Hacker News Reader

Comment by ungamedplayer | Hacker News Reader

Call it what it is.. they like the control of their in car entertainment systems and they don't want external companies taking that part of the pie.

It's okay gm, we understand. Let's hope you are able to make a compelling competition to this, otherwise your sales will suffer.

Traditional car software is very very poor for whatever reason. I don't think that car manufacturers have the mindset and capability to make even passable software, let alone competitive software.

View on HN

> Call it what it is.. they like the control of their in car entertainment systems and they don't want external companies taking that part of the pie.

they did call it as it is. it's in the article:

> In addition to potentially buying things from GM or GM’s partners through their car’s infotainment system, GM is also looking at subscription services that would be managed through the same interface. GM’s chief digital officer, Edward Kummer, told Reuters as much when the decision to drop CarPlay and Android Auto was announced. Automakers see subscriptions as huge new source of income to be tapped, with GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030.

I am dreading the future of cars, where they somehow are worse than a car I could buy right now but also I have to pay a monthly subscription for the worse experience.

The enshittification of everything is making me want to go berserk.

There's no obligation to buy a new one. Keep your existing cars on the road or replace them with other low mileage used ones.

I bet repair costs on used are less than depreciatiom + finance costs on new, and there's pleasure to be gained from a retro aesthetic.

Sure, I plan to drive my current car until the wheels fall off, but that's not the point.

I'm young enough that I will very likely need to buy a new-to-me car eventually, and there's a good chance that by then a lot of the used cars out there will be the enshitted versions. I'm not looking forward to it.

Time passes and sooner or later the oldest available used car will be from 2024. Add the effect of legislation which could deny access to some areas important for you unless you have a car compliant to regulations made in 2030.

This is what everyone said to me when phones started losing their headphone jacks (purely so that phone makers could sell overpriced wireless earbuds).

But eventually old phones stop working on the new network and you realize every major new phone has followed suit in the cash grab. sigh

A USB-C to headphone adapter is $5.

And occupies your USB-C port, which you might want to use at the same time for charging while listening to music(I do while I'm in bed, I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this).

My biggest issue with it is that it's been sold to us on a lie - the whole nonsense about "reclaiming the space" - it's BS. There is space for it in nearly every phone on the market.

A USB-C to headphone and USB-C adapter (https://www.amazon.com/Headphone-Charger-Adapter-Charging-Co... - ok, maybe search a little longer for one that hasn't got the "brand" Subynanal printed on it ;) ) isn't much more expensive either...

There are cheap bluetooth dongles with female audio port that a pair of headphones could be plugged turning them into bluetooth headphones. Calls will most probably not work, though.

And it gives you yet another device to charge, reduces your sound quality and introduces audio delay. None of which is a problem with wired headphones.

I'm feeling like a dinosaur pointing out that I still have headphones which just work and there is literally nothing wrong with them. I own two pairs of bluetooth headphones too, and they are great - but let's not kid ourselves, there are drawbacks to it too.

That’s what wireless charging is for!

You can still get a Sony Xperia flagship with a headphone jack and SD card support. I've got one, it's pretty good.

ICE vehicles can be legislatively removed from the roads or so burdened with fees and regulations that they cease to be viable for anyone other than a collector. They can't do it today because the percentage of ICE vehicles is too high but as EV market share grows, green laws can get far more aggressive. Just look at what happened during the pandemic in the name of safety. Now look at you ICE vehicle's tailpipe. That's the new method of control over you and your vehicle and the precedent has already been set that's it's an ok thing for them to do as long as they can drum up the level of hysteria, which they're now quite experienced at doing.

What's particularly frustrating, and I think relevant here, is when new things are better in some respects, but glaringly worse in others. So you can only have the good parts of the new thing if you accept the shit along with it.

I bet repair costs on used are less than depreciatiom ...

There are more considerations than simply cost of repair. Used cars break more than new cars. You are more likely to need some sort of backup plan if you have a used car. I'd be fine here in Norway: My 25 year old car is only used a few times a month. Otherwise, my partner and I walk and/or use public transportation. But I'm lucky enough to live in an area with a fairly robust public transport and pedestrian path system.

I couldn't be this secure when I lived in Indiana. Most places had little public transport, and fewer had affordable public transport (taxis only, though they likely have uber now). These options only worked if you stayed in town - but if you were like a lot of Midwestern folks, you have to drive to work and working in the next town over wasn't uncommon.

Which means: Something happens to your car, you might wind up unemployed or minimally, it pushes you ever closer to being unemployed. Hope your kid doesn't get sick and you have to miss even more work.

I'll also add that "another low mileage car" will still be expensive and you won't generally save yourself a car payment. I was lucky to find mine and if it weren't for a friend finding it, I wouldn't have it at all.

25yrs old is a bit extreme for anecdotal data on used cars. My 10yr old truck has been pretty reliable.

My 18 year old truck is great.

And mine is fine.

But again, it is luck. Some cars seriously went downhill before they were 10 years old.

