It would have been an auto-related fatality: Our terrier escaped death or grievous injury when a 710-page car owners' manual fell off the kitchen island and narrowly missed his midsection. Combine the increasing technical complexity of cars with (in this case) German uber-attention to detail and our own American predilection toward lawsuits, and you have a document that lectures, warns, and stupefies rather than illuminates.

How can make manuals be better and cars easier to use? Here are ten solutions:

Include a quick-start manual. A quick-start manual could be lean; a few sheets of laminated cardstock. Just include the basics of operation and refer owners to "the big manual," to be warned about the many possible hazards.

Write a quicker-start manual in both English and Spanish. Does the valet know how to start your car if it's complex, or how put it in gear if you have an electronic shifter? (Or to safely put it in park so it doesn't roll away?) Include a post-card-size instruction manual (or illustrations) for garage attendants, as well as for friends who drive your car.

Put the manuals online—all of them. Most brands do have owners' manuals online. Some do silly things such as password-protect the manual and make you register, as if the contents are state secrets. Others put just the main manual online but not the one for the navigation system or the premium audio.

Webify the online manual. Create the paper manual in landscape mode, which makes for easier reading online, since displays are landscape, too. If it's a PDF file, make the cover be Page 1—otherwise, where the table of contents says Page 185, you really have to go to PDF Page 189 or so to reach the page numbered 185. Even better, wherever it says "See page 185," make that a link for the online version, as a handful of makers do already.

Eliminate the warnings. Does the car really need that many warnings? On a lot of pages, the warnings take up more space than the how-to information. You have to wonder: Do the warnings really reduce lawsuits and the severity of the outcomes? Or is this another example of a proud industry being run further into the ground by non-car people? So you wind up with warnings such as, "If the brakes don't seem to be working, stop at once, and drive to see your dealer." Essentially, multiple contradictions in one sentence.

Embed the manual. If the car has an LCD, make an abbreviated version of the manual accessible on the display. It should be accessible while the car is underway, or at least if the passenger seat sensor reports the seat is occupied. If not, an abbreviated form of the manual could be read (text-to-speech) to the driver.

Put an F1 button on the dash. Make the manual accessible through a dedicated F1 or Help button. (Some guys will probably think "F1" provides engine power management, as in "Formula 1.") To bring up help on any switch or button ("What does this thing do? Is it on or off now?"), you could press F1 and then the switch in question immediately after.

Proofread the paper manual. Do a reality check and make sure the index uses common terms. If the car has a rear-view camera, make sure it's indexed as "rear-view camera," "backup camera," and "camera." If the car has a weird electronic parking brake controlled by a button, make sure "parking brake" is in the index, plus, for Type A's, "brake, parking." My monster manual has neither, incredibly.

Custom print each owner manual. Just-in-time printing lets you create a custom manual for each car, so an owner gets only the manual for the front-drive sedan, not for the all-wheel-drive version, the station wagon, or the convertible. Similarly, you'd see your premium-audio-system car with navigation and an iPod adapter, not the one with the basic radio.

Let the car teach the owner. At least for the first couple months of ownership, any button you press should have a confirmation on the LCD screen or the car's two-line information display below the speedometer. That's especially important with obtuse menu boxes on an LCD, where blue on yellow may be the selected choice and yellow on blue the deselected choice. Or the option says "On," but it's not clear if that means "it's now on" or "press to turn it on."