Automobile companies tried for years to make a decent infotainment system in cars, and almost universally they were all terrible no matter how expensive the vehicle. Finally Android Auto and CarPlay gave everyone what they wanted - decent access to music on their phone, call capabilities that actually work, and program integration with things they actually use with internet service they already have.
Then manufacturers realized they were losing control to Google and Apple, and want it back. So now I guess we're back to random garbage half-baked solutions that no one likes, just so they can sell subscriptions for seat heaters and music players. Back to the walled gardens everyone, move along.
I'll never buy a new vehicle again, particularly GM now, and simply stick to something older I can either put any standard double-din deck into, or a vehicle with 3rd party mods that then add Android Auto like my Infiniti that shipped with the worst infotainment system ever.
It’s interesting how you correctly identify that this is a massive play for control by Apple and Google, and yet you still seem to sympathise with their position!
I can completely understand why vehicle manufacturers are so wary. Just look at the history of how Apple, Google, etc companies have behaved when it comes to “partnerships”. Look at the App Store. Look at what Google did to supposedly open source Android.
It begins with some generous offer of allowing access to the UX/platform in exchange for innocent sounding things like control over user data/login. It ends with the platform completely taken over, GM being held to ransom, and no in-house systems or staff left to revert back to their own solution.
I don't want to have an infotainment system in my car I need to spend hundreds of euros to update the software for. Or order a Totally Legit Upgrade DVD from Slovenia via eBay for only 50€. That just happens to require me to insert a CD that says "unlock" on it first :D
Then the upgrade took two hours, 1h 50min of which the device was totally unresponsive and I wasn't sure if it would be OK to turn off the car or not.
Oh, and the maps were always out of date. It cost more to get the "update" (which was always old) than it would've been to buy a separate GPS unit.
And this was a premium VW car, albeit a bit older at the time.
I'd much rather use the device in my pocket that has eons more computing power than all the CPUs in all the cars I've ever owned combined, with up to date maps, traffic data and regular free software updates. The device I can upgrade separately from my car at any time I want.
If a car doesn't support CarPlay, I'm not buying it. (One of the top5 reasons I haven't bought a Tesla)
I don't read GP as sympathising with Apple/Google at all, they just want a nice experience in their car; say that they think they get it from A/G, and that they didn't for years before that from car manufacturers.
i.e. it's not about being a fan of particular brands, it's a self-interested desire for a decent UX/platform.
> I don't read GP as sympathising with Apple/Google at all, they just want a nice experience in their car;
Apple/Google are not a nice experience. If you could share your screen would have been ok. But running special apps is out of discussion. I tried Android Auto. It is terrible, it needs a lot of time to set up (permissions, settings on car), the car must be stopped (ignition off) and 95 % of apps installed are not compatible. In the end, to listen music i have memory sticks and for navigation a Garmin.
Initial setup depends on a car a lot. On my previous car it was connecting through USB, initial setup was complicated but afterwards it mostly worked. On my current car connection is wireless and set up was pretty easy. It takes some time to connect to my car once I turn it on but most of it is loading of infotainment system.
As far as apps - depends on what you need. For me maps, music and calls are enough, but if you want something very specific - it's probably not going to work.
I don't knwo Android Auto, but Apple CarPlay. It's far from perfect, but I had a whole different experience than you.
First time plugging in, a simple confirmation on my phone to allow connection. CarPlay starts, everything works out of the box. Now I can phone, can search my music library (try that with bluetooth) and I have a voice control that mostly understands what I want to play.
Right, correct, and I understand your position, but the offerings from the automobile manufacturers came with a 1000x markup for stuff that didn't even work half the time ... unless you paid the entire cost of manufacturing an entire head unit all over again.
A premium vehicle I owned (Mercedes Benz) needed the dealer to install the new maps, only had support for BT music on my phone, and cost more than a decent Android tablet each time I wanted new maps.
Honestly, if the automobile manufacturers want to wrest back control from Google/Apple they had better up their game while lowering their greed.
Before Android/iOS was viable, they felt no shame about their display of naked greed when it came to nickle-and-diming the owner.
If they want people to use their system as anything other than an interface to a phone, they need to make the updates free, make the system reliable, and make it so much better than the basic phone interface that people prefer their system to the Android/iOS one.
> It’s interesting how you correctly identify that this is a massive play for control by Apple and Google, and yet you still seem to sympathise with their position!
Apple and Google got to where they are because people actively want to buy and use their stuff. Apple stuff isn’t cheap and for most of Google’s products, their nearest competitors are a click away and have been even when they didn’t completely dominate major product categories.
People have lots of experience with in-car infotainment and navigation, and here’s the real alternative: people would rather mount their phones in their car using an aftermarket kit or literally just hold their phones in their hands while driving than use the in-built infotainment and navigation systems that car makers provide. CarPlay and Android Auto provide them a nicer experience than doing that which is why new car buyers look for these options by name.
Five years later and the touchscreen keeps causing ghost touches every time the car stops, I actively have to make sure I'm in some obscure menu where random touches won't start calling people or changing the radio channel.
Turns out doing it better influences people's preferences. The problem is fundamentally that the carmakers do such a shit job.
If infotainment systems matter at all to consumers, we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.
> we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.
I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe. I bought a new Camry in 2017, right at the start of their 4 year upgrade cycle (i.e., the 2018 version). I chose a Camry due to their well-known reliability.
However, none of the new vehicle models that Toyota sold had CarPlay at that point, and it was unclear whether Toyota would ever offer it at all. After a few months of driving my new car and then getting the chance to use CarPlay in a rental car, I decided I would not buy another Toyota in the future because it was so annoying to be aware of the experience that could easily exist involving navigation, music, etc. but that did not.
Toyota eventually relented in 2018, and luckily my Camry had upgrade support to install CarPlay (so clearly it had been planned a while ago for this model). But they would have lost me as a customer otherwise, and I doubt my perspective on this is unique. It’s sort of curious that such a trivial-to-implement aspect of the car’s design can have such an outsized influence on a purchase decision.
My family wanted to buy a very capable 4x4 a couple of years ago. We wanted something capable of towing a large load and to take offroad in some challenging areas, which means most of the SUVs designed for road use are out of the question. At least locally, Toyota are usually considered among the best in this criteria. I was pretty shocked at how dated absolutely everything about it looked and felt. It was definitely a capable offroad vehicle, but it also seemed like it was stuck in the 90's design wise. And by the time it was fully optioned it was, IMO, far too expensive to justify how compromised it felt. It felt like they'd let their reputation stall out their design for a couple of decades.
We ended up buying something else that was much more comfortable and better designed (including CarPlay!) and haven't regretted it.
Same. Longtime Toyota owner who keeps cars for around 10 years. When Toyota didn't offer carplay, there was no way I was gonna live in the 'oldentimes' for another decade and I chose a VW with carplay.
I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe.
It’s already happening. When GM announced no more CarPlay, we took the $60K we were going to use on a new Blazer EV and gave it to Hyundai instead. (Good thing, too, or we’d still be waiting on that Blazer instead of driving our Ioniq 5 since April.)
Nobody is being held ransom. GM can win this any time by building good software themselves. This is just another example of tech companies gaining a market through the fair competition of building a better product.
I thought, as I got older, that my hearing was slowly deteriorating, but here you are, proving me wrong because somehow I’m able to hear you playing a tune for GM on the smallest violin ever made by humankind.