My car is reliable. I got lucky. I've replaced the brakes. And I was illustrating that I only need minimal reliability since it isn't my main form of transporation. I have public transport and live in a walkable place. I can (and do) dress for weather.

The rest of the comments aren't specific to 25 year old cars. I've had an array of used cars in an array of ages. Anything over 4-5 years starts to break due to wear and tear. Alternators and starters go out. Brakes have wear and tear. Things happen. You still likely have a car payment - and you are more likely to if you are poor. Being poor brings the bonus of opting for a car that's been driven more instead of less simply because of the price difference.

'Pretty reliable' isn't the same as the reliability of a newer car.

>There's no obligation to buy a new one

Maybe at your location. For example in Spain, many people will just not be able to drive in many places in 2024 if they don't qualify to have a good-enough "environmental distinctive" which is a label you put in your car that shows how much your car pollutes. No label or too bad of a label? You can't drive in many places.

Note: In reality it's bs as many other regulations since e.g. any ECO-labelled car (2nd best distinctive) can be a 600 CV Ferrari with a tiny electric engine.

They didn't call it as it is, that's just the obvious conclusion the author of the article makes based on another source, they make up unverified safety allegations

> though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.

you misread the article.

they did:

> Automakers see subscriptions as huge new source of income to be tapped, with GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030.

and the following quote is from a different part of the article:

> though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.

specifically:

> Essentially, the thinking is that if a car’s in-built infotainment system is good enough, drivers will be less likely to use their phone for what they’re trying to do while they’re behind the wheel, — though Babbitt admits that GM hasn’t exactly tested this in a controlled setting to see whether or not it’s true.

Good lord the greed just never ends does it? They should look at BMW and see how quickly the heated seat thing fell through for them. At least I know what manufacturers to avoid from now on.

> Good lord the greed just never ends does it?

GM profit margins have been stable for the past 13 years:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GM/general-motors/...

now look at Tesla's profit margins:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/profit-...

Good. Making car drivers finally pay is the greatest thing ever. I am sick of subsidies for them.

How does a car manufacturer earning more money help a non car user (presumably pedestrian/bicyclists/public transit users)?

I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy.

It's probably kinda the same story with great mechanical and industrial engineers, which is why approximately nobody finds GM cars exciting.

It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could easily do it ourselves in a month or less. It seems like such a simple problem. Play songs and interface with some controls/radio receiver/etc while being at least a tiny bit conscious of efficiency.

This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.

Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.

I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed.

you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.

The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.

Most modern cars have more than one CAN bus.

(And it’s lower ID messages which have priority over higher, which is more trivia than argument against your premise.)

Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.

The concern is that the attack could be carried out remotely.

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... is one such example (might be the one GP is referring to).

I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.

Voting machines are scary for different reasons.

1) The general public has private physical access by design.

2) The chain of custody is unclear and hard to prove. This undermines trust in the system.

That depends on the jurisdiction. When I voted in Maryland, there was a machine that I directly cast my vote into.

When I vote where I live now in Massachusetts, I fill out a paper form in private and then I manually feed the forms into a voting machine where I have only supervised physical access.

I think it's entirely possible to have machine-counted ballots without giving unfettered and unsupervised access to the counting machines and I prefer the MA system (for the reasons you describe), but I also recognize the Constitution is clear in its reserving the power to each state for how to conduct the election (at least for President) in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.

Counting machines are different than voting machines.

Here in Washington we vote on paper but the results are counted by machine. The counting process is overseen by representatives of both parties. In a recount the paper votes could be manually counted to reconcile with the machine. I’m not worried about any of that.

What is scary about voting machines is that the output isn’t guaranteed to match the input. This is for any number of reasons. The best defense against this is to print the choices in a human-readable format… on a piece of paper. Which means you don’t really need the machine at all. If it’s on the network you can’t trust anything.

This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.

Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.

I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.

Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving.

You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.

Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).

I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time. I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.

The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult.

Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder.

And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies.

Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.

Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so.

The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.

> infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.

Also, cars sell in the millions. Car manufacturers will redesign a circuit board if it will save them cents on each board.

So it is always a struggle to put a more powerful CPU in there.

Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?

Apple made a computer with a fast, responsive UI in 1984 using a chip that ran at 7.8 mhz and had 128 kb of ram.

You don't need a fast chip to eliminate lag. It's just incompetence.

Sure. I've used home computers since 1979. The graphics were instantaneous back then even on a few MHz and 16 kBytes of RAM.

We don't want slow and laggy UIs because the software is bloated.

But I responded to this part:

> The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered

And my point was that it is far harder than it seems to put more powerful CPUs in cars.

They weren't doing that much either. I doubt an Apple ][ could even stream modern audio codecs via bluetooth, let alone simultaneously run a local search on the GPS database.

A friend of mine has a 2022 Cadillac something. I was actually very impressed with it. Comfortable, quiet, no-nonsense self-driving capability. Seemed like a fine car. If GM can build similar no-nonsense infotainment software they will be fine.

