“So, why did you break up with Lucy after all?” “You know, I was looking for something through her wardrobe and… I found a green sweater”. “And?” “Are you kidding? I hate green!” It’s the same situation with this review of the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
There are thousands of people involved in developing a new car, so that’s why us, customers, expect everything to be nothing short of perfect. If there’s a problem, it can get past 99% of those involved, but somewhere along the line somebody should spot it and somebody else should remedy it.
On the other hand, it might be that we don’t all regard certain aspects or features as problems. We do things differently and it’s not impossible to imagine that something you consider to be a flaw in a car, was given the green light by an engineer who thought otherwise.
In this case neither you, nor that engineer are right or wrong. They should run tests and use focus groups, you say, but you know very well how secretive (read “paranoid”) manufacturers are with their unlaunched products, so that’s out of the question. Instead, they have to rely on studies on current products (both their own and those of the competition), intuition and common sense.
Still, Mercedes-Benz seems to have gotten it wrong with the audio controls as far as this automotive reviewer is concerned. His name is Micah Muzio and he thinks that the whole procedure involved in skipping to the next track with the COMAND system in the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class is too tedious. And you know what? He’s probably right.
Mercedes wanted to clear the dashboard of as many buttons as possible, so the infotainment system’s menus had to grow in size and complexity. It was a choice somebody in the company decided on and was approved by his or her superior. Then, somebody else was tasked with finding a solution to make up for the extinction of all those buttons. Apparently, as mister Muzio discovered, he didn’t do a very good job.
But if you watch the whole video, you’ll see that, apart from a (slightly) smaller mpg value than of the equivalent BMW, there’s not much he can complain about the new C-Class. So that whole skipping the track thing, although real, was only a case of nitpicking by an automotive journalist in order to find the mandatory bad things to say about the car.