Truck Nutz is so obvious I’m surprised it wasn’t in the prompt.

My suggestion was the 3,000-mile oil change interval. I guess that could fall under the “Reliability, Reliability, Reliability” entry.

The 3,000-mile oil change interval.

Bent, missing, broken car antennae.

Fumbling with paper maps and printed directions. It’s incredible to think how systems like CarPlay have made that whole process a trivial 1-sentence request.

Couldn’t you say, vacuum operated *anything*?

Thank God I don’t have to run a car charger to my portable CD player, connected to my tape adapter that needs wiggled the right way into the car’s tape deck. The portable CD player needed to sit level on the center console, and even with shock protection would from time to time skip over speed bumps and other bumps…

Vacuum operated windshield wipers.

Nothing a little boiling water and a suction cup can’t fix.

To shreds, you say?

Ah, that’ll buff out.

Hey David Tracy, you see all that rust?  I have a bridge to sell you.

I promise you, nobody I know with a sunroof has done this more than twice. Everybody I know with a sunroof has said “it’s a waste.”

This might be beating a dead horse but... Touch screens. I love that screens are getting bigger and bigger, allowing for more features and customization, but when automakers make things like climate control, volume, sunroofs, etc. accessible only via touchscreen, its just dangerous. These are functions I should be…

Automatic seat belts, in that brief period around 1987-88 between when active restraint was mandated, but airbags weren’t ubiquitous yet. The seat belt either was attached to the rear edge of the door and you had to kind of slide in under it as you got in, or it was motorized in a track around the door frame and prone…

Carplay. It’s terrible. It locks you out of so many different features in the name of safety then doesn’t properly provide those features. I spent an entire 15 minute drive trying to get Siri to call someone. Eventually I had to disable Carplay at a stoplight when I was permitted to use the touchscreen again just to…

Sunroofs.

Old school answer:

Flappy-paddle gear boxes.

The accelerator pedal on the Toyota 86.