A no nonsense infotainment system doesn’t sound like the kind of thing people will spend $25billion a year on.

Good for them? Why should a good infotainment system cost $25B/year in perpetuity? Doesn't anyone solve problems anymore?

From the article: they want a slice of the $25 billion subscriptions.

Sure but who wants that? GM could be right that people want a car that hasn’t been enshittified.

The problem with chasing $25bn in subscription fees is you don’t know the opportunity cost of alienating your customer base.

> GM alone hoping to make as much as $25 billion per year just off subscriptions by 2030.

They think they’ll make $25B themselves. They also want your data.

Oh, yeah, that’s worse.

Why did mfr's GPS cost thousands as an option or subscription for 15 years while Garmin Nuvi portable devices for three hundred dollars ran circles around built-in units?

>I expect they don't want to pay what great software engineers cost, and even if they did, most such engineers probably wouldn't want to put up with GM's bureaucracy.

IMO, the bureaucracy isn't that big a problem; all big companies have this problem. The big problem for GM is their locations: who the heck wants to move to Detroit? Or any of the other places their suppliers tend to locate?

Super low cost of living on a tech salary? Sounds good to me. But if that doesn't work GM has the Cruise offices in San Francisco that they'll have to find some use for. GM proper also has offices in North Hollywood and Pasadena. Cadillac famously used to have offices in New York for the prestige, but Cruise still does AFAIK.

I'd bet that the problem is absolutely going to be more of a bureaucracy and salary issue than a location one. GM is a hilariously broken company and I can't imagine an enjoyable one to work for.

I was talking to folks who did this in the southeast. Compensation was the problem, not location.

For those folks, sure. For many others, the location could very well be. You won't know because many people probably only look at job ads filtered by location, so they just ignore any that are in "undesirable" places, whatever those may be.

GM has many development centers, including Roswell, Georgia, but it should be pointed out that like most American metros, Metro Detroit has a wide variety of cities and towns for different lifestyles. You don't have to live in Robocop to work for GM, which has facilities spread about both the Detroit metro area and the country.

And since software is built in big factories just like cars are, there is absolutely no way for those engineers to build those systems without moving to Detroit.

The tragic aspect is that they spend inordinate amounts of money on this software with nothing to show for it. The money is spent so poorly and ineffectively, while trying to cut every inconsequential cost corner along the way with the output being micromanaged by people that don’t understand software, that if you directed a fraction of that money at a small team of highly paid and experienced software engineers you’d likely get a brilliant product.

Automotive OEMs don’t work that way, they spray money at hundreds of the cheapest engineers they can get away with and hope something good comes out the other side. I’ve seen it over and over. Their problems could be solved by paying a small team of excellent engineers proper Silicon Valley wages. It would be cheaper and produce a better product, but they don’t think that way. The concept of a highly paid software engineer is objectionable to the executives in that industry.

Many years ago, I discussed possible employment with a major head unit manufacturer. They were very excited about modernizing but basically stunned into silence when I mentioned typical senior FAANG pay. I'd be surprised if things have changed much.

Sitting here in Michigan I still see auto company software positions sometimes that are mid/late career positions and pay under 100k. The legacy auto industry really doesn't get it. And now GM is forcing RTO, so I expect they'll lose more talent and have a harder time attracting engineers.

My 2010 BMW has excellent infotainment software. Better than any new car I have driven (all rentals).

Navigation is easily controlled with the iDrive knob. Previous destinations are sorted in reverse chronological order. New destinations are easy to enter. Adding destinations works as expected (insert/append). When the fuel gauge reaches 1/8 of a tank the car prompts to add a gas station on the route which can be accepted with a single button press of the main iDrive knob. When a trip is in progress I can search on the route by category for points of interest like rest stops. It picks up traffic information over AM radio and uses that information when routing.

Similarly pleasant experience when operating the radio/built in mp3 player. Everything can be done with iDrive but there are also dedicated buttons on the steering wheel and dashboard.

Climate control is managed by physical knobs.

Bluetooth calling is supported but Bluetooth audio (music) is not.

Overall an excellent experience. It's obviously dated and a little slow but completely serviceable even today. The system is completely self-contained so it does need map updates from time to time. OTA updates, even on wifi would be nice.

From a design perspective I have no complaints at all, it is well integrated with the car and otherwise stays out of the way. A helpful tool.

It would be useless to me personally.

I hate radio. I don’t listen to much music. When driving I mostly listen to podcasts and audiobooks which sounds like is not really practically possible.

It has an aux cord so you can plug in a cell phone. Or you can use a USB drive to transfer files to the internal hard drive. The lack of Bluetooth Audio is the greatest flaw of the system.

It does have a "cradle" in the center console to connect a phone, I believe audio is supported by that. Unfortunately it requires an adapter and 2010 was the era of phone minification so there's not physically room for modern mega-phones to fit between the cradle headers, even if BMW kept up with adapters. There's also an iPod adapter but it uses the 30-pin plug. I haven't tried plugging in a regular 30-pin to USB A plug to the console USB port, that might work as well.

