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Comment by iamphilrae | Hacker News Reader

My brand new Toyota C-HR comes with an entertainment screen that is not Retina display. Technology that has been out for half a decade and is found in the dirt cheapest of smart phones. It honestly doesn’t surprise me that the rest of their tech is so far behind.

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Automotive grade components have to survive greater temperature extremes and vibration for 10+ years. Disposable consumer products don't operate in the same sphere. Tesla has been burned by using consumer grade screens.

Seriously... it’s just some extra pixels?! The have picked cheap components, plain and simple.

think again.

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

I tried looking for automotive grade LCDs with high DPI. Couldn't find all that much, but came across this press release from Mitsubishi[1], indicating they released something that starts to approach retina only last summer.

As mentioned, in a car you really want automotive grade components, at least due to the heat and vibration it needs to sustain.

[1]: https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2019/0423-b.html

This used to be a good excuse, but somehow it starts to ring hollow. Ipads are as near indestructible as any hardware I've seen - drop'em, scratch'em, give'em to toddlers to play with. By comparison a car screen kinda lives a sheltered life.

Cars see radically different temperatures. Park a car in Phoenix for 8 hours in the sun, or let it sit overnight in Anchorage. My iPhone can’t be left on the dash in sunny weather without overheating. Even in the Bay Area, commuting home with Waze forced me to mount it on an AC blower with the case off.

A car screen will take hundreds of thousands of kilometers worth of vibration over the expected decade+ of use, lots of direct sunlight exposure, wildly varying humidity, temperatures of anywhere between -35C and +80C and it will work just the same. What you're describing is nothing compared to that.

It has been burned, but the solution was to control the temperature of the car, not be behind by 10 years. Both have pros and cons.

It just usually sucks to pay a lot of money for a car that's so far behind all the cheap devices that I have.

You can't control the temperature in a car all the time. A car left outside in the south-west US will get very hot. Often up to 80 degrees C (170F). It's a greenhouse.

Likewise a car parked outside in Montreal in winter might reach -40 degrees C (-40F) inside.

Your electronics need to work through that entire temperature range, cope with repeatedly thermally cycling between extreme and room temperature and then keep doing it for more than 10 years.

I spent a summer in Texas where my car would hit 185F if parked in the sun during the day. Light tan Corolla with tinted rear windows, so not even near optimal in terms of retaining heat.

I baked cookies on the dash one day. Not hot enough for caramelization though so the flavor was lacking.

Surely I had covered parking most of the time.

Tesla's come by default with something called cabin overheat protection. The car will protect itself at something like 105F. It costs power of course, but I doubt many owners disable this feature.

Similarly if plugged in (which I do when I'm below -20F and not driving) it will heat thing to protect itself.

Why would someone need an incredibly pixel dense infotainment display in their car anyway? Does it show all the information I need? Does it have an easy to navigate UI? Will it last a long time and be inexpensive to repair or replace if needed? That's all I really care about for a screen that I look at maybe 5% of the time I'm in my car, because for the most part I'm looking at, y'know, the road and cars around me.

When using the screen for navigation, clarity and contrast of the map being shown is of upt-most importance, especially with the "glancing" nature one would view the map. A high-density screen could help aid this.

-Toyota is rather conservative with regards to new technology, which IMHO is part of the reason they tend to score very well on all kinds of reliability barometers.

(An almost fanatical devotion to quality and process control being another major factor!)

Chances are you will still be able to buy that entertainment screen in 15-20 years' time.

    (An almost fanatical devotion to quality and process control being another major factor!)

They call it "kaizen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

They even wrote a book in it, "The Toyota Way".

My car has a monochrome segmented LCD and physical controls that I can manipulate without looking. My friend’s low res color touch LCD is bad enough, I just know the people building these UIs now unconstrained by the physical DPI would include features that require long careful looks in order to resolve.

Glancing at the big, high-dpi navigation map and getting the info you need quickly is a pretty major feature. The Model 3 screen has a bit of this issue with buttons around the edges, but where it's important, like speed, autopilot controls, and the map, they've done well.

Every decision made on a car like that is based on cost. The C-HR is a low cost car and I'm sure the retina display is one of hundreds of cost savings decisions made. The Tesla OTOH costs about 1.5-2xx as much as what I see as the base price for the C-HR - so I'd expect more expensive components.

The touchscreen system of my Honda HRV from that I bought in 2016 is ridiculously bad.

I think the new models come with Android or Apple Car integration but mine has a UI that looks and feels from 20 years ago. Not only it's fugly, but it's slow and unresponsive. Bluetooth disconnects randomly. Sometimes the phone connects but not the audio. The volume control is a fucking touchscreen slider which is totally unresponsive. Jesus, the team that did that had no idea what they were doing.

Touch screens in Subarus, BMWs, Lexus, and Fords (the ones I've personally tried) are laughably bad. Like 10 year old phones, of even older tables like the Nokia 770 tablet (2004 ish).

The Tesla was the first UI I tried that felt as good or better than this years phones. Nice large, clear, color display. Fast UI, pinch and zoom, etc. I do wish they spent a bit more on ram/SSD to keep a better local cache. Seems silly to zoom in, then zoom out and have to wait for the infill.

Automotive grade matters:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

How often do you replace your phone? How often do you replace your car?

Larry Ellison and Tesla definitely want you to replace your car like your phone.

Exactly that my point. My car is brand new, the model is brand new, yet it’s screen looks like it’s out the bargain basement of an LCD factory. In 5 to 10 year’s time when I replace the car, it’ll look even worse!

> In 5 to 10 year’s time when I replace the car, it’ll look even worse!

Not to be pedantic, but it will be the same usable screen, you will just have been sold higher expectations by then. An unfortunate byproduct of progress. Things are good enough until one day they aren't :)

That works the other direction - because of this reason, cars need to have high-end components (in e.g. display resolution) in order to be future proof; because if your phone resolution is horribly obsolete you just replace the phone, but if your car built-in screen is horribly obsolete, then you're still stuck with it. It's unacceptable for a brand new car to use obsolete tech because it won't be replaced any time soon.

why not just make the screen a module that can be replaced or upgraded, such as by inserting a fresh iPad every few years.

I bet your C-HR didn't cost +$40,000.

£35,000... so yeah, it did

Should have buy a Tesla Model 3

None of the Teslas have Retina displays (> 200ppi)

Retina displays, at least at their intended meaning depends on the distance the display is meant to be viewed. So a phone you might well read at 2 feet needs quite a bit more PPI than a car display.

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