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I have a stupid question: Why is the user interface on a $30K car so bad compared to a $99 smart phone you can buy at the drug store?

What is with the garbage they call software these days? The response time on some of these in-dash systems can be measured in seconds.

You're comparing two vastly different things. Maps for Google (I assume people are referring to google maps) is a very important part of its business, up there with gmail.

But maps for car companies is an afterthought, a secondary luxury feature.

You can't expect car companies to drop billions on mapping and full time software devs in perfecting the navigation system.

The way I see it, the best way would be for them to use google maps in their car. There'll probably be a slew of privacy issues with that though, because you can close the maps app but it'll be more difficult to control the GPS system build into you car.

Sure, but I expect Google could make a kazillion dollars with some kind of licensing deal to provide Android and a stripped down offline version of Google Maps as a backup if there's no data available to car manufacturers.

Customizing an existing Android-for-cars platform sounds like a way better plan than whatever junk these manufacturers are shipping today. I've seen better systems in the 1990s in terms of responsiveness and performance. The only thing consistently worse than the UI in cars is the UI in set-top boxes which I can only presume are designed and implemented in North Korea and intended to run on CPUs made in 1985.

Apple is probably working on this exact thing, so I'm surprised Google hasn't made any inroads here. They can take more chances than Apple can.

>some kind of licensing deal to provide Android and a stripped down offline version of Google Maps as a backup

I don't think a default offline android will ever be in the picture. If everyone is offline, how will it make money? (android is free, so its far fetched to think it will start charging for that). It is risky for google to just give away lot of map data. Google spent a lot of money trying to acquire it. If it starts distributing it in a nice little package, people will start flashing their in-car devices with it.

I refuse to believe that Google can't pre-fetch ads and monetize their maps in other ways. Want your company logo to appear on the map itself? Pay up. I'm sure fast food chains and places like Starbucks would fork out to get custom pins.

Garmin has tons of map data too, and they "give it away" when you download it for your device. The offline mode might not have all the detail of the live version, but it could be good enough for travelling in remote areas without reception.

Development and support lifecycles for automotive systems are much longer than consumer electronics. They probably started speccing it out and developing hardware 10 years ago and will support it for the life of the vehicle, whereas that cheap phone may never receive an update after the day you buy it.

A lot of that comes down to the fact that people have a much higher expectation for a car than a phone: if the map in your car fails due to some weird bug, the potential downside is a product recall and lawsuits; if the maps app on that phone has the same bug, they might just point you at the you-get-nothing EULA or suggest you download the latest Google Maps app or buy a new phone instead.

This is why things like Apple's CarPlay / Android Auto make so much sense since they're basically just a remote UI for your phone: the functionality requirements are orders of magnitude simpler, you can upgrade independently, and the car manufacturer isn't on the hook if you install a navigation app with a bug.

Because the smartphone software is being continuously iterated and is critically evaluated by a billion people on a daily basis.

The car software was customized for that particular vehicle's combination of knobs and buttons, will be a check-box on the feature list, doesn't have any alternatives (except the phone) once you've bought the car, is lacking real-time traffic and constant map updates, was designed five years ago, was sold from a tier-two supplier to a committee at a tier-one, who sold the whole instrumentation package to an OEM, is burdened by safety and legal requirements (the vehicle must be in park, because you can't know whether it's the driver or the passenger doing the programming) ...

The problems are numerous. Two things seem like a possible fix:

1. Let it hook up to your home wifi or tether to your phone. We're close to having phone data plans that can handle that in the US. 2. Provide two things: A standard set of controls (wheel, buttons, touchscreen) and an open app store. Android or iOS compatibility would be nice for developers.

Together, these would mean that even if their own developers didn't get a good solution in place, the market could fix it later.

I would guess because the in-car navigation is a relatively new thing to car companies, and largely outside the specialties they've developed.

Ask a car company to design a useful and functional suspension system, an engine, a transmisison, a brake system, and they'll have little trouble doing so. These are all things that rather fundamental to having a functional car, and the car companies have had decades to work out the various difficulties in engineering and building such things.

However, a nav system is not (yet) a hard dependancy of a functional car. As such the man hours that car companies (or their contractors) have put into their (non-essential) nav systems likely pales in comparison that Google has put into maps.

The CPU, Display, etc of a car is designed extremely conservatively. Cars lasting 20 years are not uncommon, vibration, temperature extremes, and direct physical abuse (kids, fingers, ice cream, feet, fists, pounding, etc). Not to mention being turned off for months. Car buyers are also pretty sensitive about monthly costs (thus no data connection).

Your smartphone is designed to die around 2 years (expoxied battery), is designed for something like 40F - 100F, and will survive a light rain if you are lucky. All the while charging you $50 a month.