The navigation functionality is far superior to anything else I have seen.

iDrive 5 forward (2015ish), map updates are OTA.

Tesla is the exception here: they seem to have mastered making a car software experience that doesn’t suck, and they don’t even support CarPlay. But Tesla is a tech/software company that happens to make cars (of dubious build quality), I don’t think conventional automakers can replicate that.

Tesla software experience far outshines CarPlay and Android Auto.

In those specific usecases that it implements.

Also navigation makes idiotic moves lately.

I do not own a Tesla, but I've seen videos that told me that you pretty much have to use it's in car navigation system, for good reason: it factors in your route to give you an accurate range estimate, otherwise the estimates can be (significantly) off. That's important given that even the best electric cars have shorter range than gas cars, and there are far fewer recharging options than there are refueling options.

It will also use knowledge about the destination to prep the car. Heading to a charger? It will prep the battery so that it’s at the optimal temperature for charging on arrival etc..

That said though, there are route planners that can give excellent range estimation (both for online and offline cars), by taking into account the terrain/temperature/etc, like ABetterRoutePlanner - ABRP

But it lacks good media apps for podcasts and audiobooks unfortunately.

How about Spotify?

Apple Podcasts is coming in the next (holiday) update in +- 2 weeks (seriously)...

Sounds great with apple podcasts!

My main issue with spotify is that the syncronization is not great (and there are no audiobooks, at least in my market).

For example, I am listening to a podcast at work during the morning. Then some hours later I get in the car to drive home and want to continue the podcast, but often spotify would not be up to date with the current listening position in the podcast and I have to manually try and find the right location.

Can you give examples of this? I was recently looking for a car and saw the discounts and credits for a Tesla and thought it was finally time to go electric. Then I started researching the interface and saw so many people talking about how clunky it was and they decided to just use bluetooth with their phone to listen to music rather than the interface or even worse hacks where they setup a web server on their phone to mirror to the interface and have to type urls so they can use waze.

My wife has a Honda CRV with android auto and it works great when I drive it. We both use Youtube Premium (formerly Google Music) for our music and I use (soon to be going away) Google Podcasts for my podcasts. Those both work great with Android Auto. My understanding from looking it up is that it is near impossible to use non-supported software with a tesla without ugly hacks. My experience with Android Auto is good that it, or something better, is an absolute requirement on my next car. From my research, it seemed like Tesla added more walled garden annoyances than improvements.

My personal opinion:

1. The navigation works really well for me. Including routing via superchargers

2. The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)

3. The screen is very responsive. Touch UI is fast.

4. The backup and side camera view is the best I’ve seen on cars.

5. Record the last X minutes from all cameras when you honk (someone backed into my car and it’s nice to have easy access to the video footage via the usb stick)

6. Auto defogging.

7. Heating and de-icing the car from the app when I’m having breakfast.

8. Autosteer (the free included one) works surprisingly well. It handles more roads and situations than I’ve seen on other manufacturers

9. Auto detect different drivers from the phone key and sets their seat/steering/settings (and even their spotify account)

There’s dozen more small things that show the attention to detail that some car manufacturers also have in their hardware but almost never have in their software.

It’s not all perfect (eg the Spotify app could be better) but it’s a lot better than any other car or rental I’ve been in, including carplay).

2-8 do sound great. They are the reasons I was looking at a Tesla. Hadn't even heard of some of those. The car I'm looking to replace is a 2009 toyota corolla commuter car that is really starting to have maintenance issues. The right speakers even stopped working a few years ago. The speaker on my phone is better so I just put the sound all the way up and use that. The audio sucks, but it's easy. I sit down, press play, and I'm listening to what I want.

My wife's CRV is a 2018 which I only drive when we are driving long distances. Still, I just plug my phone in and all my data is there on android auto. I have starred places on google maps going back almost 15 years. I click a place on recents and it maps me there. I press shuffle on youtube music and it has all my history there to play through. Youtube music also has the download option so I can play music in non-signal areas. That was another thing I couldn't seem to find an answer for with a Tesla. Does spotify work without a signal? If so, how much storage does the tesla offer to spotify? I have multi-gigs of downloaded music on my phone. We hit 30+ minute terrible signal areas on our holiday travels to family.

The options seemed to be switch my apps to spotify/tesla navigation for "car riding" and have to double-entry everything from my home-listening or completely switchover. Which could maybe work for spotify (does that have the same option to upload your own music that google music had?), but definitely wouldn't work for tesla navigation. Then there's the privacy concerns that I'm now sharing more data with two places rather than one. Then the added monthly fee of using Tesla's data plan vs. android auto being free. All that made me think that getting a tesla would only increase my annoyances and costs rather than providing me a benefit. The advantages you listed are really, really nice, but hard to justify with the rest of it.

FWIW a lot of the things in 2-8 aren't unique to Tesla.

