When it comes to Lamborghinis, the Jarama is possibly one of the least-known and least-loved, and I’m not really sure that’s fair. The Jarama was built for the American market and was designed to be a fast, comfortable, and fairly practical GT car. It succeeded in that, I think, with a 3.9-liter, six-carb V12 making about 350 horsepower, a roomy interior, and a big trunk (that looks like it should be a hatch). The polarizing styling, simultaneously conventional and weird, was designed by Marcello Gandini and evoked the rectilinear fastback look that would define so many 1970s cars. Only 328 Jaramas were built between 1970 and 1976, and there’s one detail about the model that absolutely fascinates me: the radio location.

Over the course of the Jarama’s production run, four different radio locations were tried out in the car – five if you count not having a radio at all, which I don’t. Four different places for the radio? Why? Why couldn’t they just pick one? That’s like a different radio placement for every 82 cars! What the hell was going through your head, Lambo?

Built on a 10-inch-shortened Espada platform, the Jarama was one of Lamborghini’s slowest-selling cars ever. Despite this, Ferruccio Lamborghini, the company’s founder, liked them so much that he ordered one for his own personal use, and considered it one of his favorites. It’s one of the rarest Lambos, definitely one of the most underrated, and when it comes to radio placement, absolutely one of the most, um, diverse.

I get that a company like Lamborghini, especially in the 70s, was able to enjoy a lot of freedom because of their low-volume production. If a change is wanted, they don’t really need to wait for the next “model year” or anything like that; the way their cars are built allows for changes as they seem right, which must be a factor in the multitude of radio placement options here. Let’s look at all the places the radio ended up in these cars:

Okay, so we have, with the no-radio option, five possibilities here. The first one, with the radio just set into the dash in a position that you’d expect it, is by far the most conventional. Why didn’t they just call it a day with this one? It works, people know to look and reach there for the radio, and we’re done, right? Well, Lambo didn’t think so. Also, these options are not chronological, I should point out. I have no idea when in the production run they tried the conventional approach. Maybe it was at the end?

Oh, by the way, here’s a nice walk-around of one of the ten automatic Jaramas that were built:

The center console options are deeply strange, too. They tried both front- and rear-facing installations here, and while both are awkward, the one where the radio controls are facing away from the hands and faces of the people in the car absolutely baffles me. Why would anyone choose this?

I mean, look how this is positioned:

I crudely put where a person would be in that seat, a dotted line showing their line of sight, and then, in light greenish, you see where the radio controls are. How would you read the tuning dial on that? It’s so awkward; I can’t fathom how anyone would have thought this was an idea that made sense for human beings, the ostensible target market for this car?

Look, even our pal Doug DeMuro finds this radio layout baffling, though he, like me, probably secretly loves it because this kind of crap is so much fun to talk about, exasperatedly:

The rear-facing center console version is a bit better, but still weird, and the overhead one is at least sort of aircraft-cool, I suppose.

But why did Lambo have to try out every one of these options for such a small run of cars? Is this some strange form of perfectionism, just without the burden of the “perfect” part? It’s so strange. I love it.

This Is The Only Other Time I’ve Seen A Car Part Used As A Whole Car Face Other Than In My Head: Cold Start

Musical Mirrors Are Very Clever Things: Cold Start

Remember The Time Pioneer Let You Put Dolphins In Your Dashboard?

The post Lamborghini Once Built A Car And Somehow Could Never Figure Out Where To Put The Damn Radio appeared first on The Autopian.

I truly believe that not enough is being done to preserve automotive history. Yes, there are great vehicle collections out there, but there aren’t nearly enough museums about car culture itself, filled not just with vehicles, but with amazing documents and sketches and prototype parts and on and on. I say this because a reader picked up an incredible piece of automotive history cheaply enough that he sent it to me for free. And I’m just blown away.