Nothing stops vehicle manufacturers from making the best entertainment system any customer could wish for. Instead, they’d rather nickel and dime their customers for everything they’ve got.
Subscriptions for connectivity, subscriptions for car features, subscriptions for basic entertainment functionality, fees for current maps, and on and on it goes.
All the while pinching pennies wherever they can by using yesteryear’s computers barely more powerful than a Raspberry Pi (if that) while inflating prices in the US market on cars sold cheaper overseas and lobbying to keep the market as closed off as possible so overseas competitors cannot enter the market.
And make no mistake, this isn’t about being “wary of partnerships”; GM happily licenses Android Automotive.
This is about collecting as much data as possible and capturing revenue by gating as much as possible behind a paywall.
After all, who will pay for connectivity and other features when people can hook up their pocket computers with all that to the screen?
Their play for control hinges on creating a better user experience than car manufacturers have bothered to create. GM could simply claim that their experience is better, but they’d have to back that with privacy guarantees which would cost them recurring revenue, and they’d have to compel overdue improvements to Bluetooth and USB standards regarding in-car uses, which would then benefit their competitors. GM, a for-profit corporation based in the United States, has apparently chosen not to take those essential steps that would undercut and destroy Apple and Google’s current plays for control, as it would similarly threaten the “our system is ours” niche GM dug for themselves.
Vehicle manufacturers are not (edit: end-user/OS) software companies, it doesn't make sense (or for any company for which it's not the core business) to build their own OS. Yes OS builders control the OS by definition. What's next, car manufacturers producing music so they get control back on what drivers listen to?
There's a lot of software, but their business is making and selling hardware. That almost always leads to the business viewing software as an afterthought and a cost center. Embedded is absolutely rife with this and the quality is often awful as a result (yes, even in safety critical applications)
I sympathize with my need to have a proper car display.
I have a Toyota RAV4 from 2 years ago and the display is straight from the '80s.
I had to use the gps ONCE and I almost crashed into a trashbin because I had to manually follow the car pointer as it was leaving the display. Yes, that's right.
If I was Apple or Google, I would make GM execs use a 15 years old version and make it cash I've a day. Revenge.
> Finally Android Auto and CarPlay gave everyone what they wanted
Bzzt.
What I want is what I have: there's a $10 bluetooth receiver hooked to the car audio input jack, and a $10 phone holder on top of the dash, and a $10 USB charger plugged into the 12V. If phones routinely came with headphone jacks, I could skip the bluetooth intermediate.
So: when I start the car, whatever phone I have paired reconnects with the bluetooth receiver and plays what I want through the dumb speaker system. If I want to run a map app, I do that. If I want to make a call, I can do that. The phone is in charge of muting the music when a call comes in. It's very good at that.
If I change software on my phone, the new things work in the car. If I want to replace the phone with something not tied to Google or Apple, I can.
The car can't report its location, can't be remotely immobilized, can't show me advertising. No new subscription. No bugs in the car system to exploit; no bugs in the car system to brick the system. Easily and cheaply replaceable parts.
I don't understand why any driver would want more integration than this. Somebody suggested that the car should tell the mapping system when I've clicked the turn signal on or off, but if you need that level of detailed support when driving, I think maybe you shouldn't be driving while distracted by a mapping system at all.
I still have a drawer full of phone holders and bluetooth receivers that I used in my previous car with a "dumb" radio. All of the holders were annoyingly rattling when driving over potholes and finicky to insert or remove the phone. From all the bluetooth receivers I tried (3 of them), none of them had a decent microphone, which meant making phone calls a no go, and the first 2 of them had poor power filtering resulting in a high-pitched hum (I suppose it was from the alternator).
Now I have a car with wireless Android Auto and when I start the car I immediately get a google maps view without having to search for the app, including two recommended destinations (usually places I go to frequently, or the last searched place on Gmaps). The whole interface is easier to use while driving, because of the limited feature-set and larger screen than on the phone itself. Same story with calling, it just works - I can answer calls from the buttons on the steering wheel and the mic is decent and in the right place.
Can we stop pretending that every innovation since 2010 is evil? I get it that it locks in you in Google's/Apple's ecosystems, but their solution is simply working well. For me the alternatives don't cut it, and I believe that their shoddy practices (data collection, monopoly etc.) should be fought with legislation and not by refusing to use their stuff on principle.
In long trips, the car starts to loose the connection to the phone, even if connected by USB cable. Looks like a memory leak crashing the system. And no, I don't want to stop the car just to restart display of Google Maps on the car display: baby is sleeping, stopping is not an option.
The major problem I have with software is that there's no commitment to maintaining it once it's sold, and no additional money is there to be made. The old boring button-based radios lasted forever without software updates, and they could also be swapped out for newer devices later on if need be. Now cars are being made with very specific parts that are not easily replaced, and with systems that aren't infinitely upgradeable, even as we've somewhat reached a plateau of hardware performance that can handle most application demands. Now hardware is being bogged down by resource-eating ads and limited/ spotty Internet bandwidth more than by processing power.
As we progress into the future, there needs to be a major pushback on the software upsell practices of companies, especially for cars. Cars need to be reliable, and dependable. My desktop PC has been running for 11 years now, with the power on (with only minor hardware & OS updates), the only thing that has been a constant threat to it's reliability is the drive by software makers to milk me out of my money for updates.... They often push updates under the premise that they are for security, but now most updates are to insert ads and up-sell schemes into the apps and OS.
I miss the old days, because even though you could buy new hardware, you rarely needed to... Now, with each update, I'm worried about my PC being bricked and heavy downtime without any real technical support available, because there are so many different greedy brands of companies making tons of devices that they regularly drop updates for. Something has to change about the software-driven economy, or I'm planning to just go entirely "off grid" for the most part in my retirement from being a developer and consumer myself.
Just an anecdote - I own a Volvo XC60(with Sensus not AAOS) and 99% of the time I'd rather just use the built-in OS than Android Auto - AA is slow to respond and imprecise(clicks are almost always recognized as swipes rather than clicks, problem which doesn't happen in the built-in OS), and every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road, even though it's my passenger using it. The integrated navigation and Spotify work great and don't give me this minimalistic interface of AA that is barely usable.
Like, I get that it's a great solution in a lot of cars. But I don't think it's universally true that "no one" wants to use the built in system - I definitely do.
>>just so they can sell subscriptions for seat heaters and music players.
Yes, that is absolutely horrendous trend that I hope we manage to stop - but I suspect we won't, the genie is out of the bottle now so to speak.
As an observation point - I drive a company car (a BMW) and will be looking for a new car next year. I would not even considers Volvo until they support wireless CarPlay. GM must very much believe in appeal of their car to piss off android and iOS users simultaneously.
Tbf, I don't know why people get hung up on this, I see this on Volvo forums all the time as well - you can literally get a £50 adapter, leave it plugged in inside your armrest and voila, you have wireless carplay. It literally "just works".
Should the car already come with it installed? Yes. Is it a big deal to rectify? No.
I am not buying a 60k EUR worth new car to fiddle with adapters. It is almost 2024, wireless carplay is a figured out thing since years. If they cannot solve it, they will not get my money, it is as simple as that. If anything, customers should punish manufacturers more for such bullsh*t, not less. Because current behavior let them believe they can get away with anything, thus this thread.