My non-Tesla does 3, 4 (camera view seems higher res than the Model Y I test drove, although I don't find the blind spot cameras that helpful because you have to take your eyes off the road to use them), 6, 7, 8 (Although I don't have enough experience to say how Tesla's compares), and 9 (except the Spotify bit, but since I use Android Auto and anyone who DJs in my car has either that or Carplay it's a non-issue)

You're also a paying customer of one of those services that you're sharing data with. It doesn't automatically mean that they'll be any better, and Tesla has had quite a few privacy-related fuckups, but one is in the business of selling your data, the other isn't. Take it for what it's worth. Lately they've been pushing quite a lot of privacy related things, but it may just be virtue signalling on their part. One feature I really like is the ability to share a destination from Google Maps on my phone to the car and it will instantly route there.

For some strange reason the Spotify app in Tesla doens't have the option to download playlists, it will only buffer ahead and cache things. I've had it happen that it stopped playing because it lost connectivity and I tried to shuffle ahead quite a few times. I think all Teslas come with at least 60GB of internal user accessible storage, you can also expand that by just plugging in a USB-drive in the glovebox. The Tidal app in Tesla does offer offline playlists, and much higher bitrate. I think Tesla is doing their audio engineers a disservice by the atrocious bitrate that they provide through the Spotify and Apple Music app. And Tidal is borderline unusable if you want innovative and ground breaking features like Shuffle, but apparently that is coming this "holiday update".

You don't need to have a "Premium Subscription" to use Spotify or any other streaming service in a Tesla, you just set up a hotspot on your phone and it will automatically connect to it. I've also seen some people connect a mobile hotspot to the glovebox USB-port. Some of them even come with additional storage and things like internal battery so it'll stay connected even when the car powers down the infotainment system. If you have an iPhone it's a little more convoluted, but it's easily sorted out with just using a Shortcut to enable hotspot that fires automatically when it connects to your car.

Tesla does a lot of things very well, and some things just don't make any sense at all. Like when they removed the "repeat playlist" option in Spotify for a year or so. It made impossible to use shuffle, as you'd usually reach the end of the playlist within a couple of shuffles, and it would just change to radio or something. It still supported the option, I could toggle it on in the Spotify app on my phone, they just removed the UI element. Luckily it came back not that long ago.

I was doubting for a while until I took a test drive. You can ask for the last test drive on Saturday evening and keep it till Monday morning. At least here in Belgium that works and you get to properly test it. Which helped to try out the baby and kid chairs we use.

> The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)

But do you still have a key?

My phone ran out of battery some 80 km far from home last Thursday because I forgot to charge it. I could enter my car and drive back home because I open it and start the engine with a traditional physical key.

I slip the key card between my phone case and it works fine.

Yeah, a card. A very inconvenient form factor compared to a key. I forgot that new cars use cards more and more. A key can be put in a pocket and never breaks. A card needs a holder to protect it.

I don’t have one, but something I can just put in my wallet as opposed to another thing that needs to be in my pocket seems nice.

You can always get a key fob, you just have to buy it separately.

I'll never go back to a car without being able to use my phone as a (reliable) key and store the credit card sized backup key in my wallet. Because it's just that - a backup key. In over two years I've used the key a total of zero times. And one thing I've noticed is that key fobs seems to become bigger and bigger, every year. Just look at the new Volvo key fob. It's the same size as AirPods charging case.

I do have the keycard in my wallet but often travel without it. On longer trips, my wife is usually with us so we have two phone keys and the likelihood of both of us forgetting to charge are slim ( also, the wireless pads in the car is where you usually store it )

Additionally, if I were to be stranded somewhere there are 2 other people with phone keys that I could contact for them to remotely open the car, or just find a charger somewhere.

I have had more bad luck losing physical phone keys in the past.

Agree, Tesla software is amazing. Have had a Model 3 for 1.5 years; I think I love the remote climate most of all, living in Melbourne, Australia.

I bought a BMW i4, not a Tesla 3, so this is just my comparison. But Tesla software works really well, they have navigation to chargers, something that doesn’t really work in the BMW, you are pretty much on your own. They have sentinal mode, and it actually doesn’t suck like BMW’s drive recorder does. You can open your car with your phone, like for real via UWB, not just some NFC thing that works only in one place, or over the slow cellular unlock. I guess I didn’t explore the Spotify/music streaming experience.

I still chose the BMW because the better interior and build quality, but it was definitely a sacrifice.

I have an i3, pre-carplay, and I like that the computer works well with just a jog wheel.

It has a navigate to charger feature that works reasonably well (though there are too many steps to “only show fast chargers”, and many stations are broken, though hopefully the tesla supercharger deal will fix that…)

Range estimates seem to be accurate, unlike Tesla’s high-balling.

Anyway, I’m hoping they can do at least that well moving forward.

The navigate to charger lotion in BMW maps is just too hard to bother with. It’s almost better tk just ask siri to navigate to a charger of some kind. The jog wheel is nice, but I get away with voice for most functions. I hope it improves over time, especially the random GPS bug that displaces you by 100 meters and makes navigation useless.

