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Comment by lycopodiopsida | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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