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Toyota Accelerator Data Skewed Toward Elderly
An anonymous reader passes along this discussion on the data for the Toyota accelerator problem, from a few weeks back. (Here's a Google spreadsheet of the data.) "Several things are striking. First, the age distribution really is extremely skewed. The overwhelming majority are over 55. Here's what else you notice: a slight majority of the incidents involved someone either parking, pulling out of a parking space, in stop and go traffic, at a light or stop sign... in other words, probably starting up from a complete stop."
Were little old ladies form Pasadena...
27 data points is not enough to draw a strong conclusion.
parking, pulling out of a parking space, in stop and go traffic, at a light or stop sign... in other words, probably starting up from a complete stop
Or in other words, they take their foot off the pedal and put it on the wrong one.
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Old people can't use computers. Even if it involves lightly pressing on the accelerator.
Woz has already described the repro case.
Now, the iPad may not be the be all and end all of consumer devices, but I trust Woz when he talks.
If the vehicle has that much computer controlled functionality, why doesn't the black box tell which pedals were pressed at the time of impact and for the moments before impact? The black box system is arguably an invasion of privacy, but in this case it would go a long way toward fixing the problem(s) and perhaps saving lives.
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I suspect it's got something to do with the idle left foot getting involved as well. I drive manuals (stick shift for you Septics) and have a strong preference for them. Occasionally when I drive an automatic I get a brain fart and I am trying to de-assert (haha I am a programmer) the non-existent clutch I end up hitting the brake and wondering WTF is going on. Same goes when one wears thongs (jandles/flipflops) and driving one gets the brake being pressed at the same time as the accelerator. How many old people with low muscle tone are wearing broad soled shoes nowadays?
This assumes there is only 1 problem, not a half dozen different problems occuring in different situations. Yes, there are probably some that are putting their foot on the wrong pedal, that happens with every make and model of vehicle out there. Lets say statistically all cars have some percentage of elderly putting their foot on the wrong pedal, subtract them out and look at what's left. Serious electrical or mechanical issues can be lost in the noise.
I resemble that remark you young whipper-snapper!
Now get off my lawn before I accelerate uncontrollably and run you down!
God-damned kids!
Sig this!
TFA is actually quite convincing; however, might I suggest another possibility? It could be that short or elderly drivers are less easily able to react/respond to the unintended acceleration, and as a result are more likely to get in an accident as the result of the problem. Perhaps the author of this study could compare his data to the demographic/height distributions of various types of traffic accidents to test this hypothesis.
It sometimes does. From everything I can gather, the story reveals that the driver pressed the gas instead of the brake... revealed from the recorder box in the car.
Any vehicle with cruise control will have the same issue.
Since you made such a total generalization, I can easily demonstrate that you are incorrect by only giving one example.
In the 1997 Nissan Sentra:
1) Any touch of the brake pedal cancels cruise.
2) If the vehicle goes under 30MPH for any reason, cruise is cancelled.
3) Once cruise is cancelled, it can only be started again by going over 30MPH; and even then, you can only set it to the speed you are currently going at; not at a higher or lower speed. (So you have to reach the desired speed manually, then hit the button).
Come back when you have facts, not fabrications.
The real explanation could be as simple as "Those 55 and older are the ones who can afford to buy the cars in question".
Jobs? Which jobs?
Actually most won't activate until you're pushing the pedal yourself to around 20 mph or so.
That may satisfy our biases, however drawing a conclusion from this data without first adjusting for the distribution of Toyota owner ages is just plain bad analysis. Drawing a conclusion from such a small sample, and the large number of cases in which no age is listed are both factors that weaken the point of the article. Aren't the number of Toyota cases close to 100? Don't other manufacturers have similar problems? Sound conclusions require rigorous analysis.
What it means is that there's likely zero problem with Toyota's cars and there never was.
What's happening is that people are missing the brake pedal and hitting the gas pedal without realizing it. Their car then speeds up, shocking them, and since they think they're foot is on the brake they slam it all the way down, stomp on it, etc., and it just keeps going.
