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Comment by bastard_op | Hacker News Reader

Automobile companies tried for years to make a decent infotainment system in cars, and almost universally they were all terrible no matter how expensive the vehicle. Finally Android Auto and CarPlay gave everyone what they wanted - decent access to music on their phone, call capabilities that actually work, and program integration with things they actually use with internet service they already have.

Then manufacturers realized they were losing control to Google and Apple, and want it back. So now I guess we're back to random garbage half-baked solutions that no one likes, just so they can sell subscriptions for seat heaters and music players. Back to the walled gardens everyone, move along.

I'll never buy a new vehicle again, particularly GM now, and simply stick to something older I can either put any standard double-din deck into, or a vehicle with 3rd party mods that then add Android Auto like my Infiniti that shipped with the worst infotainment system ever.

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It’s interesting how you correctly identify that this is a massive play for control by Apple and Google, and yet you still seem to sympathise with their position!

I can completely understand why vehicle manufacturers are so wary. Just look at the history of how Apple, Google, etc companies have behaved when it comes to “partnerships”. Look at the App Store. Look at what Google did to supposedly open source Android.

It begins with some generous offer of allowing access to the UX/platform in exchange for innocent sounding things like control over user data/login. It ends with the platform completely taken over, GM being held to ransom, and no in-house systems or staff left to revert back to their own solution.

I sympathise with myself.

I don't want to have an infotainment system in my car I need to spend hundreds of euros to update the software for. Or order a Totally Legit Upgrade DVD from Slovenia via eBay for only 50€. That just happens to require me to insert a CD that says "unlock" on it first :D

Then the upgrade took two hours, 1h 50min of which the device was totally unresponsive and I wasn't sure if it would be OK to turn off the car or not.

Oh, and the maps were always out of date. It cost more to get the "update" (which was always old) than it would've been to buy a separate GPS unit.

And this was a premium VW car, albeit a bit older at the time.

I'd much rather use the device in my pocket that has eons more computing power than all the CPUs in all the cars I've ever owned combined, with up to date maps, traffic data and regular free software updates. The device I can upgrade separately from my car at any time I want.

If a car doesn't support CarPlay, I'm not buying it. (One of the top5 reasons I haven't bought a Tesla)

I don't read GP as sympathising with Apple/Google at all, they just want a nice experience in their car; say that they think they get it from A/G, and that they didn't for years before that from car manufacturers.

i.e. it's not about being a fan of particular brands, it's a self-interested desire for a decent UX/platform.

> I don't read GP as sympathising with Apple/Google at all, they just want a nice experience in their car;

Apple/Google are not a nice experience. If you could share your screen would have been ok. But running special apps is out of discussion. I tried Android Auto. It is terrible, it needs a lot of time to set up (permissions, settings on car), the car must be stopped (ignition off) and 95 % of apps installed are not compatible. In the end, to listen music i have memory sticks and for navigation a Garmin.

Initial setup depends on a car a lot. On my previous car it was connecting through USB, initial setup was complicated but afterwards it mostly worked. On my current car connection is wireless and set up was pretty easy. It takes some time to connect to my car once I turn it on but most of it is loading of infotainment system. As far as apps - depends on what you need. For me maps, music and calls are enough, but if you want something very specific - it's probably not going to work.

I don't knwo Android Auto, but Apple CarPlay. It's far from perfect, but I had a whole different experience than you.

First time plugging in, a simple confirmation on my phone to allow connection. CarPlay starts, everything works out of the box. Now I can phone, can search my music library (try that with bluetooth) and I have a voice control that mostly understands what I want to play.

Right, correct, and I understand your position, but the offerings from the automobile manufacturers came with a 1000x markup for stuff that didn't even work half the time ... unless you paid the entire cost of manufacturing an entire head unit all over again.

A premium vehicle I owned (Mercedes Benz) needed the dealer to install the new maps, only had support for BT music on my phone, and cost more than a decent Android tablet each time I wanted new maps.

Honestly, if the automobile manufacturers want to wrest back control from Google/Apple they had better up their game while lowering their greed.

Before Android/iOS was viable, they felt no shame about their display of naked greed when it came to nickle-and-diming the owner.

If they want people to use their system as anything other than an interface to a phone, they need to make the updates free, make the system reliable, and make it so much better than the basic phone interface that people prefer their system to the Android/iOS one.