I don’t want to downplay how great some car museums are — The Petersen, the Mercedes-Benz Museum, The Lane, and on and on — but you’ll never convince me that car culture is being properly preserved in 2024. Not when some of the greatest automotive artifacts are just hiding away in a vault in Detroit; not when one of the greatest brands in the world doesn’t even have a museum (my friend has original Willys-Overland engineering drawings that had been thrown in the trash when Chrysler left the Jeep-Truck building on Plymouth Road in Detroit!!); not when one of the finest museums in the world shuts down after 15 years (with the artifacts later being sold at auction); and certainly not when amazing relics of car culture are being found in swap meets for dirt cheap, and then being sent to little ol’ me.

Remember that article from January about the amazing original designs of the ZJ Grand Cherokee — an extremely popular car, and one whose history is not in any way being preserved since there’s no Jeep museum? This one:

I’ve stumbled upon amazing relics of auto history many times, and I’m always amazed that it’s out there and so cheap. And perhaps more importantly: I’m amazed that so few people seem to care about it. Meanwhile, I’m over here freaking out and calling things holy grails. Maybe I’m in a little too deep? Or maybe there is a real problem with car culture preservation.

In any case, that brings me to today’s main subject: This incredible DaimlerChrysler welcome kit:

 

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Yes, you’re seeing that right. This is the original welcome kit sent to Chrysler employees back in the summer of 1998, when the ink dried on the infamous Daimler-Chrysler merger. Called the “Merger of Equals,” it was a partnership marked by huge insurmountable cultural clashes; by initiatives like Material Cost Management (MCM), which involved Chrysler pulling cost from areas it shouldn’t have, like interiors (which became awful); by Chrysler feeling like it was being wrung dry by Ze Germans (as the famous joke goes: How do you pronounce DaimlerChrysler? The “Chrysler” is silent); and on and on.

It was a failure, even if not a complete and utter one, since Chrysler did milk its LX (Charger, 300) and WK2/WD (Jeep Grand Cherokee, Dodge Durango) platforms, and used Daimler-sourced transmission in damn near everything for many years. As for what Daimler ended up getting out of it? Well, it lost billions of dollars and gained, well, not a whole lot. Here’s how the Harvard Business Review describes what went down:

In theory, the Daimler-Chrysler combination should have yielded two very potent sources of competitive advantage. The first was a cohesive global brand architecture. Consider Toyota. Its brand structure is extremely clear and logical: Lexus for the high-end buyer, Toyota for the middle-income family, and Scion for the hip young. The segmentation makes sense and the progressions between segments are natural ones. Young people find partners, have children, and buy minivans; people with money move up to luxury vehicles.

The second potential source of competitive advantage lay in creating a coherent platform strategy built on the economic logic of parts sharing. Because the cost of developing new vehicles is so great, car companies design “platforms” from which they create families of vehicles. They also try to share parts between platforms to drive economies of scale in manufacturing. See two papers on the history of the US and European automobile industries and platform strategy — 1, 2 — that I wrote with Nathan Simon.

Realizing synergy in brand architecture and platform strategy would have required deep integration of Daimler and Chrysler. German engineers would have had to design cars using parts created by American engineers and vice versa. The management team would have had to develop a global brand strategy and associated logic of competitive positioning. None of this happened. They ran the two organizations as separate operations. When major shifts in the environment (rising gas prices and the move away from SUVs and trucks) kicked out the blocks from under Chrysler’s recovery, it was both necessary and possible for them to part.a

That article also refers to Chrysler as “mid-market cowboys of Detroit” and the Germans as “high-end knights of Stuttgart.” Whether that’s how the Germans viewed the Americans, I’m unsure, but as a German-American citizen, I’d say the answer is: probably.

In any case, it seems like every company was keen to merge back in the 1990s to realize synergies and optimize processes — “merger-mania” as the Harvard Business Review puts it. And this time, like many others, it ended pretty poorly for everyone, with Daimler wasting money and Chrysler being sold off to private equity firm Cerberus.

