BlueSander

May I ask which cars have you own previously? The last guy I met actually complained about the control in Audi MMI moved from a Camry to new A4 and had never touched any cars with GPS equipped.

u080570

[QUOTE=ArubaSF;23954492]Totally agree! Even on the steering wheel thumbwheel, just to get to the preset list requires a couple presses of the 'Mode' button and then a scroll down through the Sat/FM/AM/Preset list.

QUOTE]

You dont have to press the mode button at all, just scroll the thumbwheel and your presets appear immediately....

norman1294

My previous cars were BMW 300 series convertibles. Needless to say, I'm not a stranger to GPS and advanced electronics in a car. The A5 controls are unnecessarily complicated. ( Just as bad, if not worse, than those in the BMW 700 series of a few years ago.) Incidentally, I don't have a real problem with the GPS in the A5, it's all the other stuff that is so frustrating and distracting while driving.

perdido34

My ten cents: Car operating controls should be intuitive enough that a driver new to the vehicle knows how to operate the basic systems within a couple of minutes. You get this is nearly any American car and nearly all Japanese cars. Audi doesn't approach this standard, although I am now used to the car's control after three months of ownership.

Nav systems require some study, so that's a little different. The gold standard of nav controls is what one finds on standalone GPS units, such as medium-price-and-up TomTom or Garmin units. The most expensive of these costs $2000 less than our nav system. Why am I twiddling an alphabet dial to input destinations instead of having a touch screen? Why is it so hard to see what the alternate routes actually are before you choose one? etc. etc. I know, I know... I could have bought a non-nav car and saved the money, and I knew what I was getting when I bought it. But IMO the nav display is top-notch, yet the nav controls suck. For $2500, Audi should have gold-standard controls. Maybe in 2011.

As for the radio, yeah it would be nice not to have to reselect PRESETS every time you restart the car. I mean, if they are PRESETS, then they are the channels/stations that you want to hear. There should be no extra steps to see them in front of you when you press RADIO for the first drive of the day.

The wipers: The rain sensors are described as flawed by many people. Glad that some people think they are fine. For me, they work fine in the rain but were either too zealous or too lazy when it snowed. The actual control lever is flawed in its design, too, since the slide switch controlling the interval between wipes leaves LONGER intervals when the switch is next to the logo that shows a SHORT interval.

OTOH the cruise control lever works really well. I have no complaints with the heating and AC controls, but I can see that some people want it to be easier to change the automatic settings than it is. The sunroof twistee **** is silly--how is this an improvement on the rocker switch that everybody else uses? The doorlocks are upside down--pushing the top of the switch should unlock rather than lock the car. If you think I'm wrong, put a friend in your car and ask him/her which way to push the button in order to lock the doors.

ArubaSF

When I do this, I get the entire list of stations in the current band, not the presets. Is there a way to configure it to show the presets? Still, would be nice to be able to switch between map and presets in the MMI (so as to be able to see song titles etc.) with one click. Of course, I'm old enough now that it's like when you were trying to teach your grandparents to use a computer... hopeless!

Another slight annoyance I've noticed with some classical music is the MMI's truncation of track titles (you can't actually see the important bits because they're too far over to the right), and sometimes the sort order is a bit off on the jukebox.

u080570

[QUOTE=ArubaSF;23957794]When I do this, I get the entire list of stations in the current band, not the presets. Is there a way to configure it to show the presets? QUOTE]

I'm not sure if there is a setting to turn that on or off....once I did my presets, they just showed up in the list when I scroll the wheel...

Can you see a list of your presets in the MMI? - you should have a screen that lets you add a preset, replace presets, etc..I did mine a long time ago so I dont remember the exact sequence

ArubaSF

Yes, the presets work fine. We're just complaining about the number of button presses required to get to them (because the Radio MMI button defaults to the full list of stations, as does my scrollwheel -- interesting that yours doesn't).

Just occurred to me what the ideal interface would be, actually: a row of 4 or 5 buttons, similar to the preset buttons on an old-fashioned car. But the MMI would let you assign several stations to each one of those buttons. So e.g. you could put all your dance stations on one, classical on another, talk on a third. Then you could pull up the corresponding list on the MMI screen with one click, according to what you were in the mood for. And the scrollwheel by default would move between stations in the current list. Hmm, maybe I should sell this idea to Audi for millions of dollars!

ArubaSF

This one actually makes sense to me -- because I read the logos not as the "interval", but as the "amount of wiping". So more frequent wiping is the bigger bar. But totally agree with you on the other points.

dreish

I just went down and confirmed that you're apparently both right. I'd never tried using the thumbwheel in radio mode (not much of a radio listener, more of an iPod guy), so I just did it now, and it gave me all the stations, not the presets I picked out a few weeks ago.

But I futzed around with the thumbwheel for a couple of minutes (can't remember the exact steps, sorry), and I was able to get it to go directly from speedometer to numbered list of presets when I scrolled without first pressing anything. I then put the MMI in nav mode, shut the car off and turned it back on, and when everything started up again and I tried turning the thumbwheel again, it again gave me presets, so it seems to stick.

Good luck, guys. I know how irritating a little thing like this can become over the course of a few months, once the glow wears off.

atombomb33

I'm not sure about you, but I only have to press one button once to get my presets. Not multiple buttons/presses.