What’s the killer app for head units that’s being ignored by car manufacturers?
It would be nice to open physically locked compartments with an app too! And if I could purchase more for my Steam library I'd be almost completely happy with my new advanced motor vehicle.
Don't complain when they extrapolate to the subscription based door locks and braking system. Just about everyone would almost have to sign up for them! /s
ETA: I guess it could be debated as well whether the "auto brake" type features would be desirable by that group. My personal opinion is no, but I think other threads have indicated I may be in the minority.
I rented a uhaul last year and it was mostly analog, with not a screen anywhere on the dash. The backup camera was ingeniously placed under the glass of the rear-view mirror. Most of the gauges were "digital-lite" (lots of lcd/led segmented displays). I'd say if there was a car version with the same interior I would have been quite happy to drive it.
For example a screen in the car doesn't have to be bad tech. But if the screen is where all the controls of the car are located then it probably is. Internet connectivity doesn't have to be bad tech. But if it allows access to the most critical parts of the car it probably is.
Then there are things that aren't bad until you realize they're probably abused by the manufacturer. Your internet connectivity meant to allow you to locate your car in the parking lot is great and might be harmless until the manufacturer starts selling that data to pad the profits.
Sometimes all the high tech in the car might be super useful, super secure, super private, and still be bad because in a few years it makes the car prohibitively expensive or outright impossible to maintain and repair.
Preach it brother!
Throw in an analog dial for the A/C fan too!
/s
I'd rather save thousands on the car price up front with a basic head unit that is affordable to replace.
But I absolutely prefer having CarPlay instead of having to stick my phone in a random location, blocking the view, or having to make sure wires don't interfere with anything, or finding a way to have the phone not vibrate, etc. I usually rent my cars, so I can't set up something sturdy and have cables get there nicely.
I also like my phones small, which makes them less than ideal in a car, being sometimes far away (I hate talking to my phones so have to be able to reach them with my hands). The aforementioned vibrations don't help, either.
My dad's Toyota, as well as a Fiesta I rented a while back, were perfect for this. I could stash the phone somewhere out of the way, and have the map or whatever displayed on the big screen of the car, which didn't vibrate and was well-placed.
Carplay is a common interface, and has niceties like being able to selecting different playlists from different music apps instead of needing to pre-select your music choice for the car ride.
This.
One of the nicest cars I've driven, controls-wise, was a Fiesta I rented a few years back. I just plugged in my iPhone, and directly got access to maps, spotify, etc via the car's controls.
It had physical knobs to adjust the volume, the air conditioning, etc. When I put it in reverse, the camera feed would replace whatever was on the screen.
It worked perfectly because it just didn't get in my way and didn't have me futz around in some three-level-deep menu to do anything.
And as others said, CarPlay is so much better than the older OEM systems for music and maps. Even current OEM systems in 2023 don't neccessarily have maps that keep themselves updated.
One feature of CarPlay I didn't think of until I used it, is the ability to plan your route on your phone while you're drinking a coffee or walking to your parking spot, and have your navigation ready to go before you even start your car.
Maybe I'm the problem?
Personally I'm in for anything passive (cameras, sensors) as long as it is not intrusive, acc and lane centering is kinda.... I'm already driving and have hands and feet on controls, I don't need that automated in the first place.
I am 100% or 0% on any "driving automation" or self driving. Either work as automated taxi, let me enter the address and let me read book in peace on back seat, or let me drive the car without bothering me. So I drive 15yo civic type R lmao.
Anecdotally: I and a number of friends have held this same opinion for years, but recently it has changed. Not because of lane marker following, but because of this situation: “idiot in front of me slammed on their brakes at the last second while I was scanning left or right”; the system kicked in and legitimately prevented an accident. If there was some way to just enable that feature I’d be pretty happy.
How many accidents have you had of that type in the past, say, 300000km of driving?
