[kube-system]

Cars have too many features.

And I don't mean this in a, "I'm a luddite and wish cars were simple" type of way. I seriously think the number of controls on a vehicle (and burden of the owners manual) is so great that it is causing safety issues.

My car has more controls for the lights alone than my first vehicle had for everything. Literally.

"Automatic" features like headlights were supposed to make us safer, but I think that is backfiring as it is causing cognitive overload and making people complacent.

[nawgz]

> My car has more controls for the lights alone than my first vehicle had for everything. Literally.

As someone driving a 2021 Subaru who grew up in a 99 Integra and an 01 Civic. I don't see this at all? The controls are extremely familiar for the lighting, except my new car has a no-friction option: I turn on the "Auto" setting and it automatically puts on DRLs or full lights for me given the lighting conditions. It even turns on my lights for me when I pull into my parking garage at midday.

How exactly could this be made less complex?

[kube-system]

I'm not sure what the solution is, or whether it is even a design problem at all, rather than a societal/political/licensing problem.

My older vehicles had 3 controls for exterior lighting: parking lights, headlights, high beam. They were simple on-offs with feedback that indicated their current state. If people couldn't see your car, you couldn't see your gauges.

My 2021 Honda has SEVEN pages in the owners manual dedicated just to the headlight operation -- not counting the several other sections it calls out for related information. Some sections are called out as US specific and some called out as Canadian model specific.

Let's take just the high-beams for instance:

Flashing the high beams is a different physical control than turning them on. Activating the auto-high beam functionality is somehow not a separate control, but is done flashing your high beams, and there is a not-very-clear symbol in the instrument panel that indicates the current state. This means that when you flash your high beams, you are also changing the current state of the auto headlights. If you flash it an even number of times you will keep the same state, if you flash them an odd number of times, you change the state. Furthermore if you hold the stick in for 40 seconds, you disable the auto headlight feature entirely. If you hold it in for 30 seconds, you turn it back on. Yes, there are two independent levels of "on" and "off" respectively just for the auto-high beams.

It works perfectly fine when you know what it's doing, but it isn't something that a person would automatically know if they were someone who started driving when you turned on headlights by pulling a knob on the dash.

Besides that one specific gripe, there's 160+ pages dedicated to just to controls and the instrument panel alone.

Anyone who reads a modern 600+ page owners manual will learn something. The problem is that people don't, and sometimes the thing they didn't learn is important.

[wcunning]

I'm late to the party so no one will read this comment, but it's important for posterity. I own an F150 for moving things literally too heavy to move in even a well spec'd SUV. As a result, I cared a lot about things like load tie down points and weight ratings. In many ways, I learned an awful lot about that from the owner's manual, though in many other ways, I wish that they had better information about load placement in the bed and weight ratings of the bed liner in small areas, etc. You really can learn an awful lot that people should know about the limits of their vehicle from reading the manual.

On the other hand, we have legally required boilerplate sections like "how to decode tire ratings" that take up 20 pages, so there's definitely useless bloat.

[nawgz]

What you describe here is clearly insanity, although I am slightly unconvinced owner's manual page count is very relevant.

I read nothing and intuitively understood my car's controls, this is what I also agree should be the clear state, and it seems to me in some sense it should be legislated to prevent what you describe. It is an interesting point though, should each vehicle manufacturer be obligated to put a light stick with some exact set of controls for the headlights in?

[kube-system]

I don't think it is insanity. It's part of the complexity inherent to managing state with auto high beams. My Toyota worked differently but had other complexities. I just looked up a 2021 Legacy manual and it sounds like Subaru High Beam Assist works about the same way as my Toyota did.

The annoying thing about that design is, if I want to turn my high beams on manually, and the car decides that a street light in the distance is a vehicle, it will ignore my request to turn on my high beams when I push the stick forward. I then also have to set my primary headlights to manual mode in order to override the car. This requires turning the knob at the end of the stalk which is not backlit and therefore not legible while driving at night. This is one area where I like the Honda design better: I can always turn my high beams with one operation.

I think the page count is relevant because it is indicative of complexity and is likely inversely related to the number of people who read it.

While I am sure you probably do understand the controls on your vehicle -- I think it is important to note that the people driving around with lights in an improper state at night are also under the impression that they understand their vehicle's controls. They're just mistaken.

I personally wish licensing and enforcement was more stringent. But this is not politically possible in the US.

