Car Navigation Systems Plot a Course Forward Against Phone Apps | Hacker News Reader

Car Navigation Systems Plot a Course Forward Against Phone Apps

nytimes.com

27 pointsuptown41 comments

Almost nothing these companies are bragging they will do in the future is stuff that phone apps cannot or will not replicate.

For example, they think that they can scrape data about traffic from thousands or millions of connected cars. Yay! But Apple and Google can scrape location data from millions of devices, and you don't have to own a car to give them useful data, they can scrape traffic flow from people riding on buses or in other people's cars.

Obviously, there are privacy and permissions issues, but on the whole I would say that the only thing propping up companies developing in-car navigation is that they help car companies make money. There is close to zero actual customer benefit. And that sounds an awful lot to me like exactly the kind of market that technology has been successfully disrupting for decades: Old-line businesses built on business models that are customer-hostile, but survived because there was no effective way to compete in a closed industry.

> For example, they think that they can scrape data about traffic from thousands or millions of connected cars.

It's not something Google/Waze could also do, it's what they already have been doing for years.

Google Maps has great traffic speed and accidents layer for all large cities in the world. And already uses it for routing, time estimates, and even calendar alerts like "leave early because of high traffic".

I was once driving on a remote two lane road outside of Palm Springs (Dillon Rd.) on my way to some BLM land for some plinking. Not a car in sight. I recall looking on google maps which happened to have traffic turned on. Up ahead on the road google indicated red! I was skeptical that there was actually traffic on this road, but was of course curious as I drove on. As I approached the “traffic” area I realized what had happened. Ahead of me in the shoulder was a bicyclist. Undoubtedly his slow speed was being misinterpreted by Google as a slow vehicle. Kinda made me chuckle.

I use both on a weekly basis.

The wife's 2016 Acura RDX (was mine) has the navigation / technology package. It's 2 screens (no idea why) where 1 controls the radio, phone, settings and the other is full time dedicated to navigation. It's often gotten confused where we actually live (there is another street with the same name a few towns over), it's slow; it often wants to take us on a less then ideal route and who knows the last time it was updated - probably never because I'm not paying the $400 / year for the service.

VS on my 2016 Mustang which Ford was kind enough to send out an update for Sync 3 + an $80 USB module upgrade to allow the car to have Carplay. I get in the car, plug my iPhone in, turn on the car, the center console immediately flips to Carplay, begins to play whatever music I left off on and Apple Maps is 1 touch away. I can tell Siri to route to where I need to go or look it up quickly. The map is always up to date; shows traffic and is quick to the touch.

I'll take Carplay over anything on the market right now. BMW charging monthly / yearly for it is bull but if I had one, I'd probably pay. I like it that much.

Naively, this is the 2nd Acura we've had back to back without Carplay and now that I use it daily on the Mustang, there will not be a third. The next car has it, or we don't purchase / lease it.

If my backup camera could route its video onto my phone, I'd never have a reason to look at or listen to the infotainment system. A camera, an OBDII dongle to see when you're in reverse and some software to manage it and stream it over WIFI would solve this.

This existed, although I believe they shut down after a year or so:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/pearls-rearvision-is-a-bac...

> Buyers of Alfa Romeo’s base Giulia model who want Sirius XM satellite radio must take the navigation system, too — at a cost of $1,900.

I wanted Bluetooth A2DP so I had to buy the navigation system and Sirus XM radio package, neither of which are features I want in my car. In fact I would probably pay money to have them removed.

> Even with their limitations, in-dash systems have some advantages. They’re convenient and uncluttered. There’s no need to find a way to suspend a smartphone and its dangling charge cable in the middle of the instrument panel. They use a vehicle’s built-in controls, and there’s no danger of running out of power.

I wouldn't say my car's layout is convenient at all. If anything it's poorly thought out and requires me to take my eyes off the road to use. Instead of dials that are easy to grope for volume and fan speed, I have 4 identical buttons with no tactile distinguishing characteristics. The 10 buttons around the navigation screen are identical and of the 10, I will only ever use 3 of them.

I would actually pay extra for a car that omitted the nav/stereo system bullshit in favor of a bluetooth endpoint that could pair with more than 3 devices and a place to plug my phone in to charge.

Also, the move in in-car systems has been to essentially mirror the phone whether through CarPlay or Android Auto. I don't see how legacy navigation systems can even come close to competing in this space

Without lifetime (and I do mean lifetime) map updates, a built-in navigation system is a complete non-starter for me.

I bought my current car with a navigation system in 2008. It's massively annoying to me that Toyota charges more for a single map update than Garmin and Tom-Tom do for a brand new GPS unit with lifetime map updates included.