I think it is exactly the other way around. My brother was long time working for a big car manufacturer, and citing him "it is quite an achievement these days to make a car which drives genuinely bad". And it is true, especially given the move to EV and that with an increasing age my desire to drive a car past 160 km/h and in sports mode is basically 0.
So, where a car still can collect bonus points is infotainment and interior in general. If you offer some touchscreen-blandness, you have to go down with the price significantly, because I see where money was spared. I use the built-in wireless CarPlay daily, so I expect it to work without occupying myself with fixing Volvo's incompetence.
>you can literally get a £50 adapter, leave it plugged in inside your armrest and voila, you have wireless carplay. It literally "just works".
I'm thankful for whichever Chinese engineers reversed the protocol for CarPlay to make this work. But my experience with these adapters is they are more fiddly than you're describing.
I mean I have one for wireless android auto and it does just work, it's plugged in, I never have to think about it or worry about it, it just pops up on my screen as if it was built into the car. Maybe the CarPlay ones are more fiddly, I'm not sure.
When I said CarPlay I meant that my particular adapter had reverse engineered the CarPlay protocol to communicate with the car over USB. It can do wireless android auto as well.
They don’t all just work, I tried the most popular one (CarLinkIt) and it didn’t work with mine or my wifes phone, I gave up, wireless was not worth it enough for me to go through the hassle of reset this, clear that etc…
I have wireless android auto with a built in conveniently placed holder for the phone that does wireless charging, and 95% of the time I still plug the phone in anyway.
Me neither - I have not used a cable connection once in 3 years I have my current car. Do not even have a lightning cable in the car. But hey, people are different!
Well a lot of cars have a wireless charging pad available in the phone holder, so you just drop your phone there and it starts charging / connects to Android Auto.
Tbh, the charging pad is bad, if I would rely on it a lot, I would keep a cable in the car. I don't know why, but it heats up so much if you use it, that the iphone overheats and starts to throttle.
> every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road
Whoever came up with that wasn't entirely right in the head: so now people will stare at the device for another five seconds wondering what they did wrong. Sound of impact.
>>Or just push the button on your steering wheel and use voice control
It's literally the worst way to interact with anything. It's infuriating how bad it is, especially for someone whose first language isn't English. It understands maybe 20% of the commands I give it, and the delay between clicking the button, it doing the "bong" to indicate it's ready, then listening to my command, then it processing and finally giving me a response(usually "sorry I didn't understand that") is just horrendous.
Not to mention that it's still physically impossible to use voice controls to dial people with non-English names if you have your OS set to English - try saying "Dial Jan Szczepanek" and it will never recognize it, no matter how you pronounce it. If you have OS set to Polish it will work fine, but I cannot be expected to keep switching my OS language!
> Not to mention that it's still physically impossible to use voice controls to dial people with non-English names if you have your OS set to English - try saying "Dial Jan Szczepanek" and it will never recognize it, no matter how you pronounce it. If you have OS set to Polish it will work fine, but I cannot be expected to keep switching my OS language!
This is just the modern allergy to allowing user configuration. (God forbid someone use your software to do what they want to do!) The problem was solved in the 90s, when speech-to-text sucked, by letting you define your own words.
But you are still allowed to configure your contact information, so there's an obvious solution: instead of calling him Jan Szczepanek, just call him John Stevenson. Everyone wins! ;D
My new car has voice control too. It's actually not too bad at recognizing what it's said (that is, it properly displays in text what was spoken, most the time), but it usually can't handle the commands properly.
However, it also has a "hey Google" like feature, where it's always listening and triggers voice control when it hears the words, without the push of a button. And it triggers randomly when I'm talking with my wife, even when we say nothing remotely close to the keyword.
Funnily enough, we also didn't know this feature existed, and neither did the dealership. So for a while we thought it was a random bug. Eventually, my wife figured it's a feature, and it can thankfully be turned off.
Right, I feel your pain, bilingual Android Auto sucks. I wouldn't use voice control to call someone (luckily there is a dedicated button on the steering wheel for that).
But for other stuff (changing tracks or albums - "play xxx from spotify") it works just fine for me. And yes, I use a louder "computer" or "command" voice when talking to digital assistants (had to learn how to do that to control Amazon's Alexa devices). ;)
I would use voice control more to pick my music if it would stop misinterpreting me. When I ask for my XYZ playlist on Youtube Music, I'm not asking for the song X by some artist I've never heard of. And when I ask for directions to a place I go to at least once a week, it shouldn't try to navigate me to somewhere halfway across the state.
Voice control is imprecise. You are forgetting about us folks whom are not native in one of the supported languages for voice control and constantly have to adapt our accents to the whims of speech recognition. And the right incantation of command for the task.
It's not impossible, just a very annoying way to control something precisely.
Same here with a BMW and iDrive8.5 I’ve never used CarPlay with it. BMW infotainment system just works, and its navigation system is superior to Google Maps (more up to date and better high traffic alternatives). Said that, I’d still like to have CarPlay in case BMW stops updating its system after 5-10 years.
> decent access to music on their phone, call capabilities that actually work, and program integration with things they actually use with internet service they already have.
I am convinced all of these things are unsafe. I refuse to take calls when driving over bluetooth; distracting yourself with a conversation when you're supposed to be driving is reckless and I think this is doubly true when it's a phone conversation (in which the other participant can't watch the road and know when to stop talking.)
Even music while driving is a nuisance. Nobody talks about the role of music in car accidents because almost everybody likes it, but it contributes to distracted driving and in some cases reckless driving. It encourages people to continue driving when they are mentally fatigued (take note of how many people say music "helps" them during long drives.)
GPS navigation on a screen is a bad idea too; your eyes cannot read a screen and watch the road at the same time. Pure voice navigation giving brief commands and updates is sufficient and relatively safe. Car integration isn't necessary at all; a phone placed in the center console with the volume turned up and the screen turned off gets the job done. If you need to make adjustments or read a text or take a call, pull over.
I think GPS screen-based nav is safer than voice-based for any complex interchange situation. Showing me at a glance which lane I need to be in and what my overall path/goal will be is better (at least for me, but I think for loads of people) than describing the same over voice commands.
Voice both takes longer and is subject to being pushed to you at the wrong moment where info from a screen can be pulled on demand and quickly.
Yes, and on top of the mediocre infotainment UX, the automakers also have comical/user hostile upgrade cycles.
I bought a new model release BMW which halfway through the 2nd or 3rd year of the models life, they shipped a slightly different head unit. From that point, only the owners with the new head unit get the newest OS/features. Imagine if next year when iOS 18 comes out, we learn that only iPhone 15s made after March 2024 were eligible, and no iPhone 14 or earlier was, lol.
Beyond that, the OTA updates tend to not work and require you to go to the dealer. No one quite knows the rhyme or reason.
For what it's worth, most vehicles still have aftermarket dash panels and wiring harnesses so you can install whatever you want. Way less of a compromise than buying an older vehicle, but I wouldn't expect some of the control integrations with the steering wheel and other displays to work though.
Really in retrospect nothing has changed from the days double-din was standard apart from some extra steps. Does anyone know if there are projects that reverse engineer these misc integrations for various manufacturers? Is it all just CAN bus or something proprietary?
Nope, isn't as easy as it has been during the 90s.
Ever had to deal with abominations like CAN-but-not-really-CAN like PSAs own VAN? Having to find out which model has which bus? Non-standard size cutouts / bays?