The 2 year phone replacement cycle used to be driven by innovation and large performance/capability increases. Which have pretty much stopped. 2 year contracts on sponsored phones used to drive them as well, mostly stopped. So manufactures seem to have decided on making phones 0.6mm slimmer and expoxing in the battery to drive the replacement cycle.

Swapping out a unit every 2 years (or why it craps out) for $200 sounds like a good deal compared to a terrible one that lasts 20 years and costs $10000 to replace.

You just made a great argument for investing MORE in GPS software in a car than in the phone: get it right the first time so you aren't stuck with useless software for two decades–that's a waste of everyone's time and money.

I'm all for awesome car nav in a car. Nice touch screen, fast updates, current traffic, up to date maps, etc.

Unfortunately every car I've seen (including some rather expensive cars) look like Maemo Mapper from my ancient (pre-android pre-iphone) Nokia 770 tablet.

However I'm weird, I have a note 4 with a replaceable battery, wireless charging, 3GB ram, and a microSD slot. A phone that could easily last 5 years. It's VERY hard to find similar on the market today.

Unfortunatley cars need to get over NIH for software. I'll admit CarPlay/android auto seems like the way forward.

> and direct physical abuse (kids, fingers, ice cream, feet, fists, pounding, etc)

Considering that tablets in the hands of babies are commonplace (with special distraction apps) it seems that phones / tablets have or need to have this too.

Software is the life blood of your smartphone. It's probably one of the reasons, if not the most important reason, that you bought the phone. If it's no good, you probably won't buy that brand of phone again. Software is a primary focus of the company that provides it, software is seen as a key differentiator, and it's taken seriously. Market researched, designed, tested, iterated on.

The software in your car is just another of the thousands of line items on the bill of materials, along with brake calipers and lug nuts. The car company sourced it from the cheapest supplier that could manage to sign a contract and barely throw something together--and did so 5 years before the car was even built, using even older technology. Whoever actually wrote the software may be several tiers down the supply chain and have no idea what the end user wants. They're implementing from a list of requirements someone from the vendor wrote, then it's off to supply the next vendor. Not to say one's software developers are any better or worse, but the mentality is totally different. Software is a cost to minimize and, if possible, mark up when selling.

Check out the http://maps.me/en/home app - it gives you offline routing using OpenStreetmap data on your phone.

Google Maps also supports offline downloads, but from what I remember, they expire every 30 days, so you need to keep re-downloading.

HERE Maps / HERE WeGo (whatever the hell it's called now) has supported offline map downloads from day one, between every Windows / iOS / Android phone I've owned I have had the entire US downloaded from day 1.

+1 for maps.me, I've been using it for more than a year in multiple European countries and it's been rock solid, even if it sometimes takes a while to get a fix (though that's probably more of a problem with my phone than with the app).

> However, once out of the city, and cellular data ceases to be a thing, Google maps and similar applications built with an assumption of an always-available Internet connection become kind of useless. Yes, you can add maps for the areas you are planning to be to your offline areas, but that requires planning ahead. And if you ended up somewhere you didn't plan to be, well, good luck.

I'm one of the few who still uses a Nokia smartphone (from before the deal with Microsoft), and it has an application called Here maps that allows you to download maps for offline use. I have all of the US, Canada and Mexico pre-loaded into it. It takes around 3 GB of space on the phone IIRC and I haven't had any issues with lack of map data at least in the areas I drive (plenty of which do not have adequate cellular signal on any network).

It also exists for Android and iOS now. Offline navigation included.

I realize this isn't a perfect counter, but Google Maps (on Android, and probably iOS) allows you to download "offline areas", and you can store just about many of them as your phone has storage for.

This means that as part of your trip preparation, you can download the maps and use them on your trip in the boonies. I don't know how well it _uses_ them, nor what amount of data connection it still wants, but it saved us a bunch of mobile data usage on our last trip.

The offline areas are useless. They are basically just prefetching the map-tiles. You can't do anything while not online, not search in the offline area, map a route or anything like that.

Here maps blows this out of the water in comparison.

Are you sure? Have you tried this recently? I've been navigating without a signal and asked for the nearest gas station and it still found it for me.

> You can't do anything while not online, not search in the offline area, map a route or anything like that.

That's not true at all: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Plat...

That used to be the case but a year or two ago they vastly expanded the offline functionality.

I find google maps offline support pretty good. Seems pretty smart with caching, and if I'm going somewhere in the middle of nowhere without a signal I'm usually using the navigation to get there. As soon as you ask for a route it preloads all the maps.

I usually plan my routes while on wifi (restaurant, bar, home, or work) to avoid any cellular data charges. Similar for music and podcasts I use for driving.

I have 5 countries worth of OpenStreetMap on my phone, that at least covers the "seeing a map" part. (I haven't tested routing with it)

There are offline mobile navigation systems that are easier and cheaper to keep up to date than the one in your car. For example, Sygic provides free updates once you purchase the initial license.