[nawgz]

> The annoying thing about that design is, if I want to turn my high beams on manually, and the car decides that a street light in the distance is a vehicle, it will ignore my request to turn on my high beams when I push the stick forward. I then also have to set my primary headlights to manual mode in order to override the car. This requires turning the knob at the end of the stalk which is not backlit and therefore not legible while driving at night. This is one area where I like the Honda design better: I can always turn my high beams with one operation.

It's an Outback for what it's worth, but... High beams work directly by pushing the stick forwards. I haven't experienced it denying such a request, only correctly toggling off when traffic is both oncoming and within a reasonable distance, but if it did behave incorrectly in this way, I would simply pull the stick back and push it forwards to re-activate high beams. I don't think there is any complexity in managing state with this implementation, it seems inherently obvious to me it would be this way. I am very surprised with everything else you've written here because it seems quite extraneous.

[kube-system]

> if it did behave incorrectly in this way, I would simply pull the stick back and push it forwards to re-activate high beams

In the Toyota that I had, if it thought there was an oncoming car, asking it to do the same thing again wouldn't result in a different outcome. Maybe Subaru's system is tuned better, or maybe my driving conditions are an edge case.

Either way, this was just an anecdotal tangent to support my above point that vehicle controls are more complex than they used to be. What was once one single boolean value is now a logic tree containing four boolean values ([auto headlight system engaged][vehicle detected ahead][vehicle speed within operational parameters][highbeams commanded by driver]).

[gkop]

The Subaru auto headlights work great indeed. Other Subaru smart functionality is crap though. For example, the touchscreen and gauges auto-dimming: literally every time it auto-dims or auto-undims, I have to tweak the dimming level. It would be an objectively better car without the auto-dimming.

[nawgz]

> For example, the touchscreen and gauges auto-dimming: literally every time it auto-dims or auto-undims, I have to tweak the dimming level

I have never noticed this, fingers crossed you didn't Baader-Meinhof me. The feature to aim the lights where you steer and auto-dim high beams when traffic is approaching and re-activate them works quite nicely for me as well, so I would consider the headlights to be a great strength of this vehicle. It is crazy to get into my partner's mid-2010s sedan and laugh at how bad the lights are at nighttime compared to the perfectly aimed and calibrated Subaru lights

[idiotsecant]

>It is crazy to get into my partner's mid-2010s sedan and laugh at how bad the lights are at nighttime compared to the perfectly aimed and calibrated Subaru lights

On the other hand, that mid 2010s sedan's headlight system will age gracefully - there are no aiming servos to fail or autodim relay output to stop working or such thing. It's just lights with a switch to turn them on or off.

Increased complexity also implies increased maintenance and often more troublesome failure modes when something does fail.

[nawgz]

I would find it hard to believe that the failure mode of these headlights wouldn't be "points straight and doesn't auto-dim ever", which reduces it to the previous implementation's graceful aging modes, but you are right a new possibility is introduced.

[idiotsecant]

I would absolutely believe the failure mode will be that one headlight will stop moving when it's commanded to, which best case means straight headlight, worst case means aimed where it shouldn't be 99% of the time

[kube-system]

And whatever those failure modes are, they better be good, because in 20 years those vehicles will be on the road in some state without regular inspections, driven by someone without the money to pay for OEM electrical repairs.

[toss1]

Yup, I discovered that I have an automatic headlight dimming feature. It works well most of the time, often surprisingly well.

BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, it sometimes fails, and at the worst times - like when it is drizzly & foggy at night, in a tight bit of road and a lot of wet pavement glare from the oncoming car — so the workload is already high with bad visibility & grip, and now I have to ALSO flick the lever and move my eyes to the dashboard display to check whether or not I got the lights to the correct state (it may unpredictably finally work and my action goes back to high beams a half second later).

I keep being lulled into giving it a few more chances, but I'm pretty sure it'll get turned off for good. I already reliably switch the hi/lo beams at a subconscious level with near-zero mental workload, so I'm better off just letting that instinct work by feel, rather than randomly having to engage another higher-level attention task at particularly high-workload moments.

This is a Ford and I read that they had this same feature about a decade ago and had to remove it because it just wasn't good enough. It seems that they're a lot closer, but not enough.

Something like the uncanny valley of tech features - almost good enough makes it really bad?

[tata71]

Apple Car's on the way, hang tight.