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Touchscreen, Apple Carplay or breakdown kit: what actually sounds like progress, at the same time brings us some unfortunate bereavement in automotive culture.
The constant progress in car manufacturing has brought us many welcome improvements. The safety gain from the anti-skid ESP alone cannot be rated highly enough. But not every “progress” is consistently associated with advantages. Some of the more recent developments in the industry have displaced some of our cars' favorite details.
No more space for CD's
For example, those who are used to throwing in CDs for musical entertainment may be disappointed with new cars. Their permanently installed audio systems have been doing without compact disc readers for years. Music systems are now equipped with all kinds of connectivity technology, which allows occupants to play their favorite hits from the Internet or from smartphones. However, anyone who does not save their music as files on their mobile phone or has a Spotify subscription - yes, there should still be such contemporaries - has every reason to regret the extinction of CD drives.
Nobody will miss the hand brakes
The quality of car tires has improved in several ways over the past few decades. Among other things, the tires are no longer as prone to flat feet as they used to be. However, flat tires still occur today. In order to remedy this, new cars usually only have so-called breakdown kits, with which at least small holes can be tightly sealed. If it works with the seal in the event of a breakdown, you can still drive the temporarily patched tire to the next workshop, which is only open at XNUMX a.m. in the rarest of cases. Good for those who can use a spare tire.
Parking brakes in new cars are mostly electric, which offers several advantages: In the center console there is only a small switch instead of a large cable lever system. Dispensing with the latter also creates more space between the front seats for storage areas, control buttons or cup holders. Such a tidy center console also looks better. Finally, the electric stoppers can be a safety gain, provided that they are activated automatically when parking. However: On snow, which we now also miss in Germany, it can be particularly fun to pull the classic handbrake with feeling to initiate rear drifts. A lot of fun for kids who will probably not only welcome the trend towards electric parking brakes.
The touchscreen remains in trend
The wetting of our car cockpits continues. A new high point in this development is the workplace of the newly introduced Mercedes S-Class. It has a huge touchscreen in the center console, which looks unquestionably chic and offers many new possibilities of use. But as with many other cars with a central touchscreen, the operating logic that changes at the same time means that many direct selection buttons and rotary controls disappear. If you suddenly come across a rainy area while driving, the interior of an automobile can suddenly become cooler. In the past, a quick turn of the button was enough to trim the temperature towards the comfort zone. Today, in many cars, you first have to switch to a corresponding menu on the touchscreen and then set the temperature on the screen. It's usually pretty easy, but it was even easier with good old knobs.
No more cigarette lighter in the cockpit - a reason to quit smoking?
At the beginning of the 1880s, the alpine native Friedrich Wilhelm Schindler had a brilliant idea: to make a metal spiral glow under the influence of electricity in order to be able to light the cigars that were popular at the time. This epoch-making innovation was first installed in cars in the 1920s. For decades they were part of the standard equipment in almost every automobile. Gentlemen drivers were usually also connoisseurs. But the fight against tobacco consumption, which has been going on for decades, has long since reached the equipment worlds of new vehicles. Cigarette lighter such as ashtrays are actually no longer provided. Instead, there are USB ports and cup holders in the cockpits. Some manufacturers still offer smoking packages as an extra. In many cases, however, the ashtray is just a small mini-barrel with a lid, which is loosely inserted into the cup holder. Such an ashtray box not only lacks the cigarette lighter, but also the lighting, which among other things ensures higher hit rates when washing up in the dark.
