Toyota joins Ford's infotainment fight against Google, Apple

I have a toyota, and the system in it is pure junk. I only use it as much as I need to interface with my phone. It has a navigation system (a very expensive upgrade forced on me by the dealer as part of their package bundling strategy) that really sucks.

I vowed this: I will never buy another car that does not support CarPlay. If I have to, I'll go to older cars and buy used and retrofit a third party carplay system in it-- hell going to CarToys and having them do that would be a lot LOT cheaper than what I paid for the useless navigation system.

Car dealers (And everyone else hardware oriented it seems) can't make decent software... barely anyone but Apple can.. so why they think they can force proprietary systems on us an d make us think its "choice" is beyond me.

Furthermore the only reason CarPlay exists is because Apple is dong the car companies jobs for them (since they suck at software, and Apple does not.) IT's a very nice system designed to be flexible... the car makers should be ecstatic that the experience in their cars is no longer so subpar.

Remember, this is an industry that wouldn't give us audio in, let alone bluetooth for decades. (People were using walkmen and CD players in the 1980s. Audio In plugs only became common in 2010 IIRC)

Toyota can sign onto this open source choice-- that's fine, but if they don't also offer CarPlay, then they lose me as a customer.

And I've been driving toyotas for over 30 years.

I'm really glad someone's pushing an open source option here. I was pretty concerned it was going to be CarPlay this or Android Auto that alone. Ford also, I believe, said all of their cars in 2017 will support CarPlay and Android Auto as well, which means consumers should have options.