Interiors on even entry level cars have gotten so intricate over the years that the cheapest cars now have more intricate trim pieces, soft-touch surfaces, and other do-dads than mid-market cars from 20+ years ago. Just talking in reference of the affordable segment, not a bad idea if it brings costs down, assuming those reduced costs are passed down to the consumer (that's a big if). I don't think this idea would be well received on more up-market cars, but the general idea of simplifying entry level car Interiors could be a good thing, again, assuming any costs savings actually get passed down to consumers.
Interiors are one of the areas that have definitely seen the most improvement. My Cherokee was midtrim for 1999, and it's interior is worse than any base model sold today. Interiors have a much more intricate design now.
I disagree. Basic Japanese and European cars in the 90s and prior, like the Corolla, were full of soft touch and fabric materials. In the late 90s and early 2000s, automakers downgraded the materials with hard plastic and shrank or entirely removed the fabric interior trims. Recently, they have merely reintroduced what we should get in the first place.
The 88-92 Corolla's door armrest was certainly not soft-touch; even though there was fabric on the door, the armrest was hard plastic. And there wasn't a center armrest to speak of at all; the center console and dash was entirely hard plastics.
Standard features have come a long way. My base model highlander from 2010 came with nothing. No side turn indicators, no cameras, no Bluetooth, no leather or wood, no fog lights, no blind spot monitors... All I got was flat Grey cloth seats and the bare necessities to consider it a complete vehicle.
Get into a new car today and you'll get dual-zone climate, seats with designs in them, a full safety suite, Bluetooth, carplay/android auto, digital gauges... Cars have come such a long way over the last 10 years.
Yes and it's pretty funny to me that it's rare. It's a 1AR-FE, which was basically only used in a few bigger vehicles like the Sienna and Venza. It's undersquare and makes decent torque, but it's still not enough for the vehicles it went it. 1st gear in the Highlander is comically short and it's easy to spin the tires even in normal driving. Redlines below 6k RPM lol. Though I did see an [MR2 swap](https://youtu.be/n_0Z3xMB1yM?feature=shared) where a guy scammed it and got it to Rev over 8000.
The linked article was talking about interior door panels specifically, and that makes me think of my first car, a 1994 Honda Civic. Solid interior, but it was beautifully simple. I had the interior pulled out many times because I was into car audio at the time, and the door panels on that Civic were basically one sheet of molded plastic with some fabric overlay on the molded-in arm rest section. Similar for the dash. I got to the point where I could remove the few screws holding it on and then pop it off without breaking any clips in under a minute (I was constantly adjusting and switching out speakers). Functional, didn't rattle or feel cheap, but was dead simple and probably relatively cheap to manufacture. Many cars now have such complex door panels made from multiple parts, the arm rest is usually a separate piece, chrome trim inset with a contrasting vinyl or faux carbon/wood, and other different materials on different sections, etc, and I'd be leary about removing them. They look a lot fancier, but have got to add significant cost to build such complex panels. The linked article talks about going back to one piece molded panels, which would be great for entry level cars.
Every part of New Chevy door panels are part of the door panel. Handle breaks? Door panel. Pull breaks? Panel. Pull on the wrong spot and rip it off the door? New panel.
Panels are disco and running out for many colors.
Similarly, a lot of safety features that used to be expensive options or only available in higher end cars are now standard in even basic cars. A base model Toyota Corolla has more airbags, stronger passenger compartments, better crumple zones, and better seats than a Lexus that was made 20 years ago. You can have a crash in a Corolla or a Hyundai Elantra and walk away from the accident, which may not have been possible just a few years ago.
This doesn’t include all of the active safety features, like better brakes, ABS, and other driver assistance features that reduce the chances of a crash happening in the first place. Cars nowadays are so much safer than ever before.
Carbon fiber is also fabric, yet reasonable and intelligent people recognize that the other reasonable and intelligent people don't call something "fabric" if it is carbon fiber or alcantara, just call fabric "generic vowen material like on clothes or furniture.
Sadly you are neither intelligent nor reasonable.
I'd gladly take "cheaper" fabric over black piano plastic any day of the week. You can wash stains out of fabric, but you can't remove all the scratches from that shitty black plastic.
Cheaper for them and better for the consumer is a win-win, at least at face value. No reason to shrug off a better design choice just because it's also cheaper for the manufacturer.
Reddit seems to forget that there are moves that are both pro-consumer and pro-profit/corporation. It's like how everything bad is a result of capitalism, and anything good isn't actually capitalism.
I guess people worry that it’s cheaper to produce but will be sold at a premium because it sounds like it would.
Not saying that’s what’s going to happen.
Valid, but in theory, if consumers want it then they would purchase it and if they didn't then VW would lose sales. Is it really VW's fault if it's cheaper/lower quality and more people end up buying it?
