Modify My Ride
Many of Today’s Cars Let Their Owners Call the Shots on How Things Work
By Jeffrey Steele
CTW Features
These days, Americans like to fine-tune everything around them, from cell phones to coffee to their own very individual tastes. So should it come as any surprise that carmakers are working hard to give them that ability in the vehicles they drive?
For some time now, upscale brands have let buyers customize how their vehicles operate. Buick, for instance, has long been big on allowing owners to determine how the doors unlock (only the driver’s or all four at once) and how long the headlamps and interior lights stay on after the ignition has been switched off.
The trend toward vehicles tailored to individual preferences has reached a new and some say outrageous strata, with the BMW M5 and M6. These cars permit their owners to customize their rides to an extreme degree, offering a dizzying array of permutations involving personalized steering, suspension, throttle and shift settings.
This isn’t just recognition on the part of automakers that Americans are more ruggedly individual than ever before, says Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based auto-information Web site. It’s also another way to differentiate themselves from their rivals.
“It’s an industry competitive thing,” Brauer says. “Once one offers it, then they all have to. If BMW is offering all these massive changes in how a vehicle feels as it drives down the road, then Mercedes and other luxury makes are caught at a competitive disadvantage, and they feel they have to respond.”
Brauer has been aware of the trend toward customization for some time now. “The first time I remember hearing about this myself was about six or eight years ago, when I read about it being offered in the BMW models, and it was called ‘Car and Key,’” he says. “It was the ability to customize the car based on the driver and driver profile. BMW would give you two keys, in different colors. You would take one, and give the other to your spouse. And then the dealer would set up the car so the various settings like seat position and how the doors locked would be tied to each of the keys. The car would behave like you or your spouse liked, based on whose key was being used.”
Since then, the capacity to fine-tune vehicles’ convenience features has become far more common, Brauer notes. GMC trucks got in on the act with a vast scrollable menu of options, allowing customization of the instrument panel’s language, whether the speedometer and odometer would use miles or kilometers and whether lights would remain on for 30 or 60 seconds or turn off immediately after doors were locked.
Many cars now offer speed-sensitive volume, a feature that permits owners to determine whether and how much the sound system volume rises with increases in speed, to compensate for surges in road noise.
“Almost every General Motors car made now has that level of customization,” Brauer says. “Mercedes has had it for many years, where you can scroll through pages of a menu system, and dive into it and make changes. Ford’s got the same thing.”
BMW’s high-performance M5 and M6 models take the tailor-made approach up a notch, Brauer says, moving beyond convenience to controlling aspects of a car’s performance. For instance, fine-tuning the vehicle’s suspension can alter how much the system limits body roll around corners, and how softly or tightly sprung the suspension is for performance driving.
Similarly, tailoring the engine’s horsepower allows an owner to use a default setting of 400 horsepower when the vehicle’s ignition is started, then tap a button or change a setting that bumps the engine up to 500 horsepower. “The idea here is that a valet wouldn’t necessarily need 500 horsepower,” Brauer says. “And it’s also for the fuel savings. It’s how the engine is mapped and tuned for horsepower versus fuel savings.”
So far, the chance to dramatically tailor a vehicle to the driver’s personal preferences has pretty much been the province of upscale, higher-end cars. But that doesn’t mean John and Jane Q. Public will be left out for long.
“I don’t know if you’ll see different suspension settings for a Kia Rio,” Brauer says. “But certainly, the opportunity to change different convenience features will filter down to even the lower-end cars – probably in the next five years.”
Why? For the same reason the first wave of technical advancements have always been offered first on luxury autos: amortization. The cost of developing advanced systems is paid by high-end car sales, after which automakers can add them to lower-end makes without a major impact on production cost, Brauer says.
How much more advanced can such features get? Brauer has an answer. “I’ve said for a while the next frontier is not technology – that’s already available. It is making the technology easy to use for the average person, and not distracting for drivers, so they’re losing focus on the road.”