Alone the FW versions i had to test of Alpine / OEM adapter products to get steering wheel controls working. The PDC i couldn't.
Do they really? Most recent cars I've seen have a touchscreen LCD popping up out of the dash and it all looks rather custom. Are there some kind of standards like double-DIN?
One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples.
There’s other manufacturers as well.
I recall seeing model specific replacement head units for the pop up type display you describe but can’t find them now
> One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples.
What GP complained about was that the factory-installed head units have very non-standard shapes for everything but the screen, and even then it'd be glued into some molded piece of plastic trim which has a non-regular shape in the dashboard.
You'd literally have to cut out the trim with a saw and refinish it in order to use the din/double-din standard sizes.
The fundamental problem is that once you bought the car, the manufacturer now has a monopoly on everything they can sell you for the car.
In my opinion we should have a "no-tether" law: once you buy a product you should be able to use (and upgrade) it as advertised even if you break all ties with the original vendor. This means that other vendors can supply parts and services. This law could hold for many product categories, including cars and smartphones.
I have like the opposite experience...AA and Carplay have always been cause of issues, having to take the phone in my hand while driving, sluggishness..
In fact I feel the opposite you say: car play has been an excuse for some automakers for subpar infotainment.
That being said removing it completely is madness, because people like you are millions and want it.
None of these issues exist on my Mazda car. Screen is tactile at stops, but I only ever use the rotational+directional knob. Phone stays plugged and untouched. It's snappy.
I bet some other cars have poor HID but here they put the work in and it is good.
Why do you have to take your phone in your hand? You just do all your actions on the screen in the car. I’ve never had to touch my phone in the car once it’s plugged in.
That's really odd. As far as I know carplay just sends video data to the screen and the screen shows it. It's like an hdmi cable in that regard. I would say it's a problem with your car, then. My volkswagen has absolutely no issues with carplay.
> Automobile companies tried for years to make a decent infotainment system in cars
To expand on your point, both Google and Apple are rumored to be getting into the business of manufacturing cars (e.g. Waymo and the rumored Apple Car). So GM may be looking toward the future where their infotainment systems are owned by rival car manufacturers.
Modern cars are of such high quality that they are largely commodity, even moreso with the switch to electric drivetrains. Margins on the hardware will continue to decrease, and automakers will be desperate to recoup revenue through digital and subscription services. The problem is that traditional automakers are way out of their league. GM has a lot more in common with Foxconn than it does Apple or Google.
Call it what it is.. they like the control of their in car entertainment systems and they don't want external companies taking that part of the pie.
It's okay gm, we understand. Let's hope you are able to make a compelling competition to this, otherwise your sales will suffer.
Traditional car software is very very poor for whatever reason. I don't think that car manufacturers have the mindset and capability to make even passable software, let alone competitive software.
> Call it what it is.. they like the control of their in car entertainment systems and they don't want external companies taking that part of the pie.
they did call it as it is. it's in the article:
> In addition to potentially buying things from GM or GM’s partners through their car’s infotainment system, GM is also looking at subscription services that would be managed through the same interface. GM’s chief digital officer, Edward Kummer, told Reuters as much when the decision to drop CarPlay and Android Auto was announced. Automakers see subscriptions as huge new source of income to be tapped, with GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030.
They didn't call it as it is, that's just the obvious conclusion the author of the article makes based on another source, they make up unverified safety allegations
> though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.
> Automakers see subscriptions as huge new source of income to be tapped, with GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030.
and the following quote is from a different part of the article:
> though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.
specifically:
> Essentially, the thinking is that if a car’s in-built infotainment system is good enough, drivers will be less likely to use their phone for what they’re trying to do while they’re behind the wheel, — though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.
Good lord the greed just never ends does it? They should look at BMW and see how quickly the heated seat thing fell through for them. At least I know what manufacturers to avoid from now on.
I am dreading the future of cars, where they somehow are worse than a car I could buy right now but also I have to pay a monthly subscription for the worse experience.
The enshittification of everything is making me want to go berserk.
This is what everyone said to me when phones started losing their headphone jacks (purely so that phone makers could sell overpriced wireless earbuds).
But eventually old phones stop working on the new network and you realize every major new phone has followed suit in the cash grab. sigh
And occupies your USB-C port, which you might want to use at the same time for charging while listening to music(I do while I'm in bed, I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this).
My biggest issue with it is that it's been sold to us on a lie - the whole nonsense about "reclaiming the space" - it's BS. There is space for it in nearly every phone on the market.
There are cheap bluetooth dongles with female audio port that a pair of headphones could be plugged turning them into bluetooth headphones. Calls will most probably not work, though.
And it gives you yet another device to charge, reduces your sound quality and introduces audio delay. None of which is a problem with wired headphones.
I'm feeling like a dinosaur pointing out that I still have headphones which just work and there is literally nothing wrong with them. I own two pairs of bluetooth headphones too, and they are great - but let's not kid ourselves, there are drawbacks to it too.
Time passes and sooner or later the oldest available used car will be from 2024. Add the effect of legislation which could deny access to some areas important for you unless you have a car compliant to regulations made in 2030.
ICE vehicles can be legislatively removed from the roads or so burdened with fees and regulations that they cease to be viable for anyone other than a collector. They can't do it today because the percentage of ICE vehicles is too high but as EV market share grows, green laws can get far more aggressive. Just look at what happened during the pandemic in the name of safety. Now look at you ICE vehicle's tailpipe. That's the new method of control over you and your vehicle and the precedent has already been set that's it's an ok thing for them to do as long as they can drum up the level of hysteria, which they're now quite experienced at doing.
Maybe at your location. For example in Spain, many people will just not be able to drive in many places in 2024 if they don't qualify to have a good-enough "environmental distinctive" which is a label you put in your car that shows how much your car pollutes. No label or too bad of a label? You can't drive in many places.
Note: In reality it's bs as many other regulations since e.g. any ECO-labelled car (2nd best distinctive) can be a 600 CV Ferrari with a tiny electric engine.
I bet repair costs on used are less than depreciatiom ...
There are more considerations than simply cost of repair. Used cars break more than new cars. You are more likely to need some sort of backup plan if you have a used car. I'd be fine here in Norway: My 25 year old car is only used a few times a month. Otherwise, my partner and I walk and/or use public transportation. But I'm lucky enough to live in an area with a fairly robust public transport and pedestrian path system.
I couldn't be this secure when I lived in Indiana. Most places had little public transport, and fewer had affordable public transport (taxis only, though they likely have uber now). These options only worked if you stayed in town - but if you were like a lot of Midwestern folks, you have to drive to work and working in the next town over wasn't uncommon.
Which means: Something happens to your car, you might wind up unemployed or minimally, it pushes you ever closer to being unemployed. Hope your kid doesn't get sick and you have to miss even more work.
I'll also add that "another low mileage car" will still be expensive and you won't generally save yourself a car payment. I was lucky to find mine and if it weren't for a friend finding it, I wouldn't have it at all.
My car is reliable. I got lucky. I've replaced the brakes. And I was illustrating that I only need minimal reliability since it isn't my main form of transporation. I have public transport and live in a walkable place. I can (and do) dress for weather.
The rest of the comments aren't specific to 25 year old cars. I've had an array of used cars in an array of ages. Anything over 4-5 years starts to break due to wear and tear. Alternators and starters go out. Brakes have wear and tear. Things happen. You still likely have a car payment - and you are more likely to if you are poor. Being poor brings the bonus of opting for a car that's been driven more instead of less simply because of the price difference.
