THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT THAT older drivers are bemused by the steady march of technology. What makes it worse is that many of them don’t see any real benefit or advantage when perfectly acceptable technology is replaced by newer technology.
They are even less impressed when it costs them money to update.
The latest “great leap forward” became obvious when seniordriveraus was driving a new Volkswagen T-Cross. Yes, we’ve come to grips with the loss of CD players in cars (and cassette players before that, and, going back even further, eight-track cartridge players).
We’ve explained to readers that a USB is so much more practical than a CD player – hundreds of albums on one USB, and no need to pull out a CD when it’s finished playing and replace it with another.
So far, so good.
But now many of us are about to discover that our USBs have been superseded. When we went to plug in our USB into a port in the VW (two in the front, two in the rear), we discovered four ports, none of which was compatible.
A quick check revealed that the T-Cross was using the new USB Type C, and all our USBs are Type A (like the one in the image above).
Don’t despair: you don’t need to throw out all your USBs and replace them with the new one. Instead, you can buy an adaptor that will allow you to slot your Type A into a Type C slot. And it should cost less than $10.
We asked VW for an explanation and received this response: “USB-C is better for faster data transfer, charging etc, and for the most part is the way most external devices are going now. The latest Android phones, for example, are all USB-C. You can of course get adaptors, and in some cases now you also have wireless Apple Carplay/Android Auto, along with capacitive charging, so you wouldn’t even need a cable.”
Still, would it have been so difficult to include at least one USB Type A slot?