The elderly do this all the time.
Toyota's are just really popular cars, and some lawyer out there smelled blood.
And right now is a really good time to buy a Toyota. You'll get the deal of a lifetime :)
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The data in question catagorizes fatalities. Elderly people are often
killed by accidents that would only injure a young person. This could explain
the data skew regardless of whether or there is an actual accelerator defect.
I have used a number of cruise control systems in GM, Ford, and Toyota vehicles of various vintages from the 70s on to brand new vehicles. I have NEVER ONCE seen a cruise control that would do what you describe. All of them refuse to activate below a minimum speed (over 25mph, over 30 in most cases.)
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Look how many have a name that starts with U indicating that U the customer are the problem.
In addition to the data on that spreadsheet suggesting that the majority of cases were "older" people, look at the racial breakdown. Not suggesting that it has anything to do with race, per se, but rather that it would be interesting to know how much experience operating a motor vehicle that these folks have. Did they migrate here? Were their licenses just carried over from their originating country or did they have to retrain to the applicable state requirements?
3) Once cruise is cancelled, it can only be started again by going over 30MPH; and even then, you can only set it to the speed you are currently going at; not at a higher or lower speed. (So you have to reach the desired speed manually, then hit the button).
Come back when you have facts, not fabrications.
Odd, my car (not a Nissan), cruise control has a "Resume" feature. If CC gets canceled for some reason (#1 and #2 above), I press the Resume button and the CC accelerates back up to the speed it was set at. Turning the car off or turning the CC OFF, would reset the CC, but other then that it remembers where it was set.
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First thing you would need, if you really wanted to see if there was a correlation, would be the age distribution of Toyota drivers.
If, perhaps, the distribution looked just like this graph, it would mean nothing.
If, perhaps, the distribution of driver ages skewed to younger drivers, or showed a flat pattern, then you might have something.
Without that baseline, it isn't even worth coming up with theories.
Just out of curiosity, does your cruise control have an "accelerate" button that bumps you up a couple of mph on a tap? If so, what happens when you tap that button while underway? In most cruise control systems, that button is also the "resume" button, which will attempt to get you back up to the last set speed, flooring the accelerator if you're currently doing 45 and the last speed was 65 or something. That said, it still won't do anything if you're doing less than 30, but it can be surprising to hit what you think is the set button and have the cruise control suddenly floor it.
I read the internet for the articles.
These numbers are meaningless without the proper context.
First of all, what is the percentage of ownership, by driver age. In other words: Do a disproportionate amount of older people buy these cars?
Secondly, what is the comparable accident percentage, by car manufacturer and driver age. In other words: Do older people have a problem with all manufacturers or only Toyota?
Lastly, 24 incidents is way too few to make any kind of sane inference. Once you break it down by age category you have some categories that only have one to three members. At that low an amount they could simply represent random chance and not some sort of trend.
When you have such a low number you have two choices: ignore the problem or dig deeper beyond these simple statistics. Given that people's lives (and Toyota's reputation) are at stake I'd say that Toyota is doing the right thing by dissecting the cars and chasing every possible problem. If they find something then they can fix it, if they don't find anything then at least they gave it their best and can honestly say that these incidents seem to be user error.
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On my 1993 Sentra (RIP), there was a resume button that would bring the vehicle back to its old set speed. Touching the brake or going below 30 (say you're going up a hill while you're trying to resume cruise speed) would knock out cruise again even if it hadn't yet gone back up to speed.
I started car shopping shortly after the bad press about Toyota broke. I always wanted a Corolla because of its great reputation.
I tried researching the issue, but nobody had hard numbers to firmly establish that the hype was hype. All I got were anecdotal accounts along the lines of "we've had Toyotas for years we love them". The only numbers I did get were that Toyotas got in more accidents per a given number of cars than Hondas, though it wasn't established if it was the car or the driver.
