A Rant About Modern Cars

10 July 2026  |  3 min read

I recently bought a new Peugeot and the experience of getting setup on their online platform has been painful to say the least.

Yesterday I picked up my shiny new (to me) Peugeot E-3008 GT. It's a beautiful car with lots of bells, whistles, and toys. I had my little MG EV for around 2.5 years, and it served me well, but I wanted something bigger, with more range. So I opted for the Peugeot.

Anyway, since this is a modern car, it no longer comes with an owner's manual. Instead you need to install an app and read the manual there. So I did that and duly signed up for a Peugeot Connect account - all standard procedure in this internet age we find ourselves in. That was until it came to generating a password.

I did my usual and generated a 30 character, complicated password with Bitwarden, only to be greeted with this ridiculous password complexity error:

So my 30 character, random string password is apparently weak and the only way to make it secure is reduce it's length (and complexity) by ~50%. Not only that, I had to abide by a slew of other arbitrary rules along the way.

I tried to generate a 16 character PW with Bitwarden a couple times, but the error persisted. So I ended up jumping over to Gemini, pasting the requirements in, and asking it to give me a password. Being the sycophantic AI that it is, it spat out a password that conformed to Peugeot's ridiculous rules. Or so I thought...

OK, so the password Gemini generated for me was vR4&mK2$qW9_zP7!. Let's see how it stacks up to the requirements:

• 8-16 characters ✅
• An uppercase letter ✅
• A lowercase letter ✅
• A number ✅
• A special character from the list ✅
• No sequential characters ✅

So why the fuck is the password still being rejected as too weak? I assume it's poor wording on Peugeot's part, but I ended up just typing gobbledegook into the field until it passed.

Interestingly, P@ssw0rd also passed and was reported as a "very strong" password:

For the record, P@ssw0rd is NOT a very strong password. Don't use that. Ever.

I'm astonished that this is still an issue in 2026. Why on earth can't manufacturers get this simple shit right? It's basic stuff. All you're doing here is forcing people to use shitty passwords.

But wait, there's more!

I finally got into my bloody Peugeot account and tried to enable to Connect features so I can do things like control air-con from the app, only to find that it costs £90 (~$120) per year!

This isn't a piece of hardware that I'm paying for. It's literally £90/year for a switch to be flipped in some software. Utter. Fucking. Robbery.

Peugeot, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Aside from this, the new car is lovely. 🙃

</rant>

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