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Comment by valgaze | Hacker News Reader

Author says "I literally will not buy a car that does not support CarPlay."

From July 2022: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/apple-carplay-could-be-a-tro...

  Apple engineering manager Emily Schubert said 98% of new cars in the U.S. come 
  with CarPlay installed. She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would 
  only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.

  “It’s a must-have feature when shopping for a new vehicle,” Schubert said 
  during a presentation of the new features.

View on HN

Not only does it irritate me not having it in a practical sense, it’s also an arrogance on behalf of the manufacturer. “We can do it better than iOS/Android”, or “We have a better reason to do it”. No, and No.

That’s just a line. More like, “We can collect our own data”, or “We can lock them in and collect subscription fees.”

Mostly the second point.

They already collect and track you, even with car play. I strongly recommend this CCC talk, where they hacked a Volkswagen database that contained unfiltered, high-accuracy, timestamped locations of a large majority of electric cars from VW group.

Based on that they were, for example, able to identify cars owned by members of Germany's security apparatus: where they work, where they live, where they drop off their children each morning. Who visited brothels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzoXbbth0s&t=30m

The frustrating thing is I bet they’re still tracking and collecting this when you stop paying for the tracking / telematics.

They do, you just then don't benefit from the service. At least, that's been confirmed to be the case with Subaru from other security researchers looking at the telematics system.

good thing that brothels are legal in germany.

Irrelevant - it’s still a great type of kompromat when you want to gain leverage on someone. They probably don’t want their wives to know, for instance. Same if they’re a prominent backer of religious moral values.

Just curious, are car manufacturers required to obtain explicit consent from owners for collecting such data according to GDPR? Or German car lobby's pocket politicians were able to carve out some exception for them?

And what of passengers?

Where's GDPR when you need it?

They all think they can do better, and it is sheer arrogance, because even the best of them is utter garbage compared to software that is actually built with fast iteration, UX research, and real user testing. No car manufacturers do a good job of this, and they all bake their atrocious UX into a $50k piece of hardware you keep for decades and which *never* gets a significant software update. The fact that they don’t see how impossible it is for them to win at this game is why they will never win. Sorry Rivian. Your vehicle is great but you’re handicapping yourself with software hubris.

I hear so many complaints here on HN about "car UX". I am not a Tesla fanboy, but lots of people who review Teslas say they have great "car UX". Can you share some specifics about what you don't like?

I used to be a person who thought I would never buy a car without Carplay, and Tesla won me over.

I don’t pay for any Tesla subscription services, but I do not miss Carplay. Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there was/is no equivalent car at that price with Carplay.

They are slow. They all feel the need to make a “unique” UX that doesn’t actually work very well. They require some sort of subscription. They have limited functionality because they want to gatekeep functionality on some proprietary app. They require some godawful mobile app. They are just universally inferior.

Tesla’s is probably better than most, but they still lose by not letting me just use my phone, which is what I like.

I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years, different make and models, some really cheap, some fairly expensive. One thing they all have in common: their terrible infotainment UI.

I’m sure they are trying and it has gotten slightly better lately - but it’s still not great imho. If they really want to do it better than Apple etc., they seriously need to up their game - and I really wish they would, but I don’t see that happening, the cost is too high.

    > I’ve had ~15 cars over the past 25 years

That is a lot of cars! Why so many?

I don't think they can. The infotainment is outsourced to who knows where and those people develop based on specs sent by the manufacturer: as cheap as possible and as fast as possible. Unless you actually spend time understanding what people want, how they want it, if they like it or not, you cannot have a superior product.

I have a newish car (2023 make) with an Android based infotainment system: the built-in maps move so slow, no online updates (I have to use a stick to update them once a year) and so on. Basically they put it there I think out of habit, not that the majority of their customer demand in-car navigation as a must to buy it.

Even if they can do better, will it be better than Carplay in 10 years? Or 20? Will I get free GPS map updates for that long?

