QOTD: Automotive Tech Flops - Past, Present, and Future
TTAC commenter Bruce suggested today’s Question of the Day, and he wants to talk tech features. Specifically, the kind which are all the rage for a short period of time, then fizzled into nothingness.Today we ask you to tell us about automotive tech flops – past, present, and future.
Bruce’s four-wheel steering suggestion is a great example of a tech flop. I can think of four-wheel steering vehicles from the ’80s through the ’00s, and none of them gained much by having the feature. The ’80s brought us the four-wheel steering Honda Prelude, and the ’90s the tech-laden Mitsubishi 3000GT. GM got in the game in the early 2000s, offering the complex Quadrasteer system between 2002 and 2005 (usually on high-end Denalis). Then it was gone.You turn if you want to. These wheels are not for turning.
Another example from the ’80s — voice alert systems. Available notably on Chrysler products throughout the decade, a Electronic Voice Alert (EVA) shouted warnings from the car’s electronic brain. Leave the door open? Well your door is probably a jar. Turn your headlights on? A voice confirms what your eyes have already observed. This feature/gimmick fizzled out sometime around the dawn of the 1990s, and I don’t think anybody missed it.
From the nearer past, hands-free parking was advertised in high-line cars starting around 2006 or so. There was a memorable segment on old Top Gear from 2007, where Richard Hammond attempted rather unsuccessfully (per his own error) to park a Lexus LS460 in the studio. Autonomous driving capability has stolen the spotlight from hands-free parking, but perhaps the parking capability will just get folded into the larger autonomous system, rather than fade away entirely. To that point, what are some of the current tech trends you see falling away?
Take to the comments, and list your picks for past, present, and future technology flops in cars.
[Images: Honda, GM, Chrysler, YouTube]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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Mitsubishi also put 4-wheel steering in the Galant VR-4.
The automatic seat belts in my '91 Laser were incredibly annoying. I'm glad those didn't catch on.