331–340 of 392 posts
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Not all cars support that, though. Due to licensing or tech, some cars (even new ones) only support Apple car with a cable (my case). I bought a wireless adapter on Amazon and it works seamlessly.
A wireless adapter that lets you use wireless carplay on a car that doesn't have it? Could you please post a link?
Reminds me of an aggravating feature (or really lack thereof) in my new Prius. It has wireless charging, but requires a cable connection for CarPlay. I hope I never meet a Toyota engineer in person, because it would be hard not to do something criminal to them.
That's just the usual features taking a while to come to Toyota.
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Not only stupid. That is plain criminal.
I was in a car crash as a child. Two cars caught fire, although I didn't realise it until I got out. My door was blocked by another vehicle, as was my dad's. He was busy trying to get my sister to open her front passenger door, so he could clamber out after her. The other rear door was damaged, and I had to pull the latch and then kick it to open it. (Not sure how that would work with one of these small manual releas…
A conversation that should have happened during the development of this car, but didn't: "Remind me again why the brake pedal isn't a button buried in a sub-menu? Because that would be inconvenient, unintuitive, and doesn't allow quick access? Then why the fuck would you do this with anything ?"
You the fuck do this with some things because if you didn't ever do it, modern cars would either look like a jet aircraft cockpit, or they'd have very few features. Anyone who's looked inside a Subaru from circa 2019 would know how physical button mania can make cars objectively worse. (To be clear, I'm firmly on team mechanical glove boxes. )
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I have a car with a touchscreen all in one for audio and such. I have to use bluetooth to connect my phone, rather than being able to just use USB. When starting the car, it loses the connection, and sometimes can't reestablish it. And like 1/10 times it asks me to stop the car to be able to pair it again. Especially annoying if it happens when I want to use GPS through my phone. (My record was having to stop -> star…
> When starting the car, it loses the connection, and sometimes can't reestablish it. We are long past the point as an industry when we should have collectively declared Bluetooth a failed experiment.
It may be an issue with GP’s car rather than the protocol itself. Turning your car off and on for Bluetooth sounds particularly stupid. I can unpair and pair my car without restarting it.
There is no longer anything useful on the dash above the wheel. No speedometer, odometer, battery level indicator, repair lights, nothing. All of it is integrated into the infotainment unit on the dead center of the dash. Similarly, there are no knobs or real buttons anywhere on the center of the dash; it's all touch screen. All of it. I wanted to moan about it the entire time I was in the car, but I didn't want to just complain about my friend's nice new vehicle.
The F-150 lightning I test-drove similarly has all of the climate control and music controls stuffed into infotainment center with no physical knobs or dials to be found. If you read online, you will also find that its infotainment center is notoriously slow. Otherwise, it's a very nice truck.
Tesla is basically the Apple of EVs right now. Leading the way in some really interesting technology and features while causing potentially irreparable long-term damage to the health of the industry overall (think storage-tier pricing and the removal of all but USB-C ports/headphone jacks).
Edit: found this video in the Twitter thread linked in the article 1. Actually what the Cadillac is doing here (particularly with the doors) is aggregious. Tesla has added an additional step to opening doors from the outside (you push your thumb in first and then grab the handle) which is something you can become accustomed to in one fluid motion. At least it looks kind of nice and is only mildly less convenient than traditional handles. The push-to-release-pull-side-of-door-because-theres-no-handle mechanism on the Cadillac is absolutely braindead.
Seeing this video and multiple other new cars in person, I've also noticed a disturbing trend of changing the hatch opening mechanism. Before: manually open the hatch assisted by hydraulics which prop the door open until manually closed. Now: automatically open the hatch (slowly) on a button press and close it (slowly) on a button press. What's the problem here? Apart from being actually worse UX once the novelty wears off, the second mechanism is much more failure prone over the lifetime of the vehicle. The nice salesman at the Ford dealership actually told me off for trying to manually close the frunk on the Lightning because he was afraid I'd break it!
My honest opinion is that these changes all point in one direction but cut two ways. 1. Increase revenue by increasing standardization and eliminating many pieces from the manufacturing process (at the expense of UX/longevity) and 2. Mitigate the lost recurring revenue due to how much more reliable EVs are than ICEs by introducing new failure modes masked as modern features for plausible deniability.
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Driver UX was the reason of my initial focus on BMW over other makers.
BMW is not bad (I own one) but try turning off the air conditioner some time.
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Remember curved TVs? Remember 3D for TVs? That was essentially technology bullet-point features, but since they flopped hard you can no longer buy curved TVs or 3D TVs. Turns out if people really don't want shit, it disappears again, no matter how hard various corporations push the shit.
Except that you can't "not buy" a vehicle you need for transport just because the manufacturers decided to remove the latch from the glove compartment. Your logic only works in healthy markets like TVs where you could buy _EQUIVALENT_ device without the curvature or 3D. Meanwhile with cars this isn't true - the touchscreen crap trend is being implemented across the market (since its cheaper) and many people can't fre…
There’s many manufacturers and millions of used cars.
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It's a cost cutting move. One touch screen is cheaper than 30 individual buttons, and ultimately many people have died because of it. But I'm sure GM would never do anything sketchy or illegal to lower cost or increase revenue
How is a manual glovebox latch more expensive than an electronic latch? I think there must be consumer demand for this feature. Oh how luxurious it must feel to never have to use a manual latch unlike the unwashed…
That’s assuming competence. Design that follows consumer demand requires actual research work performed by the design team.
It’s much easier for product designers to simply follow the design decisions of the “market leader. It’s what their higher-ups may even be requesting or requiring.
This pattern explains such user-hostile decisions like the loss of headphone jacks, or curved glass displays that distort edge pixels and don’t accept glass screen protectors. Or car maker’s trend to remove tactile controls with a laggy, convoluted touchscreen UX.