UPOL

We're on vacation this week. Out on the east coast to visit some of my wife relatives. And there is, of course, a rental vehicle involved. Now we take several short trips a year (to visit medical specialists, mostly), so we cycle through various rental options which is always nice in the sense of getting to know what kinds of mid-price car choices are out there but we usually only have them for a couple of days at a time. So we don't usually both trying to figure out the car's console.

But this time is different for a couple reason.

First because we're staying a bit over a week, and second because there is absolutely no place to prop a phone running nav where the driver can actually see it.

So we've got a phone synched to the thing and can display nav data. Yeah.

Unless, that is, you want to change the AC settings. Or mess with the audio. Or someone sends you a text. Or a myriad other things that might happen. Because the designers of this thing have moved very nearly everything that used to have a button or switch onto that single center panel and let each and every function take over the whole display whenever they are active.

I have christened it the Universal Panel Of Lose.

Now, it could be worse. I known some Tesla owners, and Muskmobile is trying to remove the stems from the steering column in favor of a cleaner look.

And I'm not against manufactures trying to improve the user interface of cars. There is no reason to think that the layout we're used to is ideal. Not even for the central controls, but especially for the lots of little auxiliary things that have accreted over the decades. Even in my life time I've gotten to watch the interface for cruise control appears in a variety of clunky states and improve by little increments until now I see one of two pattern that each works pretty well. Good job, guys. Much appreciated.

But it is painfully clear that the testers of the UPOL (which I known has infested multiple major brands all up and down the price spectrum) never actually took it for a test drive on a route they didn't know. Never needed to use the nav even while they tried to communicate with the people they were suppose to be meeting at a new-to-them destination. Basically never really ate their own dog-food.