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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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…

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

>>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.

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.

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