June 8, 2025
I rented a car this weekend and I tried the Dodge Hornet. This car is ass, it’s bad in ways I didn’t know a car could be bad.
Granted, this was a rental car, so maybe it’s seen more abuse than a family car, but the interior was falling apart. The vent controls had been snapped off, the brackets in the hatchback that lift the trunk cover were broken, the trim on the rear window was falling off and would loudly flap in the wind at highway speeds.
The car felt like it was made entirely of chintzy plastic that would fall apart the minute it drove off the dealer’s lot.
The software in this car is BAD, which is especially frustrating because it’s all digital displays, so they could have fixed all these problems long after the physical design was done. The displays all feel like they were designed in an office with no affordances for how the car would actually be used.
Some examples…
The car beeps when you exceed the speed limit. As anyone that has driven a car before knows, this means the car is constantly beeping at you. Even more aggravating, if you are in heavy traffic the car will just beep once a minute as you move with traffic. It’s annoying and doesn’t solve any problems.
This car is a plug-in hybrid, which means you can fill it with gas or charge it. The charging port is on the driver’s side, the gas is on the passenger side. There are dual gauges to monitor charge and gas and the charge dial is on the passenger side and the gas gauge is on the driver’s side. It’s the exact opposite of where they are on the car. This is confusing and unnecessary.
The car has bluetooth CarPlay, which actually works great! The screen is high resolution and the Apple interface looks better than any other car I’ve ever driven. THAT SAID, the CarPlay UI is far too small. The application icons are about the size of the tip of my pinky, which means switching between maps and music requires you to concentrate and carefully jab the screen in exactly the right spot. I can’t imagine what a nightmare this would be for someone with fine motor control issues or the elderly. UI like this in a car should be illegal. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.
Like I said, this is car is hybrid. It’s also a “sports car” so it comes with a tachometer. The interface is all digital, so the designers had some fun with fluid animations, glowing effects on the dial, some “carbon fiber” backgrounds. I bet it looks fantastic on the designer’s laptop. In practice, an animated tach on a hybrid is dumb as hell. During regular driving, the engine is regularly shutting off while coasting or braking. Which means that cool-ass animated tachometer is constantly dropping to 0, then shooting back up to 3k with a little burst of animation and color. Having your instrument panel go nuts every few seconds is distracting. Every time I looked down at the gauges, they looked fine. I knew something important had happened because I saw the flash of color out of the corner of my eyes, but it took a few hours of driving before I caught the tach in the act of turning-off-turning-on and realized what was going on. This was dumb as hell.
At the very start of my drive I was all ready to rant about how there is no physical volume control nob for the stereo. Turns out there is a nob! It’s inexplicably located in the upper-right-hand corner of the gear selector panel between the front seats. Which, conveniently for me and where I set my seat hight, is exactly blocked from my vision by the gear selector. At some point I got tired of reaching around the gear selector to twiddle a dial I couldn’t see, so I started adjusting the volume from the steering wheel, which brings me to my second gripe…
The buttons on the steering wheel are inset. This means you can’t slide your finger over the buttons to feel for their edges, you’ve got to lift your thumb up and jab inward to hit the buttons. I only drove this car for 6 hours, but at no point was I comfortable just tapping the buttons without looking, I had to look nearly every time. This is aggravating and dangerous.
Speaking of the steering wheel controls, there is a small rotary nob on the right side. This nob is used to change the instrument cluster display, so if you want to display your speed in a large font or engine performance or whatever, that’s how you change it. However, in order to change the instrument cluster you’ve got to enter the instrument cluster mode, which is indicated by tiny 12-pt font at the bottom of the main screen. If you don’t correctly enter this mode that same rotary knob controls next and previous tracks for your music. Also, it’s a rotary nob, so if you give it a spin, you just skipped the next 5 tracks. Nobody has ever wanted to do this. 99% of the time I only want to skip a single track, which means every time I use that dial I’ve got to carefully roll it over once to make sure I don’t skip too many tracks.
Finally, the turn-signals are ass. Doug DeMuro rants about them a bit here. All other turn signals I’ve used can either be lightly held down for changing lanes, or locked all the way down for making a full turn. These stalks don’t lock down. The car tries to figure out if you’re just changing lanes or making a turn and will act appropriately. However, the car is not good at this. I frequently had my turn signals stay on after completing a turn. You have to manually turn them off by moving the stalk in the opposite direction, which may turn the signal off or may turn your other signal on. It’s infuriating and unnecessary.
Sometimes the parking brake would turn on automatically when parking, but then stay on when you tried to drive. You can tell this is happening because the rear tires squeal as they skid down your driveway.
The side-view mirrors fold in when you use the key to lock the car, but they don’t unfold when you use the RFID key proximity sensor to open the doors. They don’t always unfold when you start the car. At one point I started the car then got out of the car and that caused the mirrors to unfold.
I never did get the battery to charge. I even got out the owners manual to see what setting I was supposed to change. Everything was set correctly as far as I could tell, but no battery charging. I haven’t yet filled up with gas, but the car also seemed to use more gas than I was expecting, probably because a hybrid without a battery is mostly just a shitty gas car.
« I am now tracking you | Home | Selecting the most recent non-blank value in Numbers »