Mario Trono, a film studies instructor at Mount Royal University, has to dig through an overflowing glove compartment to find the owner's manual of his 2020 Acura.Sarah B Groot /The Globe and Mail
Mario Trono never reads his vehicle’s owner’s manual.
“My manual rests at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that is my glove compartment, a zone bereft of gloves but choked with old crumpled-up insurance and registration cards, desiccated Wet-Naps packages, fast food napkins, hand sanitizer and an old broken phone cord,” said Trono, a film studies instructor at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
His first look at the manual for his 2020 Acura ILX sedan was enough to turn him off for good. Looking for instructions on how to control the car’s features, he gave up in frustration. “I didn’t know what certain functions were called, so I couldn’t look them up in the index.”
Trono said he doesn’t understand technical language, and the manual “is so far removed from reader-friendly, it’s like they’re trying to explain how to operate a deep-space rocket system.”
Mario Trono sits in his car in Calgary on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024. Trono, an instructor at Mount Royal University, has to dig through an overflowing glove compartment to find the owners manual of his 2020 Acura. (Photo by {Sarah B Groot/Globe and Mail) Sarah B Groot /The Globe and Mail
He is among the growing legions of vehicle owners who never even crack the cover on their owner’s manual when they buy a new car – until a problem occurs. One of them is Barb Martowski, a marketing professional in Cold Lake, Alta.
“Reading a tome about my new vehicle’s operational and safety information is not my idea of a gripping read,” she quipped.
Geoff Scotton, a senior communications advisor with the Alberta Utilities Commission in Calgary, says he is intimidated by the “massive” user’s manual for his Mazda CX-5 Turbo. “It must be three inches thick. Too intimidating. And opening it is like entering a black hole.”
”Less than 5 per cent [of people read them],” joked Matt Carpenter, an automotive technologist instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. He went on to explain the importance of reading them, but it is easy to see why many people don’t.
In 2020, Bristol Street Motors examined the owners’ manuals for the U.K.’s 30 most popular cars and surveyed drivers about their reading habits. It found 60 per cent of drivers said they didn’t read it and only 37 per cent would open it even if they had car trouble. The rest would turn to the internet first. It also found the average time it would take to read a manual was more than six hours. The longest was for an Audi A3, at almost 12 hours. To compare, one could read The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers faster.
It turns out that almost nobody cracks the spine of that thick book unless they are stuck by the side of the road. And for that reason, more and more automakers are shipping the venerable user’s manual off to the scrapyard.
“Increasingly, it’s going away,” said Robert Karwel, a senior manager in the automotive division of J.D. Power and Associates in Canada. “It’s going to be replaced by a digital document.”
Ford Motor Co. is one of the manufacturers that is well down the road on the transition to digital guides, tapping into the company’s infotainment technology to offer a digital owner’s manual and a cloud-based information source.
The digital guide is resident in the vehicle or can be accessed using a smartphone with a Ford app. The digital search function makes finding information easier, says Akbar Sheikh, connected services marketing manager at Ford Motor Co. of Canada. “Instead of flipping through dozens of pages, users can navigate from a table of contents, search by keyword and create bookmarks,” he said. Video enhances the experience, and the guides are custom-tailored to each vehicle model and offered in multiple languages.
Karwell says this is happening because drivers simply aren’t interested in learning all the ins and outs of their new vehicles.
“They just want to drive the car,” Karwell said. And tech-savvy drivers are more likely to look online than paw through a printed tome: “You don’t have to cut down a tree.”
Digital manuals, enhanced with video, tend to be easier to understand than jargon-laden print editions illustrated with static photos and complicated line drawings. “If I want to look up ‘turn light,’ it’s ‘signal light’ in the [table of contents],” said Doug Lacombe, owner of a digital marketing agency in Bainsville, Ont. “Or worse, ‘directional safety indicator.’ It’s far easier to Google things.”
Mercedes-Benz began the transition to digital vehicle guides in 2018, when it introduced Ask Mercedes, an augmented reality (AR) system in its E-class and S-class premium cars. Drivers who install the app on their smartphones can use the phone’s camera to scan the vehicle’s interior, identify specific parts, and then get information on specific components, in either how-to videos or through a digital owner’s manual.
Mercedes still provides a printed manual, a company spokesperson said.
The decline of printed manuals combined with an explosion of high-tech features is driving dealers to focus on giving new owners detailed orientation sessions. Karwel said this is an opportunity for dealers to build customer loyalty by giving them an enhanced ownership experience.
“They should be spending much more time with the consumer so that they [the buyers] appreciate the value of the car’s features,” Karwel said. “This is a value issue for customers.”
It could also build brand loyalty because, once drivers become accustomed to the features of one brand, they may want to stick with it on future purchases, he said.
Binny Onqa, general manager of Boundary Mercedes-Benz in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, B.C., said the dealership devotes a lot of time to orienting new owners to a vehicle, starting with making sure they know how to access the digital manual. Previous owners of Mercedes who are familiar with the vehicle might get a 35- to 45-minute refresher, but new buyers get a much, much longer lesson.
“We have a couple of salespeople who will take four or five hours, if that’s what [the buyer] wants,” Onqa said.
The shift to a digital manual also makes life easier for dealers, Onqa said. Owners can quickly search for answers to simple problems, like how to release the fuel door manually or even how to change wiper blades. And, because the information is on the vehicle’s infotainment system, it can be accessed in remote areas where there is no data signal.
“It’s better than the old way,” Onqa said.
Roadside problem-solving will also soon get a technological boost. With fully connected cars, carmakers will be able to diagnose a problem remotely and offer advice on what drivers need to do to fix them, Onqa said.
Other automakers are in various stages of digitizing manuals, either as a replacement or enhancement to the printed product. Volvo, for example, has gone entirely digital with content on-screen, online or through an app. It also offers company-approved how-to videos on YouTube. Subaru has digital manuals for all its new vehicles and Volkswagen is working on an “interactive solution,” although it still supplies its vehicles with printed manuals, a company spokesman said.
Karwel said the need for detailed orientation sessions points to what he considers the excessive number of tech features in new cars. “There’s a lot of technology for technology’s sake,” said Karwel.
Esoteric features, such as the ability to change colours on the instrument panel or ambient lighting, are attractive to tech-savvy drivers, but most drivers can’t be bothered to learn how to use them.
“The pendulum has swung a bit too far,” Karwel said. “When it gets too complicated, it negatively affects the quality scores [provided by drivers] and how the users like their vehicles.”