Anyway, that’s a bit of the context behind this welcome kit — as you can see, back in 1998, the merger seemed so promising and exciting! Just look at how palpable the optimism is in this welcome kit. There’s a Swatch gift inside (in the 1990s, Swatch and Daimler were also in a joint venture, with the Smart car being the byproduct):

Here’s the gift note, stating that the Swatch represents that “this merger is ‘the right step at the right time,’ and that we intend for DaimlerChrysler to be a ‘transparent’ company.” Plus, the note says, “we fully expect that fun will indeed be one of the byproducts of all our hard work to make DaimlerChrysler the most extraordinary company in the world!”

So much optimism!

Under that gift note is a letter from CEOs of both companies — Juergen Schrempp and Robert Eaton:

The whole letter is just pure blind optimism about how the CEOs want DaimlerChrysler to be “the greatest company in the world” and “extraordinary in everything we do, everywhere we do it, all the time.”

Behind that letter is a “Day One Magazine for Employees.” On the cover are some headlines: “The First Day of DaimlerChrysler,” “An Overview of the New Comapany,” and “The Birth of a Big Idea.”

d

On the first page is a letter from both CEOs to employees. “These are historic times as we embark on a new future together. With the merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler now complete, we have an opportunity to break existing paradigms and move into a new dimension,” the letter begins. It goes on to say that “both companies are in excellent shape and are strong enoguh to continue to grow on their own. Why, then, merge? Because together we can grow faster and more efficiently both in our traditional markets and in mergeing markets, where we will take advantage of new opportunities as DaimlerChrysler.”

“Our goal is clear: to create the world’s leading automotive, transportation and services company for the 21st century — with your experience, your commitment and your effort. But most of all with your ideas that will enable us to outpace our competitors.”

Next we have a page with quotes from employees in Germany and in the U.S. The quotes basically offer the employee’s thoughts on how this could turn out to be a great merger:

Next is an article describing the thought process behind the merger. “The Right Idea At The Right Time” is the headline, with the lede going: “Changes in the world economic landscape, particularly the globalization of markets, are constantly creating new challenges for international companies such as Daimler-Benz and Chrysler.”

It continues: “This is fueling already intense corporate pressure. Companies have to improve their efficiencies bt sharpening their cost structures and developing new products quicker. Pressure is mounting on the manufacturers to combine so they could provide better value and return to shareholders by reducing costs, maximizing opportunities in research and development, and sharing the cost and risk of developing new products for emerging markets.”

On paper, it seemed like a great idea. “Independently of each other, both companies carried out strategic reviews and came to the same conclusion: they were the ideal partners.”

“On the automotive side, their product ranges are complementary. In regional terms too, the companies complement each other perfectly. Chrysler is strong in North America. Daimler-Benz is particularly strong in Europe.”

Next is a bit of an intro to Daimler-Benz and its cars, as well as an intro to Chrysler and its brands and vehicles:

Here’s a leadership org chart showing the new company’s incredible diversity:

From there, the welcome kit shows the facilities under the DaimlerChrysler umbrella:

Here’s the story on how the “biggest merger in industrial history” came about in only a short 10 months:

Here’s some info on share prices:

Here’s a bit of history on both companies:

From there, the “Day One Magazine for Employees” highlights a bunch of employees at each company:

Here’s the story of how the two companies launched the ad campaign to launch the new company, DaimlerChrysler:

The article even features Ralph Gilles!:

Here’s some then-recent news from each company:

And here’s the story of how the two companies built a single web platform for all employees of the new company:

The welcome kit also included this awesome poster of the cars Daimler and Chrysler built at the time:

It’s just an amazing piece of car history, and I’m so humbled that reader Gareth sent it my way. I’ll cherish it, and make sure it stays in wonderful shape, though I may wear that Swatch watch to automotive gatherings like Pebble Beach next month.

The post I Have The Kit DaimlerChrysler Gave Employees In 1998 To Introduce The Biggest Merger In Industrial History. Here’s What’s Inside appeared first on The Autopian.

