h a l f b a k e r yIdea vs. Ego
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In my Calibra, when you open the door the interior light comes on. When you close the door, the light goes off. When you start the ignition, the stereo comes on. When you turn off the ignition, the stereo goes off. That's it.
In my hire car (VW Touran, while my Cally is repaired after being driven
into by a dunderhead), when you unlock the car the interior light comes on. When you turn the ignition off the stereo stays on. When you remove the key, the interior light comes on. Some cars take this to ridiculous degrees - the first time I drove my brother-in-law's Mini I spent about quite a while trying to turn the headlights off, not realising that they stay on for a few minutes after you shut the car down and lock it...
What a pain! Surely it wouldn't take much to include a button/key/whatever to bypass the new circuits and leave things the way they were? I LIKE to stop the car and have the stereo go off - much better if you want to have a conversation before you get out of the car (conversation? is that what the kids are calling it these days?). I DON'T like the interior light coming on when I take the key out of the ignition, it hurts my eyes when I've been driving at night...
You could extend the feature to cancel out other newfangled ideas such as rain sensitive windscreen wipers (which were a ROYAL pain in the VW Golf I recently drove), or light-sensitive lights, which also were a pain when driving in semi-dim conditions...
(Is this a rant? Should I delete it? Just read it back before posting and thought "listen to yourself!")
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This may well be a rant [kmlabs], and it's baked to boot. I read this and agreed with everything, before realising how much of a grumpy git I have become. Isn't old age a bugger. |
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I like the phrase 'Royal pain in the VW Golf' - Very nice euphamism. |
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I don't see how this is baked, [suctionpad]; can you provide a link? Otherwise, if the intent of the idea is to reconfigure one car's interior accessories to mimic another's, (or a custom configuration) this idea is new to me. It would be like 'skinning' your winamp.
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Hmmm. I love my rain sensitive wipers. They're quite accurate and behave perfectly. I mean, I have to turn them on--they won't just start wiping on their own--but, once on, the rain sensitivity controls the intermittent dwell time. |
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As for all of these other things, I think it may be possible in some cases to re-program the behaviors. Again, in my car I can control, through re-programming at the dealer, the length of time the headlights stay on after the car is shut off and whether they remain on at all if it is light out, whether the 12 volt outlets are active with the ignition shut off, how loud the turn signal audible indicator is, how the interior lights behave (do they stay on after the doors are shut, etc.). So, it may be possible that you actually have access to some of the things that are, apparently, causing you grief. |
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This is a semantic point: Since the car giving you grief has no built-in memory sense of the "things the way they were like," so you'd have to settle for reprogramming the features to be "things the way YOU like." |
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What sort of car do you drive, [bristolz]? I'm impressed! |
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The rain sensitive wipers in the Golf were a nightmare - the 'intermittent' position was rain sensitive, you could turn them on or off too... but if you only had enough rain for intermittent wipers they were unfailingly either too slow, or so fast they added lift to the car. |
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Regarding the car remembering "the way things were", you're right, it doesn't. But the manufacturers do... |
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All the desired options are baked in my 13 year old VW golf [xrayTed]. Okay, not strictly connected to pushing a big red button... |
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[suctionpad]: I would agree that the features are baked, but not the ability to change them, i.e. "...include a button/key/whatever to bypass the new circuits..." |
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[suctionpad] they're baked in my Calibra too - but they were completely unbaked in the modern hire cars I drove - and they'd be very easy to bake. |
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It's a Mercedes and, no, it isn't perfect but certain things like rain sensitive wipers and the ability to reprogram almost any attribute work very, very well. |
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