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>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.

I know it makes me terribly old-fashioned, but god that's horrifying.

I'm not sure why it's horrifying. Assuming the data is on your device and that's what it's learning from, at least with respect to appointments, this was also an objective of every PDA and productivity software ever made. To help you plan your day without having to sit down and plan your day. Throw in data, it tells you what you need to know and when. Regarding suggesting destinations based on habits it's only (potentially) horrifying if this means the data is going to some Google/Apple/Other server and projections coming from it.

I would be surprised if Google's technology works without it being stored on Google's server.

>it's only (potentially) horrifying if this means the data is going to some Google/Apple/Other server and projections coming from it.

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.

You absolutely have that choice.

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.

History working at all is a more recent change. Previously, if you disabled location history it would only remember POIs that you navigated to. Not addresses. And it allowed you to add local bookmarks, but didn't let you name them. Have fun with a list with some yellow stars with GPS coordinates only. The whole thing was outright unusable for no technical reason, as if nobody at Google had tested "non-treacherous mode", or as if they on purpose sabotaged it.

> Yes, well that's exactly what it's doing.

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...

Aside from being quite creepy, wouldn't one already know how to get to their favorite brewery?

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.

"wouldn't one already know how to get to their favorite brewery?" - I navigate most everywhere I go of any distance so I get warned of traffic issues or speed traps.

If you like that stuff, go nuts, but I don't see much benefit to any of it.

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.

Maps on AC is a game changer for me. Anytime I've never been to a place I use it, and I sometimes use it for other things like if I'm in an unfamiliar place and want to stop for food or find a store. Simple voice command. New route, done. Also the real time traffic updates is huge - so many times now I check just in case there is an accident that will cause a huge delay.

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?

>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.

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 can't recall the last time I drove somewhere and was impacted by a road closure that wasn't clearly marked with a detour, or there wasn't an immediately-obvious alternate route. If you're not blindly following GPS navigation, and pay attention to signs and what's going on around you, it's not an issue.

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.

Your experiences don't generalize to everyone. Just yesterday I drove home from an errand without navigation and discovered that the bridge across the lake was closed in one direction. This wasn't signed well at all and meant that I lost 10-15 minutes turning around and taking another route. Being able to have the car tell me when a turn is approaching rather than having to look at every street sign along the way wondering if this is my turn keeps me focused on the road and prevents the worries of "did I miss it?". It's strictly an improvement.

I know my city like the back of my hand and can chart my own course across it on a whim thank you. I don't just decide where I'm going, but I also choose how to get there. Sometimes the course is more important than the destination.

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.

I prefer to plan my own routes. But I sometimes use maps before I set out because:

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.

First of all, thanks for the detailed reply. Appreciated!

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.

Car units are integrated with your car's controls. I almost never need to use the touchscreen because of my in-steering-wheel controls. A smartphone with Bluetooth only covers the basic scenarios where you know where you're going before you leave - and that only if you spend far MORE effort hooking up a charger, a mount, launching the app you need, and you never need to switch apps (such as between maps and music) during your drive.

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.

Again, thanks for the in-depth answer. You got a point on the integration side (on-wheel commands) and the eventual app-switching needs. I also concede that modifying the route (more than merely following it, which I find trivial in any setup) is easier on an integrated system rather than a mounted smartphone.

I usually throw my smartphone away in the backseat when I drive, so that's where our paths start to diverge I guess.

Just to +1 this - a major reason we picked the car we picked last year was because it had AA. Now, you can upgrade most any system to it, but given we were buying a new vehicle anyway? It's just.... superior to any in-car system, and I'm not even an Android user !

You can’t get to work or your favorite bar without a computer navigating you?

I know 5 or 6 given paths. Which one is fastest depends on all sorts of things. Is there traffic? Has an accident on the highway brought things to a standstill? Is going North around the lake slow enough that the toll lanes are worth it?

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.

Traffic reports. Saved me hours a month (usually 1-2 hours each time) when I got rerouted around a bad accident on my primary route home at my previous job. It was the main highway connecting the area near my office to the town I actually lived in. When there was an accident, it was 30-90 minutes of being stuck without moving, depending on if there were serious injuries/fatalities (versus a fender bender). With a notification before I left the office [0] I could choose the longer but not backed up route.

[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.

Reminded me of this "ad" for google that google never made - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ysH2Glw5w (folks from India might appreciate more, but it is in English so should be accessible)

I just got a vehicle that supports it, but when my Pixel 3 tries to connect, the AA UI shows briefly for a second, then fails, every time. Any tips? I've tried over USB and wireless, same result.

Might have to go to a dealer to get a firmware upgrade.

Not the parent but in my ‘18 Audi I think I called the dealer and they did some kind of software update which resolved the issue.

Mines wired only but my issue seemed to be cable related. I bought an anker powerline II usb c to a cable based on reddits recommendation and haven't had any issues since!

I've certainly seen issues with cables before (even ones that seem to half work), as mentioned in another reply. My first step in debugging would be to unpair the devices (on both sides) and try to set them up again to see if that helps.