What’s The Most Confusing Button Ever Installed On A Car?

Weird Buttons
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Who doesn’t love a good gadget? From clever tools for DIY projects around the home to electronic functions on the latest tech, the wow factor of gizmos holds undeniable appeal. However, some of these gadgets can be unnecessarily difficult to decipher for the uninitiated, particularly in cars. From electric roller blinds to heated cup holders, automotive creature comforts can be tricky to use, especially outside of our semi-secretive hive of handbook readers and button enthusiasts.

David’s submission for a confusing button is Porsche’s valved exhaust button, which looks like a pair of binoculars (see above). This is especially weird because Porsche’s loud mode button is labelled better than most, with the bumper cut for the exhaust tips appearing on the icon. Then again, it’s easy to see how less technically-minded people or those not used to modern performance cars would have difficulty finding what the icon references.

4runner Party Mode

Another solid contender is the Party Mode button on Rob’s Toyota 4Runner. I thought party time was all the time in a modern 4Runner? Anyway, this button whacks up the bass on the stereo equalizer and shifts balance to the back for tailgates and festivals. From the front seat, it just makes the stereo sound a bit crap, which doesn’t seem like much of a party.

The REST button on a 2006 BMW 325i

Oh, and who could forget the button marked “REST” found in many German cars? Does it make the car tired all of a sudden? Not quite. Instead, it circulates warm coolant through the heater core when the car’s off so you can pop into the shops in the winter and come back to a warm cabin. Now that’s a thoughtful touch.

The automotive kingdom is filled with confusingly-labeled controls, so we want to hear from you. Is there a button, switch, or knob you’ve found absolutely perplexing? Let us know in the comments below.

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161 thoughts on “What’s The Most Confusing Button Ever Installed On A Car?”

  2. The US-designed and -built VW Atlas also comes with a REST button

    My submission is the Honda CR-Z’s “km/h – mph” button. All it does is switch the car’s units between Imperial and metric, but how often do you really need to do that? Sure, lots of cars let you change units, but usually from some settings menu, or tucked away switch, not a prominent button right in your field of vision by the steering wheel, the mirror adjustment, and the traction control button.

    There are exactly 3 places in the world I’d expect this to be useful: the Mexican and Canadian borders of the US and for UK drivers going to continental Europe. More confusingly, from what I can tell, RHD UK CR-Zs have a headlight adjustment angle switch in the same place and the “km-mi” switch is placed a bit lower.

    I’ve just never understood why it needed to be a button, why it is so prominent, and why you couldn’t just do it from instrument cluster settings?

    1. I have lived in both Niagara Falls NY and Niagara Falls On. I regularly cross the border. I can do the conversion in my head (ie 40 mph is about 60 kph) but I am one of the few people who would find a metric/imperial button useful. A buddy of mine had a Pontiac Bonneville with that feature.

      1. I feel similarly–never been out of the country, but our neighbors using the superior system are right there. It’s just one button and its use is clearly obvious, so its worst fate is that it remains unused. But the potential is definitely there.

        1. I don’t know if metric is all that superior. Especially for temperature. With Farenheit, 0 °F is really cold and 100 °F is really hot. The two extremes we are used to dealing with. In Celsius, those would be -18 °C and 37 °C. It just isn’t as intuitive for everyday life.

          1. Temperature is basically the only measure where I might side with Imperial units, but even then…every Celsius user I’ve tried having that discussion with disagrees. And I mean, I’m sure they got used to theirs just as much as we get used to ours.

          2. In centigrade 0 is icy, 100 is literally boiling, and 20 is t-shirt weather.

            Fahrenheit uses the freezing point of a particular antifreeze (that’s got to have been a joke, right?) and almost but not really the temperature of a human as it’s 0 and 100 points. It’s fundamental units are garbage.

            As for inches, and especially the use of 1/16s as a smaller unit? Urgh. If it was 16” to a foot I’d just assume it was a joke in hexadecimal, but no, you switch to base 12 for bigger than inches.

            1. I really wish humanity had used base 12 as a numbering system. I assume we went base 10 because that is the typical number of fingers. In base 12, you can divide by 2,3,4,and 6 very easily. I believe the sumerians used base 60 which is amazing.

      2. And lots of cars let you switch units, but like I said, it’s not something placed prominently, it’s usually in a settings menu somewhere. I’m just flummoxed why the CRZ puts it on par with the climate control or mirror adjustment in importance./frequency of access

  3. I like to add labels to the blank dash buttons in my (usually) base model cars. It’s an easy way to add extra features like “Phasers” or “Oil Slick.”

  7. I recall my dad’s 76 Celica as a kid having a weird button next to the cigarette lighter. It had a picture of a tall rectangle with an angled line across the middle.

    My dad being someone who sometimes used slang in a derogatory way, which was indicative of the time as much as anything I suppose, called it a polack switch.

    Anyway it was supposed to show the side view of the choke butterfly and was in fact a choke button….up until then I had only ever seen or heard of choke levers, never a button.

  10. If you’ve never seen it before, and don’t take the time to read the manual, the “center temperature” vent dial on BMW’s is endlessly confusing to people.

    I can be used to adjust the temp of the air from the center vents only, independent of the settings of the auto climate control. And it did necessarily operate the same in all applications

    https://f30.bimmerpost.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1498351

    https://www.bimmerfest.com/threads/what-is-that-vent-dial-for.382494/

  13. My vote is for the array of unmarked chrome knobs, sliders, and levers in 1950s-era American winga-dinga cars. You’re just supposed to know what they do.

    1. most had bezels with the words for what they do, though I have had plenty where the bezels were no longer readable or if printed on the knob faces they were worn off.

  16. My two newer cars have a button with “off” under the anarchy symbol that I have to push every time I drive to prevent the anarchy of the engines being put through the stop/start cycle every time I slow to make a right turn at an intersection.

