Changes in design.
I was sitting in line at a petrol pump a couple of years ago. The guy in front of me, in a large 4x4, began to reverse for some unmfathomable reason, and as he got closer, my concern turned to panic and I went for the horn. Except that I didn't. My immediate reaction would have sounded the horn on an earlier car, but not on the one I was actually driving. Only luck saved me from damage because the guy in front of the 4x4 moved off.
If the windscreen was dirty with pollen (as it is with yellow pine dust this season), I used to be able to sqirt, give the wipers a single or two wipes as I chose, and the screen was clean enough to be safe. Now, with the Fiesta, that appears an impossible task. If you squirt, the wiper comes on automatically and gives too many wipes, thus going beyond the helpful area and into the state where all you achieve is the spreading of smears, blinding vision more than it was when you started. Bloody clever.
The traffic indicator. I have more or less given up on its automatic cancellation. I went back to the Ford dealer, and he told me that his own Focus is exactly the same, and there's zilch that can be done about it... As for visually knowing you have failed to cancel the indicators, that's also very unlikely on the Fiesta because the two green arrows are placed at the outer edges of the dash, and perfectly screened by your hands in the straight ahead position. Had the lights been kept in the centre of the dash, you would see them at once and notice them flashing... Have the music on and you'll hear nothing from the little clickers.
The evening I collected the new car I drove home without being able to work out how to go from main beam to dipped. I've driven Fords here for over thirty years... The simple switching from Trip to Total mileage is also another pain in the ass to figure out. These things should remain the same. It should not be about looking clever and pretty, it should be about reliable, unchanged and instinctively accessible in an emergency. Sure, make the bodywork as different as you please, but why throw away what we had decades ago: the ability to see all four corners of the car from the driving seat. Now, we have to park by sound, the sound of breaking glass. Or pay hundreds more for a friggin' device to make up for that particular rotten design fault.
Rob C