iletric said:
Wouldn't that be something..."horn will sound incessantly when hi-beams are engaged..." Now wouldn't that be the Chevy way.
Like that physical key they attached to the pod. "You can have it bo' but you'd better not use it or alarm will sound." I almost fell off my chair when the dealer told me that this is the way it is supposed to work, adding that this is why Chevys don't get stolen.
No surprise Japanese cars took over American auto market.
Yes.
The Spark EV dash has many more features than my Honda Fit. But it is too full of surprises and embarrassments like the honk to flash, and somehow my passengers have a hard time with the door locks. The Fit is incredibly easy to use, all the controls are where you expect them to be, they do what you expect them to do and they don't do weird things autonomously, like honk or turn the lights on for no particularly good reason.
No doubt I'm disposed to think that the Fit controls are logical because I have driven mostly Hondas for the past 30 years. But there is a reason for all those Hondas. I clearly remember getting my first 81 Civic and what a great impression it made, having everything right where it was supposed to be. And somehow they managed to not screw that up since. Contrast this with eg my father-in-laws Buick with the headlight switch on a little knob on the drivers door arm rest. Seriously, the headlights? on the door? At least it was on the
drivers door.
The Spark is nowhere as bad as that, but there are some other Spark ergonomics nitpicks:
- There is no need to duplicate the climate controls on a display and with knobs.
- It would be nice to be able to turn the radio off without turning off the whole display.
- It is too easy to hit a button below the touch screen by accident with another finger hanging down when trying to hit a menu item on the screen.
- The power mirror select switch is really cheap feeling. It makes this brittle snap when you toggle it left/right like it's about to break.
- The seat heater switches are too low and far forward, you have to bend and stretch to reach them. Better locations would be with the climate buttons, or the side of the seat, or even on the armrest.
- Of all the climate controls, the hard to reach seat heater controls are the only ones
not duplicated on the display/menus. Did they run out of menu items? Why are they so far away anyway, did they run out of wire?
- The "energy flows" display is pointless as it duplicates information already on the "DIC" (heh heh) with an even sillier animation and even less information. Why waste code on this when it could have been spent fixing the other energy screens? Eg, the graph background lines on the "energy history display" are the same in international units mode as in US mode. However one line per 4kw/100km makes sense. Sadly in Miles mode each line represents 3/4 mile/kwh. Which is pretty hard to interpret. Either change the scale to match the background lines, or change the background lines, but don't make us multiply fractions in our heads.
- Why does the energy history graph have it's y-axis zero on the right and travel from right to left? Just weird.
- Why can't you find out the remaining KWh in the battery? Or the amount required to charge it? The projected range is not as useful for figuring out how long a charge would take instead of how far you can go.
- The screen to set the electric utility rate schedule was a complete brain twizzler the first few tries even though I knew what they were doing and why. They were building a table of the schedule for one 24 hour interval from five non-overlapping segments starting at midnight by just specifying the end point of each segment. But that is not how people do this sort of task. People make list of the start and end time of each segment. What the Spark does is sort of like making change by stacking the coins up and then measuring the height of the stack. Sure, it works, but it's just weird and no-one does that.
Don't get me wrong, I really like my Spark EV, the space utilization is good, it handles pretty well, the ride isn't bad, and all that instant silent thrust makes up for a lot of minor sins.
