Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think this is a fair take, and I've had similar thoughts too. However, one thing computer industry people don't seem to get is how much the idea of Apple owning the "dials" on the instrument cluster as shown in the keynote this year will likely go down like a cup of cold sick at most European auto makers. In many cases the designs or colors used in the dial faces have decades of brand history behind them.

Regardless of what customers desire, auto-makers are in no rush to become just a dumb pipe for apple or google's driving software. So far not one automaker has of yet publicly announced support or plans to support the more extensive CarPlay Apple demoed. I think if it does ship, it will need to support far, far more customization on interface and dial-faces than was shown in the keynote for auto-makers not to feel totally sold out of the cabin.

It was slightly disappointing to me I've only really seen Nilay Patel at the Verge in the media point this out; anyone with experience of the car industry I think will come to a similar conclusion. People may forget, it took a very long time for some automakers to even trust adding the existing CarPlay, partly due to concerns regarding loss of control of cabin features. Old CarPlay is is a far less intrusive system than the one Apple are proposing now.

As a thought experiment - if I personally ran BMW or Mercedes, I would have real concerns about dilution of the brand by adopting a generic industry wide car UI, even if I also think Apple would probably do a great job. Maybe the carrot of Apple solving autonomy as part of the package might be enough to swing the deal, but even there, I think in time legacy automakers will work out who to aqui-hire to build their own systems instead of selling out completely.

> https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/7/23157963/apple-carplay-nex...

I understand where the automakers are coming from and agree that it'll take a while for this to become mainstream because of this.

But I can help but laugh a little at this attitude from carmakers. Modern cars have almost all become the poster child for "bad ui" with their addition of touchscreens that almost universally look dated and run poorly.

> Modern cars have almost all become the poster child for "bad ui" with their addition of touchscreens that almost universally look dated and run poorly.

The dashboard dials have little left to be optimized. This is separate from the issue of media controls in the centre console.

Given occasional hiccups with CarPlay itself, intermittent dropouts or UI lag because of a flaky cable or an older phone running the last supported OS is intolerable to something as mission critical as the speedo.

The speedometer is one thing, but even more "mission critical" are the warning/error symbols, which have a low-to-medium level safety rating on them. Speedometer probably would have that, too, but monitoring "fancy" screen contents like this becomes a somewhat more involved task.

> auto-makers are in no rush to become just a dumb pipe for apple or google's driving software

The cellphone carriers and manufacturers wanted control too. They both used to dictate what you did with your phone. Apple wouldn’t be the Apple we know today if it hadn’t up-ended that market.

I can’t really see Apple producing something so good that it makes all other car manufacturers efforts look like crap, but then most people would have said the same about the phone industry.

CarPlay is already there as far as I'm concerned. Vastly better than the built-in UI of my car (VW), which is filled with ugly graphics, annoying, slow animations, and poor organization.

I agree in most cases, with the main exception of Tesla. While not perfect, the responsiveness/design/ease of use in their cars is generally consistent and well executed. I'd still take Tesla's OS over CarPlay, personally, given the choice.

I think my BMW i3's user interface is superior to CarPlay. Maps have a lower "ink to information ratio", it is snappy, and well-organized.

I dread the day when I end up getting a touch screen car to replace it.

My previous car had a touch screen, and I've used touch screen cars from a dozen vendors. They all suck badly, except Tesla, but they still suck compared to a jog wheel + physical buttons, or even an old fashioned "dumb" car.

One thing that is different regarding cars is that car industry executives have the benefit of hindsight here. Apple was not a trillion dollar business in 2007, in 2022 everyone pays attention.

Apple's business model is clear; they would hoover up any profits that might arise via new in car software business models. Apple's success in reducing cellular carriers to dumb pipes will be the cautionary tale every car CEO in the world is familiar with.

Remember that when the iPhone came out, wireless carriers thought Motorola and Nokia and friends had too much power and they were looking at whether they could get white label phone manufacturers to make phones for them directly.

1990’s and 2000’s mobile in the US was a refugee camp for executives from the Bell Telephone breakup. They were a bunch of dirt bags trying to snap up everything they could, including re-patenting information technology by adding, “but without wires” to existing patents.

The RAZR phone was one of the first times they’d blinked in a while, and Apple showed up in the afterglow.

Carriers did that to themselves.

I'm willing to bet that Apple will lay down some cash to get car manufacturers on board if they think it will increase lock-in for iOS (and therefore the iPhone and other devices) by a certain margin.

Google I'm sure has its own incentives to do this.

Too early to tell if this will be the case or not.

Car makers are very well aware of the lock-in possibilities and execute them already. They were just very slow to wake up to the fast raise of, how to call it, "software defined car", and start pouring endless money now into this.

The car makers usually defined the functions in their car and how to split that to the different computers (plus quite a few of this is fixed to specific computers, anyway). They also defined the data going back and forth between these, at least in part. Everything else was defined and done by the suppliers.

This entire approach was upended by increasingly powerful embedded hardware and possibilities resulting from it, which rendered the entire software stacks in the cars so complex, the car makers had to seize control over this again. Someone has to define the larger scale software architecture in a vehicle etc.

Combine that with that juicy lock-in scenario (I mean the big idea is to have cars connected all the time, like your phone), and you can bet on the fact that the car makers are very well aware of the possibilities which come with that (think of all the data which comes with that). And they are not exactly willing to just yield to the likes of Google or Apple because of it, i.e. we are talking really big money here.

How all this will play out in the longer run, lets see. Car makers sit on a lot of cash, so this will be a fight which will be going for a while.

Maybe they can start working with a car manufacturer that doesn't have such an image to protect, like one of the Chinese ones that are expanding in the West.

If it's actually good, customers will then push manufacturers into it.

I can't help but compare to what happened with the wireless carriers with their crippled "smart" phones before steve jobs convinced AT&T to take the iPhone 1.

and that relegated ATT/TM/Sprint into pure utilities, with little intrinsic value

Agreed. The car manufacturers will lose control of the "car user interface" if they take on Apple's new CarPlay. My prediction tho is that some manufacturer will be desperate and take it and on then its a slow moving wave that crests over the industry as consumers ask for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com