It occurred to me that the main reason I started thinking about the Corolla was reliability....in other words, not having to think about my car and here I was scouring the internet doing research.
Finally, the 2010 Car Buying Guide of The Consumer Reports came out. Everything that attracted me to the Corolla, reliability and safety seemed to rated slightly higher in the 2010 Civic.
If my current car was in better shape I probably would have waited 6 months for the smoke to clear before giving up on getting a Corolla.
My intuition is that a significant amount of bad hype is involved( though not the only issue going on ), but when it comes time to put down tens of thousands of dollars of your own money and take risks that could hurt you personally, your attitude changes.
I don't like spending more money for a Honda, but I can and given what is at risk it is not worth it to take a chance on a Corolla in the next few weeks.
I think getting their electronics analyzed by NASA is the smartest thing Toyota can do. They need a detached third party body with a stellar reputation to reassure people to clear their name.
According to TTAC, the number #1 vehicle for unintended acceleration is the Lincoln TownCar. The Ford Police cruiser is one of the lowest, however. Funny thing is that, mechanically-- they are the same car. The difference is the people who drive them-- one group being highly trained with fast reaction times, and the other group-- well not so much.
It is not just age distribution that they need to look at with Toyota, it is the complete demographic of the Toyota owner. Car enthusiasts do not usually buy Toyota's these days. Toyota's are incredibly boring in appearance and they handle like slugs. The are anti-exciting, right up there with a root canal. The average Toyota driver is the person in the fast lane doing 45mph and texting someone at the same time. For the average user, unintended acceleration happens everytime they touch that strange scary pedal on the right. When you add in that their brakes are likely shot because they drag them all the damn time while talking on their i-phone going down the road-- and never do routine maintenance on their vehicle: it is no wonder they can't stop.
Toyota's main problem is that they decided to make cars for idiots and got bit by that (granted that is a large market share, just ask Microsoft).
1) Older people have slower reflexes. A thirty-year-old is more likely to regain control of a runaway without incident than a seventy-year-old regardless of the cause.
2) Older people are not as strong. A twenty-year-old may be able to stop a runaway by hitting the brakes where a seventy-year-old can't.
3) Regardless of whether or not Toyota has a computer problem, some of the Toyota runaways are probably due to "wrong pedal syndrome". What is the age distribution for "runaway" accidents for all makes?
4) As others have pointed out, the elderly are more likely to die in accidents.
5) As others have pointed out, the sample is too small to justify any conclusions about age.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The odds of this kind of skew are ridiculously low.
We have ages of 27 people. 13 of them are over 65. If you look here, you can compute that of all Americans over 15 years old, 16.5% are over 65. (14.4/(14.4+72.9)=16.5)
I'll be generous and assume that 20% of Toyota owners are over 65.
So in a sample of size 27, what are the odds of getting 13 or more people over 65, when the population you are looking at has only 20% of its people over 65?
The odds of getting that skewed of a sample are only about 1 in a thousand. (1-binomdist(12,27,.2,1)) So despite claims to the contrary, that is indeed statistically significant.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing about where this sample even came from, and am not claiming anything about its validity. I am merely disputing the posts dismissing this sample out of hand without doing some simple math.)
Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick? It's hard for about 3 hours, but once you get a feel for it you simply have so much more control over how the car behaves that it is actually hard to deal with not doing it. I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic... they always seem to upshift too early, sacrificing torque for smoothness, which would be great if I didn't have some whacko barreling up behind me at 50 and I need to be going fast enough that he won't smash into me 5 seconds ago.
Oh, and when they flub going up steep hills, that's just terrific.
But you just go ahead and keep knocking people who are better at driving than their cars, I'm sure you know better than they do.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
...for you Septics
In case anyone else is as puzzled as I am -- it turns out that's rhyming slang for yank. (Septic tank, got it?)
no, a typewriter does not give you greater control over your typing (much less actually) whereas manual transmissions can provide a great degree of control and comfort just not available in automatics.
