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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm hopeful that stuff like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay will continue moving some of the risky obsolete-able complexity away of the giant expensive machine I plan to keep for over a decade (the car) and into smaller easier-to-replace ones (my smartphone.)

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.

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I posted this above, but in new Lexus RX models at least, the Lexus vehicle management software trumps the AA interface so you're forced to setup their mobile app if you want to use AA (for things like navigation).

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).

That sounds like sync 3.. there was a known problem with Bluetooth connectivity but there was a fairly easy way to fix it. I cannot remember but I will look at my ford vehicle tonight for what I did

They want their hands on that juicy data that Google and apple are getting. It's why GMC opted to make their own instead, and why you have to jump through their hoops first.

GM, at least on their new Equinox EV, no longer supports either Apple CarPlay or Android Auto electing instead to provide only the Google built-in infotainment system and apps.

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.

For some reason, they still get CarPlay outside of US.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/gm-evs-will-get-apple-carplay-...

I can't figure out why car manufacturers insist on building whole parallel universes of UIs, media apps, nav apps et cetera. Doesn't it cost a ton? Do people actually use/want this stuff?

The why is pretty simple: they want recurring revenue. What the customer wants is secondary.

And insisting on building their own mediocre ui helps them achieve that how exactly?

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.

Once you have the data the money can be figured out later.

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

Don't forget selling the driving data to insurance companies, private investigators, law enforcement, etc.

I think what they want is long term dominance, not necessarily revenues. Allowing Apple/Google run their code by default on all cars would be near out of question to them.

A lot of people also need robust offline navigation. The freebie included infotainment offer that.

It's very simple. They want to "own" the experience.

If their HU was 100% Apple or 100% Android, then e.g. a BMW and a Honda would feel the same.

Same with TV manufacturers, or early phones (Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung.. had all different OSes and UIs.)

Except most phone manufacturers jumped onto Android when that became an option.

Android TV is also pretty widespread these days although some big players still have their own firmware.

This is not the direction that the software is going in.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/carplay-ultra-the-nex...

fascinating idea, but no mention of android. Would one (like me!) simply be unable to use this car to its full extent?

CarPlay Ultra sounds like it's extending it further? That is, it's still essentially VNC† with some data fed from the car and rendered by the phone, but now with multi-monitor support.

† it's more complicated than that, but still a dumb framebuffer.

This is what I hoped for but based on the Ultra implementation in the Astons is not at all what we’re getting

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

> but still a dumb framebuffer.

Nope. Your car and phone exchanges some info, too. Like serial numbers, some real time telemetry data, etc.

I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?

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 can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?

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.

Do you have any recommendations on vendors for aftermarket CarPlay?

Honestly it's like TVs? They're all broadly the same thing, usually Android tablets stuffed into whatever form factor. All have quirks, many have things to troubleshoot in terms of getting them to play nice with your vehicle's CAN system. That said the one I just installed this month in my truck is great. Wireless CarPlay, all the time, quick bootup, good quality reverse camera image, and it was a fairly cheap amazon-sourced unit.

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.

I know that regular CarPlay works like this, but I thought they would change it for CarPlay Ultra. Normal CarPlay isn't really safety critical currently.

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..?

> CarPlay Ultra provides content for all the driver’s screens, including the instrument cluster, with dynamic and beautiful options for the speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, and more, bringing a consistent look and feel to the entire driving experience.

There is no way that’s running on the phone.

This is a bit of a two-edged sword. I kind of doubt that Carplay and Android Auto will keep working with new phones as long as a car can. At which point you will end up with an old smartphone in your car or some workaround like that.

Has this ever happened with CarPlay? As far as I know, even if your car was made in 2013 when CarPlay was first released it should continue to work just fine with the newest iPhones. If you plug the latest iPhone into your 2013 car, you would see the latest version of CarPlay pop up on the screen. I know there's a new version of CarPlay which requires support from the car maker, but I think CarPlay support is a binary matter of if the car supports CarPlay at all. I'd hope they'd design the system such that it wouldn't become obsolete over the average lifespan of the vehicle.

I would hope so, but I don't trust computer makers.

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.

On the other hand, Apple is quick to get rid of old APIs in their software, but they consider features sacrosanct. Only this Fall will macOS lose support for Firewire, which finally means that we have a version of macOS that doesn't support the first iPod. Which came out in 2001. All the USB iPods will still connect and sync.

> I don't trust computer makers

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.

CarPlay is essentially a conditional pair of video inputs. Any system that supports on-screen rear-view camera and that has a wheel speed sensor can support CarPlay.

Is wheel sppeed really the only car sensor exposed to the app? That is kind of sad.

What do you really need? Is the car moving forward or backward is the only one you can't figure out from GPS on the phone (this is possibly what they are getting from wheel speed - GPS speed is more accurate if you have a signal).

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.

Nav apps on phones will use dead-reckoning if they don't have a GPS signal, so they don't really even need the wheel-speed sensor, but I'd guess they use it just to increase accuracy.. e.g. in a long tunnel.

Increasing accuracy is a wild understatement. Dead reckoning with mobile phone hardware won't give you a usable result for long. Maybe your experiences are from tunnels with dedicated beacons to tell the phone where you are.

Most vehicular tunnels aren't too terribly long, if you're stuck in one in traffic, yeah dead reckoning drifts quite a bit. But if you're driving through one for a minute or two, it's sufficient.

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.

This isn’t something I have actively thought about… but now that you bring it up, I am definitely concerned. If the APIs were deprecated, CarPlay would be useless as the auto manufacturers would not update their head unit.

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

Automakers didn't update the cassette decks in their cars when CDs came out. You could expect cassettes to be around in cars for a good solid ~20 years, but that was about it. At some point technology moves on.

> 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.

> Automakers didn't update the cassette decks in their cars when CDs came out.

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.

It's not like car manufacturers have any more incentive to update the built in navigation and multimedia applications either.

HDMI should have had a multitouch-over-EDID extension. An I2C HID controller with a spec-agreed address should be able to be just wired in parallel to EDID ROM line and it would just work. Lack of such standard must have strongly justified existence of CP/AA.

This was vehicles made in 2018.

I’m trying to keep mine alive as long as possible.

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