'Pretty reliable' isn't the same as the reliability of a newer car.
Sure, I plan to drive my current car until the wheels fall off, but that's not the point.
I'm young enough that I will very likely need to buy a new-to-me car eventually, and there's a good chance that by then a lot of the used cars out there will be the enshitted versions. I'm not looking forward to it.
What's particularly frustrating, and I think relevant here, is when new things are better in some respects, but glaringly worse in others. So you can only have the good parts of the new thing if you accept the shit along with it.
I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy.
It's probably kinda the same story with great mechanical and industrial engineers, which is why approximately nobody finds GM cars exciting.
The tragic aspect is that they spend inordinate amounts of money on this software with nothing to show for it. The money is spent so poorly and ineffectively, while trying to cut every inconsequential cost corner along the way with the output being micromanaged by people that don’t understand software, that if you directed a fraction of that money at a small team of highly paid and experienced software engineers you’d likely get a brilliant product.
Automotive OEMs don’t work that way, they spray money at hundreds of the cheapest engineers they can get away with and hope something good comes out the other side. I’ve seen it over and over. Their problems could be solved by paying a small team of excellent engineers proper Silicon Valley wages. It would be cheaper and produce a better product, but they don’t think that way. The concept of a highly paid software engineer is objectionable to the executives in that industry.
Many years ago, I discussed possible employment with a major head unit manufacturer. They were very excited about modernizing but basically stunned into silence when I mentioned typical senior FAANG pay. I'd be surprised if things have changed much.
Sitting here in Michigan I still see auto company software positions sometimes that are mid/late career positions and pay under 100k. The legacy auto industry really doesn't get it. And now GM is forcing RTO, so I expect they'll lose more talent and have a harder time attracting engineers.
It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could easily do it ourselves in a month or less. It seems like such a simple problem. Play songs and interface with some controls/radio receiver/etc while being at least a tiny bit conscious of efficiency.
The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult.
Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder.
And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies.
Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.
Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so.
The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
They weren't doing that much either. I doubt an Apple ][ could even stream modern audio codecs via bluetooth, let alone simultaneously run a local search on the GPS database.
Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.
This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.
Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.
Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).
Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving.
You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.
I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time.
I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.
Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed.
you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.
I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.
That depends on the jurisdiction. When I voted in Maryland, there was a machine that I directly cast my vote into.
When I vote where I live now in Massachusetts, I fill out a paper form in private and then I manually feed the forms into a voting machine where I have only supervised physical access.
I think it's entirely possible to have machine-counted ballots without giving unfettered and unsupervised access to the counting machines and I prefer the MA system (for the reasons you describe), but I also recognize the Constitution is clear in its reserving the power to each state for how to conduct the election (at least for President) in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.
Counting machines are different than voting machines.
Here in Washington we vote on paper but the results are counted by machine. The counting process is overseen by representatives of both parties. In a recount the paper votes could be manually counted to reconcile with the machine. I’m not worried about any of that.
What is scary about voting machines is that the output isn’t guaranteed to match the input. This is for any number of reasons. The best defense against this is to print the choices in a human-readable format… on a piece of paper. Which means you don’t really need the machine at all. If it’s on the network you can’t trust anything.
The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.
I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.
A friend of mine has a 2022 Cadillac something. I was actually very impressed with it. Comfortable, quiet, no-nonsense self-driving capability. Seemed like a fine car. If GM can build similar no-nonsense infotainment software they will be fine.
Why did mfr's GPS cost thousands as an option or subscription for 15 years while Garmin Nuvi portable devices for three hundred dollars ran circles around built-in units?
>I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy.
IMO, the bureaucracy isn't that big a problem; all big companies have this problem. The big problem for GM is their locations: who the heck wants to move to Detroit? Or any of the other places their suppliers tend to locate?
Super low cost of living on a tech salary? Sounds good to me. But if that doesn't work GM has the Cruise offices in San Francisco that they'll have to find some use for. GM proper also has offices in North Hollywood and Pasadena. Cadillac famously used to have offices in New York for the prestige, but Cruise still does AFAIK.
I'd bet that the problem is absolutely going to be more of a bureaucracy and salary issue than a location one. GM is a hilariously broken company and I can't imagine an enjoyable one to work for.
And since software is built in big factories just like cars are, there is absolutely no way for those engineers to build those systems without moving to Detroit.
For those folks, sure. For many others, the location could very well be. You won't know because many people probably only look at job ads filtered by location, so they just ignore any that are in "undesirable" places, whatever those may be.
GM has many development centers, including Roswell, Georgia, but it should be pointed out that like most American metros, Metro Detroit has a wide variety of cities and towns for different lifestyles. You don't have to live in Robocop to work for GM, which has facilities spread about both the Detroit metro area and the country.
My 2010 BMW has excellent infotainment software. Better than any new car I have driven (all rentals).
Navigation is easily controlled with the iDrive knob. Previous destinations are sorted in reverse chronological order. New destinations are easy to enter. Adding destinations works as expected (insert/append). When the fuel gauge reaches 1/8 of a tank the car prompts to add a gas station on the route which can be accepted with a single button press of the main iDrive knob. When a trip is in progress I can search on the route by category for points of interest like rest stops. It picks up traffic information over AM radio and uses that information when routing.
Similarly pleasant experience when operating the radio/built in mp3 player. Everything can be done with iDrive but there are also dedicated buttons on the steering wheel and dashboard.
Climate control is managed by physical knobs.
Bluetooth calling is supported but Bluetooth audio (music) is not.
Overall an excellent experience. It's obviously dated and a little slow but completely serviceable even today. The system is completely self-contained so it does need map updates from time to time. OTA updates, even on wifi would be nice.
From a design perspective I have no complaints at all, it is well integrated with the car and otherwise stays out of the way. A helpful tool.
I hate radio. I don’t listen to much music. When driving I mostly listen to podcasts and audiobooks which sounds like is not really practically possible.
It has an aux cord so you can plug in a cell phone. Or you can use a USB drive to transfer files to the internal hard drive. The lack of Bluetooth Audio is the greatest flaw of the system.
It does have a "cradle" in the center console to connect a phone, I believe audio is supported by that. Unfortunately it requires an adapter and 2010 was the era of phone minification so there's not physically room for modern mega-phones to fit between the cradle headers, even if BMW kept up with adapters. There's also an iPod adapter but it uses the 30-pin plug. I haven't tried plugging in a regular 30-pin to USB A plug to the console USB port, that might work as well.
The navigation functionality is far superior to anything else I have seen.
Tesla is the exception here: they seem to have mastered making a car software experience that doesn’t suck, and they don’t even support CarPlay. But Tesla is a tech/software company that happens to make cars (of dubious build quality), I don’t think conventional automakers can replicate that.
My impression of Tesla (from driving a friend's, who is a massive Tesla fan) is that I get the feeling that the systems aren't as clever as they think they are, and it led to some "interesting" (actually downright scary and dangerous) experiences with the driver assist functions on a long distance drive we did. It wasn't the full Autopilot, just the lane following/adaptive cruise control kind of thing but we almost did go off the road at least once.
But in general with the UI, there was a lot of, "Hey, how do I do [elementary car function]" and he'd be like "Oh I think they changed that [or moved it in the menu] in the last update, uh let me have a look"...
