I've personally just bought a car from 2012 with no infotainment systems at all, and I also only miss bluetooth with my phone. That's it.
Am I missing something big or is it really just marketing?
Yes, you are. I had nothing more advanced than Bluetooth, drove a rental car with Android Auto support for a week, and immediately went out and replaced the head unit in both of my vehicles with one that supported AA and Carplay.
The most obvious benefit is navigation. You get the full power of Google/Apple maps in real time, and you never have to pay your car OEM for updates.
Navigation is also integrated with everything else. It knows that I have an appointment on my calendar in half an hour and suggests that as a destination without me having to retype it. It knows that in the mornings my most likely destination is "work" and my most likely evening destination is "home". It knows what brewery I like to go to on Saturday afternoons and suggests that too.
Voice control is another huge one. I don't have as much experience with Carplay, but with AA I can use Google Assistant for nearly everything and keep my eyes on the road.
It makes the connections trivial. Most modern systems should support wireless Android Auto - when I get in the car it connects over WiFi automatically without me doing anything. Even on older vehicles I plug in one USB cable and am good to go. Compare this to my bag of hardware I bring on trips where I'll have a rental car - you need to find a mount that works (sometimes a.dashboard suction cup, sometimes a vent clip), get the phone in a good angle where you can see it and it can get a good GPS signal, go into the car and pair it to Bluetooth, attach the charging cable and make sure it's not getting caught on anything, and so on.
For calls and texts, it just works. I've fought with Ford Sync and other proprietary systems just trying to get it to recognize names. The stock unit in my Subaru was so bad that it couldn't keep "Firstname Last name" and "Othername Last name" as two separate identities because they sounded alike, so I had to map half my family to Harry Potter characters. With Google/Apple, no such problem - just say "Call Firstname Last name" and it works every time.
The system integrates with whatever background noise you want - music, podcasts, and so on. It makes everything automatic and painless.
Android Auto gave new life to my old cars
I know it makes me terribly old-fashioned, but god that's horrifying.
Yes, well that's exactly what it's doing.
A local-only solution would of course be a different story. But even if such a thing existed, with suitably ironclad security for such incredibly sensitive data, the mere creation of that data is a liability that many might opt out of if they had the choice - like taking nude pictures, or logging your location at all times.
I have Location History turned off in my Google Account and this feature still works. It might work better if I let it use history, not sure - but it absolutely works without it. I do have Search History turned on, so I could hypothesize that it's able to use things I've searched for in the past at certain times, but it's not using my location.
Not for Apple. Siri suggestions are learned on device and end-to-end encrypted when shared with your other devices: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/tell-siri-about-yours...
I'm similar to the parent; I have a "dumb" head unit with an aux cord + dongle. I suppose one benefit would be if it could suggest faster routes around traffic or detours.
Even when I know where I'm going, it's very useful to have an accurate ETA. If I get a call, I can tell someone quite precisely when I expect to arrive.
[0] I usually left halfway through rush hour, most accidents seemed to occur just before I left but I never crunched the numbers so just an observation.
I rarely drive anywhere that I don't already know how to get to. I certainly don't need a navigation system to get to work, home, my favorite bar, the homes of friends or family, the local supermarket or other stores I frequent, etc. I only need navigation a handful of times a year, and even then, I usually wish I'd reviewed and memorized the directions ahead of time rather than relied on blindly following step-by-step directions.
I don't need or want voice control of the basic car systems. Give me traditional knobs and sliders. The tactile feedback is better and less distracting than any visual feedback. Voice commands have gotten pretty good, but I still find I have to repeat myself often enough to be frustrated. And why should I have to turn the radio down in order to adjust the air conditioning?
Touchscreen displays in cars are unnecessary and distracting. You should never be looking at one. You shouldn't need a mount for your phone because you shouldn't be looking at your phone. You shouldn't need a touchscreen because you should be using knobs and sliders and other controls that are easy to find without looking and provide tactile feedback.
There's no need to view, listen to, or reply to messages while you're driving. It's dangerous, even hands-free. You shouldn't even be having voice conversations while driving. Sure, we all do it from time to time, but it should be rare and under exceptional circumstances. It's dangerous and unnecessary. Pay attention to the damn road.
I do agree that for car functions I like physical knobs, but for infotainment? being able to say "hey siri play X" is awesome.
> There's no need to view, listen to, or reply to messages while you're driving. It's dangerous, even hands-free. You shouldn't even be having voice conversations while driving. Sure, we all do it from time to time, but it should be rare and under exceptional circumstances. It's dangerous and unnecessary. Pay attention to the damn road.