Because you say it legitimately prevented an accident, but this is a routine thing that happens (drivers slam on brakes at the last second) and if you aren't routinely driving into the rear of cars who brake at the last minute, then ... no, the accident wouldn't have happened anyway.
As an aside, trying to quickly search for these sorts of statistics leads to an awful lot of law firm websites.
But that number is not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of humans avoiding these accidents to humans not avoiding these accidents.
Like I said, having to avoid the car in front which braked hard is routine. It happens all the time. It's why the blame and culpability for a rear-end accident is always on the rear driver by default - safe driving distance and all that.
Which is why I phrased my question to the GP the way I did - if he managed to go 300000km without rear-ending someone even though unpredictable braking happens so routinely ...
> What % reduction in these would make it make sense to "require" this?
I doubt there'll be a decrease, if any. A better system that beeps if a safe minimum following distance is not adhered to will almost certainly prevent more accidents than auto-braking, because the auto-braking system will sometimes get it wrong and cause the jackass tailing you to rear-end you.
An alert won't cause any accidents.
I don't have an auto-brake feature, only ridden with people who do. I believe that most of them do have some sort of warn prior to brake - but to your point, there are so many situations where this could falsely trigger that it would likely end up being tuned out, at least as I imagine it. Actually, my truck has one of the "warning" things, and I ultimately turned it off for this reason. The number of "immediate danger" warnings that would flash when I was driving, e.g. alone on a country road at night, made it not worthwhile to me. I can imagine an auto-brake would be even worse that way though, lol.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what the main driver of this is. In part, it's probably a combination of "I know better than the system," especially after some incidences of false positives, and then the general confusion / annoyance with "new UI." Again, at least for most people I know, having an "entertainment center" in the car is not desirable. A simple display for current time / now playing and then a series of tactile buttons is the desire.
For me personally, the blind spot indicators specifically, the yellow triangle blinking on and off in my periphery, are really bothersome. I haven't owned a car with them yet, so likely after enough time I'd get use to it, but I really don't like this feature. I'm not familiar with ACC, looks like "adaptive" cruise control? In general, I don't have the opportunity to use cruise control, except for infrequent drives to some other location. In this case, the manual cruise has typically been plenty, and if I have to turn it off due to traffic, it's usually enough that I'd probably want to be paying enough attention to manually manage my speed rather than letting the car adapt. I haven't used it though, so hard to speak to that. I have not liked the centering, though maybe the versions I've used have been too primitive - it generally makes me nauseous if it's on, the unexpected pulls back are too abrupt..
It's IMO OK to use the screen for the rear camera when reversing, but even for this I'd prefer the rear mirror to have a picture-in-picture thing rather than taking over the screen that's IMO supposed to be my phone's external screen. This can be an actual nuisance because I cannot roll out of my garage, set directions on the phone while the gate closes and then finish backing up onto the street because the rear camera will keep hogging the screen unless I switch to a different great just to get the screen back.
Backing camera is kind of must for US market so I guess it would have to have it too
It's got what I consider the important features - auto lights, auto rear view camera in reverse (embedded in the rear view mirror), bluetooth.
It has very little else smart. Knobs and buttons everywhere, basically no screens (a very small one under the dash showing trip stats, but dials are hugely predominate, and a normal radio display with nothing but the station, song, and clock).
It's a very nice truck - was near top of the line for it's year, good sound system, heated seats, cooled seats - all of it has a physical button.
I hugely prefer it to the dash of any modern car I've rented in the last 5 or 6 years.
It looks like this: http://gtcarlot.com/data/Ford/F150/2011/41459168/Dashboard.h...
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I would absolutely prefer to buy a high end car with the budget dashboard (GIVE ME KNOBS AND BUTTONS!)
https://cjjeepbuilders.com/ , https://www.fj.co/
and similar wouldn't exist?
