Apple’s CarPlay is going beyond the infotainment screen
theverge.com
theverge.com
Secondly, anything that affects functional safety should itself be vetted fron a FuSa perspective. I guarantee you that most manufacturers treat the instrument cluster as a Functional Safety item. If CarPlay can't bring the system to a state where that analysis is affected (which seems unlikely here), there's no issue.
That said, I'd probably use it.
Certain early-2000s GM speedometers were prone to breaking. Either the servo motors straight-up stopped working, or the label started peeling up and jammed the needle. My brother had several trucks from that era with this problem.
The iPhone on its own has locked up a handful of times, as has the built-in VW entertainment system.
In addition, I have VW Tiguan with glass cockpit (or whatever you call it when it does not have mechanical speedometer) for about 3 years and it froze on me a couple of times. The only way to fix was to turn off/turn on the car.
Let cars be cars for fucks sake.
The on device display is basically a dumb remote terminal. Those are easy to stay compatible forever. I can still AirPlay from my an old 1st gen iPad to a new Roku TV. I can still print from an old IPad to a new printer.
The fact that Apple and Tesla aren't good stewards of mission critical car software is, in fact, the fact it's trivial to push updates. It means they can shove out stuff with less validation and fix it in post. I would contend that easy patching nearly guarantees poorer software development correctness.
Consider the fact that no Nintendo GameCube game has to be post-launch patched, and while some flaws do exist that speedrunners can exploit, all of the games still work, decades later. Compare that to modern games, which often require a "day one patch" to fix them.
I absolutely trust a traditional car manufacturer to release better software than Apple or Google. It may not be as pretty or have as many bells and whistles, but it probably isn't going to kill me.
It could be argued that this is for slightly different reasons - because of the delay between a game being submitted to console manufacturers for testing and release, and the "crunch time"-style industry of game dev, I'd argue this is mostly to try and get the game launched sooner, because its cheaper/faster to ship a buggy game on disc and fix it on release day than to wait until the game is entirely fixed first, now that it is a viable option
(Not to disagree with your point - I completely agree)
Your car isn’t going to crash because Apple Music is flaky.
Car dashes should just have an DisplayPort or USB port we plug chromecast-like or a hypothetical apple-cast-like device into, imo. And those can mediate the experience with our phones/devices, but are themselves affordable & replaceable.
This would be much more sensible if there were a coherent, sensible, reasonable, fair reasonable and non-discriminatory standard for IoT that was available, for communicating things like sensors, camera views, dealing with multi-zone audio, setting brightnesses/heat, adjusting chair shape... Right now we're still in goofy world where everything is ultra-proprietary and there's not even a common base we hypothetically could extend/build around.
It gives me headaches just thinking of it.
Why build something when there is no demand? Besides there are all sorts of security consideration in not allowing random devices to change to many things in the car.
I'm pretty sure a boring $50 Chromecast could drive this experience just fine & without challenge. An 8-core ARM chip with a decent GPU is remarkably affordable in this day & age, and more capable than most people realize.
It would be significantly different to try to drive multiple experiences at once, versus a Chromecast which runs a single app at a time. But there are just so many cores now. Even if they're low performance Cortex-A510, I don't see the need for big CPU. And nothing I've seen on any of these videos gives me the feeling big complicated GPUs are necessary: the whole thing experience is powered by pretty lo-fi simple Widgets, "glancable" experiences.
I think we're into splitting hairs territory. You're right, automotive industry is typically unbelievably crazy far behind, and accounting for that is a pain.
ARM in general has made me very very very sad for a decade of non-delivery now. Cortex A53 turns 10 years old in October. ARM still doesn't have any replacements actually shipping that are really any better- A55 was like a 5-15% boost (a real stinker), A510 isn't actually shipping yet, & who knows if it'll really be better this time, another sad repeat of A55.
But I don't think it changes my arguments or belief significantly. We could easily not-suck if we wanted to. Some big car company could go work with a foundry or hyperscaler & decide to kick out a lower-middle speed automotive ARM chip, which would cost very very little. I think it's also conceivable that simply using an extended temperature range chip & being a lot more careful about power regulation & noise tolerance is perfectly doable.
Let's look at the parent:
> You need top end device with mobile connections to drive experience similar to Carplay or Android Auto with fancy map animation, fast touch response time and music streaming apps. That device cost at least $700+.
If we evaluate your critique a little more, look around, we can go further with your arguments: anything decent and Automotive-grade is not available, at any price. No one cares, no one buys it, no one makes it. Right now.
Anyhow I was just throwing out numbers. You're right, we might not have 8 cores to throw around right now. Maybe only 4. A Google TV runs off a Allwinner S905D3 with slow quad A55 and low end G31MP2. It still runs a decent 4K, is pretty fast & responsive (hindered largely by flash speed). It's barely warm to the touch. The gist was: even basic cheap computers are quite fast & capable, and you're pointing out that automotive prices are high. I have to add that there are no high end cores for automotive right now, at any price, and generally just automotive is vastly under-served. But I think, ultimately, there's probably still plenty enough oomph to run a system like this, with whatever we've got.
As for simply using extended range components, Tesla actually did that for several years of the Model S infotainment system. Turned out that wasn't enough and the components started failing after a couple years [1].
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/widget-games-casual-arcade/id1...
They're probably working on their new monthly subscription plans for "activating" this feature...
I see this more as "here's some early Apple Car UI that you all can play with and tell us what works and what doesn't, and maybe one of you developers in the audience will make something interesting we can eventually steal".
The concept images are compelling but you won't see this in any new car any time soon.
Alternatively a car could just come with the guts of an Apple TV built in to run an unconnected version of CarPlay when an iPhone is not connected.
I'm an automaker and I want a fancy UI on my dash (like Tesla or EQS). So I put in the big screen and then add the Apple extensions to allow CarPlay 2.
But what do I ship with the car? A cheap and quick UI with basic features, or do I have to write a second fancy UI that looks good in the showroom, on test drives, and when the battery dies in the phone? How much time and money do I spend on that?
If I'm Toyota and shipping cheap Corollas, what kind of screen do I pay for on that car? Triple-wide LCDs aren't exactly a commodity part. So is CarPlay 2 something only for expensive cars?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUlm_XEUUAAViqE?format=jpg&name=...