with rear DISC, but comethefrickon. There isn't but one safety feature, TPMS, that is added on to a '10 that wasn't available in '96.

As for the belt lines being too high and lack of overall visibility, thank the gubment for that as an avoidance measure to prevent occupant ejection and reduced head injuries in side impacts.

I said it back in a different thread, but I believe that you should be able to sign a waiver to delete safety content and that waiver continues on with anyone buying that vehicle.

Brian

I despise that every "option" is part of a package now in new cars, at least in my experience. Just a way to get the customer to pay for 3 or 4 options when he only really wants one of them.

Case in point: Bought a new 2008 Nissan Armada 3 years ago. 4 kids. Wanted in car TV/DVD player. Not a stand alone option. Have to buy the "technology package" for over $3k that also includes sat. radio, bluetooth, sat. navigation. Should have bought a $150 dvd set from Walmart, a $80 TomTom and a $2500 Miata.

Number of times, in 3 years, I have used the things I didn't want: bluetooth: 0 Sat radio: 0 (after 3mo free promotion ended) Sat navigation: maybe 10

I absolutely hate mirrors that drop themselves automatically when you put the car in reverse. I mean there are times I want to see farther back and it renders them useless. Totally unneeded.

I also despise the height of new trucks. It makes the bed almost as useless when you need to load it, and it blocks the forward vision of anything following it short of a semi. Lower the stupid things back down. This is a fairly new complaint since I had to load something in our work F150 yesterday in the rain, and had to lower the tailgate and climb up in it instead of just throwing it over the side.

Other than that, just the general complexity. All these non-needed items eventually break, and many times cost more than a car is worth to fix them. My Dad's BMW is a good example when the entire dash electronics shorted out at less than 40k miles and just out of warranty. And I only use a small portion of my G35's electronics.

Car companies have done a good job of convincing us that we need these things though. I was watching a Taurus commercial last night and all they were pushing as selling tools were the electronic "feel good" money makers. "Yeah my Taurus has a Bluetooth and your Camry doesn't, that means the Ford is better" mentality. Hate it hate hate it.....

High belt lines, high bumpers, high front ends, high seating positions, pedestrian crash standards (don't step in front of a moving car dumbass), high weight.

And last but most important - high price.

Option packages are there to reduce overall production costs. Easier to wheel over one cart of crap for 4 people to install on the line then to have one person install one part on every once in a 100 vehicles.

My biggest suggestion is to shop the parts dept accessory books for available upgrades over checking off option boxes. The accessories are still factory equipment, kills crappy AM junk in quality, but designed to work without the rest of the stuff in the option package. Sure the $800 part plus the 2hr install, might be a hard pill to swallow, but it eliminates all the crap you don't want/need.

Brian

+++ infinity on the TPMS.

I don't mind some of the other nannies, such as ABS, Traction Control, etc. especially on a daily driver, but I check my tire pressure on a regular basis, like you are supposed to. All it does is annoy the hell out of me. It costs $60 extra to change tires on my car because of it (you have to rebuild the valve stem every time they are serviced), and having a second set of wheels causes the stupid light to come on. The reset tools they have out there (except for the super expensive dealer ones) don't work on my car. All because people are too lazy to maintain their cars.

I also hate the trend toward using hard, creaky plastics in all new cars on every inside surface. What happened to padded dash boards, padded door panels, etc?

And another thing... I think all cars and trucks should have a manual transmission option. And furthermore, I believe all new drivers should be required by law to have a car with a manual transmission. Driving a car with a stick forces you to pay more attention to the car, the road, and your surroundings. And it's hard to juggle a cell phone, a cheeseburger, a newspaper, a latte, make-up, etc. when you are forced to actually DRIVE the car.

I have to disagree on ABS & traction/stability control. While I prefer to be able to disable these when I chose to, they've saved my ass on more than one cold, rainy night. And I wouldn't want my wife to drive without them.