(I'm still mostly happy with my i4, but I knew what I was trading off)

I also own an i4 and I still prefer its navigation system to Google Maps or Tesla. Navigating to chargers works perfectly, and it notifies you in realtime if for some reason it gets occupied.

Yes, Tesla sentry mode is really good, but I really cannot live without a parking front and lateral cameras in the narrow streets of Europe. Specially without a working PDC system.

I’m very happy with my i4, best car I’ve ever owned. And much better that all my Tesla experiences.

I too appreciate my parking cameras given the tight parking situation I have here in urban Seattle. It is also sorely needed because the i4 is a huge compact while I was used to parking a smaller sub-compact.

BMW navigation system is not very good for my needs. Maybe it is just better suited to Europe? That would explain the German-accented English it uses :). Our charging networks are so few and so saturated here in the PNW that it probably wouldn't mean much anyways.

Wake me up when you can open the glove compartment without drilling down a menu on a touchscreen because that is certainly not what I call good UI.

I don't get that either. The rest of Tesla's UX is so good, I don't know how they botched this. Is it a cost optimization? Any PMs over there care of chime in?

edit: Locking the glovebox is a great use case, but not the typical one.

I'm not a PM, but I found this really weird initially, too. Then I realized I could start safely storing things in the glovebox conveniently - behind a code, no physical key necessary. It changed my mind and I started considering it well thought out.

I am somewhat surprised it's not one of the actions you can customize on the hotbar. I have no doubts that if people complained about it, Tesla would add it.

In older cars (early 00s and before) you could lock the glove box with your ignition key.

Some had a valet key that wouldn’t open the glovebox

There's no reason why it couldn't be lockable while still having a physical button to open.

I've never been in a Tesla but does that mean that you can't pull it open with your hands?

I'll put that into a checklist of things to try whenever I'll buy my next car.

Correct. Worst rental car experience of my life.

OMG, thanks. I'll put Tesla on my no buy / no rent list.

Press right button on steering wheel - say "open glovebox". Works every time in a split second even with my terrible English accent

Personally, I am impressed that you can say that phrase in a split second. Takes me at least a second and a half. Which is a second longer than pressing the glovebox open button in my boring old car.

Google maps or waze are much better than the on board tesla maps. You need to pay to have traffic data on tesla, waze and Google maps gives you that for free.

You pay to have traffic visualization, but traffic data is part of the trip planning, and the navigator does reroute you on a faster road if it's available (the delta is configurable).

I would rather not give Tesla access to data from my phone.

No its a car company which writes its own software. Their primary business in not software its cars. Although i agree they are not very good at it, the build quality is obviously dubious. Perhaps the Know how of old car companies + Tesla's battery and Motor tech + Software could result in an overall better product. A merger would be a net positive IMO.

My impression of Tesla (from driving a friend's, who is a massive Tesla fan) is that I get the feeling that the systems aren't as clever as they think they are, and it led to some "interesting" (actually downright scary and dangerous) experiences with the driver assist functions on a long distance drive we did. It wasn't the full Autopilot, just the lane following/adaptive cruise control kind of thing but we almost did go off the road at least once.

But in general with the UI, there was a lot of, "Hey, how do I do [elementary car function]" and he'd be like "Oh I think they changed that [or moved it in the menu] in the last update, uh let me have a look"...

Elon Musk's antics had already basically made me decide my next car wouldn't be a Tesla, but driving one a bit didn't really sell me on it anyway...

Yeah moving a control function in the UI of a car system through an OTA update should be not be allowed imo.

And we are not even talking about "safety critical" things like the hazards switch or parking brake or whatever. If I want to adjust the airflow to my feet by a little bit, I want to do that regardless if I'm driving or standing still. If I need to navigate a menu to do that, then I'll do that, whether I'm moving or standing still. Nobody has the patience to learn the UI up front, or pull over to navigate through a menu safely.

This dead horse has been thoroughly beaten, but please: give us physical controls! Say no to touch screens!

> It wasn't the full Autopilot, just the lane following/adaptive cruise control kind of thing but we almost did go off the road at least once.

Your friend should have warned you that there are conditions where AP is expected not to work well, they're also clearly stated in the manual. I tend to agree that Tesla oversells the AP/FSD functionality just by the name, AP should be renamed to "vision lane assist", or something along those lines.

> But in general with the UI, there was a lot of, "Hey, how do I do [elementary car function]" and he'd be like "Oh I think they changed that [or moved it in the menu] in the last update, uh let me have a look"...

As an M3 2019 owner, I recall 2 instances since 2019 where stuff was moved around a lot, otherwise it's pretty stable.

While the first big update sacrificed some navigator real estate space for non-FSD users as well, it also grouped speed, speed limit and AP limit better at the top left corner, which used to be placed further away (now I don't need to turn my head anymore, I just glance bottom-right). The second one introduced dynamic tiles at the bottom for the less used stuff (things which were otherwise hidden behind non-intuitive areas, like the T Tesla logo at the top center of the screen).

