Vehicle manuals - just poor??

[Horrgakx]

Does anyone else find their instruction manual very very lacking indeed? I find it quite hard going and it says a lot without actually explaining much.

 

[whitenemesis]

Does a fair job of explaining a very complex bit of kit. What needs improvement is indexing and searchability. Sometimes rather unintuitive.

 

[Stratman]

I suspect a lot of the waffle is to keep m'learned friends off their backs

"But the manual didn't SAY I couldn't have a nap while using cruise control"

 

[Dryce]

Our R170 and W211 manuals were excellent.

Our BMW Z4 and 640d GC manuals were appalling. Worst vehicle manuals I've personally experienced.

My Touareg manual is good - not too far short of the R170 and W211 ones.

 

[kid-jensen]

I've been in manufacturing industry all my working life, and it's obviousl to an insider why they are so often useless..

They are traditionally written by the least experienced Engineer (or new grad), with the smallest budget, and impossibly tight of timescales.

No surprise really.

 

[AMGeed]

This is the one to get

 

[whitenemesis]

They are written by those who know the systems well, so often miss explaining the most obvious points.

I always passed a draft procedure to someone who had never done the job before. Guaranteed to highlight the omissions...

 

[190]

The information you need is provided but I find the manual tedious for the reason already mentioned. Far to much bias towards anti-litigation nonsense which no one reads and not enough focus on the facts. It's what society calls progress because my old 190e manual is not like that.

I suppose we should be thankfull that it's only in one language.

My prize for the very worst set of instructions comes from the manufacturer of a very expensive market leading car baby seat where to provide one set of instructions to cover 99 different languages there are almost no words and only diagrams. For a safety related item where getting it right could be a matter of life and death it was a disgrace.

 

[gIzzE]

We need more Ladybird books for cars, they tell it how it is....

 

[Deleted member 113659]

Does anyone else find their instruction manual very very lacking indeed? I find it quite hard going and it says a lot without actually explaining much.

Have you tried the C Class app manual? Seems very detailed. However, I've not got an actual manual to compare it against. Just wondered if the app is any better.

Ant.

 

[AMGeed]

We need more Ladybird books for cars, they tell it how it is....

I saw this earlier but didn't dare post it

 

[Tim203]

^ Brilliant, been laughing all day today at it, cheers

 

[Horrgakx]

As an example of what I was meaning, the recent thread I started on the "Charge" bar (bottom right of the Navi panel). The best educated guess is that it's something to do with the start stop system. But that might not be accurate and it is still a guess. There is no more information in the manual about it.