Drug Church‘s fifth album, PRUDE, arrives October 4 via Pure Noise (get our exclusive neon violet vinyl variant), and now they’ve announced a tour for it, one frontman Patrick Kindlon has long been teasing on the hardcore podcast he co-hosts, Axe to Grind. The shows start shortly after the album’s release, on October 11 in Santa Ana, and run through November including NYC on October 24 at The Brooklyn Monarch, and the tour-closer at Echoplex in Los Angeles on November 16. Modern Color, Soul Blind, and PONY open all dates which go on sale Friday, July 26 at 10 AM local time, and are all listed below.

Modern Color (featuring Militarie Gun drummer Vince Nguyen) release their new album There Goes The Dream this Friday (7/26). Soul Blind’s most recent release is 2022’s Feel It All Around, and they’re also supporting Fiddlehead at Union Transfer on Saturday (7/27). They also just opened for Drug Church at the shows they played the other day at Salty’s in NJ and Amityville Music Hall in Long Island. 

Drug Church also just played a killer set at Sound & Fury, and are playing Riot Fest, Furnace Fest and Best Friends Forever. Last week was also the release of their new single and video that you watch again here:

DRUG CHURCH: 2024 TOUR DATES
Sep. 20 – 22, 2024 RIOT FEST 2024 Bridgeview, Illinois
Thu, SEP 26 Louder Than Life 2024 Louisville, KY
Sun, SEP 29 Louder Than Life 2024 Louisville, KY
Sun, OCT 6 Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark Birmingham, AL
Oct. 10 – 13, 2024 Aftershock 2024 Sacramento, CA
Fri, OCT 11 Observatory Santa Ana, CA
Tue, OCT 15 Marquis Theater Denver, CO
Wed, OCT 16 recordBar Kansas City, MO
Thu, OCT 17 Fine Line Minneapolis, MN
Sat, OCT 19 Magic Stick Detroit, MI
Sun, OCT 20 Mahall’s Lakewood, OH
Tue, OCT 22 The Axis Club Toronto, Canada
Wed, OCT 23 Théâtre Fairmount Montréal, Canada
Thu, OCT 24 The Brooklyn Monarch Brooklyn, NY
Fri, OCT 25 Royale Boston, MA
Sun, OCT 27 Union Transfer Philadelphia, PA
Wed, OCT 30 Baltimore Soundstage Baltimore, MD
Thu, OCT 31 Spirit Hall Pittsburgh, PA
Fri, NOV 1 Ace of Cups Columbus, OH
Sat, NOV 2 Canal Club Richmond, VA
Sat, NOV 2 Canal Club Richmond, VA
Sun, NOV 3 Motorco Music Hall Durham, NC
Tue, NOV 5 Eulogy Asheville, NC
Wed, NOV 6 New Brookland Tavern Columbia, SC
Thu, NOV 7 The Masquerade Atlanta, GA
Fri, NOV 8 Conduit Winter Park, FL
Mon, NOV 11 The Secret Group Houston, TX
Tue, NOV 12 Tulips FTW Fort Worth, TX
Wed, NOV 13 Mohawk Austin Austin, TX
Fri, NOV 15 The Nile Theater Mesa, AZ
Sat, NOV 16 Echoplex Los Angeles, CA

Last Friday CrowdStrike did something really bad and it destroyed every airport in the world. I didn't bother to learn anything else about it because I was too busy writing my 10k whitepaper about how all the problems were all caused by one simple mistake: not drinking my patented Miracle Tonic™®.

Developers who drink my Miracle Tonic write code 100% faster with 100% fewer bugs. This would have prevented the CrowdStrike outage, the 2016 DNC hack, Ariane 5, Therac-25, and that one moth caught in the Harvard Mark II. Developers are also happier at work, suffer no burnout, and keep all standups to exactly five minutes.

The Miracle Tonic is so effective that it should be immoral not to drink it. It's like if surgeons didn't wash their hands. If you write code for a living and you don't drink my Miracle Tonic, do us all a favor and never touch a computer again. You idiot. You absolute moron. I can't believe you call yourself a "professional".

Frequently Asked Questions:

Do you have any actual evidence that Miracle Tonic actually helps programmers?