After 6~10mo ago (can't recall) they grouped all car commands in the same panel when you bring up the settings to make it easier and more consistent to access those when required.

UI has gotten much snappier since I got the car, even though it's still running on a very low-end Intel Atom chip.

My feeling is that some breakage is sometimes required to achieve better solutions, and while there's the usual outrage of "changing my workflow" ® in the beginning, Tesla UI updates are usually for the better in the long run.

> AP should be renamed to "vision lane assist", or something along those lines.

In aviation, all autopilot does is keep your plane going in a straight line at the same speed. So the use of autopilot to describe auto-cruise, lane keep assist (not just going in a straight line, but keeping inside the lane and slowing down when other cars slow down in front of you), well, an aviation autopilot doesn't go that far, so it sounds like underselling rather than overselling to me.

If Tesla is outlawed from using the term auto pilot to describe their feature, it would force the aviation industry to stop using the term as well, so I don't think the NSTB will go there, even if there are public misconceptions that auto pilot is somehow equivalent to full self driving/flying.

In aviation autopilot nowadays can do much more than just "keeping the plane straight", it can also improve stability during maneuvers, or auto-land (mostly, ILS). But even aviation autopilot has limitations, which are well understood by the well-trained officers operating the plane as their only mission.

I see these problems with the naming:

- non-technical people have a "magic" grasp of the "autopilot" word that was passed down by movies, as a "set-and-forget" magical button that will make all the problems go away

- non-technical people won't read manuals (most of them, at least), so they are not aware of limitations, and WILL get distracted thinking AP will safely operate the car for them

- Tesla's AP, as of today does NOT handle most streets in most conditions well enough, and still has some caveats on highways, which are its intended operational domain; I understand FSD would do better, but still not a set-and-forget experience

So while I agree that it's being undersold feature-wise, I really think the issue is that "autopilot" is tied to unrealistic expectations in the mind of the average person, which easily leads to dangerous situations in the case of operating a 2-ton vehicle.

I'm not sure I consider rediscovering why buttons matter is mastering anything.

It's okay I wouldn't call it great.

Unfortunately consumers don't really punish companies for doing these kinds of things, at least I presume that's the story since high-end cars often have very shitty in-car computer experiences, like BMW or Porsche.

All car infotainment systems are essentially garbage. But BMW and Porsche both have excellent CarPlay support.

The infotainment screen in my Tesla is great. Just the other day I had to drive a relatives car and used google maps navigation on my phone, I was amazed at how subpar google maps navigation is compared to tesla (lacking ability to quickly overview route, missing lane based navigation, screen never auto recenters as you drive)

Google Maps has lane navigation. IDK what you mean about 'auto' recentering. I think it does this though.

There used to be a zoom out/overview feature, but it's def not in Android Auto these days.

Both Tesla's navigation system and Google Maps suck, but in different ways. Neither is able to suggest the best routes - Google Maps will try to make me waste 4km and 6 minutes suggesting a crappy route - only to update (showing much improved distance and ETA) when I disregard its guidance and take what road I know is more direct. The Tesla maps are surprisingly better in this regard but they are often completely unaware of traffic or road closures (this is in Germany mind you - maybe in the US they behave better). Also they flood you with useless instructions (keep left to stay on Highway XX. How about you only tell me when it's time to leave the highway, not to remain on it?).

I just look at both in the morning, make my own opinion on what road would be best, then I close them both and use Waze for the alerts.

But for example, if I'm traveling somewhere far away, with charging stops, I _have_ to use the Tesla maps because the car will then start preheating the battery on approach to a charger.

with there being a limited number of auto manufacturers, with the general consensus seeming to be that consumers should own increasingly nothing and increasingly like it, there aren’t many alternatives.

which is why it becomes less and less crazy to imagine apple offering a car subscription - might as well, they have the payment platform and the customers have already spent their anger on the incumbents. not that apple is alone.

I've tried Android Auto a couple of times and it was much worse than the BMW's iDrive for navigation and for the entertainment. Perhaps different consumers have different preferences?

That’s also my experience. However my wife still prefers to use CarPlay over iDrive, mainly because of access to messaging in WhatsApp (CarPlay reads the messages to you and it’s possible to reply back via voice to text).

I'm guessing that when buying a car most people can't afford to be picky with the infotainment system and will prioritize buying a better car over infotainment quality.

Worst-case scenario these days is not too bad either, you'll get an aux connector or somewhat stable Bluetooth (if you set it up once and avoid doing anything other than play/pause/next). Yeah, from the software engineering point of view it's slow unreliable crap, but as a consumer you have little power to fix things.

As a data point, I buy used cars because they are not a tool I use for work so they are not like my laptop. It's pointless to pay the full price for a car: it is 100% a cost, the car has not ways to give me back some of the money I spend on it.

So my cars are always about 5 or 6 years old when I buy them. I optimize for price and costs of running and maintaining them. What's important is that they handle well, brake as they should, be reasonably safe in case of crashes and that's it.

