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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing! I am vacationing in Spain and rented, I think, the same model as you. A BMW X2 M something or other.

Absolutely rock bottom by far the worst driving experience ever. Ultimate driving experience indeed. Insane and subtle annoyance, major wtfbbq moments, endless alarm dinging when you exceed whatever speed limit it incorrectly read from a sign, and on and on. The slamming on of the parking brake as you approach a large blade of grass in reverse is nerve wracking and startling even when you know it’s going to happen.

On narrow streets and in parking lots it feels less maneuverable than my full size American SUV. It may have the same turning radius despite being half the size.

Your tweet is making me laugh because honestly you cannot exaggerate how bad this car is. Every time we get in and start going my wife and I share a moment of incredulity. How can they have made this car this bad?

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It's a fair question, how does it happen? The faults resemble a lot of problems across the industry, and is even analogous to the new Apple updates, which is a total lack of empathy or care of the person who has to use it. Like the screen behind the steering wheel has this UI like from an early 00s X-box game, and I'm sure when they're in the office, and they know what everything is, they go, "wow, that sure looks futuristic, like an X-box, ship it". And nobody thinks about the fact that your eyeballs use contrast edge detection to discard information, or the fact that in some places you have a bright sun on the screen, or that I might need some information more than some other information. Careless, shameless and ignorant.

Before this, the strangest I had seen was in a new Renault Clio where they had removed the tachometer and instead had a large icon of a green leaf that fades in and out of existence.

I felt like that was peak modern UI "design" but now I know you can do so much worse.

> endless alarm dinging when you exceed whatever speed limit it incorrectly read from a sign

That's mandated by the EU, and also that it gets reenabled every time you start the car again. BMW made it pretty simple to turn it off. You can just press the car with the green circle about it and disable the assist systems or you press the microphone button and say "Hey BMW, disable speed warnings"

Same experience here, with a brand new Audi I got "upgraded" to. I'd take an old Yaris over that zoo any day.

>How can they have made this car this bad?

Typical German beancounter MBA run company treating SW like a cost center.

"We need to add interactive computers on cars because that's the latest hip trend, but we need to outsource it to the cheapest bidder because SW development is not a "real" engineering discipline and we don't like paying for good SW developers."

Then a manager from another division hears there's computers in cars and decides to improve his KPIs by forcing ConnectedDrive signup in every car and gets a massive promotion.

When I saw Mercedes' "HyperScreen (TM)", and read that EQS doesn't recommend you pop the trunk and hide the latch behind a screwed cover, I decided that I'd never approach them for a very long time.

BMW lost its (not only visual but whole company) soul when they decided that catering to Chinese aesthetics will be their global image forward, and the details of how the car behaves is... nuts.

VAG lost my trust with DieselGate already.

Zee Germans.

Well, I switched from BMW to Mercedes because I was done with BMW's "performance over reliability" philosophy. I'm staying away from their EVs though, thanks for the tip.

None of these things happen in my X5. It will even detect my bike rack and not automatically stop like my wife’s X7 does with iDrive 7. You can turn off all the speed warnings but no one is going to do it in a rental.

Not surprised the X2 sucks it’s the cheapest model and usually the Germans do not do well in this category. The cheap small Mercedes are similar.

The biggest annoyance is the horn beeps when I leave the car running and grab something from the trunk.

I believe some of it should be configurable, but I'm mystified that the default configuration should be so aggressively unempathatic to the driver. I did manage to turn off the thing where it covers the map with my forward camera view. But if Car Play worked, I wouldn't have bothered, and would have kept using Google Maps.

Reminds me of:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated...

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