Some brands don't even do OTA updates, so you'd have to get your car in for a service if there's a new feature or bug fix in an update you care about. I'd never want to do that for a map fix when I could just use Carplay where Google Maps (or whatever else) has already fixed it.

And even if they do OTA updates, they won't be updating those maps in 10 years, much less 20.

Car Infotainment Systems vs Built-in TV UI/Apps shittiness FIGHT!

It's a real competition, not sure who would take home the gold.

Winner goes through to the semifinal against an in flight seatback entertainment system, but will go down in the final to a WiFi router configuration web interface with default password ‘admin’.

It pains me when I see people using the built-in TV apps. I've bought and/or gifted older Apple TVs and the like (Fire/Chrome stick/box) to show there is a better way. The lag and general slowness of those interfaces drive me nuts.

They can do it better than your phone but only if you are a professional driver in your car for at least four hours a day. The typical person spending half an hour going to work or going to get groceries has everything on their phone and the hassle of setting up their card just how they want it isn't worth it. The typical person also is more likely to be thinking the address I need to go is in my calendar system and that's going to be more hassle getting into the car then the open in maps function from the phone.

I worked at a car company. It's not arrogance, it's greed. They do want their own proprietary infotainment to be good, but it's more that they don't want to abdicate control, both out of a possessive feeling over what you're looking at, and over the potential for selling you access to their own stuff on that screen.

Ironically, it’s the same greed that has made Apple rich: the carmaker wants to own a platform where the only way onto that screen is by cutting them in on the profits. Of course, on a “much less accessible to small businesses” scale. I assume Spotify or Audible have to pay large annual lump sums just to be there on the GM platform, rather than “just” the 30% shakedown Apple charges. So it excludes any developer who isn’t part of a Fortune 500 company.

It’s also just a much greater cost per head of build / management / maintenance/ transacting to hit a much smaller proportion of users. Build an app for iOS, deal with Apple (or Google…), you’re hitting many many nore people for that effort.

Every time I have to cycle through the SirusXM hardcoded ad in the AM->FM->Bluetooth->SirusXM cycle of my car stereo's mode picker, I get angry at Toyota.

Lol, be glad it's not a Subaru. Same issue in the infotainment, but also occasionally shows you a popup box ad that doesn't go away unless manually cleared, which prevents you from using the infotainment or climate controls (since they're part of the screen now). The dealerships also opt your phone number into recieving SiriusXM ads by default.

From a non-(voluntary-)user perspective, that kind of arrogance and frankly abuse is what got Apple diehard fans, so it wouldn't surprise me if Rivian is also aiming for that.

I mean they can’t have no option and rely completely on CarPlay and if they do that they can’t half ass their own system. There’s no excuse for not supporting CarPlay though.

Even if they could "do it better" it is still locked into a single device/vehicle and can't match the eco-system that Apple and Google have developed across a family of devices and services. In order to really compete, they would need to enter markets already dominated by big tech companies.

Since then GM has dropped CarPlay. Rivian has appeared following Tesla and refusing to support it. And I thought there were some other existing manufacturer who was either getting rid of it or thinking about it.

Basically despite the popularity the market seems to be moving against it slowly. And the more those cars succeed the more other auto makers will be willing to follow.

It's not that the market is moving away, but more like car companies realized if they want to sell monthly subscriptions in the future, they need to own the software.

This is crazy to me because the primary value proposition of Rivian's Connect+, as I see it, is enabling the hotspot while you're in the car and being able to monitor Gear Guard while you're away from the car. These are entirely separate from supporting CarPlay/Android Auto.

If Rivian et al. truly want to sell a premium product, their software needs to be premium. And frankly it's just not there. The other day I was trying to listen to an upcoming album that has a few singles released. On my phone I can do that no problem. On the Rivian Spotify app, the album just didn't show up. It wasn't possible to play those songs in order without searching for the songs one by one. There are a ton of things that I love about my R1T, but as more time passes, the gap between what they offer and what other manufacturers offer becomes more and more apparent

The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.