Not to mention I've already got a far superior navigation system on my phone.

I keep cars for a long time. I drove my previous car for 22 years.

Toyota probably signed unfavorable deals with their OEM that require them to pay hefty royalties on every map update. The terms may have seemed reasonable at the time, and now they're stuck with them. It may not be entirely their fault.

Do you have any evidence of this, or this happening to other car manufacturers?

No, just experience in other industries.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not making excuses for Toyota. I get the same BS from my own car's manufacturer. Their map updates are more like $300, and even the dealer thinks it's a galactic ripoff.

Car Navigation Systems Arrogantly Charge Forward Against Products That Are A Decade Ahead of Them.

You know what's great about have maps on my phone? I can get out of my car and walk and still have my route mapped in. Don't even get me started about the amount of features in Google Maps vs. in-car nav.

That being said; When I'm in the car driving, using the navigation package is much more seamless than doing it on the phone. My Mercedes is all voice controlled and works very well. Press button on steering wheel -> say "Enter destination" -> say "123 main st city ville" -> Route mapped. There's a few more steps to do this on mobile, so I prefer to use the car's navigation system.

A proper solution would be let me route voice control to my phone somehow; turn the car interface into a peripheral for my phone.

> That being said; When I'm in the car driving, using the navigation package is much more seamless than doing it on the phone. My Mercedes is all voice controlled and works very well. Press button on steering wheel -> say "Enter destination" -> say "123 main st city ville" -> Route mapped. There's a few more steps to do this on mobile, so I prefer to use the car's navigation system.

I almost never route a destination while driving so this workflow seems odd to me. When I need directions I know it before I even get in the car and most of the time I have an email or text message with the address so it's literally 1-click to open maps. In addition to that it's just as easy to say "hey Siri" or "ok Google" and ask for directions as it is to press a button.

Also the voice recognition in my Nissan is somewhere between mud and potato.

Agreed. Nav systems usually don't do address lookup right, can't "take me to the nearest in n' out" and generally are years behind GMaps/AMaps UX.

They also don't know (unless they slurp) my contacts addresses - and I'm not going to willing give up that info.

Give me Android Auto/CarPlay and call it a day. I'm happy I can pull a lever on my steering wheel and let my phone guide me through the head-end display - esp. if I want to pull up directions not using car speaker and instead through my BT earbuds (think: night driving - kids asleep but I want step-by-step directions).

My mom's BMW had the most bizarre method. You'd have to search through a database of every city in the country (without narrowing it down by state first), then input only the first letter of the street, then scroll through the list to find the street you need. Simply typing the street name in full was not an option, you were allowed only one character(or maybe three, it's been a while). This was all done entirely with knobs and buttons, no touchscreen. Easily the most clunky nav system I've ever used.

It was also wildly out of date.

Needless to say, everyone who drove it used their phone, because Google Maps was already more advanced and easier to use before that car was even built.

Holy smokes - that's the same as the cheapo aftermarket GPS system my in-laws in France owned (that we borrowed while going between family houses).

Acceptable for the 800km cross-country trip but not so hot for the quick 20km outing to a new resto.

Given the drive included portions where our Free-data TMO plan didn't cover, we had to rely on that nav system for the long trips.

> Car Navigation Systems Arrogantly Charge Forward Against Products That Are A Decade Ahead of Them.

Very droll. On the nose, but also droll.

> There's a few more steps to do this on mobile, so I prefer to use the car's navigation system.

And there is no structural obstacle to this becoming even more seamless on mobile. Apple's iOS 11 already has a "car mode," and while it is highly imperfect at the moment, they are iterating a lot more rapidly than an industry that wants me to drag my car into the dealership every 12,000km for software updates.

The only structural obstacle is that in a tunnel, the car knows how far you've gone and GPS doesn't.

Virtually all phones have acceleration sensors and can/could do short term inertial navigation in tunnels or areas with poor reception anytime they want. And don't forget that phones have many different ways of getting position information: bluetooth, wifi, cellular tower triangulation, etc, etc.

I see no future world where in-car navigation could ever compete against a cell phone. For one, I replace my phone about every 2-3 years, whereas most cars have a far longer lifetime and none of the fossil burners have ever thought of having upgradability of the individual components as a selling point.

I believe in Android Auto / Apple Carplay mode, the phone gets access to that info (and a stronger GPS antenna).

GPS, maybe not. But the phone's accelerometer knows.

> A proper solution would be let me route voice control to my phone somehow; turn the car interface into a peripheral for my phone.

