Somewhere between the concept car and the dealership lot, new vehicles pick up a handful of habits that nobody actually requested. They’re not the headline features automakers advertise — the horsepower figures, the range estimates, the safety ratings. They’re the smaller behaviors baked into the software and hardware that owners discover organically, usually within the first week of ownership, usually with a mix of confusion and mild irritation.
Some of these exist because of regulation, some because of a marketing team’s idea of what feels premium, and some for reasons that remain genuinely unclear even to the people writing about cars for a living. What they share is that virtually no owner, if asked directly during the design process, would have said yes. Here are eight of the most common.
Playing a Startup Chime or Animation Every Single Time
Fully digital gauge clusters and infotainment systems often greet the driver with a branded animation and sound sequence every time the car starts, the automotive equivalent of a computer’s boot screen. It’s mildly charming the first time. By the hundredth cold start on a rushed Monday morning, it’s a delay most owners would happily trade away for an instant-on display, particularly in the seconds before pulling out of a driveway into traffic. The practical annoyance is what waits behind the animation: on some cars the climate controls or the navigation search aren’t usable until the screen finishes loading. Check the sound and display settings, because the welcome chime can often be turned down or switched off even when the animation can’t. When you’re test driving, start the car from fully off, not from a warmed-up demo, and see how long it takes before the screen responds to a touch. A system that feels slow on the lot will feel slower every morning you’re running late.
Resetting Personalized Settings After Every Software Update
An over-the-air update is supposed to improve the car, and often it does fix real bugs. What it can also do is quietly reset drive mode preferences, driver-assistance settings, or infotainment layout customizations back to factory defaults, forcing an owner to redo settings they’d already dialed in. Nobody asked for their preferred radio presets or climate settings to vanish in exchange for a bug fix buried three menus deep. The defense is dull but effective. Before you accept an update, take phone photos of the settings screens you care about: driver-assist options, display layout, drive mode choices, and saved presets. Schedule the update for overnight at home instead of tapping “install now” before a trip, then take a slow lap of the menus the next morning. Check that your driver profile still holds your seat and mirror positions. Pay particular attention to safety settings such as lane keeping and following distance, which you’ll want to know about before you’re on the highway.
Nagging Drivers to Take a Break on Long Drives
Driver monitoring systems designed to detect fatigue are a reasonable safety idea, and the problem they target is real: NHTSA attributes 644 deaths to drowsy-driving-related crashes in 2024. But on-screen suggestions to pull over for coffee, when they’re triggered mainly by elapsed driving time instead of any actual sign of drowsiness, can feel patronizing on a long but perfectly alert highway drive. Owners who know their own limits find generic timer-based prompts more irritating than helpful, especially when the same message appears at the same interval on every trip. Two things are worth knowing. First, the settings menu often lets you adjust the alert’s sensitivity or switch it off. Second, the coffee-cup icon is occasionally right. NHTSA says drowsy crashes happen most often between midnight and 6 a.m. or in the late afternoon, and its advice if you do feel tired is specific: one to two cups of coffee and a 20-minute nap somewhere safe, because caffeine alone isn’t always enough.
Requiring an Account and App Just to Use Basic Features
Setting up a new car increasingly means creating a manufacturer account, agreeing to a lengthy terms-of-service document, and downloading a companion app before certain features — remote start, vehicle status checks, even some infotainment functions — will fully work. Owners who simply want to drive their car without another login to manage find this onboarding an unwelcome surprise for a purchase that used to require nothing more than turning a key. The account is also where data sharing gets agreed to. Federal Trade Commission staff have warned that connected cars can collect location and biometric data, and that companies don’t have free license to monetize it beyond what’s needed to provide the service. So read the consent screens instead of tapping through them, and decline any data sharing that is optional. Ask the dealer which features are free, which are trials, and what they cost afterward. When you sell the car, remove it from your account and factory-reset the infotainment system.
Sending Marketing Notifications Through the Car Itself
Connected vehicles with built-in data plans have opened a new channel for automakers to send promotional messages directly to the infotainment screen or a linked smartphone app — offers for extended warranties, accessories, or upgraded subscription tiers appearing on a screen the owner is using to navigate or adjust the radio. It’s a use of the car’s connectivity that serves the manufacturer’s interests more than the driver’s, and it intrudes on a space that used to be free of advertising. You may have more control than it first appears. Look in the infotainment settings for notification or offer preferences, and in the companion app for marketing and push-notification permissions. Where they exist, they can be switched off separately from alerts you do want, such as recall and maintenance notices. If a pop-up appears while you’re driving, leave it until you’ve stopped. And when a trial subscription is ending, decide ahead of time whether the service is worth paying for, so the renewal prompts don’t make the decision for you.
Making Basic Functions Dependent on an Internet Connection
Certain infotainment features, and in some cases parts of the navigation experience, are increasingly built around a persistent internet connection instead of functioning fully offline. Owners driving through rural areas or hitting a temporary outage in cellular service find that voice commands, map search, live traffic, or streaming stop working, for reasons that have nothing to do with the car’s mechanical condition. There’s a longer-term version of the same problem. A car’s built-in modem depends on a cellular network that may not outlast the car: when U.S. carriers shut down their 3G networks in 2022, the FCC listed vehicle SOS services among the connected products that could be affected. To limit the damage, download offline maps to your phone before a trip through thin coverage, and keep a charging cable in the car. When buying, ask how long connected services are included, and which features keep working without a subscription or a signal.
Auto-Locking Doors the Moment You Walk Away, Even With Items Left Behind
Proximity-based auto-lock systems are convenient in theory, sensing when the key fob or phone moves a set distance away and locking the doors automatically. In practice, they can lock a car with a phone, a wallet, or a bag momentarily set down inside while a driver steps away to grab something, since the system can’t distinguish between a driver walking off and a driver simply stepping ten feet from the vehicle. It’s a convenience feature that occasionally creates the exact problem — being locked out — it was meant to prevent. The risk is highest when the thing left inside is the key itself, or the phone that acts as one. Many cars are designed to refuse to lock when they detect the fob in the cabin, but don’t assume yours does; test it in the driveway with a window down. Walk-away locking can usually be switched off in the vehicle settings if it doesn’t suit how you load the car. Keep the fob in a pocket, not a cup holder.
Displaying Full-Screen Legal Disclaimers Before Basic Navigation Use
Before allowing a driver to enter a destination or use certain infotainment features, many vehicles display a full-screen legal disclaimer about distracted driving that must be acknowledged, sometimes every time the car is started and not just once during initial setup. The intent is understandable from a liability standpoint, and the underlying concern is real: NHTSA counted 3,208 people killed in crashes involving distracted drivers in 2024. But a warning that appears on every start becomes something drivers tap through without reading, which makes it a ritual more than a safeguard. On some cars the screen clears itself after a few seconds, so waiting works as well as tapping; on others, there is no setting to turn it off. The more useful habit is the one the disclaimer is clumsily asking for. Enter the destination before shifting out of park, or use voice entry once moving. If a passenger is handling the navigation, have them set the route before you pull away too.