Re: Acura or Infiniti?
Interesting. I have not driven one yet, but in the pictures, it appeared that the interiors are very upscale and suave. For my wife's next car, I was (still am) seriously considering the EX-35 by Infiniti. Of course, I won't buy one before test driving them.
However, I must caution that sometimes limited time behind the wheels does not give us an appropriate chance to evaluate the features of a car's advanced electronics. For example, pretty much all car reviewers pan BMW's iDrive. Some call it tumor, most call it non-user-friendly etc. Problem is that many of these people spend just a few minutes or a few hours with the car, and could not figure out iDrive and end up hating it. In my BMW X5, after getting over the initial learning curve, I now think that iDrive is one of the most sophisticated and user-friendly interface design to control so many advanced features of the car. It surely beats, hands down, having a gazillion buttons surrounding the navigation screen. Best part is, its placed just in front of the arm-rest, so I can control pretty much anything without reaching out for it. Its fabulous. But the only reason I know is because I own the car and drive it every day. I am pretty sure if I just test drove it and gave up on iDrive, I'd end up hating it too. This is one reason, BMW doesn't simply sell you a car. They make sure each new owner is given one hour of one-to-one demonstration of car's functionality. This helps new owners get comfortable with these kinds of advanced features. Modern cars, especially luxury cars, have come a long way in advanced electronics, and many things are no longer learnt just by intuition.
All good points Faisal, but I wasn’t talking about the technical features in the car… I was just turned off by stuff that was even more basic at a functionality level
Here’s an example…
The seat adjustment controls in the Infiniti G35 are on the inside, i.e. on the right side for the driver and on the left side for the front passenger.
First, I find this design “innovation” totally unnecessary… why go against a widely accepted design standard ! What’s worse is that these controls are so darn close to the front cup holders that I was just dreading the situation if my coffee cup were to spill over and mess up the controls there. With the parking brake, the cup holders, the seat belt latch/buckle, and the seat controls, there’s just too much going on around that part of the interior.
This is just one of the two or three bad design examples that I thought of at the time of my test drive. I’m pretty good when it comes to learning and adapting to new technology features but this was something that in my opinion wasn’t done right at the functional level in the car’s interior design.