On the other hand, dealerships would rather you keep bringing your car back for repairs and maintenance for 10+ years.

This was a fruitful conflict for the consumer until dealerships started steering buyers away from EVs.

They want everyone to, but they also know that the cost of cars, it's not realistic for that to happen. The only way even people on the upper middle class can afford to be buying or leasing cars every three years is because at the end of those three years the car still has a lot of value left to sell on to someone who is more middle class. And that middle class person will likely sell it again to someone who is a little bit lower down and at about 10 to 12 years it finally reaches someone who is poor.

The only way someone could buy a car more often is if they became a lot cheaper. That would mean doing away with a lot of the luxury parts of the car that are where the profit is.

They’re working on it. I follow a mechanic on YouTube who has shared dozens of examples of manufacturers seemingly intentionally shipping deeply flawed components for seemingly no reason other than to push the average lifespan of a vehicle back downwards from the high levels we’d reached by about 2012. Cars are being junked with less than 100k miles because the original parts fail, replacement parts are hard to get, and now manufacturers are making it so you need an expensive piece of software which they completely control to program a new part to the car, without which, it’s a brick. So essentially they can drop support for a car from that software, and make it near-impossible to replace those parts even if someone reverse-engineers aftermarket parts.

I’m sure they would, but they also know their new car prices would be unsustainable if you couldn’t sell your old car… and that means everyone in the second hand car market is running stale infotainment stacks

Current State of Chinese EV Manufacturers

Make them cheaper and I’m game.

Updating the infotainment head unit on most newer vehicles is effectively impossible due to the way they're tightly integrated into the rest of the vehicle's systems and controls.

To be honest, Tesla is a computer with a car as an add on. That’s why it works.

Traditional companies do it the other way around.

Pretty much every major manufacturer has a bay area satellite office these days. Toyota has a research center in San Ramon and a woven office near the broadcom campus in Palo Alto. GM has an office in SOMA and in mountain view. Ford has an office literally a block away from Tesla HQ. Mercedes used to be near Cariad at moffet field, but now they're down by SJC. Nissan is in Santa Clara.

Need I continue? And Tesla is generally understood to pay on the lower end among those companies.

I think more often, traditional car companies don’t have in-house talent to work on their infotainment… that’s contracted out to the lowest bidder, to predictable result.

It’s federal regulations. If the reverse camera screen doesn’t appear quickly enough, the car gets recalled and fixed. This has happened to many manufacturers.

Ford, Toyota, Lexus, etc. This notice from Tesla actually specifies the regulation:

> On affected vehicles, upon vehicle power up, a certain software configuration may prevent camera streams from being sent to the MCU for up to 11 seconds, causing a loss of rearview image for up to 11 seconds for drivers who shift into reverse during this time, which does not comply with FMVSS 111, S5.5.3.

https://www.tesla.com/support/recall-loss-of-back-up-camera-...

AFAICT, they always run in the background anyway. CarPlay is mostly just a pass through canvas rendered on the phone. The system can decide at anytime to overlay something on the CarPlay canvas.

Whats even less convenient is opening up Spotify on a road trip to listen to some Sum 41, and finding out most of their catalog has been removed.

I agree that CDs have too much friction though. Theres no easy pathway from “I like this album” to listening in the car/stereo. Especially for someone who is constantly discovering music and keeping up with new releases from artists.

First of all, not all releases are even available on CD. Even if they were, I would be spending thousands of dollars per month for the amount of music I listen to. Not to mention the lead time from ordering CDs which could take a couple weeks or more to arrive. And then I can’t even listen in my new car anyway cause there’s no CD drive.

I like hi-res lossless audio files. I can load them up on a USB and plug it into the car. I don’t have to mess around with Bluetooth at all. It’s easier to get the music too. And it sounds better. And it can’t be taken away. And is cross platform. And its free!

Btw I like supporting artists, especially the less popular ones. If I like your stuff, Ill buy some merch. But thats after I have the music.

