5 Car Features Almost No One Actually Uses

Automotive technology has considerably evolved over the past few decades. Odds are, if you step into a car dealership’s showroom floor, you’d hear the sales rep rattle off more features than you can count or care to remember. While these features, on average, go a long way to improving the quality of your driving experience, you wouldn’t be wrong to consider a handful of them extraneous.

We’ve entered a screen-heavy era of car design, love it or hate it, and with this next step in the evolutionary design tree, automakers are complementing their new releases with state-of-the-art features. There’s no denying the usefulness of innovations like the lane-keeping assist system, but the quest to leverage convenience as a big part of the sales package can sometimes dilute the intended impact.

When that happens, what you have is a range of features that nobody really uses. So, why is it hard for automakers to find the right balance? It’s simple; Tech-laden dashboards and futuristic gimmicks sell, and personally, I suspect they help drive the rising price tags that buyers encounter these days. While these innovations help automakers add more meat to their profit margins, there needs to be a definitive line in the sand separating features that actually assist drivers from what sounds good in a thirty-second commercial. Less is more when it comes to tech, and drivers tend to forget these features exist when the new car smell starts to fade.

For years, driving a manual transmission required skill and engagement with your vehicle. It’s why learning with a manual transmission vehicle was recommended back when they were still common on the roads; You could really learn the mechanics of car movement that way. Times changed, and now automatic rules the world.

With paddle shifters, however, automakers aimed to turn back the hands of time by bringing the thrill of manual transmission to automatics. The idea behind this was for new-age drivers to get a sporty taste of gear shifting. As such, paddle shifters are marketed as a component of a sports mode option. Take the 2024 Volkswagen Jetta, for instance. The base trim (without the paddle shifters) starts around $21,500. The GLI trim, which includes paddle shifters as well as a more powerful engine and a host of other components, goes for about $8,000 more.

For what it’s worth, the paddle shifters have their uses. The adrenaline rush of flying into a curve or speeding past a slower vehicle can feel more natural by downshifting the gears. However, the average Joe can’t match the automatic transmission’s precision timing. As you can imagine, the thrill of using the paddle shifters fades shortly after tearing the plastic covers off the seats.

On paper, the idea of a parking assistant rocks, to say the least. That way, you don’t have to parallel park — a modern-day nightmare for unseasoned drivers. If you need a few tips, we have a guide on how to parallel park perfectly. That’s why parking assistants are so common; The slick look in a commercial of pushing a button and watching your car back into a space in a crowded parking lot goes a long way to cementing the hypothetical.

However, the reality is markedly different. The feature’s performance varies by automaker — and none meet the standards required for use in a heavily populated area. For starters, the system takes quite a bit of time to assess the conditions before it begins to reverse into the desired space. The system utilizes cameras, sensors, and supervised learning algorithms to identify the ideal parking spot and park the vehicle. The longer it takes, the more doubt creeps into the driver’s mind about letting an AI system park their car.

Admittedly, the feature can be quite helpful for people who find parking incredibly challenging. Unfortunately, it’s hard to trust an AI system in the real world. The parking time might seem like a nitpick, but on a busy day with horns blaring all around you, the impracticality is bound to rear its head. At best, you might show it off to your friends once, then never use it in real life.

Proprietary voice control systems are an example of manufacturers burning R&D budgets on technology that became irrelevant overnight. Before smartphone integration became standard, automakers allowed drivers to shout commands at their car system. The idea was to enable drivers to take a call, adjust the music, or perform other simple tasks while keeping their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. However, it was hit-and-miss at best.

Asking it to ‘call Mom’ was as likely to kickstart a navigation to the Samoan Islands. While some automakers did manage to build a good voice recognition system, most drivers find themselves having to yell, repeat themselves, say the commands slowly, or even just do things the old-fashioned way. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto have taken market prevalence in this area — elegant solutions that mirror your phone’s superior voice assistant onto the car screen. Read has a list of CarPlay features you should be using in 2026.

One look at your infotainment system after connecting your iPhone is all it takes to decide there is no reason to use the car’s clunky, outdated system when Siri understands you perfectly the first time. However, with the rise of AI-powered voice assistants that can learn patterns such as your tone, driving patterns, and routes, it might not be far-fetched for the technology to find a regular audience.

With rising fuel prices and climate change consciousness, the innocent green leaf button that is heralded to give better gas mileage should become increasingly tempting to the average Joe. Eco mode functions by reducing the vehicle’s throttle response. This works by shifting earlier in the cycle to keep the engine running at a low rpm, which reduces fuel consumption compared to the normal mode. However, these gas savings come at a cost that many car owners are not willing to pay — that of sluggish acceleration. Read covers how eco mode works in more detail.

You could achieve marginally better fuel economy with this mode, but according to some real-world testing by Consumer Reportsthere is more to it than meets the eye. Results showed no fuel economy benefits for the mode while running at the same speed in the city and on the highway. Basically, driving habits play a much bigger role in fuel savings than toggling on Eco mode.

Think of Eco mode like towing an invisible anchor — you need to press the accelerator all the way to generate any torque. This will come off as a huge turn-off to drivers who prefer their cars to be responsive, prompting them to disable it and drive normally.

The gesture control system is another example of futuristic features that look better in a commercial than they actually function. As a result, once the new car smell fades, many car owners go back to the tried-and-tested method.

BMW’s internal studies confirmed this theory, which is why the new iDrive X does not feature gesture controls. Despite the manufacturers originally taking an ambitious approach to touchless interaction, it was a struggle for drivers to reliably use the gesture control. Couple that with the fact that you could easily reach over to the infotainment system or rely on the voice assistant to do the same job, and you have a solution to a problem that never really existed in the first place.

It doesn’t really take any visual attention to twist a knob the old-fashioned way, and it succeeds every time, regardless of hand position or lighting conditions. So, it’s no surprise that drivers prefer the legacy control system over futuristically waving your hand at the infotainment system, hoping it picks up what you are putting down.