Cruise control location in the FF

A thousand mile trip in our '14 FF convinced me that the cruise-control (aka "pit speed") knob is in an awkward location. I repeatedly had to take my left hand off the steering wheel to adjust speed. It seems to me that the old fashioned stalk or even a control on the steering wheel would be a far better placement than at the left end of the dash. This was my one complaint after a 1000 miles; otherwise the car is a ball to take on a long trip.

If I were king, I would get rid of the headlight flasher on the steering wheel and install a cruise-control control.

 

When you are crowned, would you please also have the Start button removed from the steering wheel? I use a lot of other functions that require me to remove my hands from the steering wheel in a given trip many more times than I start the car.

 

And to your real issue: yeah, it could be better placed, but I find it not as big an issue as I had thought I would when I first got the car. After a short while I found that as its a simple dumb cruise, not adaptive, its less useful than I would like anyway and just don't use it as much as I would like. I find the absence of adaptive cruise a far bigger fail. Used and loved that feature in our 2000 BMW 7 series, and sorely miss it.

 

All of the buttons on the steering wheel are actually very cool ... and actually a pain in the butt to keep straight! After 34,000+ FF miles I still hit the headlight flash when I want a turn signal or something else ... or hit the turn signal when I want to blind a butthead coming the other way with his brights on. And the turn signals, I would have made a momentary push into the three blink lane change with a long hold as a continuous turn. And the headlight flash seems to be backward compared to the windshield washer/wipers.

A very cool idea for my ego as the uninitiated love the buttons ... and I never tell them what a pain they really are

Rick

 

Yes, there are a lot of oddities to get used to when you want to activate some control or other. But if your philosophical approach is to keep the driver's hands on the steering wheel, Eric has it nailed when he points out that the start button doesn't need to be there. You start the car once. Period. Better use of that space would be for the cruise. Put the start on the dash. As for the headlight flasher a behind the wheel push button would have been just fine.

And by the way while I'm at it, another personal beef is that the sound system volume control buttons behind the wheel are on the opposite side of the wheel as my Abarth. One might have hoped that within Fiat there would have been standardization, but it was not to be.

 

We can only hope the same for Porsche now that it is part of VW.

 

I have wondered what that pit speed would be like. Seems very inconvenient. Unfortunately, that is now standard on all the F cars now...

 

I bought a Fiat 500L for my daughter, and correct the rear buttons are backward. That I have mastered somehow.

Rick