What little thing about your car drives you nuts?

Mark Richardson

WHEELS EDITOR

I drove around in a Fiat 500 last week — the cute European car that Chrysler hopes will lead North America’s acceptance of smaller vehicles.

The company has many millions of dollars invested in this little four-seater — probably billions — and its designers spent literally years getting everything right before it was introduced here. There’s a lot at stake.

So why would I not buy one?

Because of the stupid seat heater switch, that’s why.

After all the market research, design brilliance, engineering challenge and hard-fought consumer buzz, it comes down to that one little button on the dashboard that rules it out for me.

Actually, two little buttons. There’s one for each front seat: press it once and the heater comes on under the stylish leather; press it twice and it goes off again. There’s a little white light blob on the button that shows if it’s on or off.

Except that the light is so poorly designed that if there’s any kind of daylight in the vehicle, you just can’t see it. I tried. I jumped in, pressed some buttons, couldn’t remember if I’d pressed the seat heater and had no way to tell except to wait to see if my butt warmed up.

After dark, the light was quite clear; in daylight, it was unreadable. Even cupping hands around the button to create darkness didn’t help — there was nothing to do but wait.

This is a very small foible, to be sure, but if I owned a Fiat 500, it would bug me every single day until I sold the thing. And that’s just not good enough — it doesn’t need to be this way. Just as an entire aircraft can be grounded for lack of a 25-cent screw, so this sale would be lost. Too bad.

When you’re buying perhaps one of your largest investments, and committing to a sizeable chunk of your life behind its wheel, small things like this can drive you crazy.

Sometimes they can be easily fixed. I drove a BMW 5-series a few years ago that was fabulous to experience during the day and annoying at night because the little warning light beamed at me from the dash to say that the passenger airbag was turned off. It did this because there was no weight on that seat to suggest I was carrying a passenger. In the dark, that became the eye’s only focus.

I fixed it after a couple of days by sticking some black electrical tape over the light. But then, with my newfound BMW sensitivity, that tape became really annoying to see during the day.

I couldn’t win.

With that car, though, the battle was already lost because the LCD display could not be set to just default to the map on its screen when the car was started. Every time, I had to go through a series of fiddly commands with the iDrive knob to reset it. So much for racetrack by day and opera by night. I didn’t want to leave the driveway.

Which raises the question: Are you having a similar experience? One small, nagging thing that just negates everything good about your car? If you do, then write to us at wheels@thestar.ca and tell us about it, or you can send a tweet to @wheelsca.

Who knows? Maybe you’re not the only one.

Mark Richardson is the editor of Wheels. mrichardson@thestar.ca

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