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If you want to use that kind of analogy, I'd suggest comparing an IBM Model M to a cell phone on-screen keyboard. The Model M is tactile, precise, and communicative. The touchscreen is none of those things, and you just have to hope the software does a good job of guessing what you meant to press.
I'd much rather switch gears myself. The car can't see the hill coming up, or spot the hole in traffic I need to merge into. I can, and having the ability to select gears for power or economy as I please makes handling those scenarios that much easier. The only place I'd prefer an automatic is when there's a string of stop signs on a hill, and there are morons behind me pulling right up to my bumper. I do sometimes roll back a hair, you know...
You may be right, but may be wrong. What they should have done was compare it to the general stats on fatalities to see if the elderly are overrepresented in Prius crashes. But you have to figure out the percentage of them that drive Priuses and correct for that as well. We don't know whether it's statistically significant, but you insinuate that because they didn't correct for this, their message was wrong. It could be right or wrong, but we don't have enough info to determine it either way.
Not to mention, looking at the data indicates that "fatalities" are skewed toward the elderly, you read it wrong in that the Google spreadsheet provided was tracking incidents, not fatalities. Unless you meant the article linked, which indicated over 50% of fatalities involved drivers over 60, while the general fatality rate for all crashes has about 15% of crashes involving over 60s. So unless old people are 4 times as likely to drive a Prius as the general population, it still shows old people are over represented. Now all we need is rates for Prius mileage driven by over 60 vs under 60. If the rate is anywhere close to even, then the numbers show a distinct age related factor.
So, you are 100% right that we can't draw any real conclusions yet, but it does prove that either old people drive Priuses much more than everyone else, or there is a distinct age-related factor. So, since you seem to poo poo the idea of an age related factor, please present your proof that the elderly are more likely to drive a Prius. Any less than this, and your post was just an ill-thought out "I don't like that implication, so I'll just make a half-assed comment about the data being crap without ever having thought about the issue.
Or are you no less a moron than the people you complained about?
Oh, and if anyone wonders where you get good stats on traffic fatalities in the US, go to http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx. Fatal Accident Reporting System, abbreviated FARS, then renamed Fatal Analysis Reporting System because the government hates "accident" because people associate "unavoidable" with accident, when 99% of crashes are avoidable driver error.
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Anyone remember that gem of litigation? The one where people won lawsuits claiming breast implants caused chronic fatigue syndrome despite the fact the rate of chronic fatigue among breast implant patients was the same as the general population.
The law isn't about the truth. It's about narrative.
Look at the Tylenol scare. There's only one way to respond as a company in that situation. Toyota's great sin is that they held back and waited for the truth.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
if you can drive your auto with as much control as your manual, then i don't think you actually HAVE much control over your car.
What is it, exactly, I shouldn't be able to do ?
i can't say, never having seen you drive.
and i don't have any trouble driving an auto, actually its less taxing on the mind. but sometimes i like being in control of my car, especially on trips >100km.
Long trips are one of the best times to have an auto (along with cruise control). Probably beaten out only by city driving and commuting.
i think you've never driven for fun. automatic gears take the fun out of driving. inside the city it becomes a burden (not an advantage) to continually keep shifting. automatic gear shifting is really helpful there.
when, on the other hand, you don't need to shift so frequently, it becomes nice to have something to think about. here, automatics just take away the enjoyment of a long drive.
cruise control is usually liked by people who aren't bothered about driving and just want it to be as painless as possible. i find it quite boring.
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i can't say, never having seen you drive.
You're the one arguing automatics can't be controlled properly. I want to know in what ways.
i think you've never driven for fun.
I drive quite frequently for fun, though not as often as I'm on a motorbike, these days.
when, on the other hand, you don't need to shift so frequently, it becomes nice to have something to think about. here, automatics just take away the enjoyment of a long drive.
