Do you even drive, bro?

This is a personal rant, not a serious essay.

I drive a 2020 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle. All battery. I have used it like a mini pickup truck with a piece of plywood laid over the folded down back seat and banged around the dirt roads of Vermont for the past six years. I have to say that it is the best car I have ever owned. With the weight of the battery pack at floor level it handles beautifully. The acceleration is smooth and quick. It is quiet and vibration free. Aside from the two times I have bottomed it out in the mud it hasn’t required any major repairs (and they were under warranty). I’d buy another.

But still, I have to ask, have any of the designers of the car’s interior ever driven during daylight hours? Have they ever tried to operate a car’s climate controls while in motion? In winter? For that matter, did the designers of the charge port understand the concept of snow?

Some bonehead decided to put a strip of chrome plastic trim across the top center of the dashboard above the touchscreen. It is curved in both the left/right and up/down directions. This means that when the sun is overhead the driver cannot escape a point of blinding solar reflection from the center of the dashboard. That’s an actual safety hazard. I had to get some gray tape and cover it.

Likewise, there is a reflective chrome Chevy bowtie symbol in the center of the steering wheel. When the sun comes in from the upper left or over the driver’s left shoulder that is similarly blinding.

Location aside, why is there any reflective surface on the dashboard anywhere in any orientation? It’s an annoyance and a safety hazard. Anyone driving the car for an hour on a sunny day would notice this. How did this get through the design process? I am at a loss.

The climate controls include a dial for temperature control with a digital display in the middle, a few virtual touchscreen buttons, and a cluster of physical buttons. The virtual buttons can’t be operated with gloves on. I live in Vermont. Several months of the year I have to cover my hands when outside. The virtual buttons also have no tactile response or physical definition, so the driver has to look at them to touch them and to see if they have been activated. The physical buttons also need visual confirmation. The fan up/down buttons need to be located and pushed repeatedly while the driver looks at a tiny bar graph display on the screen. It’s all annoying and a hazard.

And that temperature dial. Why? The display tells me the temperature of a sensor somewhere in the car where my body is not. I have to look at it to see what I have done. And what I have done is pointless. I don’t care if that sensor is detecting 71F or 72F. There are so many variables. What am I wearing? What’s the temperature outside, and have I been out in it? I don’t need 71F or 72F. Depending on the season and my condition I need

Meat locker cold

Kind of cold

Cool

Neutral – whatever it is outside

Warm

Hot

Bread oven

These are all subjective, not numerical values.

Here’s what I want: Three vertical, physical sliders, side by side, in the middle of the dash.

The left hand one is the fan setting, zero at the bottom and 100% at the top.

The middle one is temperature. Meat locker at the bottom, a detent for neutral in the middle, and bread oven at the top.

The right hand one controls where the air goes. Windshield defrost only at the top, feet only at the bottom, and a logical progression of combinations in between, with detents. The middle detent is every vent at once. If they want, it could be a vertical array of physical buttons with a definitive click feel.

They could put a switch at the passenger end of that with direct vent up and recirculation down.

All of these could be operated by feel with gloves on. It really wouldn’t be any more expensive than the instrument clusterfuck they have now.

And then there’s the charge port, or snow funnel. It’s a forward opening door with a push to open, push to close latch. After use in a few precipitation/freeze/thaw cycles it is a punch three times to open, slam twice to close latch. There’s a recess behind the door with the charger receptacle in the middle. It is angled up. Snow accumulates around the receptacle in the pocket space, then melts, and refreezes. It fills the rubber V gasket around the edge and freezes. It gets into the latch mechanism and freezes. It even gets into the plug/receptacle junction and freezes so the charging plug has to be wiggled carefully until the ice breaks free. I have spent a lot of time carefully picking ice and snow out of the charge port. I am sure that every driver north of 35 degrees latitude has done the same.

Could the charge port door open upwards? Like a sort of umbrella? Put something in that deploys above the charge port to keep out the snow. This should not be a revelation to the designers. It’s basic user experience in the snow belt.

As long as I’m ranting about snow and user experience, the aerodynamics of the hatchback are such that the rear license plate is completely obscured after fifteen minutes of driving in the snow and the backup camera is unusable. For that matter, the backup camera becomes unusable due to accumulated dirt quite often. Aerodynamics is a big deal with you guys, unless you want something to look extra cool. Oh well.

As I said, overall, I would buy one again. But really, it’s so frustrating to drive something that got the hard stuff right and face planted on the easy stuff.

Rant over.