> It’s interesting how you correctly identify that this is a massive play for control by Apple and Google, and yet you still seem to sympathise with their position!

Apple and Google got to where they are because people actively want to buy and use their stuff. Apple stuff isn’t cheap and for most of Google’s products, their nearest competitors are a click away and have been even when they didn’t completely dominate major product categories.

People have lots of experience with in-car infotainment and navigation, and here’s the real alternative: people would rather mount their phones in their car using an aftermarket kit or literally just hold their phones in their hands while driving than use the in-built infotainment and navigation systems that car makers provide. CarPlay and Android Auto provide them a nicer experience than doing that which is why new car buyers look for these options by name.

Yea but CarPlay and android auto work :)

I have little compassion for poor GM not being able to upsell me a touch screen system that doesn’t work

What Nissan did was say “if you want leather interior, you have to buy the package that includes our awful touchscreen nav”.

They sold a lot of nav units that way (and that’s about the only way, IMO).

Had to do this with Mazda.

Five years later and the touchscreen keeps causing ghost touches every time the car stops, I actively have to make sure I'm in some obscure menu where random touches won't start calling people or changing the radio channel.

Turns out doing it better influences people's preferences. The problem is fundamentally that the carmakers do such a shit job.

If infotainment systems matter at all to consumers, we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.

> we'd expect to see GM take a hit for this, and get their market share eaten by competitors who don't do so.

I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe. I bought a new Camry in 2017, right at the start of their 4 year upgrade cycle (i.e., the 2018 version). I chose a Camry due to their well-known reliability.

However, none of the new vehicle models that Toyota sold had CarPlay at that point, and it was unclear whether Toyota would ever offer it at all. After a few months of driving my new car and then getting the chance to use CarPlay in a rental car, I decided I would not buy another Toyota in the future because it was so annoying to be aware of the experience that could easily exist involving navigation, music, etc. but that did not.

Toyota eventually relented in 2018, and luckily my Camry had upgrade support to install CarPlay (so clearly it had been planned a while ago for this model). But they would have lost me as a customer otherwise, and I doubt my perspective on this is unique. It’s sort of curious that such a trivial-to-implement aspect of the car’s design can have such an outsized influence on a purchase decision.

My family wanted to buy a very capable 4x4 a couple of years ago. We wanted something capable of towing a large load and to take offroad in some challenging areas, which means most of the SUVs designed for road use are out of the question. At least locally, Toyota are usually considered among the best in this criteria. I was pretty shocked at how dated absolutely everything about it looked and felt. It was definitely a capable offroad vehicle, but it also seemed like it was stuck in the 90's design wise. And by the time it was fully optioned it was, IMO, far too expensive to justify how compromised it felt. It felt like they'd let their reputation stall out their design for a couple of decades.

We ended up buying something else that was much more comfortable and better designed (including CarPlay!) and haven't regretted it.

Same. Longtime Toyota owner who keeps cars for around 10 years. When Toyota didn't offer carplay, there was no way I was gonna live in the 'oldentimes' for another decade and I chose a VW with carplay.

I think there’s a better chance of this happening than they believe.

It’s already happening. When GM announced no more CarPlay, we took the $60K we were going to use on a new Blazer EV and gave it to Hyundai instead. (Good thing, too, or we’d still be waiting on that Blazer instead of driving our Ioniq 5 since April.)

Nobody is being held ransom. GM can win this any time by building good software themselves. This is just another example of tech companies gaining a market through the fair competition of building a better product.

I disagree. I will never trust a non Apple or Alphabet entity more than Apple or Alphabet to connect to my phone.

I like and will always prefer that I can get into any vehicle with CarPlay/Android Auto and trust that my phone is not giving out any information.

I thought, as I got older, that my hearing was slowly deteriorating, but here you are, proving me wrong because somehow I’m able to hear you playing a tune for GM on the smallest violin ever made by humankind.

Nothing stops vehicle manufacturers from making the best entertainment system any customer could wish for. Instead, they’d rather nickel and dime their customers for everything they’ve got.

