Of all the new cars ideas I've seen recently, only the Slate mini-truck seems to be taking a minimalist approach, with no fancy head unit or navigation system.
A quick outline for those who haven't used them: The car's head-display becomes mostly-controlled by your phone, which is what supplies any navigation, music, podcasts, address-book, GPS, cellular data-connection, etc. Meanwhile the car focuses on providing the display/touchpad hardware, inputs from steering-wheel controls, and maybe AM/FM radio modes.
With the right vehicles/adapters I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket, which is great because then I can't forget it in the car.
On a related note, the Bluetooth stack in my F150 doesn't work very well with phone calls. I can place calls fine, but receiving calls will not route them through vehicle audio. I have to turn on speaker phone to participate. It's a known problem "won't fix" from Ford, regardless of the fact that they've sold millions of these trucks (mine is a 2017 and has never worked).
I discovered this just yesterday while researching the Equinox for a friend.
She is no longer interested in the Equinox despite her loving its looks.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/gm-evs-will-get-apple-carplay-...
A lot of people also need robust offline navigation. The freebie included infotainment offer that.
Maybe I'm just super out of touch on how people use their cars, but my cars infotainment system has not made its manufacturer any additional money as far as I can tell.
You can figure out how people use the car and what features matter to them and upsell or upcharge for those features in the next line.
You can cross-advertise (oh you listen to music when driving here's Spotify deal through us and behind-the-scenes we get a cut for lead generation to Spotify).
You can use the information to defend in lawsuits. Oh our car is faulty leading to accidents? But all these people were fiddling with the unit before crashing.
Also if you control the platform you can sell integration spots to companies. I know my old BMW had a specific separate path to connect Spotify on your phone to car, no other audio app.
There's surely other ways I haven't thought of. The investment pays off later IF you get the data, but CarPlay and Android Auto have really mucked that gambit up for the car makers
If their HU was 100% Apple or 100% Android, then e.g. a BMW and a Honda would feel the same.
Android TV is also pretty widespread these days although some big players still have their own firmware.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/carplay-ultra-the-nex...
† it's more complicated than that, but still a dumb framebuffer.
There is no way that’s running on the phone.
It seems to require pretty deep integration with the automaker (Aston provides a lot of custom visuals), and based on the available third party reviews it doesn’t work as well as you’d suspect for a flagship integration
I thought the main image would be rendered on the car using local data and only the entertainment stuff is transferred from the phone.
And also, how would you drive your car without the phone if everything is rendered on the phone? Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this? I thought it would always show the CarPlay Ultra interface, even when no phone is connected.
I have some understanding of this being someone who has installed way too many aftermarket head units, and as best I can tell, all the rendering indeed occurs on the phone. The CarPlay experience is virtually identical across all the units I've tested on, from my stock '18 Corvette unit, through 4 or 5 ones I've shuffled through in my F-150, and through 2 or 3 through my Chrysler 300. Apart from display size and density, there is no difference at all in all these CarPlay units. They function identically.
The phone also gets notably warm even just playing music which is part of why I strongly suspect all of that is phone-side activity at play with the dash just providing a resolution/density combo and touch inputs.
> Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this?
Correct, if my research is to be believed. There's a stock OEM OS look to everything in line with each brand's visual designs, which is then swapped out to whatever degree they feel like exposing to CarPlay Ultra, at which point it's reskinned in Apple's look.
I don't own any vehicles new enough for this, but it's pretty cool if it works. That said I'm less a fan of everything being a display. For gauges and such I do prefer physical gauges.
If you want a name brand, you're probably looking at Pioneer, though they only make double-din units which make for less transformative upgrades than my truck's which is an entire replacement center console. To each their own though.
For efficiency's sake, I hope it's like a theme (in the style of Winamp, or well, Windows XP), so you can pick some theme on your phone, and the phone tells the car to use that theme while rendering the car's instruments. For UI elements needing data from the phone (like album cover image), the theme would tell the car computer to fetch it from the phone. Considering the state of the tech industry, it's probably HTML and CSS too. And Javascript. Goatse anyone?
By the way... who the hell thinks it's important that someone operating a 800+ horsepower car should be able to be distracted by what the album cover of the music currently playing looks like..?