Yes I do! All sorts of studies prove the effectiveness of Miracle Tonic:

1. One survey found that 68% of devs drinking miracle tonic say their code is "awesome". That means it works!
2. A double-blind clinical trial found that 7 undergraduates who were given Miracle Tonic wrote 10% better code (using the Hills-Bourne-Davidio Corrected Dolorimetry metric) than the control group (6 undergraduates who were punched in the face).
3. Someone found twelve projects on GitHub that didn't use Miracle Tonic and they had 268% worse failure rates than this one project I did with it. That's a P value of 0.00004!

That's so many studies! I can say with 100% confidence that Miracle Tonic is proven to work beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I read a study saying that Miracle Tonic gives people headaches.

Why are you trusting studies? Are you really gonna listen to some graduate student dweeb who's never been a real programmer?! If you're curious about Miracle Tonic, just try it and see for yourself.

Are there any downsides to drinking Miracle Tonic?

Of course, there is no silver bullet, everything is tradeoffs, etc etc etc. The downside of Miracle Tonic is it doesn't work if your company is a toxic feature factory that cares more about micromanaging mindless worker drones than cultivating good engineers. And don't drink it if you're allergic to peanuts.

This tastes revolting.

I've trained five Miracle Tonic Brand Ambassadors and they all tell me it's delicious. Your taste buds must be wrong.

I tried drinking your Miracle Tonic and it didn't make me a better programmer.

How dare you. How dare you spread FUD about the most important programming technology ever made. Were you drinking exactly 12.063 mL at 67° C every 75 minutes? Yeah, thought not. Of course it's not going to work if you didn't follow it properly. And you'd know this if you took my $1500 three-day "how do drink Miracle Tonic" course. Which you didn't. Get out of my sight.

How does Miracle Tonic compare to competing products, like toad oil, Pirelli's Miracle Elixir, or Design-by-Contract?

Fucking charlatans, all of them.

This is the part of my job I dread.

I do formal methods for a living. Last year 100% of my income came from either writing specifications or training others how to write specifications. This year, due to a lot of work in diversifying my revenue streams, it will only be 90% of my income. This creates an immense pressure to become an ambulance chaser, to see ten billion dollars in economic damage as a chance to say "look at me!", a longshot chance to find the next source who'll pay my next month's rent.

I'm also a True Believer. Of course formal methods would have prevented the CrowdStrike outage! It also would have prevented COVID-19, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Lincoln assassination. Years of being an advocate have shaped my worldview to always see how it could have helped, how everything is just the right shape nail for the hammer I'm selling you.

None of this depends on anything particular to formal methods, which is why advocates of every stripe are telling us "what they should have done", because every advocate is a true believer, and every advocate wants to get paid. I understand this all, and I get why people do this, but I hate feeling this way, that all this misery begets opportunity. I hate the pressure to say "they needed X" as fast as possible, before people lose interest, regardless of whether X would help or even if they were already using X. I hate the feeling that capitalizing on this might compromise my principles.

Most of all though, I fear the slippery slope from advocating to grifting. There are people out there who saw the outage and got excited. Please, God, let me never be that.

As the Democratic Party began to coalesce behind Kamala Harris, the New York Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24) quickly put forward the knee-jerk corporate media prescription for Democratic candidates: urging Harris to the right.

Under the subhead, “Why moderation works,” David Leonhardt explained that “the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party.”

As evidence, he pointed to two polls. The first was a recent Gallup poll that found Trump leading Biden on the question of who voters agreed with more “on the issues that matter most to you.” The second was a 2021 Winston poll asking people to rate themselves on an ideological scale in comparison to Democratic and Republican politicians; people on average placed themselves closer to Republicans than to Democrats.

Of course, these polls, which ask only about labels and perceptions, tell you much more about the fuzziness—perhaps even meaninglessness—of those labels than about how well either party’s policy positions align with voters’ interests, and what positions candidates ought to take in order to best represent those voters’ interests. Responsible pollsters would ask about actual, concrete policies in the context of information about their impact; otherwise, as former Gallup editor David Moore has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), they merely offer the illusion of public opinion.