Elon Musk's antics had already basically made me decide my next car wouldn't be a Tesla, but driving one a bit didn't really sell me on it anyway...
Yeah moving a control function in the UI of a car system through an OTA update should be not be allowed imo.
And we are not even talking about "safety critical" things like the hazards switch or parking brake or whatever. If I want to adjust the airflow to my feet by a little bit, I want to do that regardless if I'm driving or standing still. If I need to navigate a menu to do that, then I'll do that, whether I'm moving or standing still. Nobody has the patience to learn the UI up front, or pull over to navigate through a menu safely.
This dead horse has been thoroughly beaten, but please: give us physical controls! Say no to touch screens!
> It wasn't the full Autopilot, just the lane following/adaptive cruise control kind of thing but we almost did go off the road at least once.
Your friend should have warned you that there are conditions where AP is expected not to work well, they're also clearly stated in the manual. I tend to agree that Tesla oversells the AP/FSD functionality just by the name, AP should be renamed to "vision lane assist", or something along those lines.
> But in general with the UI, there was a lot of, "Hey, how do I do [elementary car function]" and he'd be like "Oh I think they changed that [or moved it in the menu] in the last update, uh let me have a look"...
As an M3 2019 owner, I recall 2 instances since 2019 where stuff was moved around a lot, otherwise it's pretty stable.
While the first big update sacrificed some navigator real estate space for non-FSD users as well, it also grouped speed, speed limit and AP limit better at the top left corner, which used to be placed further away (now I don't need to turn my head anymore, I just glance bottom-right). The second one introduced dynamic tiles at the bottom for the less used stuff (things which were otherwise hidden behind non-intuitive areas, like the T Tesla logo at the top center of the screen).
After 6~10mo ago (can't recall) they grouped all car commands in the same panel when you bring up the settings to make it easier and more consistent to access those when required.
UI has gotten much snappier since I got the car, even though it's still running on a very low-end Intel Atom chip.
My feeling is that some breakage is sometimes required to achieve better solutions, and while there's the usual outrage of "changing my workflow" ® in the beginning, Tesla UI updates are usually for the better in the long run.
> AP should be renamed to "vision lane assist", or something along those lines.
In aviation, all autopilot does is keep your plane going in a straight line at the same speed. So the use of autopilot to describe auto-cruise, lane keep assist (not just going in a straight line, but keeping inside the lane and slowing down when other cars slow down in front of you), well, an aviation autopilot doesn't go that far, so it sounds like underselling rather than overselling to me.
If Tesla is outlawed from using the term auto pilot to describe their feature, it would force the aviation industry to stop using the term as well, so I don't think the NSTB will go there, even if there are public misconceptions that auto pilot is somehow equivalent to full self driving/flying.
In aviation autopilot nowadays can do much more than just "keeping the plane straight", it can also improve stability during maneuvers, or auto-land (mostly, ILS). But even aviation autopilot has limitations, which are well understood by the well-trained officers operating the plane as their only mission.
I see these problems with the naming:
- non-technical people have a "magic" grasp of the "autopilot" word that was passed down by movies, as a "set-and-forget" magical button that will make all the problems go away
- non-technical people won't read manuals (most of them, at least), so they are not aware of limitations, and WILL get distracted thinking AP will safely operate the car for them
- Tesla's AP, as of today does NOT handle most streets in most conditions well enough, and still has some caveats on highways, which are its intended operational domain; I understand FSD would do better, but still not a set-and-forget experience
So while I agree that it's being undersold feature-wise, I really think the issue is that "autopilot" is tied to unrealistic expectations in the mind of the average person, which easily leads to dangerous situations in the case of operating a 2-ton vehicle.
Personally, I am impressed that you can say that phrase in a split second. Takes me at least a second and a half. Which is a second longer than pressing the glovebox open button in my boring old car.
I don't get that either. The rest of Tesla's UX is so good, I don't know how they botched this. Is it a cost optimization? Any PMs over there care of chime in?
edit: Locking the glovebox is a great use case, but not the typical one.
I'm not a PM, but I found this really weird initially, too. Then I realized I could start safely storing things in the glovebox conveniently - behind a code, no physical key necessary. It changed my mind and I started considering it well thought out.
I am somewhat surprised it's not one of the actions you can customize on the hotbar. I have no doubts that if people complained about it, Tesla would add it.
Can you give examples of this? I was recently looking for a car and saw the discounts and credits for a Tesla and thought it was finally time to go electric. Then I started researching the interface and saw so many people talking about how clunky it was and they decided to just use bluetooth with their phone to listen to music rather than the interface or even worse hacks where they setup a web server on their phone to mirror to the interface and have to type urls so they can use waze.
My wife has a Honda CRV with android auto and it works great when I drive it. We both use Youtube Premium (formerly Google Music) for our music and I use (soon to be going away) Google Podcasts for my podcasts. Those both work great with Android Auto. My understanding from looking it up is that it is near impossible to use non-supported software with a tesla without ugly hacks. My experience with Android Auto is good that it, or something better, is an absolute requirement on my next car. From my research, it seemed like Tesla added more walled garden annoyances than improvements.
1. The navigation works really well for me. Including routing via superchargers
2. The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)
3. The screen is very responsive. Touch UI is fast.
4. The backup and side camera view is the best I’ve seen on cars.
5. Record the last X minutes from all cameras when you honk (someone backed into my car and it’s nice to have easy access to the video footage via the usb stick)
6. Auto defogging.
7. Heating and de-icing the car from the app when I’m having breakfast.
8. Autosteer (the free included one) works surprisingly well. It handles more roads and situations than I’ve seen on other manufacturers
9. Auto detect different drivers from the phone key and sets their seat/steering/settings (and even their spotify account)
There’s dozen more small things that show the attention to detail that some car manufacturers also have in their hardware but almost never have in their software.
It’s not all perfect (eg the Spotify app could be better) but it’s a lot better than any other car or rental I’ve been in, including carplay).
2-8 do sound great. They are the reasons I was looking at a Tesla. Hadn't even heard of some of those. The car I'm looking to replace is a 2009 toyota corolla commuter car that is really starting to have maintenance issues. The right speakers even stopped working a few years ago. The speaker on my phone is better so I just put the sound all the way up and use that. The audio sucks, but it's easy. I sit down, press play, and I'm listening to what I want.
My wife's CRV is a 2018 which I only drive when we are driving long distances. Still, I just plug my phone in and all my data is there on android auto. I have starred places on google maps going back almost 15 years. I click a place on recents and it maps me there. I press shuffle on youtube music and it has all my history there to play through. Youtube music also has the download option so I can play music in non-signal areas. That was another thing I couldn't seem to find an answer for with a Tesla. Does spotify work without a signal? If so, how much storage does the tesla offer to spotify? I have multi-gigs of downloaded music on my phone. We hit 30+ minute terrible signal areas on our holiday travels to family.
The options seemed to be switch my apps to spotify/tesla navigation for "car riding" and have to double-entry everything from my home-listening or completely switchover. Which could maybe work for spotify (does that have the same option to upload your own music that google music had?), but definitely wouldn't work for tesla navigation. Then there's the privacy concerns that I'm now sharing more data with two places rather than one. Then the added monthly fee of using Tesla's data plan vs. android auto being free. All that made me think that getting a tesla would only increase my annoyances and costs rather than providing me a benefit. The advantages you listed are really, really nice, but hard to justify with the rest of it.