$240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service

its likely not the metadata, since they already have access and sell that, but then they can sell ads on maps like Google does.

I don't understand why people are so deluded about the value of metadata about them. It's not that valuable, you're not that important.

This is part of a broader trend I see in all consumer markets: especially in markets with just a few large important players: the companies start making very unpopular moves in the hopes that their competitors will realize the massive profit potential and follow them out of greed rather than try to steal customers by being the good guys.

Examples: self-ordering kiosks at restaurants, every change made at every airline in the last 15 years, bandwidth caps at ISPs, “resort fees” at every hotel, tipping for car services, etc.

They know that since there aren’t many options, it doesn’t matter if customers all hate it, as long as they have no choice. The automakers (at least in their fantasies) smell blood in the water for the idea of CarPlay/Android Auto, and want to kill it if they can.

Aviation is an incredibly low-margin business - airlines are less trying to earn "massive profits" and more just trying to continue to operate year over year

Fair enough, it would be more accurate to simply say significant increases in the bottom line. Certainly possible that it simply moves from massively negative to less negative, like American Airlines. It still makes a big difference to them all the same.

I turned down buying a Rivian for exactly this reason, but it seems plenty of consumers don’t care.

Curious if anyone has been able to calculate the sales and profits surrendered by the likes of GM and Rivian due to this switch. (My guess is it’s low.)

I think one of the things at issue here is that "professional service every six months" with EVs has gone from two oil changes, a tune-up, and a tire rotation to "maybe just a tire rotation". Most people don't do tire rotations that regularly, and any garage can do a tire rotation who needs to go to the dealership for that. They might be hoping that they can use some of that $240/yr to make dealers a little bit happier about selling EVs.

Which does sort of get slightly to the heart of some recent things that the dealer model in the US has always been sometimes antagonistic to consumers, EVs make that worse, and it may be time for brand new dealer regulation. (Though that alone won't address the subscription fees because car companies will want recurring revenue with or without dealers.)

> two oil changes, a tune-up, and a tire rotation

What is this, the 60s? Modern gas cars are so computer controlled that the concept of a "tune-up" effectively no longer exists, and they go 10,000 miles between oil changes so most people don't even average a single oil change every 6 months. EVs are even lower maintenance, but the difference isn't nearly as big as you're implying.

I think that is still in agreement to my point. Even ICE maintenance is no longer the same schedule (and cost patterns) as it was when the dealership model was invented. EVs push it to a "crisis mode", but it has been a building misaligned incentives problem for decades.

Additionally self driving vehicles are promising to reduce the total number of collisions, and collision associated repair is a significant portion of all auto mechanic activity.

I'm sure that's a big reason. But I think they also may be afraid that, if CarPlay/AndroidAuto really becomes such a must have that they can't sell cars without, Apple and Google with start charging them huge fees.

I'm in this camp: I will not buy a car without CarPlay. And I put so few miles on my car that while I'd like a new one, if the vendors make this impossible then no one gets my money.

Same here. I have a Chevy that supports wireless CarPlay and I refuse to buy a car that doesn't have it. We're looking at replacing it soon, and we're going to go with a Subaru in no small part because it supports CarPlay.

Are there vehicles that support it in a way that isn't buggy? I have a few friends with it and I don't think I've been on a single ride with them without a glitch. Freezing interface, spontaneously jumping to regular Bluetooth, music playing but no actual volume, plugging into usb power causing some kind of mode-shift that makes the screen hang or briefly cease to work, all kinds of nonsense. Also kind of weirdly bad interface I feel (very subjective opinion there, obviously that's not a "fact").

I've only had Android Auto in my own vehicles, and while it hasn't been as buggy, it feels slow. I never use it anymore.

Haven’t had issues with Hondas or Toyotas since the 2020ish models at least

It's funny you mention Toyota, my Dad's 2022 Civic Hybrid is the one I get to witness being buggy garbage pretty much non-stop with CarPlay. Lord don't plug it into the USB port that does data if you're already on wireless Carplay. You might be done until you pull over. I also love the way using speech to reply to a text often resumes the wrong song (seemingly just starts a random song midway through, and multiple times the Joe Rogan Podcast which dad doesn't listen to and is not subscribed to - when this happens it always starts at the same point in the intro).

