Question Of The Day: What Is Your Most Hated Feature?

Earlier this week, I wrote a column on an automotive feature I really hate: this incredibly annoying switch, or slider, or dial, or whatever you wish to call it (“The Devil”), and I wrote about how I really wanted to murder everyone associated with the switch and grind them up into tiny pieces.

After I eagerly read your responses to this column, I must say they fell into two distinct categories: one, people whose vehicles also have the switch and either agreed or disagreed with my complaints; and two, people who thought I was making a mountain out of a mole hill. (Or, making ground up body parts out of a switch, as it were.)

This surprised me, because I believe strongly that few automotive enthusiasts can live with a modern automobile without at least one complaint about a feature, or a function, or a switch, or a button, or a lever. And so today I want to know: what’s your complaint?

As you may have guessed, I’m going to start with a few more of my own to get the ball rolling here.

So, just to begin: I have this feature in my SUV where I can unlatch the rear liftgate by pushing a button by the driver’s seat. This is a common feature; many SUVs have it; and I do not find it special or unique or good or bad in any way.

What I DO find particularly unique is what happens after you press the button, and the liftgate has been released. Here’s how it goes down: You push the button and you hear the tailgate release. Then you open your door to get out of the car, in order to grab whatever you want from the tailgate. Then you shut the door, because that’s what you do when you exit a car. And then – I swear this actually happens – the force of shutting your car door is so great, and it rocks the car so much, that the tailgate actually manages to re-latch itself.

This happens every single time I un-latch the tailgate. It doesn’t matter how hard I open or close the doors, either, unless I make a concerted effort to close them so softly that they don’t latch. But either way I’m left with some sort of latch issue, and after a while I realize I really want to kill the latch people, too, and possibly ground them up and feed them to the switch people.

Here’s another annoying feature: I once had the opportunity to drive a 2006ish Maserati Quattroporte. You know: the one that now costs $19,000 and has a transmission that shifts like a small child got ahold of a clutch pedal and a gear lever.

Anyway, the big annoyance of this car was not the transmission (though it was awful) and not the depreciation (though it was awful) and not even the infotainment system, which seemed like it had been designed by an Italian grandmother who had never previously experienced the act of listening to music while simultaneously operating an automobile. No, the big annoyance was actually the fuel door release.

The problem was this: you could only open the fuel door when the car was on. So you’d pull up to the gas station, and you’d turn off the car, and then you’d push the fuel door release button, and you’d think “SON OF A!”, when nothing happened. And then you’d have to restart the car every single time, until you finally remembered that, inexplicably, Maserati had designed the vehicle so you could only open the fuel door when the car was running. So how do you get gas if you’ve run out? Nobody knows. Probably not even the grandmother who designed the infotainment system.

So those are two automotive features that especially annoy me, and now it’s your turn. What little items bother you the most? What features do you think they designed without ever testing in real life?