My daughter's very ordinary 10+ year old Kia Soul has a very nice navigation and media UI. It's not the base model but it's a joy to use because it's incredibly responsive and very well integrated with the car's physical buttons. The SiriusXM radio even has a built-in DAR!
replyThe Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone.
replyBut Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.
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.
replyNeed I continue? And Tesla is generally understood to pay on the lower end among those companies.
then why is it that their software is a generation ahead?
replyLeaving aside any quibbles about the quality of Tesla's offering, look up the story of CARIAD [0]. The scale and cultural inertia of OEMs is hard to overstate. That change can't happen quickly.
replyToyota had the better idea, keep the software folks an independent business unit with internal competency/ownership, and only allow them to fix future platforms. Woven is apparently having great success inside Toyota. The side effect is that those changes still aren't apparent even years later.
GM had the same idea, but killed it recently.
[0] https://www.germanautopreneur.com/p/cariad-volkswagen-softwa...
The Rivian R2 makes Tesla’s look old and Android like. It’s very slick. The only thing I miss vs CarPlay is the voice Apple Maps uses, which is more natural.
replyI 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.
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