Not GP. But a decade ago, my brother’s car didn’t have bluetooth. We burned down a few mixes on CD and that was ok for long trek during town. He replaced that unit but we still used those CD from time to time. It was simpler than deciding which phone to connect.

Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify

> And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.

When it comes to playing music from phones in cars, connection type seems to matter more than the source, and iOS has some weird built-in sound normalization only for CarPlay that drives me crazy.

In my Audi A3 (2018), if I connect my iPhone 12 Mini via AUX or Bluetooth, sounds works perfectly fine. Same when playing via CD or USB stick inserted into the car, no problem. FM radio also works well, regardless of volume.

However, if I play music via CarPlay (Spotify [lossless], YouTube, on phone .flac files, etc) some built-in sound normalization seems to kick in and suddenly it ruins the music when playing even slightly louder.

I've tried for years to figure out what the hell is going on, tried every setting under the sun, but cannot get it to work so only thing left is some built-in sound ruinification ("normalization") that Apple does, only when played via CarPlay, not when playing via AUX or Bluetooth.

Seems to happen with every car I try it with, but I never tried a different phone. So right now I'm choosing between being able to have GPS or listen to music properly, as I cannot do both at the same time...

My 2012MY car has Bluetooth, but only for calls/interruptions not for music so I've been using USB sticks still. It has a navigation system but the map DVDs are so weirdly expensive that I have never updated the maps. I'm at the point where I don't always trust the nav system to get me somewhere and use my phone. I leave the car's map up if I want to glance at it to double check, but also assume some of the roads are wrong now. The biggest thing I miss is "next turn info" in the driver cluster, but the Apple Watch has a version of that. It's still less convenient to glance at my watch instead of the driver cluster, but still better than glancing at my phone or having to mount my phone somewhere.

CarPlay sounds fantastic but right now all the manufacturers I'm looking at for "next car" don't support it. I keep thinking if I never experience it first hand I'll not be disappointed if the "next car" doesn't have it. Bluetooth for music might be enough of an upgrade for me. It seems interesting to me this pendulum swing in "every car has CarPlay" to "manufacturers don't trust CarPlay" has happened within the time period of me owning a single car. It probably says something about the car life cycle.

Seconding this. Who knew that the time an old CRT took to warm up would seem like an instant compared to the boot time of a 75” flatscreen introduced 35 years later? :[

I miss dumb TVs so much.

Your comment got downvoted for being flippant but I agree. It's an interesting discussion but it really comes off as grandstanding. Doesn't address the main thrust of the article nor the comment to which it replies.

Some manufacturers are attempting to address this via apps and account syncing, which I think is still much worse than carplay/AA.

My Audi has user profiles and they can’t even get that idea right - for example, a key cant be assigned to a user permanently, it just defaults to the most recent user. So if she hands you her keys to borrow her car because you forgot yours, then her key is now your key until she switches it back. This would be minor except it takes like 30 seconds to “load” settings whenever you switch users… it is like they are being read from a freaking floppy disk or something.

> You get any music/podcast/any-other-audio continuity with just Bluetooth.

Tesla bluetooth UI is pretty ass, actually.

Agreed, if you’re a single-app user then something like Spotify works just as well, as long as they do a great job of maintaining to-the-second sync across devices. Audible does a good of that as well.

That just puts you in the space of needing all apps to be available on all devices.

Does the car support different Spotify accounts on each driver profile? If not then you can say goodbye to personal playlists and favorites and podcast progress…

That way also makes it mandatory that you pay for the redundant car data plan that most people wouldn’t need but which they so badly want you to buy for another $30-40 a month.

Or the aux port.

And use the phone’s UI for anything more complex the pause/skip?

Fully agree on screen size. In my car the dash screen over twice the physical size of my iPhone 16 Pro Max and is much easier to read maps from at a glance.

Can't speak for Carplay, but Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit. The car's (an Audi) system does not, but it fails on many other levels. Both make me angry, albeit for different reasons.