What 3Sixty Knows…

I am thinking of replacing my car in the next 6-12 months, so have begun the process of research. So far I have spent time on the following sites: Ford, VW, Honda and Toyota. After about an hour of hunting around all of these sites I was ready to throw my laptop out of the window in frustration. Here’s a list of some of my gripes:

• VW and Ford kept crashing in both Firefox and Safari.
• Excessive use of Flash and Java on all of the sites… too slow!
• Usability; I wanted to find a good interior photo of all the cars I am considering. This was not an easy task, and in some cases I failed completely!
• The photography fails to show the level of detail I would like. Lots of “on location” shots of the cars cruising in the South of France…I just want a pic of the boot!
• Video on the Ford site didn’t work properly; even in IE! Other sites don’t seem to be exploiting the potential of video.
• The typography (esp on Ford) left a lot to be desired…even to my untrained eye.
• None of the sites have even begun to experiment with Web 2.0…blogs, user generated content etc (from what I could see)
• etc.

I know Jon is a big fan of the VW site, but personally I found it too clever for its own good. Come the end I was yearning for a simple, elegant, CSS site (with the odd bit of Flash and AJAX). I wonder if any of the car makers will be brave enough to realise that on the web, less is (normally) more?

P.S. Do any of you petrol heads out there know if Toyota have discontinued their Previa range of MPVs?  Can’t find it on their site.