Car Features We Hate

MotorTrend has always had an eye toward the future. We tell you what's going on in automobiles today, but we're just as interested in what's coming next year, in the next few years, and beyond. Yet as we look forward to what's on the horizon in our annual peek at future cars beginning on page 36, we also decided to take a moment to consider what we're ready to leave in the past.

- By Scott Evans

If you talk cars at all, you've heard the complaint that today's models have too much technology. Some of that is just get-off-my-lawn crabbiness in automotive terms, but there's a case to be made that car companies are running out of ideas for genuinely useful new features and are instead greenlighting increasingly niche add-ons with diminishing use cases.

Because we test every new car, truck, and SUV, we're acutely familiar with feature bloat. We polled our staff to find out which ones our experts are most ready to be done with. Here, beginning with our most common complaints, are what we wouldn't be sad to see go.

Multifunction Switches

Whether it's two window switches that do the work of four (VW, Volvo, Polestar), knobs and touch-sensitive buttons that switch from volume and stereo controls to temperature and climate controls (Kia, Hyundai), or some other cost-cutting combination of functions, we hate it. More editors complained about this trend than any other. If a feature gets used enough to need a hard button, it needs its own hard button.