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Unhinged: Telling Your Seat What To Do Is Comic Fodder


Unhinged: Telling Your Seat What To Do Is Comic Fodder

I want you to think about something for a second: how many of you get confused over a power seat anymore? How about ever? I had them down-pat by the time I was in kindergarten. It didn’t hurt that Grandpa Ken sprung for the overkill interiors on the Chryslers he bought, so as I sat in button-tufted comfort, I dorked with the thirty or so different ways that the seat in a 1989 New Yorker could humanely move. You can almost hear my brain in full Homer Simpson mode: “Seat go up. Seat go down. Seat go back. Seat go forward. Butt go up, butt go down, Back lay down, back rise up”. Five years old, and I could manipulate the seats in Lee Iacocca’s dream vision for the K-car to my heart’s content.

Welcome to 2018, where things have to become needlessly complex for the sake of cramming in that much more technology, because that’s a buzzword that sells things. According to The Truth About Cars, Ford is considering a combination of voice inputs and a touchscreen interface that will basically remove buttons from the seat movement function. Instead, either you’ll use the screen to move things around, like you’d experience if you shell out for the high-end first class seats on some airliners nowadays, or you’ll yell at the infotainment system to shift your ass around so that your left leg quits going numb…and to turn on the seat cooler because things are getting just a wee bit swampy.

I have to wonder about something, though. Realistically, the only seat that should be voice-commanded is the driver, right? Nobody wants him screwing with a touchscreen to adjust the seat so that his cheeks are in a comfy spot. So, question: what’s to stop someone from calling out voice commands for him? While driving along, what’s to stop me from yelling out “Seat: Max Height, Heater On, Back Massage Level 10, Butt Massage Level 10”? Nothing, that’s what. So now the driver has to go and yell at the screen to shut down that show, distracting him from driving a bit.

A few buttons isn’t going to hurt anyone. Stop fixing shit that isn’t broke, ok?


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2 thoughts on “Unhinged: Telling Your Seat What To Do Is Comic Fodder

  1. phitter67

    Even if I could afford a new car, Things like this make me want old cars. And with my voice who knows where the seat would end up.

  2. Threedoor

    Don’t mock me. I bought my first rig with a seat that did more than slide foreword and tilt just last fall. I still can’t get it set right.

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