‘Radical’ Democrats

For the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (7/23/24), the first question about Kamala Harris is “whether she will signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats.”

And where do people get the idea that the Democratic Party is, as Leonhardt says, “radical,” and misaligned with them on important issues?

Of course, the right-wing media and right-wing politicians offer a steady drumbeat of such criticism, painting even die-hard centrists like Joe Biden as radical leftists. But centrist media play a starring role here, too, having long portrayed progressive Democratic candidates and officials as extreme and out of step with voters.

For instance, the Times joined the drumbeat of centrist media attacks on Sen. Bernie Sanders for supposedly being too far out of the mainstream to be a serious 2016 presidential candidate (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). Forecasting the 2016 Democratic primary race, the Times’ Trip Gabriel and Patrick Healy (5/31/15) predicted that

some of Mr. Sanders’ policy prescriptions—including far higher taxes on the wealthy and deep military spending cuts—may eventually persuade Democrats that he is unelectable in a general election.

As FAIR (6/2/15) noted at the time, most of Sanders’ key progressive positions—including raising taxes on the wealthy—were actually quite popular with voters. Cutting military spending is not quite as popular as taxing the rich, but it often outpolls giving more money to the Pentagon—a political position that the Times would never claim made a candidate “unelectable.”

Voters’ leading concern this election year (as in many election years) is the economy, and in particular, inflation and jobs. As most corporate media outlets have reported recently (e.g., Vox, 4/24/24; CNN, 6/26/24), economists are warning that Trump’s proposed policies—massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as increased tariffs—will increase inflation. So, too, would deporting tens of millions of immigrants, as Trump claims he will do, as this would cause a major labor shortage in an already tight job market.

(It’s also worth noting here that, even without being given more context, a majority of respondents oppose Trump’s deportation plan—Gallup, 7/12/24.)

Representative democracy needs informed citizens who understand how well candidates will reflect their interests. Reporting like Leonhardt’s, using context-free polling and blithely ignoring the disconnect between what people concretely want and what candidates’ policies will do, only strengthens that disconnect and undermines democracy further.

‘Promising to crack down’

As the New York Times (7/24/24) has elsewhere noted, crime rates are currently lower than they have been in more than a generation.

Believing he has established that Democrats in general are “radical” (or else believing it’s more his job to pretend they are than to dispel the notion), Leonhardt in the next section asks, how can Harris “signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats”?

He offers “five Democratic vulnerabilities,” the first of which he says is crime—”the most natural way for Harris to show moderation,” since she is “a former prosecutor who won elections partly by promising to crack down on crime. Today, many Americans are worried about crime.”

Again, Leonhardt takes a misperception among voters—that crime rates are elevated—and rather than attempting to debunk it based on data, which show that violent and property crime rates are lower than they’ve been in more than a generation (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), he allows the unchallenged misperception to buttress his move-to-the-center strategy recommendation.

Next is immigration, where Leonhardt wrote that, since

most Americans are deeply dissatisfied that Biden initially loosened immigration rules…I’ll be fascinated to see whether Harris—Biden’s point person on immigration—tries to persuade voters that she’ll be tougher than he was.

The truth is, it’s hard to get much tougher on immigration than Biden without going the route of mass deportation and caging children, as he kept in place many of Trump’s harsh refugee policies, much to the dismay of immigrant rights advocates. But few in the public recognize that, given media coverage that dehumanizes immigrants and fearmongers about the border (FAIR.org, 6/2/23, 8/31/23).

‘Outside the mainstream’

In the face of racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris from the Republican Party (Atlantic, 7/25/24), Leonhardt demanded that Harris prove she’s not “quick to judge people with opposing ideas as ignorant or hateful.”

