Cigarette lighters are the most eliminated equipment in cars. Nowadays, almost no one uses them for smoking. They are mostly used to connect driving recorders and mobile phone chargers. It is recommen

Cigarette lighters are the most eliminated equipment in cars. Nowadays, almost no one uses them for smoking. They are mostly used to connect driving recorders and mobile phone chargers. It is recommended to use USB or Type-C interfaces for convenience and space saving.

I guess many people thought at first that cigarette lighters are very convenient. In fact, that’s right. It was originally designed to light cigarettes. Don't tell me, the proportion of people lighting cigarettes in cars was quite high in the early years. After all, many people smoked in commercial vehicles and private cars at that time, so cigarette lighters became a must. I still remember the time when I was discussing business with a client and the driver lit a cigarette with a lighter while sleeping in the car. I felt quite nostalgic.

Cigarette lighters are the most eliminated equipment in cars. Nowadays, almost no one uses them for smoking. They are mostly used to connect driving recorders and mobile phone chargers. It is recommended to use USB or Type-C interfaces for convenience and space saving.

I guess many people thought at first that cigarette lighters are very convenient. In fact, that’s right. It was originally designed to light cigarettes. Don't tell me, the proportion of people lighting cigarettes in cars was quite high in the early years. After all, many people smoked in commercial vehicles and private cars at that time, so cigarette lighters became a must. I still remember the time when I was discussing business with a client and the driver lit a cigarette with a lighter while sleeping in the car. I felt quite nostalgic.

However, if you think about it carefully, the current automotive environment has completely changed. You said, someone is still smoking in the car? It's probably become something that happens occasionally. What do most car owners do with cigarette lighters? It's not used for smoking, it's used to power the driving recorder and charge the mobile phone. Especially mobile phones, which have basically become the second brain in the car.

I saw a statistic, it seems that most mid-priced cars (such as A0 to B-class cars) are equipped with cigarette lighters that have become multi-purpose interfaces. Sometimes I think, this combination is actually quite natural: why not turn the cigarette lighter into a USB or Type-C interface? This can also save space, be more intuitive, and supplement charging needs. Who would really use the cigarette lighter hole? I just looked through my notes and estimated that a charging cable would occupy half the space of a cigarette lighter, and it could also avoid the trouble of having to pull an adapter outside the cigarette lighter.

In fact, in other words, there are people who say that a cigarette lighter is reasonable - what else can it do? . I think now, unless you are a user with a particularly strange collection, or you like the smell of cigarettes in the car (can't say it's strange, right?) - but in fact, no one would really leave a hole for the cigarette lighter to smoke. That's too far.

This made me think about the ancient relics still retained in many cars. For example, out of a hundred people looking at the battery indicator light, ten will understand its function. Some models still have a manual air conditioning outlet adjustment wheel, which is an old-fashioned turntable design. You know, sometimes when you adjust the air conditioner in your car and find that the twist can’t be turned, do you think that this is a sign of technological degradation? For example, a friend said: The car I bought seems to use a machine to adjust the temperature. Isn't it too old-fashioned?

Compared with cars in the same price range, such as the entry-level car of the X brand, the basic version from a few years ago has basically no new technology, except for the fuel gauge and sunroof design, which are normal. As for mid-to-high-end models, those ancient furniture still remain. You will even find that the door lock buttons and window rockers in the previous generation model still use plastic dials. Maybe the manufacturer thinks: it’s quite easy to use anyway, so there’s no need to replace it. But in fact, when many young car owners look at it, they are thinking: Can this be replaced with a modern human-computer interaction design?

When I thought about it again, I suddenly had a question: Will the new cars on the market be able to forcibly ban these ancient dead creatures in the future? Or, some designers feel that these old gadgets are inert anyway and are quite resilient after being used for a long time.

Is this a bit off topic? I really don’t want this article to turn into a throwback memoir. Just imagine a scene: Today, someone has to go through tedious operations to find that old knob. It would be faster to just use a mobile phone to turn on the air conditioner settings. Does this feeling mean that times are changing? Do you find those plastic buttons that have been used for many years annoying? I once got in and out of a new car, and I was confused for a while before I figured out where the air conditioning adjustment wheel was.

Cigarette lighters are at the top of my list of items to be eliminated. To be honest, except for collection value or extreme scenarios (such as outdoor camping for ignition), few people use it anymore. I think that future cars will increasingly emphasize intelligence and space utilization, and their designs must follow the trend, otherwise they will really become a museum of ancient relics. I'm thinking that if I buy a new car one day, I can just cancel these dead configurations to make the space and usage logic more reasonable.

By the way, besides the cigarette lighter, what other ancient things do you think are in the car? I have a guess: the rearview mirror adjustment buttons on many cars are also rigidly manufactured. If new cars don't support touch screens, there may be people who insist on using that small knob to adjust... (press this paragraph for now). If this is the case, it can be regarded as the inertia of human nature taking over.

Continuous innovation in design will inevitably encounter some resistance. No one likes to find something unreasonable after using it - such as the outdated airbag control button. Let me tell you something: I just looked through the photo album and found that the car I took that year seemed to have a mechanical manual defogger button. Do you feel like you are going to cry? But in fact, this kind of design, frankly speaking, is not too bad - just from the perspective of user experience, it is like typing on an old-fashioned typewriter, which is gradually replaced by new technologies and is the trend of the times.

The little ideas in the middle are twists and turns. Do you agree? I have always had a question in my mind: in the future, if all the ancient configurations are abandoned and all that is left is digital + intelligence, will the soul of the car still be there? This is really a question mark.

(Click this paragraph for now)

This drama of technological degradation or upgrading is probably due to changes in people's living habits. You still remember driving when you were a kid, and the things you were most afraid of forgetting when you went out were matches and lighters. What now? Once the phone is stuck there, the charger becomes a must. Perhaps, replacing the cigarette lighter with a large-capacity USB port in the future will be more in line with the trend of future cars.

Anyway, I personally feel that if we want to design a future car in the future, the first thing to abandon is those rigid rigidities. Do you think we should close all those outdated buttons and holes and completely replace them with screens or virtual interactions? This is a good question.

Besides the cigarette lighter, what other ancient relics do you think are in your car? In other words, will you still use the Bluetooth connection to adjust the air conditioner? Hey, don't tell me you're still using car CDs, I really don't believe it.

Anyway, this industry is changing really fast, and no one can predict what it will look like in the future. The only thing that is certain is that we will rely more and more on numbers, but those ancient configurations may not escape the fate of being wiped out. You say, right?

This work was originally created by the author, and the content was written manually. Some of the content was assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) tools during the creation process. AI is mainly used for data organization, language polishing, expression optimization and inspiration expansion. The core ideas and main content are independently created by the author.

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