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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

They already showed off giant carplay updates at WWDC this year. They showed a car where the entire dash was a giant wide screen, where it even handled the speedometer, odometer, fuel level, etc

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/09/apples-2023-carpl...

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Wow, congratulations, Apple managed to hotglue a screen to the dash. But how about the rest of the car?

What's the seating like? Is the suspension firm or soft? How big are its blindspots? Can it make it over a grass median without bottoming out? What about a snow bank? How well does the frame cope with rust? Can you manipulate its doors with a hand full of groceries? Do the brakes fade when fully loaded? Does it oversteer or underwater under hard cornering?

There's so much more to a car than its dashboard and powerplant, but I feel like 90% of SV think all you need to do to disrupt the auto market is bolt an iPad to a motor

Since iOS 13(2019) Apple CarPlay can show a second display on the gauge cluster or HUD. AFIK no automakers have supported it. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875604/apple-carplay-io...

I'd rather see standard APIs and hardware mounting systems that let me slot in different hardware to upgrade my cars software + screens + CPU + etc. without having to buy a new car

Isn't the point of CarPlay and Android Auto to make this possible, without needing to actually replace hardware? The idea is to make it so the hardware in your car is just a dumb terminal that doesn't ever need to be upgraded. Your infotainment system gets upgraded every time you get a new phone or iOS/Android upgrade.

Sort of, but they don't let you control things like... climate control, etc.. There's no real reason those APIs can't/don't exist as long as they have proper safety mechanisms in place.

There have long been CarPlay and Siri intents for things like climate control but no automaker has wanted to give up more control inside their dashboard.

Isn’t that the purpose of Android Automative - not to be confused with Android Auto?

Yeah, but no manufacturer has implemented it to my knowledge. Also I believe that requires being installed on the car's head unit itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Automotive#Vehicles_wi...

Seems like there's quite a few cars out there with Android Automotive?

That terrifies me

Of course, like it or not, you're describing how Tesla does it and again, like it or not, it's probably the direction that a lot of car controls are headed.

Which is why I'm torn. I love all of the safety features, quiet interiors, etc that modern cars have, but I really like the simplicity of older cars (especially their lack of privacy invading add-ons).

Tesla interiors are awful (for a car, not just for a luxury car) so I'm in the "or not" category there. It's not just about the lack of physical dials (although that's a factor). Everything about Tesla interiors screams "cheap and no QA"

You are not alone. I like the idea that gauges are connected directly to the thing they are measuring. However, I may be disconnected from modern reality in that what might look like a "traditional" gauge might already be connected to the car's computer rather than direct measuring. I'm just not a grease monkey to know the inner workings.

Yeah no gauge in a modern car is directly connected to anything, except maybe the fuel gauge in a cheap car.

Everything is being run the cars ECU, all of those gauges are servo driven, all of them are getting their data in the form of discrete digital values. That’s assuming your car even has physical gauges, and not just digital gauges on a screen.

While my Honda Passport does have a reasonable number of physical buttons--which probably are still fly by wire--I'm pretty sure all the gauge displays are all just digital readouts of readings coming off the bus.

Yeah nothing in the UI is connected directly to a sensor these days. The UI is just a display for relevant data on the CAN bus.

Sensors have redundancies and detections in both sensing and communications so that the receiving end knows when there is an issue and doesn't display false information, resulting in an error code being thrown and displaying a "check engine light".

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