I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.

I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.

Just a small note: Civic is Honda, not Toyota.

Haha yea - my dad always had a Prius prior to his civic hybrid. Easily mixed up! Well at least for my dumbass.

my mazda cx-5 has had no issues. it's an extension of my phone at this point.

fun car to drive too. zoom zoom :)

Ooo they do look badass. Really pretty shape.

Regarding Android Auto being slow, it could just be due to your phone. It has to stream the whole interface as video to the car's infotainment system over USB (or Wi-Fi on newer models), then handle taps and stuff that it receives back, if you're using an old or budget android phone then that can be pretty laggy.

I have the Nothing Phone 3a now, before that, I had all flagship pixels. 0 were not slow. I always figured it had to do with the infotainment centers implementation of the protocols or simply their hardware.

It was always stable for me, just sluggish.

If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.

The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.

I own a Ford and a BMW, both with CarPlay. The BMW is flawless. The Ford just refuses to connect about 10% of the time and requires the infotainment system to be rebooted. It also occasionally connects but leaves audio coming out of the phone speaker. So yes, implementations vary.

I have a Ford that after 13 years is reaching the point where I'm considering replacing it.

Their homemade infotainment system prior to CarPlay was awful, and has an overflow error which hits me about once every 6 months which requires pulling the fuse to hard reset it. As far as I can tell they keep adding new songs to a stack, and never flush it so at some point you'll reach the end of a song and it won't play any more. Once you reached that you can only use the phone function, attempts to use music result in you getting your Bluetooth connection terminated.

Which cars specifically?

I haven't seen a broad range, but Mazda seems very fast and reliable.

Chevrolet (prior to recent models that drop it) and Honda do it well.

It is pretty terrible on my Bolt but it's a 2019 so maybe it's just an age thing.

I have a mid-aughts VW and have never had any of these issues. So I suppose you can count mid-aughts VWs.

Tesla might support it.

https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...

GM has not dropped CarPlay. I just checked out some 2026 GM vehicles (Chevy) and they list CarPlay.

It may be for MY 2027. I know the new Bolt drops it.

Right now it’s only dropped in GM’s EVs. Of course when this causes a drop in EV sales, they’ll use that as an excuse to kill off their EV lines.

They’ll attribute that to something else and claim dropping CarPlay was a huge success and do it in gas models.

Most likely they’ll do both, with a straight face.

GM 100% dropped it in their EVs and announced moving away from it.

https://www.theverge.com/transportation/804562/gm-apple-carp...

OK, but EVs are a fraction of their cars... And the OP didn't say EVs, so I was confused.

Blazer EV dropped it and sold like shit lol

Same here. CarPlay is in the top 10 features for my next Car. Even for my older 911 which I bought second hand, the first investment was a Pioneer head unit with CarPlay.

In my opinion, anything older than a 996 shouldn’t have an infotainment screen. Looks very out of place. Just use a phone mount for navigation or use audio navigation through a period correct radio.

I agree. I find it tacky when people buy old BMWs and Mercedeses just to throw the original (often mint condition) radio unit out and put in a cheap carplay display.

Like you have this 30 year old car with a pristine wooden trim where all components align nicely in design and you decide to ruin it for the convenience of having notifications in your face while driving? A phone holder looks much less invasive.

It's a 997. it had the original OEM double din stereo with the Nav. Porsche offered the PCCM CarPlay upgrade, but decided the Pioneer unit was much better.

Nice one. Yes on the 997 a CarPlay screen will not look out of place!

There doesn’t have to be a big screen.

Porsche sells head units with car play for their cars going back to the 1960’s. I think they look great.

https://vehicle-accessories.porsche.com/prod/pag/Vehicle/Acc...

Tesla might actually support car play soonish: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/tesla-is-...

