satellite radio song titles being truncated... safety hazard when the Smart City Brake Support system overrides the driver accelerating and steering and applies the brakes... Lane Departure Warning warns me when I touch a line to actually avoid a collision...
... Auto AC getting bricked
... Remote Start turning the car off when opening a door
... Painting process promoted for how thin the layers of paint are, but actually results in increased propensity of chipping.
... Taller than necessary steering column shroud that blocks portion of lower gauge display (where headlight indicator is) from driver view for over 50% of adjustment range.
... Gauge brightness that has a huge gap between the highest available dimmed setting and the non-dimmed setting that results in either too bright or too dim gauges during dawn, dusk, rainy or very cloudy driving conditions, along with the sensor in auto mode switching between the two 10+ times on a 30 minute commute.
... New 10.25" infotainment system for 2021 CX-5 Signature does not include wireless Carplay meanwhile the prior generation 8" system in my MX-5 GT had this standard.
It seems two types of testing are being conflated into one.
* quality testing
* usability testing
These appear to be deliberate choices (compromises) made by Mazda, and not testing inadequacy:
* Smart City brake support - I have experienced the scenario you mentioned but without additional sensors to detect and project lateral movement change of preceding vehicle along with more sophisticated logic, the programming for that situation becomes costly. You can either keep a more conservative following distance or disable the system for this trip if it bothers you. It's a support system. If for example, Mazda chose to narrow the radar detection toward the center to accommodate the scenario you mention, the car will then plow into stationary objects on the periphery.
* Lane Departure - Same reasoning as previous
* Remote Start turning off when opening door - Deliberate choice for legal reasons; not testing inadequacy
* Thin paint - This is par for the course for most Asian manufacturers I think and it's a deliberate cost-related choice; Mazda's fancy colors weren't touted for durability but for aesthetics
* Taller than necessary steering column shroud - Would it have been better if the shroud was lowered? What would people who lower their steering wheels have to say about that? I think this is a usability testing issue where it's impossible to satisfy all and objective is to satisfy the majority. Again deliberate choice.
* Gauge brightness - You can elect not to use the auto-headlamp setting. The logic of these auto-lamps are stateless and simply sensor-based. They have no notion of past state and future. When it detects bright ambience, it goes bright and vice versa. Unless there is sophisticated heuristic involved, eg, machine learning, it's tricky to get right. How does it know it's going under a slatted bridge during the day, for example? A simple way might be to add an interval threshold on how frequent it should switch, but that's another cost and I'd rather have the system be responsive.
* Wireless CarPlay - Deliberate choice, not testing inadequacy. Cost is probably a factor.
This may be a legit quality testing failure:
* Auto AC failure (what's the failure rate compared to other manufacturers? European cars with complex electronics and higher failure rates?)
I'd be interested to see comments on how other OEMs handle these scenarios.