I rolled in our soon to be departed long-term 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour the other night and was reminded of something. When I worked at Big Motor Car Corp, we worked a lot on JD Power Initial Quality Survey (IQS). A lot.
Of course you know IQS surveys tens of thousands of new-vehicle owners to provide feedback on quality during the first 90 days of new-vehicle ownership. For complaints where our customers had difficulty with operation of any type, we used the term DTU, for difficult to use.
Well I doubt that Honda R&D Americas has had to deal with too many DTU complaints with the Accord Crosstour. That's because everything is easy to use -- the navi, the radio, the HVAC, the center stack switches (even if there are a billion of them), the cruse control, setting the trip odo. Everything.
Everything, except the horrible interactive voice response Bluetooth phone pairing (I hate this in all vehicles so equipped.)
Next time, Honda should put it in the navi screen with a visual-manual interface -- like Nissan.
Albert Austria, Senior VE Engineer @ ~19,600 miles
1487 says:
05:45 AM, 02/18/11
why do you have to talk to pair your phone in the car? Are you supposed to say the pairing code aloud or something? Do you have to do that every time you get in the car?
hoosiergrandad says:
06:37 AM, 02/18/11
@1487
Once the pnone is paired , it stays paired. Paired a second phone last night in about a miute..think I said 2 words. Not sure, though....I was just following directions.Downloading phonebooks is quick and easy. Don't know whether it's possible to pair without saying anything. Maybe someone else can tell you.
rudycantfail says:
08:15 AM, 02/19/11
Paired mine in about a minute the day I gotthe car. Without Nav the only interface is the voice prompts. So you say something like "pair phone" and respond to the voice prompts. Easy enough.