The obvious thing to do is have the instruction manual with an index in it and look up SRH quickly using the alpha sort. Even better would be putting the entire manual in the car's computer and using the touch screen to search for SRH.
Hunting through the owner's manual isn't a good option while driving.
Having a single page in the manual with all buttons and their meanings would be helpful, and avoid having to look 20 different places if using the index. Once it's looked up, I think for me, an icon has a better chance of being remembered than trying to remember that SRH stands for Steering Responsive Headlights. SRH could mean just about anything, while a steering wheel and a headlight on a button would give me a pretty strong reminder that it's for making the lights move with the steering wheel, even if I don't remember the technical or marketing name for the feature.
Most of the icons in my car have no correlation with their function. Every designer of these thinks he's Susan Kare.
For example, what's the icon for "stop"? There isn't one. We've all simply memorized what a red octagon means. There aren't any icons for verbs, only things, and with the very limited space for a drawing, they aren't going to reliably be interpretable.
My keyboard still labels keys with "Enter", "Delete", "PgDn", "Shift", etc. That's because there's no icon that means it.
> We've all simply memorized what a red octagon means.
This is required learning to get a driver's license. If anyone doesn't know what a red octagon is, they shouldn't be behind the wheel of a car. That same is true for any common symbol used in street signs.
Music playback has pretty universal iconography. ▶ ⏏. I'm sure anyone who used a walkman or discman in their youth could readily tell you what all these icons mean. It doesn't seem unreasonable that standards could/should be made for cars as well. As the names for things get longer and longer, the words are too long for the button, so we need something else.
> My keyboard still labels keys with "Enter", "Delete", "PgDn", "Shift", etc. That's because there's no icon that means it.
Many of these do have symbols. Some keyboards include them. The symbols are commonly used in menus to indicate the shortcut for the command in the menu.
Those are all learned, they are not obvious pictures. There's a limit to how far one can go with this, which is why pictographic written languages evolved into phonetic ones, again and again.
We're not talking about developing an entire language, we're talking about a button to let someone turn features in their car on and off. An icon can be used globally, just translate the owner's manual instead of making thousand of different cars where the only change is the language on the buttons.
Can't do search with an icon.