So android auto? Sounds like what I've got in my 2016 Astra.

Not to mention "Apple CarPlay."

And I have heard talk that 2018 will be the year of Linux on the in-car dash.

Aren’t those in car dash systems already Linux?

It was a Dad Joke. And it fell about as flat as I did this morning trying to shovel snow off a slippery wood deck.

I know for sure that the telematics systems in Chrylsers are running on QNX when I was working on them in 2012.

Other benefits of my phone for navigation? It can suggest locations for meetings/events I've scheduled in my calendar, I can send snd receive locations, all my contacts are in my phone ("Directions to Celeste's House"), and on and on.

In other words, navigation turns out to be more useful when integrated with the rest of my life, just as you say.

To update the navigational system of the car I bought 2 years ago (a 2015 model) requires me going to the dealer and spending hundreds of dollars, which is a complete ripoff compared with using Google Maps or Apple Maps on my phone.

Yeah, it pisses me off to no end when I was getting letters saying 'Act now to get a discounted price for your latest map updates! Only $99 if you order before March!'

What? I need to pay every year to have map updates, when there are so many other services that give you instant updates for free, and include way more services than you have?

Not to mention that the time estimates are horrible, the traffic routing usually makes my trip worse, and the interface is clunky.

This is a fight between smartphone-default map apps (Google Maps, Apple Maps), and other map networks that come integrated in a different product, like a car or a standalone GPS unit. The article chooses HERE to represent the latter, whose lineage includes NAVTEQ and Nokia Maps, and was bought by the German automakers in 2015 -- but NAVTEQ has been providing map data to GPS maker Garmin for a long time.

Everyone's vying for mindshare and marketshare, and machinating in ways to gain independence from companies who could become competitors. HERE doesn't have the power of being platform-default on smartphones, but does offer smartphone apps as well. Presumably, these could integrate with the fixed units to allow for seamless transfer of state. Meanwhile, Google and Apple are lobbying other automakers to defer their in-car infotainment systems to their integration instead.

In my mind, Google and Apple would appear to have the upper hand, being able to make the case that they represent a user's discretionary choice, instead of a captive platform that ships with a car. But on the other hand, as those companies have shown, the power of defaults is strong, and if HERE delivers a good experience inside cars, some people will begin using HERE on their phones as well, weakening Google and Apple's grip on the market.

The question of ongoing revenue streams adds an additional complication. If carmakers begin requiring additional, recurring fees to make use of this service, that could blow back on HERE's platform as well, because no one likes to be nickel-and-dimed where comparable alternatives exist. And in situations where carmakers charge extra for Google and/or Apple integration, their heavy-handed approach to steer people towards their own platform will evoke additional consumer ire.

I want full control of my data and information about my movements. I'm not interested in buying an expensive vehicle and then having to also pay to upgrade devices which are monetizing my data for the manufacturer.

I want to buy my wife a new car, but when I priced it out I found out it cost $3,000 for CarPlay ($1,500 for their standard navigation system, plus another $1,500 for the Car Play compatible components).

It helped me realize we don't need a new car.

I installed CarPlay in my car for $400 plus 2 hours of my time. It was a Sony unit, should come up first thing in searches.

That's if you have a standard radio. I have a Ford Focus and to replace the radio with a 2DIN unit, i need to buy a new frame and a bunch of adapters.

Or maybe you just don't need CarPlay.

Really? I just bought a 2017 Honda Civic and Carplay/Android auto are natively supported by the built-in tablet that comes stock with all Civics... and the base model doesn't have navigation built in but I haven't needed it as I always use Android auto w/ Maps/Waze.

I'd far rather my car be useful without my phone. I've switched phone platforms back and forth a number of times, and my car works as it's supposed to. The technology in phones is cheap, and it's trivial to integrate it into cars, there's no reason to go looking to Apple or Google here.

Car companies do need to get with the times on software updates being free. If they don't want to spring for embedded 4G, it's likely using your phone as a hotspot or even connecting to your home wireless when you're nearby to get updates is pretty reasonable.

In my Tesla, I usually forget I can ask it to navigate somewhere for me, and instead ask my phone. Part of this is even in the Tesla, Android still does a better job. Part of this is the Tesla is just harder to make do the job.

Unless I'm going long distance and need to route through superchargers, or know what my charge will be at the destination. Then the integration with the car is critical.

They're just thinking about this now? I switched to using my phone with Waze full time over a standalone GPS 5 years ago.

BMW latest iDrive does it quite well. Paired with the Heads-up Display and you can see directions on the windshield glass without having to take your attention off the road. I always use my car's nav over phone nav.

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