[arkh]

> you set a target temp

You should be able to set 2 temps.

Early morning in summer: temperature is under 15°C, no need to heat over 20°C. Evening: outside is 30°C, I don't need 20°C in the car anymore but 25ish would be perfect. A 2 temperatures setting or 1 temperature + delta would prevent having to change it every time I enter the car.

[hgomersall]

You don't need any of that. You just need a knob that ranges from make as cold as you can to make as hot as you can and a reasonable fine grain in between. I can find the right set point because I'm literally sat next to the knob and I'm a better control system than anything they can come up with.

[nottorp]

My (old, obsolete) car's knobs not only stop completely at the extremes, but they aren't truly continuous but have "stops" every half degree that you can feel in your hand while turning them without looking at them at all.

That's too ... physical ... for modern designs, I guess?

[arkh]

And I'm a lazy fucker: I want to set a temperature range and then not bother until I sell the car. Under the range? Heat it. Over? Freeze it. But a range, not a single point. So if the temperature is between min and max, the AC stays off.

[hgomersall]

I posit you're unusual in your opinion. I mostly observe people use the climate control knob like a heater knob. If it's cold, the set temperature gets cranked up; if hot it gets cranked down.

[nottorp]

I don't like thermal shocks when getting in/out of the car so I stick it to a low-ish temperature in winter and something high-ish but still bearable in summer.

I really don't like getting out of a car cooled to 18 C when outside it's 30+.

However this just proves "smart" automatic a/c is useless because, newsflash, different people have different habits.

[ninalanyon]

> I mostly observe people use the climate control knob like a heater knob.

That's because their car has badly designed and implemented climate control.

I do that in my current car because it has crap climate control, Tesla S 70D. In my previous car I set it when I bought the car and adjusted it perhaps once a year, Rover 75 Connoisseur.

[eszed]

Yeah, that's because climate control is crap. When I get into the car and it's 45° I want to a) get some hot air on my feet and hands, and b) warm the cabin up to a comfortable temperature ASAP. The standard climate control system doesn't do that, it sets the air temperature to roughly the target temperature and takes twenty minutes to get to something comfortable. I can "trick" it by setting the target temp to 95°, and then I'll actually get warm air.

I get that approach for AC, because cooling air takes energy, but there's no excuse for that behavior when (in an ICE car) you're warming the cabin with waste heat from the engine. Just give me some damn heat!

Fortunately, I have an old enough car that I can take manual control of the heater and blast it for a few minutes until I'm warm, and then switch over to climate control to maintain temp. Cars which don't have manual override have to be tricked by using the climate control like a heater knob. It's dumb, all around.

[BurningFrog]

This is, by far, my main AC complaint. Since it's almost always not the exact requested temperature, the AC noise is always on.

[account42]

Do you wear the same amount of clothing all year around? Never excerted yourself or been in a blizzard before entering your car where you might want to get back to your ideal body temperature quickly?

[nottorp]

You're designing the controls for the area you live in and for your driving patterns now.

There's some famous electric car manufacturer that did the same. His products were unusable in some locales even before he went all political.

[robertlagrant]

BMW's first iteration of iDrive was very ill-received, and so they improved it. I think launching a global car brand is pretty difficult, even if you don't like the guy.

[nottorp]

But I test drove a Tesla and besides the stupid tablet controls the smart turn stalks couldn't hold a turn signal when turning left at a crossroads that wasn't at 90 degrees. That's life threatening if you ask me.

No, I don't need to know Musk's politics to avoid his cars.

Of course, it's well known that BMWs come without a turn stalk so maybe it seems normal if you compare those two brands :)

[amluto]

My biggest objection to modern smart turn signal stalks is that you can’t turn the turn signal off easily. Sometimes the signal is on, I want it off, and there simply is no way to do it reliably. The old latching stalks could be moved to the center position, and the signal would turn off every time.

[nottorp]

With the Tesla i couldn't keep it on to turn left at something like 30 to 45 degrees and at the same time maneuver to the lane reserved for taking that left. Which required turning the wheel right a bit.

Since I was test driving, I just moved forward instead.

[tekknik]

On a Tesla you do exactly the same, push the stalk back to center. It’s a little confusing at first but so is one pedal driving.

[amluto]

What generation Tesla?

On the originals, sure. The stock physically latches away from the center position when the signal is on. Works great.

On some of the newest ones, there is a left signal button and a right signal button. I think that, if you are signaling right and push the left button and you don’t lose the race against the automatic end of signaling, then you end up not signaling. This is both modal and racy.

On the intermediate models I’ve tried, I’m moderately confident that the stick always rests in the center position. You can’t push it toward center because it’s already there.

[Lanolderen]

The issue I see with AUTO most often is noise. Almost every time I've disabled AUTO was in the beginning of a drive while talking to someone having to yell over the fans or just going to move my car 10 meters and it just being annoyingly loud.

The temp I don't believe you can really fix. Sometimes I throw my jacket in the back, sometimes I keep it on, sometimes I'm tired or my stomach is upset and I want it to be a sauna, sometimes I'm sweaty and want it to be a fridge..

[yial]

From my experience: BMW, Subaru, and Mazda the auto settings are worthless / not functional.

Audi is okay.

The best I’ve found is Infiniti, which 2013 ish on, the auto settings are perfect 99% of the time.

(This of course means, you do have to adjust the temperature setting, but once set the fans spinning up and down are perfect along with the heat moderation. )

BMW could be user error on my part. The longest I’ve used a BMW is 3 weeks, with probably 9 weeks of total usage, and while I tried to get the auto settings to work, on multiple models it was nothing but agony for me.

[tekknik]

When people get hyperbolic and state that AC controls are pure agony it shows a disconnect with reality and it’s hard to take that person serious.

[nottorp]

You could consider the noise as part of the feedback :)

If I hear the a/c more than 5 minutes after starting the car, it means it's on window defog.

Or it's over 30 outside and I'm driving in full sun. What climate change?

[HPsquared]

Some cars have an option for how "intense" you want the system to be.

[dupays]

I just wrote the same thing. It seems obvious. Set range and forget.