Nope. Your car and phone exchanges some info, too. Like serial numbers, some real time telemetry data, etc.
The thread about an F150 with a known Bluetooth issue is a great example. Number one vehicle sold in the US for a LONG time, and yet no incentive to keep it working apparently
> Number one vehicle sold in the US for a LONG time, and yet no incentive to keep it working apparently
Yeah, there's no incentive to fix problems when people buy the product anyway.
And reasonably enough: few people even in the early 90s had CD changers in cars, and people didn't want to scratch their discs, and in any case everyone pretty much still had a tape deck at home - it wasn't too hard to copy your CD to tape, which was cheap, small, rerecordable, and more durable, and sound quality in cars wasn't great anyway.
There are people who still use cars made in the 1960s as their daily driver (probably only a handful in the US). Most parts are still available, and if not you can make them in your garage with affordable tools (metal lathes are rare but not unheard of in a home shop).
Apple switch to OSX, m68k to PPC to x86 (ARM is in progress). I had the first android phone - the apps I bought for it back then are not on installable on my current phone (most haven't very modified from what I ran back then). If I had a copy I could still run Office 97 on a modern windows 11 machine - or so I'm told - but nobody will know how to inter change files with me. My company has had to redesign perfectly good embedded controllers just because the chips are not made anymore.
Nor should you!
> There are people who still use cars made in the 1960s as their daily driver (probably only a handful in the US).
I do like resisting the disposable economy, though I hope keeping ICE cars that old wouldn't be normal enough to be a factor in designing a product if for no other reason than emissions and safety features.
> (metal lathes are rare but not unheard of in a home shop).
Indeed. I grew up with a >1 ton metal lathe in ours, as well as a milling machine. My siblings and I would use the lathe as a climbing gym.
There are a lot of nice to haves of course. GPS does eat phone battery so better if the car can give you that. There is a lot of other car data that is interesting, why force plugging a OBDII dongle in to get DTCs, RPM, O2 sensor values, or whatever. However for car play to work at all it doesn't need anything more.
On a side note I've personally had bad experience with beacons in train tunnels telling me I'm miles away from where I'm actually at.
I’m trying to keep mine alive as long as possible.
https://openinverter.org/wiki/ZombieVerter_VCU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280 https://youtube.com/@evbmw
And if you fill the engine bay on an ICE car with battery packs during the conversion, the weight distribution will be extremely uneven and cause trouble with the suspension and related components, poor handling, etc.
That "etc." hides "moving the heaviest, most flammable and non-extinguishable part of the drivetrain into a primary crumple zone in front of you" pretty neatly. :D
Plus, as I noted in the weight part, an engine in a compartment is designed to detach and slide down to protect the cell. Can every retrofitter guarantee the same thing for their battery packs?
That's something spewed by people who don't know enough about cars to know they're chasing the wrong criteria. Battery placement is like a 2nd/3rd/4th order problem. You could fit a very respectably battery in the space where the fuel tank and exhaust go and if not there then the floor might just have to get a couple inches taller in the rear row. Not a big deal. Making battery cases to fit those locations is hard, but also not crazy. Just scan it like Weathertech and Uhaul do for mats and hitches.
The first order thing that's keeping all this from happening is that there's no money in it after all the expensive re-engineering and low volume manufacturing you'd need to do to integrate it into the vehicles you want to support.
This is why the industry is kind of stalled at the "supporting DIYers" level. It just don't work without free labor doing the vehicle specific bits.
You can fit some battery there, but liquid fuels have a much higher energy density and so I wouldn't call it respectable. I have know people who converted a car to electric, and finding places to stuff batteries was the major challenge, they did the fuel tank of course, but then went looking for any other unused empty space. In the 1980s old trucks were favored because under the bed there was a lot of empty space to work with (even then those old lead-acid batteries didn't give much range)
They've done it, actually:
1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time
1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen).
2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk.
2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars.
Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.
Nah the motoring industry has been saying that forever. Just to back that up, I inherited a ton of the "Car Mechanics" magazine here in the UK. Just for fun I've just pulled a random 1960s one - November 1965, 2 shillings it cost. Flicking through, firstly i'm struck by just how many adverts there are, there's 1.5 pages of advert per 0.5 page of content and the adverts are commonly absolute tat like antifreeze additives that surely do nothing useful. Anyway, by page 35 we've found our first nobody maintains anything anymore story: "Transport Tests", top right hand side - a column railing against "defective lorries on the road", "49% of trucks stopped were defective" - i knew no matter which magazine i pulled, there'd be something in there decrying a lack of maintenance these days (in 1965...).