Subscriptions for connectivity, subscriptions for car features, subscriptions for basic entertainment functionality, fees for current maps, and on and on it goes. All the while pinching pennies wherever they can by using yesteryear’s computers barely more powerful than a Raspberry Pi (if that) while inflating prices in the US market on cars sold cheaper overseas and lobbying to keep the market as closed off as possible so overseas competitors cannot enter the market.

And make no mistake, this isn’t about being “wary of partnerships”; GM happily licenses Android Automotive.

This is about collecting as much data as possible and capturing revenue by gating as much as possible behind a paywall.

After all, who will pay for connectivity and other features when people can hook up their pocket computers with all that to the screen?

Their play for control hinges on creating a better user experience than car manufacturers have bothered to create. GM could simply claim that their experience is better, but they’d have to back that with privacy guarantees which would cost them recurring revenue, and they’d have to compel overdue improvements to Bluetooth and USB standards regarding in-car uses, which would then benefit their competitors. GM, a for-profit corporation based in the United States, has apparently chosen not to take those essential steps that would undercut and destroy Apple and Google’s current plays for control, as it would similarly threaten the “our system is ours” niche GM dug for themselves.

Vehicle manufacturers are not (edit: end-user/OS) software companies, it doesn't make sense (or for any company for which it's not the core business) to build their own OS. Yes OS builders control the OS by definition. What's next, car manufacturers producing music so they get control back on what drivers listen to?

sure they are. there's a ton of software running in cars outside of the infotainment system

I should have added the distinction: they are not end-user software companies, embedded is another world.

There's a lot of software, but their business is making and selling hardware. That almost always leads to the business viewing software as an afterthought and a cost center. Embedded is absolutely rife with this and the quality is often awful as a result (yes, even in safety critical applications)

> their business is making and selling hardware. That almost always leads to the business viewing software as an afterthought

apple is a hardware company and manages to buck this trend.

I sympathize with my need to have a proper car display.

I have a Toyota RAV4 from 2 years ago and the display is straight from the '80s.

I had to use the gps ONCE and I almost crashed into a trashbin because I had to manually follow the car pointer as it was leaving the display. Yes, that's right.

If I was Apple or Google, I would make GM execs use a 15 years old version and make it cash I've a day. Revenge.

You know you need to look out the front windshield still even when you have a GPS right?

> Finally Android Auto and CarPlay gave everyone what they wanted

Bzzt.

What I want is what I have: there's a $10 bluetooth receiver hooked to the car audio input jack, and a $10 phone holder on top of the dash, and a $10 USB charger plugged into the 12V. If phones routinely came with headphone jacks, I could skip the bluetooth intermediate.

So: when I start the car, whatever phone I have paired reconnects with the bluetooth receiver and plays what I want through the dumb speaker system. If I want to run a map app, I do that. If I want to make a call, I can do that. The phone is in charge of muting the music when a call comes in. It's very good at that.

If I change software on my phone, the new things work in the car. If I want to replace the phone with something not tied to Google or Apple, I can.

The car can't report its location, can't be remotely immobilized, can't show me advertising. No new subscription. No bugs in the car system to exploit; no bugs in the car system to brick the system. Easily and cheaply replaceable parts.

I don't understand why any driver would want more integration than this. Somebody suggested that the car should tell the mapping system when I've clicked the turn signal on or off, but if you need that level of detailed support when driving, I think maybe you shouldn't be driving while distracted by a mapping system at all.

I still have a drawer full of phone holders and bluetooth receivers that I used in my previous car with a "dumb" radio. All of the holders were annoyingly rattling when driving over potholes and finicky to insert or remove the phone. From all the bluetooth receivers I tried (3 of them), none of them had a decent microphone, which meant making phone calls a no go, and the first 2 of them had poor power filtering resulting in a high-pitched hum (I suppose it was from the alternator).

Now I have a car with wireless Android Auto and when I start the car I immediately get a google maps view without having to search for the app, including two recommended destinations (usually places I go to frequently, or the last searched place on Gmaps). The whole interface is easier to use while driving, because of the limited feature-set and larger screen than on the phone itself. Same story with calling, it just works - I can answer calls from the buttons on the steering wheel and the mic is decent and in the right place.

Can we stop pretending that every innovation since 2010 is evil? I get it that it locks in you in Google's/Apple's ecosystems, but their solution is simply working well. For me the alternatives don't cut it, and I believe that their shoddy practices (data collection, monopoly etc.) should be fought with legislation and not by refusing to use their stuff on principle.

