Sometimes car tech goes too far, and carmakers are admitting it

WASHINGTON - When Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen announced that his team would reconfigure the signature pop-out electronic door handles that had been criticised as a safety hazard, it was a rare admission that the company needed to adjust and improve a long-standing product.

“The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button makes a lot of sense,” Mr von Holzhausen told Bloomberg News. “That’s something that we’re working on.”

Tesla is not the only carmaker rejigging its calculus about what technology to put into its cars.

In recent weeks, executives from Audi, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have announced that they are reconsidering some of the systems they once touted as the latest, greatest and most fantastically futuristic, from grilles and electric powertrains to computer-screen designs and steering wheels.

The walk-backs offer the rare insight that despite immense pressure to constantly introduce the most advanced systems, sometimes carmakers’ latest inventions are trying to fix problems that don’t actually exist. 

“You can get ahead of yourself,” says Mr Ola Kallenius, chairman of the board of management and chief executive officer of the Mercedes-Benz Group, noting a decision to revert to an older volume control system in the latest version of Mercedes’ top seller, the GLC SUV. “Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward.”

New doesn’t mean good

The history of cars is littered with innovations tried and tossed aside. 

Remember the automatic shoulder belts that traced the outline of the door frame as they handed you the shoulder section of your three-point safety harness?

The height of sophistication in the 1980s, they were popular at Jaguar, Toyota and Volkswagen, among others, but prone to twisting and often set inside doors too long to close easily. When driver-side airbags became standard in 1998, the motorised belts disappeared virtually overnight, no longer considered the essential cutting edge of  safety.

The softball-size display keys BMW tried to make a thing in 2015? Discontinued by 2022 due to poor sales. In 2024, Lincoln, Ford’s luxury vehicle brand, announced it would discontinue its active park assist feature starting with the 2025 model year; the company’s connected vehicle data indicated lacklustre use rates. 

“Lincoln spent a lot of money developing an automated parking system only to discover that virtually no one has ever used it,” says Mr Sean Tucker, the editor of Kelley Blue Book.

“Now they’re removing it because there’s no point to having it there.” 

You cannot blame them for trying. Car brands use technology to differentiate themselves from competitors; new gadgets help indicate which models are more upscale, whether via audio systems and safety features or the engineering underneath the car itself. 

It has long been so. In the 1970s, luxury vehicles such as the Mercedes-Benz S Class always introduced something nobody else had seen, like ABS brakes. Sometimes the new invention doubles as a money saver, too, as with the single centralised screens in electric vehicles such as the Tesla Model S. 

“Integrating everything into one screen in the centre of the car is cheaper than two screens, as is not having to engineer the car for lots of additional buttons and switch gear in the doors,” says Mr Alastair Weaver, the editor-in-chief of Edmunds, a US-based automotive research and review platform. “A lot of that technology was driven by cost reduction.”

Carmakers today must work even harder to differentiate their product via technology because high-tech has become normalised – and expected – by consumers across every price point. You can find Apple CarPlay in a US$20,000 (S$25,700) Nissan or a US$300,000 Bentley.

“If you’re not careful,” Mr Weaver says, “automakers just load up on things that nobody ever really wants and (everyone) doesn’t really use.” 

A new tone

A few leaders are indicating that they’re open to using proven technology rather than something more newfangled. 

Disappointing electric-vehicle sales, disruptive tariffs and road bumps in what was once considered a sure bet – China – may have softened their ever-more-tech outlook; some are now sounding downright introspective about the challenges of navigating extreme market turbulence. 

Earlier in September in Munich, Mr Kallenius announced that the new GLC would return to the much beloved roller-style volume adjuster on the steering wheel controlled by the right-hand thumb, since customers had eschewed the haptic version that had replaced it. He stressed that while the company is forward-thinking, it’s “not about tech for tech’s sake”. 

“We listen to the customer, so the steering wheel is pared back,” he said. The concession was unexpected in a hyper-competitive industry in which executives rarely admit publicly that they’ve changed their minds. 

That same week, Mr Michael Schiebe, CEO of Mercedes-AMG, described the performance division’s mood as “self-reflective and humble” after blowback from AMG acolytes when it decided to replace the roaring eight-cylinder in the Mercedes-AMG C63 with a more advanced and fuel-efficient engine that had half the cylinders. 

“We should have explained it more to our customers,” he said, emphasising that the V-8 configuration would stay at AMG for “many, many years” and hinting that AMG is working on a solution for the C63. “If the customer wants that number of cylinders, maybe that is something we need to deliver.” 

In Milan, Audi CEO Gernot Dollner introduced the new Audi Concept C as a fresh design lodestar for the company and promised to simplify the entire production process of making cars at Audi, which had become too complex and vague. “It’s a new era of clarity,” he said. 

In the coming years, Audi will simplify its production strategy by, for instance, reducing the number of steering wheel configurations it offers from several dozen to three. “We are focusing on what truly matters,” Mr Dollner said. 

Meanwhile, Mr Ulrich Beierlein, Audi’s head of interior design architecture, touted the single touchscreen in the Concept C. The screen folds and disappears completely on demand, a less-is-more approach compared with the multiple long screens that dominate the dashboard in Audi’s current lineup.

It is not exactly analogue, but you might describe the new set-up as intuitive, even sensible. “Our goal is to understand what the customer needs,” Mr Beierlein says, by way of explanation. “We don’t want the customer to be overwhelmed.” BLOOMBERG