>> So they stopped optimizing for that segment
Again, i don't think you're accurate here. There's nothing a mechanic loves more than to gripe about the engineers who foolishly designed a car to be harder to service. It's a time-tested complaint of the mechanic. Today with all the tight packaging of various systems i think there's often a point to be made about ease of repairability but even when engine bays were gaping empty holes in the 50s and 60s that you could literally stand in (in some cases) with plenty of access space while you worked, there were models of cars derided as "hard to work on" because of lack of optimisation for maintenance. Packaging is hard. If the decision is between optimising for sale (aesthetics, packaging etc) or for maintenance, the design engineer is going to lose that battle in the drawing room.
I think market forces have changed how manufacturers view servicing over time though. If you're doing fleet sales, and your product requires an oil change every 8k miles and the other manufacturer is every 20k miles, then the company purchaser who cares not a jot about mechanical sympathy and a whole lot about a bonus for saving the firm money, applies a pressure to the market to reduce maintenance costs over the first 3-4 years that a vehicle is leased for. And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.
You're approaching this as if it would be a binary across an entire industry. That's obviously not the correct level of analysis. The question is, "are more and more manufacturers doing this?" You've made no case to this point.
> And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.
Would you share the Year, Make and Model please? I want to see this and I want to see precisely which oil products they recommend. The part you may have missed is that specialty oils have come a long way in the last 2 decades.
Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance.
Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.
I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse.
For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software.
This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.
I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.
I worked for a deutsche telekom subsidiary in 2004 and they had a brand new BMW e65 7 Series all liveried up in corporate branding, advertising internet connectivity on the move. At the time i thought that was the ultimate car but i never managed to borrow it...
£10 per megabyte as i recall.
The first way this can go is that the people with a stake in selling cars (dealers, OEMs, etc) get their lobbyists leaning on the politicians and get it rammed through.
The second is that the issue gets delayed long enough that the number of older vehicles it applies to goes down out of attrition and it's not worth fighting over.
Considering the cultural disposition of the nordics when it comes to matters like this I expect the first option to be chosen. There will enough people hand wringing about safety and whatnot to provide the political lubricant to ensure the first outcome.
If it's a pre-computer car, all you need is a machine shop or access to one.
Don't they have proprietary batteries? So you're out of luck at end-of-life if that company still isn't in business. And if a part fails are there replacements?
I'll give you the price is cheap. But if we're just looking for cheap then OP has nothing to worry about. There's cheap transportation in a variety of forms if you buy used.
don't get me wrong - I encourage everyone to ride a bike where they can. However it is for health reasons not saving money.
Agreed re: Slate, it looks interesting through this lens for sure.
But I also think there's probably a business opportunity here, and wonder why a bunch of thinkpad enthusiasts don't get together and start a classic tech business delivering simple EVs with knobs+levers, and computers that don't suck.
But if you're talking about new cars, I think the best way to mitigate that is to buy something that is ubiquitous. The popular cars are the most likely to have enthusiasts finding ways to keep them running until the wheels fall off.
You think you own your car, phone, appliances, but actually, once this system is in place, you will effectively be on some sort of subscription contract with few traditional ownership rights, with many other parties (the car maker, government agencies) able to turn your car off remotely.
Nice and safe.
Now they are along for the ride no matter what.
What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
But then, how would they get a duplicate of the ignition key?
https://blog.nuoplanet.com/en/long-range-rfid-readers
Since at least 2009 it has been possible to duplicate keys using photography, a hobbyist replicated the work in 2018. So take a photo when the keys are out somewhere; on a table, or when unlocking the car.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/reproducing_k... https://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key-duplication... https://markhedleyjones.com/projects/duplicating-keys-from-p...
I think something like this happens to Macbooks if you set the date too far into the future: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251100942?sortBy=rank
I suppose then you can change the date on the car's computer so it's still 2014 or something, at least the car would remain a non-fascist place with Obama still president...