First published on LinkedIn on 5 July 2025. Read the original LinkedIn article.
Why is the user journey for driving a car for the first time so reliably poor? For many people a car is their biggest purchase after a house, so there is a large opportunity to make the experience seamless, enjoyable and safe rather than leaving it to “guess and hope”. This looks like an opportunity for more agile and product-centred thinking.
Some context
I don’t buy new cars, but I hire cars several times a year for work, holidays and emergencies, and I get very new cars on loan when my 10-year-old car is in the garage. So I drive lots of different cars, often for a short time, and I go through this “onboarding as a new user” experience regularly.
I have also driven in several countries in Europe and North America, in left-hand and right-hand drive cars, manual and automatic, on everything from Scottish single-track roads to German autobahns with no speed limit. I have an interest in safe driving and have passed the RoSPA advanced driving test, and my licence has 10 permitted categories. There is a lot to take in across different driving environments, signage, sides of the road and rules without adding vehicle complexity to the load.
Where this is failing
- In 2013 I had to travel to Scotland urgently for a family emergency. I took a taxi to the airport, flew up, hired a car and it wouldn’t start. It was one of the first cars where you had to press the footbrake for the car to start, and there were no instructions. I had to ask for help, which added stress and delay I didn’t need.
- Before that, I was travelling to Scotland monthly. I hired a car and it stopped at a junction without warning. It was the first time I’d had a car with automatic stop-start, and it didn’t quite work, leaving me stranded at a junction with an oncoming car. I only just got the engine going again and out of the way. There was no warning or instruction about that either.
- A few years ago I drove my first car with lane assist. My RoSPA test, supervised by the police, taught me to indicate only when it is useful to other road users, and there were none around on a high-speed road. The lane assist tried to take over because I hadn’t indicated. Not knowing what was happening increased the risk of an accident. Nobody told me the feature was fitted or switched on, and if I don’t know about a feature, I don’t know to ask the garage about it.
- When I land and need to get somewhere, I’m tired of learning how to set up the satnav for the first time or pair my phone. I now bring my own satnav, preprogrammed with the destination, and use that instead. Android Auto is fine when it pairs, but sometimes it doesn’t.
- Most recently, with my car in the garage for some work, I was given my first all-electric car. Electric cars are often cheaper to hire, so I want to know how to use one well, but I don’t usually have time to learn when I’ve just landed and I’m on the way to a meeting. This was my chance, and it was a mess. There was no explanation of what sort of charger the car needed, so I had to search for that with a picture. There was no explanation of where the chargers were, so I searched for that too. There was no quick way to find charging times and costs for a top-up if I kept the car longer than expected, and I tried a few apps. I couldn’t ask the car easily, because that was only for account holders “for security”, and I didn’t want to register my details on the car when I could already see the name of every recent driver and where they had been. There was no quick start guide, and no compatible cable was supplied, which mattered because I have no charging at home. Half an hour and two apps later, I concluded that unless you can charge overnight, which I can’t, every other option meant leaving the car at a supermarket a 30-minute walk away for two to three hours, which is about as long as you can stay there. That would have written off the afternoon. I was glad I didn’t face that after a long flight on the way to a meeting.
The biggest purchase after a house, and not so much as a one-page quick start guide.
Why it matters commercially
As we came out of the Covid lockdowns, car hire prices shot up. Moneymaxim explains why:
“…car manufacturers used to court car hire firms - the vast numbers of vehicles needed by the industry made them ideal for manufacturer’s who wanted to have a steady number of cars coming off the production line straight into the fleets of an industry that wanted the latest models. It also provided free test drives, with some hirers deciding that they loved their rental car so much they would buy one as their next vehicle”
The key point is this: some hirers deciding that they loved their rental car so much they would buy one as their next vehicle.
The car hire experience matters, and it drives car sales. So car makers and hire companies should make it excellent, not poor, dangerous and full of surprises, needing a thick manual or a web search to get going safely or adjust the seat. Turning down the radio, changing the station and changing the instrument language shouldn’t add to the cognitive load of a new country and new driving rules. At the very least, a “car not ready to start” message should say why.
The complexity is also increasing significantly. Porsche puts it like this:
“The higher computing power and integration are necessary because the number of lines of code and the complexity of the functions in the vehicle is increasing year by year. One number may make this clear: 100 million. This is how many lines of code feature in today’s car. By comparison, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner only has 14 million.”
Who is looking after simplicity for the user?
What would be better?
- A one-page sheet left in every hire car: “important things you need to know about driving this vehicle”.
- A vendor-neutral settings app on my phone that I can send to the car: language, time and date formats, favourite destinations in a secure profile, favourite radio stations, and preferred seat position and distance to the steering wheel. In return the car would send back charging information, vehicle details and important first-time user information, and make it easy to update my parking apps with the registration number. What I don’t need is one app per hire company, per car, per model.
What else would help someone get going safely in a new car in under five minutes?
What AI could do
I asked ChatGPT for a quick-start guide to the car, a Mercedes-Benz EQA. Within a minute it produced a guide covering starting and stopping, the charging port and plug types, charging times, recommended charging apps, the key controls, tips for first-time electric drivers, finishing a trip and basic troubleshooting. It also explained regenerative braking and one-pedal driving, neither of which the garage had mentioned. That was far better than “guess and hope”. It was still generated text rather than the manufacturer’s guidance, so I checked the safety-critical points rather than relying on it.
If a general-purpose AI can do that much in a minute, how many car sales could hire companies and manufacturers generate by offering an excellent, safe first experience as standard? I’ve written more about checking AI answers before acting on them in Are We Outsourcing Our Thinking to AI?.
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