On Friday I assisted with getting a Mercedes SLK convertible to the dealer for service. The car needed an oil change ($279) and for a whole bunch of crud to be cleaned out from near the ventilation blower (over $1000 for the cleaning and a new motor; the car apparently has no protection against sucking in leaves, pine needles, squirrels, etc.). If you are less than 5’3″ tall and want a $50,000 two-seater with less nimble handling than a Honda Accord, this vehicle should be on your short list…
We were given a brand-new Toyota Camry as a loaner. On the basic model of Camry, Toyota doesn’t want to give the consumer the convenience of a climate-control thermostat, so the temperature control looks like the old cold/hot slider. However, underneath the system has all of the mechanical complexity of the fully automatic system. The dashboard knobs are not mechanically connected to a valve controlling hot water from the radiator, as in my friend’s 1989 Honda Accord (still working fine at 340,000 miles). The dashboard knobs send electric signals to motors that push on the same levers as in the fully automated system. Except that in this car something was broken and there was no heat at all. The consumer thus pays for maximum possible complexity, unreliability, and expense to maintain while receiving the minimum possible convenience in return.
How was it to drive around in Massachusetts in February with no heat? We’d just flip on the heated seats… except that there weren’t any on this trim level.
We returned the Camry and received a brand-new Mercedes C300 sedan as a substitute. The car had a GPS antenna on the roof, a medium-sized LCD screen in the middle of the dashboard, and a complex user interface controlled by a multi-function knob. The only thing missing? A $2 GPS chip. In their attempt to get a consumer to pay up an extra $2000 for a GPS, Mercedes had compromised the car’s interface (a driver doesn’t need the multi-function knob and menus on the LCD screen to control a radio and a heater/AC system) and uglified the roof. What do they do with all of those useless pixels on the LCD screen? Display a 1950s-style FM radio dial and show a moving needle as the seek up/seek down buttons are pressed.
I’m wondering if turning out so many brain-dead products is hurting these companies’ long-term prospects. What happens when the Chinese manufacturer shows up here with a low-priced car that has all of the electronic stuff people would expect as standard equipment? If people remember their $25,000 Toyota with no heat or $35,000 Mercedes with no GPS they might be a lot more willing to try a new brand.
I suspect that when China is able to manufacture and export autos that rival US/Japan/Korean/German quality at a fraction of the cost the US will erect very strong trade barriers.
Interestingly China’s car exports dropped 50% in 2009.
(Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704454304575080792207769522.html
Or what about a car with virtually no electronics at all and where stuff just works?
They make ’em. A few years ago we were in Kenya, we were being driven around in what looked like relatively new Toyota Corollas. But to make them affordable in that market, they had about the same complexity as my old ’86 Corolla.
Instead of westerners on a budget having to buy the low-end, crappy, unreliable electronic gizmo versions, why not sell the mechanical ones here?
It’s kinda like the simple mobile phones that just make calls and your grandma would be comfortable using; they still make them, they just won’t sell them to us.
Reminds me of my first calculator, a TI-1200 four-function job, which I got in about 1975. My grandfather was an engineer and liked to buy me gadgets. The metal front plate fell off some years later to reveal that the calculator had been holding out on me — behind a place on the front plate that had no button lurked a little membrane that, when you pressed it, changed the sign.
I get why companies do that — it’s cheaper than designing and building two separate systems. I’m sure Texas Instruments charged more for whatever model of calculator had the sign-change button.
I imagine it was cheaper for Mercedes and Toyota to make the design decisions they did, but unlike the sign button on my calculator, their decisions led to systems that were either more costly to repair, or harder to use, or both. I wonder when these things will go the way of power windows — it’s hard to buy a car without them today.
At the same time, I wonder what portion of the population requires fully automatic climate control and a nav screen with GPS. I sure don’t. I’ve rented cars with auto climate control and it’s nice, but the old way is still entirely acceptable to me. And I still figure out my route before I get in the car and am not sure what value an onboard GPS unit brings me. And, most importantly, I’m a bit of a tightwad and prefer not to pay for these things. Really, if I”m going to spend a lot of money on a car, I want that money to go toward zippier acceleration and better handling.
