Our Volvo doesn't let you adjust the volume when you're in reverse. That means if you're backing out of the garage and the music is blaring -- you can't turn it off!
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow.
I'm a UX designer and I've taken delivery of an XC40 Recharge two months ago, and I've never felt dumber in my life.
Don't get me wrong, the car is absolutely wonderful, but the UX is so badly designed it makes me question myself.
For starters, I have absolutely no clue how to use the lights, fans and wipers. Just last Saturday, a design oversight (and idiocy from my part) caused me to reverse into another car parked behind me, I reversed to leave the parking spot, then instead of switching to D, I forgot it on R all while the rearview camera is showing red lines. For a car equipped with driving assists (collision avoidance and line assists), it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping the rearview camera, it only beeps for 5 seconds when it sees an obstacle then stops, same for the open door and seatbelts.
There is also the odometer, there are 3 different odometers in the car and all of them are showing different values, one with a TM next to it, another one with this symbol Ø and a third one in the "Driver performance" tab. So which one is the real distance and what's the difference? Only the norse gods know.
Also, the charge and fuel left gauges adapt to your driving by going up or down instead of showing you the real amount of fuel/charge left. And it already nearly left me stranded on the highway with 5km left of fuel.
This car is amazing but there are a lot of design oversights when it comes to UX.
"I’m having a hard time understanding how “I forgot to change gears and then hit the gas” can be classed a UX problem. Sounds like PEBKAC."
On the one hand, it is easy to point to this as user error and you're not wrong.
But older cars have a significant tactile difference in operating different systems in the car. Shifting a gear is very, very different physically than pushing the button for your hazards. Your body moves in very different and operates these controls very differently.
This distinction was made clear to me years ago when we bought a 2013 Mercedes wagon - the physical action to: shift to park, turn the car on, turn the radio on were all nearly identical - just a button press. In fact, the buttons themselves were almost identical.
So, although I never actually did this, there were a number of times when I got relatively overloaded, cognitively, and I pressed the power off on the radio in an attempt to shift to park. Or I pressed the park button a second time in an attempt to turn the car off.
I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Absolutely.
For example, in a manual VW/Audi, you have to push the stick down, then way over into R.
It's one of the nicest feeling gestures, makes your intent extremely clear, and is impossible to do by accident.
> I believe that different subsystems in the car - especially life safety / critical driving systems - should have vastly different controls that force different physical interactions.
Airplane cockpits are designed like this, for obvious reasons.
It's really a hardware/ergonomics problem. The gear selector in these vehicles goes back to it's original position after you select a gear. One major problem with these new shifters is that it's very easy to select the wrong gear. Likely what happened is the driver was trying to go into reverse but pressed a little to hard on the gear shifter and caused it to go into drive instead.
These shift-by-wire shifters have been the biggest step back in automotive design in my opinion. Used to you can hop in, shift gears and you can tell which gear you are by where the shifter is (or can at least tell if you are in D or R), with these new shifters there's no way to get that sort of feedback so you are there having to carefully select a gear every single time. I rented a Jaguar that had the same thing and it took me a few tries to get the thing to go into reverse because you had to hit it just right or else it would go into P.
Driven many cars with these “click” type shifters, including recent Volvos, thought I would hate it before trying but after one drive it’s actually very convenient and never saw it as a hazard.
You can’t press too hard to accidentally go the wrong direction. Up is R and down is D. Distinguishing up from down is very easy. Changing direction can only be done at standstill. Pressing too many times does nothing, except toggle D and B, that have same behavior from intent at parking point of view.
What might happen though is you thought you were in N but are actually in gear, as you accidentally clicked twice instead of once. But if you want to go N you should really just press P instead.
I think what they are implying is that car with so many safety features should be able to handle this situation. Volvo has lot of "collision avoidance" safety features, so one would expect that they could handle this as well.
This is common feature in other cars - I rented mazda few years back and it did automatically stop when I almost reversed into another car.
That's actually what I meant. It's unfortunate because the car already has everything it needs to handle this situation. I admit it was an idiotic thing from my part to do, but still, you gotta expect better from a 56K car whose main selling point is safety.
At that point, the driver really is to blame though. Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably; not to save himanity from themselves despite the ongoing insistance by governments that somehow the industrial sector should take on the onus for technically enforcing whatever measures that some bureaucrat sets their sights on today.
This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying.
Yes, I know I'm responsible. I do not want/need car/manufacturer to be responsible, I just want technology to help where it could.
> Manufacturer's job is to make things affordably
This maybe is your opinion, but that's not how it works. There is plenty of manufacturer's who manufacture things which are not affordable and plenty of people buy it. Pretty much any industry has luxury segment which also tends to be most profitable
> This mentality that the car should make up for fundamental defects in safe driving is horrifying
Humans are imperfect. Stress, distractions, tiredness etc could make anyone to make mistake, even yourself. Why would adding safety features be horrifying?
People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.
Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.
The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.
This Volvo like I said, is absolutely wonderful on the road, and the safety features it's got even in the base model are a godsend and make the car feel like it has a mind of its own, in a good way. It saved my butt from so many accidents that I never even noticed, it sees danger before it even happens, it's amazing.
So my point from the beginning was, if a car is capable of detecting/anticipating and dealing with danger at 100Kmh, it sure as hell should be able to prevent dumbass me from reversing into another car by mistake.
Its' not some impossible ask here. My 16k yaris beeps then brakes the car when going forwards into an obstacle. Why cant a 56k volvo do the same in reverse? It definitely has this technology, I think its mandated now, but seems to me OP is saying volvo didn't bother putting it on the reverse side of the car. Which is a little bewildering that a car manufacturer might consider a reverse collision impossible, and makes you wonder what other common sense safety things they've screwed up as well, or opted to knowingly not include to improve their bottom line.