That’s Android Auto/Carplay, except it uses WiFi or USB, for a better connection.

Better connection is not my experience.

In long trips, the car starts to loose the connection to the phone, even if connected by USB cable. Looks like a memory leak crashing the system. And no, I don't want to stop the car just to restart display of Google Maps on the car display: baby is sleeping, stopping is not an option.

I'm in your camp.

What I want in a car's "infotainment" center is that it doesn't have one in the first place. I can supply whatever I need on my own.

Seems like that kind of turn signal integration could be easily done via Bluetooth if someone bothered making a standard fo it.

The major problem I have with software is that there's no commitment to maintaining it once it's sold, and no additional money is there to be made. The old boring button-based radios lasted forever without software updates, and they could also be swapped out for newer devices later on if need be. Now cars are being made with very specific parts that are not easily replaced, and with systems that aren't infinitely upgradeable, even as we've somewhat reached a plateau of hardware performance that can handle most application demands. Now hardware is being bogged down by resource-eating ads and limited/ spotty Internet bandwidth more than by processing power.

As we progress into the future, there needs to be a major pushback on the software upsell practices of companies, especially for cars. Cars need to be reliable, and dependable. My desktop PC has been running for 11 years now, with the power on (with only minor hardware & OS updates), the only thing that has been a constant threat to it's reliability is the drive by software makers to milk me out of my money for updates.... They often push updates under the premise that they are for security, but now most updates are to insert ads and up-sell schemes into the apps and OS.

I miss the old days, because even though you could buy new hardware, you rarely needed to... Now, with each update, I'm worried about my PC being bricked and heavy downtime without any real technical support available, because there are so many different greedy brands of companies making tons of devices that they regularly drop updates for. Something has to change about the software-driven economy, or I'm planning to just go entirely "off grid" for the most part in my retirement from being a developer and consumer myself.

Just an anecdote - I own a Volvo XC60(with Sensus not AAOS) and 99% of the time I'd rather just use the built-in OS than Android Auto - AA is slow to respond and imprecise(clicks are almost always recognized as swipes rather than clicks, problem which doesn't happen in the built-in OS), and every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road, even though it's my passenger using it. The integrated navigation and Spotify work great and don't give me this minimalistic interface of AA that is barely usable.

Like, I get that it's a great solution in a lot of cars. But I don't think it's universally true that "no one" wants to use the built in system - I definitely do.

>>just so they can sell subscriptions for seat heaters and music players.

Yes, that is absolutely horrendous trend that I hope we manage to stop - but I suspect we won't, the genie is out of the bottle now so to speak.

As an observation point - I drive a company car (a BMW) and will be looking for a new car next year. I would not even considers Volvo until they support wireless CarPlay. GM must very much believe in appeal of their car to piss off android and iOS users simultaneously.

Tbf, I don't know why people get hung up on this, I see this on Volvo forums all the time as well - you can literally get a £50 adapter, leave it plugged in inside your armrest and voila, you have wireless carplay. It literally "just works".

Should the car already come with it installed? Yes. Is it a big deal to rectify? No.

I am not buying a 60k EUR worth new car to fiddle with adapters. It is almost 2024, wireless carplay is a figured out thing since years. If they cannot solve it, they will not get my money, it is as simple as that. If anything, customers should punish manufacturers more for such bullsh*t, not less. Because current behavior let them believe they can get away with anything, thus this thread.

>>I am not buying a 60k EUR worth new car to fiddle with adapters.

I mean, that's absolutely fair - I'm just saying that this is such a trivial issue to fix that it's not even worth worrying about(IMHO).

I think it is exactly the other way around. My brother was long time working for a big car manufacturer, and citing him "it is quite an achievement these days to make a car which drives genuinely bad". And it is true, especially given the move to EV and that with an increasing age my desire to drive a car past 160 km/h and in sports mode is basically 0.

So, where a car still can collect bonus points is infotainment and interior in general. If you offer some touchscreen-blandness, you have to go down with the price significantly, because I see where money was spared. I use the built-in wireless CarPlay daily, so I expect it to work without occupying myself with fixing Volvo's incompetence.

