It’s not just cars, and it’s not just new ones: is it the fault of the machines or who created them?
The only button on the climate control panel pictured below from which the coating has worn away tells a much larger story than its small size would suggest.
It’s merely a single fan-speed-down button, but to me it represents ground zero in a much wider conflict.
There is a reason for the overwhelming number of pushes it has received over the past 23 years and, as you might imagine, it’s an annoying one.
The car is an Audi A2 (my own 2004 diesel), a small car with automatic climate control. Swish. If you set the temperature you desire and push the ‘auto’ button, the fan speed looks after itself until the interior temperature matches the one requested.
For some drivers, that setting will be fine, but not everybody wants it that way. In summer, there are those who want chilled air lightly breezed into a cabin otherwise basking in warmth.
Then there are drivers and I’m one of them who in winter like very hot air drawn into the cabin, but only softly. Then there are people who just don’t like a lot of fan noise. I’m one of those too.
And for drivers who want hot or cold temperatures matched with low fan speeds, there are manual override controls.
The system has buttons for temperature, fan speed and air distribution. Those for the temperature and distribution do as they’re told. Alas, those for the fan speed do not, with the insistence of a badly trained dog continually pulling at a lead.
If a driver sets the fan speed low (to, say, one or two bars on the scale), after a few moments the fan will increase speed of its own accord, setting itself to three, then four or the exact point that the noise starts to become irritating.
So, as evidenced by the wear on the button, the driver pushes the down fan switch until the fan is back at the desired speed.
And another minute or two after it has been reined back in, off it wanders again, searching for something to sniff at, continually having to be dragged back to heel. So it goes on and on, driver infuriated, button worn.
The tired old button says I’m not the only one bothered by this over the decades, and a bit of additional research says the same. Even today people buy a used Audi, then head to online forums to wonder why the climate control isn’t listening to them.
Infuriatingly, this is by design. If the interior temperature remains too far from the one the system thinks has been demanded, it ignores the user’s fan speed request and speeds up the blower to try to make up the temperature difference.
It was programmed to do so by someone who clearly didn’t understand the end user.
A quarter of a century on from its programming and without that team in the room with us, it of course feels like a manversus-machine battle of the kind that we’re tied up in day after day, with apps that won’t do what they’re told, notifications automatically defaulting on, ovens that won’t work unless you tell them the time and generic non-stop continuous interference that we never asked for and doesn’t work properly.
Cars have more than their share of this.
I don’t want to bang on about it, but new year, same old complaints: you get into a new car and have to spend too much time disabling systems lane keeping assistance, road sign monitoring, reverse emergency braking that slams the car to a halt if someone 30 metres away is flapping their arms around a bit that don’t work properly, only for them to default on again because the law says they have to.
It’s easy to blame the machines for this. They are the primary point of interface, after all, and the us-versus-them paradigm is a common one in popular culture. “We don’t know who struck first, us or them,” said Morpheus in the landmark film The Matrix about the global war in which intelligent machines enslaved the human race.
A cheery thought for another day. For now, it’s worth remembering for every machine that ignores or fails you, there’s a human who told it to do so. We struck first, when we instructed an Audi to ignore us.
