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Oh, and the maps were always out of date.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.e. it's not about being a fan of particular brands, it's a self-interested desire for a decent UX/platform.

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.

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.

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.

I have little compassion for poor GM not being able to upsell me a touch screen system that doesn’t work

They sold a lot of nav units that way (and that’s about the only way, IMO).

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.

I like and will always prefer that I can get into any vehicle with CarPlay/Android Auto and trust that my phone is not giving out any information.

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.

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.

We ended up buying something else that was much more comfortable and better designed (including CarPlay!) and haven't regretted it.

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.)

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.

apple is a hardware company and manages to buck this trend.

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.

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?

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.

Should the car already come with it installed? Yes. Is it a big deal to rectify? No.

I mean, that's absolutely fair - I'm just saying that this is such a trivial issue to fix that it's not even worth worrying about(IMHO).

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.

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.

And what about switching drivers and quickly switching phones? Or just having the passenger quickly switch to their music.

Every driver (me and my wife) is in the system and car selects the iphone available in the car, but I can also switch it manually if required.

The passengers have in general to stay off my infotainment system, they can do whatever they want in their own car :)

Most car trips are under an hour long, and many phones have batteries that last 18-24 hours.

Personally, I mostly never use a car charger unless my phone missed the wireless charger that night.

Not really sure why!

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.

It's not impossible, just a very annoying way to control something precisely.

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!

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.

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). ;)

Does that work with foreign titles? Dragostea Din Tei? 爱的就是你?

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.

https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/tutorials/Customizing_Dra...

Obviously, that solution will still work today.

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

It's just not reliable enough for everyday use.

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.

I bet some other cars have poor HID but here they put the work in and it is good.

Also, as I stated, I'm perfectly fine with the out-of-the-box experience of the infotainment in both my cars.

There's radio, there's maps, that's all I really need.

Spoken by someone who's never had to troubleshoot HDCP handshake issues with hdmi cables.

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?

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.

And MOST is a different topic.

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.

On the other hand I will only buy a car where the car is a BT audio unit and control head and nothing else. Everything more than that sucks.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I want in a car's "infotainment" center is that it doesn't have one in the first place. I can supply whatever I need on my own.

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.