Forget profit, that just means they should continue to do it because people seem like they're okay with it or want it
My first car a 2001 Chevy I feel had more soft touch materials than today's cars. The dashboard was at least half an inch of plush fake leather or idk rubber. Everything was well padded. I wonder how much those interiors cost compared to today's mostly hard plastics. I miss my lazy boy comfy seats from back then too lol
It is. You still have plastic underneath, but now the imperfections can be glued over with cheap foam and fabric.
Cutting tooling and molds for large pieces of textured plastics (T1) isn’t cheap.
Because it allows them to use even shittier plastics underneath. Absolute garbage with half assed tolerances and no surface finish treatment on the molds.
Literally says this in the article
>Volkswagen is set to move away from cheap interior plastics in favor of higher-quality fabrics, **claiming that this shift will actually save the company money.**
Using VW’s new patented Nylon-Walmart bag composite polymer will surely be more comfortable no need to fear!
In all seriousness the fabric in my Mk7 golf is comfortable, durable, and stiff enough to hold me well when driving in twisties so there’s some hope.
If it's better, I don't care.
Ford did this with the Maverick to cut costs. They put fabric over cheap ass plastic and it looks better than more expensive plastic and withstands scratches better. I say go for it. More companies should do it.
> “This should be the same once you use the car; it’s meant to work with you and not make things more complicated“
I don’t get why VW group still sells cars with capacitive buttons on steering wheels then
“I believe most people don’t want to be the coolest or appear aggressive in public,” Mindt said. “They want to have a suit and a good outside appearance while being happy and optimistic. What is the need to be aggressive? Our core is like this: be the nice guys.”
or get this, i want a car i think looks good. i could give a fuck what other people think
Yeah, as a matter of fact I do. I always buy all weather floor mats and take out the factory carpet ones. My Wrangler had WeatherTech mats, and CX-5 has TuxMats
I love my Weathertechs. They are great at keeping the carpet clean, I can hose them off at the car wash and dry them quickly with a microfiber, and they can even be restored to a like-new glossy black finish if I take the time to wipe the insides down with Mother's VLR.
Depends on the fabric.
Some of the fabrics Toyota use are amazing to clean up with a bit of light scrubbing and a wet dry vac and a microfiber towel.
On an old Sienna, I sucked up engine oil that had been soaking in the carpet for... who knows how long? And it looked practically new.
Leather (especially non-synthetic), on the other hand, requires a lot of care during cleaning to make sure it doesn't discolor or stain.
Leather is super easy to wipe down as is plastic. All that you described to clean fabric? I don't run my own detailing shop bruh fuck off with that "it's as easy as 1,2,3 " bullshit
Automotive communities such as here are mostly young males. It's understandable that they simply don't have a lot of disposable income. The bitching about car prices is simply a reflection of their stage in life
I recently discovered controls worse than even capacitive buttons.
Flowmeters we got for a wastewater job at work have a glass face, and to "press" the buttons which are behind the glass, you have to wave a magnetic wand in front of them... Just... wow.
So yeah, don't give VW any ideas.
It’s fabric and they give you a needle and thread and you have to embroider what you want the car to do. So if you want to move the left menu on the gauge cluster down one step all you have to do is embroider “move menu of left gauge cluster down one step” on the fabric steering wheel
I just finished driving a 21 Passat for 5 days and that thing is the most hollow sounding car I’ve ever driven. It felt like I was in a wind tunnel when on the highway.
I really don't get what's going on with modern VW.
You used to put up with worse reliability and cost of ownership to get a nicer, comfier, more substantial, more fun-to-drive car than the Japanese competition. It was a reasonable tradeoff.
Now you sacrifice reliability and cost for..what exactly?
VW was nearly the experience of the other German makes (all of which are luxury brands in the US), for a lot less money. It was great.
Those days are over, and it really makes me sad.
If you're talking about a North American passat that is probably why. Bigger and cheaper was the entire goal when they decided to split off and build a car for American tastes instead of continuing to import the euro passat.
I wish Toyota would "ditch cheap plastics" for just less cheap plastics. I thought my covid-era Tacoma was built cheap af, then I sat in a 3rd gen Tundra and 4th gen Tacoma.
Sorry I should have been more precise. I meant interior offgassing and not car smells in general. Plastic and adhesive offgassing should not be a desirable smell but I get it is subjective.
Went inside a new Mini countryman which also has "quality fabrics" and boy does it look and feel cheap. Not to mention, what's stopping them from fading in Florida or New Zealand sun?
VW, if you’re seeing this, for the love of god it’s time to let go of the Piano black. Also whoever decided to cover the entire key fob in piano black should be drawn and quartered for such a stupid idea.
Are they going to get rid of the fucking stupid "2 buttons to operate 4 windows" thing as well?
Every review I've read says how much that passes everyone off. And while no car is perfect, your car absolutely should not piss you off every time you drive it.
Andreas Mindt was head of Bentley design before going back to the big parent company. I'd like to think he knows a thing or 2 about interior material quality.
The problem they can’t wrap their head around is that people loved the old interiors because they were thoughtfully designed as in put thought into it.
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