technology: safety not critical.

I prefer 'Coming of the Epoch-alypse'

Yesterday I had a discussion about the poor build quality on modern cars, in particular the terrible build on my Renault. But today while driving down half the UK motorway network I began to note all the faults with my 4 month old car. Just imagine what it would be like at 4 years.

Firstly the Carminat (what a stupid name that is, it's a SatNav built into the car why not just call it the Built-in SatNav, I guess somebody was paid a fortune to come up with the name), has a bug that means it reports the speed camera alerts in Kmph and not Mph, so go through a camera with a speed limit on 30Mph and it reports that as 18Mph because it thinks it is actually 30Kmph. It has no problem with speed limits for roads, just bloody cameras. So it flashes at you wildly when you are actually obeying the speed limit and is terribly distracting.

Secondly, the Multi-Function TunePoint (again what's up with the stupid name, it's the cd/radio/mp3 player why does it have to be a TunePoint with Multiple Functions) has started crashing after 35 minutes. Plus, despite understanding ID3Tags it will only play tracks in alphabetical order WTF?

Thirdly, the OneTouch on the drivers window doesn't work so when you try to close the window it starts closing and then re-opens. So I have to open the passenger window instead because it's more convenient and safer than hoping the drivers window shuts rather than just re-opening over and over again.

Fourthly, the cruise control is just bug-tastic. When you press the button to increase or decrease the speed it just chooses an arbitrary number. Most of the time you can go from 68mph to 69mph and then instead of 70mph it jumps to 71mph. And you can go 54Mph and 56Mph but not 55Mph. The most annoying bit of this is that speed limits for roads are 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70, but you can only choose 29, 39, 49, 59 and 69 or 31, 41, 51, 61 or 71. But then sometimes it will let you choose 70 and wont let you choose 69, it will jump from 68 to 70. Why? How? What?

Come on, these are the computer systems for a car, surely these sort of bugs should not be allowed to ship, just imagine what other bugs are lurking in my cars computer system. I could be just one IndexOutOfBoundsException away from a firey death. It's not on, any computer in a car should be a Safety Critical System no matter it's function because a buggy SatNav or stereo is as likely to cause an accident due to distracting the driver as the brakes suddenly failing.

By the way, I haven't spell checked this post because I didn't regard that as 'Safety Critical', so it could be buggy.