I’m sure they are trying and it has gotten slightly better lately - but it’s still not great imho. If they really want to do it better than Apple etc., they seriously need to up their game - and I really wish they would, but I don’t see that happening, the cost is too high.
I have a newish car (2023 make) with an Android based infotainment system: the built-in maps move so slow, no online updates (I have to use a stick to update them once a year) and so on. Basically they put it there I think out of habit, not that the majority of their customer demand in-car navigation as a must to buy it.
Some brands don't even do OTA updates, so you'd have to get your car in for a service if there's a new feature or bug fix in an update you care about. I'd never want to do that for a map fix when I could just use Carplay where Google Maps (or whatever else) has already fixed it.
And even if they do OTA updates, they won't be updating those maps in 10 years, much less 20.
It's a real competition, not sure who would take home the gold.
> I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years
They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group.
Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels.
I don’t pay for any Tesla subscription services, but I do not miss Carplay. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there was/is no equivalent car at that price with Carplay.
Rivian is turning away potential lifetime customers because they want to force customers to pay for another cellular data plan and get their cut.
Basically despite the popularity the market seems to be moving against it slowly. And the more those cars succeed the more other auto makers will be willing to follow.
Which does sort of get slightly to the heart of some recent things that the dealer model in the US has always been sometimes antagonistic to consumers, EVs make that worse, and it may be time for brand new dealer regulation. (Though that alone won't address the subscription fees because car companies will want recurring revenue with or without dealers.)
What is this, the 60s? Modern gas cars are so computer controlled that the concept of a "tune-up" effectively no longer exists, and they go 10,000 miles between oil changes so most people don't even average a single oil change every 6 months. EVs are even lower maintenance, but the difference isn't nearly as big as you're implying.
Examples: self-ordering kiosks at restaurants, every change made at every airline in the last 15 years, bandwidth caps at ISPs, “resort fees” at every hotel, tipping for car services, etc.
They know that since there aren’t many options, it doesn’t matter if customers all hate it, as long as they have no choice. The automakers (at least in their fantasies) smell blood in the water for the idea of CarPlay/Android Auto, and want to kill it if they can.
Curious if anyone has been able to calculate the sales and profits surrendered by the likes of GM and Rivian due to this switch. (My guess is it’s low.)
If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent
Actually, Tesla is apparently planning to add CarPlay support via a software update.
It hasn’t happened yet, as apparently it’s been waiting on a new feature from Apple which will allow navigation data to be shared/synced between CarPlay and the car’s self-driving system.
This Route Sharing feature was announced at WWDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwG0I8UGjg&t=771s
I've only had Android Auto in my own vehicles, and while it hasn't been as buggy, it feels slow. I never use it anymore.
Their homemade infotainment system prior to CarPlay was awful, and has an overflow error which hits me about once every 6 months which requires pulling the fuse to hard reset it. As far as I can tell they keep adding new songs to a stack, and never flush it so at some point you'll reach the end of a song and it won't play any more. Once you reached that you can only use the phone function, attempts to use music result in you getting your Bluetooth connection terminated.
It was always stable for me, just sluggish.
If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.
The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.
I haven't seen a broad range, but Mazda seems very fast and reliable.
Chevrolet (prior to recent models that drop it) and Honda do it well.
I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.
I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.
fun car to drive too. zoom zoom :)
Porsche sells head units with car play for their cars going back to the 1960’s. I think they look great.
https://vehicle-accessories.porsche.com/prod/pag/Vehicle/Acc...
Like you have this 30 year old car with a pristine wooden trim where all components align nicely in design and you decide to ruin it for the convenience of having notifications in your face while driving? A phone holder looks much less invasive.
GM just wants to extract a pound of flesh. All are companies making dumb decisions by ignoring what customers want.
It will cost them customers. My company buys like 10k cars a year and we make CarPlay a requirement. We see it as a safety and productivity issue. We want employees using maps to navigate and avoid hazards, but don’t want them operating our vehicles unsafely.
Personally, it would be a long shot for me to buy any GM product due to high depreciation. The CarPlay/Android Auto thing disqualifies them.
https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/804562/gm-apple-carp...
My vehicle doesn't support the carplay to hud stuff, but that's okay. The thing is... when my car stops getting map and traffic updates, I will still be able to switch to carplay for at least the command screen presenting information. I intend on keeping this vehicle for a long time, so that's important to me.
On top of that, carplay offers better bitrate than bluetooth.
For people that wish to keep a vehicle for a long time, carplay/android auto isn't just a convenience anymore. With the increased integration of headunits, aftermarket becomes a tougher sell.
Why not just name the brand?
Could be an Alpina
I would be shocked by the number being that high because while iOS has a slim majority of the market share, it's nowhere near 79%.
These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.
Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.
Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.
Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.
Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.
As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary
I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.
To quote a wise man:
>> We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.
>>We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.
These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market.
Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies.
Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise.
Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping?
How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over.
Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils.
Google and Apple are not good companies.
You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.
You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple.
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...
What’s your point?
(I will, apparently, never buy a car)
But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.
So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility
Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?
Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.
My car will not exceed a certain speed if TPMS is malfunctioning.
But then again, I am old enough perhaps to have been taught to regularly check your tires before driving to begin with.
Real TPMS sensors inside the wheel give much more accurate information.
There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).
"No antenna/modem I can't readily remove" might be _slightly_ more achievable.
Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.