Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Our Holiday Wish List: Five Things from the Auto Industry

Were the car-manufacturing industry based out of the North Pole, instead of Detroit, Southern Germany and Toyota City, my list to Santa and his elves would go something like this:

1) Quit nickel and diming me with this options bullshit. Let’s say I want to buy a Mazda3. Ok, I’m looking at a base price of about $19,000. Nineteen. Thousand. Dollars.

And if I want, say, a cargo net in the back, to keep things from rolling around? That’ll be $40. Give me a break. That’s 0.2% of the base price of the car–just add in the f’in cargo net, would ya? Whatever the tiny incremental profit Mazda and the dealer just earned, it also cost them in my walking away feeling like they’re a bunch of mincing tightwads.

2) Make safety features standard. Every car company likes to say that it values safety above all things (well, maybe not Ferrari and Lamborghini and a few other sports-car specialists, but that’s another matter). They run ads showing happy children, dutiful crash-test engineers and mangled-yet-intact passenger compartments.

So if safety is The Most Important Thing, why are some of the more important features only available as options? Oh, you want electronic stability control (”electronic stability control could prevent nearly one-third of all fatal crashes and reduce rollover risk by as much as 80%,” says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) in your Nissan Quest minivan? Well, forget about getting it on the $25,000 base model–the only way you can get this rather vital feature is by splurging on the top-of-the-line 3.5 SE Quest, which starts at $34,000 (and includes additional life-saving features such as a six-CD changer and a moonroof). Apparently, the rich actually are different from you and me: They survive more car crashes, among other things.

Oh, and if you’re checking out a Honda Fit or Ford Focus, don’t even bother trying to upgrade–those models don’t even have ESC. Sure, the government is mandating that all cars sold in the US have this feature by 2012, but why are car makers waiting? Don’t they want to get out in front of this and beat the deadline?

3) Enough with the awards, already. First, there was JD Power. Then there was RL Polk, AutoPacific, Strategic Vision… the list grows longer by the week. By now, there are (I think) more awards than there are cars, and almost all of them do absolutely nothing to inform or educate the consumer–it’s just a whole heaping mess of self-congratulatory hokum. It’s like the entire auto industry went to some non-competitive summer camp (not that there’s anything wrong with that–I had a hell of a time at Camp Med-O-Lark), and they all got certificates for “participation.” Please.

4) Just make the iPod connection standard, ok? The iPod has, like, 122% market share or something (sorry, all you Zune owners; all two of you). It stores more music than any CD-changer. (And as for those fancy new car models that tout built-in hard drives, don’t even try it: Capacities for those top out at something like 8GB. Which is what the iPod stored. In 2002.)

So just do it, auto industry: Install the charging and connection cable into all your cars so we can all listen to what we want without dumbass adapters and, more importantly, stop fiddling with our iPods while cruising at 70mph.

5) Hire somebody else to design the dashboards. The various controls are getting out of hand. Either there are way too many things going on (hello, new Honda Accord) or, in an attempt to simplify things, car makers experiment with infuriating multi-system controllers (that means you, BMW).

Which automaker is going to have the cajones to realize:

a) They’re lousy at this

b) It’s time someone dropped a big pile of cash in front of Steve Jobs and said “So what should we do, Steve?”

Jobs may not go for it, but what if he did? Based on past performance, it would appear that the key to simplifying the way a car works isn’t located in Munich or Tokyo, but in Cupertino, California.

Happy holidays. Don’t forget to check your mirrors.

— Sam Grobart