5 Most Annoying Features In Your Car

Most of us are quite happy with the cars we purchase.

After all, we buy cars on two general premises – we either needed to buy that car, or we liked it enough to buy it.

Either way, there would have been more positives than negatives that we saw in the car; but since nothing is perfect, there are bound to be some stuff we still don’t quite like.

Here’s the top five of ours.

If I had a penny for every time it sounded.

But brexit isn’t quite working out so maybe the Singapore Dollar is better.

Anyhow, this is potentially the most irritating thing on most cars these days; at least it is for this writer.

Each morning I’m usually in a rush to get out of the carpark and on the road, especially since I’m also the designated bus driver which means the family is hitching a ride too.

Most drivers are in the habit of belting up before they go; it’s a routine habit after all, but with passengers they tend to have the luxury of sorting out where to put their bags and stuff and get comfortable first before belting up.

Which leads to the inevitable and annoying chiming of the belt minder.

It’s not a necessarily bad thing, considering that safety is hugely important, but still annoying nonetheless.

Okay this is a little controversial if I might say so myself.

Because it’s a feature that car makers used to sell quite hard when it first hit the market in luxury cars about a decade ago, but one that is arguably completely pointless.

In time I’ve been dealing with cars and people who buy and own them, I’ve hardly found anyone that actually uses the automatic aircon function.

Why?

Actually I have no idea because I do and I love the feature.

Yet here’s where it annoys most other people – in our hot climate, the aircon usually starts in full blast, which means you get the full eye-drying blast in your face and the noise of a jet engine every time you start the car.

Most of the time we want the minimum temperature setting and a decently quick fan speed to cool the car down as quickly as possible, which is something that automatic climate control systems never seem to quite understand.

This may not be a feature that many cars have, but for those that do, it can be quite embarrassing.

How so?

You first have to understand what this function does and how it works.

Essentially, a camera mounted to the windscreen near your rearview mirror constantly scans the road ahead, working in conjunction with the ambient light sensor for your automatic headlamps to detect both ambient light levels as well as traffic conditions ahead.

Most systems are either button activated (which is fine because if you don’t activate it none of this applies) or self activated together with the regular dipped beams.

Once the camera scans that the road is clear of traffic including cars, bikes and other road users, it automatically activates the main beams so that you get the full range of the headlamps. This feature is particularly useful on emptier stretches of highways especially in places that don’t have roadside lighting because it enables you to see further in the dark.

However in our local context, our roads are particularly well lit and there’s usually some traffic ahead. Yet when some automatic high beam systems detect some distance between you and the car ahead it still switches on the high beams for a few seconds until inevitably you close the distance to him and it switches off again.

The net result of that is that in certain systems, your car is always “flashing” the cars ahead of you, making you look extremely irritable and half crazed for randomly flashing your lights at people who’re not doing anything out of the ordinary.

Have you ever wondered why car makers give you one automatic window and that’s it?

In the past, the cost of motors and sensors were probably higher, which was justified then that motorised windows were a luxury option especially in a time when you had to crank open the windows.

Today however, the same cannot be said.

And if you get one fully automatic window on the driver’s side you might also be thankful, because in some cars, the window automatically goes down, but doesn’t want to come back up again by itself.

Ah, the wonders of modern car manufacturing.

This list wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory engine stop/start feature, the bane of most drivers’ lives.

Most European cars have it; increasingly more Asian cars are fitting it, all in the name of lower emissions and saving the polar bears.

For those who don’t know, many modern cars now come with a feature that shut off the engine when the car is stationary, for instance, at a traffic light most commonly. This means that the car is constantly shutting down the engine and restarting it again repeatedly as you commute through regular traffic, and is particularly annoying in slow moving traffic or jams.

Sure you can usually turn it off via a button, but you always have to do that with each time you drive the car.

Polar bears huh.

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