>you can literally get a £50 adapter, leave it plugged in inside your armrest and voila, you have wireless carplay. It literally "just works".

I'm thankful for whichever Chinese engineers reversed the protocol for CarPlay to make this work. But my experience with these adapters is they are more fiddly than you're describing.

My aftermarket Carplay adapter works 100% of the time. Need to make sure both the car and phone Bluetooth aren't paired, then works great.

I mean I have one for wireless android auto and it does just work, it's plugged in, I never have to think about it or worry about it, it just pops up on my screen as if it was built into the car. Maybe the CarPlay ones are more fiddly, I'm not sure.

When I said CarPlay I meant that my particular adapter had reverse engineered the CarPlay protocol to communicate with the car over USB. It can do wireless android auto as well.

They don’t all just work, I tried the most popular one (CarLinkIt) and it didn’t work with mine or my wifes phone, I gave up, wireless was not worth it enough for me to go through the hassle of reset this, clear that etc…

Didn't know these adapters were a thing! Just went to amazon and snagged one for $25.

I have wireless android auto with a built in conveniently placed holder for the phone that does wireless charging, and 95% of the time I still plug the phone in anyway.

Not really sure why!

My wireless degrades music quality very noticeably - really annoying. I have a crappy dongle though, not sure if that's the case with all wireless.

Me neither - I have not used a cable connection once in 3 years I have my current car. Do not even have a lightning cable in the car. But hey, people are different!

Don't you need to plug in your phone anyway to charge it?

And what about switching drivers and quickly switching phones? Or just having the passenger quickly switch to their music.

I have a build-in charging pad, which I almost never use, since modern smartphone batteries are just good enough to survive a day.

Every driver (me and my wife) is in the system and car selects the iphone available in the car, but I can also switch it manually if required.

The passengers have in general to stay off my infotainment system, they can do whatever they want in their own car :)

Well a lot of cars have a wireless charging pad available in the phone holder, so you just drop your phone there and it starts charging / connects to Android Auto.

Tbh, the charging pad is bad, if I would rely on it a lot, I would keep a cable in the car. I don't know why, but it heats up so much if you use it, that the iphone overheats and starts to throttle.

Why do you need to charge a phone every minute?

Most car trips are under an hour long, and many phones have batteries that last 18-24 hours.

Personally, I mostly never use a car charger unless my phone missed the wireless charger that night.

> every time you need to do something it locks you out for 5 seconds to look at the road

Whoever came up with that wasn't entirely right in the head: so now people will stare at the device for another five seconds wondering what they did wrong. Sound of impact.

Or just push the button on your steering wheel and use voice control. You (mostly) do not have to touch the screen at all.

>>Or just push the button on your steering wheel and use voice control

It's literally the worst way to interact with anything. It's infuriating how bad it is, especially for someone whose first language isn't English. It understands maybe 20% of the commands I give it, and the delay between clicking the button, it doing the "bong" to indicate it's ready, then listening to my command, then it processing and finally giving me a response(usually "sorry I didn't understand that") is just horrendous.

Not to mention that it's still physically impossible to use voice controls to dial people with non-English names if you have your OS set to English - try saying "Dial Jan Szczepanek" and it will never recognize it, no matter how you pronounce it. If you have OS set to Polish it will work fine, but I cannot be expected to keep switching my OS language!

> Not to mention that it's still physically impossible to use voice controls to dial people with non-English names if you have your OS set to English - try saying "Dial Jan Szczepanek" and it will never recognize it, no matter how you pronounce it. If you have OS set to Polish it will work fine, but I cannot be expected to keep switching my OS language!

This is just the modern allergy to allowing user configuration. (God forbid someone use your software to do what they want to do!) The problem was solved in the 90s, when speech-to-text sucked, by letting you define your own words.

https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/tutorials/Customizing_Dra...

Obviously, that solution will still work today.

But you are still allowed to configure your contact information, so there's an obvious solution: instead of calling him Jan Szczepanek, just call him John Stevenson. Everyone wins! ;D

My new car has voice control too. It's actually not too bad at recognizing what it's said (that is, it properly displays in text what was spoken, most the time), but it usually can't handle the commands properly.

However, it also has a "hey Google" like feature, where it's always listening and triggers voice control when it hears the words, without the push of a button. And it triggers randomly when I'm talking with my wife, even when we say nothing remotely close to the keyword.

