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Comment by urbandw311er | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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Oh, and the maps were always out of date.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.

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.

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.

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?

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