You know people are going to do it, so it should be made less dangerous, no?
This just means that you're blindly following older, possibly out-of-date directions. What happens when you discover that a road is closed? Do you pull over, pull out your maps, and try to guess what the next best path is, possibly involving a fair amount of backtracking? I've done that before - I drove east to west across the US with just printed maps - and it's not anything I look back on with nostalgia.
I use Google Maps navigation from time to time and I get that it can be helpful negotiating new territory. Of all the newfangled gadgets in cars, that's the one that has the most value, but it should be a supplemental tool; you shouldn't be lost and hopeless without it.
Reliance on online nav systems is an excuse for poor roadwork planning and lazy accident management. I want robots and helicopters to take of the roads as I know them, not constantly updated paths that need to be tracked. Learned mental map of the territory should prevail. Else we'll end up being floated over non-euclidian chaotic trajectories for reasons of economic efficiency.
1. Map apps give duration information about different routes - this is interesting as it calibrates my own mental model of potential routes. However I also often optimise my routes for things apart from time.
2. I am in a hurry, and map apps are better at avoiding roadworks and traffic jams than my own mental model. I ignored a route suggestion the other day because I thought I knew better, which delayed me by 15 minutes because a flyover I wanted to use was temporarily closed.
3. Map Apps are great when I am travelling across town on a route I would rarely drive, so I am unfamiliar with the possible routes (e.g. I often go to A, and I often go to B, but I rarely go from A to B).
4. Edit: and map apps are fantastically safer in cities or towns you have no familiarity with. You can pay attention to your driving and not be distracted looking for street names or other route waypoints.
> It's dangerous and unnecessary. Pay attention to the damn road.
Opinion or fact? My opinion is that voice directions makes it possible to pay attention to the traffic, and I am not stressed, and I don’t have to have uncertainty about road choices (which is safer). It certainly makes looking for unknown street numbers or businesses safer - scanning for street numbers or business frontages is very distracting.
Use your tools sensibly and safely - don’t use them like a fool.
Unfortunately I'm clearly missing something, because it looks like a lot (and I mean a lot) of effort is going in these entertainment systems just to have a map (which you probably already have on your phone), a touch screen (which you should NOT use while driving) and to read/reply to texts (which you should NOT be reading/replying while driving).
Just to be clear, the most usual use-case is maps and music. So, we could say a smartphone paired with the radio via bluetooth solves 90% of the problems with maybe 5% of the effort and technology required. But I guess nowadays Bluetooth is just too uncool to justify 30k for a car.
EDIT: More than anything, from the answers in this discussion I see people have kind of a feticism to over-optimize every part of their lifes. I undertand it in a work enviroment, but to get groceries? That's how you end up playing Cyberpunk in your car. And that's not a good thing.
A good mapping solution enables all sorts of things: * Seeing alternative routes you don't know about or expect along with their anticipated time difference * Easily adding stops on the way (gas stations, restaraunts, you name it) * Letting you know what you need to do soon (such as seeing a pattern of four lanes on the freeway and learning that you need to be in the second from the right) * Giving you a solid idea of when you have to be watching for your next turn and when you can simply focus on the road without reading street signs. "Next turn in 3 miles" means look at the road, "next turn in 0.2 miles" means you need to start looking at street signs * Automatic rerouting. If you DO miss a turn or get stuck behind traffic from an accident, you don't need to immediately start thinking about how best to get back on course. You can focus on the driving instead.
In the music scenario, it gives both voice controls that let you focus on the road ("Play Modest Mouse in Spotify" rather than having to dig through albums or radio stations), integration with your car's controls (next track involves lifting my thumb rather than reaching for a knob in the middle of the car or my phone).
Saying "no one should ever hear a text message while driving" is just abstinence-only education at this point, and the message works about as well as it does for sexual education. That ship has sailed and it's simply not a valid line of argument. "No one should reach for a touch screen" isn't any better - it's not a good model, but it's the reality in a huge percentage of vehicles sold today.
This isn't over-optimization - it's simply a quality of life increase. Most people don't want to have to micromanage every detail of their trips - they want to get from point A to point B safely, reliably, and rapidly. Good car systems make that simple. If you want to sit your Rand McNally atlas next to your manual transmission and your 8-track, that's your right, but other people want to focus on the parts that they HAVE to be involved with, not the parts technology can help with.
I usually throw my smartphone away in the backseat when I drive, so that's where our paths start to diverge I guess.
Yes technically you could mount your phone up but that always seemed to be a hassle, smaller screen, mount points were rarely as good, have to have charging cables running across dash.