Here's some example clever features that I like:
- automatic wipers
- automatic headlamps
- cornering lights
- auto-hold
- hill hold
- tyre pressure monitoring
Stupid features I don't like:
- games in the infotainment screen
- smartphone integration for, eg opening the glovebox
- anything involving a subscription, especially for features whose hardware is already in the car
I wonder if the insurance lobby was the one that pushed for backup cameras, it's probably greatly reduced the number of rear collisions that they have to pay out.
I think in my developing country daytime running lights have been made mandatory for all new vehicles, but the millions of existing vehicles don't have them, and their drivers don't bother to turn them on during rains.
This is literally why I drive a 25-year-old Range Rover.
It does seem anticompetitive though so maybe there are antitrust and interoperability angles?
How about "no subscriptions on titled property"
Compare to a heated seat. They are some of the simplest circuits out there. Apply 12V and it will heat up a nichrome alloy wire. Same way a cigarette lighter works.
It's never RICO until it is. But it's never RICO.
Of course, for things like heated seats, the question is whether or not they've actually reduced the price of the car to account for the additional post-sale revenue. For Tesla, the Model 3 started out at $35k so heated seats being an additional charge at first made a lot of sense, but as it crept well over $40k for the standard range/RWD version, it started to look like a money grab and IIRC it was the 2022 refresh that removed the heated seat post-purchase requirement on the RWD trim.
"Heated seats" is just a piece of wire put into seat, some $1 (probably less) micro to turn it off and on and some $0.1 sensor.
I wouldn't be surprised if even few % of buyers buying that would cover for having to fit extra (and not have separate SKU for heater-less seats)
The point is to find the most innocuous thing that you would accept at time of purchase and then make the majority of customers pay for that more often and longer than anybody at the time of purchase thinks about.
It's similar to the marketing for payday loans. People are not entirely rational actors.
If you could make double the normal sales price of the car in revenue, and the car stops working if the customer ceases to pay, then if you don't mind the occasional customer service public meltdown on social media, then as a car manufacturer you are welcome to scheme away.
As a smarter than average customer, you are wise to the scam, and hope that the scheming of the car companies is not effective on the general public.
Also subscriptions are awesome for car manufacturers for accelerating planned obsolescence. Why should there be any resale value to your car anyway, if they could figure out a way to either 1) make the new owner pay for the car again in subscriptions or 2) make your car near worthless after you initially own it, then from their perspective this is the most brilliant thing they have ever thought of! ;)
Of course, barring legal discovery or a leaked email we'd never know.
Auto loan rates are about 7% p/a.
On a 5 year loan of $589, you'd pay $700 including interest. Plus you might recoup some of that when you sell the car.
A monthly subscription for the same period would cost $1740.
Wordt lease offenders I've seen so far: bikes. You repay it in about a year.
Most cellular modems are pushed through the head unit, and most car operations are controlled by the canbus. Given this, you could probably talk to the canbus unit to control the seat warmers.
Maybe in sunny California you have no reason to care, but in these northern climates it is useful information. Road conditions can change rapidly as you approach the freezing point.
Yes, this means you lose real-time traffic data.
Plugging the prototype into a car and getting useful data out of it was satisfying.
They are quite convenient, but tend to only "see" generic PIDs. The manufacturer specific diagnostic codes are much more useful.
I've got one and I've got the actual manufacturer scanner, and there is a world of difference in the utility of what is reported (things like transmission oil temperature, which is needed to correctly set the transmission oil level, etc).
Well, it's giving you kW, and you already know voltage from the charger, so you can work out the number of amps being pulled, roughly.
Not that I am disagreeing; it would be nice to see all three figures without having to try to work out any of them.
I'm considering swapping out the headunit but there are a few car settings the OEM headunit controls that I'm not sure if I want to relinquish control over.
Being able to see more data would be cool too. In my car I can't see my historical MPG like I've seen in other cars.
https://www.alpine-usa.com/product/jeep-wrangler-radio-apple...
