321–330 of 398 posts
Ok... What car brand has the least bad UI these days? I have been putting off getting a new car for about a year.
Volkswagen was a standout for absolutely awful experience across the board with unituitive layouts, horrible capacitive buttons and gimmicky lag galore.
> …and receive offers tailored to their interests… The day my car starts showing me advertisements of any kind is the day I take a sledgehammer to its infotainment system. For a luxury car brand to even include this in their copy they send out is a bit worrying.
do you remove all their advertising badges, model numbers, logos from the outside of your car too?
You get a car with most badging removed.
> The company is confident that this strategic approach to software and hardware development will be the basis for lifetime revenues as well as additional contributions. Already in 2022, Mercedes-Benz generated more than 1 billion euro in software-enabled revenues with products and services such as navigation, Live Traffic or online map updates. Get ready to pay a monthly subscription to use features that come stock…
What's the legality of hacking these things, assuming you own the car? For example, BMW charges $18/mo to turn on heated seats you already own. Am I legally allowed to hack their software to enable heated seats w/o paying? How about installing a wire and switch and running them manually?
It's not about difficulty of hacking, but with just how easy it is to put in DRM measures that will make sure that official repair shops will reject the repairs (and unofficial ones are really struggling due to lack of access to DRMed service tools necessary for new modules).
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My (admittedly-beloved) 2015 F-150 will reboot Sync if I'm listening to music (usually on Soundcloud) if the song title includes non-ASCII characters.
My 2011 Ford Focus with Sync would randomly lock up and loop the same 10th of a second of the current track. Like a really old PC if it crashed while playing a sound. Turning the car and back on again to stop the noise got old really fast. All of the radio inputs stopped working when this happened.
Oops, I forgot to give you more data... or tell you to stop... >:)
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Mercedes' crap software caused me to stop driving them, even though I love the handling, the reliability of the engine and the general lack of distractions. They really blew it, their software is a safety liability rather than an asset and I really wonder what caused them to drop the ball in such a terrible way.
Do you know any programmers who think it's cool to work for German car companies or that they at least offer a decent pay? I think that's the answer: those traditional German industries don't care nor understand IT. These days and entry level KIA has better software than a BMW (I owned several BMWs from different eras and will not buy anything from them again).
German Software Engineer here. I'd rather chop off my left pinky than working on any software product any German car manufacturer is developing: 1) Their management hierarchies only consist of MBA suits that think short term and treat their engineers like apes in a zoo. This frequently leads to engineers actually behaving like apes in a zoo. 2) German culture is deeply based on thinking in silos. They divide everythi…
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Some Mercedes also have the bug where the sign classifiers somewhat regularly mis-read 80 as 60 for speed limits, causing cruise control to arbitrarily slam on the brakes in some parts of the country. You would think that they would catch these things with rudimentary quality control. The automotive code for many of these systems is incomprehensibly awful but the entire process of how it is made virtually guarantees…
I just ran into this issue in Montana the other day. Weird thing was that it’d sometimes read the 80 mph limit correctly, then a second or two later revert to 60. My Sprinter just beeps at me, though. No brake action if it thinks I’m speeding.
It reportedly happens with 80 kph speed limit signs in Canada as well.
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> Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. That's a bit contradictory. If you can't see the road markings the road is not drivable.
In Ontario and it's very common to be driving on packed snow for a few days after new snowfall. You get barely any road markings at all. You just use common sense and memory to try and act like the lane dividers, turning lanes, stop lines are still there. It must be the same in many parts of the US as well. With winter tires and the right attitude its perfectly fine! But yeah if you can't see the road markings due to…
You’re absolutely right. You just do what you need to do.
Having some form of inertial navigation supplemented by GPS and visual odometery from features that stick out from the side of the road (like a road sign; memorized by the vehicle on past drives) would help a lot. A HUD UI could show road markings on “slice” of the road.
Call it “low viz aid” or something catchy.
In my case, I was driving on a rural road just before dusk without street lighting where there is nearly no traffic on a good day. Low-beam headlights were reflecting off the flakes and high-beams were obviously out of the question.
Risk of a collision with another vehicle was low, but going into the ditch was possible if you didn’t know the bends of the road.
Yes, these are dangerous conditions, but I started off driving in rain and didn’t anticipate the switch to snow mid-drive.
I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience. It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because th…
Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s. Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.
My toyota is absolute crap, if this helps.