Funnily enough, we also didn't know this feature existed, and neither did the dealership. So for a while we thought it was a random bug. Eventually, my wife figured it's a feature, and it can thankfully be turned off.

Right, I feel your pain, bilingual Android Auto sucks. I wouldn't use voice control to call someone (luckily there is a dedicated button on the steering wheel for that).

But for other stuff (changing tracks or albums - "play xxx from spotify") it works just fine for me. And yes, I use a louder "computer" or "command" voice when talking to digital assistants (had to learn how to do that to control Amazon's Alexa devices). ;)

> But for other stuff (changing tracks or albums - "play xxx from spotify") it works just fine for me.

Does that work with foreign titles? Dragostea Din Tei? 爱的就是你?

I would use voice control more to pick my music if it would stop misinterpreting me. When I ask for my XYZ playlist on Youtube Music, I'm not asking for the song X by some artist I've never heard of. And when I ask for directions to a place I go to at least once a week, it shouldn't try to navigate me to somewhere halfway across the state.

It's just not reliable enough for everyday use.

Voice control is imprecise. You are forgetting about us folks whom are not native in one of the supported languages for voice control and constantly have to adapt our accents to the whims of speech recognition. And the right incantation of command for the task.

It's not impossible, just a very annoying way to control something precisely.

This was exclusively in the context of where you do need to use the touch screen. Which I think should be outlawed for automotive applications.

Same here with a BMW and iDrive8.5 I’ve never used CarPlay with it. BMW infotainment system just works, and its navigation system is superior to Google Maps (more up to date and better high traffic alternatives). Said that, I’d still like to have CarPlay in case BMW stops updating its system after 5-10 years.

To be fair Volvos entertainment system is by far the best one I've used so far. Night and day compared to a lot of other manufacturers

You need to be precise about whether it's the pre-Google system or the current one (after they went all-in on Google).

BMW's is pretty good as well.

> decent access to music on their phone, call capabilities that actually work, and program integration with things they actually use with internet service they already have.

I am convinced all of these things are unsafe. I refuse to take calls when driving over bluetooth; distracting yourself with a conversation when you're supposed to be driving is reckless and I think this is doubly true when it's a phone conversation (in which the other participant can't watch the road and know when to stop talking.)

Even music while driving is a nuisance. Nobody talks about the role of music in car accidents because almost everybody likes it, but it contributes to distracted driving and in some cases reckless driving. It encourages people to continue driving when they are mentally fatigued (take note of how many people say music "helps" them during long drives.)

GPS navigation on a screen is a bad idea too; your eyes cannot read a screen and watch the road at the same time. Pure voice navigation giving brief commands and updates is sufficient and relatively safe. Car integration isn't necessary at all; a phone placed in the center console with the volume turned up and the screen turned off gets the job done. If you need to make adjustments or read a text or take a call, pull over.

I think GPS screen-based nav is safer than voice-based for any complex interchange situation. Showing me at a glance which lane I need to be in and what my overall path/goal will be is better (at least for me, but I think for loads of people) than describing the same over voice commands.

Voice both takes longer and is subject to being pushed to you at the wrong moment where info from a screen can be pulled on demand and quickly.

If you have someone in the car with you do you tell them to be silent?

If they don't watch the road and know when to be, yes. If they're talking when it's safe to that is okay.

Yes, and on top of the mediocre infotainment UX, the automakers also have comical/user hostile upgrade cycles.

I bought a new model release BMW which halfway through the 2nd or 3rd year of the models life, they shipped a slightly different head unit. From that point, only the owners with the new head unit get the newest OS/features. Imagine if next year when iOS 18 comes out, we learn that only iPhone 15s made after March 2024 were eligible, and no iPhone 14 or earlier was, lol.

Beyond that, the OTA updates tend to not work and require you to go to the dealer. No one quite knows the rhyme or reason.

For what it's worth, most vehicles still have aftermarket dash panels and wiring harnesses so you can install whatever you want. Way less of a compromise than buying an older vehicle, but I wouldn't expect some of the control integrations with the steering wheel and other displays to work though.

Really in retrospect nothing has changed from the days double-din was standard apart from some extra steps. Does anyone know if there are projects that reverse engineer these misc integrations for various manufacturers? Is it all just CAN bus or something proprietary?

