In 2019, Volkswagen decided to create a car OS. How’s that going?

It might be partially because I haven't seen what a "new" car looks like in a while, but I found everything horrible. Both the actual touch menu navigation as well as the applications - possibly the worlds most useless distance sensing / park assistance technology who's only mode of operation is to been insanely at you when you're near anything. I've also had it just crash and had to look up how to reset by holding the power button for a long time.

I think this stuff may be par for the course on new cars now, but VW in particular is shit.

I would add that I don't know what the design goals of the OS are. It appears that in-car OSs generally are for the utility of the car company, whether stealing personal information or upselling, nagging, or preventing you from doing things you'd like with your car. So maybe it's going great on those fronts.

It is a good car* imprisoned within an utterly abysmal user interface. I want to add one new data point to this conversation, the parking brake button, one of the four tactile buttons available, will actuate past detent and click on occasion without engaging the parking brake. This is incredibly dangerous and must be addressed (VW staff on HN please find a way).

Further, repeated lamentations. Any basic task, changing fan speed, turning on heated seats, looking at the battery charge level is dangerous in motion. The latency is absurd - mid-10s iPad on a 105 degree day under strain bad.

It’s also notable that the design of the touchscreen’s surrounds is poor. There is nowhere to place your hand so you’re groping around in the air without any tactile reference. It’s just really bad, I’ve never successfully activated the defogger without turning on something else by mistake.

I have another VW family station wagon where all of the controls are physical, including a nice overhead switch panel. It feels special and is easier to use in all regards. It is a charming and thoughtful piece of human-machine interface design.

I won’t abandon electric cars but I will pay close attention to physical button availability going forward.

*the brakes do not provide the authority I expect from a VW

It's clear that this project is a mess, but most of the article is just some exec giving jargony but information-free quotes to make it sound like everything is going just great.

Somehow Ford revamped Sync faster than VW has optimized their software.

There is too much capability and polished UI in smartphone-derived platforms. There are too many apps, especially media apps, that users want. Google maps and navigation is the "killer app" that no other car software maker can surpass.

Eventually, there will be two, maybe three holdouts who can justify vertical integration and everything else will be based on Android Automotive (not Auto!). In the slipstream of Android Automotive will be Waymo's autonomous driving software, plus the Waymo ride hailing UX. That, also, will become a fallback for everyone doing robotaxis who doesn't benchmark better than Waymo.

Open hardware, upgrade car cpu, gpu Open software. Linux dashboard.

So instead if your car becoming like an old smartphone on wheels. With opensource It would become upgradeable.

CarITX HDMI for car display.

I absolutely hate controlling my AC in a car via a touch screen.

Soon you'll have to open a menu and select "brake" and then move a slider if you want the car to slow down.

> The idea is still right, but of course, as you have seen, we've gone through the storming phase, a norming phase, now you know, having to deliver in the performing phase, but it's what you would expect

I can guess what these phases are, but is that a common workflow in the industry? I never heard anyone to refer to these cycles in software development. For me it just sounded like a poor attempt to explain the delays with some buzzwords.

All my previous cars were VW's. But the abysmal software was _the_ reason I didn't go with VW (or any of the other brands) this time.

Skoda Enyaq was the best of the bunch, the UI was fairly intuitive but still slow and unresponsive.

VW Id4 was over the line bad, but the worst of them all, it still annoys me to this day, was Audi Q4. For a car with that price point, it was like the engineers made a sport of how bad they can make a UI.

A pop-up saying something about privacy every time you start the car. Very regularly a pop-up saying "no data connection, while you could see LTE in the background, and everything appeared to just function normally. And many, many more

The only usable part is the fact that you can use Android auto/carplay.

In the end I went with a Polestar, and honestly I am very pleased. Would recommend it to anyone.

I’m a bit confused. If I was developing a platform I would have several machines in car For each major function:

driver assistance

drive control (drive by wire, body control, battery mgmt, motors, signaling)

safety (belts and airbags)

infotainment/non-critical displays

critical displays (driver speedometer, etc.)

Seems to me like using a COTS RTOS is best and then build up from there.

Source: two years working from Bay Area with German and Swiss engineers.

Not clear how the name applies. Does this, by any chance, make sense in German?