> ”Rivian … following Tesla and refusing to support it.”

Actually, Tesla is apparently planning to add CarPlay support via a software update.

It hasn’t happened yet, as apparently it’s been waiting on a new feature from Apple which will allow navigation data to be shared/synced between CarPlay and the car’s self-driving system.

This Route Sharing feature was announced at WWDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwG0I8UGjg&t=771s

Tesla and I think Rivian goes deep into the computer as a control surface. They save $10 not having a handle for the glovebox or whatever.

GM just wants to extract a pound of flesh. All are companies making dumb decisions by ignoring what customers want.

It will cost them customers. My company buys like 10k cars a year and we make CarPlay a requirement. We see it as a safety and productivity issue. We want employees using maps to navigate and avoid hazards, but don’t want them operating our vehicles unsafely.

Personally, it would be a long shot for me to buy any GM product due to high depreciation. The CarPlay/Android Auto thing disqualifies them.

I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW, which has excellent navigation integration with a HUD. Recently, they announced that my vehicle would receive map and software updates, for basically as long as the included modem was functional.

My vehicle doesn't support the carplay to hud stuff, but that's okay. The thing is... when my car stops getting map and traffic updates, I will still be able to switch to carplay for at least the command screen presenting information. I intend on keeping this vehicle for a long time, so that's important to me.

On top of that, carplay offers better bitrate than bluetooth.

For people that wish to keep a vehicle for a long time, carplay/android auto isn't just a convenience anymore. With the increased integration of headunits, aftermarket becomes a tougher sell.

> I have a vehicle that's basically a BMW

Why not just name the brand?

I assume it's a Toyota Supra

It could also be a Rolls Royce or a Mini.

Or a Grenadier.

That's just engine and gearbox i believe, not really a BMW.

Could be an Alpina

The screen is also BMW.

It could be a small brand not sold in the US that a large portion of the audience here wouldn’t recognize.

If only there was a global repository of information about everything that was readily accessible at our fingertips that anyone here could access!

Let’s create such a marvelous thing! What shall we call it?

Excluding whatever's going on in China right now, there's just not that many small brands left. You only have to have a passing interest in cars to be aware of pretty much every global car brand - excluding high end supercars, kit car weirdness and whatever mayhem is happening in China.

I assume it's a MINI, which is made by BMW

because the infotainment system and drivetrain isn't by that brand (which is toyota). the vehicle is, for most intents and purposes, a bmw.

I’m one of these buyers. I had a reservation for a Rivian, then this interview shut the door on possible CarPlay. I canceled my reservation and bought an EV9 which I love and it has CarPlay!

Rivian is turning away potential lifetime customers because they want to force customers to pay for another cellular data plan and get their cut.

> She delivered a shocking stat: 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it supported CarPlay.

I would be shocked by the number being that high because while iOS has a slim majority of the market share, it's nowhere near 79%.

A household might have three or four mobile phones, but only one or two cars. Many cars also can and do support both Android Auto and Carplay. If my wife and I used Android and my teenage son used Apple, I'd definitely want our car to support both.

It might be new cars. I could see new car buyers having an iphone bias vs android.

I would love to buy a Rivian R2 but I will absolutely not drop that kind of money until they support CarPlay. To me - a refusal to support CarPlay is an extremely user-hostile decision.

I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it

(I will, apparently, never buy a car)

I mean, "no microprocessor" means no engine designed in the past 30 years, because the fuel pump needs one.

"No antenna/modem I can't readily remove" might be _slightly_ more achievable.

50, as another commenter pointed out.

That was the first such car. Even though the automatic transmission was invented a long time ago, new cars are still made with manual ones

I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik.

Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.

That’s a very hard line

TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) is a coin battery powered computer inside each tyre of your car. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now. Even the lowest end cars have TPMS in each wheel. If you change wheels you need to go to a wheel shop and have them re pair (as in re pair wifi) the wheel with your car. I had to do this recently with my 2014 ford focus.

