Droid
kglesq's Brother
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2010
- Posts
- 1,486
- Reaction score
- 757
You wouldn't believe the volume of customer complaints and warranty cost caused by that one feature. It was always "customer states trip meter inoperative with 2 lines in front of the numbers". Dealers were replacing Instrument Panel Clusters because the stupid trip meter was paused. Consumer acceptance and response is a huge factor in which features get added and removed throughout model years.
Yeah, but replacing that with "Paused, press OK to resume" would have solved it too.
The "Gauge Mode" option on the Gen1 downright pissed me off. There was one gauge, Transmission Temp (which also had an analog readout). They'd set up two screens for it, with the second one being "intentionally blank" according to manual. Very much looks like a case where the designers originally planned to add useful data (as was done on Mustang a year later), but the idea got canned.
Entirely understand that these things have to be designed for morons who can't open manual or type something into a search engine, but the "solutions" automakers come up with are often worse.
And Ford is *FAR* from the only automaker guilty of this crap. And overall I'm thankfully nothing in the electronics really constantly annoys me, which I cannot say for many other vehicles.