• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, August 26, 2014

What is happening with initial auto satisfaction? One study, just out, says American vehicles are gaining on imports. And generally, satisfaction is down a tad across the industry.Once again, consumers are unhappy, or at least less happy with their cars, it seems, depending on whom you ask. 

And it also depends on when you ask it and what you ask about. Take J.D. Power's IQS, the Initial Quality Study. This measures what people think about their new vehicles 90 days after ownership. It’s about surprise and delight. And guess where that’s coming from these days? 

I'm of two minds about the study. On one hand, I think there's a good argument that the IQS should be bipartite: a traditional-features study that looks at old-fashioned things: consumers' feelings about fit and finish, handling, interior layout and aesthetics, parts and services, mileage, dealership experience, console layout, and then recalls. 

Meanwhile, there are elements pertaining to the connected car, mostly having to do with surprise and delight around simplicity and intuitive function: whether accessing features by touch screen or buttons; whether the car predicts what you want to know, not what you don't need to know; how easy it is to find things via menus and other information navigation routes; how well entertainment features are integrated with information features, such as navigation, climate, and engine status; generally how well the car functions as a mobile, mobile device. 

The poster child for this argument would be the first-generation Ford Sync, which sunk Ford's IQS score a few years ago. When that happened, I remember thinking, "No fair." I don't think I was alone there. I think a lot of people lauded Ford for taking a risk on that first-generation system that users, it turned out, found confusing. 

The other argument is that the driving experience is holistic, automakers have evolved to the point where the infotainment experience has become a kind of proxy for the rest of the car. If the navigation system is lousy, and the interface is a digital Rubik's Cube, the car is demoted to Pontiac Fiero status. It's the proxy problem: if one aspect of a car doesn't function as expected, the owner is now angry, and his or her perception of the rest of the vehicle is clouded by frustration and resentment around the car that didn't deliver as advertised. Is that fair? I have really mixed feelings about it, still. 

I'm tending toward the latter: Back in 2000, the Chris Bangle-designed BMW 7-Series took a ton of heat for its dial-controlled information interface. Let's pretend the weird back-shelf design of the vehicle didn't happen (I kind of liked it, but I also liked the first-generation Caddie CTS, which a lot of people didn't like.) Basically, the entire car was slammed for that dial interface. 

But I'd say that since the late '90s, 70% of the driving experience is around human-machine industrial design with regard to driver/console interaction. And that interface is becoming more and more digital, as screens replace buttons. Whether it involves controlling the AC, the radio, or the color of your speedometer, the experience is becoming virtual, visual, and in some cases even haptic, an innovation designed to help the driver. 

Human/machine interface as a specialty of industrial design has probably been around since the Univac, but  in cars it seems the deal maker or breaker is looking a lot like what happens in the cell-phone store.