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Comment by DisjointedHunt | Hacker News Reader

An absolute coup that Apple might be able to pull off is if they're able to replace control electronics for Daimler with their A-Series (Or other custom ASIC) chips.

When Sandy Munroe tore down the Tesla Model 3, a remark he made hit hard. That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.

That's not a compliment to Tesla alone, that's a criticism of the state of the art in the car industry where miniaturization has not kept pace with the leading edge phone generations that Apple spits out every year.

Imagine that, a common platform that Apple could upsell to ALL vehicle manufacturers with custom enterprise apps written by the companies themselves for vehicle electronics.

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> That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.

Part of this is that a car contains quite a lot of electronics (there are a lot of things to control!), but cars are super cost sensitive. That pretty much means the car industry is barred from using any remotely modern tech, because they need to be buying CPU's and microprocessors that are in the $1 range, not the $100 range.

Obviously, the other half of it is just that the car industry is now very conservative with designs - today a big innovation is something like having an app, whereas back in the 60's, a big innovation would be adding a jet engine or making a flying car.

They recently showed a video of some vaporware where their car software powers every screen in a car, including the speedo and stuff like that. So they might be thinking along the same lines.

Why do you consider it vaporware? It's not like Apple is some sort of Nikola that uses smokes and mirrors to obfuscate its abilities, CarPlay is in millions of cars and will only grow as people trade in older cars.

I wasn’t really trying to imply anything to be honest, I just consider all demos vapourware until they ship. I would say that Apple aren’t immune, eg with AirPower - that demo looked at least as real as the car one. But I do agree that Apple tend to ship their stuff and probably will ship something like what they demoed.

Not exactly vapourware since it’s announced as supporting cars at the end of 2023, though it still runs off of your phone

So if your phone overheats in the sun, or crashes, your instrument cluster freezes?

Note also that CarPlay does not work at all with Siri disabled. This means that if you don’t opt in to a hot mic you can’t use any of it.

The cars will presumably fallback to native clusters when the phone stops responding. It’s still too early to tell though, but they are a very safety conscious company so I assume that people have thought about contingencies before making themselves liable.

At the least it likely won’t be worse than the multitude of cars that have moved to digital clusters anyway and may freeze themselves.

The claim of Carplay not working without Siri is also incorrect. A quick Google search shows you can disable Siri but will be limited in what you can do https://stereoupgrade.com/how-to-use-carplay-without-siri/ since the goal is hands free use.

Lastly most newer iPhones do on device Siri processing for common commands so it’s not really a privacy issue.

1. Reverts to the standard vehicle interface

2. Siri is activated by user input (holding a button / pressing a button in-car) with a side feature for hot mic (hey siri) that’s disabled by default

3. Maybe there’s car implementation solely driven by Siri? Hondas is touch screen and Mazda is button/knob based (and touch screen but only when idle).

No, you literally get an error on the display if you have Siri disabled systemwide and try to use CarPlay.

That’s the next version of CarPlay.

If that ends up being vaporware I’ll eat my hat.

I think it's more important that we have tried and tested technology in safety critical devices than be experimented on at the bleeding edge.

Imagine a vehicle that was just a vehicle and not another platform to upsell shit on until the vendors get fed up with it because that's what you're asking for.

Absolutely 100% in the case of vehicles, less is more. Less intelligence, less nondeterminism and definitely less space age.

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