Oh my god I could rant about a lot of this for hours, including what some of the comments discuss.
For now I'll just add my 2 cents to the main article topics.
Automatic Climate Control
In general I find that it works well and I don't know that I ever have felt the need to run it in manual. Not all cars offer the same manual controls. My SRX offers probably some of the best controls in that you can adjust as much or as little as you want. Other systems offer these adjustments but none seem to do it as intuitively as the SRX. In the SRX you have two main knobs. Fan speed and air direction. Temp is up and down via driver and passenger buttons. So you set your temp. Then, with the fan knob, you can set it to ANY fan speed manually. Or turn it all the way counterclockwise to "auto" and it'll do auto fan speed. All that typically does is use more fan speed when the current temp is further from the set temp and bring fan speed down as it gets closer. Which is exactly what you'd do manually except it does it without touching anything. Then on the right you have air direction. You can set any air outlet location, like any car, but turn it fully counterclockwise for full auto. What is cool is you can run everything in auto, just the fan in auto or just the air direction in auto. On the left, you press the button on the knob to turn on, or off, the A/C. In full auto it will default to A/C but I always disable it unless I need actual cooling, for fuel economy.
Particularly if the car has a strong A/C and heat performance (looking at GM classically, though today many cars do well here), auto climate works best. If you have the kind of heat or A/C that you always need to crank at max, then the auto isn't going to add much value.
I'll say one pet peeve before moving on:
You've got people like my mother, with climate control that can be set to a specific temperature, yet always set it to either 60 or 80, because it "works faster"
I don't need to get into why that is infuriating but it is. For what it's worth, automotive climate control is actually a lot more sophisticated than residential HVAC. It automatically adjusts the following: fan speed (house is on or off, or MAYBE 2 stage), where the air comes out in terms of the floor and defroster on heat and vents on cool (house is the same all the time), blend door setting (a house system is either on or off - in a car it will always have air moving but adjust how hot or cool the air is depending on demand).It is infuriating to keep telling my parents that setting the temp to 80 won't get it to 72 any faster than setting it to 72.
4 of my 6 cars have it. And it works well in all of them. Except the Roadmaster has poor heat...
Is it necessary? No. Power windows and automatic transmissions aren't necessary, either. 400 hp isn't necessary. Let's not go down that road.
Rain-sensing wipers
My first real exposure to this was my STS so it's pretty new to me. And it works great in the STS because of two key decisions they made:
- The system is always on when intermittent is selected. No modes to worry about.
- It is ONLY for intermittent in that it does not try to run from no wipers up to high speed. Limiting the range of performance makes for a better user experience, because it is easier to optimize the performance when the scope is narrower.
The comments then get into fog lamps. Some folks are annoyed that people use them all the time. I don't get that. More light on the road (yes it is more in front of the car so you can't see further down the road). People can see you better. I use them every time it is dark. My Cadillacs have auto headlights but the fogs must always be manual.