Your questions answered: are car makers removing content from their cars?

In this edition of Your Questions Answered, we look into the murky world of vehicle specs and whether car companies are getting cheap on us. We’re also asked whether we should include reliability ratings in our reviews.

We also ponder where the cool cars are gone, and whether CDs actually sound better than Spotify.

Got an automotive question but you don’t know where to find the information you need? Never fear, email us here at editor@carsales.com.au

Question: Most brands have models that provide great adjustment for the driver’s seat, but not the front passenger seat. It’s hard to find a small- to medium SUV with four-way adjustable lumber for those of us with crook backs.

Some European brands do offer it but getting them serviced in regional areas is a hassle and they tend to be overpriced. Can you help? – Geoff

Answer: Hi Geoff, I feel your pain both literally and figuratively, my friend. Getting the perfect driving position is not the work of a moment, and there are some cars where that ‘just right’ moment will never happen.

Your observation about a lack of functionality on the passenger side of a modern car is spot-on, and for that we can lay the blame squarely at the door of something the industry likes to call ‘decontenting’ .

Over the past decade in particular, car makers have fought a never-ending battle with two entries on their product spreadsheets; content and cost. More of one means more of the other, and in an industry where pricing is often decided on the eve of a product launch, making sure that bottom line figure is right has, unfortunately, had an impact on what gear makes it into our cars.

The industry will argue about price and additional weight and all the rest of it, but if you’re building 250,000 of model x’s best seller across the globe over the next five years, saving eight, 15 or 80 bucks per car on lumbar function, or a telescoping sun visor (looking at you here, Audi) has a significant impact on the profit margin at the expense of the customer.

Case in point; the passenger seat has been steadily losing features such as lumbar adjustment, height adjustment, massage function and the like for a while now, even on cars that purport to be highly specced.

And I reckon it’s a short-sighted strategy; the person in the jump seat next to the pilot often has a very significant input into the purchase of the family car. They’re uncomfortable in brand x? Less of a chance it’ll get a look-in come trade-in time.

Unfortunately, the simple answer is to spend more money on high-spec vehicles in your choice set, though even that won’t guarantee the addition of passenger-side lumbar support. The only one I could find at a quick glance is the Lexus RX350, which pops over the $70k mark, That would be model-specific, I bet.

Your point about the Euros is well made, happily though the world is a pretty small place when it comes to sourcing parts to keep cars going. The Peugeot 508 GT features driver and passenger lumbar control, for example.

If you’re so inclined, Japanese domestic market cars are generally more highly specced than their Aussie counterparts, but again it’s a matter of a deep dive into the spec sheets. Sorry I can’t be of more help.

Question: I enjoy reading your reviews but I do have a question; having owned a few car brands in my time; FJ Holden, Peugeot, Ford Falcon, Jaguar, Audi, Mercedes, BMW and Toyota, I have learned a few things about reliability.

In the USA there’s the JD Power reliability report and chart but not much information here.

The NRMA would have this information but choose not to reveal it.

Could you be brave and make reliability part of your report?- Michael

Answer: Hi Michael, thanks for your question. The JD Power studies that applied to our market and others in the region disappeared back in 2020 after an investment buyout, though the US version continues on.

To your point about the NRMA having such info (and assuming we’re talking about the roadside arm of the NSW-based motoring club, not the separate insurance arm), it doesn’t have anything of the sort, unfortunately. Motoring clubs have lost a lot of sway in the modern world and they simply wouldn’t allocate the resources to assemble such a data set.

And why don’t we cover the subject in our review? Good question. In the main we report upon and review cars that are new in the market, so looking five years or more into the future to comment on reliability is simply not possible, especially when we would only do so if it’s factual.

We do, however, report on recalls, and the ACCC makes searching for car-related recalls on their site very easy, which gives real power to the consumer.

Is that sufficient for us to suggest that because brand x’s last mid-sized SUV had 15 recalls in two years the new version will follow suit? I’m not sure it does.

Question: I want to buy a new car, and I don’t want to buy a ute or a PHEV or an SUV or any of the other white and grey boxes I see in the shopping centre carpark. Why don’t car companies care about cool cars anymore? – Moss

Answer: Hey Moss, we call black, white and grey cars the ‘German rainbow’, and it’s a pretty apt nickname of the state of the average carpark these days!

The SUV is the dominant body style on sale today, which does mean there’s a lot of sameness out there. Fear not, though, there are a few cars new to the market (and some that have been on sale for a while) that tick the interesting box for us.

First, all hail the Renault Duster! Known overseas as the Dacia Duster, it’s a smallish rig with bluff lines and a no-nonsense spec that keeps the price down. Opt for the FWD auto and you score a lightweight yet spacious little rig that you won’t see on every street corner.

Second, the Hyundai I30N in base spec is about the best $50k-odd you’ll ever spend on yourself. It predates most (not all) of the fuddy-duddy driver aid requirements, it has a chassis tune touched by angels and is still as practical as a hatchback (which it is). We are still big fans.

And if you’re looking for used and interesting, my colleague Scott Newman found this searing yellow Bentley Continental GT that can be had for less than the price of a Toyota LandCruiser.

Interesting isn’t dead; you just have to look for the gold.

Question: Can you solve an argument for me? My boyfriend claims that CDs sound better in his car than streaming Spotify, to the point where it’s getting weird. We now have a glovebox full of the damn things, and I reckon he’s full of it, they sound the same. So who’s right? – Kit

Answer: Hey Kit… bad news, I’m afraid, the other half may be right here. I’m not an audio tech by any stretch, but what it comes down to is digital compression.

In our parents’ day, records were the most faithful or accurate rendering of something being performed; what we heard in real life is what came out of the record.

The advent of the compact disc took that analogue feed and converted the sound into digital zeroes and ones, which were then burned into the CD. This led (according to audio buffs) to a loss in quality.

Fast-forward to the modern age, where we have the world’s music and recorded word available to us at the swipe of a finger. To transmit that amount of data over the air would take longer and consume more digital bandwidth, so boffins found a way to compress those zeroes and ones even more.

I guess it’s compressed to the level that the majority of humans perceive to be acceptable, which leads us to your car concert conundrum.

I’m probably going to be bombarded by audio greybeards for being overly simplistic, but the CD version of any given album will have more data per song, let’s say, than a streamed version. Your bf may have better hearing (it’s how it is in our house for sure), so he can appreciate the richer feed of info coming from a CD.

I recently popped a memory card full of old music I transferred off some of my CD collection into my VW, and I can attest that yes, they sound richer and more fulsome than my Spotify stream, so there’s definitely something to it.

Got an automotive question but you don’t know where to find the information you need? Never fear, email us here at editor@carsales.com.au

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