Leonhardt called inflation another “problem for Harris,” again, without pointing out the reality that a Trump presidency would almost certainly be worse for inflation. And he closed with the problems of “gender issues” and “free speech,” which both fall under the “woke” umbrella that the Times frequently wields as a weapon against the left (FAIR.org, 3/25/22, 12/16/22).

He argues that liberals are “outside the mainstream” in supporting “gender transition hormone treatment for many children,” which he claims “doctors in Europe…believe the scientific evidence doesn’t support.” Leonhardt is cherry-picking here: While some doctors in some European countries believe that—most notably doctors in Britain who are not experts in transgender healthcare—it’s not the consensus view among medical experts in either Europe or the United States (FAIR.org, 6/22/23, 7/19/24).

“If Harris took a moderate position, she could undermine Republican claims that she is an elite cultural liberal,” Leonhardt wrote. By a “moderate position,” Leonhardt seems to mean banning access to hormone therapy for trans youth—a decidedly right-wing political position that, through misinformed and misleading media coverage, particularly from the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23), has become more politically acceptable.

Finally, on “free speech,” Leonhardt wrote that “many Americans view liberals as intolerant,” noting that “Obama combated this problem by talking about his respect for conservative ideas, while Biden described Republicans as his friends.”

It’s a topsy-turvy world in which the Black female candidate, who has received so many racist and sexist attacks in the past week that even Republican Party leaders have asked fellow members to tone it down (Atlantic, 7/25/24), is the one being admonished to be tolerant and respectful.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Enlarge / The left spoke has controls for adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, the right spoke is for controlling settings and audio functions. (credit: Volkswagen)

Of all the recent trends in automotive technology and design, the adoption of capacitive controls over mechanical switches and buttons—particularly on multifunction steering wheels—is among the most deplorable. One can see the appeal to the designer—slick-looking fiat panels trump dust-attracting seams, for starters. The bean counters love them, too—it takes less time to install the subassemblies, and that means a little more profit per car. It's just that they suck. And now, some Volkswagen drivers say capacitive buttons are to blame for their car crashes.

Capacitive buttons require only the lightest of touches to register a button push. That's mostly a positive thing for buttons on the center console, but when those controls are on bits of trim you might touch by accident, you can run into problems.

For example, capacitive buttons are sometimes put on the spokes of a multifunction steering wheel, as in the image above. In some maneuvers—parking, for example—it's possible to brush either one of the panels of buttons with a palm. If it's the spoke on the right side, an accidental touch will just mess with the audio system, which is annoying and perhaps a bit distracting.

But the left side spoke operates the adaptive cruise control system, and mistakenly brushing against the "resume" button could re-engage cruise control to whatever speed it was last set, causing the car to accelerate when the driver didn't actually want that to happen. And that's exactly what a number of owners—one of whom reached out to us—suspect is to blame for a spate of crashes affecting the VW ID.4.

Many of the incidents occurred when drivers were parking, so most of the crashes happened at relatively low speeds, but three of the 13 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash reports that Ars reviewed involved injuries to the occupant(s). In at least one case that Ars knows of, the car's black box did not register an accident and the airbags did not deploy, presumably due to the lower speeds involved. The ID.4 sustained several thousands of dollars of damage to the battery pack.

In addition to reporting the incidents to NHTSA, ID.4 owners have been sharing information online, but as is often true in cases of unintended acceleration, they have been greeted with as much skepticism as sympathy. And while there are multiple reports in NHTSA's database, the agency has yet to open an investigation into the matter.

We reached out to VW to ask if it was aware of the problem, and if so, whether a fix is in the works. The company told Ars, "We are aware of a small number of complaints."

Time for a new wheel

However, shortly before the first ID.4 unintended acceleration event was reported, VW had publicly repudiated the capacitive multifunction wheel. In October 2022, the head of VW Passenger Cars Thomas Schäfer announced that due to overwhelming customer feedback, "we are bringing back the push-button steering wheel! That’s what customers want from VW," he wrote.

That hasn't happened yet; as you'll be able to read in a review later this week, Ars just tested a model-year 2024 ID.4 that still uses the capacitive design.

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