    Apparently there are wiring harnesses to disable this anarchy for good, but I have not gotten around to it yet.

    1. If one of your cars is a Volvo, and you figure out how to permanently disable it, please, Please, PLEASE let me know!

      At least my Mini defaults to the last setting, so turn it off and it stays off. But the Volvo? NooOOOoo. Those gefilte fish eating bastards make you press the button every. Damn. Time.

      1. I have a Kia Soul and I have to turn it off every time as well. Given the fact that the engine takes a moment for reflection before deciding to TURN ON and do its job, it’s actually dangerous in some situations to have it that feature on.

      2. Interesting re the Mini. The reason auto start/stop defaults to on when most cars are started is that the EPA generally uses the default start modes (for both auto start/stop and things like eco/normal/performance driving modes) for measuring fuel economy. Apparently Mini is just offering start/stop as a feature customers can use, and not using it to game fuel economy numbers?

        1. Well Mini is one company that shouldn’t have to game the system to meet CAFE standards. However, I bought it used, and it is possible that a previous owner reprogrammed it to keep the last setting rather than default to on. There are multiple BMW iDrive programmers that could potentially do something like that.

  18. For BMW drivers, apparently it’s the stalk thing on the steering wheel column.

    I had an X3 cut me off just today with no warning or indication he was turning.

    3. I saw the most remarkable thing last month. I was behind a shabby, mid 2000s 5 Series, fake badged as an M car. What blew my mind is that the driver used hand signals, since the blinkers must not have been working. I must have found the only BMW driver in the world who signals their turns and they weren’t even using the ones that came on the car.

  20. My 2CV had an unmarked black button that turned out to be the manual pump for the windscreen washers. Push it slowly and nothing happens, push it fast and water jets over the top of the screen.

    I also spent ages trying to find the interior fan button. There is no button. It’s air cooled and ducts air from the engine cooling fan in to the cabin via cardboard tubes over the exhaust system. They catch fire quite often, also to demist in winter your only option is to drive as hard and fast as you can.

    1. OG Fiat Panda is exactly the same. A big rubber button that acts as a pump to squirt water on the windscreen. In traffic I used to see how hard I could thump it and see how many cars behind me I could get wet.

  21. The two or three buttons on the inside rearview mirror labeled • and ••

    Apparently those are to operate some kind of industry standard wireless garage door opener and home automation equipment?

    3. Yep. Home Link. If you have a garage opener and/or gate opener, this is a great system if you can get it work. In the 2 cars I’ve had with it, there are three buttons, *, **, and ***, for programming three different remotes.

      1. Yeah, “if you can get it to work” is the operative phrase there. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get my in-laws’ Highlander to synch with one of my garage doors without somehow losing all the pairings on either their car or my door.

        1. I had an Infiniti G35 with home link, and was able to get it to sync with my garage without too much difficulty. But I have not been able to get my Mini to sync with the same opener. But both sync’ed with our neighborhood gate with little effort. Key difference being rolling code vs non-rolling code remotes. The rolling code really complicates the sync’ing.

  22. I’ve never driven a Porsche and I honestly thought the three buttons pictured were just illustrations by Torch trying to come up with the most ridiculous, indecipherable crap he could imagine. Activate fishing sonar! Eject binoculars! Toaster!

  24. I had a base model, first gen Kia Sorento. Virtually no options.

    But there was this button on the dash that I couldn’t figure out until I consulted the manual. It depicted the windshield with the wiper, but also had a squiggle that ran across it. Until I looked it up, it appeared to be how to operate the wipers if the car is submerged up to halfway up the windshield.

    It’s a heater for the wipers. So if there’s an ice buildup at the base of your windshield, it will melt it and free them. On the poverty spec model.

    My neighbor, who had a MUCH nicer H-D Edition Supercharged F150 SuperCrew was quite annoyed that my stripper model Kia had a feature he wished his Mack daddy truck had.

    1. I was in Iceland recently and my rental car was a base model Kia sTonic (stonic? s-tonic?). it was the absolutely stripped bare trim with the sparsest center console I’d ever seen. And yet (AND YET!), it had heated seats! I was amazed. And very grateful.

  25. I find the exhaust buttons confusing. It’s not intuitive to me from looking at the button whether they will make the exhaust quieter or louder. In other words, is “quiet mode” or “loud mode” the default? Trial and error required.

    1. Exhaust valves default to quiet on start-up, so your first press of the button makes it loud. However some cars have a drive mode that includes the exhaust switching to loud, in which case the button toggles to quiet on the first press, if you change drive mode first.

      Early vacuum operated valves will always be loud on start up as despite being in quiet mode they don’t have the vacuum required to close them right away. People like the noisy blip on start up so later systems have this built in. Some let you disable this so you won’t annoy neighbours some of the time. Sometimes it’s all the same button.

      Regardless of the exhaust mode the valve will open anyway at high revs/load because these aren’t valves for making the exhaust louder, oh no, these are valves that protect the engine from damage from high back pressure. That’s the legal justification for them. In Europe they just changed the regs so that the exhaust system has to pass a drive by noise test in all available modes, so switching exhausts over here (and I assume for some European makes over in the US) now switch from quiet to slightly less quiet.

      Both vacuum and electric valves default to open when you turn the car off as a fail-safe, as being closed will cause engine damage (because legally that’s what they are there to prevent), so a broken valve will be loud, unless it’s really, really broken, in which case get ready for a catalyst, exhaust valve (the little ones in your cylinder head, not the big one in your tailpipe) or other catastrophic engine failure if you use high revs or high load. You may, or may not, get a warning light first depending on the type of valve and failure mode.

      Given the choice I’ll go for a passive exhaust every time.

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