10 Most Useless Car Technologies

In theory, the ability to manually shift an automatic with nice, prominent steering-wheel paddles makes some sense. Many of us don't want the inconvenience of a manual transmission during the daily grind, but who doesn't want to manually change gears once in a while? On some cars, like the AMG Mercedes with the seven-speed auto box, the paddles work fairly well. But we've often found that that the computer-controlled transmissions are far too reluctant to respond to driver inputs. As just one example, we've tried on multiple occasions to actuate the paddle shifters in the five-speed automatic in Acura's nimble new TSX about eight times before one corresponding upshift occurs. Unless the paddle shifters are calibrated properly, they're just another pointless feature.

This one's a bit of a throwback, but it might be the most famous market failure here. Interlocked seatbelts and starters, which would prevent drivers from starting the car unless they were wearing their seatbelts, became law in 1973. But Minnesotans, for just one example, laughed it out of their market. No matter how well they were tuned, the carbureted cars of the period required owner finesse to start at minus 30 F. Why buckle up before you determine your car will start? So many Minnesotans would just buckle the belts in the fall and sit on them through the winter. Congress soon quickly rescinded this misguided rule.

This feature is just like the automatic spelling-correction that interferes when you type on a word processor or a smartphone: You spend more time defeating the system when it screws up than you'd spend using the system manually. We feel an easy-to-reach switch for wipers remains the best way to clear an intermittently misting windshield. Automatic rain-detecting wipers fall under the category of trying to read Mother Nature's mind—hundreds of meteorologists say it can't be done. The reason automatically adjusting wipers were invented in the first place is because customers complained of poorly designed and placed wiper switches. Carmakers should have adopted a slightly simpler solution: easier-to-reach switches.

For our money, we'll take good headlights with broad beam spread and light output that covers the road evenly over these systems, which were designed to help drivers see around corners by turning the beams when the car's steering wheel reached a preset angle. This feature is normally found only on luxury cars; we've tried them all and were never impressed.

That said, these headlights should not be confused with the adaptive-pattern technology recently introduced by makers such as Audi and BMW. These variable-beam-pattern LED lights consist of more than two dozen beam sources that provide seamless light to the darkest corners of the road without blinding oncoming drivers. But the old-fashioned automatically steering headlights actually made drivers' vision worse: We sense a car's attitude on the road with visual cues, such as a fixed line on the hood (racing stripes were not added to car hoods because race drivers crave fashion), and ordinary fixed headlights make this easier when you're driving at night.

What's a map? Oh right, that stack of papers we used to carry around. The Mercury Capri of 1971 arrived standard with an articulating small spotlight (made by Hella for rally drivers) that would fold down from behind the rearview mirror and aim directly at the driver's or passenger's laps, illuminating a map without blinding the driver. It migrated to some Mustangs, but similar effective lighting wasn't available in the U.S. until the early 1990s, though without the precise intensity of the Capri's unit. By the late 1990s, map lights were finally common—just in time for the slow obsolescence of paper maps.

Effective interior reading lights are still available only on high-end luxury cars. Map light, reading lights—whatever you want to call them, they never met expectations.

When Mercedes introduced this feature in the 1994 SL500, we found a great use for it: If a driver is following you with high beams at night, you can aim the mirror to reflect the light back into his eyes without reaching up. As Mercedes explains, the feature is meant to work with the memory system for seat positions, exterior mirrors, and other controls. We think, however, that it's a good practice to adjust the mirror manually with your right hand after you get in any car, and this vital habit isn't so inconvenient that you need the extra weight in a servo motor and wiring to allow you to unlearn it.

Back in the 1980s, before airbags became common, automakers used motorized seatbelts to satisfy the passive-safety requirements (the rules for what a car needed to have to protect occupants during a crash). But for most, the only passive part was the shoulder belt and you still had to buckle a separate lap belt. Plus, the tracks were prone to getting gummed up slowing the belt to a crawl. Epic fail.

In these systems, sensors detect an object close to a car and trigger alerts to warn a driver—sounds very handy. In practice, though, the alerts are not common between different cars (like vehicle horns), and they offer no easily viewed direction as to where the alerts are coming from: front, rear, or side. Often the alerts sound distractingly similar to other warning chimes, such as those intended to warn you about unbuckled seatbelts, open doors, and even low-fuel alerts.

Like any automotive technology, the more you use a proximity warning system, the more familiar with it you become. But too often we find that the majority of proximity alerts force us to take our eyes away from the road to scan an instrument panel for warning lights.

Junior Johnson of Nascar fame perfected the "bootleg" turn, a method of reversing the direction of a car at speed on a narrow road, sometimes with the help of a parking brake. Latter-day handbrake users employ the parking brake to slow down in speed traps without alerting the speed-trap operators by flashing brake lights, and still more mechanical-handbrake fans use the brake lever regularly to turn into sharp driveways covered in snow. Electronic parking brakes in Jaguars, Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, and Bentleys won't allow any of this driver control.

Now that we've all learned the ins and outs of touchscreens, we also know they're nearly impossible to use accurately while we're walking or jogging, riding a bike, or riding in a car. And even though we all balked at the first mass-produced touchscreen in a car, featured in the 1986 Buick Regal, those pressure-touch screens are much easier to use on the move than the Volt's sensitive capacitive-touch screen. Plus, the Volt touchscreen, just like an iPhone screen, doesn't work if you're wearing gloves unless they're made of specially designed conductive threads.