Anyway those are just four of hundreds of computers in your car these days.

Not exactly a great example as it's unnecessary and expensive to replace. Lots of other microprocessors actually make your car easier and safer to drive.

A TPMS doesn't make your car easier and safer to drive???

You can buy a tire gauge at a gas station for $10 and check your tires when you clean your car.

But then again, I am old enough perhaps to have been taught to regularly check your tires before driving to begin with.

Did I just read an argument that it’s easier or safer to manually check your tire pressures rather than having the car do it automatically every time the car drives fast enough to “wake up” the TPMS units?

It's easier to do that than to pay to replace them when the battery dies. Just stop adding more unnecessary costs to my car maintenance!

That battery lasts longer than the tire. People sometimes try to say but I don't drive my car much and that doesn't change the math because tires are destroyed not just from the way of driving but also the sun and ozone in the air destroy tires it still needs to be replaced every seven years., it still needs to be replaced every seven years.

I’m totally comfortable going out to 12 years on tires. Beyond that, I’m replacing them. 7 seems excessively conservative for road use.

The $10 gauge is of dubious accuracy. Especially if I bought it at a convenience store that happens to sell gas.

TPMS has been mandatory in the U.S. since 2007. It turns out riding on under-inflated tires is dangerous, and people don’t regularly check their tire pressure.

My car will not exceed a certain speed if TPMS is malfunctioning.

It amazes me that people don't notice. I was driving with a friend once and had to tell them to pull over because they had a puncture.

Conveniently it cost around $200 every 5-7 years to replace all 4.

Driven cars much longer than that without replacing TPMS.

Some cars use ABS speed sensors instead of that which is usually a bit less accurate, but also less of a hassle.

Yes. But in my car the downside is that it does not tell which wheel has a problem, just a generice message: check tyre pressure.

Real TPMS sensors inside the wheel give much more accurate information.

That's a software issue rather than an inherent limitation. I've driven cars with abs-sensor based TPMS that will tell you which tire is under or over-inflated

The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado is generally considered to be the first car to have microprocessor control.

But Ford's EEC was built around Toshiba's TLCS-12, the world's first 12-bit microprocessor, developed specifically for engine control, and might have been in cars produced prior to 77, but documentation is spotty.

So do you only drive cars built prior to the late 70s? Because sacrificing the enormous safety improvements just for a bizarre feeling of moral superiority is a really awful hill to die on. And literal death is a real possibility

Or do you not drive and never planned to buy any kind of car and thus your claim is meaningless?

You can get up to 1983 without computers if that's what you're looking for. 1984, they all had computers. Then if it had a carburetor, there was still a computer somehow controlling that carburetor.

I don't think this is a useful stance to take for more or less any reason (any reason you can point to will have a different underlying issue). Cars functionally have to have microprocessors, if nothing else but to control emissions, and that's a good thing. I don't want society to smell of exhaust, so that's an obvious and gigantic benefit. There are many other good reasons to have them, like rear cameras, tire pressure sensors, infotainment, the lot.

There are downsides, but many boil down to 'manufacturers are knobheads' (data collection, pushing subscriptions) and lessened control (tuning computers can be easier than tuning mechanics, you just aren't given control, so this to is arguably a case of 'manufacturers are knobheads', or sometimes liability issues).

Sounds like the Apple monopoly has made yet another industry its bitch.

These companies are giving up sovereignty of their primary product to a company that can steer away customer loyalty and disrupt any hope these companies have of increasing their already scant margins.

Any car should be able to interface with a phone without Apple or Google's legally binding terms and NDAs. The direction of control should be on the side of the customer first, and the automotive company second.

Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

What do you want the regulators to do to Apple in this case? What have they done wrong?

Consumers having a preference is not ok?

I feel the same way about Android auto. I refuse to be locked into some terrible, never updated or expensive subscription vendor nav unit. I have a phone. I want to be able to use it.