Long drives are boring, regardless. Having to regularly row through the gearbox just makes the whole experience more fatiguing - and the last thing you want on a long trip is more fatigue.
cruise control is usually liked by people who aren't bothered about driving and just want it to be as painless as possible. i find it quite boring.
Cruise control is liked by people who are experienced at driving distances and realise that it makes monitoring your speed one less thing you have to worry about, again reducing fatigue.
It blows my mind that anyone would want to drive for any non-trivial distance without cruise control.
Instead, I just demolished the author's prima facie case.
Yes, it's horrible. 55% of Prius unintended acceleration fatalities are with elderly drivers, and 15% of the fatalities at large are elderly drivers. Obviously there isn't any age link, right?
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All in all I'd be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which modern autos are "better".
Teenage girls.
That being said, i agree with you 100%. Ive been driving manual since getting my license, and find AT to be very annoying.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Again, someone making fun of GP.
Ever driven an 18 wheeler? Ever driven an 18 wheeler with an AUTOMATIC???? I did. Once. Never again.
As has been pointed out, the transmission cannot anticipate that I need a bit more torgue to climb a hill that it hasn't sensed yet. Nor can it see that I need to merge into traffic. It senses nothing, anticipates nothing - it only responds to certain stimuli, and everything is WRONG by the time those stimuli reach the brain controlling the transmission.
Worse, that damned transmission took a nice stab at killing me. Going downhill, a driver puts the truck into a lower gear and/or engages the Jake brake to govern his speed going down the hill. Try that with an idiot computer which decides that you are wasting fuel at high RPM's and upshifts the transmission, just before you get to the steepest grade on the hill. I had a hairy few minutes, believe me. 80,000 pounds of inertia falling into the gravity well is hard to overcome when the machine is fighting with you!
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There was a consumer report issue on this (I think it was consumer report), they put all segment of age in a car , then induced circumstance where the brake had to be used. And overwhelmly , older people mistook the brake and accelerator much much more than younger people ! I can't find the report anymore because now google is FLOODED with toyota accelerator "problem", so it makes search for anything older difficult. And my own ancecdotal evidence, a lot of the accident you see in the news, people plowing into farmer market or into other kids, are old people either not having their sense, or mistaking accelerator and brake ! It is a KNOWN problem, and chief among why some of us would like to see people over 55 do a driving test on regular basis... Locally, that don't happen, and people have to do a test only when they were in accident, are known to have mental problem, or were fined above a ertain number of points. In other word, too late.
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"But one shouldn't believe the hype. We went through this a generation ago with the Audi 5000 and other autos accused of sudden acceleration, and, again, mysterious unknowable car components were supposedly at fault. In a North Carolina case I worked on, the plaintiff's expert theorized that electromagnetic transmissions from submarines might have set off the throttle via the cruise control, though, unsurprisingly, he was not able to duplicate the effect while driving around electrical towers with much greater electromagnetic interference. Back then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spent millions studying the issue. They found that sudden acceleration was several times more likely among elderly drivers than young drivers, and much more frequent among the very short or someone who had just gotten into a vehicle. Electromagnetic rays don't discriminate by age and height, which suggests very much that human factors were at play: in other words, pedal misapplication. A driver would step on the wrong pedal, panic when the car did not perform as expected, continue to mistake the accelerator for the brake, and press down on the accelerator even harder. This had disastrous consequences in a 1992 Washington Square Park incident that killed five and a 2003 Santa Monica Farmers' Market incident that killed ten the New York driver, Stella Maycheck, was 74 (and quite short); the California driver, George Russell Weller, 86. We're seeing the same pattern again today. Initial reports of a problem, followed by dozens of new reports coming to light as people seek to blame their earlier accidents on sudden acceleration."
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Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick?
I'm not GP, but allow me to chime in. I initially learned to drive manual - there is no other option in my home country. So that's what I had to prepare for, and that's what the practice exam was with.
