No, I don't want to talk to my damn car

“Oh, you see, it’s totally fine that you can’t use the touchscreen like you’re used to anymore or that we’ve removed 27 buttons from the interior! You can just use our totally awesome voice controls!”

I’ve been hearing something roughly like that a lot recently while raising some, um, concerns I have about several recently overhauled infotainment systems. Toyota and BMW, for example, have gone downhill in terms of how intuitive and easy their touchscreens are to figure out and operate once under way. For Toyota/Lexus, that means getting rid of the excellent physical menu buttons and split-screen functionality. For BMW, that means burying functions like key climate controls and adaptive cruise control following distance within a sea of touchscreen menus. For both, it also means aggravating satellite radio interfaces.

When I asked a Toyota/Lexus technical communications rep why it would remove those menu buttons and the ability to split the screen between content sources as you could do previously in some of its vehicles, I got the voice control answer. When I raised my concerns about the page full of tiny menu icons drivers are faced with while driving in the BMW i4 and iX, a BMW software engineer gave me the voice control answer.

OK, fine. Let’s give ’em a whirl then.

I was recently driving a BMW iX, and when I came upon an old truck belching fumes, I decided to try using voice controls to engage air recirculation. Remember, this is apparently natural speech recognition software.

“Hey BMW. Turn on air recirculation.”

Nope. Boilerplate “robot didn’t understand” answer.

“Hey BMW, turn on climate control air recirculation.”

Nope. Ditto.

“Hey BMW, please engage the air recirculation function of the heating and ventilation system of this stupid futuristic car.”

Nope. By this point, the interior was stinky.