How I wish that was my only complaint. Now the nav scolds me, the seatbelts hector me, my passenger needs to swear some sort of oath that they “are not driving”, etc.
I hate warning labels. For every useful one (e.g. “Pinch Point”, “Not A Step”) there are ten more that believe me to be a hapless infant.
Universal scan tools like Launch/Autel/Topdon/Snap-on are good in terms of the wide range of makes they support, but they lack in depth - you may not always get the full feature set especially when it comes to "coding" (aka setting configuration parameters) or anything beyond fault codes, live data streams and actuator tests.
Brand-specific scan tools on the other hand only cover their specific brand but generally offer a much deeper set of features.
What's more amazing these days is that technology like `bootmod3` (bm3) makes flashing (remmaping) stage one as easy as 1-2-3. One needs to understand what they are doing though.
I may try this, although seems overpriced:
https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Sunvisor-Warning-Label-Cove...
1. Ability to integrate traffic light info (how long they're gonna be red for, how fast do I need to drive to get a green light, how fast should I drive to get as many constant greens as possible, integrate this into adaptive cruse control) - Audis have this feature, but I should not have to buy an Audi just for this.
2. Police info (integrate radar detectors, radio for police freq and Waze etc. directly into the infotainment, heads up display or dash)
3. Integrate CarPlay / Android Auto navigation into heads up display / dash (currently only Honda / Acura does this as far as I know)
4. Play media (Netflix and other popular apps) via wifi when the car is in park mode
EDIT:
5. Add ability to integrate dashcams (and SD cards)
6. Add Toll auto-payment apps
For example, trying to turn from my driveway across two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
In the US it'd be a left hand turn, but for me in Australia it's a right hand turn.
I wish I could get easier, better visibility of the moving traffic before I turn into that lane. It is always awkward, slow, and difficult. Especially when I am in my normal car surrounded by SUV's.
I got a model 2019 Hyundai Kona EV and the integrated navigation software is just shit: It's outdated, the saved chargers are not available anymore or just plainly false in regards to their power output, it's just unsuable.
So whenever I need good navigation, I have to fiddle with a USB cable so I can rund Android Auto with Google Maps on the head unit.
You can download an updater (at least for Windows) which downloads the whole head unit update data, which you then just copy to an SD card and stuff it into the reader in your car.
There is a similar service for Kia (they share head units with Hyundai - it's basically the same company)
I did a couple of successful updates on my Irish 2017 Cee'd . Maps are updated every few months, Kia claims to provide updates for cars up to 7 years old.
I'm looking at buying an aftermarket head unit. The biggest feature for me is the boot time of the head unit, followed by good feeling physical buttons. Suggestions?
They're basically Android tablets with physical buttons and a direct OBD connection.
Second, audio controls that match or exceed what I can do with my phone from which I’m playing audio. BMW’a click dial interface was fantastic the last time I used it. Basically something that is optimized for maximum capability without taking eyes off the road.
The holy grail seems to be the ability to text while driving. Nobody has figured this out yet. Voice to text and text to speech are just not great solutions. Add to this the fact that a million apps are used for texting and you really have a huge untapped market. Figuring this out could make someone very rich.
When my wife takes my car, when she returns the car will automatically connect to my phone even when I've already got headphones on (so my headphones will just cut out).
And sometimes I just want to go for a drive with nothing playing, but it will aggressively autoplay without asking. By aggressive I mean, even if the last thing I listened to was an album which I finished, it'll just autoplay the last song again.
Then if you want more than one device connected to the car via bluetooth, it becomes a nightmare of device management. It seems to just randomly connect to one or the other.
I personally think there's a lot of room for 3rd party audio apps. I don't mind using my phone via Bluetooth / Android Auto / Car Play, but I really just want to install my streaming service's app into the car.
One thing that would be nice is, instead of a subscription for data, use my phone's data plan. Or, if you can get data cheaper, in-car wifi.