Car manuals are all the same and suck.

Car manual suck.  You usually only use them when you have a flat tire or when you have some beeping sound/blinking light you don't understand.  The car manual represents the failure of a car dashboard interface really. If the car was completely friendly, you would not have to make sense of how to use or comprehend it.  Other than the car aficionados most people don’t care how the car works or how to operate it.  They just want to go from point A to point B and enjoy themselves during the process.  In fact, if we could transport people like in Star Trek from A to B most people would skip the car.  

Most car manuals are almost the same and cover the same topics, they just have different diagrams or instructions because the cars are slightly different.  This means that the natural language needed to support the top 10-20 things a person might do with a car is similar across most brands.  

A natural language interface should be developed to solve this car manual problem.  An interface that covers most of the common topics and questions that might occur using the car.   The language across various companies is the same, since people are the driving force, once developed it could be open-sourced and reused for all.  “How do I change a tire”, “Where is the tire”, … “What does the engine light mean”, ….

Indeed this language interface can be provided as an app for a phone as I’m sure manuals are available now, but building it into the car directly would much better.  Whether transcription software locally is used or a cellular signal to talk with the cloud transcription servers, the work is the same and is doable NOW. The car would be interactive and help solve the problems for a person as another person would through language.

Eventually, autonomous cars will eliminate a lot of the need for manuals. In the meantime let’s encapsulate the questions/processes in an NLP system and make the car manual suck less.