But, as soon as I could, I got an AT car - and never regretted it. GP's comment about manual typewriters is spot on. For the sake of a flamebait, I'll add an even more apt one - driving manual is like running OpenBSD. Sure, you're in control, but do you really need to waste so much time and effort for so little benefit? Maybe, but for most people the answer is definitely "no".
I've driven recent model cars in both the US and Germany. When comparing things like fuel economy and performance, here's a short list of things people tend to forget:
Driving in the US means much more driving very long distances compared to Europe. So many of my European colleagues just don't grok this until I describe a few things. For example, an 8 hour drive from Phoenix to LA at 70+ miles per hour, then show them on a map how little of the US that actually covers. I do that, then ask them how far away they'd be if they drove for 8 hours from their house at that speed (as if it were possible).
Distances impact the relative "feel" of fuel costs. I live in a rural part of the country (as do 42% of McMericans). It's several miles drive for me to get to groceries. It can be a 45 minute commute at highway speeds just to get to work (not for me, but it's common enough). You just use a lot more fuel. This is also why public transportation is so much more difficult to make practical here. The distribution of population is radically different. Much of the US was settled after the advent of personal transportation that you didn't have to feed and water.
To my German friends -- don't feel bad about not quite fully understanding that sheer size and scope of the U.S. You aren't the first from Germany (well, technically Austria I suppose) to make that mistake. (poke).
P.S. - On the whole Automatic vs. Manual transmission thing -- I've certainly driven both. People claiming better turns on sweeping mountain roads and are driving front wheel drive cars are pretty much full of crap. Sure, a manual will give you a real edge with a rear wheel drive car. Otherwise, get over yourself and quit pretending your an F1 driver in your silly little consumer box.
When I drive in Europe, I make an effort to rent a small automatic. It costs more. Why? Because I don't know the roads well and my attention is full enough paying attention to the different road etiquette and the GPS combined with signs in different shapes than I'm used to and frequently in languages I don't speak.
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Because Toyota hasn't pointed it out. Don't you think that if these incidents occured across all cars, the Toyota would have pointed it out by now?
Usually the best indication that something is not a defense is that the defense ain't using it.
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It's not that women can't because they're women and they're small, stupid, whatever reason anyone may argue. Teenage girls, in particular, may also be 80 pounds (though probably not, especially in the US) but they aren't experienced truck drivers, and they *don't care* about controlling the car safely. They care about getting where they want to go... the most technical thing they care about is hooking up their ipod to the stereo.
Teenage girls are the least likely of all demographics to care enough to learn to understand technical things, and driving an 18-speed transmission sounds rather technical. Even a regular five-speed manual takes quite a bit of understanding and practice to learn, and to a teenage girl that time is 100% wasted if they can just drive an automatic instead. It's not that they *can't* learn, but they don't care and they don't want to learn.
There's nothing sexist about the argument you're responding to. It has nothing to do with whether women are capable of driving with manual gearboxes or not - obviously they are. And girls aren't conforming to any stereotype when they choose an automatic over a standard... just like the majority of guys (in the US), who also choose automatics! They've just got more important things to care about, and automatic transmissions are "good enough" for most - obviously not for truckers.
Actually, come to think of it, as a young guy in the US if I think about all the people I know well enough to know this about them, I think I know more girls who can drive a manual than guys.
Oh my my. You have never driven a manual car I see.
Aside from the better fuel economy, the car is much nicer to drive.
It's a also a great theft deterrent - most car thieves in the US don't know how to drive stick.
Dear mods, can we stop modding different opinions as flamebait please? Thanks.
Thanks for an enlightening post. It clear up some confusion in my mind about AT vs Manual transmission.
I've never driven a truck of the sort you are talking about, but I can see how human intelligence can make the difference in alot of situations as you pointed out.
