Every week, I get behind the wheel of a brand-new vehicle to review for the Car Pro Show, and after all these years, I still look forward to it. I've driven thousands of cars in my lifetime, and I continue to be amazed at how far the automobile industry has come. But I have to confess something that happens more often than I'd like to admit. I'll climb into a beautiful new vehicle, settle into the driver's seat, look around at all the technology and then spend the next several minutes trying to figure out how to do something that used to be ridiculously simple. Sometimes it's adjusting the air conditioning, sometimes it's finding a particular radio station, and occasionally it's just figuring out how to turn off something the car has decided I need turned on. There have been times when I've sat there staring at a giant touchscreen, thinking to myself that the engineers who designed this thing must be incredibly intelligent people, but I'd sure like to have five minutes alone with them to ask what in the world they were thinking.
That got me thinking about something that has been bothering me for a while now, and it goes well beyond automobiles. Why does everything have to be so complicated these days? I'm not opposed to progress, and after spending most of my adult life in the automobile business, I've seen some remarkable technological advances that have genuinely improved our lives. But somewhere along the way, it seems we've confused making things more advanced with making things better, and I'm beginning to wonder whether some of the people designing all this wonderful technology have ever actually tried to use it.
I remember when you could get into a car, turn a key, adjust the air conditioning with a couple of knobs, turn on the radio and drive away without having to read anything. Today, I climb into some of the new vehicles I review and feel as though I should have attended a training seminar before leaving the driveway. The car welcomes me, asks me to agree to something, wants to connect to my phone, suggests I create a driver profile and occasionally presents a message that sounds suspiciously like a warning from the federal government. All I wanted to do was go to the grocery store.
I understand why manufacturers love touchscreens. They look modern, they can control dozens of functions, and software updates can add features long after the vehicle leaves the factory. There are some truly excellent systems out there, and I appreciate the technology when it's thoughtfully designed. But when I have to navigate through three menus to change something that used to require turning a knob, I have to question whether we've really made progress. I'm driving a car, not operating a nuclear submarine, and I'd prefer to keep my eyes on the road instead of hunting through a computer screen to figure out how to turn off the heated steering wheel.
And while we're talking about cars, can somebody explain why they need to beep at us constantly? I've driven vehicles that seem genuinely offended by my existence. There's a chime when I open the door, another when I close it, a warning when I back up, a different warning when I pull forward, and occasionally a message suggesting that I take a break when I've barely been driving long enough to finish my coffee. I appreciate safety technology, and many of these systems have prevented crashes and saved lives, but I sometimes wonder whether the engineers have considered that a vehicle issuing a warning every 30 seconds eventually trains the driver to ignore the warnings altogether.
Of course, the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly on making simple things difficult. I recently found myself thinking about how easy it used to be to watch television. You turned it on, selected a channel and watched whatever was playing. If you didn't like it, you changed the channel. Now, between streaming services, subscriptions, passwords, updates and menus, finding something to watch can take longer than the program itself. Half the time, I can't remember which service has the show I want, and by the time I've located it, I've lost interest. I don't need my television to know my viewing preferences, recommend 37 programs or ask whether I'm still watching. If I'm sitting in front of it with my eyes open, there's a pretty good chance I'm still watching.
Then there are restaurants. I don't know who decided that looking at a menu was a problem that needed solving, but apparently somebody did. You sit down, ask for a menu and the server points to a little square on the table that you're supposed to scan with your phone. Now I'm trying to adjust the brightness, get the camera to focus, wait for a website to load and enlarge the print enough to figure out whether they serve chicken-fried steak. I'm not trying to launch a satellite. I'd just like to order lunch. A regular menu worked pretty well for generations, and I don't recall hearing anybody complain that restaurants were making it too easy to see what they served.
And don't even get me started on customer service telephone systems. I've spent 25 years encouraging people to call my radio show with their automotive questions, and we actually answer the telephone. Imagine that concept! But try calling a large company today and you're likely to be greeted by a cheerful recorded voice telling you that your call is very important, which is usually followed by a series of options that have absolutely nothing to do with why you're calling. You press one number, then another, then another, and eventually the system asks you to explain your problem in a few words. You explain it, the computer misunderstands, and before long you're having an argument with a machine that keeps telling you it didn't quite get that.
