2010 Ford Fusion: nice car, UI fail no extra charge
January 20th, 2010 at 11:58 pm ETOn our trip to Florida last week, we rented a Ford Fusion. They tried to upgrade us to something larger, but I’d been interested in test-driving the Fusion since I first saw one.
The car they handed over had only about a thousand miles on it. Nothing remarkable about it, but an all-around positive experience — good power, very good handling for a car of its class, generally good visibility with a couple of blind spots. I probably wouldn’t buy this car, but if I won one on a game show, I’d keep it. So far so good.
But.
The car had one of those magical digital gauges showing the mileage and the “miles to empty” on two lines, like this:
1172 MI
137 MI TO E
Since we’d prepaid for fuel and were incentivized to return the car with a tank as empty as possible (not to mention our adventurous and carefree natures), on our way back from Gainesville to the Orlando airport (a trip of about 2 hours) we decided to trust the mileage calculator and see what happened. At the start we calculated we had about 25 miles of cushion, which narrowed a bit as we drove.
The problem is, once we reached “50 MI TO E,” the top line of the display was replaced by the words LOW FUEL WARNING or some such — and we were no longer able to see the odometer mileage! Consequently we could no longer use the odometer to calculate our position or the miles remaining, and now had no choice but to rely only on the “MI TO E” mileage.
This happened to coincide with our initial approach into the Orlando metro area (a city I don’t know very well), where the route got more complex and the chances went way up that I would take a wrong turn, and burn through some of our mileage cushion finding my way back. This made me very nervous and pretty much ruined my positive impression of this bit of gadgetry.
While I understand the reason a UI might add a warning when certain conditions are triggered, I don’t think it should ever cover up or replace an important data readout with the warning… I am not a UI designer, but come on — that’s just basic, isn’t it?
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
