Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

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I recently did some testing of Bluetooth connecting an Android phone to a reasonably new Mercedes. Being a "luxury" brand, you'd think the Mercedes would have good infotainment software, but I found at least 5 bugs in the GUI in about 1 hour of testing, and I wasn't particularly looking for bugs, just testing what I thought would be the happy paths for Bluetooth connection. The Android phone, on the other hand, did its job flawlessly.

I know software and embedded systems well enough to know all of the issues I found were preventable, if anyone cared.

The car seems well built in many other respects. It doesn't look like the problem is engineering ability.

(See also: Set-top box GUIs that are painfully slow to render menus, scroll, search etc. on hardware that I know can render 10-100x faster when programmed to.)

As you alluded to, the answer is they don't care. Car companies look at software like it's any other line item on the BOM. Like a bolt or a gasket: Source it as cheaply as possible and spoon it onto the product somewhere on the assembly line. I see fit-and-polish mistakes all the time in car infotainment. Text that can't handle unicode, icons that are misaligned by 1 or more pixels, connections dropping and coming back, audio mixing problems, things drawing outside their "windows." Nobody cares--they get to the drop dead date when the software needs to be on the assembly line, hand it over, and start flashing devices.

I agree with you, and I can also easily imagine how this comes about with the software teams or contracted companies that do the infotainment system being completely different people from those who design the rest of the car.

But it was still a surprise to see this a lack of attention to detail in the infotainment system, in a car where the brand itself is all about giving a lot of attention to detail in everything else that's visible, the comfortable mouldings, pleasant interior lighting, different kinds of cup holders, nice place to wirelessly charge your phones, seat controls and sensors, etc.

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