Rant of the day: Modern cars suck

[Danth]

This both a rant and off-topic; I'll post in O/T since it's a rant but not an EQ-related rant. I feel like ranting and have nowhere in particular to vent besides yelling at clouds. So I'll rant here.

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Modern cars suck. ALL of them, insofar as I know. It has been many years since I've seen a new car I actually like, and I make a point of checking out as many as I can. They're uniformly trash. Why?

Tiny, cramped interiors. I tried out a Chrysler 300 and was appalled at how tiny a so-called "big" car was inside. Where does all the space go? The interior volume is rated high yet there's no space. The front seats felt like sardine cans, or coffins. The back seat was worse than an early 80's Ford LTD.

Center consoles suck. They suck up a huge amount of space for no good reason. I detest them. I miss the wide open straight-across seats of yesteryear...I think that one was outlawed during the Obama years for no good reason. I like it when the wife can can slide across and snuggle up to me while cruising.

Stupid absurd headrests. Think this one is another Obama-era nonsense item. Can't even get into a car without knocking my hat off, can't lean back or get comfortable, got to sit straight as a ramrod. Least the headrest problem can be solved with some taking-apart or at worst by using hacksaw--if only the rest of this rant was so readily-addressed!

Crash standards have gone from reasonable to completely crazy-town during the past 25 years. Interiors are basically designed around the 5 foot 9 Hybrid III crash dummy. Great for women and short dudes? I'm taller than the "tall" dummy variant and modern cars all feel as bad as squeezing myself into a sprint car felt when I was younger and dumb enough to try dirt tracking.

Can't see out of modern cars. They're mandating back-up cameras now as a band-aid solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Visibility in a modern car is as bad as it is in some chop-top 30's Rat Rod.

Rock-hard suspensions are everywhere. Designers nowadays seem to think everyone only drive on a perfectly-manicured circuit. They have forgotten what bumps or potholes are or what winter does to roads. Every modern car I've driven rides pointlessly hard, what in my youth we would've called "truck-like."

If that wasn't bad enough, modern seats are typically rock-hard too. Racecar influence, probably. What happened to nice soft seats that were comfy to slide into when I'm tired and simply want to drive home in peace?

To complete the rock-hard-ride trifecta and maximize discomfort, low-profile wheels are all the rage and having no sidewall space to flex means the ride gets that much harder still. What for? I suppose they shave a few more tenths off their track times, because obviously people buying a family sedan care about track times more than NVH? No, they don't care about that, because if they did they wouldn't be flocking to trucks en masse, but designers are a stubborn lot. It's a perfect storm of suck.

The steering sucks. Racecar-style quick-ratio steering isn't needed on a street car, and because of it the steering is usually also under-boosted (so folks don't twitch and crash themselves on the freeway) to the point where the wheel feels like it's stuck in wet cement. Last time I drove a modern car any real distance my wrists were getting sore within half a day--yuck! I've driven numerous older cars that entirely lack power steering and which take less effort to turn the wheel than a lot of modern cars do. It's pointless and idiotic.

There's no ground clearance anymore. Again designers seem allergic to designing cars actually suited to real-world conditions rather than racetrack conditions. I know folks who've damaged their cars by simply driving over speed bumps or railroad grade crossings. This is a big one driving the huge surge in "crossovers." Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Too many driver aids. I find onboard driver aids largely unnecessary, and not a little insulting. I know to brake when there is something in front of me. I know to turn the wheel a little to counteract torque steer. I know how to not slide off the road in snow. I can lock my own doors if I want to. I know to adjust my mirrors different for highway driving so there's little to no blind areas. Autos these days seem increasingly designed for people who don't know how to drive and probably shouldn't be on the road at all. The logical progression of this madness is eliminate the driver entirely--and we're getting there.

Surveillance: Increasingly autos are little more than rolling spyware monitoring everything the driver does. I find it disgusting on general principle, and I certainly don't need Bitching Betty riding shotgun telling me I'm looking out the window or leaning off to one side too far or a little more tired than normal.

Plastic, plastic everywhere: Damn near everything inside cars nowadays is made out of plastic. The interior of a modern "luxury car" is covered with as much or more plastic than the interior of the '89 Ford Escort my sister once owned. What we once called an econobox we now call normal? This is not progress, not in a good way, at least.

Bumpers, where art thou? A niece hit a wood mailbox and did over $3000 to her stupid plastic Mitsubishi. That flimsy piece of garbage is about normal now, automakers having forgotten that people do in fact bump into things now and then. Many years ago I owned a '90 Cadillac and when I ran over one of those heavy metal tube street nametag posts it knocked the post flat and didn't hurt the car at all besides a little scuff in the bumper--as it should be.

Sat-nav would be cool if it didn't invariably come with location monitoring and tracking. Since it does, it's really just a gimmick to get people to part with their liberty for a little bit of convenience. /puke.

"Infotainment" systems and screens should be outlawed. Why design systems which require drivers take their vision off the road? That's inherently bad design.

Turbo gas engines are stupid in street cars except maybe for high elevations. Didn't we all figure this out in the 80's? I guess every generation has to repeat the mistakes of the past. For that matter plenty of non-turbo engines suck. Automakers this time 'round have taken it to another level by routinely installing stupid little weedeater engines (with torque curves that look practically like a spike) in their cars, and using a billion gears to make up for the lack of wide-range torque. Woo, now you can experience turbo lag in a car that doesn't even have a turbo! Hit the gas, nothing happens...wait for the engine to tach way up, wait for the transmission to drop through a couple years, then fiiiiinnnallly you get some power, well after you actually wanted it. Once they eventually rev up they can make big power numbers for advertising purposes, but throttle response is wretched and they're gutless in the normal driving range people actually use most the time when they aren't thrashing their cars. But I guess they get to say they have "modern" dual overhead cams instead of "old and busted" pushrods?

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I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it. I hate it all. I see the media lamenting that the millennial generation doesn't care about cars like my own generation or those who came before. Duh? Why would they? All the cars are horrible now. Who could like this trash? Worse, they've been horrible for long enough that a lot of folks getting into middle age have never had the chance to drive something that's actually nice, so they don't know any better. Absolutely everything about modern cars seems designed to make the experience of driving as miserable and dreary as possible. Cramped interiors, hard seats, hard suspensions, low visibility, heavy steering, laggy powertrains. I'm not alone in that assessment, either. This rant DOES bear up under market scrutiny: We're presently seeing a mass-exodus from cars to "crossovers" and trucks which usually share only some, but not all, of the above problems. I wouldn't call them good, but they're less bad, and that's the best you can get today. The Big Three are slowly moving out of regular car production entirely--as usual, blaming "changing market conditions" instead of their own garbage products and incompetence. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I'd say progress hurts sometimes but none of the above is "progress" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's regression. Modern cars suck and I'll continue driving older models in preference as long as I can find them and keep them running. Sad, because modern build quality is the one area where dramatic improvements have been made (thanks, automation and computer-assisted fabrication!) and I certainly don't wax nostalgic for old-timey build quality even if I much prefer decades-old design criteria.

Alright, done yelling at the cloud for the day.

Danth