You're also a paying customer of one of those services that you're sharing data with. It doesn't automatically mean that they'll be any better, and Tesla has had quite a few privacy-related fuckups, but one is in the business of selling your data, the other isn't. Take it for what it's worth. Lately they've been pushing quite a lot of privacy related things, but it may just be virtue signalling on their part. One feature I really like is the ability to share a destination from Google Maps on my phone to the car and it will instantly route there.
For some strange reason the Spotify app in Tesla doens't have the option to download playlists, it will only buffer ahead and cache things. I've had it happen that it stopped playing because it lost connectivity and I tried to shuffle ahead quite a few times. I think all Teslas come with at least 60GB of internal user accessible storage, you can also expand that by just plugging in a USB-drive in the glovebox. The Tidal app in Tesla does offer offline playlists, and much higher bitrate. I think Tesla is doing their audio engineers a disservice by the atrocious bitrate that they provide through the Spotify and Apple Music app. And Tidal is borderline unusable if you want innovative and ground breaking features like Shuffle, but apparently that is coming this "holiday update".
You don't need to have a "Premium Subscription" to use Spotify or any other streaming service in a Tesla, you just set up a hotspot on your phone and it will automatically connect to it. I've also seen some people connect a mobile hotspot to the glovebox USB-port. Some of them even come with additional storage and things like internal battery so it'll stay connected even when the car powers down the infotainment system. If you have an iPhone it's a little more convoluted, but it's easily sorted out with just using a Shortcut to enable hotspot that fires automatically when it connects to your car.
Tesla does a lot of things very well, and some things just don't make any sense at all. Like when they removed the "repeat playlist" option in Spotify for a year or so. It made impossible to use shuffle, as you'd usually reach the end of the playlist within a couple of shuffles, and it would just change to radio or something. It still supported the option, I could toggle it on in the Spotify app on my phone, they just removed the UI element. Luckily it came back not that long ago.
FWIW a lot of the things in 2-8 aren't unique to Tesla.
My non-Tesla does 3, 4 (camera view seems higher res than the Model Y I test drove, although I don't find the blind spot cameras that helpful because you have to take your eyes off the road to use them), 6, 7, 8 (Although I don't have enough experience to say how Tesla's compares), and 9 (except the Spotify bit, but since I use Android Auto and anyone who DJs in my car has either that or Carplay it's a non-issue)
I was doubting for a while until I took a test drive. You can ask for the last test drive on Saturday evening and keep it till Monday morning. At least here in Belgium that works and you get to properly test it. Which helped to try out the baby and kid chairs we use.
> The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)
But do you still have a key?
My phone ran out of battery some 80 km far from home last Thursday because I forgot to charge it. I could enter my car and drive back home because I open it and start the engine with a traditional physical key.
I do have the keycard in my wallet but often travel without it. On longer trips, my wife is usually with us so we have two phone keys and the likelihood of both of us forgetting to charge are slim ( also, the wireless pads in the car is where you usually store it )
Additionally, if I were to be stranded somewhere there are 2 other people with phone keys that I could contact for them to remotely open the car, or just find a charger somewhere.
I have had more bad luck losing physical phone keys in the past.
Yeah, a card. A very inconvenient form factor compared to a key. I forgot that new cars use cards more and more. A key can be put in a pocket and never breaks. A card needs a holder to protect it.
You can always get a key fob, you just have to buy it separately.
I'll never go back to a car without being able to use my phone as a (reliable) key and store the credit card sized backup key in my wallet. Because it's just that - a backup key. In over two years I've used the key a total of zero times. And one thing I've noticed is that key fobs seems to become bigger and bigger, every year. Just look at the new Volvo key fob. It's the same size as AirPods charging case.
I bought a BMW i4, not a Tesla 3, so this is just my comparison. But Tesla software works really well, they have navigation to chargers, something that doesn’t really work in the BMW, you are pretty much on your own. They have sentinal mode, and it actually doesn’t suck like BMW’s drive recorder does. You can open your car with your phone, like for real via UWB, not just some NFC thing that works only in one place, or over the slow cellular unlock. I guess I didn’t explore the Spotify/music streaming experience.
I still chose the BMW because the better interior and build quality, but it was definitely a sacrifice.
I have an i3, pre-carplay, and I like that the computer works well with just a jog wheel.
It has a navigate to charger feature that works reasonably well (though there are too many steps to “only show fast chargers”, and many stations are broken, though hopefully the tesla supercharger deal will fix that…)
Range estimates seem to be accurate, unlike Tesla’s high-balling.
Anyway, I’m hoping they can do at least that well moving forward.
The navigate to charger lotion in BMW maps is just too hard to bother with. It’s almost better tk just ask siri to navigate to a charger of some kind. The jog wheel is nice, but I get away with voice for most functions. I hope it improves over time, especially the random GPS bug that displaces you by 100 meters and makes navigation useless.
I also own an i4 and I still prefer its navigation system to Google Maps or Tesla. Navigating to chargers works perfectly, and it notifies you in realtime if for some reason it gets occupied.
Yes, Tesla sentry mode is really good, but I really cannot live without a parking front and lateral cameras in the narrow streets of Europe. Specially without a working PDC system.
I’m very happy with my i4, best car I’ve ever owned. And much better that all my Tesla experiences.
I too appreciate my parking cameras given the tight parking situation I have here in urban Seattle. It is also sorely needed because the i4 is a huge compact while I was used to parking a smaller sub-compact.
BMW navigation system is not very good for my needs. Maybe it is just better suited to Europe? That would explain the German-accented English it uses :). Our charging networks are so few and so saturated here in the PNW that it probably wouldn't mean much anyways.
Google maps or waze are much better than the on board tesla maps. You need to pay to have traffic data on tesla, waze and Google maps gives you that for free.
You pay to have traffic visualization, but traffic data is part of the trip planning, and the navigator does reroute you on a faster road if it's available (the delta is configurable).
My main issue with spotify is that the syncronization is not great (and there are no audiobooks, at least in my market).
For example, I am listening to a podcast at work during the morning. Then some hours later I get in the car to drive home and want to continue the podcast, but often spotify would not be up to date with the current listening position in the podcast and I have to manually try and find the right location.
I do not own a Tesla, but I've seen videos that told me that you pretty much have to use it's in car navigation system, for good reason: it factors in your route to give you an accurate range estimate, otherwise the estimates can be (significantly) off. That's important given that even the best electric cars have shorter range than gas cars, and there are far fewer recharging options than there are refueling options.
It will also use knowledge about the destination to prep the car. Heading to a charger? It will prep the battery so that it’s at the optimal temperature for charging on arrival etc..
That said though, there are route planners that can give excellent range estimation (both for online and offline cars), by taking into account the terrain/temperature/etc, like ABetterRoutePlanner - ABRP
No its a car company which writes its own software. Their primary business in not software its cars. Although i agree they are not very good at it, the build quality is obviously dubious. Perhaps the Know how of old car companies + Tesla's battery and Motor tech + Software could result in an overall better product. A merger would be a net positive IMO.
Unfortunately consumers don't really punish companies for doing these kinds of things, at least I presume that's the story since high-end cars often have very shitty in-car computer experiences, like BMW or Porsche.