I got my license on an AT, and when I bought a car with a Manual transmission, I thought, hmm, I guess it's going to be harder to eat that Whopper now while I'm driving, other than that I didn't see any real advantages or disadvantages to it. Vaguely, I half remembered that race car drivers and car afficionados preferred manual transmissions, because they had more control over the car. I guess I agreed since starting off can be a little sluggish in an AT but then those times when you forget you are still in third and try to take off in third, and don't go anywhere that happen to me sometimes even after driving nothing but manual transmission vehicles for six years, sort of compensate for that.
Anyway, a couple of days ago on wired I read that all the new Ferrarris are coming out with AT. I don't know a damn thing about cars, but I was thinking HMM... I guess the afficionados have changed their collective minds.. I wonder why... I still don't know, supposedly the automatic transmissions were faster on some track tests, but I guess if you have a huge enough engine you'll take off just fine no matter what gear the transmission's electronics are in...
Then again, watching dang, I wonder the name of that show is where the celebrities try for the best time, Top Gear?, whatever, I always see them farting around with the electronics on even very expensive cars like ones that cost twice what my house does, and I'm thinking - WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!
Electronics that you see, are a big minus. Note to electronic interface designers designing interfaces to computerized crap on cars - When accessed through the electronic interface, your car should respond like Mario does on SNES games. INSTANTLY, and without any thought. NOTHING of importance should require looking down at any controls. When controlling mario, you don't have ANY menus, you don't take your eyes off the screen. DRIVERS whose lives may depend on their cars responding to their input, and being able to see the road, DON'T want to be fracking around with electronics. Even stuff that ought to not be time sensitive ought not to take much time or thought. There should be no digital displays on a car. The radio's display can be digital and show the time, the station and the current mp3 track. AM/FM, Seek, favorites buttons, should be BIG. The volume and tuner should be the only two knobs. The tuner can double to select MP3 tracks read from a keyfob.
You are going to have your car for at least 5 years, and maybe 10. Any electronics you have are going to be obsolete after a two or at most three years. Any menus necessary to access features effectively subtract the feature as a selling point. Your car should be a car first and foremost, with electronics added only where absolutely necessary to make your car do it's car thing.
The only other exception to the no display except the clock radio rule is that the check engine light should have a display that is blank unless there is a problem. In that case it should display a human readable/understandable description of the problem with an error code. It might be too tempting for designers to use that display for something other than displaying error codes though. You DON'T want any displays you have to read to access funtionality of your car. accessing your car's functionality is otherwise known as driving, and that is dangerous when texting.
...
The transmissions Ferrari is using along with other manufacturers can be better thought of as auto-shifting manuals as opposed to the manual-shifting autos you're probably familiar with. The Ferrari transmissions have a computer controlled clutch to handle engagement/disengagement of the tranny rather than a torque converter used by auto transmissions.
Sure, you're in control, but do you really need to waste so much time and effort for so little benefit? Maybe, but for most people the answer is definitely "no".
When you're in control of half a ton of tempered steel traveling at roughly 60mph or more, then the answer is a definitive "yes." When we are talking about operating systems on home computers where a crash causes some headaches and a few days worth of inconvenience, you're right, you don't need that extra control. When we are talking about what is, essentially, a very powerful weapon that is supposed to be used for peaceful transport purposes (yes, that much directed energy is a weapon, like it or not) then that control is absolutely essential. Those folk who are too damned incompetent to deal with that level of control should stay the hell off the roads, just like those folk who are so old they can no longer tell the brake from the gas pedal.
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Whether it's a complex interaction fo systems that can't be reproduced in QA, the uncovering of a hardware of software bug; or if something as simple as the user consistently clicking the wrong button -- or pressing the wrong pedal, if that is what happened.
On the surface, yes - in some of those cases, the user does the "wrong" thing. But what that really means is "the user did not do what I said they should do". So is that user error, or interface design error? Why would they do it wrong in *this* case, but not in other cases? WHy did the same user never have this problem with any other car?
A bug doesn't mean only that code is broken. It can occur in any number of steps in the process -- code, interface, expectations we have set for the users, design, assumptions, hardware, etc.