I have discovered that saying "representative" repeatedly doesn't always help, although I admit that I've occasionally tried saying it with increasing enthusiasm. By the time an actual human being answers, assuming one ever does, I'm so relieved that I almost forget why I called in the first place. Then, just when I think we've made progress, the person asks for all the information I already entered into the automated system. I suppose the computer and the human don't speak to each other, which seems like a fairly significant oversight in a system designed to improve communication.
Passwords may be the greatest example of technology creating a problem and then selling us another technology to solve it. Every business wants you to establish an account, even if you're only planning to buy something once. The password must contain capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols and apparently a secret message that can only be deciphered by someone at NASA. Then, six months later, the website informs you that your password has expired and you must create a new one, but it can't resemble any password you've used before. At this point, I have more passwords than I have relatives, and I don't remember all of their birthdays either.
What really gets me is when a company requires an app to do something that worked perfectly well without one. I understand the convenience of using a phone for certain things, and there are applications I genuinely enjoy, but I don't believe every business transaction needs to become a permanent relationship with my smartphone. I don't need an app to buy a sandwich, pay for parking, check the balance on a gift card or operate something in my house that already has an on-and-off switch. Sometimes I just want to accomplish a simple task without providing my email address, agreeing to terms and conditions or being invited to join a rewards program.
Now, I realize I may be sounding like one of those old guys who believes everything was better in 1965, and that's not what I'm saying at all. Modern technology has made our lives better in ways we couldn't have imagined when I was growing up. Today's cars are dramatically safer, more efficient and more capable than the vehicles I started selling decades ago. Navigation systems have eliminated the need to unfold a road map across the steering wheel, smartphones allow us to communicate instantly with people around the world, and advances in medicine, manufacturing and communication have changed our lives for the better.
I wouldn't trade those improvements for the good old days, and I certainly wouldn't want to go back to doing everything the way we did 50 years ago. What I would like is for the people creating new technology to remember that the purpose of an improvement is supposed to be making something better for the person using it, not simply demonstrating how much technology can be packed into it.
I learned something about that during my dealership years. Customers didn't care how complicated our computer systems were, how many departments had to communicate with one another or how much work went into preparing a vehicle for delivery. They wanted to buy a car, get a fair deal, have their questions answered and drive home happy. If we made that process unnecessarily complicated, it was our problem, not theirs. I always believed that the easier we made it for customers to do business with us, the more likely they were to come back, and I still believe that applies to virtually every business.
In fact, one of the smartest things a company can do is make something complicated appear simple. That's not easy, and it often requires a great deal of thought and effort behind the scenes, but the customer shouldn't have to understand all that work to enjoy the result. The best technology is often the kind you barely notice because it does exactly what you need it to do without demanding your attention.
I sometimes wonder whether we've become so impressed with what technology can do that we've stopped asking whether it should do it. Just because a refrigerator can connect to the internet doesn't necessarily mean it needs to, and just because a car manufacturer can put every control on a touchscreen doesn't mean that's the best way for a driver to operate it. There ought to be somebody in every design meeting whose job is to ask one very simple question: "Is this actually going to make life easier for the customer?"
And if the answer is no, perhaps somebody should have the courage to suggest leaving well enough alone.
I don't expect the world to stop changing, and frankly, I wouldn't want it to. I'm still fascinated by new technology, especially in automobiles, and I look forward to seeing what engineers and designers come up with next. But I hope the next generation of innovations places a little more emphasis on simplicity, convenience and common sense, because those things never go out of style.
In the meantime, I'll keep learning how to operate the latest vehicles, trying to remember which streaming service I'm paying for, searching for passwords I was certain I'd never forget and occasionally asking a restaurant server whether they have an actual menu.
And if anybody knows how to reach a real human being at one of those companies that keeps telling me my call is important, please let me know.
I'd be happy to call them.
Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.
-Jerry