The infotainment screen in my Tesla is great. Just the other day I had to drive a relatives car and used google maps navigation on my phone, I was amazed at how subpar google maps navigation is compared to tesla (lacking ability to quickly overview route, missing lane based navigation, screen never auto recenters as you drive)
Both Tesla's navigation system and Google Maps suck, but in different ways.
Neither is able to suggest the best routes - Google Maps will try to make me waste 4km and 6 minutes suggesting a crappy route - only to update (showing much improved distance and ETA) when I disregard its guidance and take what road I know is more direct.
The Tesla maps are surprisingly better in this regard but they are often completely unaware of traffic or road closures (this is in Germany mind you - maybe in the US they behave better). Also they flood you with useless instructions (keep left to stay on Highway XX. How about you only tell me when it's time to leave the highway, not to remain on it?).
I just look at both in the morning, make my own opinion on what road would be best, then I close them both and use Waze for the alerts.
But for example, if I'm traveling somewhere far away, with charging stops, I _have_ to use the Tesla maps because the car will then start preheating the battery on approach to a charger.
I've tried Android Auto a couple of times and it was much worse than the BMW's iDrive for navigation and for the entertainment. Perhaps different consumers have different preferences?
That’s also my experience. However my wife still prefers to use CarPlay over iDrive, mainly because of access to messaging in WhatsApp (CarPlay reads the messages to you and it’s possible to reply back via voice to text).
I'm guessing that when buying a car most people can't afford to be picky with the infotainment system and will prioritize buying a better car over infotainment quality.
Worst-case scenario these days is not too bad either, you'll get an aux connector or somewhat stable Bluetooth (if you set it up once and avoid doing anything other than play/pause/next). Yeah, from the software engineering point of view it's slow unreliable crap, but as a consumer you have little power to fix things.
As a data point, I buy used cars because they are not a tool I use for work so they are not like my laptop. It's pointless to pay the full price for a car: it is 100% a cost, the car has not ways to give me back some of the money I spend on it.
So my cars are always about 5 or 6 years old when I buy them. I optimize for price and costs of running and maintaining them. What's important is that they handle well, brake as they should, be reasonably safe in case of crashes and that's it.
Infotainment and navigation, I put my phone on a holder and I use it. The car could be a dumb one from 70 years ago and I wouldn't notice. I only use Bluetooth to make hand free calls. If it had no Bluetooth I guess I'd have to find some solution for a noise canceling mic.
By the way, my current car came with a version of Android auto that Google stopped supporting the year before I bought it and the manufacturer never updated the car. However I don't care, my phone is always updated and it's exactly the same UI I'm used to when I'm not in the car. This beats having to learn two of them.
How long do you keep such cars? Also, 5/6 years old depending on mileage & make is usually the time for some expensive part replacements. Eg. water pump, thermostat & related sensors for BMW F30.
I drive a 2006 diesel VW Beetle. I've had it for 7 years and aside from some electrical weirdness I've only had to change the oil. It cost me $6500. the infotainment system is a CD player with an aux cable. Amazing value.
(this car pre-dates the emissions scandal, I checked.)
Do the expensive part replacements even get close to the price difference of getting a new car? What if you try to account for insurance and maintenance?
I kept one car for 11 years. I was doing very little km. I bought my current car 3 years ago. I'm doing more km now. Maybe my next car has already been sold. I'm not liking what I see around. At least the lower end cars I buy have less enshittyfication inside. My friend's Mercedes and BMWs are a nightmare. They want to do too much and in their own way. They (and their manufacturers) should accept that they are only tools like a screwdriver.
with there being a limited number of auto manufacturers, with the general consensus seeming to be that consumers should own increasingly nothing and increasingly like it, there aren’t many alternatives.
which is why it becomes less and less crazy to imagine apple offering a car subscription - might as well, they have the payment platform and the customers have already spent their anger on the incumbents. not that apple is alone.
How would you compare that with Tesla? For high end cars, I mentally compare in car compute UX to using an iPad and Tesla was the first car company that impressed me. BMW does not belong on the same tier.
I bought a 2017 Mercedes a few months ago and was disgusted to find that I was unable to update my map data beyond 2020. In the first week of ownership I had driven on to roads that didn't exist in their map.
Also, it appeared to have no network connection so would not pick routes according to traffic.
I spent $600 on an aftermarket CarPlay and Android Auto device and couldn't be happier.
I want abandonware in my car. Don't include alpha-grade software in a mid-five-figure product. If you can't get it right don't ship it.
The navigation/infotainment space is a thoroughly solved domain. We don't need biweekly OTA updates to add the latest trendy thing. I don't want controls moving around or menus changing based on a perverted engagement metric.
BMW "pathced" several mechanical features of my car. This is called a "recall". Auto manufacturers try to avoid them.
I've got abandonware in my Ford. It's got a bug in the Bluetooth stack which makes it unusable with my new phone. It's never going to be updated, so out of 2 users of that car, one can't play media and the other needs to deal with occasional infosystem crashes that require a full reset and re-pairing. You may be lucky today, but as years go by, you'll find some bugs too.
As Bluetooth standards evolve, you'll want non-recall updates in your car.
Well the car is a 2010 model year and still works as well as the day it was new. The Bluetooth might stop working at some point but 14 years seems pretty good. The infotainment system might not even have been new that year and could go back as far as 2007.
You mean a dongle to aux jack, because that's a new phone. I can also not use a cable and turn the volume up to max. Either way, that's a workaround for something that's actually broken and could be fixed with a software update.
> You mean a dongle to aux jack, because that's a new phone.
Yes, that's the way most phones have gone.
> I can also not use a cable and turn the volume up to max.
My experience with 1/8" connections is that you have two means to change the volume, the one on the source and the one on the destination. There can be some issues with driving both hot (or one hot and one weak), but you set the destination in the modest middle and it works just fine.
> Either way, that's a workaround for something that's actually broken and could be fixed with a software update.
"Workaround" is the wrong way to refer to a "just works" physical standard that functioned reliably and adequately for decades without any need for continued attention / updates.
Especially when comparing it to a sand-castle software stack.
Wireless audio protocols have a few nice situational advantages, but they have not yet really reached a point where they're suitable outright replacements, and short of attaining wireless power combined with an utterly boring level of commodified stability, it's possible they won't get there.
The disadvantage to the aux jack is I can only control volume while driving. With the built-in hard drive I can change songs as well. That is loaded from simple USB drives. 2010 was still the era of technology serving us.
I would like an update to the navigation when a road is changed though. Its things like that that have caused me to install and Android Auto head unit into my 2008 car as the built in navigation is way out of date.
I mean, GM doesn’t seem to have a reputation for building the best, most reliable vehicles as it is — even just looking at domestics (factor in imports, and there’s no comparison). Every time I shop for a vehicle, it’s crazy how GMs are almost universally lower rated than all other vehicles.
I mean, maybe they have cost on their side, but they better hope that and brand loyalty is all they need.
Maybe this was once not a major factor, and maybe it’s still not for some. But I’d say the number of people that don’t care about CarPlay or Android Auto is shrinking.
Then manufacturers realized they were losing control to Google and Apple, and want it back. So now I guess we're back to random garbage half-baked solutions that no one likes, just so they can sell subscriptions for seat heaters and music players. Back to the walled gardens everyone, move along.
I'll never buy a new vehicle again, particularly GM now, and simply stick to something older I can either put any standard double-din deck into, or a vehicle with 3rd party mods that then add Android Auto like my Infiniti that shipped with the worst infotainment system ever.