If there were zero UX feedback as to which gear the car is in, it seems entirely possible for the problem to be the software and not pebkac. In a thread discussing that the manufacturer's UX is horrible, blaming the user seems out of place. Of course the user bares some level of responsibility but the UX of a vehicle clearly affects drivability of a car. Eg BMW's widely derided iDrive UI.
> Ø or ⌀ is sometimes also used as a symbol for average value, particularly in German-speaking countries. ("Average" in German is Durchschnitt, directly translated as cut-through.)
My 2002 VW has the same and it means average over multiple trips. TM probably means this trip? You may have distance of the current trip and average consumption of the current trip (eg 40km, 6.3l/100km), then the last few trips with a combined average for those (eg 1500km, 5.4l/100km).
Re the odometers, in my 2018 Volvo and my Wife's 2019 XC40. They are all accurate, but for different purposes.
1. The standard "life of the car" odometer is permanently on the left gauge, top reading
2. There is one (two?) manually resettable trip odometers
3. There is an auto-resetting trip odometer - it resets when the car has been off for four hours.
You can configure which of the second two are displayed by going to in-dash "app" menu and selecting what you want in the "Trip" tab. On my car, this configures the lower displays on the left and right gauges.
Update Re: your high beams - It sounds like you have them on auto. There's a spring loaded ring on the left-hand stalk that engages auto vs. manual high beam. Twist it and the light-with-an-A sign on your dash should change to a normal light symbol. You can then use the twist knob with detents to select parking light vs. low beam and whether you want auto-on or manual on. High beams are engaged by pushing the lever (or you can pull to flash).
It's quite telling the fact I needed a 3 paragraph reply from a user on HN to explain to me how to use the odometers and lights in my car.
I had a Tucson before this Volvo and it was just so intuitive and easy to use. It's something that needs to be standardized, they are tools that no car would be street legal without and thus, should have identical interactions no matter the manufacturer.
OTOH, maybe the other problem is that you're buying cars too frequently to be willing to study the manual.
There are plenty of times when ergonomics and feature discoverability are at odds, and I heavily prioritize ergonomics when I'm driving a large, lethal object at super-human speeds.
I find this hilarious, especially since they brag about having "Google inside", which already sounded more like a confirmation to me of a dystopian timeline rather than a feature.
> it shouldn't have let me reverse any more as it was seeing a clear obstacle behind me or at least make me double check by beeping
My backup camera frequently loses its shit because it gets obstructed by rain or snow, or sometimes paint on the ground fakes it out. If the only sensor is a camera, that must not override the driver. Beeping is fine. I might feel differently about lidar.
On that topic, though... I really wish backup cameras had some sort of wiper.
I honestly don't think my volvo bases its rear detection on the camera itself, pretty sure it's the sensors because on the camera it tells you in segments exactly how far each obstacle is and doing that using video + ML would be overkill for a simple feature that could use lidar.
The odometer problem is really strange. I have done some work with Volvo and they used to take a lot of care over preserving odometer readings across any repair work done on the car electronics.
I get why, but my Volvo (2017) WILL NOT let me lock the keys in the car. Which is annoying if I'm trying to safely warm it up on a -15 Minnesota day and have the spare keys in the house. There's lots of forums detailing tricks involving rolling the windows down or locking the car from the back seat. I love all the tech automation and safety features, but at times I find myself befuddled by the designers choices.
My 2004 Ford Escape won't let me lock or unlock the car with the key fob if the engine is running. So I can't warm it up in the morning without either risking it being driven away or having an extra door key for just that purpose. Ugh.
I’m also unable to lock my 2019 Toyota if it is running and I’m not in the car. It’s implemented this way so they can sell you remote start. Pity about all the car thefts that happen as a result of auto manufacturer greed.
Weird! My older (2007) Volvo doesn't let me change the station in reverse, but I can adjust the volume via a knob, or turn off the radio by pushing the knob/button.
Hopefully the system on your Volvo can be updated to fix what are presumably bugs in the system!
Same - I've a 2021 XC60. I can turn the volume knob, press the pause button, or use the volume controls on the steering wheel while in reverse. Just not use the touchscreen controls unless I press the "home" button which closes out the rear camera.
My Toyota's head unit bulldozes to reverse mode and if I was in reverse for 10 seconds, the song resumes 10 seconds as if its been playing in the background.
My Toyotas head unit has similar behavior issues. It will connect to bluetooth and start playing the song as soon as you turn on the car, only no music will come out of the speakers until you pause the song, then press play. Why do I have to manually "wake up" the speakers instead of the head unit? Probably because this software took one engineer no more than a week to write before it was shipped out full of these annoyances that would have been avoided had you, you know, tested out connecting a blutooth device to the head unit before production even just once.
I had a rental V90 last year, and it was easily the dumbest smart car I've ever had the displeasure of driving. Comically bad in some cases. Death by a thousand cuts. Little things like you say, or the fact that it would blare about the front parking sensor detecting the wall when I put the car in reverse, etc. I ended up spending a few minutes going through all the menus turning stuff off.
I had a rental Camaro a couple years ago that would pop up a notification if you were driving a bit spirited that said "Sport Shifting Mode Engaged" or something to that effect. Which was prominently displayed on top of the speedometer.
The Volvo UI pops up an almost full-display warning when it can't connect to the phone over bluetooth on startup. This UI takes priority over the rear camera. So I guess it's better to hit Timmy and his puppy when I'm backing out, so long as I know my phone's not connected!
The Volvo's headlights have "smart" auto-adjustments. That means I can't leave the high beams on, or force it to stay on low beams. It will decide for me! I think maybe I can disable this... somehow.
So smart.