Bas, Jim: It would be nice to have a mechanically simple and inexpensive car (like the Tata Nano!) for $2500-5000 and have $20,000 left over to spend on more interesting parts of one’s life. But that doesn’t seem to be an option in the U.S.; even the Tata Nano is going to cost $8000 by the time they comply with all U.S. regulations (some of which do enhance safety, but others are simply regulations; and losing $5500 to government-imposed regulations means that you don’t have it to spend on things like a health club membership or substituting air travel that might improve your safety).
If the car is going to cost $25,000+ I think it is reasonable to expect it to have the same capabilities as a $200 phone, e.g., a GPS, the native ability to play back MP3s from a memory card, a WiFi transceiver for updates, traffic, and weather. If the car lacks those capabilities, a consumer has to wonder “How come the engineers at Motorola and Nokia are so much better than those at Toyota and Mercedes?”
Really, car makers should get out of this business altogether and hand it to companies like Garmin or Avidyne to build the electronics for them.
But I suspect they suffer too much from Not Invented Here syndrome…
My wife’s Lexus ES350 has a GPS/Navigation system that is stunningly complex; the manual is roughly as thick as the car’s manual. The best part is that it is theoretically voice actuated, but this does not come close to working. In fact we have a game cherished by the children in which we make inquiries such as “florist” for nearby florists, and the GPS will inevitably suggest something impressively bizarre, such as funeral homes.
She mostly uses her iPhone for navigation, which has the advantage of real-time congestion info.
Someone who sells electronics systems to auto manufacturers explained to me that the electronics are set 5 years before the car rolls off the production line. Also, hard drives are problematic due to vibration. No, this isn’t a satisfactory explanation, but maybe it’s better than nothing.
Phil, good point. Of course, I imagine buying a $25,000 car today with that memory-card reader for MP3s and then driving it for years and a metric gob of miles as I like to do — and by then memory card technology has moved on and nobody even makes cards compatible with my car anymore!
Out of curiousity, you say it was a brand new Camry, do you mean a new model or one that has the window sticker still in the window?
I find it rather funny that you would complain about the rental cars (which everyone knows they take a severe beating by many renters), but don’t complain about the massive oil change bill. I guess this wasn’t oil they were putting in the car but rather “Black Gold.”
Gene: I’ve rented a lot of cars (mostly Fords from Hertz and GMs from Avis) and never had one before with a failed heater. I don’t see how a Mercedes owner using this Camry for a day or two could have broken the heater, especially as there is no mechanical connection between the dashboard knobs and the functioning part of the system.
As for the oil change bill… it’s a dealer! They poke around into various other parts of the car looking for broken stuff. The minimum annual service for this car is $280 on the “minor” years alternating with about $550 on the “major” years. That would be your bill if the car were mechanically perfect and the only thing that they ever had to do was change the oil. In practice I think it is more like $2000 per year.
…and of course the lack of a simple mechanical engine on/off switch has proven fatal for some Toyota owners when their cars accelerated out of control.
As a long-time Mercedes owner, I can assure you the “C” in “C-class” ought to
stand for “cheap”. Because that’s just what they are.
They were designed to sell to people who truly couldn’t afford a Mercedes and
of course, in the U.S., they are now Mercedes’ number one seller.
Fran: I kind of liked the way that the C300 drove. I just wish that they hadn’t saved themselves $2 on the GPS chip, $10 on the memory card to store the street database, and whatever it costs to license the atlas information (can’t be all that much since the portable GPSes retail for $100 and include a screen as well). Instead of walking away from the loaner saying “That was a nice car and I wish I had one” I said “That was a car that didn’t do what I expected any competently engineered car to do in 2010.” The loaner had AWD so I have to assume that the sticker price was close to $40,000. If you tell me that they make some $100,000 cars that would meet my expectations, that wouldn’t motivate me to visit a Mercedes dealer next time I am shopping for a new vehicle; I’m not interested in paying $100,000 for a car unless maybe it were able to drive itself.