Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

I used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do.

I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian.

In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud.

Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay.

On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay.

I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not.

and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again.

But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.

My Polestar didn't have Android Auto when I bought it.

Navigation was still Google Maps, and text integration was there.

But no Pandora for music. And that's the problem, in my opinion. Even Android Automotive is way behind Android Auto in app support. That reduces the owner's choices for which software they want to use for their use cases.

I own a Tesla not a Rivian, but I agree with you here. As a software engineer, I find CarPlay to be a tack-on solution. For that, it works well, but only because the base infotainment systems on almost every OEM are utter trash.

Something that I don't believe is discussed enough, especially here, is how bad 90% of software is in general. Software from non-software companies, almost without exception, is just junk. It has stuff tacked garbage from a partner deals, confusing organization that seemed like a product or marketing guy that never used the software. I could go on.

The exceptions, of course, are Rivian and Tesla, who actually make first-class software. On them, I don't miss it, And actually, I would be slightly annoyed if they had it, simply because it breaks up the consistency with infotainment.

If they had it, you wouldn’t be required to use it.

I’m in a similar spot. I miss CarPlay much less than I expected because the Rivian software is really good. The big thing I really miss from CarPlay is having text messages announced. Google Maps on the phone is a bit better too but I got over that quickly (TTS, features like showing road hazards, and general rendering)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com