Infotainment and navigation, I put my phone on a holder and I use it. The car could be a dumb one from 70 years ago and I wouldn't notice. I only use Bluetooth to make hand free calls. If it had no Bluetooth I guess I'd have to find some solution for a noise canceling mic.

By the way, my current car came with a version of Android auto that Google stopped supporting the year before I bought it and the manufacturer never updated the car. However I don't care, my phone is always updated and it's exactly the same UI I'm used to when I'm not in the car. This beats having to learn two of them.

How long do you keep such cars? Also, 5/6 years old depending on mileage & make is usually the time for some expensive part replacements. Eg. water pump, thermostat & related sensors for BMW F30.

I drive a 2006 diesel VW Beetle. I've had it for 7 years and aside from some electrical weirdness I've only had to change the oil. It cost me $6500. the infotainment system is a CD player with an aux cable. Amazing value.

(this car pre-dates the emissions scandal, I checked.)

I kept one car for 11 years. I was doing very little km. I bought my current car 3 years ago. I'm doing more km now. Maybe my next car has already been sold. I'm not liking what I see around. At least the lower end cars I buy have less enshittyfication inside. My friend's Mercedes and BMWs are a nightmare. They want to do too much and in their own way. They (and their manufacturers) should accept that they are only tools like a screwdriver.

Do the expensive part replacements even get close to the price difference of getting a new car? What if you try to account for insurance and maintenance?

I bought a 2017 Mercedes a few months ago and was disgusted to find that I was unable to update my map data beyond 2020. In the first week of ownership I had driven on to roads that didn't exist in their map.

Also, it appeared to have no network connection so would not pick routes according to traffic.

I spent $600 on an aftermarket CarPlay and Android Auto device and couldn't be happier.

Punish how? What can I do after I bought a car which I intend to drive for at least the next 10 years?

BMW infotainment system has been considered the bet in the market for a long time. Far from shitty experience.

How would you compare that with Tesla? For high end cars, I mentally compare in car compute UX to using an iPad and Tesla was the first car company that impressed me. BMW does not belong on the same tier.

Calling it car software is very generous. More like abandonware.

I want abandonware in my car. Don't include alpha-grade software in a mid-five-figure product. If you can't get it right don't ship it.

The navigation/infotainment space is a thoroughly solved domain. We don't need biweekly OTA updates to add the latest trendy thing. I don't want controls moving around or menus changing based on a perverted engagement metric.

BMW "pathced" several mechanical features of my car. This is called a "recall". Auto manufacturers try to avoid them.

I've got abandonware in my Ford. It's got a bug in the Bluetooth stack which makes it unusable with my new phone. It's never going to be updated, so out of 2 users of that car, one can't play media and the other needs to deal with occasional infosystem crashes that require a full reset and re-pairing. You may be lucky today, but as years go by, you'll find some bugs too.

As Bluetooth standards evolve, you'll want non-recall updates in your car.

Well the car is a 2010 model year and still works as well as the day it was new. The Bluetooth might stop working at some point but 14 years seems pretty good. The infotainment system might not even have been new that year and could go back as far as 2007.

or an aux jack

You mean a dongle to aux jack, because that's a new phone. I can also not use a cable and turn the volume up to max. Either way, that's a workaround for something that's actually broken and could be fixed with a software update.

> You mean a dongle to aux jack, because that's a new phone.

Yes, that's the way most phones have gone.

> I can also not use a cable and turn the volume up to max.

My experience with 1/8" connections is that you have two means to change the volume, the one on the source and the one on the destination. There can be some issues with driving both hot (or one hot and one weak), but you set the destination in the modest middle and it works just fine.

> Either way, that's a workaround for something that's actually broken and could be fixed with a software update.

"Workaround" is the wrong way to refer to a "just works" physical standard that functioned reliably and adequately for decades without any need for continued attention / updates.

Especially when comparing it to a sand-castle software stack.

Wireless audio protocols have a few nice situational advantages, but they have not yet really reached a point where they're suitable outright replacements, and short of attaining wireless power combined with an utterly boring level of commodified stability, it's possible they won't get there.

The disadvantage to the aux jack is I can only control volume while driving. With the built-in hard drive I can change songs as well. That is loaded from simple USB drives. 2010 was still the era of technology serving us.

I would like an update to the navigation when a road is changed though. Its things like that that have caused me to install and Android Auto head unit into my 2008 car as the built in navigation is way out of date.

This just feels like suicide, honestly.

I mean, GM doesn’t seem to have a reputation for building the best, most reliable vehicles as it is — even just looking at domestics (factor in imports, and there’s no comparison). Every time I shop for a vehicle, it’s crazy how GMs are almost universally lower rated than all other vehicles.

I mean, maybe they have cost on their side, but they better hope that and brand loyalty is all they need.

Maybe this was once not a major factor, and maybe it’s still not for some. But I’d say the number of people that don’t care about CarPlay or Android Auto is shrinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com