This GPS system is pretty terrible compared to google maps. It does nominally have voice recognition to allow setting it eyes free, and disables most of the physical buttons when the car is in motion to "comply" with anti-distraction laws.
However, the voice recognition system is so shitty, it would literally be safer to lock it out when moving, and enable all touchscreen features instead. Think have to spell the destination out one letter at at time, with an 80% chance it even understands the letter right in the first place.
Using google map's voice recognition system is orders of magnitude better and less distracting.
Plus user's can access their preferred non-radio music sources like Spotify.
Integrated nav is nice and convenient but it's only real benefit over a $20 phone mount of $15 GPS from 2006 is less clutter.
Does any entertainment or arts 'produce tangible, relevant and unquestionable benefits'?
But anyway - yes. For example my car's maps knows where it is in a tunnel because it can dead reckon with the speedometer. My phone cannot do that. For my example my car has a DAB receiver and my phone does not. For example my car's infotainment has cameras I can use to park, sensors to tell me how deep I'm wading, my range left, etc. Obviously my phone doesn't any of that. How is none of that useful?
> do these infotainment systems actually produce tangible, relevant and unquestionable benefits?
Yes for many people, but not you.
The driver and passenger can change music, podcast, directions without needing to look at the phone, nor asking the driver (phone owner) to unlock their phone.
A passenger can also plug in their phone without needing to figure out the bluetooth dance, and it just works, play their spotify, or podcast, or any number of things.
It's also right there on the dash, you don't need a car mount to mount your phone on the dash, or window to get the directions, change a playlist, or podcast. It works on the dashboard and if you have steering wheel controls, they usually work there too.
My '07 got a Sony head unit that does both, along with a nice 6.95" capacitive touch display for ~$400. It was worth every penny when I was commuting. You're missing convenience: Siri is nice, maps on the screen are nice, sharing the screen with passengers, quickly choosing a song without risking a cellphone use ticket (at a stop).
Being able to just use the same map app that my phone does is so much more convenient, and feels safer than glancing down at my phone in the cupholder.
"Speak on the phone with the car speakers" just needs Bluetooth which is much older and more widely available. This tech is about the display.
But.
How's different or better than this 9$ smartphone mount? https://www.amazon.com/AUKEY-Car-Phone-Mount-Compatible/dp/B...
All this compromises and costs just for a slightly bigger screen? While I'm driving?
Because on my Mazda I can do all that with the physical builtin car controls. Or I can just tap the voice control button and say it.
Also the navigation on a 7" dashboard mounted screen is significantly more glanceable than squinting at a small phone screen.
It's all a great benefit for the 8+ hour highway drives I need to regularly do.
It sounds like a $9 smartphone mount and a mini headphone to cassette adapter (or FM audio adapter) you can get 95% of the benefits in any vehicle manufactured since 1980.
I've only used CarPlay, but the messaging app is a perfect example. The phone's native messaging interface is of course inappropriate for safe driving, being primarily visual. CarPlay's messaging app only gives you a glanceable list of contacts, and you tap one to dictate a message, which is then also read back to you for confirmation (no message text is ever displayed on the screen). I've had entire text conversations without taking my eyes off the road.
For maps and music, the difference may be somewhat less profound, but the same design principles combined with a larger screen that equates to fewer milliseconds scanning for information or steadying your finger to touch a small button, still have a significant effect in keeping driver app use as safe as possible.
When the car is parked, you can use the on-screen keyboard to type in your searches; driving, voice search only. If you scroll too deep in your Audible library, past the first five or ten audiobooks, it will be all, "no, you can't browse your media library while driving, what the hell is wrong with you".
It's annoying, but annoying in the kind of way that keeps you from getting in the habit of distracting yourself while driving.
The fact is that a lot of people use such a mount anyway, but they are technically breaking the law and can be sent fines (eg if spotted by a motorway/freeway automated camera system).
It kind of makes sense.
Devices built into a vehicle have to meet safety specifications and it can be proved that they have. There is no such reassurance on a dash mounted phone. It could easily switch mode and distract you and cause an accident.
I have a similar (but magnetic) mount in my car, and if I'm not careful my phone will fall off and cause a distraction.
CarPlay is awesome. I'm sure AA is, also. All the necessary communications functions, but specifically adapted for use in a car, along with navigation, music, podcasts, or whatever app.
I won't buy another car without it. I'm all done having to hear my phone buzzz or ring and wonder what/who is trying to grab my attention. All done using outdated navigation systems that don't have traffic information. Etc.