Not just that, but car makers have proven they can’t be trusted with our data. My phone has all my appointments and addresses in it. I’d much rather use the nav on the phone where the data already is, then sync it with my car so they can do god knows what with it.

Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay.

What’s your point?

> Where the hell are the regulators? This is not okay.

To quote a wise man:

>> We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit.

>>We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755473

These are the companies that undersigned the Orwellian "protect the kids" act.

These trillion dollar companies are the problem. They're moving into other healthy industries and crushing them. They're sucking the oxygen out of every market.

Stop cheerleading this. They need vibrant competition. We need a de-ossifying forest fire. We need lots of nimble smaller companies.

Instead the giants place a ceiling on the growth of every other industry, then when they need more growth, they start to creep in and dump on healthy markets unrelated to their original enterprise.

Look at Amazon giving away Lord of the Rings, running a $200M ad campaign for free on its Rivian trucks, printed boxes, website, app, etc., buying up MGM... How do actual companies in these spaces compete with the dumping?

How do businesses keep Apple and Google from strong-arming them? Rivian doesn't want to be Apple's bitch. You guys are cheerleading it and telling Rivian to bend over.

Google and Apple are the companies that want to track you and turn the internet into a land of device attestation and mandatory ID sign in. They're both actively building "age assurance" into their platforms, and it won't be long before they start gating internet use via these tendrils.

Google and Apple are not good companies.

You're all building this Orwellian hellscape. STOP.

You know the reason why companies like GM don't like CarPlay is because they think they should be the ones who get to track you, sell you various subscriptions, and sell the resulting data to third parties. Right?

You'll note that it wasn't Apple who sold out their own customers, it was GM. [1] False-equivalence arguments are both pointless and, in this case, unnecessary. There is a lesser and greater evil here, and the lesser one in this case happens to be Apple.

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/gm-pay...

Seems like, if anything, the right action for regulators would be to enforce car manufacturers to not refuse to support existing consumer connectivity protocols... or at least not unless they can come up with something at least as good. And definitely something that isn't "pay us a data subscription so we can track you too while you use a crappier re-implementation of what your phone can already do."

Or "we're gonna cut off our older models to force people towards new cars instead of older ones." That's a bad pattern to let people selling $30,000+ devices get access to.

What regulators and the industry should have done was to devise a touch-over-HDMI protocol, so that CarPlay can be deprecated and its successor sectioned off as they like. That was IMO the root cause of this problem.

This wouldn't be a solution to the argument in the article: Rivian and Tesla don't want to support phones projecting to infotainment

As it is, CarPlay is implemented as a h264 video stream which receives touch, microphone, and metadata from the vehicle, the protocol is fine albeit proprietary

As a owner of a GM without android auto, never again. Everything is on my phone but I can't safely access it while driving. Also can't legally because my state makes using the phone while driving illegal (for good reason. I suspect most states don't allow it)

That doesn’t make any sense… The comment you’re replying to is about people’s desire for a particular feature, but pretty much any car that supports CarPlay also supports the Android equivalent, as well as still having media playback and often some kind of navigation without either!

Your comment would only make sense in a hypothetical situation where the car infotainment only worked if you had an iPhone or if there was some kind of exclusivity agreements to preclude it working with Android, but that isn’t the case in any circumstance I’m aware of.

It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.

That’s nothing to do with the OP’s comment, and ignores the second part which I pointed out too (that nobody is forcing you to use this optional feature that most people want), so swing and a miss on two points…

The OP’s argument is that lots of people wanting CarPlay is evidence some kind of monopolistic anti-competitive behaviour by Apple, which is nonsense. Nothing in your comment relates addresses the argument or the rebuttal!

Android Auto is also a thing.

Do you understand how headunits work and have you ever sat in a car? It doesn’t sound like it since you think cars are forced to use CarPlay.

The customers want to be able to control the infotainment system, by functionally replacing it with something completely different, since the defaults are garbage across the industry. Both Apple and Google have outdone every single carmaker in what is supposedly their own game (or at least their own arena). Can't blame them for that.

What monopoly?

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