Seat Leon: A Moment of Silence

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In 2006, Steve Jobs presented the progress of iPod integration in the car industry: “70 percent of the new cars sold in the US offer iPod connectivity as an option.” Since then, car makers have had more than ten years to bring at least Bluetooth audio into vehicles as the standard successor. Apart from Android Auto and CarPlay, I mean simply playing audio from the phone through the car stereo. What could go wrong? Here’s a brand-new Seat Leon, probably similar to other entry-level VW stereos.

With no Play/Pause button on the steering wheel, the volume control does the job: volume at zero means pause; turn it up and it plays. The Siri/voice-control button on this model’s steering wheel does nothing, and using the resistive touchscreen while driving is life-threatening. At least when parked, the operation is so horribly inaccurate that it only gives you a heart attack. Charging the iPhone from the built-in USB port doesn’t work. The cigarette lighter for proper power is in the centre armrest, and soon the car would look like the cable mess behind my TV.

Sure, the digital car industry moves more slowly than the rest of IT. But after ten years with smartphones, shouldn’t the basics at least be reasonably usable? Six years ago, I showed the integration in a BMW that wasn’t much more expensive:

That was still a rather cumbersome dock-connector cradle, but it worked much more smoothly than simply using the Seat as a Bluetooth speaker.

Listeners tell me that wired CarPlay integration in Seat’s larger stereo is less awful (a €600–1,000 upgrade). In exchange, Bluetooth and USB are apparently a disaster in Opel too. VW had to revise a number of newer cars because, as with this Seat, the USB port didn’t provide enough power for CarPlay.

@bitsundso The Seat CarPlay integration works perfectly, but unfortunately only with a cable 🙁 — Jan Schöppach, April 24, 2017

@bitsundso It’s similar in my Opel Meriva. Bluetooth is a disaster and USB drains the iPhone. :( — Kai-Uwe Wagner, April 24, 2017

As for the rest of the car:

I drove the first 1,000 km in this Seat over the weekend. The metal-and-oil part is acceptable for its class, though it doesn’t inspire much joy in driving. The cruise-control operation is particularly unintuitive and a constant annoyance: three buttons have four functions. That means an extra glance at the display to check the cruise-control state before every press. Otherwise, you can’t tell what the click just did. Cruise control has two status indicators: a green LED shows whether it is actively regulating speed, and the last selected speed appears in the lower-left of the display. That’s the same spot where Front Assist, the radar distance warning and brake assist, rather aggressively warns you that you’re following too closely. I can’t understand putting a harmless informational indicator and a danger warning in the same place. Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out how the system reacts when the distance is really critical. Compare Mercedes: its four cruise-control functions are foolproof on the two axes of a lever (up, down, forward, back), and the status appears in a light ring around the speedometer and as a display overlay.

There’s a similar problem with choosing what appears on the centre display between the speedometer and tachometer. The steering-wheel selector (left/right arrows) first displays the categories (Audio / Vehicle / …) and holds that heading on screen for a second before showing the actual information. The driver spends an extra second looking at the screen rather than the road while waiting for the computer. At Mercedes, the category doesn’t get its own screen. Scroll on the steering wheel and the information appears immediately (Bayern 3 / 100 km/h / …). Bonus challenge for the Seat stereo: tune to a station that hasn’t been preset. I couldn’t do it.

There’s an intrusive flapping noise (wind?) around the right B-pillar at higher speeds. It’s absent on the left, and presumably isn’t intentional. The rear passenger complained of a cold draft and put their winter coat back on.

Conclusion: 80 years of bending sheet metal don’t help at all with UI and UX. After this extended test drive, it’s clear that the car’s biggest weaknesses are all in software. Only a firmware update could turn my damning verdict into a mediocre recommendation.