Nope, isn't as easy as it has been during the 90s.

Ever had to deal with abominations like CAN-but-not-really-CAN like PSAs own VAN? Having to find out which model has which bus? Non-standard size cutouts / bays? Alone the FW versions i had to test of Alpine / OEM adapter products to get steering wheel controls working. The PDC i couldn't.

And MOST is a different topic.

Do they really? Most recent cars I've seen have a touchscreen LCD popping up out of the dash and it all looks rather custom. Are there some kind of standards like double-DIN?

One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples. There’s other manufacturers as well. I recall seeing model specific replacement head units for the pop up type display you describe but can’t find them now

> One option is standalone CarPlay and Android Auto head units - search for carpuride or Atoto for examples.

What GP complained about was that the factory-installed head units have very non-standard shapes for everything but the screen, and even then it'd be glued into some molded piece of plastic trim which has a non-regular shape in the dashboard.

You'd literally have to cut out the trim with a saw and refinish it in order to use the din/double-din standard sizes.

you just need an aftermarket trim piece that allows install of standard head units.

The fundamental problem is that once you bought the car, the manufacturer now has a monopoly on everything they can sell you for the car.

In my opinion we should have a "no-tether" law: once you buy a product you should be able to use (and upgrade) it as advertised even if you break all ties with the original vendor. This means that other vendors can supply parts and services. This law could hold for many product categories, including cars and smartphones.

I have like the opposite experience...AA and Carplay have always been cause of issues, having to take the phone in my hand while driving, sluggishness..

In fact I feel the opposite you say: car play has been an excuse for some automakers for subpar infotainment.

That being said removing it completely is madness, because people like you are millions and want it.

None of these issues exist on my Mazda car. Screen is tactile at stops, but I only ever use the rotational+directional knob. Phone stays plugged and untouched. It's snappy.

I bet some other cars have poor HID but here they put the work in and it is good.

I have the same experiance, I wonder if maybe people are using wireless modes(I don't have that option in my car), and don't have "knob controls".

Why do you have to take your phone in your hand? You just do all your actions on the screen in the car. I’ve never had to touch my phone in the car once it’s plugged in.

I think you need to upgrade your phone. I have never had these issues with a (more or less recent) iPhone.

The idea that I have to upgrade my perfectly working phone to get a better infotainment experience sounds ridiculous.

Also, as I stated, I'm perfectly fine with the out-of-the-box experience of the infotainment in both my cars.

There's radio, there's maps, that's all I really need.

If it's sluggish then it's not working perfectly.

The infotainment is sluggish not the phone.

That's really odd. As far as I know carplay just sends video data to the screen and the screen shows it. It's like an hdmi cable in that regard. I would say it's a problem with your car, then. My volkswagen has absolutely no issues with carplay.

[it] just sends video data to the screen and the screen shows it. It's like an hdmi cable in that regard

Spoken by someone who's never had to troubleshoot HDCP handshake issues with hdmi cables.

I think you pretty much nailed it.

On the other hand I will only buy a car where the car is a BT audio unit and control head and nothing else. Everything more than that sucks.

$40 bucks on fiver gets you a better management system than what GM will develop.

> Automobile companies tried for years to make a decent infotainment system in cars

To expand on your point, both Google and Apple are rumored to be getting into the business of manufacturing cars (e.g. Waymo and the rumored Apple Car). So GM may be looking toward the future where their infotainment systems are owned by rival car manufacturers.

Modern cars are of such high quality that they are largely commodity, even moreso with the switch to electric drivetrains. Margins on the hardware will continue to decrease, and automakers will be desperate to recoup revenue through digital and subscription services. The problem is that traditional automakers are way out of their league. GM has a lot more in common with Foxconn than it does Apple or Google.

Ironically motorcycle companies seem to be doing better in this regard. For example Royal Enfield, KTM or even BMW.

At least nobody is stupid enough to add a touch screen infotainment system to a motorcycle.

I'm actually not exactly sure. But would be hard to use it with gloves anyway. Most systems rely on buttons on the handlebars.

Well, touring harleys have that for years (like since 2014)

I just have a playlist on a USB thumb drive. Works flawlessly.

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