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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

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.

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> 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.

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

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).

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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